In China, timber processing is growing every year. To limit deforestation, China has turned to timber imports, especially from Russia, a forest power.

China, which has undergone a huge economic transformation over the past 40 years, is now the world's largest timber importer, with the United States ranked second. At the same time, China is the world's largest exporter of logs to high value-added goods and shipped to warehouses around the world. Logs from Russia are stored in the Chinese border city of Manchuria, where timber is processed and shipped around the world.

Once, Russia rarely supplied timber to China. It now accounts for more than 20 percent of China's imports. In 2017, China imported nearly 200 million cubic meters of timber from Russia, and the price of timber logging concessions sold in Russia is much lower than that of similar concessions in other countries. In Russia, the average lease cost is about $2 per hectare, or 80 cents per acre per year.

Over the past few years, Russia's unprocessed log exports have continued to decline. According to the analysis, the decline in exports is due to the increase in Russian demand for sawwood raw materials, especially in Siberia and the far East after the introduction of new capacity, as well as tariff and non-tariff controls imposed by the Russian government.

China has now shifted to New Zealand coniferous logs, increasing the supply of New Zealand logs, up 17 percent year on year in 2017 and 21 percent in 2018 to 17.4 million cubic meters.