Like their compatriots selling cut-rate clothes in the markets of Khabarovsk or labouring in the logging camps of the region's forests, the workers see in Russia a livelihood more difficult to come by in their overpopulated homeland.

But despite the decline in the region's population, the growing presence of Chinese workers is not encouraged by authorities who say their first priority is to attract Russians to work there and who warn of ethnic tensions.

As Russia prepares to elect a successor to President Vladimir Putin next mnoth, the question of how to populate the east of the country and create attractive job opportunities there for Russians is high on the Kremlin's list.

Putin admitted last week that measures taken in recent years had "not produced the results that were hoped for" in the region, where the population has plunged due to relatively low living standards and high death rates.

Putin's expected successor, Dmitry Medvedev, has spearheaded a nationwide drive to boost agricultural production by Russian farmers.

Yet workers from China continue to cross the border into Russia, where they rent land to cultivate cucumbers, watermelons and vegetables of all kinds in a zone virtually written off in Soviet times as difficult for agriculture.

"In the morning, you see them in the fields. When you go home in the evening they are still there," said Vladimir Lyandov, head of the farming village of Kamyshovka, about an hour's drive from the industrial city of Khabarovsk.

"They are a people that know how to work. I wish to God that our people could work like that."

Lyandov however downplays the role that Chinese immigrant labour plays in the increasingly abundant harvests in his region, saying they were more the result of cheap Chinese pesticides and fertilizers.

Siue Li, a 28-year-old farm worker from China, says Russian workers are not capable of producing the crop yields that the Chinese produce in the region.

"There is a lot of drunkenness" among the Russian farmers, said Siue, who has transformed her first name Li to the traditional Russian name Lena for her work in Russia's far east.

"Russians don't know how to do this work," said Siue, who guards a number of empty greenhouses as temperatures outdoors hover around minus 15 degrees celsius (five degrees fahrenheit).

Siue has worked in the area for the past three years, but crosses back over the border into China periodically for long periods in order to renew her immigration papers, an ordeal she describes as "extremely difficult".

A few kilometres away, two men in dirty clothes sit inside an earthen hut, the air fetid as two puppies warm themselves by a small wood fire stove and two cats eat rice. They open the door for visitors but remain silent.

"They live in the fear that the police will come and confiscate their passports," explained Anna Permenko, 35, the owner of the Sungari Chinese restaurant, the village's only real attraction.

"The police came around recently and took a Chinese tractor."

Permenko, who has a degree in Chinese and is married to a Chinese national from the nearby city of Harbin, complained about the cumbersome bureaucracy for registering Chinese cooks in her restaurant as well as her own husband.

The administrative hurdles reflect Russia's official reticence about immigrants, many from China, filling the Russian population void in the far eastern regions of the sprawling country.

"Yes, of course there is a need" for more manpower, said Alexander Levintal, the economy minister for the Khabarovsk region which, like the Jewish Autonomous Republic, borders China.

"The general idea is not to introduce a lot of foreign workers" but to allow them into Russia in a "measured way" to help fill labour needs, he explained.

"The main priority is to attract Russians from the European portion of the country.

"We have seen what happened in France, in Paris, when a surplus of labour to the detriment of the local population created ethnic conflicts," said Levintal, alluding to 2005 riots in Paris suburbs.

Russia's ambivalent relationship with Chinese labour is nothing new. In 1885, a congress in Khabarovsk praised "the love of work, the sobriety" of Chinese workers but nonetheless advised the Tsar to limit their stay on Russian soil.

Today however the depletion of the Russian population in the Asian far east of the country is as pressing as ever: The region lost 1.7 million residents, or 20 percent of its population, between 1990 and 2007 alone.

And whether they acknowledge it openly or not, Russian officials are again turning to imported labour to give a lift to the regional economy and put the far east on a track toward economic development.

"The influence of Chinese labour on the region's economy is insignificant," stated a document published by the Khabarovsk regional governor's office.

"Chinese workers account for about 1.3 percent of the active population."

The numbers of Chinese and other immigrant labourers in Russia's far east may be relatively small, but they are growing.

Last year, there were officially 25,000 foreign workers registered in the region -- 2.5 times more than in 2003 -- of which more than 37 percent were from China, according to official statistics.

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