evidence: The island is divided in almost equal sections between Russia and China. The Soviet Union occupied the whole of Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island (known as Heixiazi, or Black Bear, in Chinese) following the so-called Chinese Eastern Railway Incident of 1929, but in an historic agreement between Russia and China signed in 2004, Moscow agreed to return about half of it. The transfer took place in 2008. Since then the island in the Ussuri has become a miniature symbol of the vast Asian regions divided between the two geopolitical giants. [...] What you find out looking at a map is that this statue is placed on China’s easternmost point, the very first place in China meeting the sun every morning. One of the ironies of political geography here is that China, the eastern empire, sits to the west and Russia, a European power, confronts it to the east. A swath of Russian territory cuts China’s Heilongjiang Province off from the Sea of Japan. Look again, more carefully, and you will realize why so many in Beijing regard the Russian far east exclave as the last remnant of European colonialism in Chinese lands. Is this monument a symbol, a proclamation that the East is Chinese?