Luo says there were 72 people per square kilometer in his native district near the Russian border.
Yevgeny Nazdratenko, governor of Primorsky Krai, now speaks publicly of the need to bring the Russian border guards into line.
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Last month you even went beyond Beijing and got a rare glimpse of the city of Harbin near the Russian border.
From the village of Ivalo (and with the help of a guide), visitors drive their own team of dogs through pristine, snow-covered fells, covering between 30km and 50km a day, sleeping in remote wilderness huts each night and experiencing the isolation and beauty of Lapland in a section of forest just 50km from the Russian border.
On 29 May, Russia began construction of what is planned to be the largest commercial port on the Baltic Sea at Ust-Luga, adjacent to the Russian-Estonian border.
Compare, he suggests, a shade smugly, Narva, Estonia's virtually all-ethnic-Russian town on the north-eastern border, with Ivangorod, just across the river in Russia.
He was posted to the eastern front with the Russian troops in Valk, now on the border of Estonia and Latvia.
After being interned in a Nazi work camp during World War II, he managed to make his way with his first wife, Eva, to the Romanian border, only to encounter a Russian commander who demanded to see his papers.
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Some problems are largely beyond Mr Shevardnadze's control, such as the private fief of Ajaria in the south, the two regions on the northern border which have struggled, with Russian help, to secede, and the Chechen rebels who use northern Georgia as a haven of last resort.
At the frontier with Russia, Seriozha instructs the passengers to tell the Russian officials that they are on a day trip from the Georgian border town of Kazbegi.
Goma, on the Rwandan border, now has a direct air link, on rickety Russian planes, to Kinshasa, a journey that used to be a nightmare.
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This would be a logical next step: border bureaucracy and endemic crime make it horribly difficult for any Russian firm to maintain fast and reliable supply lines of components from abroad.
But they are citizens of Russia, and Russian is the lingua franca among the various republics along the country's southern border.
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