Changing Lifestyles : In Russia’s Far East, Chinese Are Building on Cooperation : Peasant workers are streaming into the former Soviet Union. And both sides are happy about it.

Overlooking a small lake on a vegetable and dairy farm, a pastel-blue, tin-roofed wooden cottage evokes the aura of old Russia.

This building once served as a dormitory for students who spent summer vacations helping in the fields. But in the post- Communist era, city youths no longer come.

Now, from planting to harvest, this serves as home to Chinese men such as Zhu Dianlong.

“Of course I’m homesick,” said Zhu, 28, a peasant from China’s Heilongjiang province, across the Amur River from Khabarovsk. “My wife didn’t support the idea of my coming here. She thought it was better for husband and wife to be together. But I wanted to come to earn money for my family.”

Zhu is part of a stream of Chinese contract labor, primarily in agriculture and construction, now flowing into sparsely populated regions of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Russia’s overall economy may be a shambles, but it remains a country of vast and underutilized resources. And China, with a population of more than 1.1 billion and a much lower overall standard of living, is a natural source of guest workers.

The dream of marrying Chinese labor with Russian resources is an old one. Chairman Mao Tse-tung first proposed it to Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in the 1950s, before the bitter ideological split between the two nations.

Mao suggested that Chinese workers build factories in Siberia and help develop the “virgin lands” of Kazakhstan in what was then Soviet Central Asia. But Khrushchev, fearful that land-hungry Chinese might never leave once they came, rejected the idea.

Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s 1989 visit to Beijing, which ended nearly 30 years of tension between the two Communist giants, brought the idea to life again. And by the fall of 1990, about 10,000 Chinese laborers were in the Soviet Union, according to a report by the official New China News Agency.

By September of this year, the number had grown to more than 13,000, the newspaper China Daily reported. And indications are that the numbers will keep growing despite Russia’s economic dislocations. China Daily reported a 15% rise, to $780 million, in the value of engineering and labor service contracts with former Soviet Bloc nations signed at an August trade fair in the northeast China city of Harbin.

“In some industries, mainly construction and agriculture, we have an absolute deficit in the labor force,” said Pavel A. Minakir, vice governor of Khabarovsk Territory. “In this territory we have right now approximately 1,700 people officially registered as unemployed. At the same time we have 16,000 unfilled jobs. Almost all the unemployed are engineers, bureaucrats and so on. Among simple people--among workers and peasants--we have no unemployment. We have lots of unfilled jobs.”

The reforms and economic upheavals in Russia pose some difficulties for the importation of guest labor, including the thorny matter of how to pay for it when foreign exchange is unavailable and prices of barter goods can fluctuate wildly. But the changes under way in Russia also create new niches that Chinese workers can fill.

Zhu is one of 50 Chinese at the Krasnorechenskaya cooperative farm near Khabarovsk. “They are quite industrious, and the authorities here are satisfied with their work,” said Maria Nosyreva, the farm’s chief economist.

This farm, with 800 Russian workers, emphasizes milk production. But it has always grown vegetables as well, which traditionally were harvested with the help of Khabarovsk residents. “Since city dwellers no longer help the farmers, Chinese workers were invited to extend this assistance,” Nosyreva explained.

Under contract with a state agricultural agency from Harbin, more than 1,300 pounds of fertilizer are shipped across the border in payment for every 2,200 pounds of vegetables produced here. The Russian side provides housing and food for the Chinese. The peasant laborers are paid in cash by the agency in Harbin when they return home, Nosyreva said.

“This arrangement is very profitable for the Chinese side,” she said. For the Russians, the main benefit has been that the arrangement has helped keep a 50% drop in the farm’s vegetable production from being even more serious.

Life for the Chinese laborers involves much hard work and some boredom. But the pay--typically the equivalent of $75 to $150 a month plus room and board--is at least double what they would make in their home villages. Also, the drudgery is broken by the previously unimaginable opportunity to see a foreign country.

“Khabarovsk is a city of green mountains and beautiful waters,” Fu Runqiong, one of 128 Chinese construction workers helping to build a children’s hospital in Khabarovsk, said enthusiastically. “Russians have their own special characteristics--they are very polite and treat people with respect. I really admire them.”

The hospital project is a barter deal between the construction arm of Russia’s Far Eastern Railway and China’s Harbin Railway Co., with the Chinese side providing labor and some of the bricks and the Russians paying with fertilizer.

“(The Chinese workers) are ahead of schedule,” said Vladimir Chudin, the Russian site manager, in what almost amounted to a complaint. “The Russian side follows the time schedule previously agreed upon. . . . Agreements have been concluded, with the plants making the necessary materials, and the plants cannot speed up the production.”

Still, Chudin expressed overall satisfaction. “If we constructed this building by ourselves, it would take us three years to finish,” he said. “They’re going to finish it in two years.”

Guest laborers also help in some small-scale projects. Pang Lixing, a carpenter from the Chinese border town of Dongning, is one of eight Chinese workers helping turn a rundown workers’ dormitory into a Russian-Chinese joint-venture hotel in the town of Pokrovka, near the highway from Vladivostok to the Chinese border.

The private Russian partner in the hotel venture is Ivan Aleschenko, who also heads the quasi-governmental Agro-Service Export-Import Trading Co. in Pokrovka. In his main job, Aleschenko oversees the importation of Chinese seeds and implementation of contracts that brought 350 Chinese farm workers to the Pokrovka area this year.

“Even during the first contacts and talks with the Chinese, we were surprised by their harvests, which exceeded ours by four times,” Aleschenko said.

Labor for Aleschenko’s hotel remodeling project comes from a Chinese firm, which also will ship food for the hotel restaurant once it opens. The cooks will be Chinese, but the waitresses and service personnel will be Russian, he said.

Pang, the Chinese carpenter, must return to China in December when his six-month visa expires. But he has a dream. “I’d very much like to come again next year,” he said. “I’d like to become an employee of this hotel. It’s possible. But it’s not for sure.”