January 25, 2000	atimes.com

China Slow boat to a new life, or death By Antoaneta Bezlova FUZHOU, China - Disney-style houses in gaudy colors are going up in Baihu, a tiny village in the lush coastal province of Fujian, thanks to the thousands of yuan pouring in from Chinese laborers working overseas. Once-poor Fujian is now prosperous, its wealth coming in from workers smuggled to slave in the sweatshops and restaurants of Chinatowns around the world. Huaze, a 67-year-old Baihu villager, never left the homeland of his ancestors, but his son was one of many Fujian people who left China, crossed the Pacific on tramp steamers and went to the United States to find a better life. Wang's adventurous trip 10 years ago ended up in New York City, where he still lives and works in a restaurant. Elder Wang is terse on details of his son's trip, but beams with pride about his entrepreneurial spirit which brought wealth to the whole family. ''He had to work hard,'' says Wang. ''First, to pay people who brought him there and later, to pay back our relatives who all helped him for his trip. ''Last year, my daughter-in law and their boy went over too. My son is making good money now and we are building a house.'' A three-storey stone mansion furnished with Chinese-style moongates and round windows, the Wang family's house is indulgent by the standards of many Chinese, educated in the frugality of Confucianism. In Baihu, which is just an hour's drive from the dull industrial city of Fuzhou, the provincial capital, the pursuit of luxury is what drives many of its inhabitants overseas. ''Two-thirds of the village guys are abroad to make money,'' remarks Dong Haohu, a middle-aged peasant who toils at the building site of Wang's house. ''They saw people there lived in big houses and wanted to build the same.'' The only street in the village features impressive four and five-storey houses on both sides, most of them half-finished. Many are simple and solid, built with stone to withstand stormy winds and frequent typhoons. But others stand out - like one house that is a queer replica of a European Middle Ages castle, topped with turrets and flashy pink tiles. Villagers say the owners were inspired by Western homes. As descendants of people who fled years ago and more recent immigrants send back thousands of yuan every month, the have-nots of modern China - laid-off workers and destitute peasants - are eager to court any danger to reach the West too. ''I want to go but I can't afford the trip to get there,'' sighs Li Yuhua, who lost his job in a state factory in the provincial capital of Fuzhou. ''I know of seven or eight people in Changle who did it 'secretly', but they had to pay 300,000 yuan ($36,000) to the 'snakeheads'.'' 'Snakeheads' is what the locals call smugglers of human cargo. ''The government always tries to smash their networks but they are like a snake's head - fast to avoid the strike,'' explains Li. This was brought home sharply by the discovery in the past month of more incidents of human smuggling. This new wave of 117 illegal immigrants, found heading to Seattle in the United States, has alarmed both US and Chinese authorities. Three of 18 stowaways who made the ocean trip in a canvas-covered container, loaded on to a freighter in Hong Kong, were discovered dead when the ship reached Seattle. In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao warned countries not to spark ''a tidal wave'' of immigration from the mainland by granting asylum request to stowaways. He said China would strengthen its border controls and crack down on illegal immigration. But this is unlikely to discourage laid-off workers in Fujian who are forced to sustain living on 200 yuan ($24) a month, as more and more state-owned enterprises become unprofitable and close down. Nationwide, as many as 12 million workers will lose their jobs this year alone, according to Zhang Zuoji, the minister of labor and social security. In many ways, however, leaving to find a better life has been the ancient way of doing things in Fujian. In the eighteenth century, thousands of Chinese from Fujian were imported to European colonies in Southeast Asia to work as coolies in mines and plantations. A hundred years later, America became the new destination for immigrants, a land of golden opportunities where Chinese laborers built transcontinental railways, roads and telegraph lines. Historically, the Fujian people have been much more successful outside China than inside the country. The mandarin bureaucracy of imperial China and the cadre bureaucracy of communist China equally suffocated economic activity. Those who fled the limited prospects of their homeland found prosperity in their adopted countries. Today, many local people have forgotten that Fuzhou was one of the Five Treaty Ports that Western powers forced imperial China to open up for trade after its defeat in the Opium War of 1842. Yet it was foreign influence and the spirit of open trade that were the driving force for droves of Chinese to head overseas. ''There is almost no choice at home,'' says Chen Hongwu, a 36-year-old from Changle county. ''You can either try to sneak abroad or go and work for those Taiwan and Hong Kong bosses that come here because our labor is cheap. People there work 10 hours a day, six days a week and get 500 yuan ($60).'' He chose to stay on in Fujian only because he was lucky to have a sister working in Singapore. ''She helped me with money and I started my own small clothing factory.'' Only people who have no relatives abroad to help them take the risk of being smuggled into the US, according to Chen. He says local people knew some stowaways had died, but there are others willing to make the perilous trip. ''It is simple,'' Chen asserts. ''In Fujian there are more people with no money than people who have got money.'' (Inter Press Service)

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