China's Silent Army
Page 5
FEAR AND DEPENDENCY IN NEIGHBORING RUSSIA
The night train pulls out of Beijing and within a few hours is making its way through the heart of a far less charming side of China. Despite the geographical proximity of the Russian Far East, getting to Vladivostok by land is no laughing matter. Manchuria, a region that has suffered all kinds of cruelty and hardship (whether at the hands of the Japanese, Russians or Chinese), opens up ahead of us with its blunt manners and barren landscapes. In the morning we arrive in Suifenhe, a city of 100,000 inhabitants close to the Russian border. It is the first stop in our journey of discovery on the trail of the Chinese emigrant through a region that has been frequented by Asian merchants since the fifteenth century, when they used to exchange surplus tea and soya for fresh supplies of fish and ginseng. To our surprise, Jiou Peng is waiting for us at the station in a Porsche Cayenne. Good-natured and slightly built, Jiou came to meet us on the orders of his boss, Liu Desheng, whom we first met in Beijing and would soon see again in Russia. Following Liu’s instructions, Jiou is going to help us with the logistics of getting to Vladivostok. He invites us to have breakfast with him in the city’s flagship hotel, after first taking us for a drive around this fast-growing metropolis which has made its fortune from a logging industry fed by the vast Siberian forests.
The city has the same manic pace of life and typical aesthetics of any fast-growing Chinese metropolis. The shopping malls, where Chinese turbo-pop blurts out of loudspeakers, are packed from morning to night. Russian tourists pile into the shops and supermarkets to buy everything that they can’t get on the other side of the border, or to buy items they can get at home but at a fraction of the price. In the Holiday Inn, Russian couples tuck into generous breakfasts after a busy weekend of shopping and relaxation. “I have a VIP card. There’s no need to pay,” Jiou Peng insists when we attempt to foot the bill. As well as his Porsche Cayenne, Jiou’s Birkenstock trainers, Jeep polo shirt, Cartier watch and white gold Bulgari ring all announce that life is good. He is the perfect example of Chinese new money: self-made millionaires who have made their fortune in less than a decade and who live in new-built towns with no sense of glamour or luxury and throw their money away on the last word in Western fashion. These are all status symbols in a hierarchical society where it pays to mark the difference between yourself and the lower classes.
Once we have a Russian stamp on our passports, we set off on our journey to Vladivostok along roads which take us back to another era and another world. We are struck by the almost clinical division at the border in terms of race, as if sliced down the middle with a scalpel: the coarse facial features of northern China give way suddenly to the slender figures, pale skin and blond hair of the Caucasian race. Crossing from one country to another is also a leap back into the past: the dual carriageways, bridges and skyscrapers of the Chinese side give way to a poor, rural and ancient landscape. Time has frozen here in the shadows of the Soviet era.
Liu Desheng is waiting for us in a café in central Vladivostok. We first met him at a lunch in Beijing which he attended as a representative of Chinese businessmen working in Russia’s most important Pacific port. He told us about the difficulties faced by investors in a region wracked by endemic corruption. “For the first few years, a Chinese man doing business with a Russian has to hand over almost all of his takings to the Russian. That’s what we mean when we talk about the mafia. The mafia isn’t some separate, autonomous entity. It’s everywhere. But once you’ve established a relationship of trust, everything gets better.” Born in 1973, Liu personifies the Chinese version of the American dream. In 1995 he decided to give up his job as a cook and to go into business with his two brothers selling Chinese products in the retail market in Vladivostok.
His two older brothers were the pioneers. They first traveled to the Russian city in 1992 to work in the construction industry for a monthly wage equivalent to 120 euros. After six months, they returned to their village to convince their family to start trading in Chinese products after identifying a powerful business opportunity. Liu was brought up in a poor rural family; his only education came from primary school and a cookery course. He earned his living first in a restaurant and then in a brewery, and he didn’t hesitate for a moment in leaving it all behind to join his brothers in their new business venture.
“I first crossed the border with Russia on October 28, 1995,” he tells us, sitting between his assistant and his chauffeur at a café in a five-star hotel. Earlier that day his chauffeur had picked us up in one of the few modern Mercedes to be seen in Vladivostok. “I began by selling boots made in Heilongjiang. Fifty-eight days later I’d made my first fortune: 24,000 roubles, or about 500 euros,” he recalls, smiling. “Back then I slept in the same place where I kept my merchandise to save money, while my brother was in charge of supplying the business with new stock. We started to grow and we set up our first shop. Then we acquired the place next door, and we knocked down a wall to widen the business,” continues Liu, a father of three children aged eleven, six and three. Family and friends played an important role, he assures us. Today over 120 people from his circle of acquaintances are involved in a business which extends across the whole of Russia and employs thousands of people. The company now owns four shopping centers in Vladivostok, two in Khabarovsk and several shops in Moscow.
With his piercing gaze and muscular build, Liu confidently plays the traditional Chinese role of head of the clan or, in his case, leader of his enterprising compatriots. “My family is one of the most influential in Vladivostok,” he tells us. “If you have any kind of problem here, just show my card to a Chinese person in any bus or in the street and they will help you. They know who I am.” To gain his trust, we met him several times in Chinese restaurants where the staff hurried to give us their best private rooms. We toasted Sino-Spanish friendship, showed off our chopstick skills, and recommended some favorite dishes from northern China by memory in Mandarin. Not for the first time, we found that the dinner table is the best possible place when it comes to breaking down Chinese reserve.
“Russia puts a 50 percent tax on products imported from China,” he tells us, “so some people decide to bring them in illegally. They drive a truck to the border and bribe the Russian customs officers. Once the truck is over the border, they need to avoid taking main roads or making any suspicious movements, because if they get stopped at another checkpoint the price of the merchandise goes up, since they will have to pay another bribe.” In between toasts with rice wine and mouthfuls of sweet and sour pork, Liu offers us his observations on the secrets of success for Chinese businesses in Russia. Little by little, we are drawn into the heart of the phenomenon of Chinese migration in the country and we begin to understand the fear that this inspires in the local people. “If the Russians don’t want us to bring illegal merchandise into the country, they should lower their customs duties on our products,” he tells us.10
Russian officials later tell us that these taxes are applied to protect the failing local industry, but this sounds outrageous to Liu: “The Russians can’t live without Chinese products. When the police make trouble for Chinese businessmen, declaring their businesses illegal and trying to shut them down, the businessmen come to me and say we should leave and stop selling things to them. Let’s see how they would manage then!” Liu concludes, referring to eastern Russia’s dependency on China for agricultural supplies and consumer goods.11
The extent of this dependency becomes strikingly clear when we visit the biggest market in Vladivostok, which belongs to Liu. At 4,000 square meters, the market is an impressive visual spectacle which houses a thousand shops with 2,000 employees. In the covered area of the market, businesses are arranged according to the birthplace of the Chinese shopkeepers, who run almost all of the businesses in the market. The aisle for “shoemakers from Yunnan” is next to the one for “tailors from Jilin,” while tradesmen from Hebei sell knick-knacks, toys and cheap jewelry. In the open-air area we find an enormous street market
where shipping containers have been converted into market stalls. Russian, Vietnamese, Central Asian and, most of all, Chinese traders fall over each other to sell spices, torches, T-shirts, bread, sweets, tinned food and anything else you can imagine. Over 80 percent of the products on sale come from China and—to the anger of the local people—there has been very little impact on local job creation as two out of every three salespeople are Chinese. The same trend can be seen throughout Russia: 83 percent of foreign workers in Siberian markets are Chinese, and when we consider the situation in the whole of the country the figure is 61 percent.12
The success of the thousands of Chinese traders working in Siberia contrasts sharply with the decline of the former Soviet State, which is now on its guard against its neighbor’s miraculous expansion. While Chinese border towns such as Suifenhe are developing at full speed without ever looking back, the atmosphere when we got off the Trans-Siberian Railway in Khabarovsk was one of gentle decline and nostalgia for another age. During our stay in this city, where most people still drive old Lada cars which refuse to give up the ghost, the townspeople held a lively party to celebrate Khabarovsk’s 152nd anniversary. Whole families had piled out into the streets, from grandparents and grandchildren dressed in their Sunday best to sailors holding hands with retro-looking girls in high heels. They all crammed onto the path alongside the river, welcoming the first rays of spring sunlight after a long, hard winter and enjoying themselves at an amusement park that looked like something out of a Cold War spy film. The comparison is inevitable. On this side of the Amur River people sing, dance, drink and celebrate, apparently oblivious to how their neighbors on the opposite bank are developing at a breakneck speed.
China and Russia are old acquaintances who have spent centuries waging war on one another, each taking chunks out of territory that boasts an enormous store of natural resources, from gold and oil to fresh water and rare wood. Chinese migration has become a very sensitive issue in Russia, a country which now lives in fear of a silent Chinese invasion.13 As we confirmed over the course of our travels, China is also expanding into neighboring Central Asia, a region which once formed part of the Soviet Union and which, despite its current state of decline, remains to a great extent under Moscow’s control.14 Russia has not forgotten that, back before the Revolution, Chinese merchants made up 13 percent of the local population in their eastern territories, a strategic region for Moscow.15 Experts and politicians view the situation with some concern, particularly because of its future implications: the four provinces in northern China which share a border with Russia (Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning) boast a population of 132 million people16 as well as increasingly rare natural resources such as water, wood, oil and fertile land. On the other side of the Amur River, a vast territory stretching from Irkutsk to Vladivostok is home to just 6 million people and contains the natural resources and raw materials that China needs. There is also the psychological impact of the fact that China—a symbol of poverty just three decades ago in the midst of the ending of Maoism—is now a rich country. As a proud nation used to holding a position of power and looking down its nose at its poor neighbor, it is not easy for Russia to come to terms with the idea that times have changed. Whether the Russians like it or not, China’s moment has finally arrived.
Despite the anxiety that the thought of a silent invasion causes in Siberia, many people see Beijing as the only alternative in a developing region which has been neglected by Moscow and has been hit by a steady population decline. “We don’t have a choice here. The population in the Russian Far East will decrease from 6 million to 4 million by 2050. We already don’t have an adequate workforce and we will have less in the future. We will then be dependent on Chinese trade, investments and workers,” argues Vladimir Kucheryavenko, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences at Khabarovsk’s Institute of Economic Research.
Other experts, such as Mikhail Tersky, director of the Pacific Center of Strategic Development at the University of Vladivostok, have thrown in the towel altogether, insisting that Russia’s destiny lies in collaboration with China. “We have no future unless it is with China. It would be crazy to stand in the way of a hurricane. If China considers us its enemy it will be much worse for Russia, so it would be better for us to work together. Now it is just a question of finding ways of minimizing our losses.”
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
By exploring the business practices of the shanta sini and wandering through Liu’s Russian markets we can gain some insight into the strategy of Chinese emigrants, their need to abandon their country for economic reasons and, most importantly, the significant regional impact of their expansion across the planet. This impact is first felt by local businesses, which can only stand by and watch as they lose territory to competition which is both better organized and able to sell goods at unbeatable prices.17 We will later see how this emigration also transports Chinese environmental and labor standards across the world. However, it is impossible to understand the Chinese diaspora across the planet without taking into account the migratory flow that has been taking place for decades within China itself. Since the beginning of the opening of China’s economy, at least 200 million people have abandoned rural areas in search of new opportunities in the towns and cities. Experts predict that another 300 million people will undertake the same journey over the course of the next few years. While population mobility is increasing within China itself, spurred on by economic growth, a great flow of emigrants is also setting off in search of new opportunities outside China, conquering international markets everywhere, from Nigeria to Argentina and from Papua New Guinea to Canada. Here we see the acceleration of a trend that began centuries ago but which is now greater, faster, broader and more decisive than ever before.
The Chinese people have been emigrating for hundreds of years, fleeing from hunger, war, repression (even before the Communists came to power) and social conflict. All of these factors have contributed to China’s having one of the largest emigrant populations in history, with around 35 million citizens of Chinese ethnicity—mostly from the Han18 ethnic group—scattered across the planet.19 In some Asian regions, Chinese migration dates back to the twelfth century, when the Chinese empire was just beginning to transform itself into the naval powerhouse which it became in the fifteenth century at the hands of Admiral Zheng He, who is known by some as the Chinese Christopher Columbus. Zheng captained several expeditions on the orders of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty and took China as far as the Gulf of Aden on the coast of present-day Somalia. The seven naval missions that he led between 1405 and his death in 1433 were all aimed at extending the tax and tribute system of a nation which at that time had no equal in terms of modern technology and control of the seas.
With vessels four times larger than the Santa Maria which Columbus sailed to the West Indies, the voyages of Zheng He—a eunuch of Muslim origin who won the respect of the Ming emperors through his courage in battle—managed to transport up to 27,000 men on several different ships.20 His voyages marked the beginning of the golden age of trade in Southeast Asia, promoting trade in spices and handicrafts and giving ports such as Malacca the importance they still enjoy today on modern shipping routes.21 Driven by improvements in navigation, trade became the real springboard for the gradual migration of millions of Chinese people throughout Asia. Their descendants today make up the greater part of the population of various countries in the region: the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that there are 28 million people of Chinese ethnicity scattered throughout Asia, constituting a significant part of the population in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.22
Human trafficking also played a part in the arrival of small numbers of Chinese slaves in Western colonies in America and Africa. However, it was not until the abolition of the trade over the course of the nineteenth century that Chinese emigration really began to go global. At this point Chinese emigrants started to appear on the farms of Peru
, in the mines of South Africa, and even on First World War battlefields, where Great Britain, France and Russia employed up to 150,000 Chinese workers for tasks such as digging trenches and burying the war dead in exchange for pitiful wages.23 During these decades, China was effectively falling apart. Political unrest, economic hardship and generalized chaos culminated in bloody civil war and Japanese invasion, creating the conditions which laid the groundwork for the process of modern migration before the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. Waves of Chinese emigrants from provinces such as Fujian and Canton did not hesitate for a moment in piling themselves with debt in order to get hold of the boat ticket that would take them far away from hardship and foreign invasion and carry them to a new land of opportunities.
What happened to them? Did they achieve their goals? To do so, they had to face extreme hardship, even worse than that experienced by the modern-day shanta sini. However, for many of them the rewards for their efforts are still clearly visible today, as is the case for some of the people we met on our travels. They left China in order to succeed in life and they made their fortunes and never went back. Today, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are no longer emigrants. Instead they make up the new generations of Chinese overseas.