Abstract: promoting the development of the North-East, China’s old industrial base, which has become a backward periphery over the years of openness and reform, remains one of the important and, at the same time, difficult tasks in the framework of the state policy of managing regional development. Separate efforts in this direction began to be made back in the 1990s, and since the early 2000s the country’s leadership has been trying to develop a holistic, systematic approach to solving this problem. It cannot be argued that over the past years, initiatives to «revitalize» the North-East have been unsuccessful. At the same time, it is rather difficult to talk about a radical turn in negative trends in the development of this region. An analysis of the policy of «revitalizing» the peripheral Northeast as a case illustrating the process of searching for effective tools and approaches to managing regional development in modern China allows us to come to some general and more specific conclusions. One of them concerns in general the policy of state intervention in the processes of regional development, its possibilities, limitations and the most significant effects. The case under consideration also makes it possible to assess the prospects for overcoming the peripherality of the regions, using the possibilities of their border location and transboundary interactions. In this case, the Northeast of China, directly bordering the Russian Far East, is a very indicative illustration, as, unlike many other border regions, the border in this case connects the PRC with a neighbour that is quite stable, economically developed and located, at least formally, to cooperation.
Keywords: China, Russia, North-East of China, Far East of the Russian Federation, border region, periphery, public administration, regional policy, economic development, cross-border cooperation