As an Aeroflot flight attendant served a baked salmon meal on one of my six trips to the Russian Far East between 1999 and 2001, a woman sitting next to me started talking about problems facing her hometown of Livadia – a small coastal resort with sandy beaches a few miles away from Russia's largest Pacific trade port of Nakhodka. When she said “problems,” I expected to hear another deeply troubling personal account of post-Soviet Russia's social ills, such as unpaid wages and pensions, collapsing education and medical care services, and violent organized crime. But the first problem she mentioned was different: “We have too many Chinese.” In fact, she said, this was more than a problem. It was a threat – potentially a mortal threat to Russia's sovereignty over its provinces stretching along the Russia-China border from Lake Baikal to the Pacific: “The way things are going, it won't be long before they claim all of our lands back.” Having by then researched Chinese migration in the Russian Far East for more than a year, I knew that the number of Chinese nationals, legal and illegal, in my fellow traveler's home province of Primorskii was no more than about 1.5 percent of the local Russian population (Alexseev 2001). I also knew that the county where my fellow traveler lived was not among locations within that province that attracted disproportionately large numbers of Chinese migrants.