from 2016:
Transbaikal officials are working on a deal with China that would allow Chinese firms to rent more than 300,000 acres of land in that Russian region, but a Beijing official says that the deal won’t go through unless Moscow agrees to a massive influx of Chinese workers because there are no Russians available for work there.
According to “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” the Transbaikal kray government is ready to sign a letter of intent that would allow a Chinese company to rent the land for 49 years, but “in Beijing, they consider that such a transfer of land is insufficient” and that Moscow must allow for the entrance of Chinese citizens.
Beijing has already identified nine territories in Siberia and the Russian Far East which it would like to rent and then introduce a Chinese workforce, Sergeyev writes. And it is clear that economics is far from the most important consideration, something that will be even more of a red flag to Russians.
He quotes Natalya Zubarevich, a specialist on Russia’s regions at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, on this point. Much of the land the Chinese want to rent, she says, is hardly good for agricultural exploitation. The fact that Beijing wants to rent so much of it thus raises questions of its intentions.
Sergeyev does not address it, but this Chinese move is certain to provoke not only Russian nationalists in Moscow but also Siberian regionalists who may welcome Chinese investment but are unlikely to be happy about any massive influx of ethnic Chinese which would radically change the ethnic balance in a region from which Russians continue to leave.
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/06/beijing-wants-moscow-to-agree-to.html
and 2015:
Chinese media are celebrating what has passed “almost unnoticed” in Russia: Moscow’s handing over of some 4.7 square kilometers of what had been Russian land to China, with Beijing viewing this as the first step toward the return of larger portions of the Russian Far East to Chinese control, according to Newsru agency.
The outlet cited a story in yesterday’s “China Daily” which reported the return of the land, noting that it is but a small part of the 1,500,000 square kilometers “the declining Qing Dynasty gave up” to the Russians between 1858 and 1915” in a series of “’unequal treaties’”
According to the BBC, some Chinese bloggers have suggested that Russia must “return Vladivostok, Blagoveshchenks, and Tanu-Uryankhai [Tyva] to China, and one has offered an intriguing explanation for what is going on far from the Chinese border in Ukraine as a result of the transfer of even a small portion of land from Russia to China.
‘I finally know why Russia annexed Crimea,” one Chinese blogger wrote. “Putin doesn’t want that Russia will become smaller during his administration.” By annexing Crimea, the Kremlin leader can ensure that doesn’t happen.
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/11/china-welcomes-russias-transfer-of.html
Russia - China demography ping
They say that China has three types of invasion plans for Russia - a large scale, a medium scale, and a small scale (where many small groups of only a few million each are infiltrated).