China closed its border to prevent imported cases from Russia. Now Russians fear a surge in infections from stranded Chinese travellers.
Suifenhe is a county-level city on the eastern edge of China’s 4,300-kilometer border with Russia. It is 2,000 km away from Wuhan, where the COVID-19 crisis began late last year, and until recently, the epidemic may have felt quite distant.
Locally, Suifenhe is best known for a series of increasingly extravagant national gates in its land port, which are designed to project China’s progress over recent decades, in the face of Russia’s simultaneous decline. During the current pandemic, however, this land port was repurposed as a collective quarantine site for 1,479 Chinese citizens.
Even Chinese state media reported that the two countries appeared to be in discord over the border closure.
In a bid to ease tensions, the Chinese consul general in Vladivostok personally wrote a letter to all Chinese citizens in Russia, apologizing to those left high and dry in the Primorsky Krai region bordering Suifenhe. He urged them to not make the trip east from Moscow, and pleaded with those already there to remain in quarantine and avoid trying to cross the border.
It has significantly escalated the threat of an outbreak in both Russia and China.
Russia’s internal confusion, however, has not clouded Beijing’s capacity to introduce drastic measures in Suifenhe. Within days of closing the border, a 600-bed makeshift hospital was constructed in a converted office building, and six additional buildings were designated to isolate and observe potential COVID-19 patients.
This article was written by Ankur sharh
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