A Chinese boom in technology fueled by Russian talent…

China has bought all that was for sale in the famed Russian science town, Akademogorsk. Formely the brain behind the Soviet military-industrial complex, the city, just outside Nobosibirsk, in Siberia, has for many post-communist years languished in poverty and despair. Chinese cash has revived the place in a way no one has ever expected. (Even the local vegetable peddlers know the Chinese name of the produce they import mostly from China).

In “Serenity”–the hip sci fi flick–the vernacular was Chinese. The director should’ve added one or two cyrilic characters here and there…

Russia: Putin’s China Problem – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com
Siberia is home to a vast and underemployed brain trust of technological and scientific talent, which Beijing is busily buying up. Take Akademgorodok, a Soviet-era suburb of Novosibirsk, home to 52 scientific institutes and some 18,000 scientists, including half a dozen Nobel Prize winners. Already, estimates Novosibirsk councilor Aleksandr Lyulko, 80 percent of Akademgorodok’s income derives from China. And after years of post-Soviet neglect, the scientists of Siberia are only too happy to fill Chinese orders for everything from wind tunnels and soil analyzers to lasers, DNA labs and electron accelerators. “The West is wary of selling their technologies to the Chinese, so they come here,” explains Vasily Areshenko, foreign-relations chief for the Siberian chapter of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Our own government doesn’t give much importance to science. We need China’s money.”
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Moscow politicians have long talked about making Novosibirsk the heart of a new Indian-style knowledge economy. But while Moscow’s promises have stayed on paper, Chinese cash is actually kick-starting a rebirth of Russian science. Krasnoyarsk’s Institute of Solar-Earth Physics, for instance, has formed a joint venture with the Chinese Center of Space Science; in Novosibirsk, the Institute of Precision Electronics now makes high-powered lasers together with the Shenyan Technological Institute. Last year more than 400 Chinese scientists visited Akademgorodok, notebooks in hand. “China has an enormous interest in learning about new technologies,” says Vasily Fomin, director of Akademgorodok’s Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. “They say: ‘Give us a scientist who can win us a Nobel Prize and we will do anything for you’.”