MINELRES: JRL RAS: Chinese Community in Moscow

[Felix Corley]

JRL RESEARCH AND ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT
Editor: Stephen D. Shenfield
shenfield@neaccess.net
Issue No. 11
August 2002

For back issues go to the RAS archive at:
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/jrl-ras.cfm


RUSSIA-CHINA: THE CHINESE COMMUNITY IN MOSCOW

SOURCE. V. G. Gel'bras. Kitaiskaia real'nost' Rossii [The Chinese Reality of
Russia] (Moscow: Izd-vo "Muravei," 2001)

Chinese migration is widely recognized to be an important factor in
Russian-Chinese relations. However, attention is generally paid only to
Chinese migrants in the Russian Far East. (1) The presence of a large and
well-organized Chinese community is Moscow is ignored.

The author of this book, Vilya Gelbras, professor at the Institute for the
Countries of Asia and Africa attached to Moscow State University and a doyen
of Russian Sinology with long experience of study and work in China, carried
out in 1998-99 a comparative study of Chinese migrants in Moscow (428
interviews) and in the Far East (329 interviews in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok,
and Ussuriisk). (2)

Estimates of the number of Chinese in Moscow range up to 40,000. On the
basis
of indirect indicators such as the print runs of Chinese newspapers,
Professor Gelbras arrives at an estimate of 20-25,000. Most of these people
are either students (27 percent) or businesspeople, ranging from petty
traders up to "representatives of big companies subordinate to or closely
connected with [China's] Ministry of Foreign Trade and External Economic
Ties."

The Chinese in Moscow form a self-sufficient and self-contained society with

 * its own hotels and hostels, medical clinics, restaurants

 * its own protection firms and criminal gangs

 * its own "tourist agencies" (to help illegal migrants headed for the West)

 * its own newspapers. (Several Chinese-language newspapers are published in
Moscow. One of them operates a labor agency.)

 * its own associations (for students, entrepreneurs, women).

Moreover, this Chinese society is divided into a series of sub-societies by
province of origin. Even these communities of fellow provincials are to a
large extent self-sufficient and self-contained. Many Chinese hotels,
clinics, protection firms and so on cater only to people hailing from a
specific province in China. This is the main social division among Chinese
in
Moscow (as in many other places throughout the world), although they are
divided in other ways as well (e.g., by economic position and educational
level).

Pressures from within as well as without somewhat isolate this microcosm of
Chinese society from its Russian surroundings:

 -- Only 1 percent of Moscow Chinese are citizens of Russia; only another 1
percent even wish to acquire Russian citizenship. (3)

 -- Only 21 percent say they know Russian well, though another 43 percent
claim limited knowledge.

 -- Only 19 percent say that local Russian people take a friendly attitude
toward them; 36 percent say their attitude is not very friendly, and 8
percent say their attitude is bad. 10 percent report being verbally
insulted;
5 percent report being beaten and 4 percent robbed (often by skinheads).

Nevertheless, Chinese in Moscow are less isolated than Chinese in Russia's
Far East. In Vladivostok, for example, only 16 percent know Russian well, in
Khabarovsk 13 percent, in Ussuriisk 8 percent. This is connected with the
fact that the Moscow community is "substantially larger and relatively
stable" (p. 63). More than a third of Moscow respondents had lived in the
city for more than three years, compared with about a quarter in each of the
three Far Eastern cities.

Gelbras is especially outraged by the business card of a "night club only
for
Chinese," located on Prospekt mira in downtown Moscow. The card is
prominently displayed on the book's front cover against the backdrop of a
map
of the Russian-Chinese border in the Far East: two prongs of the Chinese
"invasion."

The distribution of Chinese in Moscow by provincial origin is quite
different
from that of Chinese in Russia's Far East. A large majority of Chinese in
the
Far East (60 percent in Ussuriisk, 81 percent in Vladivostok, 90 percent in
Khabarovsk) hail from the Manchurian provinces of China's industrially
depressed northeast (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Shenyang). Only 21 percent of
Chinese in Moscow come from these three provinces, as against 24 percent
from
the three provinces of Hebei, Shandong, and Fujian on China's eastern
coastline. A further 12 percent are from Beijing and 6 percent from
Shanghai,
with a scattering from other parts of China, including Guangdong in the far
south.

Thus Chinese migration to Russia's Far East is basically a local phenomenon,
arising from interaction between contiguous peripheries of the two
countries.
The Chinese community in Moscow is a more accurate reflection of interaction
between Russia and China as a whole.

NOTES

(1) See RAS No. 1 Item 8.

(2) The book deals also with other aspects of Russian-Chinese relations:
Russian public opinion regarding China and Chinese, geopolitics and
geo-economics, and implications for Russia's foreign and security policy.

(3) 96 percent are citizens of the PRC; the remainder are citizens of third
countries.