The Emperor Far Away
Page 31
Yang Chao’s stall was doing a brisk trade in kitchen utensils and hairdryers. ‘It’s a much better business than my previous one, which was a clothes shop, and it’s easier dealing with Russians than the Chinese,’ she said. ‘Russian people are quite honest and they buy things quickly. They pick up an item, decide if they like it and then pay for it. The Chinese spend ages trying to decide if they want it and then they start bargaining, which is tiring.’
So many Russians are in Heihe at any one time that the locals treat them more as a minority than as visitors, an odd-looking bunch who speak a different language but are part of the scenery. And just as the Han are always keen to demonstrate that they are in charge in the borderlands, so Heihe’s government is not shy about letting the residents of Blagoveshchensk know that the balance of power has shifted to their side of the river.
Each evening at 11 o’clock sharp, the street lights of Heihe dim abruptly. The electricity that fuels them is instead diverted to the multitude of neon signs and displays on the buildings overlooking the Amur. A Dongbei version of the glittering Las Vegas Strip, it is an unsubtle boast of how Heihe is thriving at the expense of far less luminous Blagoveshchensk, a nightly show whose significance is understood by every Russian. ‘This was all slums a few years ago,’ one told me, as we stood on the promenade gazing up at the flashing, blazing lights.
26
An Empire Expanding
Heihe’s apparently never-ending energy supply isn’t the only way it likes to intimidate its neighbour. The Wu Jing at the border control by the Amur were the rudest I had ever encountered. They pushed and shoved the long lines of Russians waiting to return home with their shopping, making many open up their purchases only to look inside for a moment before walking away, leaving them struggling to reseal their boxes and bags.
Sean, who had come to see me off, was shocked. ‘No wonder Russians say bad things about the Chinese.’ In contrast, I was treated as a special guest. Hardly anyone crosses this frontier apart from Russians and Chinese. At the sight of my unfamiliar passport, I was waved through customs ahead of everyone else. The senior officer on duty left his office to usher me out of China and was charming with it.
I emerged on to the slippery, snow-covered banks of the Amur faced with having to persuade someone to take me to the other side. In the summer, boats ply between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk, while in the winter dinky little hovercraft make the run, skimming over the ice in a matter of minutes. But a rigid system of apartheid operates on the transport across the river, with some vessels for Chinese and others for Russians. I fell into neither category and had already been refused a ticket on a Chinese craft.
Russians, though, buy return tickets in Blagoveshchensk for specific boats, leaving little space for stray travellers. I traipsed up and down for half an hour before I found a hovercraft both willing to take me and with a spare seat. I handed over 200 yuan (£20) for the cramped five-minute ride, an unwelcome but salutary introduction to the difference in living costs between Russia and China.
At the Russian frontier post, I was greeted with a mixture of bewilderment and suspicion. Obstructive, vodka-grumpy Russian officials are less common now than they once were, but they still exist. Surprised by my arrival, they made me fill out numerous forms while my passport was examined minutely. I made sure to stay polite, sprinkling every sentence with spasibo, the Russian for ‘thank you’, and was eventually rewarded with an entry stamp.
My hotel room was typical of lodgings in the Russian Far East: a massively overpriced shoebox with a bed, furniture and TV dating from a couple of decades before. But it was very warm and the small window afforded me a sliver of a river view. I didn’t stay long to enjoy it. Waiting for me downstairs were Elena and Anastasia, lecturers at the local university whose names had been passed on to me by a Russian journalist contact in Vladivostok.
Elena was a vivacious, middle-aged blonde, Anastasia younger and dark and pretty in a severe way. They asked what I wanted to eat. I suggested Russian food, which caused them to pause. ‘Well there is one place we know,’ said Elena. ‘We mostly eat at Chinese restaurants. There are so many now and they are a lot cheaper than Russian ones.’ Outside, it was bitter in the late afternoon, and after a few minutes the tip of my nose was tingling and my chin felt raw. ‘It’s frosty today,’ said Anastasia, an understated way of describing a temperature of -26 degrees Centigrade.
Both were wrapped up in voluminous fur coats. I asked if they had bought them in Heihe. ‘Of course,’ they answered in unison. ‘The only thing I buy in Russia is underwear,’ said Anastasia. We walked along the riverfront, while Elena recalled how the Chinese used to broadcast deafening propaganda from Heihe twenty-four hours a day during the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to scare Blagoveshchensk’s residents. Unlike in Dongbei, there were no teams of workers clearing away the snow. It was deep enough for some of the locals to take to snowboards towed by cars at night, a Russian winter alternative to waterskiing.
We passed the university Elena and Anastasia taught at, housed in an imposing redbrick former boarding school from the tsarist era. Blagoveshchensk, known to Russians as ‘Blago’, has a number of elegant nineteenth-century buildings, mostly lining the riverfront and its main street named after Lenin. Along with the city’s ageing apartment blocks, they are the most obvious difference between Blago and Heihe which, like most Chinese cities, has been almost entirely rebuilt over the last two decades.
But Blago, despite appearing to be much older than its neighbour, is a relatively new creation. It was founded on the tsar’s orders in 1858, the same year that the Treaty of Aigun confirmed Russia’s appropriation of Outer Manchuria. Long before then, it was the site of a Manchu town and fort. And even after it became Blagoveshchensk, much of its population remained Manchu or Daur. Few Russians were willing to venture thousands of kilometres east from the country’s European heartland to such an isolated spot.
Han migrants moved north to join the minorities. As in Vladivostok, another of the cities created in Russia’s newly acquired lands in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the Chinese who controlled much of the local trade. Well over a century before Da Dao in Heihe opened, imports from China to the Russian Far East already vastly outnumbered the goods sent south across the Amur.
That imbalance provoked jealousy and discontent among Blago’s Russians. In the summer of 1900, the decision was taken to deport the entire Chinese community. Around 4,000 people were marched to the shores of the Amur and, with no boats to take them to the other side, were pushed in to drown or swim home. Those who struggled to stay on dry land were beaten to death by willing bands of Cossacks and locals. The massacre is the subject of a museum outside Heihe. It was closed when I was there, but Russians are banned from visiting it, an indication that the Chinese have not forgotten or forgiven what occurred over a century ago.
The slaughter by the banks of the Amur was the first notable expression of the schizophrenic attitudes towards China and the Chinese that continue to be held today by most Russians in the region. Elena and Anastasia, like everyone else in Blago, knew their lives would be far less pleasant without the presence of Heihe across the river to shop, eat and drink in. As academics, they were aware too that Chinese investment in the local construction and timber industries makes for a vivid contrast with the indifference displayed towards the Far East by their own government in far-off Moscow.
Yet they were typical too in their dislike and distrust of the Chinese migrants to Blago, who starting returning across the Amur in significant numbers from 2000 onwards, even if both women were happy to eat in their restaurants. ‘Too many Chinese are here now. If too many come it won’t be beneficial to Russia,’ stated Anastasia, picking her words carefully. Elena had a problem with their personal habits. ‘They spit and smoke everywhere and they eat too much garlic,’ she said.
In part, Anastasia and Elena were merely being Russian. Intolerance of immigrants is something of a national trait
, notwithstanding the fact that Russia is the largest country in the world, as well as being hugely under-populated. ‘I think Russians in general don’t really like foreigners. Here it’s the Chinese. In other parts of Russia it’s people from the Caucacus or Serbs or Africans,’ one of Anastasia’s students named Sergei told me. ‘A lot of Chinese walk around Blago like they own the place, and many unemployed Russians resent that they take jobs away from them because they’ll work for lower salaries.’
Nikolay Kukharenko, the engaging head of the local Confucius Institute, a Beijing-funded scheme to encourage the learning of Mandarin and present a softer side of China to the world, disagreed. ‘I know lots of Russian businessmen who’ll tell you how they will pay 30,000 roubles [£550] a month to a Russian and they work for a month and then they start drinking. The Chinese don’t drink, work hard and they’ll accept 20,000 roubles [£370] a month. You know, it’s a lot easier for a western Russian politician to say the Chinese are taking jobs than it is for them to create jobs.’
Nationalist deputies in the Duma, the Russian parliament, crack jokes about how Blago is so dominated by Beijing that the city government includes Chinese officials. None of the migrants from Dongbei are laughing, as that only feeds the anger of the local xenophobes. ‘I think the Russians are prejudiced towards the Chinese,’ said Zhang Li Na, a thirty-five-year-old woman from Harbin. ‘Sometimes we are afraid to go out at night because the young Russian guys get drunk and beat the Chinese up. But the police don’t care if a Chinese person gets attacked.’
Zhang and her husband are typical of the Chinese in Blago, who are mostly small-time traders. Their business is selling clocks. ‘We buy the clocks in southern China, in Guangzhou and Yiwu, and then assemble them here using Chinese workers. Russians are no good at working hard. They drink too much and they’re lazy and inefficient,’ she said. ‘I don’t really like Russians, although the old people are friendly, and the Russians don’t like us being here. But they can’t live without us. The only real Russian industries are all heavy manufacturing. They can’t make clothes or clocks or anything like that cheaply.’
Most of the stall owners at the main market are Chinese and they were happy to put up with my tone-uncertain Mandarin, rather than having to communicate in the pidgin Russian they use normally. There are now around 10,000 full-time Chinese residents of Blago, with another 10,000 or so coming to work on a seasonal basis on farms and building sites. In total, the Chinese make up about 10 per cent of the population. That is more than enough to confirm the greatest fear of the locals, which is that China wants to reclaim Outer Manchuria and is colonising the Far East by stealth.
Beijing’s ambitions in the region are the subject of TV documentaries and newspaper columns in Russia, and are the subtext to every conversation about the Chinese in Blago. ‘Here in the Far East, people feel neglected by Moscow and we are detached from the rest of Russia. You can’t be sure it won’t happen in the future because the Russian population is declining and the Chinese need room because there are so many of them,’ said Sergei the student.
It is the dwindling number of Russians in the Far East that truly alarms the politicians in Moscow. There are around six and a half million people in an area that covers six and a half million square kilometres, down from just over eight million in 1991 when the Soviet Union expired. Across the Amur, over 100 million Chinese live in far smaller Dongbei alone. Faced with such an overwhelming numerical superiority, the paranoia of Blago’s residents is understandable. Many are convinced the arrival of Chinese workers in the Far East over the last decade is the first step in China’s plan to extend its boundaries in the north-east.
Adding to the temptation for Beijing are the region’s abundant natural resources. Rich in everything from coal to timber, as well as untapped minerals and a huge salmon-fishing industry, China is already buying up as many local companies as it can. And every Russian with even a tenuous grasp of history knows that the Far East was once Manchu territory. For the conspiracy theorists, resurrecting the Manchurian Empire would allow China to solve some of its energy needs and give its people access to a fresh supply of both land and jobs.
Arresting the decline in the Far East’s population is probably an impossible task. In the days of the USSR, many of the country’s cleverest citizens were encouraged to move east by higher salaries and subsidised flights back to European Russia. Now those incentives are gone and their descendants are leaving in their droves. Just as bright as their parents and grandparents were, they are unwilling to put up with low wages and living so far from the centre of the country.
So expensive is the eight-hour flight to Moscow that it is cheaper for Blago’s residents to cross the Amur and hop on a plane to the beaches of Sanya on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost point, for a holiday in the sun. Many of the young people in the Far East have never even been to western Russia. Instead of looking for jobs in the capital or St Petersburg, more and more of them are now migrating south. Almost all of Elena and Anastasia’s students wanted out of Blago, and China is increasingly their destination of choice.
They grow up visiting Heihe as often as twice a month. Moving to the country they know already is the logical next step. ‘I used to want to go to America or the UK and that’s why I worked so hard at my English. But then I started to study Chinese and now I’ve decided my future lies in China. It’s much easier for me to get to China than it is to get a visa for America,’ said Eugenya, a smart and tall twenty-one-year-old with flaming red hair. Her Mandarin is already almost fluent. ‘Some people in Russia think being so close to China is dangerous because of the history, but I think it’s an opportunity for me.’
Despite the Russians fleeing the Far East, and the ominous pronouncements from Moscow about China’s intentions, it is improbable that Beijing will literally retake the territory it lost to Russia. But, as North Korea already is, the region is set to become an economic colony of Dongbei. ‘In ten years’ time there’ll be far more Russian resources owned by China,’ said Nikolay Kukharenko, the most rational of the Russians I met in Blago when it came to their neighbour. ‘What reason is there for the Chinese to come physically if they can just take our resources?’
Some of the people of Blago will be absorbed into the Chinese realm too, like the Manchu, Oroqen and Hezhen before them. It is the nature of empires to contract and expand, to attract and repel. Eugenya’s determination to travel south and find a future in China is simply part of a natural process, just the latest wave of migration in Outer Manchuria – a land so vast that maps are automatically arbitrary.
China’s borderlands mutate constantly. They are permanently restless, forever in flux. Different peoples have always moved in both directions between China and its neighbours. All that changes are the reasons that pull or push them beyond the frontiers. In Blago, especially late at night, the contrast with the opposite bank of the Amur is so great that is enough to make anyone want to move on. Standing on the riverfront with the darkened buildings of the tsar’s Russia at my back, even I could feel the neon lights of Heihe calling me towards China.
Further Reading
Bailey F. M. Mission to Tashkent (Oxford University Press, 1946)
Bailey F. M. No Passport to Tibet (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957)
Becker Jasper Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (Simon & Schuster, 1997)
Bickers Robert The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire 1832–1914 (Allen Lane, 2011)
Cha Victor The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (The Bodley Head, 2012)
Chang Jung and Jon Halliday Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005)
Chang Leslie T. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau, 2008)
Colquhoun Archibald Ross Amongst the Shans (Field & Tuer, 1885)
Colquhoun Archibald Ross The ‘Overland’ to China (Harper & Brothers, 1900)
Crossley Pamela Kyle, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton (eds), Empire at the Margins:
Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China (University of California Press, 2006)
Davis Sara L. M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders (Columbia University Press, 2005)
Demick Barbara Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea (Granta Books, 2010)
Dikötter Frank The Discourse of Race in Modern China (C. Hurst, 1992)
Evans Grant, Christopher Hutton and Kuah Kung Eng (eds), Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Social and Cultural Change in the Borderlands (Palgrave, 2000)
Fleming Peter News from Tartary (Jonathan Cape, 1936)
Fleming Peter One’s Company (Jonathan Cape, 1934)
French Patrick Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (HarperCollins, 2003)
Gifford Rob China Road: One Man’s Journey into the Heart of Modern China (Bloomsbury, 2007)
Goullart Peter Forgotten Kingdom (John Murray, 1957)
Hopkirk Peter The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (Kodansha Amer, 1992)
Johnston Reginald Fleming From Peking to Mandalay (John Murray, 1908)
Kynge James China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006)
Ma Jian Red Dust: A Path through China (Chatto & Windus, 2001)
Pomfret John Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China (Henry Holt, 2006)
Scott James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009)
Shakya Tsering The Dragon in the Land of the Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (Pimlico, 1999)
Spence Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China (Hutchinson, 1990)
Thubron Colin To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus, 2011)
Tyler Christian Wild West China: The Untold Story of a Frontier Land (John Murray, 2003)
Wang Lixiong and Tsering Shakya The Struggle for Tibet (Verso, 2009)