The demographics of Siberia are complex. Once the domain of nomadic tribes, gigantic Siberia came under Russian control in its march east at about the same time as the North American west became part of the British or US domain. Invading armies from France and Germany found out with horrible consequences that they couldn’t even conquer and occupy European Russia as far west as Moscow, never mind the overwhelming spaces of Asian Russia, where whole armies got swallowed up in the First World War. During the Stalinist period, Siberia became synonomous with the land of the Gulags, slave-worker camps whose domain actually extended far to the east of what the Russians call Siberia into the Russian Far East and maritime provinces. There the so-called (in English), 3-400 Siberian tigers (Amur tigers in Russian and German) make their last stand, and may actually prove to be the last great cats (and they are the largest anywhere) to survive in Asia. 10% of them still inhabit extreme northern China (with a few in North Korea), underlining the closeness of the two emerging (again) superpowers Russia and China.
If you are very lucky you may see tigers on either side of that border, but you will see very few Chinese in Russia and fewer Russians in China save along the border cities on the Amur river where the Russian markets are serviced by Chinese coming across for the day to sell Chinese goods or perhaps even to stay (in isolation) for some months or even years with no intention of remaining in Russia permanently. Meanwhile Siberia and the Russian Far East are losing population dramatically, as their Russian populations attempt to escape the poverty and unemployment that has overwhelmed the remote area since the fall of the Soviet Union, by moving to the big cities of the west. The paranoid Russian nightmare is that the Chinese will spill over into the emptiness of eastern Russia and attempt to recolonize areas of Russia that once in fact had Chinese populations.
In Siberia there are signs of this happening, but the Chinese are being preceded by a group whose presence noone could have predicted five years ago. 2.5 million so-called Russlanddeutsche (Russian-Germans), who had been living in European Russia for centuries before being expelled to Siberia and Kazakhstan during World War Two, took advantage of the strange German blood-based citizenship laws to return to Germany after 1990. Integration has been anything but easy for them as most had forgotten how to speak German and had become in many cultural ways competely Russified or Kazakhified. A few thousand have now returned to what has become booming Siberia, (or indeed decided never to leave for Germany despite valid papers) to take advantage of plentiful work opportunities in the oil and gas fields of Siberia without which western Europe would be in for very cold winters. The Russian government contributes 100000 Rubels (3000 Euros), travel costs and free luggage transport to lure them back to a place their former Russan neighbours have abandoned. The countryside north of Novosibirsk may not be the equal of Fort MacMurray, Alberta, where the largest oil fields outside of Saudi-Arabia are now coming into full swing and housing costs rival those of Manhattan, but housing developments are springing up in Siberia built by Germans for Germans. According to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the housing developer of one such settlement did not understand the question when asked whether the Russians resented the Germans, given the war and all that, and then pointed out that these Germans had Russian (and German) passports, spoke Russian and were appreciated in any case by the Russians for their hard work. Down the road were settlements for Chinese immigrants, he went on, who the Russians really don’t like, and whose spokesmen needed translators to deal with the Russian authorities. The future of Siberia could be interesting.