BEIJING -- When Russia's President Vladimir Putin arrives in Beijing today, should he venture into the city's bustling Yabaolu district, he could be forgiven for thinking he had never left home.

In the most visible sign of the booming trade between the giant neighbors, its streets are filled with signs in cyrillic script for import-export firms and dotted with restaurants bearing such names as the Moscow.

Even at night, the central district hums with activity, as teams of migrant workers load boxes of goods perilously high onto open-top trucks, some of which make the long drive north all the way to the Russian border.

Inside the hundreds of trading firms, eager vendors sell bulk quantities of clothes, shoes and plastic toys at rock-bottom prices.

At the sales office of Eadwort, one of the firms crammed inside the six-story Yabao Plaza Commercial Center, sits Miao Boyuan, a young Chinese woman with a degree in Russian, who is known to her clients as Marina.

A trader picks over samples of boots made in the eastern commercial city of Wenzhou and in Guangdong Province to the south, before asking in Russian about prices. "I'm Israeli, but I sell these shoes in Moscow," he said. "In Israel business is not going well."

"He's a good client. He buys between 1,000 and 3,000 pairs and he has come to me many times," added Marina after the man leaves. "The others never buy more than a few hundred."

Although China and Russia sat side by side as fellow communist nations for decades, trade between the countries -- and the accompanying influx of Russians into Yabaolu -- is a relatively recent phenomenon, little more than a decade old.

The few Russian "advisers" inside China were kicked out by Mao Zedong in the early 1960s as relations soured, and trade links only thrived after Beijing began economic reforms and Russia's communist regime fell.

Even now, commerce can be affected by outside factors.

Already declining business was hit badly by recent unrest inside Russia, Marina said.

"Since the hostages were taken by the Chechen forces inside the theater in Moscow, clients are pretty rare," she sighed.

Zhou Guangqun, who sells sweaters for bargain prices inside the same building, tells another tale of woe.

"Russia wants to close its markets to Chinese products. It imposes customs duties and there are more and more frontier controls," he said.

Chinese official figures show the trade balance favors Russia, with China importing almost eight billion dollars of Russian goods in 2001, especially aluminum, fertilizer, refined oil, timber, paper pulp and frozen fish.

In return, China exported around $2.7 billion of goods, mostly textiles, leather goods and small electrical items, although some of the trade is not officially recorded.