evidence: China has a long historical memory of Far Eastern territories being seized by the Russians. In the mid-19th century, at the end of the Opium Wars, the weak Qing dynasty ceded 1.4 million square kilometers of land, including the whole area east of the Ussuri, and north and east of the Amur River to the Pacific Coast, in what was then called Outer Manchuria and now constitutes much of Russia’s Far East. This territory, annexed to the Tsarist Empire in the Aigun (1858) and Beijing (1860) Treaties, was later absorbed by the Soviet Union. By some calculations, the total territory once under Chinese imperial sovereignty that passed to Russian control amounted to almost 6 million square kilometers. [...] Chinese investment interests are focused on two key areas. One is the junction of the Amur (Heilongjiang) and Ussuri rivers, where Bolshoy Ussuriysky (Heixiazi) Island and the Russian city of Khabarovsk (with its population of 620,000) are located. The other is near the mouth of the Tumen River, not far from Russia’s great Pacific port of Vladivostok (population 600,000), where the Chinese border lies just 15 kilometers away from the Sea of Japan. In both of these strategic locations, Russia intends to harness China’s financial resources and manufacturing savvy to build two gigantic special economic zones.