Sitting at lunch today, I glanced over the Business section of China Daily and there on the bottom left corner of the page was a small item: "China to give Russia $1m aid."

China's Ministry of Commerce announced on Wednesday that the government is going to donate $1 million, plus humanitarian aid goods worth almost $3 million, to help Russia as it struggles with a rash of forest fires.

The flames have already claimed more than 50 lives. And the Associated Press recently reported that amid the smog from the fires and a record heat wave, some 700 people are now dying each day in Moscow.

Perhaps because of the setting -- I was eating in a Russian neighborhood -- my mind wandered to historical context.

China, once the 'Little Brother' of the Soviet Union and then its adversary, has come an awfully long way in a relatively short amount of time.

The facts of China's progress have become so commonplace that even to a newcomer like me, the litany of growth numbers start to blur into something that we all kind of already know -- China is on the rise.

While in recent history it was an impoverished basket case of a country, China is now one of the world's most powerful economies. (Though, like every other economy these days, it has a fair share of issues to work out.)

Because this is just an idle observation in a blog post, I won't delve too deeply into a comparison between where Moscow and Beijing stand today. Suffice it to say that when I first flew between the capitals for a trip here last fall, I was startled by the difference in infrastructure. The headline of a short piece I wrote on initial impressions between the two included the phrase "from past to future."

A quote from that story:

"The possibility of Russia following the Chinese example in the economy was discussed by Soviet and then Russian leadership ... but the country went a different way," said Mikhail Delyagin, a frequent Kremlin critic who was an economic adviser to President Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. "The economy started to change — and has been changing ever since — to meet the interests of a limited group of bureaucrats, who found out that to rob the country is more profitable than to develop it."

And a quick statistical digression: Last year, Russia had the world's 12th-largest GDP -- about $1.23 trillion, according to World Bank figures. China came in at 3rd, with more than $4.9 trillion in GDP, and some speculate that it's already overtaken Japan's spot just behind the United States (or will very soon).

Ah, but the careful reader will point out that the $1.23 trillion is for Russia alone, and not the former Soviet space. But that's just the point, isn't it? The Soviet Union is no longer here. And China is in a position to donate cash and aid to Russia, marked only by a quick mention in the morning paper .

-- Footnote: Russia has of course also helped China during times of national tragedy. For example, it sent aid during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.