The Chinese are coming ... to
Russia By Bertil Lintner
BLAGOVESHCHENSK, KHABAROVSK and
VLADIVOSTOK - The Chinese are coming! They are
invading the Far East! If headlines in the new and
free - but often sensational and irresponsible -
Russian press are to be believed, a massive influx
of Chinese into Siberia and the Russian Far East
is turning the area "yellow" and Russia is about
to lose its easternmost provinces.
But in
cities such as Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and
Blagoveshchensk the Chinese are not very much in
evidence. They are there, but seldom seen outside
their hotels and restaurants - and the region's
ubiquitous casinos and Chinese markets. It is
true, however, that Chinese merchants now
dominate the region's trade
and commerce. Economically, the Russian Far East
is becoming separated from European Russia.
Before the Soviet Union disintegrated in
1991, the Far East supplied European Russia and
the other western republics with fish and crabs
from the Sea of Okhotsk. The area's heavy industry
produced steel, aircraft and even ships, and few
foreign consumer goods were for sale.
Today, Chinese consumer goods - which are
cheaper and better than those produced far away in
European Russia - and even food are flooding the
markets, while timber and raw materials are going
south. Entire factories are being dismantled and
sold as scrap metal to China. And the seafood is
almost exclusively sold to South Korea and Japan.
In the long run this could also lead to
demographic changes. There is a floating
population of tens of thousands Chinese traders
and seasonal workers who move back and forth
across the border, and one day they may want to
stay.
Russia's Far Eastern Federal
District - a huge area covering 6,215,900 square
kilometers - has only 7 million inhabitants, and
that is down from 9 million in 1991. The
population is declining rapidly as factories are
closing down and military installations have been
withdrawn.
Across the border, China's
three northeastern provinces - Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning - are home to
100 million people, and the area has even by
Chinese standards an unusually high unemployment
rate. Or, as one Western analyst put it: "If the
Russians continue to move out, the Chinese are
ready to fill the resultant population vacuum in
the area." And that could lead to more than just a
change of the demographic balance in what still is
the Russian Far East.
Officially, 40,000
Chinese live more or less permanently in the
Russian Far East - which stretches from the Lena
River basin to the Bering Sea - but the actual
figure is believed to be much higher. The largest
concentrations are in the three main cities in the
area, and their economic dominance is the
strongest in Blagoveshchensk, the economy of which
is less developed and diversified than those of
Khabarovsk and Vladivostok.
Blagoveshchensk is also on the banks of
the Amur River - with the Chinese city of Heihe on
the other side. Hydrofoils full of Chinese traders
bringing in goods ply between the two cities every
30 minutes. There are some Russian merchants too -
but they are also carrying household utensils,
shoes and tools from China.
And it is not
only the trade in consumer goods that is in the
hands of the Chinese. The construction sector in
Blagoveshchensk is dominated by a Chinese-owned
company, Hua Fu, which has just began working on
what will be the tallest building in the Russian
Far East. Chinese New Year is not an official
holiday, but it is celebrated in style with
fireworks, drums and lion dances.
Even the
mayor of the city and the governor of the area,
Amursky oblast, usually participate as
guests of honor. Amursky oblast may also be
the most vulnerable for what many Russians call a
"creeping occupation" by the Chinese. It is huge -
363,700 square kilometers, the same area as Japan
- but with a population of only 900,000. More than
35 million live in Heilongjiang across the Amur
River.
Local Russians say the land is not
suitable for farming, the weather being too cold
most of the year, but the Chinese who have settled
there have managed to cultivate the land.
According to Lyudmila Erokhina, a researcher at
Vladivostok State University, Chinese businessmen
have bribed local officials to acquire land from
Russian farmers, and then brought in agricultural
workers from China to till the fields. A major
problem, she says, is that Russia has no law that
regulates private ownership of land. All land
still belong to the state, and individual farmers
can only get the right to use it.
But more
food - vegetables, fruit, pork and even eggs - are
brought in from China, which has led to serious
concerns about food security in the Russian Far
East. "The Chinese now dominate the agricultural
sector and food supplies," said Erokhina. "We are
totally dependent on them."
And as much as
80% of all goods - consumer goods as well as food
- are smuggled in, with no taxes or duties paid to
local or central coffers. Most of the timber that
is exported to China - millions of cubic meters
every year - leaves the country unrecorded as
well.
The government is also losing
billions of rubles every year in unpaid taxes by
the fishing fleets in the Sea of Okhotsk - but
that, local researchers say - is mainly the fault
of the government. If a fishing boat unloads its
catch in a Russian port, the owner has to pay 20%
in value-added tax if it is sold locally, and a
5-7% export tax if it is meant for markets in
other countries. Taxes and tariffs and much lower
in South Korea and Japan. So the companies fish in
Russian waters, sell their catch in Busan or
Niigata - and deposit the proceeds from the sales
in Japanese and South Korean banks.
According to researchers at the Center for
the Study of Organized Crime in Vladivostok, an
estimated 15,000-17,000 tons of seafood worth
US$83 million is exported every year to South
Korea and Japan, and 70% of it goes to foreign
ports illegally. The owner of one of the biggest
fishing fleets is Sergei Darkin - the 43-year-old
governor of the Primoriye krai, the region
around Vladivostok - which underlines the
dimensions of the problem Moscow has to deal with
it its "Wild East".
Seafood smuggling may
not be directly connected with Chinese economic
expansion into the area, but it reflects the close
ties that the Russian Far East now has with the
Asia-Pacific region - and how much it has become
separated from European Russia. The crews on the
ships are usually a mix of Russians, Koreans,
Chinese, and even Thais and Filipinos.
But
the question still remains: Why are there so few
Chinese, or other Asian faces, in the streets of
Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk?
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a
Russian immigration officer specializing in
illegal migration from China explained that most
of them live in secluded communities and seldom
venture out, perhaps out of fear of being
victimized by xenophobic youth gangs, which are
not as many and not as violent in the Far East as
in, for instance, Moscow, but still exist.
Chinese workers live in dormitories inside
factory compounds, where the only Russians are the
guards. Agricultural workers also live on the
farms, which are often surrounded by walls and
fences. And once their contracts are up, most of
them return to China with the money they have
saved.
But that is changing, as Vilya
Gelbras, a professor at Moscow State University
and a China specialist, pointed out at a seminar
in Blagoveshchensk last year: "Now every second
Chinese arrives in Russia with a firm intention
not to go back to China. Most of them cannot be
classified as 'free migrants' anymore." Many
acquire false documents, even citizenship, from
corrupt local officials who are more willing to
accept bribes from Chinese and other foreigners
than from their own people.
There may not
be more than 40,000, or perhaps 50,000, Chinese
living in the Russian Far East. But that is 40,000
or 50,000 more than in 1991. And as the Russian
exodus continues, the Chinese may, as one
researcher put it, "move into an empty Siberia
resulting in its detachment and reorientation
towards Beijing".
It may not be happening
in the way the tabloid press is saying, but
Chinese expansion is a fact of life in the Russian
Far East, and there is little Russia can do to
stop it.
Bertil Lintner is a
former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review and the author of Great Leader, Dear
Leader: Demystifying North Korea under the Kim
Clan. He is currently a writer with
Asia-Pacific Media Services.
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