Russian-made goods are displayed at the Russian Premium Supermarket in Beijing on April 8, 2025. Photo: VCG

A 21-carriage freight train carrying 42 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of construction-needed lumber recently arrived at Suifenhe Railway Station on the China-Russia border. It marked the 120th China-Europe freight train passing through this land port this year, processing a cumulative total of 11,168 TEUs of freight.

After transshipment, the 21 containers of lumber will be dispatched to Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan Province, aiding infrastructure development there. 

The Suifenhe Railway land port, located in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, is the largest land port connecting Russia in the province, and serves as a key hub for the east corridor of the China-Europe freight train service under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The port bears eyewitness to the continuous development of bilateral trade between China and Russia.

Expanding trade under BRI

Tian Wenshuai, a freight forwarding agent based in Suifenhe, told the Global Times on Thursday that, since the beginning of the year, his company has observed a notable increase in demand from Russia, with freight volume showing at least 30-percent growth year-on-year. 

The agent attributed the rapid freight growth to strengthened purchasing power in Russia, including robust demand for Chinese engineering machinery. The overall business volume is expected to see a significant rise this year, Tian said.

In the first quarter of this year, the import and export freight volume at the railway port exceeded 2 million tons, representing a year-on-year growth of 5 percent, according to chinanews.com.

Suifenhe Railway Port was not the only port recording the pragmatic trade cooperation between China and Russia. As China's largest land port, Manzhouli Railway Station land port in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is another important transport hub.

Liu Hongjie, a manager with the North China division of Chinese logistics giant Sinotrans based in Manzhouli, told the Global Times that freight trains through the Manzhouli port mostly head to Russia, with some transiting to Germany, Belarus and other European countries.

According to Liu, Russian goods constitute the main imports on the company's inbound trains, carrying pulp, fertilizer, grain, aluminum ingots, ores and other raw materials. 

"Rail freight demonstrates transport stability despite a variety of global uncertainties, which plays a positive role in facilitating free trade," the manager said.

Thanks to the joint efforts of China and Russia, the BRI construction has already yielded fruitful results. In recent years, the China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline has achieved full connectivity, and cross-border infrastructure projects like the Heihe-Blagoveshchensk cross-border highway bridge have been completed and opened to traffic, Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui noted earlier. 

Zhang also noted that initiatives such as Chinese automotive enterprises' manufacturing facilities in Tula and a Chinese-funded industrial park in Tatarstan, Russia, have consistently improved their operational performance. 

Injecting certainty 

Trade between China and Russia reached $244.8 billion in 2024, marking a 1.9 percent year-on-year growth, with China maintaining its position as Russia's top trading partner for the 15th consecutive year, Zhang said.

Russia is China's top source of crude oil and natural gas imports, while China has become Russia's top source of electromechanical products and automobile imports, according to the ambassador.

"Current bilateral collaboration goes beyond traditional 'resource-for-manufacturing' models, placing greater focus on integrated supply chains between the two countries," Zhang Hong, a research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Ambassador Zhang Hanhui noted that China is ready to deepen cooperation with Russia in a range of emerging industrial fields such as new materials, green technology, biomedicine and more, to tap the potential for cooperation in e-commerce, services trade, and overseas warehousing, as well as developing new business models.

Data released by Russian e-commerce platform Ozon Global shows that the number of Chinese goods ordered by Russian customers surged 2.2 times in 2024 from a year earlier, Chinese media outlet nandu.com reported. Russia has become China's fourth largest exporter of cross-border e-commerce, according to Xinhua News Agency.

As global changes accelerate and international supply chains undergo restructuring, China-Russia cooperation has moved beyond economic complementarity, Song Kui, president of the Contemporary China-Russia Regional Economy Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday, noting that the China-Russia cooperation now serves as a key initiative to ensure stability across Eurasia and pioneer a new model of developing neighborly relations.