Construction work on a new postal service center in the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang province is now moving ahead with a groundbreaking ceremony expected later this year, the local Harbin Daily reports on June 3, which notes that it will have an Express Mail Service center for international mail, and a warehouse for better parcel handling.

The idea is to meet the growing import and export activity between China and Russia, especially in the e-commerce business, which has seen a boom, with the center acting as a hub. The city will support the project with a logistics industry park to make the city the country’s largest trade and distribution center for cargo moving between China and Russia.

Harbin’s imports from and exports to Russian cities in the first five months of this year were worth a total of $121-million and accounted for 6.66 percent of the city’s total foreign trade, with a 38.08 percent rise year-on-year. Last year’s figure was 1.4-billion yuan ($225 million), marking a record high and putting the city in first place in China in e-commerce with Russia.

Harbin has already opened more than 10 air routes to Russian cities, including Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Moscow, and has established a China-Russia cross-border financial service center and built a North China e-commerce logistics, storage, and distribution center that can cover all of Russia with bonded warehouses in Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg.

And when a Harbin-Yekaterinburg flight was added at the end of 2013, it gave the city a total of 129 flights carrying more than 2,600 tons of cargo, worth 250 million yuan, significantly increasing trade with Russian cities.