Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Middleman Minority in a Transnational Era (Chinese Worlds)

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to Russia and Eastern Europe. However, until now, very little research has been done about the initial migrants in the nineteenth century, the presence of the Chinese in Europe and Russia in the twentieth century before the collapse of the ‘socialist’ regimes or about the great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia which occurred after 1989. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particularly important is the movement of entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, who took advantage of unmet demand, inadequate retail networks and largely unregulated markets to become suppliers of cheap consumer goods to low-income Eastern Europeans. In some villages, Chinese merchants now occupy a position not unlike that of Jewish shopkeepers before the Second World War. Although their interactions with local society are numerous, the degree of social integration and acceptance is often low. At the same time, they maintain close economic, social and political ties to China. Empirical in focus, and full of rich ethnographic data, Nyíri Pál has produced a book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, international migration, diaspora and transnationalism. Nyíri Pál is a senior lecturer and director of the Applied Anthropology programme at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Chinese Worlds Chinese Worlds publishes high-quality scholarship, research monographs, and source collections on Chinese history and society. ‘Worlds’ signals the diversity of China, the cycles of unity and division through which China’s modern history has passed, and recent research trends toward regional studies and local issues. It also signals that Chineseness is not contained within borders – ethnic migrant communities overseas are also ‘Chinese worlds’. The series editors are Gregor Benton, Flemming Christiansen, Delia Davin, Terence Gomez and Frank Pieke. The Literary Fields of Twentieth-Century China Edited by Michel Hockx Chinese Business in Malaysia accumulation, ascendance, accommodation Edmund Terence Gomez Internal and International Migration Chinese perspectives Edited by Frank N. Pieke and Hein Mallee Village Inc. Chinese rural society in the 1990s Edited by Flemming Christiansen and Zhang Junzuo Chen Duxiu’s Last Articles and Letters, 1937–1942 Edited and translated by Gregor Benton Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas Edited by Lynn Pan New Fourth Army Communist resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938–1941 Gregor Benton A Road is Made Communism in Shanghai 1920–1927 Steve Smith The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919–1927 Alexander Pantsov Chinas Unlimited Gregory Lee Friend of China – The Myth of Rewi Alley Anne-Marie Brady Birth Control in China 1949–2000 Population policy and demographic development Thomas Scharping

Chinatown, Europe: An Exploration of Overseas Chinese Identity in the 1990s Flemming Christiansen Financing China’s Rural Enterprises Jun Li Confucian Capitalism Souchou Yao Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882–1941 Kedah and Penang Wu Xiao An Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism and Identity Edited by Edmund Terence Gomez and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao Diasporic Chinese Ventures The life and work of Wang Gungwu Gregor Benton and Hong Liu Intellectuals in Revolutionary China, 1921–1949 Leaders, Heroes and Sophisticates Hung-yok Ip Migration, Ethnic Relations and Chinese Business Kwok Bun Chan Chinese Identities, Ethnicity and Cosmopolitanism Kwok Bun Chan Chinese Ethnic Business Global and local perspectives Edited by Eric Fong and Chiu Luk Chinese Transnational Networks Edited by Tan Chee-Beng Chinese Migrants and Internationalism Forgotten histories, 1917–1945 Gregor Benton Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia A middleman minority in a transnational era Nyíri Pál

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia A middleman minority in a transnational era Nyíri Pál

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 5RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Nyíri Pál All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Nyíri, Pál. Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: a middleman minority in a transnational era / Nyiri Pal. – 1st ed. p. cm. – (Chinese worlds) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Chinese – Russia – History. 2. Chinese – Europe, Eastern – History. 3. Chinese – Soviet Union – History. 4. Chinese – Russia (Federation). 5. Chinese – Migrations. 6. Emigration and immigration – Economic aspects. 7. Emigration and immigration – Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series. DK34.C45N95 2007 305.895v1047 – dc22 2007016338 ISBN 0-203-93396-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–44686–4 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93396–6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–44686–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93396–1 (ebk)

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To my friends Zhao Luoyan and Yan Xiqing

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Contents

List of tables Acknowledgements A note on the sources

ix xi xiii

PART I

History

1

1

Early contacts

3

2

Chinese farmers, hunters, workers and merchants in Russia, 1858–1914

9

3 4

Chinese as labourers and soldiers in Russia’s wars, 1914–22

31

Chinese in the Soviet Union, 1922–89

41

PART II

The present 5

47

Chinese migration to Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989: Sources, numbers and migration strategies

49

6

Employment and the ethnic economy

77

7

Transnational practices and politics

101

8

Finding a place in Eastern Europe?

129

9

Conclusion: A transnational middleman minority

137

Notes Bibliography Index

141 149 167

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List of tables

2.1 5.1 5.2

Registered Chinese population in the Russian Far East, 1858–1910 Chinese citizens entering Romania, 1990–3 Chinese citizens holding residence permits in the Czech Republic, 1990–4

19 65 65

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Acknowledgements

Some of the fieldwork this book draws on was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council within the Transnational Communities Programme grant ‘At the margins of the Chinese world system: the Fuzhou diaspora in Europe’, no. L214252012. Parts of the writing took place while on a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Freie Universität zu Berlin. I wish to thank Irina Koutcherenko (formerly of Vladivostok), Dr. Alexander Larin (Moscow), Dr. Carolyn D. Muir and Sophia Woodman (Hong Kong), Dr. Yoshimura Mako (Hosei), Dr. Judit Tóth, Dr. Katalin Haraszti and Dr. Judit Juhász (Budapest), Professor Li Minghuan (Xiamen) and Song Yu (Peking), who have called my attention to resources relevant to this book.

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A note on the sources

This short monograph intends to provide an overview of what we know about Chinese in Eastern Europe, including the Russian Federation, but excluding the former East Germany and the Asian states of the former Soviet Union. The Asiatic part of Russia proper is included because, despite its geographic position, it has been part of Europe culturally since the subjugation of its indigenous peoples by Russian colonists – even though earlier those peoples had been tributaries of the Chinese empire. The east of Germany is excluded because, since reunification in 1991, Chinese immigration there has followed ‘western’ patterns: by Chinese restaurant owners moving in from Western Germany, by students and by asylum seekers. This book intends to be a reference volume. Its focus is empirical. Although it is illustrated with ethnographic material and contains elements of social and political analysis, it refers readers interested in either more detailed descriptions or a more analytical treatment of the described phenomena to other sources. At the same time, the accents of this study are different from those of similar volumes on the Chinese in Western Europe. First, while Chinese have come to Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, before the twentieth century, practically no research has been done on them. We know very little even of their presence in the twentieth century before the collapse of ‘socialist’ regimes. The great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia occurred after 1989, and by necessity it is on this period that this book will overwhelmingly focus. Second, the Chinese diaspora in Eastern Europe is essentially the product of a history still happening. Geographical distribution and population may change significantly over a span of several years. Communities and identities are especially fluid, and boundaries hard to define. More than in other regions, Chinese in Eastern Europe cannot be seen as a localized community or set of communities. The study of the Chinese diaspora here is inseparable from the study of Chinese migration, and this is a post-industrial migration complicated with high degrees of mobility and transnationalism. The description of this diaspora will therefore require different methodological and conceptual approaches from established Chinese communities in some Western European

xiv Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia countries, approaches that are less constrained by boundaries and more suitable to describe a constantly moving group of people. Rather than adopting a country-by-country approach, this book will maintain a regional perspective on Eastern Europe, pointing out differences between the situations in individual countries. Third, while some studies have been done on the Chinese in Hungary and Russia – the two earliest target countries of Chinese migration after 1989 – only the first steps are being made toward an understanding of the situation in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Serbia, and no studies have been published on other countries. (Information from the post-Yugoslav countries is particularly scant.) The material of this book is therefore skewed toward Russia and Hungary. What mitigates this shortcoming is that the social situation and occupation of the Chinese in the countries of Central Eastern Europe – a term I will use to denote Eastern Europe excluding the former Soviet Union – is very similar, and many Chinese in the region are re-migrants from Hungary. Apart from aiming to review all existing printed works on twentieth-century Chinese migration to Eastern Europe as well as a large number of Chinese periodicals and books currently published in Eastern Europe, this volume relies extensively on my fieldwork in Hungary (1992–2006) and in Russia, Romania, and China (1999). In addition, I am particularly grateful to Gregor Benton for allowing me to use his notes on the history of the Chinese in the Russian Civil War and the early Soviet period. Because of the variety of sources of data used in this book, a note is in order on their reliability. Part I, which covers the history of earlier Chinese migrations to Russia and the Soviet Union, is based on Russian accounts dating primarily from the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century, as well as on recent work covering the period by Chinese and Russian historians. Both corpuses contain numerous contradictions regarding especially the numbers of migrants, but also the names of associations, the years of their founding, and so on. Unsurprisingly, Chinese and Russian historiographies diverge on a number of points, including the economic activities of Chinese in pre-revolutionary Russia and their participation in the Civil War. (Chinese accounts stress the oppression of Chinese migrants in the Russian Far East before the Bolshevik revolution, while Russian ones stress demographic expansion and criminal activity. Several Chinese volumes have been written on the contribution of Chinese migrants to the victory of the Red Army, but they are silent on their participation in the war on other sides. The sources are in broad agreement on other matters, however, such as the cruel treatment of Chinese labourers during the First World War and the significance of their presence for the economy of the Russian Far East prior to it.) I have aimed to include only information that was corroborated in several sources or to indicate the existence of conflicting versions. On the whole, I have tended to rely on Russian sources published in the 1990s – a period in which a burst of interest in the previously

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taboo topic of the cosmopolitan history of the Far Eastern region combined with considerable freedom in social and historical research – more than on Chinese ones, which tend to carry a more overtly ideological or celebratory character since the history of relations with the Soviet Union is a particularly sensitive and tightly controlled area of research. But even in Russian sources, the Chinese disappear from sight soon after the consolidation of Soviet power and do not appear again until the last years of the regime. The work of unearthing this history – including the deportations and likely mass deaths of Chinese under Stalin – still awaits researchers with access to Russian and Chinese archives, if and when these archives do become accessible. (Vladimir Boyko’s work in Barnaul is a start in the right direction.) Not that contemporary data are without their own problems. Official figures of Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe are unreliable, while speculation on their ‘real’ numbers, often bolstered by statements of authority figures such as police or border guard officials, is usually pulled from thin air and tends to be highly inflated. Alexander Lomanov (2005) writes that there are two sets of ‘official figures’ on the number of Chinese in Russia: one ridiculously small and one even more ludicrously exaggerated, with the likely truth somewhere in between. A similar situation arose in Yugoslavia towards the end of the Milosˇ evic´ era, when the opposition and Western media accused the government of granting citizenship to thousands of Chinese migrants and the government withholding information on Chinese migration altogether. I deal with this particular problem in more detail in the section ‘Numbers’ in Chapter 6, but would like to illustrate the way figures circulate with the following anecdote. At the end of the 1990s, high officials from Scotland Yard visited their colleagues in Budapest to discuss cooperation in curbing illegal migration. At a press conference, the head of the Scotland Yard delegation commented that there were some 40,000 illegal Chinese migrants in Hungary waiting to be smuggled to Western Europe. This declaration sent Hungarian police officials scrambling, as they were unaware of this menace. At the time I was working on a research project that involved illegal Chinese migrants to Britain, and had the opportunity to check the provenance of this figure in the internal briefing documents used by National Criminal Intelligence Service, Britain’s police information service. It turned out that figure of 40,000 came from a 1994 article by American criminologist Paul Smith. Looking up Smith’s article, I found that he had taken the figure from a BBC radio report from the previous year, which in turn had quoted none other than myself as the source of the information. But what I had said was that I estimated that there had been up to 40,000 Chinese in Hungary in 1991: I had said nothing of their status, intentions, or current location! Official numbers released by the Chinese government are almost as problematic. Figures on Chinese migrants are based either on embassy estimates – which come from leaders of Chinese organizations – or on the so-called overseas Chinese census (qiaoqing pucha), which is administered to relatives of migrants in their home towns in China. Clearly, neither of these sources

xvi Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia is very reliable, particularly since both organization leaders and local authorities have an interest in inflating numbers in order to bolster their importance. Discrepancies between Chinese and local accounts are not limited to numbers. As discussed in more detail in the section on political and social incorporation, the portrayal of Chinese migrants in Eastern European media is overwhelmingly focused on crime and illegal migration, whereas Chinese accounts emphasize economic success. Stories published in Chinese-language media mostly come from migrants themselves and therefore carry greater credibility than newspaper stories otherwise would; but one has to keep in mind that many of them serve a purpose, such as presenting a particular association or group of individuals in a favourable or else unfavourable light. Indeed, some elements of the story of the Hungarian Chinese Association (HCA), presented in some detail as an example of transnational politics, are quite close to simple gossip. But gossip mongering is an important strategy in the struggle for authority among migrant organizations, and the fighting around the HCA, which I observed first-hand as it evolved, sheds light on the operation of transnational political connections.

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Part I

History

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1

Early contacts

The Hungarian steppe, the puszta, is a continuation of the Russian steppe, which in turn is the continuation of the Asian steppe that starts just outside Peking. In pre-colonial times, conflicts between nomads and the Chinese empire triggered waves of migration that reached the eastern reaches of Europe, which at times was as closely tied to the Turkic and Mongol kingdoms of Central Asia than to the Judaeo-Christian Occident. This first large wave were the Huns (Xiongnu), who, having been displaced by other nomads from the fringes of the Chinese empire after the fall of the Later Han Dynasty, established a proto-Turkic empire in today’s Ukraine and Hungary. After the Huns, the Avars, a Mongol horde which had fled from Central Asia under pressure from the Turkic Tujue – a people also known from Chinese dynastic histories – in the sixth century, came to dominate the same region. In the seventh century came the Khazar Turks, in the eleventh century the Pecheneg Turks, and in the twelfth the Cuman Turks. Lastly, in the thirteenth century, the sons of Genghis Khan integrated the steppe, for two years, from the Danube to Peking.1 These early migrations from the East left few traces. Apart from the Hungarians who, in alliance with the Turkic Kabars, managed to create an enduring state in the Carpathian Basin, the nomads left, were exterminated or assimilated. But collective memory of their appearance laid the foundation of the way future nations positioned themselves vis-à-vis Asia. Destruction and suffering at the hands of the Mongols made for national myths of Hungary, Lithuania, and Russia as defenders of Europe and (their respective versions of) Christendom. At the same time, legends of Hun-Hungarian or ScythianHungarian heredity were used whenever martial pride had to be fuelled and whenever distinction from the West or proof of uniqueness was desired, most recently in Hungarian fascist ideology before the Second World War and that of today’s xenophobic parties. Throughout the region, the primary image of Asia formed as one of martial valour, nomadism, and a threat to sedentary Christian civilization, while images of exotic wisdom and riches came only later, with Western mediation. For Russia, the combat with Asia lasted much longer as the front moved farther and farther away from the centre. Until Grand Prince Ivan III

4

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

(1462–1505) of Muscovy, the central Russian princedoms intermittently remained tributaries of the Golden Horde. Their sovereignty was restored by Ivan and his predecessors at the price of granting Russian cities in appanage to Tatar princes and making others Muscovy’s courtiers. To the end of the Russian Empire, many of the most exalted aristocratic families continued to bear Turkic names.2 Artisans and merchants moving, willingly or forcibly, with the Mongol hordes settled in Moscow. Chinese sources speak of Chinese merchants engaging in trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a colony called ‘Chinatown’ in the suburbs of the Russian capital. (An analogous Russian colony formed in Peking, consisting at first of prisoners taken by the Manchu.) According to a 1935 Chinese almanac, peddlers of stone statues from Qingtian reached Europe via Siberia at this time (Zhang Xiuming 1998: 49). Khalkha Mongols, too, turned up in Moscow at around the same time as the first Chinese groups, also to engage in trade (Fang and Xie 1993: 293–4; Clubb 1971: 22, 40–2). None of the existing etymologies, however, links the name of the Kitay-gorod district of Moscow, neighbouring on the Kremlin, with China, even though ‘Kitay’ means China in Russian, and ‘gorod’ means town (Sytin 1959: 27–8). The defeat of the Khanates of Kazan (1552) and Sibir (1581), which was to lend its name to the whole region east of the Urals under Russian control, brought Russian conquistadors in contact with peoples that had periodically been tributaries of Chinese empires and for whom China remained the main trade partner.3 In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Russians founded military and trade outposts over the whole territory of Siberia, except the Chukotka Peninsula opposite Alaska and Kamchatka. Lands along the Amur (Heilongjiang, in early Chinese sources Heishui) river, the coast of the Sea of Japan and the Tatar Strait separating Sakhalin from the mainland – today’s Maritime (Primorskii) and Khabarovsk Provinces and Amur Province of Russia, referred to as the Russian Far East – were not included in the concept of Siberia. This region bordered on Manchuria and was inhabited by Tungusic peoples closely related to the Manchu. The first state founded by one of these peoples was the Kingdom of Bohai (698–926), which, according to Grousset, owed its organization partly to Korean immigrants (Grousset 1970: 515). This and the fact that all of its toponyms have come down to us in Chinese suggests that its court culture must have been sinified at least to some extent. It extended over Manchuria, the south of the Maritime and Khabarovsk Provinces, and the extreme north of Korea, and was conquered by the Khitan, who in 916 had established the sinified dynasty of the Liao (Tsymbalenko 1998: 8). At the beginning of the twelfth century, however, Tungusic tribes living in the present-day Maritime Province united under the name of Jurchen and conquered not only the Liao but also the Northern Song, establishing the Jin Empire, of which Peking was one of the capitals (ibid. and Grousset 1970: 516). During the wars with Genghis Khan’s Mongols, at the end of which the latter conquered the Jin in 1234, a Jurchen general founded the short-lived kingdom of Dongxia that

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included parts of today’s Eastern Manchuria, the south of the Maritime Province, and northern Korea (Tsymbalenko 1998: 8). After the fall of the Mongol Yuan Empire of China, the Jurchen – or Manchu, as they would soon be called – became a tributary people of the new Chinese empire of the Ming. But at the turn of the seventeenth century, Manchu tribes, organized by Nurhaci, moved south, proclaimed the establishment of the Qing Empire in 1636, captured all Ming realms on the mainland by 1659, and rapidly adopted Chinese forms of political administration. By 1644, Qing control extended to the Amur. It was at this time that Russian colonists appeared around and east of Lake Baikal, around and inside domains claimed by Khalkha Mongol khans, establishing the fort of Albazin in 1649 and the towns of Irkutsk in 1652 and Nerchinsk in 1654. Russian expeditions sent down the Amur beginning in 1644 clashed not only with local Tungusic tribes that were tribute-paying subjects of the Qing but also with Manchu troops (Grousset 1970: 532).4 In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed the frontier between the Chinese and Russian empires following the Argun’ and Gorbitsa rivers, the mountain range forming the watershed between the Lena and the Amur rivers, and the Udy (Uda) river to the Sea of Okhotsk. The treaty thus acknowledged Chinese suzerainty over most of the current Amur Province, the southern half of Khabarovsk Province, and the whole of the Maritime Province, albeit the unexplored strip between the Udy river and the Amur – Lena watershed was left undelineated, pending further settlement. (As we now know, the Uda flows just from the eastern end of that watershed.)5 The treaty allowed for travel across the boundary for the purposes of trade, and permitted subjects of China already in Russia (and vice versa) to remain in their adopted country. The Treaty of Kyakhta, signed in 1727, provided for ‘perpetual peace’ and ‘freedom of trade’, but – in a clause apparently directed at rebellious Mongols, but subsequently often violated – stipulated that any persons crossing the border without a valid permit from their government would suffer the death penalty. Although trade was, in practice, still severely limited and subject to arbitrary interruptions, the treaty greatly strengthened the political and commercial relationship between the two empires (Clubb 1971: 34, 47–9). Trade routes were opened from Tomsk and Nerchinsk to Peking via the domains of Khalkha Mongol khans and Manchuria (Hailar).6 Posts for the exchange of Chinese and Russian goods were established south of Kyakhta and on the Argun’, and the former grew into the town of Maimaicheng (‘trading town’ in Chinese), known in Russian as Maymachin. Maimaicheng’s significance declined after the opening of the Chinese treaty ports, but it still had 3,000 inhabitants in 1915.7 Chinese and Mongol merchants brought goods to sell as deep in Russia’s interior as Surgut, far below Tomsk on the Ob river (Clubb 1971: 18).8 A Qing delegation travelled through Siberia to Saratov, on the Volga, not for trade but to meet with the khan of the Torgut (Kalmyk) Mongols, in 1712–5. Another delegation followed in 1729–32, and at the same time, a

6

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

delegation headed by the vice-president of the Lifan Yuan, Toshi, was dispatched to felicitate Peter II with his accession to the throne. Peter had died before the embassy reached St Petersburg, but Empress Anna received it in Moscow. The envoys received a thirty-one-gun salute and, in return, kowtowed to her in the same way foreign envoys were required to do in front of the Chinese emperor. A further Chinese mission, now felicitating Anne with her succession, reached St Petersburg in 1732. Apart from being granted trade privileges, Russia was also allowed to establish a ‘Spiritual Mission’ in Peking, as a result of whose work there were around 5,000 Russian Orthodox Chinese in 1914 (Clubb 1971: 40). In 1997, a cross was erected in the courtyard of the former Spiritual Mission – now the Russian Embassy – to commemorate the 222 Orthodox Christian Chinese killed in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 (Lutz 1965: 83–4). Russia did not become seriously interested in expanding its dominions beyond the Nerchinsk border until after the first Opium War, when it found its positions in the Pacific and its trade with China threatened by the British. The Russian government suspected that British spies were infiltrating Eastern Siberia under the guise of tourists and scientists. Britain’s demand of free shipping on all Chinese rivers including the Amur was particularly threatening in the absence of a demarcated border (Plotnikova 1996: 146–7). When a naval officer raised the Russian flag over the Amur river estuary in violation of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1850, many in St Petersburg were still opposed to his action. But as tensions with Britain grew, the governorgeneral of Eastern Siberia, Count Muraviev (subsequently granted the name Muraviev-Amurskii), sailed down the Amur in 1854 and founded Khabarovsk. British and French warships attempted to sail up the Amur to destroy the fort but failed and were rebuffed, and Peking permitted the Russian ships to return to the Amur. The following year, Muraviev led another expedition down the Amur, this time carrying prospective settlers and claimed to a Manchu representative that the left bank of the Amur belonged to Russia. Two more expeditions were dispatched in 1856 (Clubb 1971: 80–2). By this time, the Qing was weakened and faced too much menace from Western powers to be able to withstand Russian advances. In 1858, after the occupation of Canton by British and French forces, Rear Admiral Count Putyatin sent a note to the Grand Council of the Qing, demanding that the Russo-Chinese border be redrawn along the Amur and Ussuri (Wusuli) rivers. St Petersburg had instructed Putiatin that Russia was, ‘on the one hand, to continue occupying the left bank of the Amur . . . and on the other, not to interrupt our relations with the Chinese Government . . . [which] would threaten our Mission with ruin and the Kyakhta trade with destruction’ (Plotnikova 1996: 147). Putiatin was also charged with ensuring that treaties between China and other powers not include clauses that would entitle the latter to claim territory in which Russia was interested or to unhindered shipping along the Amur. After some Russian cannonade at the Amur estuary, a compromise was reached in the Treaty of Aigun, which designated the

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Amur as the boundary and made the region east of the Ussuri a joint dominion. In 1860, the right bank of the Ussuri was ceded to Russia under the Treaty of Peking.9 The Russians found 14,000 Qing subjects, including 5,400 Chinese, 3,240 men and 2,160 women, in the Amur Region, and 900 settled Chinese and some 2,000–3,000 hunters and gatherers in the Ussuri Region (Soloviev 1989: 37–8, citing Grave 1912: 5). The Chinese and Manchu, whom the Russians called ‘Manza’, lived mainly near the confluence of the Amur with the Zeya and along the lower reaches of the Ussuri and its tributaries: the Iman (now Bol’shaya Ussurka), the Lefu (Lifu, now Zerkal’naya), and the Fujin (now Pavlovka) (Malozemoff 1958: 2; Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 94; Soloviev 1989: 5, citing Veniukov 1952: 86–8). Some lived in villages on the east coast. Many of these Chinese were fugitive Han convicts sentenced to labour in Manchuria.10 (Han convicts had been sent to Manchuria since the earliest decades of the Qing, and in 1781, there had been more than 18,000 of them.11) Some of them married local women. According to an ethnographic map drawn around the turn of the century by Vladimir Arseniev, the area of the estuary of the Rudnaya river near present-day Dal’negorsk was inhabited by Chzhagubai of mixed Chinese-Udege blood (Tsymbalenko 1998: 9 and inside back cover). According to old local Manchu he interviewed, theirs was the first group of Chinese to settle in the region after an epidemic had wiped out earlier settlers (Arseniev 1960: 159). In addition, there were Korean villages in the south of the region, near the Korean border, as well as on the east coast. The treaties of Aigun and Peking granted permanent residence permits to Qing subjects, including local Tungus, in the new Russian territories, exempted them from personal tax, and permitted them to retain their own local administration and justice. Chinese officials regularly travelled across the regions to collect taxes from Chinese settlers (Sinichenko 1998). According to a contemporary Russian geographer, Ivan Nadarov, some Tungus – the Gold, now known as Oroch, and the Orochon – continued to pay tribute to a Manchu official on the Chinese side of the Ussuri as late as 1887, and evaders were punished (cited in Malozemoff 1958: 12 and Soloviev 1989: 70 fn. 1). Adult male Qing subjects were further allowed to retain from 16.5 to 20 dessiatines (18.2 to 22 hectares) of arable land: 95,264 dessiatines in total (Soloviev 1989: 37). In 1861, in the same year with the abolition of serfdom – which made a much larger number of peasants free to migrate – the region was opened for settlement for Russian subjects. Between 1861 and 1900, 116,000 Russians – mainly peasants and Cossacks – settled in today’s Maritime Province (Tsymbalenko 1998: 9). This officially encouraged colonization was matched by a growing (though smaller) westward movement of Chinese along the newly consolidated east – west routes, which resulted in distinct, although related, pictures of Chinese immigrant communities in the countryside and in the cities founded by Russians. The legal basis for this movement was

8

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

created by the 1860 Sino-British treaty, which for the first time granted Qing subjects the right to travel abroad, and by the abolition, in 1893, of the punishments foreseen for those who left China illegally (Soloviev 1989: 34–5). In 1891, the Russians began constructing the Trans-Siberian Railway, starting at Vladivostok, and in 1896 the Chinese agreed to the construction of a second Russian line, the Chinese Eastern Railway, across Manchuria. In 1898, the Russians exacted a 25-year lease on the Liaodong Peninsula and new railway rights. All these developments increased the two-way flow of trade and people. Even before the final opening of the railways between 1903 and 1908, some Chinese walked west along the completed sections of the track.12

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2

Chinese farmers, hunters, workers and merchants in Russia, 1858–1914

The Amur taiga after the Treaty of Aigun The Russian government’s early policies toward Chinese immigration varied from encouragement to intolerance but were mainly governed by economic factors: the need for labour and the state of commerce. In the early decades, Russia was interested in utilizing cheap Chinese labour in constructing urban infrastructure and also needed it to create a self-sustaining agriculture, all the more that peasants and Cossacks were at first reluctant to settle here because of the enormous distance from their homes, the perils of the journey, and the isolation of the region during the winter. Thus, from the beginning, there were various flows of Chinese migrants: independent agricultural colonists going to the Amur and Ussuri valleys; hunters, gatherers, and outlaws going to the taiga; and labourers going to regions of agricultural settlements and to the cities. Soon they were to be joined by merchants. The first full census of the new territories, in 1879, showed that the number of Chinese, Manchu, and Korean settlers was increasing at the same speed as that of Russians. In the South Ussuri Region, Chinese farmed on 5,791 dessiatines, and Russian sources knew of 303 ‘fanzas’, lodges of Chinese hunters and gatherers in the taiga (Soloviev 1989: 5, 59, 62). Around the cities, they engaged in gardening and sold their produce in shops, markets, in the streets, and door to door. In 1883, around Vladivostok (between the city and the village of Nikolskoie, as well as on Russkii Island), there were 118 Chinese vegetable gardens with 493 persons working in them; that is, there was one Chinese gardener for every twenty-five rural inhabitants of the South Ussuri Region (ibid.). A report from 1877 claimed that Koreans and Manza staged a fight to decide which group should have the right to supply Vladivostok with vegetables (Matveev 1990: 112). Chinese also grew grain for the distilleries and opium poppy, either renting land – illegally – from Russian settlers and Cossacks or using – also illegally – taiga clearings. Rent was 7 to 14 rubles a dessiatine, but it went up to 100 rubles around 1911, when opium poppy production reached its peak. Around the Bay of St. Olga on the east coast, opium was sown on 690 dessiatines that year (Soloviev 1989: 60). The spread of opium production may have been related

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to the 1910 law banning the employment of ‘yellow labour’ in government works, as a number of labourers out of work left the cities for the countryside (Buiakov 1992: 63). In 1897, an estimated 200 poods (1 pood = 16.82 kg or 40 lb) of opium were exported to China from the Maritime Province (Soloviev 1989: 60). Opium importing was banned in 1887, but as this measure did not decrease opium consumption, the military governor of the Maritime Province suggested legalizing the import and sale of opium by foreign subjects but controlling and taxing it (Buiakov 1992: 62). Between 1 May and 4 October 1910, police in Vladivostok ‘uncovered and liquidated’ eighty-three opium dens (Soloviev 1989: 60). Apart from Chinese themselves, the main consumers of opium were the Tungus (ibid.). In 1915, opium production was banned, but in 1917, just after the fall of the monarchy, the governor-general of the Amur Region, a former general of the gendarmerie, the police chief of Khabarovsk, and the chief of the secret police were arrested with several others for having set up a decoy morphine plant for military needs. In reality, the plant served to procure imported opium and sell it to local Chinese through a network of fifty opium dens operated by a proxy as well as to China (Buiakov 1992: 66–7). According to A. V. Eliseev, a contemporary Russian geographer, more than 500 Chinese and Manchu crossed the border annually. In the Amur Region in 1882 the population consisted of 41,500 Russians and 15,000 ‘Orientals’ (cited in Malozemoff 1958: 11, n. 93–4). In the Ussuri Region in 1885, there were 10,353 registered Chinese and ‘probably’ some 4,000 unregistered ones, as contrasted with 30,000 Russians, of which, however, only 17,000 were settlers, while the rest were officials, soldiers, and other residents considered temporary, even though Cossacks were in reality permanent settlers. (The Ussuri Region was the first ancestor of the current Maritime Province; after 1884, it was divided into the Ussuri and South Ussuri Regions and, along with the South Ussuri Region and Khabarovsk Province, constituted the Maritime Province.) The ratio of ‘Orientals’ to Russians among the settlers here was 1.43 to 1. In 1885, in the Ussuri Region, Russian settlers and Cossacks cultivated 0.6 dessiatines of land per capita, while the Chinese had 1.1 dessiatines (cited ibid. 11, 256, n. 95–6). A Russian military statistician of the time, Colonel Nazarov, noted that while Koreans, who were also immigrating in large numbers, readily accepted the Russian language and customs and were usually soon granted the status of Russian subjects, Chinese and Manchu were difficult to acculturate (ibid.). Unlike Koreans or earlier Chinese settlers along the Amur, new immigrants came alone; only 3.4 per cent of the Chinese in the Ussuri Region in 1880 were married. Some cohabited with local women and had children by them; these families were abandoned when migrants returned to China (Soloviev 1989: 74). Chinese and Manchu bandits – the ‘khunkhuzy’, supposedly from Chinese ‘hong huzi’, red beards1 – also worried the Russians, especially after the ‘Manza war’ in 1868, an armed stand-off between Chinese and Manchu gold

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diggers and Russian soldiers and navy on Askold Island in the Ussuri, in the immediate vicinity of Vladivostok (Matveev 1990: 55–60). The Russians claimed that the Chinese did not have the right to dig there and confiscated the gold; the diggers put up armed resistance. It took Cossack troops a year to drive them away; in retaliation, the Cossacks repeatedly attacked Chinese villages (Sinichenko 1998; Malozemoff 1958: 5; Soloviev 1989: 5; Matveev 1990: 55–60). A Russian gunship destroyed a Chinese village in Strelok Bay and took twenty-four prisoners to Vladivostok, where they were deemed ‘peaceful seaweed catchers’ and released (Matveev 1990: 62–3). In 1878, the Qing repealed the ban on the migration of Chinese to Manchuria, allowed the migration of women, and in 1880, established a colonization bureau. Its work was directed toward northern Manchuria, in particular, the southern Ussuri region opposite Russian settlements and the strip between Qiqihar and Blagoveshchensk. According to materials of the Russian General Staff, in 1882–90, thirty times more Chinese colonists arrived in northern Manchuria than Russians in the Amur Province and the Maritime Province combined (Malozemoff 1958: 22). Chinese settlers received land use rights for up to five years, after which ownership of the land was transferred to them against a fee (Soloviev 1989: 26). Moreover, banished convicts who moved here were exempted from hard labour and could bring their families with them (ibid. 28). Indeed, some Chinese migrated back from Russian territory to these new settlements; according to contemporary Russian documents, the Qing encouraged them to do so as they needed people with good knowledge of the region, who could serve as guides in case of war (ibid. 8). The governorgeneral of Manchuria, Xu Shichang, wrote that ‘the main objective of the colonization of Manchuria, and Heilongjiang Province in particular, is the strengthening of the frontier’.2 This may, however, have referred to securing the Qing’s hold on Korea, threatened by Western powers and Japan, as well as to blocking further Russian expansion. In 1879–81, there were several clashes between Chinese and Russian troops in both Turkestan and the Far East, resulting in the annexation of more strips of land by Russia. In these circumstances, when in June 1880 Chinese settlers attacked the party of Captain Naperstkov, not only was the ‘head of the Chinese on the left bank of the Amur’ expelled from Russia along with those involved in the incident, but special mobile cavalry detachments were created to contain armed rebellions. A decree was issued to submit Chinese settlers to regulations promulgated by Russian authorities, which required determining the Chinese population, restricted their freedom of movement in Eastern Siberia, and allowed for their use as corvée labour (Sinichenko 1998). In 1883, a large group of Russian and Chinese gold diggers, estimated between 7,000 and 12,000 men, established itself along the Zheltuga river, near the Amur in the extreme northern part of Manchuria, and defied orders to disperse from both the Russian and the Chinese governments. They promulgated a constitution declaring an independent Republic of the Zheltuga,

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which was eventually liquidated by Chinese troops in 1885–6 (Malozemoff 1958: 12, 23). Also in 1883, Russian authorities found that Qing subjects had occupied 21,499 dessiatines of land in addition to plots allotted to them under the Treaty of Aigun; they confiscated half of the excess land (Soloviev 1989: 37). In 1886, Russian authorities prohibited Chinese from settling in border areas, and in 1892, from owning land there (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 95, Soloviev 1989: 42). In arguing against further Russian claims in Manchuria, 1898, War Minister Kuropatkin reasoned, among others, that ‘it would result in many Manchurians settling . . . in the Amur and Ussuri districts, which now are only thinly populated by Russians, and our weak colonies would be swamped by the flowing tide of the yellow’ (quoted in Clubb 1971: 125 and 528, n. 10). The explorer Vladimir Arseniev (1872–1930) – also a popular travel writer whose literary portrait of a Gold guide, Dersu Uzala, acquired international fame when the Japanese director Kurosawa Akira made it into a film – recorded three of his first expeditions in Po Ussuriiskomu krayu (Around the Ussuri region). They went across the south of the Maritime Province, from the estuary of the Jimuhe (‘the river used for shipping timber’), east of Vladivostok, to Lake Hanka on the Chinese border north of Vladivostok in 1902, and along the Fujin and Wulahe rivers in the Sikhote-Alin’ range along the east coast in 1906. Arseniev’s records show an essentially Tungusic and Chinese country, with the Tungus rapidly assimilating to the Chinese who had appeared in most of the area only years or decades before the Treaty of Aigun. Russians and Koreans, by contrast, were limited to islands of farming villages within a strip along the Ussuri and in a few places on the coast. Most toponyms – names of mountains, rivers, bays, and so on – used in the pidgin Russian conversations of the travellers and their local guides were Chinese.3 Arsenier lists nearly 200 of these toponyms with their Russian translations (Daubikhe: Duobinhe, ‘river where many battles took place’; Yidagouzi: ‘valley of the first highway’; Wangbahezi: ‘turtle creek’ etc.) and notes that they went out of use with the massive arrival of Russian settlers in the following decade (Arseniev 1960: 137, 290–4). Many names remained in use until 1972, when, at a time of hostile Russo-Chinese relations, 473 foreign-sounding geographical names in the Maritime Province alone were changed to Russian ones. The government used this occasion to get rid also of such names as Cape Koreiskii, Bays Amerika and Man’chzhur, and Iaponets (Japanese) Strait.16 Regardless of the accuracy of Arseniev’s translations, the colloquial nature of the names, similar to toponyms in Heilongjiang, suggests that, as Soloviev (1973, 1975) concluded, they had been given recently. In the taiga, between Russian and Korean farming villages (the latter bearing Russian names and founded in the 1870s), there were settlements and temples along the paths of Chinese hunters, ginseng gatherers, and travelling merchants who bought furs from the locals. According to Soloviev, traffic along these routes intensified at the beginning and the end of the working season.

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The Chinese – only men – stayed in mud huts with lattice windows, kangs, and tree bark or reed roofs set directly on top of the walls. The houses visited by Arseniev had two rooms, one used by the owner and his partner, the other by the workers. Apart from hunting and ginseng gathering, the Chinese cultivated small plots of wheat, maize, oats, opium poppy, soy beans, tobacco, and vegetables and kept chickens. Evening meals consisted of maize porridge, pickles, and wheat bread. Apart from deities of particular places, Arseniev mentions that the local Chinese worshipped the Dragon King and the Lord of Mountains and Forests (Shan lin zhi zhu, Zhen shan lin wang), whom several altars identified as a general of the state of Qi in antiquity (Arseniev 1960: 64, 84, 164, 195). According to a Russian Old Believer who served as a guide to the expedition, the taiga was ‘full of Chinese; wherever you go you’ll find them’ (ibid. 76). The Chinese village of Notohouza in the southern SikhoteAlin’, described by Arseniev as one of the oldest, had been founded by gold diggers, ginseng gatherers, and hunters before the Treaty of Aigun (ibid., p. 79). About 60 kilometres to the east of the Vladivostok-Khabarovsk railway began an area in the Sikhote-Alin’ where Golds wore Chinese dress and preferred speaking Chinese to Gold. Children spoke only Chinese. These Golds had migrated east from the Ussuri valley under the pressure of Russian immigrants. Slightly farther east, in the southeastern part of the region in the mountains and along the coast, the population consisted of separate and mixed settlements of Taza and Chinese hunters, gatherers of ginseng, fungus, lichens, and medicinal roots, gold diggers, fishers, and opium cultivators. They specialized in certain of these trades and sent the furs, medicinal products (including deer antlers, musk, and cartilages and bear gall), fungus, lichens, scallops, crabs, trepang, and pearls to Vladivostok, from where they were shipped to Chefoo and other places in China. In this area had been the main Chinese trading post in the Ussuri region before the arrival of the Russians (ibid. 122). The Taza were sinified, Chinese-speaking local Udege, only the oldest of whom – those who remembered the arrival of the Chinese 50 years before – still knew some Udege, but even they did not use it (ibid. 204). In other parts of the area – farther north along the coast – Chinese had arrived only 20 years before (ibid. 221). The Chinese called the Udege Dazi, hence the Russian name of the Taza (ibid. 65, 80, 91, and Saveliev 2002). Both Golds and Taza in this region lived in Chinese-style houses, ‘fanzas’ (from Chinese fangzi, house). One village, for example, had 38 Chinese fanzas with 233 inhabitants and 14 Taza fanzas with 72 men, 54 women, and 89 children (Arseniev 1960: 242). The Taza bartered their catch and ginseng with the Chinese caidong (owner of the capital) of the village for food, fabrics, alcohol, and opium, and were constantly indebted to the latter, occasionally paying with their wives or daughters, or becoming bondservants (ibid. 92). Taza women, sometimes taken by force by Chinese men, bore them children (ibid. 160). The Chinese maintained public order and

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

carried out justice. Along the east coast, a detachment of thirty Chinese hunters exercised the functions of the police and pursued the khunkhuz (ibid. 235). During Arseniev’s trip, a Chinese and a Taza were buried alive for killing their creditor (ibid. 178–9). The Taza described by Arseniev were in the process of losing their hunting-gathering lifestyle, but only some of them had become farmers. They had a high incidence of diseases and alcoholism. In some places, such as along the Noto and Dunza (Dongzi) rivers, the Chinese had displaced the Taza and Udege altogether, as the latter died out or emigrated (even though the Chinese appeared along the Dunza only 20 years before; ibid. 116, 183, 221). At least one village in this area, Mikhailovka, still had a Taza population in the late 1990s (Tsymbalenko 1998: 32). Arseniev did not distinguish Han Chinese and Manchu; apparently, they resided in the same settlements (Arseniev 1960: 159). The largest of the villages described by him numbered 97 fanzas (ibid.). Some of the very few Russian settlers in this area had hired themselves out as day labourers to Chinese because their own farms had failed. One Chinese described by Arseniev had helped many Russians when their crops failed, but was now impoverished and thinking of returning to China; Arseniev decided to petition the authorities in Khabarovsk for a decoration for this man (ibid. 139). Farther to the north along the coast, small Chinese hunting outposts were scattered among settlements of un-sinified Udege hunters living in yurts. In one of these villages, Sidatun (Xijiadong?), there were four Chinese fanzas and three Udege yurts, in which lived five families. The Chinese outnumbered the Udege by twenty to one. Many of them, according to Arseniev, were fugitives from the law who spent most of the time smoking opium and gambling. Here, too, most Udege were indebted to the Chinese, some had lost their wives and daughters to them and were in debt servitude (ibid.: 266–7). In the Iman river valley, the Udege complained to the governorgeneral in Khabarovsk about the cruelty of caidong Li Tangui, and upon return Li had one of them beaten to death. After this the Udege rebelled and refused to hand over their furs to Li, thus getting no food in return. The standoff continued at the time of Arseniev’s visit (ibid. 277). The largest Chinese village on the Iman numbered 42 fanzas, 575 men, three women, and nine children (ibid. 281). The owner of one of the oldest fanzas on the Iman had arrived there 50 years before (ibid. 283). The number of Chinese in the taiga south of the latitude of Khabarovsk is estimated to have reached 15,000 or even 30,000 in the peak years of 1905–10. Many of them were hired individually or in groups by rich merchants operating from Manchuria, and were managed by caidong who were agents of the merchants. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the region produced around 50 poods of ginseng, worth 550,000 rubles; up to 3,500 deer foetuses, worth 1 to 4 rubles apiece; over 15,000 deer tails, worth 3 to 5 rubles apiece in China; 25,000 to 30,000 musk deer glands, worth 1.50 to 2 rubles apiece, and up to 500 poods of dried deer antlers, worth 3 to 4 rubles

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a pound, in a year. Yearly exports of deer tendon reached 13,000 poods, sold in China for 70 to 80 kopecks a pound; of dried mushrooms, 2,000 poods, sold for 15 to 20 kopecks a pound; of lichens, 25,000 poods, sold for up to 1.50 rubles a pound. From 1876 to 1885, up to 500,000 poods of sea-cole a year were shipped to China, worth 113,000 rubles, provoking a demand by the city government in 1878 that its export by foreigners be regulated (Matveev 1990: 118–20). But in the first decade of the twentieth century, as resources were being rapidly exhausted, the production of all these articles dropped sharply, and their sale prices in China skyrocketed (Soloviev 1989: 63–9). According to Nadarov, in 1883, there were fourteen elected Chinese district headmen (starshina, zhang da ye) in the South Ussuri Region and one in the North Ussuri Region. They acted as magistrates for both the Chinese and Tungusic population. At least along the upper Ussuri and the Daubikhe, they were confirmed in their authority by a Manchu official in Imahouza – on the Chinese side of the Ussuri where it was joined by the Iman – who gave them caps with a white glass bead signifying their office (cited in Soloviev 1989: 70). Occasionally, and sometimes with the consent of Russian authorities, the official in Imahouza travelled to the taiga to dispense justice in a particularly important case (ibid. 71–2). In a report to the government, Major-General Tikhmenev complained in 1882 that the Chinese government’s attempts to get permission to dispatch a consul to Vladivostok who would be accountable not to Peking but to the governor of Jilin amounted to a planned sinification and annexation of the region. In 1880, the military governor of the Maritime Province, alarmed by the prospect of a ‘flood of Chinese in the form of docile, hard-working farmers and trappers’, had urged the government to settle Russians in unpopulated areas. In 1885, the government strengthened the protection of the Manchurian border and began investigating footpaths used by Chinese to cross the border (ibid.). In 1905, the newspaper Primorskiie vedomosti reported that authorities had found the statutes of a ‘conspiratory Chinese organization’ dating from 1896 (ibid. 107–8). In 1907, authorities learned about the existence of a society called Gongyihui (Society of Common Goals), which ‘had for the past 50 years not only monopolized the production and purchase of ginseng, young deer antlers, furs, and other game, but enjoyed undivided power among the Chinese and indigenous populace along the Iman river’ (Sukhacheva 1993: 65; Petlin 1909). Similar organizations apparently operated in many places along the Ussuri and along the coast, and statutes of several of them have been found. They reflected the occupation of the Chinese in the area of their activity. Some were concerned mainly with regulating agricultural activities, but most contained detailed regulations concerning hunting, ginseng gathering, the treatment of strangers and Tungus tribesmen, and set up punishments for their breach as well as for theft, murder, cheating, using false weights, fighting, cursing, and so on. The regulations served the

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

interests of the caidong, ensuring their control over the trade, hired workers, and the Tungus. For example, the statutes published in Primorskiye Vedomosti contained the following articles: 1. Gambling with cash stakes is allowed from the 1st to the twentieth of January. [. . .] 2. Anyone guilty of selling a sable fur to a caidong other than his own is to be punished with 40 lashes of the stick, and the fur is to be returned to its rightful owner. 3. Anyone guilty of not handing over a ginseng root to his caidong is to be punished with 40 lashes of the stick and expelled from the valley of the Iman. 4. Anyone guilty of buying deer antlers without the knowledge of the caidong is to be punished with 40 lashes of the stick. 5. Passers-by have the right of staying in a fanza for three days free of charge. For each additional day, he has to pay 40 kopecks, and for the each of the first three days of the new year, 5 rubles. [. . .] 10. The Orochon must carry the Chinese on their boats according to the following rates: [. . .] 16. A worker who leaves his master before working for one year not only gets nothing but must reimburse the master. [. . .] 18. A Chinese who fails to return a rifle taken from a Taza in payment for his debts to him by 15 April is to be fined. Statutes of the Gongyihui were similar, but more detailed, and provided for harsher punishments, such as being buried alive for stealing antlers or picking up ginseng collected by others. They prohibited taking a lynx fur from a Taza in payment for old debts (article 23), sanctioned caidong who paid their workers at mid-year (article 24), prohibited the establishment of secret societies within the district of the Gongyihui (article 27), severely sanctioned merchants who sold anything in the mountains or who bought sable furs (article 34), and prohibited shooting or undressing a Taza even if the latter owed a large debt (article 36). The statutes mention the ‘borders of the district’ under the Gongyihui’s jurisdiction. The statutes of another organization, dating from 1898, defined, in addition to similarly strict regulations, an elaborate hierarchy of officials, who had their own insignia. This organization had its own postal service.5

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Religious associations also existed. According to V. V. Grave’s research conducted in the early 1910s, an anti-Manchu and antiforeign White Lotus sect called Zailijiao, whose centre was in Tianjin, had a branch in Vladivostok, and its agents regularly visited to hold meetings and collect donations. Sect members vowed not to smoke or drink, but, to raise funds, joined khunkhuz bands. Since their aims were directed outside Russia, Russian authorities did not interfere with the activities of this and other similar sects (such as the Guangfuhui), even though they were not registered. Other organizations active in China, devoted to fighting opium smoking or to nationalist causes, also had branches in the Russian Far East, and Russian authorities similarly tolerated their activity, which included meetings and donation collecting (Soloviev 1989: 81).

Chinese workers and merchants It is understandable that authorities were concerned with what they saw as a growing Chinese share in landownership in a countryside where the symbols of Chinese culture penetrated local life as thoroughly as Russian power. They worried much less about Chinese labourers and merchants in the cities, where, despite their large numbers, there was no immediate threat of sinification because of firm Russian administrative control. The port town of Vladivostok was founded in 1860, only about 50 kilometres away from the Chinese border, and in the mid-1870s, the first party of nonagricultural Chinese labourers were brought in to build a barracks (Soloviev 1989: 44). Soon they appeared in other towns, mainly in Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk, just across the Amur from China. Recruitment increased after 1892 for the construction of the Ussuri Railway. Agents operating similarly to those that recruited coolies for the colonies and the USA carried out their recruitment, mostly in Chefoo. They obtained passports and visas for the workers and shipped them to Vladivostok or put them on the train to Harbin, from where they proceeded either to the Maritime, the Amur, or the Transbaikal Province. According to the records of the Chinese customs authorities in Yantai, over 60,000 Chinese subjects departed for Russia from that port in 1907 alone (Li and Lin 1999: 93). Visas were valid for unlimited entries and residence in Russia during one month, after which – starting in 1885 – the Chinese had to apply for residence permits, valid for one year. These were approved by the military governor, provided the applicant’s good conduct was guaranteed by the local Chinese headman and upon payment of a fee of 5.15 rubles. Those found without a passport and a valid residence permit were fined 5 rubles and issued with a residence permit. Chinese who ‘violated the rules of residence’ used the residence permit of another person or lent their own residence permit to others were subject to deportation. But those apprehended often avoided sanctions by paying a bribe; in addition, Russian police were mostly unable to establish whether a Chinese was using someone else’s papers. Many

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Chinese could not or chose not to pay the boat or train fare and the visa fee and crossed the border on foot or in junks without documents, using the routes of taiga hunters. Most of them came in small groups in March – April, led by recruiters and foremen who had made the trip several times, and left in November – December. According to Grave, there were up to 150,000 Chinese in the taiga who entered Russia on foot and were not registered in any statistics. In 1906, the military governor of the Maritime Province wrote that ‘a significant number of Chinese workers living in the Maritime Province evades taking out Russian permits’ (Soloviev 1989: 17, 36, 42–3). The influx of labourers shifted the centre of highest concentration of the Chinese to the south of the Russian Far East, the Ussuri and South Ussuri regions. In the Ussuri Region, according to two sources, the Chinese population in 1870 was 1,797 persons, twice as much as in the year before, and in 1880, 6,628 persons (most were living around Lake Hanka [Xingkaihu] and the Suifun [Suifen] river along the border and along the Suchan river east of Vladivostok). The number of Chinese in the Amur and Maritime provinces was 15,228 (Soloviev 1989: 38, citing Nadarov 1887: 119, and Sladkovskii 1974: 63, 72). In 1884, there were 3,909 Chinese residents in Vladivostok, out of a population of 13,000 (Matveev 1990: 177). In 1892, around 10,000 Chinese workers arrived in the city for the construction of the railway (ibid. 229). The 1897 census recorded 42,823 Chinese residents in the Russian Far East, and 57,000 overall in Russia. Three-quarters of the Chinese in the Far East were now in the Maritime Province, mostly in the South Ussuri Region, which comprised Vladivostok (about half of the city’s 28,896 residents were ‘Manza’ or Koreans), and in Khabarovsk (about one-third of the 14,932 residents were Chinese). Of the 12,542 Chinese in Amur Province, 2,916 were now living in Blagoveshchensk (population 32,606) (Soloviev 1989: 38, citing Patkanov 1912, v. 7: 843–62; Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 94).6 The census covered only cities, towns, and villages, but not those Chinese living in the taiga (Soloviev 1989: 7). Even so, in the Maritime Province, 26.4 per cent of residents were foreign subjects, and 8.3 per cent were foreign-born Russian subjects (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 94). Labour migration was highly seasonal, which caused Russian scholars to term Chinese migration to the Russian Far East in general otkhodnichestvo (see Soloviev 1989). The term originally refers to the temporary – either rural–rural or rural–urban – labour migration of Russian peasants, which intensified at about the same time, after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. The non-agricultural working season was only five months in the Amur Province, while in the Maritime Province, it was at least eight months long, with some workers staying the whole year (Soloviev 1989: 38, citing Patkanov 1912, 7: 843–62). The seasonal nature of this migration becomes clear when one compares figures in Table 2.1 to the number of Chinese subjects who entered Russia through the Far Eastern border. For example, between 1906 and 1910, around

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200,000 Chinese were registered as having entered Russia by train (40,000 to the Transbaikal Province via the Manzhouli and Hailar border crossings, 16,631 to the Maritime Province via the Pogranichnaia crossing, and 140,000 to the Amur Province via Qiqihar and Aigun’, as well as by river boat crossing on the Sungari) and 197,879 by steamer to Vladivostok from Chefoo. In the same period, about the same number – around 400,000 persons – returned from Russia to Manchuria by rail (Soloviev 1989: 39, citing Grave 1912: 350). In 1910, there were already 115,000 registered Chinese subjects in Russia, while Russian and Chinese estimates of the real population range from 150,000 to 500,000. In the Amur and Maritime provinces there were 94,124 Chinese men (see Table 2.1), including 28,591 in Vladivostok (Grave estimated their real number in Vladivostok’s Chinatown [kitayskaya slobodka, kitayskiye kvartaly] at 50,000: see Arseniev 1960: 283 and Grave as cited in Sukhacheva 1993: 63, n. 3). As the total population of the city had in the mean time risen to 90,000, the share of non-indigenous Asians did not, however, exceed that of 1897.7 (In 1907, there were also 4,045 Koreans and 2,141 Japanese in Vladivostok (Sukhacheva 1993: 63).) In Khabarovsk, the share of Chinese actually decreased, as there were now 7,345 male Chinese residents out of 41,050 (Arseniev 1960: 283).8 There were 5,580 Chinese men in Nikol’sk-Ussuriisk (now Ussuriisk), 4,292 in Blagoveshchensk, and 1,896 in Nikolaevsk-naAmure. Chinese settlements in the Iman District numbered 1,576; in the Ol’ga District on the east coast, 4,384; and in three districts on the Amur – the Zeia Mountain District, the Bureia Mountain Police District, and the gold mines of the Amur Cossack Regiment – 12,269, 7,683, and 4,055 men respectively (Arseniev 1960: 283). But Leonid Rybakovskii, a leading Russian demographer, considers 50,000 to 55,000, or 12–15 per cent, a realistic estimate of the resident Chinese population in the Russian Far East (Rybakovskii and Zakharova 1999: 24). According to official statistics – which did not cover all employers – there were 42,535 Chinese non-agricultural workers in the Maritime and Amur provinces, accounting for roughly 40 per cent of the non-agricultural labour force, but 70 to 90 per cent of gold diggers and miners (14,273 persons) and more than half of port workers (Soloviev 1989: 46). By contrast, on ships Table 2.1 Registered Chinese population in the Russian Far East, 1858–1910 1858

1881

1897

1910

Amur Province Maritime Province (after 1884)

5,400 n.a.

8,600 n/a

12,542 30,281

32,695 61,429

Total

8,000 to 9,000

15,228

42,823

94,124

Sources: Grave (1912: 5), cited in Soloviev (1989: 37–8); Tsymbalenko (1989: 32).

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

on the Amur river, the use of Chinese labour was below average; they accounted for about 30 per cent of the work force, two-thirds of them as servants. Wages of Chinese workers were 60 to 80 per cent of those of Russian workers of the same qualification. In 1911, an unskilled Chinese worker earned 25.92 rubles a month in the Amur Province and 30.96 rubles in the Maritime Province; on the high end, a Chinese cabinetmaker in the Maritime Province made 47.52 rubles, and a Chinese roofer in the Amur Province, 72 rubles. (One ruble was worth around US $51 at the time.) Most Chinese workers, however, were unskilled. By industry, they had the highest wages in mining and gold digging (50 rubles) and the lowest in brick making (27.14 rubles) (Grave 1912: 12–16, cited in Soloviev 1989: 39). No more than 50 per cent of the wages reached the workers, however, as Chinese contractors and foremen subtracted the rest under the pretext of various fees. In addition, a Chinese worker incurred living expenses of around 5 rubles a month, about one-quarter of a Russian worker’s. The working day lasted from ten to sixteen hours. If the workers failed to work at the required speed, their wages were significantly reduced (Soloviev 1989: 45). Soloviev writes that Chinese domestic servants were popular due to their low wages and cleaning, laundry, and cooking skills. They earned around 12 rubles a month, but did not have to pay for food and accommodation. Most of them returned to China after two or three years (Soloviev 1989: 47–51). The business of Chinese merchants in the Russian Far East unfolded in the 1870s. They had earlier been granted some trade privileges in Eastern Siberia (the Far Eastern regions were at this time subordinate to the governorgeneral of Eastern Siberia in Irkutsk) to encourage commerce. A book published by D. N. Shreider in Vladivostok in 1897 claimed that in a ‘secret instruction’ handed out by Chinese authorities to merchants wishing to trade in Russia, the latter were required to speak and write Russian, ‘so that Russians will not have the opportunity to learn the Chinese language, possessing which they could penetrate the secrets of our trade and our state policies’. According to Shreider, merchants received authorization to trade in Russia and a passport only after a language exam (Shreider 1897: 109, cited in Soloviev 1989: 51, n. 19). As their numbers increased, however, in 1877, the Russian government, dissatisfied with the loss of business Russian merchants were suffering and with the reluctance of Chinese authorities to grant them protection in China and wary of an increasing Chinese immigration, revoked these privileges. In 1881, apparently realizing the dependence of the region on Chinese merchants, they were again guaranteed duty-free trade within a 50-verst (around 50 km) border strip, but in 1888, a poll tax of all Chinese subjects in Russia was approved (Malozemoff 1958: 25). Russian trade failed to meet settlers’ demand for consumer goods, and Chinese goods were much cheaper than those brought from European Russia. In 1878, there were 127 Chinese and 26 Russian merchants in the South

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Ussuri Region (mainly in Vladivostok), and their sales amounted to 291,710 rubles. Divided by the population of the region, this figure gives 20 rubles for each resident (Soloviev 1989: 52). In 1893, Vladivostok had 127 Chinese and 23 Russian shops; in 1909, respectively 447 and 99, and in 1910, 625 and 181 (Grave 1912: 33, cited in Sukhacheva 1993: 66). But Chinese enterprises were mostly small, and, to take the example of 1910, their total sales of about 14.5 million rubles were less than 20 per cent of the sales of Russian firms. Except in consumer goods and food, they did not threaten Russian enterprises. They practically monopolized barter retail in small, remote villages and in the taiga, which Russian merchants did not reach at all. This situation had grave consequences for the local Tungus, many of whom ended up in debt slavery, but Russian merchants’ interests here were minimal. (In the Amur Province the situation was different: here Russian merchants got the better of their Chinese competitors because much of the retail trade was conducted at mining companies’ own shops.) Therefore, despite demands in 1893 and 1900 by Russian merchants and local government officials to impose a value-added tax on Chinese, prohibit their activity in the countryside, and punish and deport unlicenced merchants, the Amur governor-general refused to take any serious steps to limit Chinese retail trade, knowing that this would lead to rising prices and parts of the population simply being deprived of their daily necessities (Soloviev 1989: 53–5).9 Some Chinese sources claim, however, that Chinese merchants encountered various arbitrary punitive measures intended to limit their trade (Li and Lin 1999: 94). Chinese retailers did well in small and poor markets for several reasons. First, their expenses were significantly lower than those of Russian companies (five to eight versus 15 to 20 per cent, with clerks earning five to seven rubles versus 35 to 75 rubles a month). On the other hand, being made partners and sharing profits and losses with them motivated clerical employees, who were often relatives or acquaintances. Second, larger businesses gave credit to smaller ones. Third, Chinese companies were willing to sell at a loss to get business in the longer term. Fourth, they took advantage of smuggling, which operated out of warehouses across the border in Manchuria. Fourth, many small Chinese businesses did not acquire licences, thus operating illegally (Soloviev 1989: 53–5). Exports also developed. According to the Meyers Großes KonversationsLexikon of 1908, exports consisted mainly of sea cucumber, other seafood, dried fish, and deer antlers, and were conducted chiefly by the Chinese.10 Apart from trade, the most important areas of Chinese entrepreneurship in the Russian Far East were distilleries and coastal shipping. Chinese spirits were cheap and therefore popular, mainly with the Tungu; in 1879, a bottle of a spirit with 50–60 per cent alcohol content cost 15 to 25 kopecks, and 64,840 litres of it, or sixteen bottles per capita, were produced in the South Ussuri Region. By 1906, the production grew to 107,120 litres, and there were 204 Chinese distilleries. In the next year, authorities, seeing a threat to

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

their own and Russian distillers’ revenues, cracked down on Chinese distilleries, destroying them, confiscating their products and land on which grain used in the distilleries was grown. This, however, only served to push the distilleries deep into the taiga, or else move them across the border, from where, according to an 1881 treaty, liquor could be imported to Russia dutyfree (Soloviev 1989: 56–7). Chinese coasting in the Russian Far East began to develop long before the opening of the port of Vladivostok. In the 1860s, its centre developed in the havens of the Bay of Saint Olga, one of which harboured up to 800 junks at a time. The junks brought oil, spirits, tobacco, tea, salt, silk, and other consumer goods, and traded them for sea products, ginseng, furs, and so on. In 1906, Chinese junks transported over 100,000 tonnes of freight in and out of the port of Vladivostok, compared to 1,019,053 tonnes of freight transported by steamers (ibid. 44, 57). In 1910, the State Duma (the Russian parliament) prohibited the use of foreign vessels for coastal shipping in the Maritime Province, but it continued, if on a smaller scale (ibid. 58). Horse-carriages were also operated mainly by the Chinese, prompting local residents to petition the city government to limit the share of the Chinese in this business (Matveev 1990: 231).

Chinese life in the new Russian cities and migration to Europe In 1902, the emperor granted the Dumas of the two Far Eastern provinces the right to limit the residence of ‘Asians whose unsanitary conditions warrant special supervision’ to designated neighbourhoods. Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Nikolaevsk, Nikol’sk-Ussuriisk, and Vladivostok set up Chinatowns (Soloviev 1989: 73). As early as 1875, the military governor of the Maritime Province ordered the Chinese to clear out of the marketplace, where, according to a complaint of the bailiff, they had been ‘causing harm in both financial and sanitary terms, as they trade[d] and live[d] on the same premises, which are grouped into a contiguous mass. One [could] find here objects of luxury next to spoiled fish [. . .]’ (Matveev 1990: 104–5) After this, Vladivostok’s Chinatown, the Millionka, grew around Semenovskii Mead. Some of the land here was purchased by American and British developers who then rented it to the Manza (ibid.: 130–1). According to a local historian, A multitude of shops of Chinese merchants, eating houses, workshops of all kinds were concentrated here. Chinese cooks with moving kitchens, street fortune-tellers, barbers, healers of all types offered their services with loud cries characteristic of the Chinese. [. . .] At night, windows of residences and houses of entertainment were lit by Chinese paper lanterns . . . (Sukhacheva 1993: 62)

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Only servants of Russian households (up to five per household), workers of enterprises that had a special permission, Chinese merchants of the first through the fifth class, and managers of Chinese trade firms were allowed to live in other parts of the city (ibid. 63). Typically, Chinese slept in shops and common rooms; there were no separate sleeping quarters (Soloviev 1989: 82). After the mass arrival of railway workers in 1892, the local chronicler observed ‘hunger, homelessness, lack of hygiene’ among them (Matveev 1990: 229). In 1893, the city administration designated a new neighbourhood for Chinese and Koreans, later called Korean suburb, but most of the Chinese stayed in the Millionka (ibid.). Because of poor hygiene, they were the prime targets of epidemics. During a plague epidemic in 1894, 141 persons fell ill in Vladivostok, mostly Chinese. In 1909, twenty-seven Chinese corpses were collected from the streets during a cholera epidemic in Vladivostok (Soloviev 1989: 83). As Matveev, the chronicler of the city, noted in 1896, Beatings and robberies of Chinese and Koreans are continuous. Even children did impermissible pranks with them. In the press, one continues to hear complaints about cruel treatment of aliens, exploitation of Koreans, pulling of Chinese by the queue etc. (Matveev 1990: 249) The cities had Chinese clinics and gambling dens, which operated illegally, as well as what Soloviev calls ‘theatres and clubs’. Officially registered Chinese theatres were in Vladivostok, Nikol’sk-Ussuriysk, and Khabarovsk. Apart from organizing performances and lectures – including political speeches and patriotic campaigns conducted by officials from China – these ‘theatres and clubs’ served as gathering places where Chinese could play chess and other games. In Vladivostok, there were also brothels that employed Chinese prostitutes. According to Soloviev, gambling and opium dens in the city paid 1,000 rubles a months to policemen in bribes to be able to operate. The police chief of Vladivostok wrote to the military governor in 1907: ‘I submit to report that opium smoking results in the enrichment of those who are immediately charged with its persecution. For such persons as constables the easy opportunity to earn a ruble or a tenner is too great a temptation.’ In 1908, Chinese residents filed a complaint against the police chief himself, claiming that he had collected 4,000 rubles from them in exchange for allowing opium and gambling dens to operate for half a year. In response, he reported that ‘not only lower ranks have engaged in extorting numerous secret opium dens, but there has also existed a whole detachment of Chinese interpreters who . . . collected monthly fees from the dens in the name of my closest assistants and even in my own name’. Between 1 May and 4 October 1910, the police closed twenty-four gambling dens (Soloviev 1989: 84–6 and Buiakov 1992: 64).

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

The Chinese also had their own postal service connecting the Russian Far East with China. According to Soloviev, it operated efficiently and quickly. Mail collection points existed in urban streets, where letters were hung on nails in a wall or fence (Soloviev 1989: 83–4). Only merchants remitted money to China through banks (for example, an average 2,718,869 rubles a year between 1889 and 1893), while others carried the cash to China themselves or entrusted it to friends (ibid.). In 1883, Russia abolished the extraterritoriality Chinese subjects resident in the Russian Far East had enjoyed under the Treaties of Aigun and Peking (ibid.). Later (in 1891 according to Soloviev, a date disputed by Saveliev11), Russian authorities created Chinese community administrations (obshchestvennye upravleniia) and charged them with instructing Chinese regarding Russian laws and prosecuting criminals. Soloviev writes that Qing officials headed these administrations, a charge repeated by many later authors; but Saveliev, referring to a file in the Vladivostok archives ignored by Soloviev, rejects it.12 The administrations provided funds to deport Chinese who had violated Russian laws, set up asylums for the aged and the sick, and helped fighting epidemics. But later (Soloviev’s date: 1897), they were closed, accused of issuing certificates of good conduct to khunkhuz and criminals (Soloviev 1989: 72). A local newspaper, however, ironically wrote that the organization had ‘one very substantial shortcoming: it had the carelessness of protecting the Chinese from excessive patronage’, ‘and shielding the natural scapegoat from shearing is an obvious shortcoming of the institution’ (Matveev 1990: 230). Subsequently, Chinese residents and Qing officials repeatedly asked for permission to establish legal organizations. In 1906, in accordance with a new law on social organizations, the governor of the Maritime Province allowed the activities of Chinese commercial organizations (Sukhacheva 1993: 64–5). The General Chinese Trade Society of Vladivostok (Haishenwai Huashang Zonghui, Glavnoe vladivostokskoe kitaiskoe torgovoe obshchestvo) was registered in 1907, and branches were subsequently created in Khabarovsk, Nikol’sk-Ussuriisk (now Ussuriisk), Iman, Spassk, Kamen’-Rybolov, and other towns and villages. The society was headed by ‘the rich merchant Ma Shomo, owner of the shop bearing his name and the Tongsun Company’ (Sukhacheva 1993: 65).13 All Chinese residing in the town or district of its operation who committed to paying membership fees were allowed to join. The leadership of twenty-eight persons was elected by the general assembly by secret ballot. Members over 30 years of age who spoke both Russian and Chinese were accepted as candidates for the chairmanship (Soloviev 1989: 75). The General Chinese Trade Society organized the sale of ginseng, deer antlers, furs, trepang, crabs, and other sea products and game to the Lianhuahui, a Shanghai-based trade association, which set purchase prices (Sukhacheva 1993: 66). The Mutual Help Society (Obshchestvo vzaimnogo vspomoshchestvovaniya) also registered in 1907, although it had been active since

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1881. According to its statutes, the main objectives of the society were developing Chinese trade in the Russian Far East and helping the business of each member. Another function was defending trade from the khunkhuz and fight opium smoking and trade; for this purpose, the society made available funds to Russian authorities for hiring informers, city and neighbourhood inspectors, and for taking other safety measures (ibid.). The so-called Chinese police of the city government, financed by the society, consisted of an assistant inspector, ten constables, and seven Chinese overseers. But the Chinese police was not very effective in fulfilling its duty, particularly stamping out opium smoking (Buiakov 1992: 65). An official in the governor-general’s apparatus wrote in 1913 that legal and illegal [Chinese] organizations together form a formidable force both local Russian merchants and the administration have to reckon with [. . .] They are very well informed about the market situation and the creditworthiness of Russian trade and industrial firms. (Sukhacheva 1993: 66) The official further accused Chinese organizations of engaging in opium production and trade, buying gold and silver with the income thus generated, and handing it over to Chinese government agencies (ibid. 69). One occasion on which they demonstrated the kind of force the official was referring to took place in 1894, when Russian merchants decided to compete with Chinese intermediaries in supplying hay to Chinese retailers in Vladivostok. All retailers offered them only the rural purchase price of 34 kopecks a pood, while they paid Chinese merchants 70 kopecks. In 1900, the (Russian) Hunters’ Society decided to go around the Chinese intermediary and sell deer antlers to Chinese merchants directly: the latter refused despite the lower price (Soloviev 1989: 75). Apart from the General Chinese Trade Society and its local branches, there were commercial associations and guilds of masons, carpenters, watercarriers, vegetable farmers, bricklayers, servants, etc. (Sukhacheva 1993: 63). According to Sukhacheva, most associations exercised functions of mutual assistance, and their membership was based on native-place ties and consisted only of men (ibid.). The General Chinese Trade Society of Vladivostok, its branches, and other organizations exercised charitable and cultural functions: aiding the poor; setting up asylums, schools, libraries, funding clubs and places of entertainment; subscribing to periodicals. The societies also exercised functions of power and justice. They issued decrees, adjudicated conflicts and crimes, meted out and executed punishments, regulated prices, collected taxes and tithes from the Chinese as well as the indigenous non-Russian population (Soloviev 1989: 76; Larin 2000: 39). According to Sukhacheva (1993: 66), the General Chinese Trade Society of Vladivostok was subordinated to the Chinese ministry of trade, labour, and agriculture and, in 1909, obtained a

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

seal from Peking. Several contemporary authors made allegations of close relations between Chinese associations and the Chinese government. Larin (2000: 40–1), based on recent research in Chinese archives, confirms that government departments in Peking, sometimes consulting with authorities in the Manchurian provinces, approved the statutes and lists of officials of the organizations. The latter also submitted yearly reports and ‘even participated in the elections to the Peking parliament’. Some accounts suggest that local Chinese shared the official Chinese view and regarded Russians in the Amur and Ussuri area as usurpers just like Westerners in the foreign concessions. According to a Russian account reproduced by Western authors, during the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Chinese forces opened fire on Blagoveshchensk across the Amur. The authorities in Blagoveshchensk panicked, rounded up Chinese and Manchu residents in the town and drove them into the Amur, ostensibly deporting them, but causing most to drown (Clubb 1971: 129). Chinese accounts of the same event do not mention any fire by Chinese gunships, and describe the events as an unprovoked Russian action to eliminate the sixty-four Chinese settlements whose dwellers enjoyed extraterritoriality under the Treaties of Aigun and Peking (Li Yongchang 1999a). But according to a Russian historian of Vladivostok, the city experienced an upsurge of Chinese nationalism during the uprising, with Chinese boasting – in broken Russian – that ‘very soon Chinese soldiers city come. Soon-soon Vladivostok Chinese city’ (Matveev 1990: 274). On the other hand, some Russian residents, many of whom were reservists who feared that after mobilization was declared they would have to go to war, attacked Chinese or drove them out of their villages (ibid.: 275–6). Between May and August 1900, some 10,000 Chinese left the area, leaving half of the shops in the city Vladivostok empty and driving prices of meat, sugar, butter, and other products up by fifty per cent (ibid.). Some of them moved to Manchuria, causing a temporary shortage of labour (Soloviev 1989: 38–41). Presumably, most returned. In 1902, acting GovernorGeneral of the Amur region Belevskii wrote that the Chinese who had left after the Boxer Rising returned to Tungus settlements and ‘weakened Russian influence on the aborigines’ that had increased during their absence, including ordering them to send their children to Chinese rather than Russian schools (Larin 2000: 24). Russia, under the pretext of suppressing the Boxers, sent troops to occupy Manchuria, which remained there until the war with Japan. AntiRussian sentiments among Chinese in Vladivostok apparently resurfaced when Japanese troops defeated the Russians at Mukden in 1905, and a siege of Vladivostok was expected. According to Vladimir Arseniev, local Chinese stopped work . . . and talked about where to get arms and ammunition, so as, once the Japanese have beaten the Russians in the Ussuri region

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and the Russians started retiring toward Khabarovsk, to help them destroy the Russians, burn their villages, and kill not only adults but also children, in order that Russians be completely exterminated and the region become Chinese. Although there were no ‘illegal manifestations’,14 according to Chinese sources, soldiers caused damage to 634 Chinese shops (Li and Lin 1999: 94). After the defeat in the war with Japan, fears of the ‘yellow peril’ intensified. As in Europe, they were associated more with Japan than with China, but in the Far East, some demanded an immediate ban on the entry of Chinese into the Amur and Maritime provinces (Panov 1909, Sibirskie voprosy 1909). The arguments ranged from the demographic to the economic threat, the nuisance to public order caused by the khunkhuz, and to defending the Russian worker (Komov 1909). Due to the vulnerability of organized labour in Russia, its role in anti-Chinese campaigns was relatively minor compared to what was happening at the time in the USA or South Africa. Nonetheless, in 1912, the Labour Party proposed to the State Duma a resolution to protect ‘Russian workers in the Far East from the competition of Chinese workers’. On 10 May, the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda condemned the initiative, writing that Russian and Chinese proletarians should struggle for better working conditions together (Soloviev 1989: 4). Meanwhile, the benefits provided by Prime Minister Stolypin to encourage settlement of Russian peasants in the Far East were bearing fruit. Between 1900 and 1916, 287,000 Russians moved to the Maritime Province, compared to 116,000 between 1861 and 1900 (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 94; Tsymbalenko 1998: 9). This permitted Russian authorities to take measures to decrease the area’s dependence on Chinese migrants. In 1910, foreigners were prohibited from being hired for treasury-financed works, and foreign entrepreneurs from treasury-financed contracts in the Transbaikal, Amur, and Maritime provinces (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 45). As the largest employers of Chinese were state projects – in 1910, the military construction directorate employed 19,758 Chinese and the Ussuri Railway 2,485 – this measure would have had serious consequences had the most important projects not received various derogations. Even so, according to official statistics, the number of Chinese workers decreased to 36,241 in 1911, down from 42,535 the year before and accounting for about one-third of the total number of workers. Licencing enforcement of Chinese shops and restaurants was tightened; distilleries were being destroyed; the use of foreign vessels in domestic shipping prohibited. Finally, those products of the forest that Chinese hunters and gatherers were most interested in were being exhausted, and Russian settlers were routing Chinese fanzas from the taiga. Due to the combined effect of these factors, between 1910 and 1914, the number of registered Chinese in the Maritime Province decreased slightly but steadily to 50,875, suggesting that this measure may have affected

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migration flows (Soloviev 1989: 118–20). Thus, while depending on which estimate of the Chinese population in Russia’s Far East we take, Chinese may have accounted for ten to thirty per cent of the total population at any given time, it is very likely that the settled population of the countryside had become much more Russian than what Arseniev had seen in his travels. Nonetheless, even through the destruction and number of losses of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik takeover, a significant Chinese merchants persisted in the region. In 1920, ‘thousands’ of Chinese settlers in the region of Nikolaevsk were reportedly involved in protests against the destruction of a merchant ship carrying lumber by a Japanese gunship (Li Yongchang 1999b). Several studies of the Asians in the Russian Far East were completed in the years before the First World War, such as V. V. Grave’s Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in the Amur Valley (1912) – part of the work of the Amur Expedition carried out by imperial command – and Arseniev’s Chinese in the Ussuri Region (1914). In addition to these sources, accounts of earlier travellers, materials from Russian central and regional archives, contemporary statistics, and some Chinese and Japanese sources, are listed in the bibliography of Soloviev’s monograph, although Saveliev, who has checked those sources, found a number of errors in Soloviev’s account.15 By contrast, we know very little about Chinese in the European part in Russia, but it is certain that, by the beginning of the century, a number of Chinese had migrated to the Western regions of the Russian Empire, and some of them were coming from more remote parts of China. Chinese sources mention around 100,000 Chinese living in Russia west of the Urals on the eve of the First World War, after migrating across Siberia or central Asia or, in a few cases, jumping ship in a Russian port. Parts of this community, located chiefly in Moscow and St Petersburg, were relatively prosperous and associated with restaurants, laundries, the tanning industry, and groceries. But most of the Chinese in Russia worked as urban labourers. After the outbreak of war, the great majority of the Chinese businesses went bankrupt or closed down. As Thunø has suggested, this migration may have initiated the first flow of Chinese migrants to Western Europe, prior to the much larger influx that was brought by the First World War, and established patterns of the ethnic economy – such as the peddling of Qingtian stone carvings – that became typical for migrants during and after the war (Thunø 1999: 163). Russian and Chinese sources agree that Chinese in the Russian Far East came mainly from Shandong, Manchuria, and Zhili (Sukhacheva 1993: 64; Li and Lin 1999: 94), but Xu Shuqiu and Bi Yongsheng add that there was also a number of poor peasants from Zhejiang (cited in Zhang Xiuming 1998: 50, n. 22). Ye Zhongming recorded an interview with one such labourer, Liu Qingsan from Qingtian (Ye 1986, cited ibid. n. 23). (According to data of the Qingtian County Overseas Chinese History Exhibition Hall in Zhejiang Province, the first person from Qingtian went to Russia even earlier, in 1823 [cited ibid., Table 2].) Concurrently with the influx of Chinese labourers to the Russian Far East, the first peddlers of stone carvings from Qingtian

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reached St Petersburg and Moscow via Siberia. We do not know whether pure chance or some specific reason was behind this early trade, long before the carvings were exhibited at the 1899 World Fair in Paris, and the news of their favourable reception fuelled the production of carvings for sale in Europe (Zhang Xiuming 1998: 49). It may well have been started by agricultural labourers from Qingtian in the Russian Far East who discovered a more profitable way of making a living. Ye Zhongming recorded a number of interviews with returned early migrants to Moscow. Ji Meihou sold his land in Shankou Township, Qingtian County, in 1908, bought a bag of stone carvings, and went by train to Moscow, but as he found that the statues no longer sold well, he went on to Berlin. Ji Fudian went to Moscow in 1909 and Ji Dongsheng in 1915, but, finding that there was no demand for the statues, both switched to the leather business (Ye 1986, cited in Zhang Xiuming 1998: 49–50, n. 18–20). According to Ji Dongsheng, the carvings had stopped selling well in Moscow in 1911, and after that, many Qingtian people had gone to other European countries (Zhang Xiuming 1998: 50), in a similar way to the spread of garment and shoe traders from Russia and Hungary to other parts of Eastern Europe some 80 years later. According to data of the Qingtian County Overseas Chinese History Exhibition Hall, altogether 1,902 persons had gone from Qingtian to Russia, 94 to Poland, which was en route to Western Europe by train, 56 to Bohemia, 54 to Hungary, 50 to Yugoslavia, 44 to Bulgaria, and 38 to Romania. One can only suppose that figures for Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia cover only the period after the First World War, when these countries were independent. Figures for Poland from before the War are presumably included in figures for Russia and Germany (1,888), and figures for Bohemia and maybe Hungary, in that for Austria (480) (ibid. 51, Table 3). These figures should be treated with great caution, but they indicate that at least some individuals from Qingtian reached a number of East European countries at a certain time. There is a photo of a Chinese street hawker carrying a wicker basket in Budapest in the 1910s.16 Much more Chinese went from Russia to Western Europe, where they may have contributed to seed communities established in Western Europe by labourers during the war, shared with them their trading experience, and helped accommodate later arrivals who went to European ports by ship. In Central Eastern Europe, where no Chinese workers appeared during the war and the Chinese did not set off significant migration chains, their numbers must have remained very small. This suggests that migration to Eastern Europe, like to Russia, was distinguished by a high degree of reversibility and short terms of stay. Chinese community leaders living in Western Europe recall, however, that before and during the Second World War, some Chinese from Germany and Austria fled to Romania.17 The Overseas Chinese Investment Company (Huaqiao Touzi Gongsi) that operated in Wenzhou City, to whose jurisdiction Qingtian belongs, received investments from Poland between 1958 and 1966 (Zhang Zhicheng 1998).

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

A third group of migrants to Moscow came from Hubei. According to a Chinese source published in 1937, this chain was started by Yi Chenglin, who left Hubei due to poverty and went to Manchuria and then Russia as a dentist. In Chita, he healed the son of a Russian officer, became famous, earned 30,000 rubles and ‘returned home in golden robes’, triggering a wave of migrants to Siberia and on to Europe. These people hawked crafts and paper flowers (Li 1937, cited in Chen 1986: 4, fn. 13).

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3

Chinese as labourers and soldiers in Russia’s wars, 1914–22

To Russia, however, the First World War brought a new and different flow of Chinese migrants. Russia, like other Allied powers, recruited Chinese workers to take the place of Russian men in railway construction, coal mines, and forestry. First the ban on the use of foreign labour was lifted in the Far East, then in the mines of the Donetsk Basin in the Ukraine, on the Murmansk railway in the northern part of European Russia, and so on. Russian and Chinese contractors started recruitment in Manchuria, then expanded to Chefoo, Zhili, Shanghai, and Chinese Turkestan. A single Chinese company sent 20,000 labourers to fell trees in Smolensk Province west of Moscow (Larin 1998: 281–2). Estimates for the total number of Chinese labourers recruited during the war range from 50,000 to 500,000. Larin believes that the figure of 100,000, which originated at the Chinese Embassy in Moscow in 1916, is closer to the truth. This would make their number second only to France (Larin 1998: 284). Labourers for Russia were recruited in Manchuria as well as Zhili and Shandong by Chinese companies; those from Shandong were first sent by ship from Yantai to Dalnii (Dalian) and then by train all over Russia (Chen 1986: 31–2, 67). Contracts were subject to Chinese laws and Russia’s Rules on the Hiring and Shipping of Workers of the Yellow Race. The government of the Republic of China, which generally showed a great deal more interest in the Chinese abroad than the Qing, issued Regulations on Travel Abroad to Work and Rules for Contracting, requiring the verification of employment contracts on both sides. It demanded that employers ensure workers’ return home after the termination of their contracts or in case of sickness and intervened for the improvement of working conditions. Further, it proposed to send consular agents to protect workers’ interests. In 1916, the State Council stipulated that a local official must interview each worker before he leaves China to ensure that he is agreeing to the contract voluntarily (Chen 1986: 45). The circuit superintendent of Harbin demanded that Chinese workers be employed under the same regulations as Russians, and that they be given access to a Chinese representative if arrested. Russia rejected all these demands. China also stipulated that, being neutral in the war, its subjects must not be used to war-related ends. In reality, a considerable number worked

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

at the front, causing public outrage in China (Chen 1986: 79). This led to friction with Russia, with the Russian Consul-General in Harbin blackmailing the circuit superintendent by withholding visas to Chinese merchants in return for the Chinese refusing to issue passports to labourers recruited for military purposes (Larin 1988: 282–4). To illustrate contractual conditions, Larin cites a contract concluded by a Russian firm in Harbin to send coal miners to the Siberian mine of Kizil. The working day was 12 hours, including a 11⁄2 hour lunch break. Workers were given food, lodging, and coal, and ten holidays a year. In case of illness, the employer was to provide a rail ticket to Manchuria and 6 rubles. Workers who completed their terms were to receive a bonus of 25 to 50 rubles. Contracts of the Yicheng Company, the largest recruiter for Russia in Manchuria, set the wage at 1.50 rubles a day, of which workers, after paying for food, clothing, and firewood, should have been able to save at least 1 ruble. There were to be two meals of rice a day and one meal of black bread (1986: 98). In reality, according to Larin, workers were often left hungry. Strikes and riots – one, in 1916, involving 2,600 Chinese miners in at the Alapaevsk mine in the Ural – were violently suppressed. According to a letter from a Chinese envoy to the Foreign Ministry in Peking, a Chinese police force set up at the Kizil mine beat and tortured labourers. Some of them fled and became itinerant hawkers or day labourers. Although their numbers compared to the total of labourers were not large, they spread as far across the Russian Empire as the Crimea, White Russia, Latvia, and possibly Poland. In major cities, front-line areas, and areas along railways, such vagrant Chinese were deported to the interior, Siberia, or to China as ‘persons of suspect behaviour’. Fares and allowances were paid to the deportees, and attempts were made to follow up complaints from the Chinese Embassy (Larin 1998: 285). After the abolition of the monarchy, in June 1917, the Provisional Government called for a halt to the deportation of Chinese workers, and in July, passed a decree ending their importation. Special bodies were set up to settle problems related to the use of ‘yellow labour’ and were to work with the Chinese Embassy. The Chinese ambassador wrote to Peking recommending that China provide shelter and secure minimum living standards to Chinese in Russia; in response, the government allocated 100,000 silver rubles. As the Civil War unfolded, the Chinese government sent emissaries to monitor its citizens’ plight and repeatedly discussed it (Larin 1998: 286–8). In 1918, the Bolshevik government provided rail cars to repatriate 500 Chinese workers. The Ukrainian government agreed to finance the dispatch of several trains to Harbin, each carrying 1,000 to 1,500 Chinese. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, around 1,000 Chinese merchants tried to return via the Black Sea. A Chinese student voluntarily working for the Chinese Embassy in Russia helped repatriate 270 Chinese workers who had reached Turkey from the port of Batumi (Larin 1998: 286–8).

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About 1,000 Chinese workers, mostly on the Murmansk railway, found themselves in territory occupied by British interventionist troops in northern Russia. The British commander-in-chief suggested taking them to China by way of Europe, with preference given to those who could pay for the transportation (there were only sixty) and those who served in the BritishSlav Legion (219). Most of the workers were evacuated to Britain and then France or Canada; when the Red Army seized the area in 1920, 245 Chinese were still awaiting repatriation. Altogether until January 1918, when China closed the Russo-Manchurian border to join the Allied blockade of Russia, 40,000 Chinese had been repatriated according to the Bolshevik press. Some others tried to reach home on their own but remained stuck in Siberia, mainly Omsk and Irkutsk, where, according to reports from the Chinese consulate, they were reduced to begging (Larin 1998: 286–8). Those who were stranded in European Russia were facing similar conditions, as attested by a June 1918 telegram of Chairman Sidorov of the Novgorod Province Committee of the Bolshevik Party to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Sidorov was asking the urgent repatriation of Chinese workers who had arrived during the war to work on railway construction were now ‘unemployed, starving, and spreading infectious diseases’ and wished to go home. The Commissariat replied that this was impossible, and suggested to send them to work in peat mines (Larin 2000: 50). In German-occupied territories – despite China’s stated neutrality – many Chinese workers were imprisoned, and some starved to death (Larin 1998: 286–8). White Russian Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s government, with its capital in Omsk, balked at a Chinese request to take responsibility for the repatriation of the Chinese workers on its territory, even though China offered to pay for it using the Boxer indemnities fund (Larin 2000: 49). In 1920, the Beiyang government in Peking donated 3,500 poods of flour to the Chinese workers in Russia (Larin 2000: 59). Uprooted, penniless, and single, Chinese workers were obvious recruits not just for the British but for various Russian and interventionist armies that clashed in the Civil War, including the Japanese in 1920–1 (Larin 2000: 65). The Red Army set up a Special Command Headquarters of Chinese forces to recruit Chinese workers in the autumn of 1918. In the same year, a unit organized from Chinese miners and commanded by Ren Fuchen fought a series of battles with Kolchak’s troops and ‘White Czech’ units in the southern Ural (Zhou 1999). Estimates of those who fought across entire Russia in the Red Army range from 30,000 to 70,000, with one unit in the Far East – consisting of hunters, trappers and kunkhuzy recruited in Russia and Manchuria by a representative of the Amur Chinese Workers’ Union in 1922 – reportedly numbering 21,500 (Zhou 2002a). Some Chinese estimates are as high as 150,000 to 200,000 (Hu 1999), and some accounts born during the high tide of Soviet – Chinese friendship even give Chinese a role in legendary (and doubtful) episodes of the Revolution such as the

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

seizing of the Winter Palace in Petrograd and the Kremlin. There were also Chinese among Red guerrillas in the Far East and the Ukraine (Larin 2000: 65). The Chinese government, for its part, considered Chinese serving in any army victims of their desperate circumstances or of deception and protested against their recruitment at the Versailles peace conference (Larin 2000: 66). That Chinese recruits may have been more numerous in the Red Army than on other fighting sides is indicated not just by the insistence of later Soviet and Chinese accounts but also by the fact that, as a letter of the leader of the Association of Chinese Workers in the Ukraine attests, the Ukrainian press in 1918 accused the Chinese of being Bolshevik agents and of fighting in the Red Army, and that the Ukrainian government (presumably the pro-German one of Hetman Skoropadskyi) had even sent a note of protest to the Soviets about indiscriminate killings committed by Chinese in the Ukraine. Larin maintains that the higher number of Chinese recruits in the Red Army had to do with better treatment of Chinese in Soviet-controlled territory. Thus, while, for example, in territories controlled by Denikin’s Volunteer Army and the Don Cossack Regiment, Chinese were being interned and deported (Larin 2000: 63–4), the People’s Commissariat of Justice issued orders as early as 1918 to protect the rights of Chinese residents, and Bolshevik authorities annulled earlier discriminatory regulations (Larin 2000: 68–9). In a letter to the Cheka and local Soviets, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs insisted that ‘Chinese and other Oriental nationals in Russia must absolutely not be considered as part of the bourgeois class and seen in the least responsible for the politics of their mercenary governments’ (Larin 2000: 71). Contemporary Red Army documents claim that Chinese were ‘eager’ to volunteer and, in particular, to fight against the Japanese (Larin 2000: 66). Still, despite the success of Bolshevik agitation among some Chinese workers in the Red Army, it is likely that the situation in which most Chinese recruits fought was closer to that described by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the great Russian writers of the century, in his 1927 ‘Chinese Story’. In this little-known surrealistic short story, an opium-addicted Chinese coolie joins the Red Army in starving 1918 Moscow with foggy dreams of bread, going home, and killing the pimp of his admired Russian prostitute under the guidance of Lenin. Soon the coolie is known for his singular prowess as a sharpshooter, and, until he is killed, to his dreams is added another one, of getting a cash bonus as the ‘Red Virtuoso’ of the machine gun. A contemporary army document notes the discipline, tenacity, and courage of Chinese recruits. Dependence on their superiors and lack of social ties made Chinese a choice for sensitive positions as guards of Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolnyi Palace in Petrograd and at the Kremlin, the Cheka (secret police), railway guards, and the Red Guard that substituted police (Larin 2000: 65).

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In 1919, the British ambassador informed Chinese diplomats that over 10,000 Chinese workers in Moscow had adopted Bolshevism, and Larin believes that at least some of those who joined the Red Army were motivated by the promise of liberation of the proletariat, and of the Chinese proletariat in particular. As with prisoners of war, Bolshevik propaganda among Chinese workers was carried out by speakers, including Chinese Communists, and through periodicals, the first of which, the daily Zhongguo Gongren, appeared in October 1918. It was soon renamed Da Tong Bao, ‘Great Harmony’, referring to the Confucian ideal society (the Russian title was Velikoe Edinstvo, ‘Great Equality’). Decrees of the government were published in Chinese. In the Political Department of the Fifth Army, work with Chinese and Koreans was headed by Jaroslav Hasˇek, a Czech anarchist who later wrote Adventures of the Brave Soldier Sˇvejk in the World War (Larin 1998: 289). In 1918, Communist-sponsored associations were set up to organize Chinese labourers in Moscow, Petrograd, the Ural region, and other parts of European and Asian Russia under the general umbrella of the Association of Chinese Workers in Russia (Lü E Huagong Lianhehui), which was established in December 1918. This federation was in fact based on a student association, the Association of Chinese Citizens in Russia (Zhonghua Lü E Lianhehui) established on 18 April 1917 and headed by Liu Zerong, a second-generation immigrant who had received his education in St Petersburg and was a secondary school teacher there (Maslov 1998: 329). The main objective of the Association was to help Chinese return to their home country, for which it received 3,000 rubles from the People’s Commissariat of State Charity and, more importantly, the right to issue food tickets, saving Chinese from starvation. After Chinese diplomats left St Petersburg in 1918 and entrusted the association with defending the rights of Chinese citizens, its cooperation with Bolshevik authorities intensified. A document proclaiming equal rights for Chinese workers, drafted for the People’s Commissariat of Labour by Liu Zerong, was used as the basis for a resolution on the right of all foreign workers to the same wages, working conditions, medical care and insurance. Members of the association worked to help repatriate and find work for Chinese not only in the territories controlled by the Red Army, but also in the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and even in Turkey (Larin 2000: 52–5). The Soviet authorities decided to make the association into a structure of control and Bolshevization of the Chinese in preparation for a revolution in China (Larin 2000: 57). Renamed the Association of Chinese Workers in Russia (Lü E Huagong Lianhehui) – it had wanted to call itself Chinese Merchants’ Association, but that name did ‘not correspond to the rules of the Worker-peasant State’ (Larin 2000: 56) – it occupied the old embassy, was recognized as the representative of the Chinese in Russia financed by the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and had branches all across Russia, including the Ukraine and Central Asia. Its mandate carried a

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

handwritten note by Lenin asking all Soviet authorities to offer it ‘all manner of assistance’ (Larin 2000: 55). In 1920, following a ‘suggestion’ from the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, the Association published a newspaper, the Lü E Huagong Bao (‘Chinese Workers in Russia’), mainly for Chinese fighting in the Red Army, with a circulation of 2,000 to 3,000. Liu Zerong was a delegate at Komintern congresses in both 1919 and 1920 (Larin 2000: 57). Although in 1918, the Association exhorted Chinese workers in Pravda, the central newspaper of the Bolshevik Party, to ‘continue its heroic battle against the mercenary government of Northern China’, which did not prevent it from maintaining, at first under its old name, relations with both the Beiyang and the Canton governments. In 1920, the Third All-Union Congress of Chinese Workers, organized by the Association, called on Sun Yat-sen to help both the repatriation of Chinese workers and the recognition by China of the Soviet Government. In 1921, the Association asked the State Council for food aid for Chinese in Russia. It also consulted the Soviet government on Chinese affairs, helping it draft an appeal to both Chinese governments (in Peking and Canton). It aimed to use this leverage to become a player in Chinese politics. Its leaders suggested to Lenin to send an informal delegation to China to achieve recognition of the Soviet Government as well as of the Association as the ‘official representative of Chinese workers’, which would set up propaganda and agitation in the country. After the restoration of diplomatic relations, Zhu Shaoyang was appointed Chinese consul in Irkutsk, and another leader of the Association became vice-consul general in Moscow. Liu Zerong himself, however, despite support from Chinese Communist leader Qu Qiubai, was deemed ‘lacking sufficient political training’ and eventually left for China, while some other members of the Association were even executed (Larin 2000: 56–60). According to Larin, official People’s Republic of China (PRC) history writing sees the Association as an agent of Russian interests rather than of Chinese revolution, pointing in particular to the fact that it supported the Soviet government’s position on maintaining the ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway (Larin 2000: 84). In 1920, a congress of deputies of Chinese workers’ associations in Omsk elected a Central Executive Commission of the Association of Chinese Workers in Siberia. It declared ‘uniting, protecting, and aiding Chinese workers, supporting their lawful rights and interests in Soviet Russia’ and aiding their moral and cultural development its main objectives. The charter of the association specified that it was open only to workers and students (Maslov 1998: 329). In the same year, also in Omsk, the Siberian Bureau of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) – the RKP(b) – established a Section of Oriental Peoples, which had a Chinese department. The section was put in charge of the Chinese in Siberia and set out to establish control over local workers’ unions, as ‘speculatory elements under the guise of workers often infiltrate these unions . . . This should be said especially in regard of the Chinese’ (Boyko 2001).

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Still in 1920, a Central Organizational Bureau for Chinese Members of the Russian Communist Party (Egong Zhongguo dangyuan zhongyang zuzhiju) was set up within the ‘foreigners’ group’ under the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. Later that year, its offices were transferred to Chita, capital of the Transbaikal Province, given that most Chinese workers were resident in Siberia, but local bureaus were maintained in Petrograd, Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk in the Urals, and the Ukraine. The bureau saw itself as the centre of a contiguous Chinese communist organization comprising Russia and China itself. Yang Mingzhai, a member of the Russian Social Democratic Party who had lived in Vladivostok for 15 years, led a delegation of Russian Communists to China in 1920, establishing ties to revolutionaries in China and founding a number of the first Communist groups there. Other Chinese Communists in Russia established contacts with Sun Yat-sen, and one, Liu Qian, even agreed with him on the ‘immediate unification of revolutionary forces in Southern China, Central Russia, and the Far East, in order jointly to prepare the attack on the reactionary Northern government’ (Larin 2000: 78–9). In 1923, Deng Peifeng, Chairman of the Association of Chinese Workers and member of the Organizational Bureau, proposed to the Komintern to dispatch a brigade of 1,000 unemployed Chinese workers and demobilized Chinese Red Army soldiers to Xinjiang to establish a Soviet government there and prepare China for an eventual incorporation into the Soviet Union. In reality, only small-scale Chinese Bolshevik guerrilla operations were launched into China from Russian territory, and they were quickly routed by Marshal Zhang Zuolin’s troops. Nonetheless, the spectre of encirclement by Chinese Bolsheviks from Russia and Sun’s agents from the South caused the Peking government serious worries during the years of the civil war in Russia. According to Russian sources, Chinese Red Army soldiers were prohibited from returning to China (Larin 2000: 80–3). Chinese Communists, in their turn, sent representatives to Russia to learn more about the Communist movement of the Chinese workers. In 1921, Liu Shaoqi and other future leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned up in Moscow (Boyko 2001). An organization, the Society for the Revival of China (Zhongguo Fuxing She, Obshchestvo vozrozhdeniia Kitaia) was set up to support the Chinese in Moscow and at the same time to train them for future political activity. Among those it trained at a special boarding school were children of Chinese Communist leaders like Wang Ming (Maslov 1998: 329). Sun Yat-sen also sent agitators to Chinese soldiers in the Red Army, calling on them to support his cause (Larin 2000: 79). In 1918, Sun’s government suggested to the German command that 12,000 Chinese migrants and 10,000 German prisoners of war from Russia be sent to China to combat the Beiyang government (Larin 2000: 80). There were also some smaller Chinese Communist organizations, such as the Chinese Socialist Party and the Chinese Bolshevik Party, which operated in the Russian Far East. There was a great deal of overlap between Chinese Communist organizations, the Association of Chinese Workers, and other

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

groups, all of which were supervised by the Bolshevik Party. Thus, at the First Congress of the Komintern in 1919, Liu Zerong represented the Chinese Socialist Party; at the Third Congress the following year, he represented the Organizational Bureau for Chinese Members of the Russian Communist Party (Larin 2000: 61). Despite this flurry of activity, the success of Communist mobilization among Chinese in Russia was limited. For example, an attempt by Lin Changli, Chairman of the Central Bureau of Chinese Communists, to establish a Chinese section within the Omsk Province Committee of the RKP(b) yielded only twenty members (Boyko 2001). The revolutionary cadre generated among Chinese workers in Russia by the Russian civil war played only a minimal role in the subsequent unfolding of the Chinese Revolution. A few of the Russian Chinese stayed on in Moscow to work for the Komintern under Stalin, and in that sense played an indirect role in the affairs of the Chinese Communists. Most, however, failed to rise to prominence of any sort, due to the reluctance of the CCP under Mao to identify with Moscow and to the equivocal relations between the CCP and the Komintern for most of the civil war in China. In this respect, the experience of the CCP was quite different from that of other communist parties, in which members who could claim to have fought for the Bolsheviks often played leading roles. Another factor that probably disqualified the Chinese workers from leadership positions was their plebeian origin and general lack of education. Historians disagree on whether most Chinese workers recruited during the First World War ended up staying in Russia or returned to China after the Civil War. The first repatriation in that period took place in 1922: the train was seen off in Petrograd with a festive meeting, complete with music and speeches (Larin 2000: 86). In any case, enough stayed to inflate radically the Chinese population in the country, and changing its geographic distribution, social, occupational, and economic composition. According to a 1919 report by the Chinese State Council, 23,000 of 45,000 workers recruited by Russia had returned to China by July 1918 (Chen 1986: 153). Sources disagree on how many of them remained in Russia and where. Chinese accounts maintain that 200,000 Chinese failed to return to China and that the great majority of them were concentrated in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Ussuriisk, and other Far Eastern cities, while local almanacs testify that small numbers of Chinese remained in many cities and towns of Western Siberia (for example, between 20 and 100 in such towns in the Altai region as Rubtsovsk, Slavgorod, Biisk, and Barnaul) (Boyko 2001). Meanwhile, Chinese merchants suffered during the civil war from requisitions and taxes, and according to the Association of Chinese Workers, 5,000 of them had left Russia by mid-1920 (Larin 2000: 68). In 1920, the Peking government demanded compensation and protection for Chinese merchants as a condition of receiving a Soviet delegation (Larin 2000: 70). At the request of Admiral Kolchak, Duan Qirui’s Peking government agreed to dispatch Chinese troops to Vladivostok to help rout Bolshevik forces.

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A Chinese division was assigned guard duties along the China Eastern Railway. The troops dispatched also protected Chinese consulates and organizations, but they only seem to have participated in combat once (Larin 2000: 72). In other places, the organizations set up their own militias. These were used not only for protection. In Vladivostok, the Mutual Help Society’s militia, aided by sailors from a Chinese warship, arrested the head of a competing organization (Larin 2000: 75–6).

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4

Chinese in the Soviet Union, 1922–89

By 1926, when a census was conducted, around 100,000 persons on Soviet territory declared either their nationality or their main language as Chinese, of which 77,000 were in the Far East (Polyan 2001: 91). In European Russia, 4,000 persons declared themselves of Chinese nationality, and 6,000 declared Chinese as their main language. By 1928, Moscow alone had a population of 8,000 Chinese, most of them from Shandong and 1,000 from places south of the Yangtze. Northerners ran laundries, bakeries, and knitwear shops or were hawkers; some were unemployed. Southerners engaged in the leather business (Larin 1998: 294, 297). Until the early 1930s, Chinese shops and laundries continued to operate in the Soviet Far East, alongside Chinese communes or collective farms, and although the share of the Chinese in the Far Eastern population declined to 3.8 per cent, they accounted for 35 per cent of urban workers (mostly unskilled), 34 per cent of ‘owners’, 11 per cent of clerks, and 36 per cent of servants, in the statistics of the time. Chinese were being recruited again for work in goldmines, as well as in opium farming, which was resuscitated during the NEP as an export commodity, as ‘specially skilled labour’. In 1926, 22 per cent of the population of Vladivostok was Chinese (Larin 2000: 86–7). Chinese communes often included not just farms but food processing plants, making, for example, fruit juices and ice cream. According to Boyko, they absorbed a number of new, illegal, immigrants from China, and some Chinese charged with violating the visa regime as well as interned Manchukuo soldiers were sent to these farms from the cities by the authorities (Boyko 2001). The transition from war communism to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which aimed at restoring private entrepreneurship, generated new migration trends within Russia among the Chinese. They spread to more urban centres where they saw opportunities for entrepreneurship. In particular, there was an increase in the number of Chinese in such Western Siberian cities as Novosibirsk and Barnaul. In Barnaul, for example, the Chinese engaged in retail and small-scale wholesale trade, were cobblers, mirror-makers, itinerant photographers, as well as worked at newly built factories. As the imbalance between the sexes among migrants persisted (Larin 2000: 86), most of these Chinese, including those who had families in China, married local women,

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some of whom had been widowed in the Great War or the Civil War. Boyko believes that, in addition to the lack of local men and the ethnically mixed character of Siberia, such marriages were aided by a generally positive view of Chinese men as hard-working and family-oriented. Children born of mixed marriages had Russian names and often used Russian patronymics, sometimes replacing the Chinese surname with a Russian one or – like in Mauritius or the Philippines – one created from the full name of the father, such as Shabido. Like in Moscow, most Chinese in Western Siberia came from Shandong, particularly the Chefoo area; others came from Peking or Hubei, fewer from Zhili and Xinjiang (Larin 2000: 86). Interestingly, Chinese from Manchuria were not numerous in this region. It is not clear whether the difference in the geographical origin of the Chinese in the Russian Far East on the one hand and in Western Siberia and European Russia on the other was simply a result of wartime displacement followed by internal migration, or whether it was a result of fresh migration from China during the early Soviet period of relative stability. The last wave of Chinese immigration took place as late as in 1926–9, as a result of instability in northern China caused by the Kuomintang’s northern offensive (Larin 2000: 86). In any case, the Soviet – Chinese border appears to have been relatively penetrable until as late as 1936 – the first armed Soviet – Japanese conflict on the Manchurian border – as peasants from China continued to cross the border to farm and log on the Soviet side (Tkachenko 1999: 200–3). There is evidence of Chinese farmers in Soviet Central Asia in the early 1920s (Larin 2000: 92). Under the NEP, although business owners, like their Russian counterparts, faced an increasingly heavy tax burden, they were able to make a living. Working conditions improved, although working days in Chinese laundries lasted 12 to 14 hours. Illegal opium dens continued to exist (Soloviev 1989: 107–12). According to a newspaper report in 1919, ‘from the Chinese border to Nikol’sk [Ussuriisk], all arable land along the Suifun river is sown with poppy. All good land is rented by the Chinese. Renters pay 500 rubles for the dessiatine’. In the 1920s, however, Russians and Koreans were increasingly competing with Chinese in opium production and introduced the cultivation of cannabis. In 1925, a large shipment of hashish was confiscated in a house in the Millionka.1 Some Chinese stayed on in the Red Army, the Cheka or anti-bandit units. Other demobilized Chinese soldiers and partisans went to work in the coal and gold mines or became small-scale farmers. Some became low-ranking cadres. Many enjoyed veterans’ privileges, and some took Soviet citizenship. (After 1949, a number of these naturalized Chinese Russians returned to China [Larin 1998: 294–6].) Starting in the early 1920s, both the CCP and the Kuomintang began sending students to the Soviet Union to learn about revolutionary struggle. Most returned home, but some stayed on. A second wave of 12,000 students went to the Soviet Union (these made up almost 9,000) and Eastern Europe during the period of Soviet – PRC friendship between 1950 and 1965.

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Officially, 95 per cent of these returned (Cheng 1999b). Some of the returnees were persecuted. Mao Chun describes Tanya Tian, a student who went back to China in 1957 and immediately fell victim to the Anti-Rightist Campaign; through Soviet diplomatic intervention, she was released, married her Soviet boyfriend in Peking, and returned to the Soviet Union (Mao 1992: 30–1). Zhou Hougong, who returned to Moscow in 1993 and became president of the Moscow Chinese Chamber of Commerce, spent ten years in jail as a Soviet spy during the Cultural Revolution (ibid. and Maslov 1998). Chinese were appointed to local and even central Soviets. The Party condemned racial hostility toward the Chinese. Li Hongchang, a Chinese miner from the Soviet Far East and delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Soviets, told the congress: ‘Chauvinism, an inheritance of Tsarist times, exists in some places in the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Government and the party are waging a resolute struggle against it.’ Half a dozen Chinese-language papers were published in Russia under government control (Larin 1998: 295–6). A disproportionate number of Chinese – 58 per cent of Chinese and Koreans workers at nineteen establishments in the Russian Far East in 1932 – were classified as model workers. Private Chinese schools persisted – as attested by the intervention of a Chinese delegate at the third Far Eastern Soviet congress in 1929, in which he demanded that they be closed for ‘not teaching according to the Soviet programme’. But by the early 1930s, there were also ten state elementary schools, one vocational secondary school, one college and two evening schools for adults with instruction in Chinese, as well as Chinese theatres and culture and sports clubs. This was important since, according to official statistics, just over one-third of the Chinese in the Russian Far East were literate in 1923, and only 180 Chinese studied in elementary and secondary schools in the region in 1925. Literacy courses were organized also for Chinese goldmine workers, who also received gramophones and films with Chinese translations accompanied by Chinese ‘political workers’ (Larin 2000: 90–1). Non-government-sponsored activities were suppressed. The old Chinese associations were dissolved in 1923 (Larin 2000: 98), though some Chinese sources mention the establishment of an Association for the Revival of China (Zhonghua Fuxing Hui) in 1925 (Liang 1999a). In 1924, Party and state organs received secret instructions not to support Chinese workers’ unions for their ‘hostility to Soviet power and the proletarian revolution’ and nationalism, and ‘involve Chinese in our normal labour unions’ instead (Boyko 2001). By the end of the 1920s, when the government was ending even government-controlled diversity of organizations in all spheres of life, branches of the Association of Chinese Workers in Russia – which only a year before had been asking for powers to appoint the Chinese consul – were closed, and their membership transferred to Russian trade unions (ibid.). In the second half of the 1920s, authorities began to deport or try certain Chinese citizens for violating the visa regime or forgery. According to Boyko, this explains the increase of naturalizations among the Chinese in this period (ibid.).

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The rolling-up of the non-state controlled economy led to the nationalization of an increasing number of businesses and farms. Initially, the shrinking of Russian private business even increased the share of Chinese enterprises. But they, too, were gradually forced out of business by increasing taxes, the compulsory purchase of government bonds, the low prices of goods sold by cooperatives, and finally the state expropriation of their assets (Larin 2000: 93–4). Some Chinese businesses survived by transforming themselves into craftsmen’s cooperatives (arteli): at one point, there were 420 cooperative Chinese laundries in Moscow (Larin 2000: 100). Some Chinese enterprises and farms resisted until the terror wave of 1937–8. As Boyko writes, the Sun Yat-sen vegetable farming commune near Novosibirsk was classified as a private enterprise and faced a prohibitive tax burden. Nonetheless, as late as 1936, its former members tried to revive it near Barnaul as the Labour of China Cooperative. The local village head later acknowledged that it had made a good profit by producing vodka and beer. The Chinese in Russia were one of the groups that were practically wiped out by Stalin’s terror. Although there had been Chinese accused of espionage earlier (Larin 2000: 102), the first reports of deportations of Chinese merchants to both China and to the North of Russia date from 1927, the year of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat of the Communists in China. Chiang’s government subsequently tried to exchange Chinese detainees for Russian émigrés in China (Larin 2000: 95–6). In 1929, in Barnaul, for example, eight Chinese were sentenced to gaol terms for espionage and economic crimes. One of the eight, Wang Tingling (Valentin Valentinovich), sentenced to three years of corrective labour for being a spy of the Chinese army, was born in Shandong and learned the mirror-making trade and the Russian language in Harbin. He knew Esperanto and subscribed to the local paper, Krasnyi Altai. He was executed in 1938 along with another Barnaul Chinese, whose Chinese name has not come down to us; we only know his Russian name, Mikhail Timofeevich Startsev (Boyko 2001). An article in Pravda on 23 April 1937 about Chinese and Korean agents of Japanese espionage in the Far East gave the signal for mass reprisals (Larin 2000: 103). Some Chinese were targeted as foreign Communist leaders, but the majority became another distrusted ethnic group living in a sensitive border region (like the Crimean Tatars, some peoples of the Caucasus, or Koreans in the Far East). In addition, with the revolutionary ideology fading, local authorities began accusing Chinese migrants of the same activities that their predecessors in imperial times had: smuggling, crime, and uncontrolled immigration (Larin 2000: 95). Historians have yet to provide a clear picture of how this was carried out, as only 11,000 arrested Chinese and 8,000 deported to other areas of the Soviet Union have been accounted for (Larin 2000: 103). Some authors believe that most Chinese living in the Far Eastern region of Russia were deported to China (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 95); other versions maintain that 63,000 perished in labour

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camps in the North (Forsyth 1992: 324). A year earlier, the Millionka, Vladivostok’s Chinatown, had been liquidated by a decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Buiakov 1992: 68). Certain accounts maintain that Stalin repeated the experiment of 1900 and ordered Chinese in the Far East to swim home across the Amur. Personal accounts testify that some Chinese were used in railway construction in the Far East just before and during the Second World War and then deported to Kazakhstan (Baker 1997). A deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, B. S. Stomoniakov, who opposed the liquidation of the Chinese on grounds of international interests, was executed in 1938 (Larin 2000: 103). Eyewitness accounts affirm that Chinese continued to be visible at markets in Siberia and the Far East during the Second World War and even play a role in supplying them with vegetables, but disappeared after the war (Larin 2000: 104). Unlike Koreans, a few hundreds of whom came back to the Russian Far East from Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and even issued demands to create organs of ethnic-cultural autonomy,31 no Chinese deportees are known to have come back. The Chinese who stayed alive and remained in the Soviet Union lived the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens once again, many of them married to nonChinese women, and their descendants were mainly acculturated. According to the last Soviet census, conducted in 1989, there were 11,000 Soviet citizens whose ‘nationality’ was Chinese, and 7,000 of them spoke Russian as their mother tongue (Larin 2000: 104). Solomon Bruk’s authoritative work Population of the World, a revised edition of which was published in 1986, does not list Chinese among ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, although it does mention 60,000 Dungans (Hui), Chinese-speaking Muslims living in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia (Bruk 1986: 176–82).3 After the beginning of mass Chinese migration to Russia in the late 1980s, members of this group, at least older ones who may still have had some memories of pre-war Chinese cultural life, emerged as important middlemen and infrastructure providers in the establishment of Chinese newcomers’ businesses. They began displaying their identity and knowledge of the Chinese language, socialized with the newcomers, and some of them have become successful businessmen.

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Part II

The present

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5

Chinese migration to Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989 Sources, numbers and migration strategies

Workers, traders and students: evolution of the flows Catalysed by economic reforms and the liberalization of travel and border regimes as well as by spreading ethnic conflict, immigration to the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe gradually picked up and became more diversified in the years preceding the collapse of state socialism. Nonetheless, the massive waves of forced and voluntary ethnic migrations within the region, of labour migration from east to west and of ‘shuttle traders’ after the end of the anciens régimes caught both their successors and Western neighbours unprepared. The Chinese, largely in the latter category, became one of the largest, fastest-growing, most important, and most mobile migrant groups in the region. Russia and Hungary emerged as the main hubs of this new Chinese migration. The normalization of Soviet – Chinese relations under Gorbachev led to a renewed mutual interest and contacts between China and the Soviet bloc. In the second half of the 1980s, the exchange of students, researchers, and engineers began again. According to Hungarian Ministry of the Interior data, eighteen Chinese students arrived in Hungary between 1985 and 1988. In late 1984, China, which at this time was expanding its labour export programme, began sending workers and technicians to the Soviet Union and other East European countries to work in construction projects (Huang, Poston and Liu 1998: 2–102; Migration News 2000b), and later also sending workers for the heavy industry and, in the Russian Far East, for agriculture and logging. Like in the beginning of the century, labour migration to the Far Eastern regions of Russia is seasonal and is concentrated in areas close to the border. On the basis of interviews with four Chinese foremen, Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia concluded in 1997 that the overwhelming majority of contract workers came from the northeastern provinces and Inner Mongolia (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 99). The major reason for this is that labour export to Russia is practically monopolized by northeast Chinese provinces within the framework of regional agreements. Chinese researchers claim, however, that recruitment of agricultural workers extends also to Shandong and Hebei (Huaren jingji nianjian 1994: 409).

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Sometimes the purpose of sending workers abroad was training. Workers participating in such schemes worked in industries requiring a high level of skills, rather than in construction. According to data of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, the first ten Chinese ‘skilled workers’ arrived in Hungary in September 1984. They came from Sichuan on official contracts and worked in Budapest. A much larger group of 335 arrived in Gyo ´´r, in Northwestern Hungary, for training at the Rába motor plant between November 1987 and January 1988. They were overwhelmingly skilled metal workers from the city of Siping in Jilin, accompanied by a mechanical engineer and a doctor. Although, according to the database, practically all of these workers returned to China, some of them did so as late as 1991, and many came back as traders or helped relatives and friends to come in 1990–1. The dormitory they lived in is still referred to by locals as ‘the Chinese house’.1 This was one of the first seed groups of new Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe. One of the Siping workers, Yang Zhanjun, later moved to Yugoslavia and opened Belgrade’s largest Chinese restaurant. In 1986, an agreement was signed for 8,000 construction workers to be sent to Siberia. It was supplemented by regional agreements, such as that between Irkutsk Province in Central Siberia (west of Lake Baikal) and Heilongjiang Province in May 1989. According to Russian sources, there were around 10,000 contract workers in Russia in 1990 (de Tinguy 1998: 317, n. 24–5; Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 97). At the end of 1989, German newspapers reported that an agreement had been reached between China and East Germany to bring 80,000 Chinese workers there – but German reunification prevented the Chinese from following the path of the Vietnamese (Heti Világgazdaság 1989).2 Vietnamese guestworkers were present in East Germany and the Czech Republic in the tens of thousands and they mostly stayed on and became traders after their contracts in state enterprises ended. After the end of state socialist regimes, labour export from China to Eastern Europe stopped for a long time: the press made no mention of new Chinese contract workers until 2006, when a number of them arrived to work in garment factories in Romania to replace local workers who had migrated to Spain (Keeley 2006). In Russia, on the other hand, labour migration continued and was regulated by a bilateral agreement in 1992, a presidential decree on the employment of foreign workers in 1993, and a new bilateral agreement in 2000. The latter established and defined different categories of migrant workers, their length of service, education and qualifications. It also defined employers’ obligations when workers are repatriated early, provided for medical assistance, and eliminated double taxation. Chinese workers overtook North Koreans as the main group of foreign workers in Russia in 1994, due not to a rise in the numbers of Chinese but to a drop in the numbers of Koreans (Nosov 1996). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Far East found itself in a very similar situation to the late nineteenth century. With the freeing of prices, life became expensive, as consumer goods had to be brought from

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afar, and infrastructure was poor. With the decline of state industry, the region had little to offer to young people. Between 1993 and 1996, the region lost 480,000 residents, or around five per cent of its population (Rybakovskii and Zakharova 1999: 24), which was five million in 1997 (Motrich 1999a: 16, Table 11). Ideas of a ‘neo-Stolypinian’ programme of settling Russian peasants to avoid the depopulation of the village have been voiced, but the state lacks the resources to provide incentives for even local youth to remain in the villages. At the same time, incomes in US dollar terms increased, and are much higher than on the Chinese side of the border. Thus, Chinese consumer goods and labour once again became a logical, if not unavoidable, choice for the region (see Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 80–93). According to Russian data, there were 17,000 to 18,000 Chinese workers in Russia in 1992–3. In 1993, the largest number of workers, around 10,000, was in Chita Province (east of Lake Baikal). In the first 31⁄2 months of 1994, the newly created Federal Migration Service issued 15,000 work permits for Chinese workers, of which 8,500 for the Far East. In total, 20,301 Chinese worked with (mostly one-year) permits in Russia in 1994, 26,528 in 1995, 24,043 in 1996, 22,227 in 1997, 24,256 in 1999, and around 30,000 in 2002 (see Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 97; Wen Wei Po 2005).3 Even so, at least according to Russian data, the share of Chinese contract workers in the labour force of the Russian Far East is nowhere near where it was at the beginning of the century: according to Shkurkin, the Chinese account for less than 0.2 per cent of the workforce in the region (Shkurkin 1999: 81). In November 1985, the PRC adopted a new entry-and-exit law that significantly liberalized travel abroad. This event nearly coincided with the re-opening of the first land border crossing between the Soviet Union and China, a frequent daily ferry linking Blagoveshchensk with Aihui (Heihe) replaced in the winter by buses shuttling on the ice of the Amur river. (There are plans to build a bridge here.) Then, in 1988, came the first treaty waiving the visa requirement for certain categories of travellers between Russia and China and authorizing the exchange of tourist groups of forty persons for day trips, later expanded to one week. Since the currencies were not freely convertible and their export was restricted, each party charged its outbound tourists in local currency and then settled the costs between each other (Zhao 1994: 402). By the end of 1991, there were ten functioning border crossings between Russia and Heilongjiang alone, and in 1992, rail service resumed between Manzhouli and Zabaikalsk in Chita Province. Heihe received 520 ‘exchange’ tourists from Russia in 1988; in 1992, it received 49,000 (Zhao 1994: 402). Chinese vessels were once again granted shipping rights on the Amur in 1991, reviving navigation (de Tinguy 1998: 305–6). Starting in 1987, northern Chinese, primarily from the northeast – including many ethnic Koreans from the Yanbian region of Liaoning Province4 – but also from Peking, Tianjin, and Shandong, began to take advantage of the simplified procedure to obtain private passports to engage in ‘shuttle trade’

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between China and the Far Eastern and Siberian parts of the Soviet Union. Many of the first shuttle traders were Chinese workers in Russia who engaged in the business on the side. Most workers continue doing so because their employers often pay their wages only at the end of their contracts, leaving them without money to spend. The border trade brought a boom to the Chinese border towns, whose newfound affluence stands in contrast to the general bleakness into which the inland Manchurian rust belt has descended. In particular, with increasing unemployment as foundering state factories started massive layoffs in the late 1990s – a foreign trade official from Jixi Prefecture near the Russian border, who came to Hungary to do business in 1998, told me that a majority of Jixi City’s population was unemployed5 – it became the most obvious source of income. But, as a National Geographic reporter with a knack for socialist realism wrote, returning to Blagoveshchensk after 20 years, . . . Heihe, little more than a dusty, flyblown place of shacks and tenement blocks in the 1970s, was like a sunburst: A gleaming city of new whitetiled skyscrapers, the horizon wild with swinging cranes and the air humming with the sound of distant jackhammers echoing across the river, Heihe stood as a modern, bustling monument to Chinese pride. Everywhere there were towers of steel and glass stretching from side to side on the far bank, which was crowded with hotels, casinos, department stores, trade centers. (Winchester 2000) There is even a revolving restaurant, and the Chinese have set up a dutyfree market on a sandspit just on their side of the midline of the Amur, which officially separates Russia from China (ibid.). From the border, via the trans-Siberian railway shuttle, traders gradually made inroads to the European part of Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, and further on by train to Hungary, taking advantage of a treaty on visa-free tourism that came into effect on 1 January 19896 and of the cheapness of rail tickets, which cost only a few hundred yuan (less than US $100) from Peking to Budapest (Mao 1992: 55). The rail-borne traders of the late twentieth century with their ‘Manila Vuittons’ – the enormous striped plastic totes stuffed with clothes and other merchandise – resembled the sea-borne traders who had sailed to European ports in the 1910s and the 1920s, their trunks and suitcases bursting with leatherware, cheap jewellery, lace, and soapstone trinkets. A number of factors came together to result in the surge of migration to Eastern Europe in 1989. First, the Tiananmen crackdown sent a wave of anxiety through the fledgling private sector: entrepreneurs were eager to secure an escape path for their capital and families in case the government reversed economic reforms. Many of the intelligentsia, directly or indirectly affected by the arrests after Tiananmen, were also engaging in entrepreneurial activities or at least wanting to do so. Second, the recession of the Chinese

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economy between 1989 and 1991 affected private entrepreneurs, managers at state-owned companies (who could not sell their stock) and workers (whose wages were being held back) alike. In this situation, stories on the success of shuttle traders, able to sell any old thing in Eastern Europe and getting rich, combined with news of the visa-free treaty with Hungary, encouraged tens of thousands of people. Stories are very rarely reported on the difficult living conditions and harassment by local authorities that Chinese had to face. The rare negative articles (such as the one in Cankao Xiaoxi, 28 December 1991) claimed that migrants to Eastern Europe were leaving China because they were criminals, apparently reflecting a hardline ideological opposition to leaving China for countries that swerved from the ‘socialist’ path (Mao 1992: 38–9). Some Russian observers subsequently alleged that the lack of critical reporting on this migration reflected government support for it. It was in these stories that the ‘myth of origin’ of the Chinese presence in Eastern Europe first appeared. This myth, which was later canonized in several publications, is one not of emigration or flight but of discovery and colonization, both in terms of content and language. Its basic motif is that the resourceful Chinese student or traveller finds himself in Eastern Europe, and, by lucky chance, discovers that Chinese products he brought with himself as cheap souvenirs or for personal use sell like hotcakes and make a fortune. In the first book about Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe, Mao Chun writes: Even though these accounts were not thorough reports, moreover, they called the international hawkers ‘daoye’, [7] people with a mind for it could get market information out of them: ‘A pearl necklace worth a couple yuan renminbi can sell for over ten dollars in Hungary’. (Mao 1992: 38–9) Wang Jun, from a suburb of a certain Chinese city, went to Austria as a self-financed student in 1987. [. . .] In 1988, since he could not afford an air ticket, Wang Jun decided to go to Budapest by train and return home from there. . . . When people heard that he was Chinese, people assumed an air of respect. Why? China started reforms early; in addition, it dared oppose Soviet hegemony. . . . Wang Jun took some gifts he had not given away – such as herbal oils, silk blouses, and pearl necklaces – to the free market to sell. Remembering that year, Wang Jun smiles: ‘I had never done business before. I didn’t know how much my family members had spent on these things when they bought them for me, either. Oh, let’s just sell them! The herbal oils fetched a dollar a bottle, each string of pearls went for 15 dollars, the silk blouses sold for 60 dollars. I sold everything in a day and made a total of $860 on just a small bag of stuff’. (Mao 1992: 2–3)

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Later Wang Jun became a regular shuttle trader plying the rail route between China and Budapest. I made one trip per month. Apart from covering my travel expenses, I could make [. . .] over $20 thousand each month. I mainly sold pearl necklaces, electronic watches, lighters, and . . . shirts: these things were very light, and the profit was tenfold. (Mao 1992: 3) According to a Chinese official cited by Mao Chun, 60,000 PRC citizens took out private passports to go to Central Eastern Europe between 1989 and March 1992 (Mao 1992: 7). In addition, many people – employees of government agencies and state enterprises or simply people with access to favours from such organizations – traveled on so-called service passports, which are supposed to be issued for travel on official business. Train tickets to Moscow and even maps of Hungary and Hungarian dictionaries became scarce commodities offered by touts for many times the official price. Courses of Hungarian were in demand (Mao 1992: 6, 57). In Moscow, Chinese students touted train tickets to Budapest to transit migrants (Mao 1992: 25, 58). From 1989 to 1991, according to estimates of both local Chinese and the police, the Chinese population in Hungary grew from practically zero to around 40,000. Hungary’s popularity was due not only to its visa-free entry policy and the success of early shuttle traders but also to its perception as the country with the highest living standards and most open economy in Eastern Europe. Hungary’s reforms had received extensive attention in Chinese media in the late 1980s. Furthermore, migrants to Hungary reported to their relatives that the people were friendly and the climate pleasant (Mao 1992: 55–6). Hungarian officials reacted to the influx of Chinese by re-imposing the visa requirement in early 1992, periodically freezing the granting and extension of stay permits to Chinese, and rounding up undocumented Chinese migrants. This resulted in a secondary migration to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and to a lesser extent other countries of the region, as well as Western Europe (Nyíri 2000). 1992 was the only year when registered departures by Chinese citizens from Hungary exceeded registered entries (Hárs 1997: 82). Despite the fact that private entrepreneurship remained severely restricted until the end of the Soviet regime in 1991, by 1989, such trade was thriving due to the increasingly critical scarcity of consumer goods in the Soviet Union. Initially, the trade was based on barter. Chinese traders took a few large bags of clothes, shoes, daily-use items, household chemicals, and so on, to Russia by train. Locals were waiting at each station, and the merchandise was sold off the train (Mao 1992: 25–6). (Many others went to the train to sell the Chinese bread, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetables.) The traders used the rubles thus earned to buy Soviet articles such as watches, fur hats, pumps, and industrial raw materials, which they sold in China, then returned

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to the Soviet Union with the next batch. Others included Mongolia in their itinerary, where they also sold consumer goods and bought furs. China became the source even of whisky and vodka, presumably expressly made for that market (Winchester 2000). East Europeans had practised shuttle trading of this kind within the Soviet bloc since as early as the mid-1960s, although until the late 1980s it had been done more or less clandestinely. By the end of the 1980s – due to the lifting of market controls and the drop in citizens’ purchasing power relative to the goods that were now available – this practice took on a much larger scale across the region. Open-air markets at which shuttle traders sold their merchandise (in Hungary first called either Comecon markets, an ironic reference to the Soviet bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or Polish markets, and later Chinese markets) grew and became institutionalized. In Russia, this happened somewhat later, as liberalization of the marketplace occurred only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.9 Apart from Eastern Europeans themselves (Poles being traditionally associated with such trade), Chinese, Turks, Mongols, and Vietnamese engaged in shuttle trade. The Central Asian region of the former Soviet Union developed its own shuttle trade with the participation of Chinese, Russians, Turks, Kazaks, Uighurs, and so on (see Tan 1998: 459). Shuttle trade expanded beyond neighbouring countries; Dubai and even Singapore became popular destinations of Russian ‘shop tours’, whose participants, flying on chartered planes, were mainly shuttle traders rather than private shoppers. Some authors estimate that in 1996, 75 per cent of imported consumer goods came from shuttle trade, worth a yearly US $15 billion, and the trade, sales and services associated with it employed 30 million people (Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 4). Russian customs regulations were conducive to the trade: not until 1996 was the value of merchandise that a traveller could take into the country duty-free lowered to US $1,000 (ibid. 23). The number of border crossings illustrates the scale of shuttle trade, which reached its peak after the signing of a Russo-Chinese agreement allowing visa-free overland group tourism between the two countries on 18 December 1992 (Khodakov 1999). Russian news agencies reported that in 1992, a million Chinese entered the Russian Far East, rising to 2.5 million in 1993, and these data were reproduced by de Tinguy (1998: 302). While Bagrov confirms that 1993 was the peak year of the Chinese inflow, his data show that 800,000 people arrived from China, while 900,000 Russians went to China in that year. Of the 800,000 Chinese entrants, 410,000 entered as tourists, 237,000 for official purposes, and 33,400 on official invitations (57,100 were transport workers) (Bagrov 1999). After 1993, the number of Chinese entering Russia fell, affected by the violent standoff between President Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet in October 1993, the introduction of specialized immigration checks along the land borders, entrusted to a newly created Federal Migration Service in December 1993, and the re-introduction of the visa requirement for Chinese service passports (private passports had not been exempt) in early

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1994 (Bagrov 1999 and Khodakov 1999). The total number of Chinese entering Russia was 449,000 in 1997 and 464,000 in 1998 (Berestovoi 1999: 53). In the first six months of 2000, this jumped to 1.5 million, perhaps responding to the recovery of the Russian economy (Migration News 2000a). The Maritime Province accounted for 24 per cent of Chinese entries into Russia in 1998 (Berestovoi 1999: 53). As of 2003, visa-free border tourism remained, although in that year the Chinese government announced the introduction of special passports for it that would not entitle the bearer to travel to Russia’s other provinces.10 The Chinese government has stated that the volume of shuttle trade exceeded that of trade within the framework of bilateral agreements. A Russian newspaper reported that at a 1998 Chinese – Russian meeting with the participation of Russian Premier Sergei Kiriyenko, a toast was offered to the shuttle traders (see Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 27). Group tourism, serving as legal cover for shuttle trading, accounted for most of the crossings. According to an official from the Heilongjiang branch of China International Travel Service, in the early 1990s, one-day package tours between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk offered by travel agencies ‘were strongly characterized by shopping’ (Zhao 1994: 402). Local authorities believe that 70 per cent of Chinese tourists engage in trade; others are actually agricultural and construction workers who simply want to evade paying for the visa (Berestovoi 1999: 54). To prevent tourists from remaining in Russia illegally, regional authorities extensively apply expulsions and deportations: between 1994 and 1999, over 22,000 Chinese have been expelled from the Maritime Province alone, of which over 14,000 deported. In addition, over 52,000 Chinese have been fined for unlicenced work and other offences (Romanov 1999: 91). In the late 1990s, the authorities changed their tactics: instead of expensive and inefficient deportations, they now make travel agencies responsible for their clients (Yaropolova 1999: 97). For example, in Khabarovsk Province, the commission for licencing international travel businesses requires travel agencies to confirm the exit of tourists who have exceeded their permitted durations of stay by submitting copies of their passports showing the Russian exit stamps (Khodakov 1999). In the Maritime Province, 36 per cent of Chinese entrants overstayed their allowed stay durations in 1994. In the following four years, 46 travel agencies had their licences suspended for ‘not ensuring the necessary control’ over Chinese visitors. In 1997, the number of overstayers dropped to 20 per cent and in 1998–9, to less than one per cent (Romanov 1999: 90–1). The number of Chinese who received administrative punishment in the region (for violating the visa regime, trading without a permit, and so on) has been above 8,000 each year since 1994 (Gelbras 2000). At the same time, many more Russian citizens go to China than Chinese citizens come to Russia. In 1998, despite the drop in traffic after the devaluation of the ruble, 741,000 Russians visited China, while only 464,000 Chinese visited Russia (Berestovoi 1999: 53). In 2002, this number grew to 1.1 million

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(Travel.ru, 5 August 2003). Similarly, exit and entry statistics of the Eastern Siberian and Far Eastern stretch of the Russian border show that more Russians have crossed it every year than all foreigners combined. In 2003, according to figures of the Maritime Province’s Tourism Committee, 363,000 Russians from the province visited China, while the province received only 116,000 visitors. Unlike in Russia, where in 1992–3 China was one of the top sources of foreign arrivals, it has never been among the top ten sending countries for arrivals in Hungary. The number of arrivals from China peaked in 1991 with 27,330 entries, a figure that is well below annual entry statistics of South Korean and Japanese nationals.11 After 1990, as news of business opportunities in Eastern Europe spread across China, the number of southerners going there as shuttle traders increased. They tended to go directly to Moscow and Central Eastern Europe rather than staying in the Far Eastern regions of Russia. According to a Chinese source, nearly 10,000 Chinese traders were registered as Moscow residents in 1992, and they included 4,600 ‘all-year traders’, more than 5,000 ‘itinerant traders’, and 1,340 ‘students who also engaged in trade’ (Huaren jingji nianjian 1994: 410). The provenance of migrants to Eastern Europe showed a much more diverse picture than previous waves of Chinese emigration. Although most migrants came from large cities or fast-developing coastal provinces, there was no dominant sending area. Among 672 Chinese registered in the database of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior in 1989 and 1990, 24 per cent were from Peking, followed by 15 per cent from Zhejiang, a province with a tradition of migration to Western Europe, 11 per cent from Shanghai, seven per cent from Canton, six per cent from Liaoning, and five per cent from poor inland Sichuan. The rest of the entries were split between all provinces of China except Tibet and Qinghai. This database, which supposedly includes Chinese who at some point applied for residence permits in Hungary – the actual criteria for inclusion upon closer examination of the database seem unclear – reflects only a small and not necessarily representative fraction of Chinese in Hungary, but it does provide an indication of their provenance. The provenance of the Chinese in the Czech Republic is similarly diverse (Moore and Tubilewicz 2001). In addition to being a target country, Hungary also became a transit country for Chinese migration. At the time, it was relatively easy to get a residence permit in Hungary, which increased the chance of the holder of getting a Western European or American visa. People wanting to go to South Africa and South Korea, including ethnic Koreans wishing to visit relatives, also used Hungary as a waystation, as in absence of diplomatic relations with the PRC they could not go to these countries directly (Mao 1992: 7–8). The transit flow was aided by the appearance of migration brokers. They arranged for the documents needed to get a passport in China and come to Hungary (invitation letter from a Chinese company or in a relative’s name, company registration in the migrant’s name, enrolment in a school, and so

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on). Some of them then also helped migrants cross clandestinely to Western Europe; this was a much higher-risk activity requiring a higher degree of familiarity with the terrain, as it involved getting in touch with local human smugglers or even recruiting them from among local drivers (Nyíri 1998: 355). This route of irregular migration to the West opened up in parallel with the rise of illegal migration by sea and air to the USA via southeast Asia and Latin America.12 Mao Chun writes that Wang Jun, the student-turned-shuttle-trader, first issued invitation letters to Hungary to acquaintances for US $1,000. His acquaintances sold them on to their acquaintances for US $2,500–3,000. By June 1989, Wang Jun was issuing 100 invitations a month, with a pricing system based on the customer’s place of residence. Clients from Fujian, Zhejiang, and Canton provinces, traditional migrant homelands where going abroad was most strictly controlled, paid US $6,000–10,000; those from Shanghai and Manchuria, US $3,000–6,000; and those from Peking and inland pro-vinces, US $2,000–3,000. Another migration broker, or ‘snakehead’ (shetou),13 himself from Fujian Province, named the Sanming area (Fujian) and the Wenzhou area and Qingtian County (Zhejiang) as his top markets (Mao 1992: 4–5). Ten thousand US dollars was a high sum for an invitation that, in the absence of a visa requirement, was at the time needed only to get a passport, but it was still several times cheaper than what snakeheads were charging for passage to Western Europe, North America, or Japan (see Smith 1997). Mao mentions elsewhere that invitation letters to Hungary were offered around the Dongjiaomin Alley public security bureau in Peking for US $1,000–1,500 in 1991 (Mao 1992: 56). My interviews confirm that prices spread over a wide range, depending not only on the demand and difficulty of obtaining a passport in the client’s place of residence but also on his relationship to the broker and the extent of services offered. As in classical migration chains, close relatives were very often invited free of charge, and then sponsored until they stood on their own feet, the only distinctive feature being the speed with which they were being invited after the arrival of the primary migrant. Services included in the price could range from a simple invitation to a full package of documents needed to apply for a visa (after the visa requirement was reinstated), to obtaining a passport, applying for a visa on the client’s behalf, and arranging clandestine passage from Hungary to Western Europe. The degree of irregularity of methods employed varied accordingly. Elsewhere in his book, Mao Chun relates the story of Pu, a deputy department head for Eastern Europe of an influential state enterprise in China involved in ‘labour’ and construction projects (Mao 1992: 137–43). The company had the rights of trading in foreign currency and applying for (daiban) private passports. Since the overseas investment proposals by the mother company had not been approved, the company ordered Pu to apply for a private passport to Eastern Europe and invest there in his own name. Thus, he was ‘gong fei zi pai’, i.e. carrying a private passport but using public funds. He

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chose to install himself in Leningrad. Pu held an MBA degree and spoke English and Russian. The first contract Pu signed was setting up a farm jointly with a certain Russian province. Pu’s company provided sixty Chinese peasants on twoyear work contracts. Pu said that ‘the capitalists of the two Europes rose relying on the black slave trade and colonization. . . . Chinese capitalists no longer have this chance. If they want to get rich quickly, there is only the “big shuttle” (da dao: weapons, drugs?) and labour. “Shuttling” requires power, an ordinary person cannot do it; but labour is an inexhaustible source of riches’. ‘Labour’ means ‘smuggling people’ (fan ren). ‘My company profits 100 per cent on labour for international contract projects.’ Pu attracted the attention of Zhejiang, Fujian, and Cantonese snakeheads operating in Eastern Europe. They either had their own companies or companies representing them there. The snakeheads’ biggest bottleneck was obtaining passports. At that time, they earned US $10,000–20,000 on a customer. Pu’s mother company obtained the passports within three to 30 days as long as there was any letter of employment from abroad accompanied by any registration document of a company abroad. Pu’s company signed a labour contract (laowu hetong) and received a ‘labour management fee’ of US $1,400–2,400, plus an ‘express fee’ if the passport was needed urgently. Pu’s mother company had the PSB (Public Security Bureau) ‘exit application forms for private purposes’ and exit permits issued by the PSB. Pu and the snakeheads provided the necessary paperwork from abroad, while the snakeheads’ contact person and Pu’s mother company took care of the passport application process. As it was difficult to obtain passports in coastal provinces, Pu’s company applied for them elsewhere. Within half a year, Pu procured over 1,000 passports. For each passport, Pu received US $1,000 on top of the official ‘labour management fee’. At the same time, the party committee of his company called on employees to learn from him. Pu met his fate in the face of five brothers from Fujian who had paid 60,000 yuan (at the time worth about US $6,800) each for passports and spent a further 40,000 (US $4,500) on the road, intending to get to Western Europe. They first got to Russia, from where a snakehead took them to Hungary, but then told them that, because of the war, the way via Yugoslavia was closed; instead, he took them to Romania. While waiting there, they spent their time in casinos as they didn’t know how to do business or work. The snakehead eventually abandoned them and returned to Austria, and they decided to go back to China and settle accounts with the snakehead’s representative. On the way, however, they met Pu in Moscow. They exchanged business cards; the card of the eldest brother read, ‘Assistant Manager, East Asia Brothers Company’. The brothers discovered that Pu’s company was the one that had issued their ‘employment invitations’ and killed Pu and his girlfriend.

60 Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia Elsewhere, Mao writes about another Moscow Chinese who was a travel agent (Mao 1992: 131–5). He issued invitations for tour groups from Chinese government agencies and state enterprises in the guise of business and investment delegations. The typical customer was a mid-level cadre of an inland county approaching retirement who wanted to see foreign countries while he could still use some public funds, even though they were not sufficient to go to the West. The cadre then gave quotas for participation in the delegation to his subordinate companies, and made them pay a somewhat larger sum than needed for each participant, so that the extra amount covered his own expenses and gave him some extra profit. The vice-mayor of an inland city, indignant about unequal opportunities to travel compared to cadres of coastal areas, agreed with the travel agent that he will issue invitations for over 200 outstanding cadres from city companies to visit Russia as a delegation, and will organize an exhibition of city products. In nearly all cases, migration brokers were recent migrants – students or traders – who spoke some Hungarian and, having started by issuing invitations to their relatives and friends, realized that this new line of business can supplement their income. Many of them told clients what merchandise to bring with them, bought it, and then sold it on with a profit, thus combining the ‘people business’ (rentou shengyi, zuo ren) with trading (zuo huo). Most migration brokers subsequently expanded their services to helping new migrants apply for residence permits. Having accumulated considerable capitals, many of the early migration brokers opened restaurants and/or moved to North America as investor immigrants. When the ‘Eastern Europe fever’ (Dongou re; Mao 1992: 56) subsided, prices dropped, but the invitation industry continued despite the tightening of immigration controls. In early 2000, full packages needed to apply for a Hungarian visa could be purchased in Peking for US $3,000 from touts around the Hungarian embassy. For US $2,000, agents offered to arrange with an official at the Interior Ministry’s visa department that the applicant’s visa be approved. For much smaller fees, they helped produce documents needed to issue invitations, including housing rental contracts and bank statements showing the availability of US $8,000. Advertisements offering ‘visa in Peking’ were published in Chinese newspapers in Budapest. Chinese travel agencies and both Chinese and Hungarian ‘service companies’ (shiwusuo) also offered such services. Furthermore, newspapers in Peking and Tianjin carried advertisements of agencies offering Hungarian visas (Mao 1992: 57). A source at the visa department of the Interior Ministry said that, in early 2000, the department received around forty visa applications each week indicating a certain Mr. Wu as the inviting party; all of these applications were approved. Hungary also attracted a number of Chinese from Western Europe.14 Some of them sought to move their catering enterprise to a less competitive environment, others were unable to find work or secure a residence permit in their country of residence, yet others preferred being their own masters to working

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in a restaurant or workshop (Nyíri 1999: 32; International Organization for Migration 1998: 337; Mao 1992: 8, 18). This West-to-East flow consisted largely of migrants from Zhejiang, many of whom became initiators of long migration chains that gradually increased the weight of Zhejiangers among Chinese in Hungary. Mr. Cheng, who came from Austria, and Mr. Ying, who had lived in Belgium and Morocco, both owners of several restaurants in Budapest, are said to have brought hundreds of relatives and acquaintances from China to Hungary.15 Mr. Ying’s home county, Qingtian, is the place of origin of most Zhejiangers who came to Hungary from Western Europe. According to data from the Qingtian County Returned Overseas Chinese Association, at the end of 1996, there were 1,000 migrants from Qingtian in Hungary, 800 each in Romania and the Czech Republic each, 600 each in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, 200 in the Ukraine, 177 in Slovakia, 150 each in Russia and Albania, 130 in Slovenia, and 110 in Poland. Although one should remind oneself to treat these data, provided voluntarily by family members in China, with great caution, it is nonetheless worth noting that the largest growth compared to 1995 data had occurred in the Czech Republic, where the figure had doubled, and in Hungary, where it had increased by 50 per cent (Zhang Xiuming 1998: 54–5, Tables 5 and 6). The proportion of migrants from Fujian also increased due to the establishment of migration chains; unlike those from Zhejiang, these were created in Russia as well. By the middle of the 1990s, Zhejiang and Fujian, two provinces with strong emigration traditions, developed new migrant homelands (qiaoxiang) that cater specifically to Eastern Europe. Jiangyin and Jiangjing townships in Fuqing County, Fujian are now specializing in migration to Hungary, Germany, and Russia; Mingxi Township near Sanming City, Fujian in migration to Hungary and Italy; and Wenxi Village near Wenzhou City, Zhejiang (Mr. Cheng’s home village) in migration to Hungary.16 By the end of 1999, the largest two groups among the 10,291 Chinese in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior database were from Zhejiang (19 per cent) and Fujian (18 per cent) (Nyíri 1999: 33). In late 1997, the Association of Chinese Merchants of the Komondor Kft.’s Trade Centre (better known as Four Tigers Market, the wholesale market which is the centre of the Chinese economy in Hungary) conducted a survey asking merchants from different provinces to provide estimates of traders from their provinces. Out of a total of 7,661, Fujianese accounted for 3,100 and Zhejiangers for 2,700, including 1,800 from Qingtian.17 According to Chinese in Yugoslavia, in 2000, Zhejiangers made up the largest group.18 The same is reported for the Czech Republic (Moore and Tubilewicz 2001). In Romania, apart from Zhejiangers and Fujianese, there is a third large group of migrants, from Henan. Henanese apparently began arriving in large numbers later than the other two groups.19 Among a random sample of 428 Chinese polled in Moscow in late 1998 by the team of Vilya Gelbras, respondents from Peking were the most numerous at twelve per cent, followed by ten per cent from Liaoning, nine per cent from Fujian, eight per cent from Hebei and Heilongjiang each, seven per

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cent from Shandong, and six per cent from Shanghai. The three northeastern provinces combined accounted for 22 per cent. Zhejiang stood at four per cent, and Sichuan, Canton, and Jiangsu at 2.5 per cent each. By contrast, northeasterners accounted for an overwhelming majority of 329 Chinese polled in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and Ussuriysk in the framework of the same study in early 1999. The only sending other province with some presence in the Russian Far East was Shandong, accounting for a bit less than five per cent of respondents (Gelbras 1999: 5, 10). Following contract workers and traders, Chinese farmers and taiga trappers, hunters, and ginseng gatherers also reappeared in the Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia. In a small sample of Chinese in rural Russian Far East and Eastern Siberia (16 per cent of a total 244 respondents) interviewed by Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia in 1996–7, all came from directly across the border, either Heilongjiang or Inner Mongolia (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 100). Finally, a large number of Chinese took advantage of the renewed possibility to study in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus, and, in the early 1990s, also in Central Eastern Europe. Only a small number of these students were singlemindedly focused on their studies, while others concurrently engaged in trading, abandoned school after the completion of the preparatory language course, or did not show up at the school at all and merely used the student visa as a way of getting into the country. The opportunity for this was created by easy admission to language schools and the possibility to change one’s status from student to other types allowing entrepreneurship. A group of students in Peking told a visiting Hungarian professor in 1991 that they were planning to go to study in Hungary with the intention to stay there.20 In Irkutsk in Eastern Siberia, there were 774 Chinese students in institutions of higher education and language schools in 1994, and more than 1,500 in 1998 (Diatlov 1999a: 86). In Khabarovsk, there were 151 registered Chinese students in the first half of 1998 (Motrich 1999b). In Belarus, China was the top country of origin of new foreign students in 1996 (Zagorets 1997). According to Vilya Gelbras, university professors in Moscow, Khabarovsk, and Irkutsk believe that half of the Chinese students actually study, while the rest only trade. About one-tenth of the students get a degree (Motrich 1999b and Diatlov 1999a: 86–7).21 A Chinese student in Moscow told me in 1998 that out of 6,000 Chinese students in the city, only 2,000 really studied. In the Russian Far East and Siberia, Chinese students are often from the northeast and Inner Mongolia, with bilateral agreements between institutions of tertiary education in these regions aiding this. For example, the Irkutsk State Agricultural Academy has a student exchange programme with the Hohhot Agricultural Institute in Inner Mongolia (Kamezhuk 1998). In Eastern Europe, the distribution of the students is more diverse. In the late 1990s, some Chinese students began applying to branches of American colleges set up in Eastern Europe that offered students to spend the last year or two of their study in the USA, such as Western Maryland College in Budapest.

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A number of Hungarian universities with English-language programmes have also set up recruitment in China, although visa policies are hindering this effort. Thus, despite a shift toward a greater proportion of migrants from Fujian and Zhejiang over time in Central Eastern Europe and a relatively high number of northeasterners in Moscow, the geographical origins of Chinese in Eastern Europe continue to present a picture of diversity. Mandarin is the lingua franca. Although Zhejiangers, particularly those from rural Qingtian, and especially Fujianese are regarded by others as relatively closed groups, there is daily interaction between people from different provinces. ‘Dialect groups’ thus play a much less important role than in the more traditional Chinese diasporas.

Migration routes to, from and within Eastern Europe Many migrants do not stay at their first destination but move on, some after just a few weeks or months, some after a few years. Such remigration has taken place to Western Europe (in many cases clandestinely), the USA, Canada, or Australia (mostly by obtaining immigrant status) and even Africa, but most of it has been within the Eastern European region (International Organization for Migration 1998: 343–4; Nyíri 1999: 46–7). The main factors behind remigration within the region have been disappointment with the prospects of business in a given country and inability to obtain or extend resident status. In the past decade, the main flows seem to have been the following: From the Russian Far East to European Russia The large difference in the provenance of Chinese in the Russian Far East on the one hand and in Moscow on the other suggests that apart from northeasterners, few Chinese migrants spend time in the Far Eastern regions. But some Northeasterners move on from the Far East to Moscow, both as traders and as students.22 In the questionnaire study conducted by Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia (base size 244), one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents had visited other cities of the Russian Far East or Eastern Siberia, apart from the location they were interviewed in. Almost one-tenth of respondents have been to a Western Siberian city, three per cent have been to the Urals region; 15 per cent have been to Moscow and six per cent to St Petersburg (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 100). From Moscow to Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the drop in purchasing power, and the armed clash between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet (1991–3), many Chinese moved on from Moscow to look for better business opportunities

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and safety. Many others decided to move because of their inability to repatriate profits. The main destination was first Hungary, then, after the re-introduction of the visa requirement in the beginning of 1992, Romania and the Czech Republic. (In the month preceding the reinstatement of the visa requirement, many migrants travelling by train were refused entry at the Hungarian border and had to go to other countries; Nyíri 1999: 40; see also International Organization for Migration 1998: 338–9.) Many of the migrants from Fujian that I have interviewed in Hungary, Romania, and Italy had followed this trajectory.23 Neither Romania nor the Czech Republic had imposed a visa requirement on holders of official PRC passports, which were relatively easy to obtain; thus a large part of those who went to these countries traveled on service passports (cf. Moore and Tubilewicz 2001). For example, Chen Jian, Executive Vice-President of the Fujian tongxianghui in Romania, went to Russia in 1993, then on to the Czech Republic, where he stayed for one year, commuting between the Czech Republic and Hungary. Finally, he moved to Romania in 1994.24 Migration brokers known as ‘snakeheads’ set up operation in Moscow and helped people to get to their countries of destination and beyond, to Western Europe. According to an interviewee, going from Moscow to Western Europe cost him US $15,000 in 1992.25 From Hungary to the Czech Republic, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe The crackdown on Chinese immigration by Hungarian immigration authorities in 1992 (referred to in the Chinese media as ‘the anti-Chinese policy’) involved not only reinstating the visa requirement but also refusing to grant extensions of residence permits or holding applicants in constant uncertainty by making the extension procedure last for months, thus preventing applicants from conducting business (Nyíri 1999: 41–3). Later, increasing competition, lower profits (especially after the introduction of higher customs duties in 1995), and increasing overhead costs of market trading made doing business in Hungary less attractive compared to much less developed markets elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Romania and Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic) (Tables 5.1 and 5.2) were the most popular destinations, but Chinese also went to Slovenia, Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and later, after the end of the Bosnian war, to Yugoslavia and Bosnia. Most of those re-migrants who had spent years in Hungary maintained their businesses there, usually in care of a more recently arrived relative or friend, and continue to visit Hungary regularly, seeking to maintain a residence permit or obtain one anew. Others initially obtained a residence permit in a neighbouring country as an ‘insurance policy’ and remained in Hungary as long as they could (Nyíri 1999: 47).26 For example, Ms. Feng from Sanming, Fujian, had gone to Hungary in 1990 and moved from there to Russia.27 A man from Peking and another

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Table 5.1 Chinese citizens entering Romania, 1990–3 1990

1991

1992

1993

8,400

14,200

12,100

4,267

Source: International Organization for Migration 1998: 326, Table 14.5.

Table 5.2 Chinese citizens holding residence permits in the Czech Republic, 1990–4 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

94

261

1,388

2,567

2,907

Source: International Organization for Migration 1998: 326, Table 14.3.

migrant interviewed by the International Organization for Migration went to Budapest in 1991 and 1992, respectively, and moved to Romania in 1993. The motive of the first were that ‘there were too many Chinese in Budapest. Because of the problems they were causing there, the Hungarian government became increasingly intolerant of them’. The second mentioned that his business was in decline and he was no longer able to renew his residence permit in Hungary (International Organization for Migration 1998: 337–8). A couple interviewed by Mao Chun moved from Hungary to the Czech Republic ‘because Hungary was kicking the Chinese out’ (Mao 1992: 17). From Hungary and the Czech Republic to Germany, Austria, and Italy Some migrants who had obtained Hungarian or Czech residence permits moved on legally (with tourist or visitor visas) to Western Europe to work in workshops or restaurants. Some of those who couldn’t get visas moved on clandestinely. Some were motivated by a preference for low-risk wage labour compared to doing business; others moved because they had lost the money they had invested in starting their businesses. The infrastructure of brokered migration developed at the very beginning of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe, when snakeheads – mostly from Zhejiang and Fujian, but also from elsewhere – took advantage of Moscow and Budapest as waystations of getting clients to Western Europe and America (Smith 1994). Some Zhejiangers known in Budapest as snakeheads are remigrants from Western Europe and have apparently made use of their connections there. The services of migration brokers range from arranging for legal invitation letters, tourist visas, marriages, or school enrolment to hiring local

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smugglers to get clients across the border on foot or hidden in a car or a lorry. In the middle, clients are supplied with passports and residence permits rented from other Chinese in the country of departure or destination, in which the photos are either substituted or left unchanged, counting on the officials being unable to distinguish faces. (This system has worked so well that a Chinese restaurant owner in Croatia who wanted to bring Chinese repair workers from Hungary to finish the interior of his restaurant rented passports with Croatian visas for the workers.)28 Some of the brokers operate agencies and advertise openly, while others work clandestinely, and there is great variation between the fees (Smith 1994 and International Organization for Migration 1998: 340). A Chinese man in Budapest who rented out his passport to a snakehead in 1999 received US $500.29 According to Chinese in Budapest, before the beginning of the wars of the Yugoslav succession, the Yugoslav-Austrian and Yugoslav-Italian border were frequently used for clandestine crossing, as was the CzechoslovakGerman border. After the eruption of the Yugoslav wars, the southern route went mainly through the Hungarian-Austrian border.30 After the crackdown on Chinese immigration in Hungary in 1991–2, snakeheads appeared to reroute their business via Prague. A letter found at the residence of a Chinese man in Budapest in 1992 stated the following: Getting Czechoslovak visas for the Chinese is exclusively my business. It seems that this trend is still on the increase. Lately, some snakeheads have agreed that I do this business for them. I may have to make 100 to 200 visas a month; all these people travel from Moscow to Prague, and then without visas on to France, Italy, or another Western country. By now, Prague has become the forwarding station, Budapest no longer is one. I have bribed all the people in charge of visas at the Hungarian and the Czechoslovak embassy [in Peking]. [. . .] You can make 50 to 60 dollars on each passport or visa. . . . Sometimes my aunt hinders me in the business, referring to moral grounds; at times, I think of getting rid of her. (Nyíri 1999: 39–40) Statistics of apprehensions of border violators by Hungarian border guards appear to bear out British intelligence reports that, while Prague apparently remains an important waystation,31 the Budapest route became more popular again at the end of the 1990s.32 In 1998, Hungary and, a year later, the Czech Republic began receiving asylum applications from Chinese citizens, believed to be illegal entrants. This time, Yugoslavia served as the entry point from which migrants crossed the border to Hungary, as Yugoslavia liberalized its visa regime for Chinese citizens in 1997, and it became relatively easy to obtain a Yugoslav visa in Peking.33 Here are some examples of migration along this route. Mr Yang went to Germany after spending a year in Hungary where he had accumulated a debt

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of 700,000 yuan (US $79,500), mostly due to gambling. He now works at a restaurant. He had gone to Hungary via Russia, where he got a Hungarian visa that he thinks had been issued in the Czech Republic.34 When the clashes between Yeltsin and the Duma broke out, Mr. You, from Fuqing, Fujian, moved from Moscow to Budapest and tried trading at the market for a week, but business was bad, so he moved to Italy via the Czech Republic with the help of some people, presumably ‘snakeheads’, whom he had met in Budapest. Mr. Luo and a relative, from Mingxi, Fujian, went to Moscow in 1992 and traded for half a year, but business was bad at the time, so they went to Italy on a tourist visa.35 Yugoslavia became the main gateway of brokered migration to Europe after 1998–9. Given that China proved a more reliable political ally of the Milosˇ evic´ regime than Russia and that Yugoslavia had few other places to expect investors from, Belgrade had little incentive to tighten its visa regime. This resulted, particularly in the period after the bombing of the PRC’s embassy in Belgrade by NATO that symbolically sealed the friendship between the two states, in first one and then two Yugoslav flights a week arriving full of Chinese passengers.36 According to the head of the Yugoslav statistics office, Srdan Bogusavljevic´, 50,000 Chinese arrived in Yugoslavia in 2000.37 Additionally, Yugoslavia attracted a number of Chinese entrepreneurs from other Eastern European countries (principally Hungary) in 1998–9, when, after the end of warfare, they expected an after-war business boom.38 According to one of them, going to Yugoslavia from China in 2000 cost only US $1,500, while a Hungarian visa required a payment of US $4,500 to a middleman.39 Serbian opposition press wrote that migration brokers in China advertised Yugoslavia on billboards and referred to reports about reconstruction and rapid economic development from state-controlled Yugoslav media (J. Garai 2000). The free movement between Yugoslavia and the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia on the one hand and loose controls on the Bosnian-Croatian border on the other, plus the long and jagged Croatian and Montenegrin coastline, have resulted in a brisk Chinese border traffic, reflected in a growing number of apprehensions (Radulovic 2000, Gall 2000, Kebo 2001). After the toppling of Milosˇ evic´ in 2000, the new government imposed a stricter visa regime on Chinese citizens, and in the summer of 2000, two Yugoslav soldiers were arrested in Montenegro trying to bring twenty-five Chinese to the coast (Balmer 2000, Associated Press 2000, Milutinovic´ 2005: 153). Additionally, the route via Hungary remained an important one; according to Hungarian border guard officers, most illegal Chinese border crossers apprehended since 1998 had come from Yugoslavia, and many had residence permits there.40 Both British investigators and Chinese in Hungary and Yugoslavia believe that most of the fifty-eight Chinese discovered dead in a container at Dover in 2000 had come via the two countries (Balmer 2000). After Dover, the European Union (EU) applied pressure to Yugoslavia and sent a team of ten police to Bosnia to help stop illegal migration. Yet a man

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interviewed in the Chinese media in 2005 had paid about 200,000 yuan, or US $22,000, for his journey from Fujian Province to Western Europe via Russia and the Czech Republic (Qiaobao 2005). A report by the International Labour Organization in the same year (Poisson and Gao 2005) quoted similar figures. This relatively modest increase (from US $15,000 in 1992) suggests that the efforts of European countries on what has come to be called ‘people smuggling’ have not had the desired effect.

Numbers There are no reliable data for the number of Chinese in any Eastern European country. In most countries, there are one or several relatively low official figures and a second set of much higher ‘estimates’ that officials frequently operate with, while researchers and the Chinese themselves prefer in-between figures. The discrepancy between the various figures is frequently used to prove the proliferation of illegal immigration, but in reality, its main reason is often the poor quality of data supplied by police, border guards, and other agencies and the lack of central data collecting for certain types of migrants altogether. An additional reason is the high mobility of Chinese migrants and, in Russia, the seasonal nature of migration, which causes the population to fluctuate substantially and necessitates the distinction of the settled Chinese population from shuttle traders who may spend only a few days in Russia. The highest variation in figures concerning the Chinese population is in the Russian Far East, where it has also aroused the greatest political passions, repeating early twentieth-century fears of a ‘Chinese expansion’ but also serving as an instrument of blackmail for local leaders eager for federal funding (see Trenin 1998: 7, Trenin and Vitkovskaia 1999). Numbers given by officials range literally from the thousands to the millions. Russian media has periodically claimed that, in the border zone, Chinese outnumber Russians by a factor of three to four (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 96). This claim is reproduced by Alexei Maslov (1998) in Lynn Pan’s Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. But in the late 1990s, studies by Vitkovskaia (2000) and Gelbras (1999: 11) concluded that these figures reflect, if anything, shuttle migrants rather than settled residents. Most researchers believe that the proportion of the Chinese population in both rural and urban areas of the Russian Far East is still far below that in the early twentieth century. According to Vitkovskaia (2000: 208), the effectively resident Chinese population in the Maritime and Khabarovsk provinces is no more than 20,000 each. Significantly, while the Maritime Province had 24,100 registered Chinese residents in 1999, it had 70,000 registered Chinese traders in 1998 (Trenin and Vitkovskaia 2000: 5–6). Assuming that these traders spent only half of their time in Russia, Alexseev concluded that only 35,000 would have been in the province at any given time. The head of the province’s Migration Service suggested, in an interview with Alexseev, a much lower figure, 5,000 (Alexseev 2002: 323). In the

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same year, 2002, the PRC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau put the total number of Chinese in the Russian Far East at 60–70,000 (Qiaoqing 2002b). Despite claims in the local and Moscow press, Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia in 1998 and Alexseev in 1999 (Alexseev 2002: 321) did not encounter any town or village where there were more Chinese than Russians, nor did any of the experts interviewed by them know of such situations. On the other hand, in 1992, before immigration controls were introduced, there had been a wave of renting out flats in border towns and villages to Chinese (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 96–7). Although the number of Chinese who have legally immigrated to Russia (i.e. received long-term residence permits, vidy na zhitel’stvo) is negligible compared to their total population (in Moscow, according to the chairman of the Moscow Chinese Association, there were only 70 Chinese households with such permits in 199941), Chinese have been consistently in the first place among legal immigrants in 1995, 1996, and 1997 (Nyíri 1999: 26). According to Chinese data, the number of Chinese traders of Moscow grew from under 10,000 in 1992 (including 5,000 ‘itinerant traders’, and 1,340 ‘students who also engaged in trade’) to 50,000 in 2002.42 In 1999, Vilya Gelbras estimated it at between 20,000 and 25,000 (Gelbras 1999). In the same year, adding up the populations in various hostels (so-called ‘Chinabuildings’, tangrenlou), where most Chinese in Moscow live, Mikhail Bagrov came up with the figure of 24,000, but he did not take into account all hostels (Bagrov 1999). In any case, as of the late 1990s, the presence of Chinese in Moscow remained highly seasonal, following the yearly cycle of retail business. At times when business was sluggish, many Chinese went back to China, to come again when business picked up. In a 1999 interview, the head of the Fujian tongxianghui (native-place organization) in Moscow estimated that the number of Fujianese in the city might vary in this way from 3,000 to 10,000 or even 20,000.43 In 2000, summing up studies to that date and two roundtables on the subject organized by the Moscow Carnegie Center (in 1998 and 1999), Vitkovskaia arrived at a total number of between 200,000 and 500,000 Chinese in Russia at any given time, but considered the lower estimate more realistic and stressed that most of these were ‘commuters’ rather than residents in a classical sense. In August 2000, 237,000 Chinese were legally registered in Russia (next to none as permanent residents) (Migration News 2000). But the PRC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, which usually errs on the higher side, estimated that the total number of Chinese residents in Russia in 2002 was between 120,000 and 125,000 (ibid.). In 1992, according to a Chinese source, between 6,000 and 7,000 Chinese were registered as living in the Ukraine, including 2,500 in Kyiv and in Odessa and up to 600 in Lviv (Huaren jingji nianjian 1994: 411, de Tinguy 1998: 309). Around 3,000 Chinese were counted in Belarus in the early 1990s, including 1,000 in Minsk, the capital (Huaren jingji nianjian 1994: 411). Several hundred Chinese traders turned up in Estonia, Latvia, and

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Lithuania in the early 1990s, where they lived principally in one of the three capitals (ibid.). Estimates of Hungary’s Chinese population by Chinese organization leaders have varied between 10,000 and 15,000 since 1994. If one assumes that at least 80 per cent of the Chinese in Hungary are engaged in trading, the Association of Chinese Merchants of the Komondor Kft.’s Trade Centre’s figure of 7,661 Chinese merchants is roughly consistent with this. Finally, the database of the Ministry of the Interior included 11,541 Chinese citizens in 2000 (Nyíri 1999: 32, Nyíri 2000). At the same time, some police and Border Guard spokesmen have spoken about as many as 30,000 or 100,000, and an official of the Chinese embassy estimated the presence of 20,000 Chinese illegally (Sárkány 2001). Such figures appear unrealistic in light of my fieldwork. In the Czech Republic, the Department of Integration of Foreigners estimated that there were around 9,000 Chinese in the country in 1998, including irregular migrants. By contrast, only 3,600 Chinese were registered in Ministry of the Interior statistics in 2000 as having residence permits for over 90 days.44 In 2002, the PRC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau put the number of Chinese in the Czech Republic between 5,000 and 6,000 (Qiaoqing 2002a). According to data from the ROC’s Yearbook of the Overseas Chinese Economy, the number of Chinese in Poland was 2,100 in 1999 (Huaqiao jingji nianjian 1993–9). The same source reported the number of Chinese in Romania as 20,000; officially, there were around 14,200 Chinese citizens registered as residents in April 1999, most of them holding one-year residence permits.45 A book by Harbin demographer Li Debin, published in the mid-1990s, claims that 5,000 Chinese had settled in Bulgaria (Li Debin n.d.). In 2002, 1,729 of them held permanent or long-term residence permits (Guentcheva et al. 2003: 93). All of these numbers reflect significant growth since the early 1990s, except for Hungary where they show a drop to between one-third and one-half of the 1991–2 population. This is consistent with the fact that much of the growth of the Chinese populations in Eastern European countries initially came from the dispersion of Chinese from Hungary. The case of Serbia is somewhat anomalous, a fact mainly connected to political reasons. According to Chinese accounts, Chinese immigration into the country leaped after NATO’s bombing, which brought trade with Western countries to a halt. In 2000, Serbian opposition media claimed that there were ‘more than a hundred thousand’ Chinese in the country. This claim was fuelled by opposition allegations that Milosˇevic´ signed a ‘secret agreement’ to accept Chinese immigrants, aiming to shift the ethnic composition of the more developed Serbian province, Vojvodina, in favour of docile Chinese who, granted citizenship, would vote for him. (The significant ethnic Hungarian minority in Vojvodina was believed to be oriented toward the opposition.) An opposition politician further claimed that 40,000 Chinese had already

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received Yugoslav citizenship (Garai 2000). The general tone of his comments was quite similar to those of populist politicians’ warnings of the dangers of immigration across Eastern Europe, and to the debate in Russia in particular. But the ties between Belgrade and Peking, the mystery surrounding Yugoslavia, and the discovery in June 2000 of the bodies of fifty-eight Chinese in a lorry in Dover that turned media attention to the issue made the allegations appear more credible. The Times, for example, wrote that ‘Milosˇevic´ has capitalized on NATO’s mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy . . . by importing tens of thousands of Chinese into the heart of Europe’ (Todorovic 2000). In 2000, Chinese in Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro) estimated their numbers from several thousand to 20,000 or 30,000, adding that they are not as numerous as in Hungary. This was consistent with data reported in Chinese government publications. Official data in 2005, on the other hand, counted only 6,000. The Blok 70 market in Belgrade, the largest hub of the Chinese in Serbia and Montenegro, has over 1,200 shops with three or four Chinese associated with each of them (Fujian Qiaobao 2005). This puts the number of Chinese traders close to Budapest’s largest market. On the other hand, during a visit in 2000, no Chinese were visible anywhere else in the city. In Subotica, Vojvodina’s second largest city, there are no more than fifty Chinese residents, according to local Chinese, and the situation in other Serbian cities apart from Belgrade is similar. Chinese in Subotica and Belgrade say that no Chinese has either Yugoslav citizenship or a longterm residence permit, and only very few have visas valid longer than one year.46 In March 2001, the Serbian government said that 2,034 Chinese had residence permits in Serbia (Xie 2000). The Kosˇtunica administration denied the extension of residence permits to many Chinese, resulting in the shrinking of Blok 70’s population (Shichang 2000). It is thus likely that Yugoslavia has a large transit traffic of Chinese, but few settle. It is possible that ‘snakeheads’ procure Yugoslav passports for their clients, but hardly on a large scale.47 According to a Chinese informant in Hungary who did business in Croatia in 1999–2000, there were only around 200 Chinese there, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a Croatian visa even for Chinese residents of other Eastern European countries.48 According to the Slovenian census of 2002, there were 350 Chinese in that country.

Demographics and residence patterns Because of the individualistic nature of entrepreneurial migration and the high share of urban and educated migrants, the sex ratio among Chinese migrants in Hungary is relatively balanced for such a recent migratory flow. In a sample of 135 market traders in Budapest, 45 per cent claimed to have upper secondary education and 39 per cent, higher education (City of Budapest

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1997). On a larger base (757 respondents), Gelbras (1999) found similar percentages, but his sample included students. In Hungary (May 2000), 35 per cent of Chinese citizens in the Interior Ministry database were women. In May 2000, 35 per cent of Chinese citizens who had requested permanent or long-term residence permits were women. In Russia (Gelbras, 1999, n = 757) 34 per cent were women. Many women migrate independently. While marital status does not necessarily reflect whether a woman came on her own, a large percentage, 37 per cent of the women in the Hungarian database were single or divorced. The only information on the age structure of migrants comes from Gelbras’s study (1999).49 In his sample, 75 per cent of the Chinese polled in Moscow and Russian Far Eastern cities were between 21 and 40 years of age, and 11 per cent were below 20 (Gelbras 1999: 14). Chinese children are still relatively few, as many parents prefer to leave them in China or send them back there. The second generation that does grow up in Eastern Europe is generally upwardly mobile and lost to the family business, and this corresponds to the wishes of the parents. Most Chinese parents wish to send their children to college in the USA or the UK, and so, if they can afford it, take them out of state schools at some stage and send them to so-called international schools where instruction is in English. A number of children have actually gone on to college in the West, and some have obtained degrees and corporate jobs there. Those parents who cannot afford the considerable expense of an international education often send their children back to China, hoping they will eventually be admitted to college there. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese in Hungary (82 per cent of long-term stay permit and immigrant residence permit applicants in the Interior Ministry database) reside in Budapest. Other larger groups are in centres of cross-border trade (Nyíregyháza near the Ukrainian and Romanian and Szeged near the Yugoslav and Romanian borders). Smaller towns and villages, particularly those close to main thoroughfares, also have a few Chinese residents. Informants in Russia, Romania, and Yugoslavia have suggested similar patterns – concentration in large cities with some presence in smaller towns – but there are no data available. According to the Czech Ministry of the Interior, the distribution of the Chinese in the Czech Republic is more even, with only 59 per cent residing in Prague in March 2000, down from 91 per cent in 1993, but still 72 per cent residing in four metropolitan areas (Moore and Tubilewicz 2001, Drbohlav and Cermakova 2002). Drbohlav and Cermakova note that Chinese are more highly concentrated in cities than migrants of any other nationality the Czech Republic. This is consistent with the economic role of Chinese as importers and wholesalers: most shops that sell Chinese-made goods across the country are run by Vietnamese, not Chinese. In countries other than Russia, most Chinese live in rented flats. In Budapest, the area near the Four Tigers Market has assumed a semblance of a Chinatown,

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but it serves only as a business area. Chinese residents are more numerous in the two districts around the market (districts VIII and X), but also in some other relatively central, middle-rent districts (XIV, XI). Some Chinese families settle in housing estate buildings in which there are already Chinese residents, but many others live scattered across the city. Those who own or work at shops or restaurants often live in the building in which the business is located. The conditions of the accommodation that I have visited range from shared flats without bathrooms in the Xth district to villas in the expensive residential areas of Buda. In Russia, many Chinese reside in a concentrated fashion in hotels, hostels or other buildings of which they occupy either the whole or certain floors. These buildings are rented by Chinese entrepreneurs and are then let to Chinese tenants, for whom the rooms also serve to conduct business. In Gelbras’s sample, 50 per cent of respondents in Moscow were staying in such lodgings or in student dormitories (these are often let to non-students), while only 20 per cent stayed in owned or rented flats. By contrast, around 40 per cent of respondents in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk were staying in flats (Gelbras 1999: 15). The institution of ‘Chinese hostels’, manned by security guards, probably emerged in the early 1990s as a means by which Chinese protected themselves from robbers and police raids. According to my observations, concurred by Bagrov, a typical hostel houses several hundred to 3,000 Chinese residents, with five residents or so per room (Bagrov 1999). Conditions in these are poor, with shared bathrooms. The hotels offer better facilities. Rents, according to Gelbras’s investigation, were between US $6–12 a month for a room in 1999 (Gelbras 1999: 22). Given the large number of Chinese residing in such hostels or hotels, it is not surprising that over half of Gelbras’s respondents said they resided alone, without their spouses or families (Gelbras 1999: 14). There are no comparable data for other countries, but it appears that most Chinese in Hungary live with spouses or partners, suggesting a somewhat more stable residential situation than in Russia.

Gender roles The proportion of women is much larger than in previous waves of migration from China, where women typically followed men after the men had established a stable livelihood. In Hungary (May 2000), 35 per cent of Chinese citizens in the Interior Ministry database were women. Women’s motives for migration are very diverse and cannot be forced into gender-related categories. Most come with male partners or follow them after a few years. This classical chain-migration scenario is a tool to minimize risk, in that, before a reliable livelihood is created in the new place, the woman maintains a basic business or state job with the housing benefits to fall back onto. In rare cases, women stay behind because they are in a job

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or business with promising mobility prospects for the future. But a significant number of women migrate on their own. Others separated from their partners after migrating. For many, leaving the country was an escape from family discipline, particularly bad marriages. In other cases, the migration of the woman was part of a family migration strategy where there was no suitable male candidate for a migration opportunity, or where a couple decided that the woman’s migration was less risky to the family’s future than the man’s. The occupations of migrant women largely mirror the occupations of Chinese migrants in general: they are importers, wholesalers or retailers of Chinese garments and shoes. Female and male migrants’ education levels and occupations before leaving China are also very similar. Single female migrants, in particular, often have a prehistory of government employment, entrepreneurship, and internal migration. This largely differentiates this migration from internal migration in China as well as earlier international migration. Male – female couples share the operation of the imports, wholesale, and retail businesses that comprise the Four Tigers market and Chinese stores, and in which the vast majority of Chinese in Hungary are occupied, with little gender separation in tasks. At larger companies, women can be responsible for finance, paperwork, and personnel, while the husband travels and negotiates with customers and suppliers. Women may act as the local managers of the business in Hungary while the male partner either stays in China or goes back there to take care of manufacturing or sourcing and shipping. In a variation, the family moves on from Hungary to a Western destination seen as having a better living environment for the family but worse business opportunities. While children stay at the destination, both spouses remain mobile and split responsibilities in managing the business. In a survey of 500 Chinese women in Europe, 65 per cent of respondents in Eastern Europe respondents said that their position in the family was completely or largely equal to men’s, and only two per cent said it was largely or completely unequal. By contrast, in Western Europe, 46 per cent said it was completely or largely equal, and 35 per cent said it was largely or completely unequal (Yang and Wang, 1998).

Social stratification The most important, albeit highly permeable and fuzzy, divide among the Chinese in Hungary is between less-educated market peddlers (mostly from Fujian, Zhejiang, or Northeast China) and the better-educated northern wholesalers, some of whom own transnational businesses, are engaged in real estate development, and so on. This difference plays a role in determining friendship networks but has no significant impact or residential patterns or business networks, let alone splitting the Chinese into different communities. Those at the upper end of this divide often gloss it as being a matter

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of southerners versus northerners or of rural versus urban people, with the latter imputed higher status. In reality, although there is a correlation between place of origin and social position, there are many examples of individual entrepreneurial success starting from a rural southern background. The transition between market peddler and transnational entrepreneur is also a gradual one, and most of the latter were themselves peddlers in the recent past.

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6

Employment and the ethnic economy

As mentioned earlier in this book, the beginnings of entrepreneurial migration to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s were accompanied by press reports in China that conveyed something of the amused contempt of European conquistadores finding that they could trade glass beads for gold nuggets. The idea that any old thing could be sold to Eastern European consumers, long deprived of the blessings of the market, sent many hopeful entrepreneurs abroad. Those mythical times didn’t last long: markets became more mature, consumers more picky, regulations more strict, and Chinese officials began worrying about the negative impact on the image of Chinese products.1 Nonetheless, Eastern Europe remained, if not a dumping ground, but still a lucrative enough market for Chinese entrepreneurs to be the subject of enthusiastic reporting into the mid-1990s. The Chinese in Hungary, currently numbering over a thousand [. . .] have been dazzlingly successful in their business; altogether they run over a thousand companies and 48 restaurants; more than 80 per cent of them have made it to bosses; those with yearly incomes between $100 and 200 thousand are legion; over a dozen people have incomes of over $2 million; the yearly volume of international trade that passes through their hands exceeds $100 million. (Liu Xianlin 1994, quoted in Li Minghuan 1995: 356) The fixed assets of each of [the Hungarian Chinese Federation of Trade and Industry’s] members are worth more than $1 million, and the majority’s are worth over $10 million. (Renmin Ribao 1996b) [. . .] From peddling to opening their own stores; from carrying wares on their backs or on pushcarts to hauling them in their own vans; from using public telephones; from beying employed to employing others . . . No other country made it possible for the Chinese to achieve such brilliant success so quickly starting from such a low point. (Yu Jun 1994)

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia The outstanding accomplishments of these young people after six-seven years of struggle are already like the achievements of old European overseas Chinese after fifty years. (Zhang Zhongbin 1997)

Such rags-to-riches success stories about, and often by, Chinese in Eastern Europe – particularly in Hungary, described in the title of the first article quoted as ‘An ideal goldmine for the Chinese’ – received wide circulation in the mid-1990s in the Chinese-language press both in and outside China, and the clout they created helped in getting business contacts. They also contrasted the successful ‘new migrants’ with the struggling ‘old overseas Chinese’. That ‘Chinese in Eastern Europe are their own bosses’ is a phrase often used by Chinese migrants in the region, talking about why they prefer to stay here. Indeed, the Chinese in Eastern Europe are overwhelmingly small entrepreneurs running their own businesses. Those employed in such companies are outnumbered by those owning, co-owning or managing them, and usually such employment is only temporary, before or between starting an enterprise of their own, or a last resort when their own business has fallen on hard times. (In 1995, 900 Chinese held work permits in Hungary; in 2004, 848.2) This situation contrasts starkly with Western Europe, where most new Chinese migrants are wage workers, and reminds one of Chinese entrepreneurial migration to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the early twentieth century, or of current migration from China to some Central and South American countries.

Contract workers in the Russian Far East The ‘bosses’ of Eastern Europe would find it hard to identify with the problems faced by Chinese workers in the Russian Far East and Siberia. Just as they were in the early twentieth century, Chinese are in demand here as cheap, industrious, docile, and sober workers in construction and agriculture.3 Both Russian and Chinese authors credit Chinese workers with making the agriculture of the Maritime Province self-sufficient (Heilongjiang Ribao 1992). ‘We had never had locally grown watermelons’ – says a student from Far Eastern State University in Vladivostok – ‘before the Chinese came’.4 A Khabarovsk-based scholar writes that Vegetable plots planted by Chinese differ strikingly from the majority of [farms]. They are always in exemplary order [. . .] There are practically no weeds in the field [. . .] The Chinese [. . .] can ‘squeeze’ the maximum out of the crop [. . .] They do not simply satisfy the vegetable needs of the population, but create a surplus. (Shkurkin 2002: 90)

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Not surprising if, as Shkurkin writes, even some farms in villages with nearly 100 per cent unemployment hire Chinese workers. In any case, there is no competition, as the wages are too low to convince locals to abandon unemployment benefits, which they supplement with growing vegetables for their own consumption (Shkurkin 2002: 90–1). Chinese workers are legally guaranteed a wage higher than the Russian minimum wage, but in 1993, their average wage was US $7 a month, which is very low even by Chinese standards (de Tinguy 1998: 307). Most worked on contracts no longer than ten months. During this period, they are not allowed to go home to see their families. They work practically the whole light day, without holidays, and earn 1.5 to 2 times less than similarly qualified Russians. They are provided with basic accommodation – perhaps the word ‘shelter’ would be more appropriate – but no food. Some foremen do not release workers’ wages until departure or release only very small amounts (e.g. US $18 a month in one construction company in Vladivostok in 1996), so that workers are compelled to hire themselves out to extra work, mostly at night. ‘The living conditions of the Chinese employed in agriculture,’ Shkurkin writes, ‘are extremely far’ from those of local workers (Shkurkin 2002: 89). In 1997, Ming Pao reported about a riot by fourteen Chinese construction workers in Nakhodka, Vladivostok’s port. The workers’ passports were taken away upon arrival, and they were told that they could only get their wages from China. They demanded that their passports be returned to them so they could make some money on the side, but were refused (Ming Pao 1997). In 1998, a court in the Western Siberian city of Chelyabinsk ordered a local company to pay the Guanghan City Agricultural, Industrial and Trade General Company in Sichuan around US $30,000 in wages for 220 agricultural workers who had worked on nine vegetable farms. The company had retained part of the agreed wages, and to drive the protesting workers back to China, it had cut off electricity and water. But once back in China, the workers had filed a lawsuit through a local law firm (Ming Pao 1997). In 2005, Wen Wei Po reported, without elaborating, on a bloody standoff between police and Chinese workers in Irkutsk. Opposition to Chinese workers by Russian organized labour has so far been low, but, according to Diatlov, it is on the increase. The director of a mine in the Kemerovo Province of Western Siberia reportedly told striking miners: ‘You keep making a fuss, I’ll fire you all and hire Chinese’ (Diatlov 1999: 89). According to Shkurkin, an increasing number of Chinese rent land plots on which they grow mainly vegetables, as well as watermelons, potatoes, and soybeans. The tenancy agreement includes use of agricultural machinery, transport, and fuel, and the rent is paid in crop. Chinese farms, according to one estimate, already account for half of the vegetables sold, and they have driven down prices (Shkurkin 2002: 90).

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‘An ideal goldmine for the Chinese’ Contract workers account for a small fraction of migrants, and even they often engage in entrepreneurial activities concurrently or upon completion of their contract. The incentives for entrepreneurship among Chinese migrants go beyond economic rationality. The emphasis on ‘success’ in today’s China means not only that people seek opportunities to migrate in order to make more money (Li Minghuan 1999, Pieke 1991) but also, conversely, that migrants perceive entrepreneurship as practically an imperative. In the China of the 1990s, entrepreneurship was valorized as the necessary route to ‘success’ and sharply contrasted to salaried employment, which was devalued. (This has changed again in the 2000s when both private-sector and state employment became once again more attractive with the emergence of a new, well-paid young professional class). Having left China, in the migrants’ view, provides them with an opportunity to ‘succeed’ that they must not squander. In the prevalent idiom, ‘success’ for them means two things: making money and obtaining a residence title abroad that provides for future mobility. The pressure is all the greater because the Chinese press and popular literature constructs a glamorous figure of the ‘new migrant’ as entrepreneur (Nyíri 2001). Furthermore, Eastern European economies, unlike Western ones, do not have jobs accessible to the Chinese that would permit the accumulation of any savings, while becoming an entrepreneur is relatively easy and does not require a very large investment. Despite differences between the Far Eastern regions of Russia and Eastern Europe, trends in the development of Chinese enterprises have been similar. The process of transition from shuttle trade to more sedentary, sophisticated and specialized forms has taken place across the region, although in the Far East, where the cost of shuttling in terms of time, money, and risk is lower, it has taken longer and has affected only part of the traders. Indeed, this process has probably been typical for the whole of Eastern Europe, as the freefor-all of the early 1990s gave way to more mature business structures. In a study of shuttle traders in Russia, Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin suggest that The gradual concentration of resources, the appearance of companies dealing with large-scale shipping, purchasing, [and] domestic trade resulted in most individual entrepreneurs being squeezed out of foreign trade . . . [I]ndividuals are reorienting themselves to the domestic market . . . [but] international shuttle migration continues in its traditional form in border regions . . . (Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 36–7) Yet even in Russia, the actual shuttle traders are replaced, as those who have made enough money and gained experience move up the trade chain, entrusting newcomers to the business or hired workers with the actual process of shuttling

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while they decide what merchandise to purchase and are in charge of selling it. Indeed, Chinese traders doing business in the Russian Far East are increasingly reported to hire Russians to carry the merchandise across the border (Berestovoi 1999: 55). Conversely, Russian shuttle traders in China increasingly deal with stable partners in Russia, with whom they agree on the details of the transaction before setting out, thus reducing actual physical movement. A multi-tiered manufacturing industry caters specifically to the needs of Russian shuttle traders (Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 25–6). Outside the Far Eastern regions, the prevalence of shuttle trade – i.e. each trader actually going back to China for the next party of goods and carrying it as luggage – did not continue for long. After the first few trips, and often right after the first arrival in a country, the trader obtained legal resident status by registering a company or becoming a partner or employee in one of the existing Chinese companies. He or she then proceeded to find a place for steady trading and build up a business and arranged for a relative or friend to come with the next party of merchandise, now put together with a better knowledge of local demand. How trading (zuo huo) thus became tied to migration and migration brokerage (zuo ren) is described earlier in this book. The case of Zhao, a young female college teacher who set out in Budapest by train from Kunming in 1991 with US $200 and a cargo of 2,000 peacock feathers, exemplifies the speed with which shuttle traders moved up the ladder of the ethnic economy.5 The day after her arrival she was selling the feathers in an underground station. At a time when US $100 was enough to pay a month’s rent, the feathers fetched US $1 each, and within a few days Zhao moved to one of the Budapest markets and rented a house. In three months, she was running a shop in central Budapest with a turnover of US $7,000 a month and employing a Hungarian sales clerk.6 Like Zhao, 64 per cent of respondents in Moscow in Gelbras’s study said they had financed their move to Russia through their own savings or family means. In the early 1990s, as business boomed, it became impractical and increasingly impossible to use people to transport an increasing volume of goods. The costs of travel rose, its safety declined, and more importantly, barriers to migration sprung up rapidly across the region. Chinese entrepreneurs began shipping goods to Eastern Europe in containers, using large sea, rail or air shipping companies. Chinese importers became such important clients to some of these companies that Maersk, for example, hired several Chinese employees for their Budapest office. A Chinese almanac of Budapest published in 1996 lists twenty-five (non-Chinese) shipping companies (Bao and Ujlaky 1996: 134–46). Merchandise for most of Eastern Europe outside of the former Soviet Union was generally shipped to Hamburg, then transferred to the destination on lorries. In the first half of the 1990s, a group of Chinese entrepreneurs in Hungary promoted the Slovenian port of Koper as an alternative and opened an office there, but continuing wars in the Balkans prevented this route from becoming popular.

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In early 1992, 1,400 Chinese-owned businesses were registered in Hungary, with a total investment capital of US $20 million. One-third of these were registered as companies with limited liability (kft.), the rest being sole proprietorships (bt.); only five had registered capitals over US $200,000, while most had capitals under US $25,000. The minimal investment formally required to register a company at the time was US $8,000, which could circulate from account to account and be used in several registrations (Nyíri 1999: 50). Those who could not raise such money alone or with their friends often borrowed money in China or looked for investment partners there. Thanks to credit arrangements, however, the largest companies generated yearly sales of between US $5–30 million (Nyíri 1996: 134). Ten years later, according to the Hungarian Ministry of the Economy, the number of Chinese-owned businesses had risen to around 10,000 Chineseowned businesses, most of them kft. This would mean that nearly every Chinese in Hungary had his or her own company. The total investment capital of these businesses, according to the ministry, was US $120 million, yielding a very small average sum, US $1,200, for each. The number of Chinese businesses registered in Romania reached 2,055 in 1995. According to Shkurkin, ‘in every large or midsize city of Siberia and the Far East, Chinese small enterprises number tens or hundreds’. Several thousand are joint ventures, but, in the Far East, only five hundred are fully Chineseowned, with an average investment capital of US $10,000. In 1998, two hundred of these were registered in Vladivostok. The share of these Chinese companies in Russian-Chinese trade is, however, ‘imperceptible’. Presumably, in the Far East, unregistered shuttle traders conduct most of the trade (Shkurkin 2002: 93). Interestingly, only 503 Chinese-operated companies were registered in Moscow in 1997, suggesting that having a company was not a necessary condition for Chinese traders to remain in the city, and perhaps also reflecting barriers in front of registering a business. Clearly, many of the Chinese companies in Central Eastern Europe are inactive. Many never functioned and were only used as a vehicle of immigration, issuing invitations to nominal ‘managers’ and ‘employees’. Others were abandoned when their owners, encountering immigration or tax problems, abandoned them, choosing to register another with a new name. But this does not detract from the fact that the overwhelming majority of Chinese are effectively, individually or jointly, in charge of a business – even if it consists only of a market stall.

Chinese markets Shuttle traders first sold their wares off the train, at stations and in the street (Williamson 1997, Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 16). Very soon, however, they made their way to the open-air consumer-goods markets. Zheng, a Fujianese former factory clerk, left China in 1991:

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We bought leather jackets in Shanghai; we couldn’t carry very much, only forty kilograms each. We first went to Urumqi and on to Kazakhstan, but the jackets weren’t selling well. [. . .] My cousin told us that Moscow was good, so [we] went there in November 1991. Business was very good in Moscow. We went to various small open-air markets, like the ones near VDNKh and Bibirevo metro stations. At these places you didn’t have to pay. First I couldn’t bring many things to sell at once, then I saw that others were using carts, so I got one too. Later I bought a stall at the Lenin Sports Complex. After I sold everything I had, I got to know Pekinese who had imported goods and were selling them out of their dormitory room. It was a Moscow University dormitory that had been rented by Chinese, and only Chinese stayed in it. [. . .] I got on very well with several bosses. At first I bought goods from them for cash; later they gave me goods on consignment first and I paid after I sold them. After three years, however, Zheng decided to move on: ‘The money was good, US $3,000 to 4,000 a month. But there was no point to stay there as you couldn’t take the money out [of Russia]. It was also quite expensive for my relatives to go to Peking every time’ to repatriate the profits. So she decided to move to Hungary. The number of Chinese at the markets grew so rapidly that in a few years, local entrepreneurs began setting up new markets or refurbishing old ones specifically for Chinese traders. The new ‘Chinese markets’, such as Cherkizovo in Moscow, Europa in Bucharest, Blok 70 in Belgrade, Four Tigers in Budapest, Shanghai in Irkutsk, or the market in Ussuriisk, became important economic hubs, many with thousands of traders and tens of thousands of visitors daily. The layout and look of these markets is fairly standard and has become a little-publicized but important feature of Eastern European landscape. They consist of long rows of stalls or containers, usually in the open but sometimes enclosed in hangar-like halls of former factory buildings or warehouses. ‘Chinese markets’ also sprung up in smaller towns, reaching thirty in Hungary by 1995 (Nagy 1995). In Poland and the Czech Republic, however, the markets became known as ‘Vietnamese markets’ as most of the traders are Vietnamese, while the Chinese still play the role of importers and distributors (see Grzymala-Kazlowska 2002). In Slovakia, there has apparently been a shift from Vietnamese to Chinese domination of these markets (Williams and Balázˇ 2005). The first of the following two views of the Four Tigers is by a Chinese author writing in a Chinese newspaper in Hungary; the second from a report about a raid on the market in the official magazine of the Hungarian border guard: Before six o’clock every morning, some stallkeepers have already arrived and opened their stalls. On a few square meters, the stallkeepers can

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Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia display dozens of kinds of merchandise . . . a feast for the eyes, very attractive! At seven, the market comes alive with the noise of pots and bowls at the fast-food stalls, the calls of Arab dollar-changers, the bargaining and haggling of sellers and buyers, the cries of Romanian workers pushing carts, seething with life and thriving with activity. Shoppers come from all directions: buyers from Budapest supermarkets and owners of small neighbourhood shops along with traders visiting from Croatia, Yugoslavia, even Russia. In a broken Hungarian, they bargain and haggle with the Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabs and Hungarians at the market. If they cannot make themselves understood they swiftly pull out a calculator and show the numbers to their interlocutor. After the deal is done they joke with each other, leaving a feeling that the world is one big family. (Yang 2001) As we check the industrious, diligent persons labouring in the containers, an odour akin to the stench of sewage hits our noses. The stench is emitted by the heat of the frying-stalls along the fast-food row nearby, and only its view is more dreadful than its smell. Rubbish; filth; ramshackle pavilions; inferior and disgusting dishes. As we enter the market, the rubbish is still there; my feet chomp wet pieces of cardboard. The crowd doesn’t let you move. Most of the wares are low-quality, but because of the prices many still shop here. At one of the pavilions, border guards catch a trader. His papers are all right, but he is selling fake goods. He cannot prove their origin, so we have to cordon off the space around the pavilion. The many fakes are put in sacks, and while I wait I admire the largest knickers in the world. They are size XXXXL and need three people to stretch them. (Vezda 2001)

‘Chinese markets’ in the region frequently arouse such pioneer romanticism in Chinese accounts and such self-righteous condemnation in the local press, which together give some idea of the places. Four Tigers, with an area of 3.5 hectares, has around 1,000 Chinese-owned stalls and a few hundred owned by Vietnamese, Turks, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Afghans, and others. In 1997, the reported profit of the market itself – i.e. not that of the traders – was over US $1 million (Vitéz 2002). In addition to the original market, set up in 1994, Hungarian entrepreneurs have rented former factory buildings across the road from the market and converted them to additional space for market stalls. Blok 70 in Belgrade had around 200 shops with three or four Chinese associated with each of them at the end of 2000.7 The Shanghai market in Irkutsk was set up in 1993, when the city government allocated a marketplace to five or six hundred Chinese traders. The provincial statistics directorate estimated that their monthly profit equaled the total monthly sales volume of all registered trade

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companies in the city centre (Diatlov 1999a). The Ussuriisk market, which has its own power station, functions around the clock, with some eight hundred vendors during the daytime (Trenin and Vitkovskaia 1999: 7). In 1998, its director estimated that the market generated ten to eleven per cent of the city’s revenue, around US US $1 million dollars (Alexseev 2002: 338). Before the 1998 Russian currency crisis, one-quarter of the stalls at the giant market that operate on the grounds of the former Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy in Moscow was leased to Chinese. This site was known as ‘Shenzhenguan’, or Shenzhen Pavilion, in Chinese. In 1996, the centre of Chinese trade moved to the Cherkizovo market, where Chinese were said to account for 300 of the 1,000 stalls. These stalls were leased and managed by a single Chinese-owned company, Taiyang (Liang 1999b). Chinese traders in Moscow are present at several large markets but do not constitute a majority anywhere. In 1994, Moscow’s mayor proposed the construction of a ‘Chinese street’ to the PRC government, but this did not take place. Although the first traders travelled with goods more or less randomly chosen, they quickly started to choose certain types of merchandise that became standard: low-price clothes and shoes. In Central Eastern Europe, Chinese markets became associated with chiefly with all items of casual clothing and footwear: T-shirts; track suits; men’s underwear; socks; cotton and mixed shirts; summer dresses; cotton and synthetic jackets and coats (including down winter jackets); knitted tops and jumpers; ski overalls; pyjamas; silk shirts; trainers and plastic slippers. Later, the range expanded to electric appliances, small hardware (such as locks) and household textiles (such as towels and blankets). The structure of imports in European Russia is somewhat more upmarket, with leather jackets having an important share. A Chinese businessman told me that his company alone sold three million pairs of men’s underwear on the Hungarian market in 1994 (Nyíri 1996: 130). According to a 1997 survey by Sik, 47 per cent of the traders at consumer goods markets of Hungarian cities with populations over 10,000 were Chinese (Nyíri 1999: 50). According to a 2002 survey by the market research agency GFK, markets and street vendors accounted for 21 and 22 per cent respectively of purchases of shoes and clothes by consumers, and goods sold there come overwhelmingly from Chinese importers (Népszabadság 2002). A 2001 survey by another agency, Medián, gave an even higher figure for the share of markets, 39 per cent, in purchases of clothes (Heti Világgazdaság, 31 March 2001, p. 65). In Russia, 80 per cent of a sample of 1086 locals said they have purchased goods from Chinese, although only ten per cent said they had done so frequently (Gelbras 2001: 139). An article in a newspaper distributed by the homeless in Hungary described the ‘Chinese market’ as ‘a place of strange reputation, where although most of us appear, we immediately change direction if we see an acquaintance, just like at a nudist beach, because – let’s admit it! – it would be embarrassing to reveal to them the source of our clothes and our shopping habits’ (Simon 2002).

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Chinese consumer goods are popular mainly because they are cheap, due not only to low manufacturing costs but also to the underpayment of customs duties. Prices at the markets are one-half or one-third to prices for comparable (or the same) goods in the cheapest shops. Thus, a T-shirt in 2002 retailed for the equivalent of between US US $2–4, track suits started at US $7, and trainers at US $10. Wholesale prices are significantly lower, with T-shirts starting at under US $1. Another advantage is the flexibility of the entire business chain. If a customer asks a Chinese merchant – whether a stallkeeper or a rural shopkeeper – for a particular item not currently available, he or she will make an effort to obtain it. Market peddlers engage not only in retail but also wholesale. Their profits rely primarily on establishing long-term business relationships with shopkeepers and distributors, who come to the market regularly to stock up not only from the same country but also, in Central Eastern Europe, from neighbouring countries. It was to shuttle traders from Yugoslavia, the Ukraine, and Romania that the oldest and largest market of the region, the Four Tigers market in Budapest, owed its boom in the early 1990s. In the words of a prominent Chinese businessman in Hungary, ‘the markets of the neighbouring countries were built onto the axis of the Hungarian market’ (Nyíri 1999: 51). Thirty to forty buses with foreign license plates, carrying some 2,000– 5,000 traders, would park next to the market, and the market column of the weekly Ouzhou Daobao would publish news items such as: ‘Armenian businessmen have been buying Turkish-made suits from Vietnamese traders, saying they intended to sell them in Yugoslavia’ (Nyíri 1999: 52). In addition to individual traders, importers and distributors are also based at the markets, and it is here that shipments from China arrive, even of those goods that are not sold at market stalls. The markets thus function as commodity exchanges, at which not only actual parties of goods but also information changes hands. Finally, the markets are centres of Chinese social life, with fast-food outlets, hairdressers’ parlours, casinos, karaoke bars and travel agencies grouped around them. Some peddlers and most larger businesses employ local or migrant workers, mostly women (Gelbras 1999: 22). Migrants from Romania and Yugoslavia in Hungary, and from the Ukraine and Belarus in Russia are more willing than locals to work in these low-paid and unstable jobs. Gelbras noted that employees interviewed generally ‘spoke respectfully’ of their employers (ibid.). Two Chinese traders I interviewed at the Szeged market in 2000 employed young Gypsy women from Romania and paid them somewhat less than the official minimum monthly wage of around US $120, but they paid no social security and the employees paid no income tax. The relationship between employers and employees appeared relaxed and friendly.

Growth and consolidation of the ethnic economy Successful peddlers gradually became distributors, buying larger parties of imported goods for resale (bao huo), and some did well enough to begin

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importing goods themselves (fa huo). Merchandise to be imported to Central Eastern Europe is usually made to order in small factories and workshops in Zhejiang, Fujian (particularly shoes), or Guangdong, the latter being associated with somewhat more expensive, higher-quality products. Merchandise for Russia is sold also in Yabao lu, a Peking street full of Russian-language shop signs that is the destination of many Russian shuttle traders, mostly by traders from Zhejiang and Fujian (cf. Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin 2001: 26–7). Some migrants had sufficient capital to start directly as importers. Most of these were employees of state-owned foreign trade, shipping, or other companies in China who left for Eastern Europe with the approval of their enterprises to scout for business opportunities and represent the company. For their employers this was a means of reducing their labour costs as well as of finding new markets. In most cases, such employees stopped drawing salaries and received commission on the sales instead. Although in most cases they registered the local company as a private enterprise rather than a branch of the company in China, some of the Chinese publications refer to them as ‘branches’ of the state enterprise. Many of their founders travelled on service passports and continued to be counted as employees of their mother companies for about two years, after which they were ‘freed’ and the relationship gradually became looser. Most people never returned to their mother company, but continued to be able to enjoy its backing and help as well as some benefits of belonging to it during visits to China.8 Such migrants started their business with great advantages not only because they had preferential access to merchandise in China but also because stateowned enterprises, more than others, were able to offer them start-up capital and favourable credit conditions, in many cases in return for kickbacks to company managers (Nyíri 1999: 52–4, Moore and Tubilewicz 2001: 618–19). A businessman who headed Hualu, one of the largest Chinese enterprises in Hungary in the early 1990s admitted that The main source of capital for Chinese companies in Hungary is support from various foreign trade [. . .] companies at home; without it, Chinese in Hungary wouldn’t have reached the current standards even in ten years. . . . Chinese in Hungary get their merchandise mostly on consignment. (Nyíri 1999: 55) In the registered capital of Hualu itself, US $780,000, the Zhejiang Province Import-Export Corporation owned a 40 per cent stake. In January 1995, Hualu had fifty-two Hungarian and twenty-six Chinese employees (Nyíri 1996: 132). In Gelbras’s study, 14 per cent of respondents said that their move to Russia had been financed by a state enterprise, and nine per cent said it had been financed by a private company. These percentages are higher if the 30 per cent of respondents who said they were not engaged in entrepreneurship are not included in the total (Gelbras 1999: 18–19). Companies’ interest in such arrangements had to do with the fact that, for managers of state-owned

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companies, poorly controlled transfer of capital abroad through (former) employees offered opportunities for graft. They found ways to repatriate profits as private gains but write off losses to the company (Nyíri 1999: 53). Overseas companies informally affiliated with businesses in China could serve as channels for reinvesting money transferred to them in China in the guise of joint ventures, securing not only more favourable tax treatment but also the possibility to ‘repatriate’ profits, taking them out of China. According to Chinese statistics, regarded by Chinese entrepreneurs as realistic, Chinese imports to Hungary rose from US $64 million in 1992 to 389 million in 1994 (Nyíri 1999: 51). Hungarian statistics register only US $99 million for 1994, and Chinese entrepreneurs’ explanation for the discrepancy is that most of the merchandise does not enter Hungarian customs but is re-exported. Indeed, Yu Wenlong, a former executive vice-president of the Hungarian Chinese Chamber of Commerce, claimed that only 28 per cent of the 1994 imports ended up in Hungary (Nyíri 1999: 51). (An alternative explanation for the discrepancy would be the steep under-reporting of the value of merchandise at Hungarian customs.) Nonetheless, the retail market of Chinese consumer goods in Hungary was, according to one estimate, worth US $300 million in 1997 (Karacs 1997). According to Hungarian Ministry of Trade figures, in 1994, 79 per cent of Chinese imports were consumer goods, much of them presumably imported by Chinese companies. In that year, according to customs officials, 60 to 100 large containers, or up to 2,000 tonnes, of Chinese goods arrived at the Four Tigers market daily (Nagy 1995). Hong Yafeng, Chairman of the Eiwa Entrepreneurs Association, estimated that imports in 1998 exceeded 10,000 containers.9 According to the Scientific Association of the Tanning, Shoe, and Leather Processing Industry, a Hungarian lobby group, shoe imports from China and Hong Kong (in reality, all of these are made in mainland China) in 2000 reached nearly 30 million pairs, or three-quarters of all shoe imports (Demeter 2002). Bagrov (1999) claims that in the beginning of 1999, shuttle traders and Chinese companies accounted for 70 per cent of Russian imports from China, despite a large number of Russian companies in that business; however, he provides no substantiation for his estimate. Understandably, the role of Chinese imports has been greatest in the Russian Far East, where ‘Chinese consumer goods and foodstuffs have become the basic staple of life for the majority’ (Shkurkin 2002: 74). By 1999, the share of imported goods has grown to as much as 60 per cent in some localities of the Russian Far East, and in some basic foodstuffs such as vegetables, fruit, meat products, and sugar, it has reached 70 per cent; most of these imports come from China (Shkurkin 2002: 92). According to Russian officials, there is large-scale smuggling of vodka and foodstuffs across the border, estimated at 200,000 litres per month, which would equal 20 per cent of the total demand in the Khabarovsk and Maritime provinces (Filonov 1999). Revenues from smuggling in the Maritime Province in 1998–9 are estimated at US $6 million (Alexseev 2002: 326). But Wishnick points out that Chinese

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imports to Amur and Khabarovsk provinces have been decreasing since 1994, and to the Maritime Province since 1998, so that the Russian Far East now has a large trade surplus with China. Apart from protectionist measures by the provincial administrations, the fact that local customers’ disposable incomes were rising and they were demanding better-quality goods also contributed to the drop (Wishnick 2002: 295–6, 302). An increasing number of Chinese in the Russian Far East is turning to the more lucrative exporting of raw materials from Russia to China. One Chinese entrepreneur in Chita is reported to have progressed from shuttle trader to owner of sixteen sawmills and a large vegetable farm with over 500 employees and a capital of 100 million yuan (US $1.1 million) (Shichang 2004b). Another entrepreneur, who according to a Chinese report was given a solemn funeral by the city when he died, had invested 100 million yuan in Khabarovsk and acquired, among other assets, a 300,000-hectare farm (Wu and Lin 2002).

Transnational businesses The quality and design of merchandise gradually became more sophisticated. If initial shipments to Eastern Europe consisted of old inventory, importers soon began ordering parties of merchandise directly from factories specifically for their markets, some taking back samples of styles picked up in local stores. Owners of large imports businesses visit international trade fairs and have their suppliers in China speedily produce trainers or track suits according to the latest fashion. Although the overwhelming majority have kept overhead costs to a minimum by having no advertising, some of the largest businesses have been able to develop a certain brand recognition and have advertised on billboards, in newspapers, and through sponsorship of sports events. In Hungary, these include Wink and Sandic sports shoes, clothing and accessories, which have also contracted both Chinese- and local-owned shops to display the brand logo and, in return, receive a commission on sales. According to the Wink website (www.wink.hu), over 250 shops sell the brand in Hungary. Sandic advertised on Budapest buses using the selling line ‘Sandic: Fashion Within Reach – Accessible to Everyone’. Some companies have expanded their business to other Eastern European countries, both by opening their own branches and by finding Chinese distributors there. Thus, the manufacturer of Wink has branches in Serbia and Bosnia, and the brand, introduced in 1993, is also sold in Montenegro, Croatia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Poland. In 1999, according to the company, it sold two million pairs of footwear, and in its peak year had twenty-seven employees in Budapest and nineteen in Belgrade, most of them local except for family members of the company’s founder who are in management roles. As in Hungary, Wink has sponsored marathons and basketball games in Serbia and trips to China by local teams.10 Through family and acquaintanceship channels, Chinese importers based in Eastern Europe also reached South American and African markets, where

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the combination of recent Chinese migrants and high demand for low-price garments and shoes gave rise to similarly favourable conditions as in Eastern Europe. Moreover, markets in the southern hemisphere were complementary to those in Eastern Europe, since clothing unsold in the northern hemisphere during a summer or winter season could be shipped south to where that season would only be starting. One of the most successful businesses in terms of international expansion has been the Guoshi Group founded by Guo Jiadi, a former manager of a state enterprise in China and overseas member of the Fujian Province People’s Political Consultative Conference.11 The group also exemplifies the transnationalism of the elite league of Chinese businesses in Hungary.12 Guo created the Sandic shoe brand in Hungary in the early 1990s and opened his own shoe factory in Fujian in 1995, naming his older brother general manager. The factory employs around 1,000 workers and, according to the company’s English website in Hungary, has fixed assets of over 6 billion yuan (US $682 million).13 Subsequently, Guo expanded his import business across Eastern Europe and beyond, and within ten years had companies in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, the USA, and Brazil, dealing with the import and wholesale of shoes and some other goods. These companies were managed by Guo Jiadi’s relatives or friends. In 1999, the company entered the Spanish market by establishing a wholesale distribution company there. As sales volume in Hungary declined, the loss was offset by new markets such as Lebanon, Jordan, and South Korea.14 In China, Guoshi has some sales in the northeast, Dalian and Qingdao and is planning to enter Peking. According to the deputy general manager of the Guoshi Xieye factory in Putian, since 1997, sales have been about one million pairs per year in Eastern Europe, and the total sales volume has not declined. In 2000, Guo introduced a new brand, Moon, to be sold strictly to department stores and not at Four Tigers, in order to create a brand unblemished by the ‘Chinese-market’ image of Sandic. Moon’s retail price was US $10–27, higher than Sandic’s. In 2001, Guo said his total export volume was around US $2 million. Of course, the sales value of the merchandise is much higher: according to Guo’s Budapest accountant, the Moon brand in Hungary alone sold around US $1.2 million in its first year. In Hungary, the company has eleven Hungarian and five Chinese employees. Apart from shoes and a line of sports clothing and jackets, the group also imports angling gear. Guo also has a company in Hong Kong, which supplies capital from Hong Kong banks for overseas projects and handles the transshipment of Taiwanese and South Korean raw materials to China and of customer goods from China. According to the head of the Putian County Foreign Trade Bureau, Guo is the largest Chinese investor from Europe in Putian and the only individual manufacturer that exports directly to Europe, rather than via trade companies. Guo’s rise as a businessman has been accompanied by the cultivation of officials. On the walls of the factory’s lobby, there are photos showing Guo

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applauding Jiang Zemin and meeting the national vice-chairman of the standing committee of the national People’s Congress and the chairman of the national Federation of Overseas Chinese. Guo has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Project Hope, an official charity that build schools in poor rural areas in China. Governor Xi Jinping of Fujian who used to be in charge of overseas Chinese affairs in the province, is, according to employees, a ‘good friend’ of Guo’s. I heard Chen Ernan, a vice-director of the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee of the Fujian People’s Congress, call Guo by his first name.16 His company has been given a series of provincial awards.17 Although international brands such as Sandic are rare, many importers to Hungary have developed a cross-border distribution network, finding Chinese partners in Eastern and Southern Europe, Latin America and Africa. This allows them flexibility: when a party of merchandise cannot be sold within season or encounters difficulties clearing through customs it could be shipped to a different market. Although customs duties in Southern Europe are higher, so are the prices the merchandise fetches, and as duties in Eastern Europe gradually approach those in the EU while retail prices stagnate, it becomes increasingly worthwhile to ship to the EU.

Saturation of the clothes business and changes in the ethnic economy Chinese folklore in Eastern Europe considers the pre-1995 period as a golden age when one could sell anything and turn a profit of 100 per cent.18 During that time, fortunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars are said to have been made within a year. In the mid-1990s, several processes undermined profits. The market became increasingly saturated, shopping tourism tapered off with the spread of Chinese businesses, customs duties were repeatedly raised (fourfold in 1995 alone, resulting in 4,000 containers of Chinese goods being re-shipped to other countries; Nagy 1995), and the exchange rate of local currencies fell against the dollar (Nyíri 1999: 54–5). Suburban multinational discounter chains such as Cora, Tesco, and Auchan entered the low-price garment market, selling products made in China and other low-labour-cost countries in a more pleasant environment. Finally, as part of an effort to regulate the unprofitable and mismanaged state sector, Peking banned lowinterest loans to Chinese traders abroad and requested state enterprises to collect deposits for any goods ordered (Moore and Tubilewicz 2001: 619) and to limit investments abroad. Chinese newspapers in Hungary published Premier Li Peng’s speech on ‘stopping market research trips abroad that lack real content’ on their front pages. After the ‘Asian crisis’ of 1998, state enterprises were ordered to withdraw most of their overseas assets (Nyíri 1999: 54).19 Companies began sending emissaries to collect debts from their Chinese partners in Eastern Europe20 but found that several of them had

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disappeared. In the words of Hualu’s boss – who himself packed his company off to Sierra Leone soon after the interview – ‘all suppliers . . . wanted to withdraw their consignments at once . . . so we had a crisis’ (Nyíri 1999: 55). One particular foreign trade company in China was said to have accumulated US $50 million in bad debts in Hungary alone in 1993–4 (Nyíri 1999: 53–4). Importers passed the pressure they felt from suppliers on to their wholesalers customers, and those in turn to retailers, aggravating already growing problems in the business. Finally, some measures were implemented under the pressure of the Hungarian manufacturing lobby represented by such organizations as the Scientific Association of the Tanning, Shoe, and Leather Processing Industry. Beginning in 2000, the quota for shoe imports was no longer defined in value but in pairs; Chinese importers circumvented this by importing via Hong Kong. In 2002, customs authorities began rejecting the cost of the merchandise declared by importers and using their own estimates instead, raising the cost of clearing a container worth US $50,000–100,000 through customs from US $4,000 to around US $20,000 (Demeter 2002). In sum, traders incurred higher costs while simultaneously being forced to reduce their prices. According to one trader at the Four Tigers market, the wholesale price of a T-shirt in 1994 had been HUF 300, which at the time was worth around US $2; in 2001, the same T-shirt sold for HUF 200, but due to inflation this amounted to less than US $1. Yan, a trader in Szeged, told me that he had made US $10,000 in the first year after he came to Hungary in 1995. In 2000, he was working with only a ten per cent profit, but thanks to the expansion of his business – he now had stable customers and two stalls at the market – still netted over US $1,000 a month after he paid his expenses of around US $1,200. But expenses in Szeged were much lower than in Budapest. Two traders that I interviewed at the Four Tigers market in 1999 complained that even in the best two months of the year, when they had sold nearly US $10,000 with a profit of around thirty per cent, after all expenses – rent, wages, social security, food, car – they could save only a few hundred dollars a month. The dynamics of rental rights (leasehold) prices of stalls at the Four Tigers market reflect the changing profits of the business. In 1995, stalls could be had for US $40,000, decreasing to US $20,000 in 1998, then rising to US $50,000 in 2000, and plummeting to US $4,000–5,000 in 2002. Apart from decreasing profits, this steep drop had to do with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the market beyond 2004, when the lease contract of the operator, who leases it from the Hungarian State Railways, was due to expire. (In fact, the market is still operating in 2007, despite repeated rumours of closure.) Importers, meanwhile, said their profit on a container had dropped to around US $3,000. At the time of Gelbras’s study, in 1999, Chinese traders paid US $1,000– 1,200 a month to rent a container – used as a trading stall – at the Cherkizovo market in Moscow, but before the 1998 Russian currency crisis, rents had

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been twice as high.21 Before the crisis, monthly sales at one stall could reach US $22,000; this, too, dropped by half after August 1998 (Gelbras 1999: 22). According to Bagrov’s 1999 estimate, a Chinese trader earned US $10,000–20,000 per year, although the author does not clarify whether this figure refers to net profit. One of his informants had sent home US $30,000 in the previous year. But Roskreditbank, where Chinese staying at the ulitsa Panfilova hostel in Moscow kept their accounts, had a record of much higher transfers. A manager there told Bagrov that before the currency crisis, each Chinese customer had sent US $15,000–60,000 per month to China. It is likely, however, that these transfers had been pooled by several individuals (Bagrov 1999). In any case, the figures suggest that even as profits declined Chinese traders continued to have high incomes by local standards. The decline in profits affected the entire business chain, from importers to peddlers, but elicited different reactions. Businesses with substantial capital sought to find customers outside the traditional realm of the ‘Chinese market’. Many importers moved to higher-quality goods. Some introduced new brands for exclusive sale in their own chain of shops; others became suppliers of clothes, hardware, furniture and other durable goods to the discounters and supermarket chains. A few in Hungary succeeded in getting contracts for entire multinational store chains, across Europe and even North America. Some moved into exporting local products – such as foodstuffs – and a handful into manufacturing and food production. One company started by importing Chinese-made mopeds (scooters) into Hungary and, by the mid2000s, not only expanded into Western Europe and the USA but also purchased a manufacturing plant in Italy. Businesspeople who disposed of cultural capital in China, but had missed out on the easy finances of the early 1990s, intensified their efforts to broker business between large Chinese manufacturers,22 or, vice versa, between Chinese local governments and companies seeking foreign know-how and Hungarian manufacturers, especially in the food industry. Some of the more innovative entrepreneurs, capitalizing on the interest in China in television serials about the lives of migrants and on the access to relatively cheap European filming locations, attempted to expand into the film industry. One of the latest such attempts – following earlier soap operas produced by entrepreneurs in Hungary, such as Duonao hepan de huang taiyang (Yellow sun on the Danube banks) – was undertaken by Wei Xiang, owner of the Wink brand, who established the company Wink Culture in Peking in 2004. According to Milutinovic´, the company produced two soap operas in its first year, and both have been broadcast in China as well as on satellite television accessible in Europe. Wei has also purchased shares in telecommunications businesses (Milutinovic´ 2005: 154). More commonly, Chinese entrepreneurs have brokered real estate and trade projects. Among these – which have included a large shopping centre in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, advertised as an investment by Chinese in Hungary, and branches of a Peking supermarket chain, Chaoshifa, in Budapest and

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Moscow – the highest-profile investment has been the Asia Center, which opened in Budapest in 2003. With an expected total investment of € 200 million and an area of 205,000 square metres, the Asia Center advertised itself in the press, on billboards and on the www.asiacenter.hu site as ‘Europe’s largest wholesale, trade and exhibition centre’. The Center’s aggressive media campaign, until then unseen among Chinese businesses in Hungary, had been designed to convince both Chinese entrepreneurs and customers that, in the words of a press release on the Center’s website, it is ‘not a new Chinese market’.23 The source of the investment was somewhat unclear. Initial press releases said that Michael Song, a Budapest Chinese entrepreneur (previously active as an importer of clothes), and his wife had a 49 per cent stake in Asia Center Kft., which organized the investment and had a starting capital of US $8 million, while the remaining 51 per cent belonged to Strabag, a major Austrian construction company that Song had convinced to join. According to a press release, Strabag had then secured an Austrian bank loan of US $200 million. It is possible that – as rumours circulating among Chinese in Budapest maintained – at least some of the money had come from government officials in China who urgently had to get rid of it because of an anti-corruption campaign. By 2004, the Songs sold their share to Strabag, which became the sole owner. After two years, despite sustained advertising, the project appears to be doomed to failure. Half of the building remains unoccupied. Though some occupants came from China, most just moved from the market – without, however, giving up their stalls there because they did not trust that their customers would move to the new location. Occupants that I interviewed in 2004 complained that, despite all the advertising, business had failed to take off, while costs were much higher than at the market. When additional maintenance fees were introduced in 2004, many of them pulled out. The planned second phase of the project was never begun. Most of the visitors at the Centre appear to be consumers, while trade customers have failed to really move over from Four Tigers. In December 2005, the Chinese government announced an interest in purchasing the Asia Center and the China Mart in Budapest to set up a European trade distribution centre, but, up to early 2007, this has not happened. In 2002, another group of Chinese investors purchased Fashion Mart Rt, a Turkish-owned shareholding company registered in Hungary with a capital of around US $2 million. The company had begun constructing a wholesale centre near Asia Center’s construction site three years earlier but had run out of money. China Mart opened in 2003 with approximately four hundred shops with a space of around 25,000 square metres (Német 2002). Unlike the Asia Center, whose owners emphasize ‘modern’ forms of business, China Mart targeted the kinds of businesses currently at and around the Four Tigers market.24 But neither Asia Center nor China Mart have been able to shift the centre of Chinese business away from Four Tigers.

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A similar, but much smaller-scale project is the Great Wall of China trade centre in Ussuriisk, built by a Chinese-owned company in 1998. It has fiftyone shops, but – apparently for fear of administrative procedures and restrictions – Chinese traders have not rented space there. Instead, the shops are rented by Russian businesses, many of which employ shuttle traders to purchase their goods in China (Alexseev 2002: 338–9). Some companies pooled resources with contacts in other countries to organize a sort of institutionalized commodity exchange. A Chinese company in Poland, together with partners in Scandinavia and England, set up the Copenhagen International Transshipment Market (Kebenhagen Guoji Zhuanxiao Shichang) and marketed its services across Eastern Europe, offering to match suppliers with buyers, to ship the goods and to perform the intermediate services.25 The decline in profits accelerated the decentring of Chinese imports in Central Europe. More of the large businesses that had used Budapest as a regional centre moved the centre of their import operations to other countries with less saturated markets. In 1996, Chinese – Hungarian trade dropped 35 per cent over the previous year to US $259 million, while Chinese – Polish trade increased to US $616 million (Nyíri 1999: 56). By 2001, it rebounded to around US $1.2 billion, but no longer driven by consumer goods. Electronics imported by multinationals through intra-company trade now accounting for US $1 billion.26

Shops and restaurants Smaller business people, meanwhile, have tended to open wholesalecum-retail shops or fast-food outlets, both of which spread rapidly across Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s (although it is not clear to what extent they have become common in Russia outside Moscow and St Petersburg). Both of these forms of business are associated with lower risk and lower profit than market trading, although early and well-located fast-food outlets were reputed to be highly profitable. For example, in Hungary, prices at Chinese shops, while still up to half the price than at shopping centres or discount supermarkets, are almost twice as high as wholesale prices at the Four Tigers market, but sales volumes at these shops are low. According to a 2001 estimate by the Chinese Embassy in Budapest, there are 2,000 such shops in Hungary, including even in remote villages. According to some estimates, there is a similar number of shops in Serbia and Montenegro (Fujian Qiaobao 2005). The profitability of such shops varies widely, as the two following cases illustrate. Chen, a businesswoman from Tianjin, came to Hungary in 1998. After working as an assistant at a Chinese clinic, she scraped together US $1,600 to rent two shops in Mezo ´´kövesd and Hatvan, small towns near Budapest. As she had little money and no warehouse, she went to the Four Tigers market every day at 5 a.m. to stock up. She engaged a Chinese man, together

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with whom she came to Hungary and who had no funds of his own, to work at one of the shops in exchange for a commission. In early 2000, she estimated the monthly sales volume of the two shops at around US $6,000, of which US $1,200–1,600 was profit. She attributed her success to her ability to forge good relationships with traders at Four Tigers, thanks to which she was able to get a month’s credit from them when she was starting the business. As she was generally able to sell the merchandise in a week, this enabled her to buy more merchandise in the meantime and increase her sales. In November 2000, Chen opened a larger store in Tiszaújváros, a town in Eastern Hungary, where the monthly rent alone cost her US $2,000. She spent US $40,000 to purchase stock at the opening, and hired ten Hungarian employees. Yet after five months she closed the store with a loss of US $20,000 and a debt of US $16,000. At the same time, the monthly sales volume of her two other shops had increased to around US $22,000 and her net profit, after subtracting business and living expenses, to over US $4,000. She no longer needed to take the bus to the market; like most other Chinese shopkeepers, she had bought a van which she drove to the market once a week to stock up. Yan, a trader at the market in Szeged, a city of 200,000 near the Romanian and Serbian borders, had more ambitious plans than Chen, but he failed. In 2000, Yan had been trading at the market – formerly heavily relying on now-declining shuttle trade from the two neighbouring countries – for five years when he decided to open the city’s first Chinese wholesale outlet. In addition to fashion and footwear, he sold chinaware imported from China 40 per cent cheaper than similar products at Tesco, the city’s main discount superstore. Yan took out advertising on local television, newspapers in Szeged and the nearby Serbian city of Subotica, and printed leaflets targeting ‘trade customers from Hungary and the neighbouring countries’ and marketing his store as an approved Sandic distributor. He employed two Hungarian women as sales clerks and one as supervisor in charge of outside contacts. Like Chen, Yan drove his van once a week to Four Tigers, stocking up on Sandic and other brands. But the expected Yugoslav customers failed to come, while other Chinese traders at the Szeged market continued to purchase their merchandise in Budapest, bypassing Yan’s store. As the forint continued to drop, Yan was forced to compensate rising costs by raising prices. This caused sales to drop further. Yan saw no way out of the situation, which, in his opinion, was caused fundamentally by the oversupply of similar goods in the market. By the end of the year, Yan closed the store with a loss of nearly US $10,000. Four years later, leaving the market stalls for his wife to manage, he moved to Morocco. Chinese shops invariably display a sign identifying them as such, although Chinese are not always seen around. In the Hungarian countryside, the shops are often run by local employees, while the owners, who may have more than one shop usually in villages or towns close to each other, visit once a week. One reason for the necessity to have a Hungarian employee is that

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Chinese owners of a business are not legally allowed to perform work, while Chinese employees demand higher wages than locals and prefer to have their own business anyway. Hungarian – or Romanian – employees often get the minimum wage or less, plus a commission on sales. The first restaurants run by Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe opened in 1990, but remained few compared to Western European numbers and relatively expensive by local standards. In 1994, there were forty-eight Chinese restaurants in Budapest and forty in Prague (Nyíri 1999: 56, Moore and Tubilewicz 2001: 618). The early entrants into the restaurant business were mostly migrants from Zhejiang, many of whom had moved from Western Europe where the Chinese catering sector had become oversaturated (Pieke 1993). Soon afterwards, self-service fast-food outlets appeared, serving a range of pre-made dishes. As a meal at a Chinese fast-food shop cost approximately the same as at McDonald’s or a corporate cafeteria but was seen as more tasty, varied, and nutritious, these outlets became popular, especially with employees on lunch breaks. As shopping centres spread in Budapest in the late 1990s, a large Chinese fast-food restaurant opened in each of them, doing brisk business. The first one of these, opened in 1996 in the Duna Plaza shopping centre, was, according to its owner – a native of Zhejiang who had come to Hungary in 1990 after two years in Australia – the largest Chinese fast-food restaurant in Europe, with a monthly turnover of over US $10,000–15,000. By 2001, Mr. Zeng owned seven restaurants: four fast-food restaurants in shopping centres in Budapest, one in a shopping centre in Gyo ´´r in northwestern Hungary, two full-service restaurants in Budapest and one in the tourist town of Szentendre near Budapest. At the peak of his business, his restaurants employed over 100 Hungarians; by 2001, when I talked to him, this number was down to fifty or sixty. Encouraged by the success of these businesses, between 1998 and 2000, a number of stallkeepers left the Four Tigers market and opened fast-food outlets. At this time, an average fast-food shop brought in, according to Chinese in Budapest, a profit of between US $2,000–4,000 a month. Unlike full-service restaurants – which employed highly paid Chinese cooks and several Hungarian waiters – most of these shops were small, with relatively low overhead costs, and employed only between one and three Hungarian waiters and perhaps a part-time delivery boy. Although some families, like Mr. Zeng’s, owned several large fast-food restaurants, most were literally mom-and-pop enterprises where the husband cooked and the wife managed the business. The boom, however, resulted in a glut: some streets in central Budapest had two or three Chinese fast-food shops by 2001, and profits dropped by as much as half. A Chinese fast-food stall opened even on the area of the Palatinus open-air swimming pool in Budapest; two seasonal ones cater to the yearly Island (Sziget) youth festival. In 2002, there were over 100 restaurants and several hundred fast-food places in the city. Zheng and Fu, who opened their low-end full-service restaurant in Budapest in

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1998, said they had lost US $3,000 a month last in 1999 after subtracting all expenses, but only US $1,500 in 2000. Whereas fast-food shops serve what Chinese call ‘foreign food’, supposedly adapted to local tastes, many of the full-service restaurants target Chinese customers and serve food close to tastes in Zhejiang or northern China. In addition, at least a few Chinese entrepreneurs overtook restaurants in the countryside, which they did not reposition as Chinese restaurants but improved service, food and pricing. Thus, in 2000, a Chinese man in the town of Mezo ´´kövesd married the daughter of the owner of a local restaurant. He took charge of the restaurant and soon turned it from a loss-making business to one bringing in US $4,000 a month. Lately, several Chinese entrepreneurs in Budapest took over gyros (Middle Eastern-style fast food) shops or pastry shops. By 2001, there were three Chinese-owned three-star hotels in Budapest, catering mainly to non-Chinese tourist groups. In the Russian Far East and Siberia, the main direction of the expansion of Chinese businesses has been in exporting lumber and raw materials as well as in manufacturing. Thus, the export volume of the fifty-four joint Russian – Chinese and thirteen fully Chinese-owned business ventures in Irkutsk Province was US $1 million, while the import volume was US $1.1 million (Kamezhuk 1998). Russian officials in the Far East routinely accuse Chinese of plundering and illegally exporting ‘strategic raw materials, rare earth metals, weapons, scarce commodities, foreign currency’ (Filonov 1999; see also Shkurkin 2002: 93). In 2004, Chinese media portrayed a businessman who had moved to Russia in the early 1990s and built an ‘empire’ of sixteen lumber yards and thirteen trading companies employing 500 people (Ouzhou Shibao 2004). In addition, while Chinese in Eastern Europe have kept to an ethnic niche in the economy, Chinese in the Russian Far East, particularly Khabarovsk, participate in trading in all retail goods traded by locals: for example, they buy meat in villages and re-sell them in the cities.27 (Wishnick [2002: 310] suggests that selling foodstuffs is the specialization of ethnic Koreans.) Cobblers in the Maritime Province have already been demanding a ban on Chinese cobblers (Rybalkin 1999: 80). A more limited, but also rapidly growing, option for businesses is the ethnic Chinese service sector, which includes groceries, video rental shops, beauty parlours, phone card dealers, travel agencies, and newspapers. Agencies providing translations and help in dealing with immigration and other official procedures, companies dealing with shipping, customs clearance, and warehousing, and real estate agencies are generally run by more experienced migrants who claim to know the local language and to have good local connections. This is a limited but lucrative market, since virtually all migrants use such ‘Chinese service companies’ (huaren shiwusuo). Officials and the press routinely accuse Chinese businesses of evading customs duties and taxes, smuggling, and selling counterfeit brands (e.g. Tóth 1997: 226; Demeter 2002; Diatlov 1999a: 88). High-profile raids are

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carried out against them, in which merchandise deemed smuggled or counterfeit is seized. Chinese traders in Russia are in particular terror of these raids, which are sometimes conducted by special police units in combat fatigues and masks. A November 1998 raid on a Chinese hostel in Moscow resulted in the confiscation of merchandise worth US $20 million; during the following winter and spring, a warehouse used by 200 Chinese companies was raided nine times. The tax police charged that many Chinese companies being investigated had submitted documents which showed that they had not paid salaries for years and had zero income (Kuz’min 1999). A similar raid in 2004 provoked a strong reaction from the Chinese embassy in Moscow (Shichang 2004a). The stakes increased in the countries that joined the European Union. In 2006, two Chinese and twelve Hungarian businessmen, including former customs officers, were arrested in a raid and accused of customs fraud worth HUF 5 billion (around US $25 million) committed in importing clothing, shoes and accessories that were then sold in Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary (Heti Világgazdaság 2006). Nearly all Chinese that I spoke to said that they under-report customs value and sell merchandise without receipts to reduce value added tax; they pointed out that this was necessary in order to remain competitive, and many claimed that it was impossible to clear merchandise through customs without participating in a well-established quid pro quo with customs officials: the customs agent under-reports the value of the merchandise and shares his or her commission with the customs official.28 They also admitted that they frequently employ locals without reporting them, thus evading the payment of social security contributions. But all these methods are widely practiced by local entrepreneurs too. In fact, contrary to locals, Chinese businesses must pay a certain level of taxes in order to demonstrate their functioning, so that their owners can receive extensions for their residence permits. These payments are calculated – and indeed perceived by the traders – not as a function of the value of the merchandise but as a sort of flat residence fee, and are referred to, in Hungary, as yang lanka (‘to feed one’s blue card’ or residence permit). As one trader in Szeged said: ‘. . . Even though Chinese people all evade taxes, still, even with a good accountant, you pay 200 to 400,000 forints [US $600–1,200] a year’ in VAT. ‘We don’t know how to do this, we leave it to the accountant. But one person had a bad accountant, and he ended up paying 800,000.’ Thus, regardless of the hypothetical losses of revenue compared to what is legally required, local governments receive real gains. In addition, they raise officials’ incomes, generating substantial amounts in bribes (Alexseev 2002: 328–9, 332–3).

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7

Transnational practices and politics

Shuttle trade created complicated, circular trajectories of migration. As shuttle traders accumulated capital and developed business infrastructure, they registered businesses and turned into more ‘proper’, sedentary importers, wholesalers and retailers. But frequent (ranging from several times a year to once in a couple of years) travel to China to scout for merchandise and other business opportunities remained a necessity for some and a practice for nearly all Chinese in Eastern Europe (Nyíri 1999). As for those in the Russian Far East, much more frequent travel between Russia and China remains the rule even if they stop being shuttle traders and become more settled entrepreneurs. Individual stories of Chinese in Eastern Europe reveal an extraordinary degree of mobility. I have interviewed people who started trading in Hungary, were unsuccessful or lost their money at the casino, and went to Italy or Germany to work in leather workshops or restaurants for three or five years; now they are considering investing the money earned in Hungary or Romania once again as they want to develop their own businesses. Others, whose applications for political asylum in Germany were turned down, chose to re-enter Hungary illegally, because they thought it was easier to re-legalize their status there. Several more who started trading in Russia in the early 1990s went on to Hungary, but as residence permit policies were tightened in 1992, went back to Russia. In other words, migration, even illegal migration, is happening not just from East to West, but also in the opposite direction. Many Chinese, especially those from Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, have family members working in garment or leather workshops in Italy or in restaurants in Spain, Germany, or England, most of whom made their way there from Hungary. A number of entrepreneurs have expanded their import or restaurant businesses to neighboring Eastern European countries and now circulate between them. Others have legally immigrated to Canada or the USA, but they, too, maintain businesses in Eastern Europe. My research among migrants from Jiangyin Township, Fujian, in the Hungarian city of Szeged shows how much various locations are linked in the logic of transnationalism, the concurrent participation in the discourses and institutionalized practices of multiple localities (see Basch et al. 1994),

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and how necessary it is to apply multi-sited optics to comprehend that logic. There are several hundred Chinese in Szeged, in southern Hungary, nearly all of whom are from Jiangyin. As a result of that and the fact that Chinese in Hungary associate Fujianese, particularly those from Fuqing County, with violence, Szeged has a reputation of being dangerous terrain for a Chinese outsider, and it is somewhat cut off from the rest of the Chinese in Hungary. At the same time, nearly everyone has ties to relatives and friends from Jiangyin in Eastern or Western Europe or the USA. Such contacts, as well as contacts with non-Chinese locals, are often more important in determining migration strategies and transnational practices, as this excerpt from my field notes illustrates: When he was in Jiangxi Province, his fellow townsmen asked him to partner with them in a paper factory, but when it was up and running well, they tried to push each other out. After this happened he wanted to go to Argentina, where he had a cousin, and applied for a private passport. Meanwhile, however, another cousin, who was in Szeged, Hungary, was threatened by some Fujianese ‘gangsters’ and asked him to come urgently to help him. As the matter was urgent, he obtained a service passport, with which he did not need a visa to Hungary, through the local Public Security Bureau and Party secretary (‘they all liked me’), and went to Szeged. After a few years of trading at the market there, he married an ethnic Hungarian woman from Yugoslavia who worked at the same market. He got a permanent residence permit, and both applied for and got a tourist visa to the USA, where he now illegally works at a garment workshop owned by a relative of his first wife. Once he has made enough money, he plans to return to Hungary with his wife and open a business importing building materials from China. Note that this story is one of a non-elite migrant, while wealthy or well-connected individuals often live in a denser, more branched-out transnational space. They move in a geographically even more complex social space: they are often in constant motion not between two or three but many more countries in which they do business, engage in labour, study, get residence permits, educate children, and network with officials. For example, one couple, former employees of state-owned companies, lives separately in Warsaw and Budapest, running imports and restaurant businesses; they visit each other once every two weeks. They have companies in Peking and Fujian in charge of arranging the supply of merchandise from China and one in Hong Kong to take care of financial arrangements, and visit them several times a year. They have also been invited to Côte d’Ivoire, where a former boss of the wife manages a Chinese state-run construction project. The couple is completing immigration procedures for Canada, where they have opened a business, employing more than ten people, and bought a house in Vancouver. The focus of the business in Vancouver is the same as in Warsaw

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in Budapest: they supply supermarkets and discounters with low-price clothes, shoes, blankets, photographic film, and other consumer items, and a Germanbased furniture maker with plants across Eastern Europe with raw materials. As the wife said: ‘It doesn’t matter where I do my business: I can do the same whether I am in Budapest or in Canada. It’s not so much a matter of where you live as of what passport you carry.’1 Her non-Chinese business counterparts ‘realize that we have the same kind of thinking as they, but they don’t trust the Chinese government. But we can’t wait until the government changes’. Therefore ‘there will be a time when we have to migrate’. Explaining why Chinese business people moved so much, she added: ‘We don’t want to be encaged. Other businesspeople may not have this problem, but for Chinese business people it is difficult to get visas.’ Chinese business in Eastern Europe is both firmly embedded in the local economy and highly transnational. On the one hand, almost every single Chinese has business contacts with locals, and Chinese businesses employ a range of local workers, secretaries, translators, lawyers, and accountants, as well as customs agents. Such contacts are necessary both for the functioning and the profitability of the business. For the same reasons, close contacts with China are equally essential. Contrary to the more traditional overseas Chinese communities in Western Europe, Chinese migrants in Hungary come from backgrounds that often endow them with the cultural capital, mobility, and means of communication to develop close ties with enterprises in China, which supply them with goods, capital, and business information. The stories of these individuals make it clear that despite intensely participating in local life, the locality remains, in some sense, incidental to the migrants. One can argue that Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe, or at least many of them, live primarily in a transnational social space where flexible accumulation of local – cultural or economic – capital is part of a continuous management of opportunities of geographical and social mobility. This social space ties them through discourse and practice to each other and to China. It configures the optics through which migrants look at the physical space of migration, and which is often more meaningful to them than the optics of local society and institutions. Granted, only migrants in privileged positions can act out fully the logic of the transnational geography and move on at the spur of the moment to wherever they please; others are hindered by lack of financial and/or legal means. Still, even non-elite Chinese in Eastern Europe are physically mobile at least in relation to China.2 Such mobility is made possible by certain infrastructural factors summed up by Harvey (1989) as ‘time – space compression’. But it is also the result of a frame of reference informed by images of global modernity and wealth that today are not only transmitted worldwide on Chinese-language satellite television but also brought directly to places in China from which people migrate. Today’s migrants no longer simply switch between the idioms of two localities and find themselves isolated or else assimilated, but carry with them an idiom that enables them to be self-consciously Chinese and global

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at once. This idiom questions the naturalness of the subordinate position that earlier migrants accepted upon arrival in the West, and reinforces in migrants the feeling of legitimacy about manipulating and circumventing immigration and labour regimes of various nation-states. This imaginary, to whose construction and operationalization we now turn, is an essential element of the functioning of Chinese transnationalism.

Chinese organizations The locus of Chinese community politics in Europe is the organizations that claim to represent Chinese in general or a particular native-place or professional group. Although there is no systematic information on Chinese organizations in Eastern Europe, anecdotal evidence suggests that the first of them appeared in Hungary, and that they are most numerous in Hungary, Russia, and Romania. This would make sense in terms of the history, size, and degree of consolidation of Chinese immigration to Eastern European countries. According to the Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas edited by Zhou Nanjing, the first contemporary Chinese organization in Eastern Europe was the Moscow Chinese Chamber of Commerce (Mosike Zhonghua Shanghui), founded in 1990 (Li and Lin 1999: 98). The encyclopedia gives no further information on this association. The earliest organization it describes in some detail is the Rijeka Chinese Association (Liyeka Shi Huaqiao Huaren Xiehui), founded in the Croatian port city of Rijeka in June 1991. Its overall goals were to promote cultural exchange and friendly interaction between the Chinese and Yugoslav[3] peoples; exhort members to obey laws; protect the lawful rights and interests of Chinese; help solve their problems and alleviate their difficulties; support and help members in studying Chinese culture and understand the situation and customs of their country of residence. (Ge 1999) Such general goals, with furthering bilateral contacts between China and the country of residence mentioned in first place, are typical of Chinese organizations in Eastern Europe. With minor variations – including in most cases a clause on ‘loving the fatherland and the native place’ – they have been repeated in most if not all charters, including that of the Hungarian Chinese Association (Xiongyali Huaren Lianhehui, HCA), which, founded in 1992, is the best documented of them. I shall discuss this organization in some detail because it acquired political prominence within the transnational network of recent migrants and served as a regional model for similar associations after its president became chairman of the European Federation of Chinese Organizations in 1998.4 The founders of HCA had mostly come from Western Europe around 1990 to take advantage of an empty niche in Chinese catering or imports.

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Some of them had had experiences with Chinese organizations in their former countries of residence. Paul Kwok, a Hong Kong Chinese who had recently come to Hungary from England and counted at the time as a major importer of Chinese goods in Hungary, was chosen as president. A year later, he was replaced by Zhang Manxin. Zhang’s ancestral homeland was Qingtian, but he grew up in inland Ningxia Province. According to his published biographies, Zhang left official service in 1982 to engage in trade. He migrated to the Philippines in 1986 and then to Hungary in 1990 (Huang 2002). Zhang had been a small importer; later, building on his title as association president, he built up contacts at the Hungarian Customs office and engaged in the lucrative business of customs clearance. HCA’s founding came at a time when, with China still under Western sanctions imposed after the Tiananmen massacre and with economic growth not yet taken off, mobilization of Chinese overseas for investment and informal diplomacy was a priority for the Chinese government (Shi 2004). In particular, this ‘overseas Chinese work’ (qiaowu gongzuo) took the form of encouraging the establishment of organizations of both overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and recent migrants in North America and Europe sympathetic to the Peking government. Indeed, the number of organizations formed during this period soared (Nyíri 2001). It is no surprise that HCA was quick to establish contacts with the PRC embassy – which recognized it as the lawful representative of the Chinese in Hungary – and eschewed contact with Taiwan’s. It organized some charitable activities that received a measure of publicity in Hungary, but on the whole did little to engage with the Hungarian political or cultural sphere. Zhang Manxin spoke no Hungarian and no English, had no personal Hungarian friends and had a brusque style thoroughly unsuited to gaining the confidence of Hungarian interlocutors. By contrast, he enjoyed a close relationship with the Chinese ambassadors in Hungary through most of the 1990s. Although HCA’s charter stipulated that the president’s term is one year without the possibility of re-election and that he should be elected by the yearly general assembly, Zhang stayed in his position until 1999, holding only meetings of the leadership – the board, lishihui – throughout that period. The membership of the association was never publicly disclosed, and it was only the few dozen members of the lishihui who were involved in its activities. Initially, HCA announced the launching of low-cost services for members including the hiring of an accountant, translations, and haulage. It also organized karaoke and pool contests and visited the immigration detention camp at Kerepestarcsa. In addition, between 1992 and 1995, HCA organized various donation drives for the benefit of the Hungarian poor and handicapped; organized an evening of Chinese culture at one of Budapest’s cultural centres; funded a Chinese edition of Hungarian poet Sándor Peto´´fi’s poems; and sponsored the concert of a Hungarian wind quartet (Nyíri 1999: 92–4). The activities organized for Hungarian audiences received some publicity in Hungarian media.

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But by the mid-1990s, HCA retreated from such activities and focused mainly on the organization of and participation in meetings of a more or less political character connected to the PRC, and the sending and hosting of delegations to and from like-minded organizations and Chinese authorities. As early as 1993, HCA sought contact with the national Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau (Qiaoban) in Peking. Zhang Manxin became a frequent guest at the National Federation of Overseas Chinese (Qiaolian); for a while, a large vase donated by him decorated the lobby of the organization’s building in Peking. At the same time, HCA organized a donation drive for Project Hope, a high-profile state-managed project that builds schools in poor rural areas of China. In several instances, it donated money to flood victims in China via the Chinese embassy; in 1998 alone, the donations amounted to nearly US $10,000.5 In 1994, Zhang Manxin met with officials in Peking, participated in a Conference of Famous Overseas Zhejiangers organized by the Zhejiang provincial government, and in October, was invited to watch the state holiday celebrations from the Tiananmen Square rostrum, a signal honour (Nyíri 1999: 97). In 1995, Jiang Zemin, the Chairman of the PRC, on a visit to Hungary, received Zhang and other HCA leaders, who also stood on the runway next to embassy personnel both during the chairman’s arrival and departure ceremony. In 1996, Zhang became an overseas member of the Gansu Province People’s Political Consultative Conference (Nyíri 1999: 96), a title that, apart from the prestige, provides effective immunity from prosecution and VIP treatment while entering and leaving the country.6 He was also named vice-chairman of an organization called National Federation of Patriotic Projects (Quanguo Aiguo Gongcheng Xiehui), headed by a retired general and associated with Project Hope. In 1997, HCA organized a celebration of the PRC’s takeover of Hong Kong, including a parade in Budapest’s central Heroes Square and the hiring of two airplanes to fly banners over the city. To finance it, HCA collected around US $55,000 from its leaders and other Chinese businesses (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). In 1999, HCA organized a march of protest against NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Its president Zhou Yongping, who succeeded Zhang, later said in an interview with the staterun China News Agency that organizing this demonstration had been his ‘most important organizational task’ (Lai et al. 2000). In 2000, HCA published a five-point summary of its activities in the past two years and outlined its task for the coming year in a further four points. All of the points were concerned with building the organization and organizing or participating in meetings; none talked about social, cultural, or interest representation tasks (Polonyi 2000). HCA frequently issued statements rhyming with official political campaigns in the PRC – whether concerning Taiwan, the USA, or Falungong – or condemning visits of Taiwanese officials to Hungary and organized ‘seminars’ and ‘conferences’ discussing the Chinese government position on these issues (Nyíri 1999: 104). Thus, in the run-up to elections on Taiwan in 2000, the PRC issued a ‘white paper’, which

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threatened Taiwan with war if its government declared independence. Following a briefing by the embassy on the white paper, HCA convened a ‘seminar’ discussing the white paper and condemned pro-independence views (Lianhe Shangbao [Budapest], 25 February – 2 March 2000, p. 1). In March 2001, it organized a ‘seminar’ condemning Falungong. The most important and popular activity associated with HCA has been the organization of Spring Festival shows, sometimes at prominent venues like the Erkel Opera Theatre, attracting thousands of overwhelmingly Chinese spectators. These shows, deliberately replicating the nationally broadcast central show in Peking, feature a ‘nationalities arts troupe’ (minzu yishutuan) invited from somewhere in China (usually such troupes would visit several destinations on a European tour, arranged by and intended for local Chinese). Along with ‘traditional’ Chinese acrobatics, slapstick, Peking opera, and pop, the programme of such troupes includes ‘minority dances and songs’ intended to represent the official imaginary of China as a multiethnic socialist nation. Thus, such shows do not simply hanker to festive sentiments of homesickness and reinforce the sense of belonging to China, but carry a specific political message. In 1994, an article in the Qiaolian’s newspaper, Huashengbao, reported on HCA’s contribution to Project Hope, portraying it as Zhang’s singlehanded achievement. Because Huashengbao circulates among overseas Chinese organizations and because new overseas Chinese press frequently reproduces each other’s material, Zhang instantly became known among similar organizations in Western and Eastern Europe (Liu Xiangling 1994). His reputation was bolstered by becoming, in 1998, the first chairman of the European Federation of Chinese Organizations (EFCO) from Eastern Europe. EFCO had been founded in 1992 and enjoys the support of PRC authorities including the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Qiaoban, provincial governments and embassies (Zhang Manxin 1998). By 1998, it comprised twenty-two Chinese organizations from eleven countries (Liu 1998), most of them in their turn national umbrella organizations. According to a Hungarian Sinologist who assisted in the preparation of the EFCO congress in Budapest at which he was elected chairman, Zhang had the PRC’s national anthem performed at the opening ceremony. The congress adopted a resolution calling for the ‘peaceful reunification of the fatherland’,7 and Zhang asserted in his speech that ‘all European Chinese raise high the flag of patriotism (love of the ancestral country), of the country of residence, and of Europe; they contribute their forces to the construction of Europe, to the promotion of peace and progress in Europe’ (Zhang Manxin 1998). Both the content and the style of Zhang’s speech corresponded to the language of official PRC propaganda and signified identification with it. Thus, the resolution supporting ‘peaceful reunification’ stated that ‘certain foreign powers, for their own ulterior motives . . . find various excuses to interfere in the Taiwan question . . . We resolutely oppose any foreign power’s . . . interference in China’s internal affairs, resolutely oppose any suggestions of

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“one China, one Taiwan”, “two Chinas”, “Taiwan independence”’. Furthermore, the congress discussed – but rejected – a proposal by HCA to issue a letter to Jiang Zemin, then Chairman of the PRC, calling for ‘strict checks’ on the export of films from China – naming three by the famous Chinese director, Zhang Yimou – that ‘distorted the image of China’ by portraying ‘ignorant, savage, preposterous, promiscuous’ behaviour (Nyíri 1999: 114). The letter finished with the words: ‘We earnestly hope that the problem of export films will attract your, the Party’s, and [government bodies’] attention as an element of socialist spiritual construction.’8 A collection of articles from periodicals published for overseas Chinese in China, entitled My Motherland, was released for the occasion, prepared with the Qiaolian’s help (Mou and Liu 1998: 320). Several delegations of officials from China attended the congress, while others, with the Director of the Qiaoban at the head, sent their congratulations (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). The congress also engaged in activities promoting business ties with China. Thus, it announced the organization of a delegation of European Chinese to participate in an investment fair for the inland and western parts of China organized by the State Council in Hunan Province.9,10 When Zhang Manxin was elected EFCO Chairman, he gave up his post of HCA President and was succeeded by Zhou Yongping and then Cheng Shilin, a restaurant owner from Qingtian. Zhang himself evolved into a transnational apparatchik. He spent the following year traveling across Europe setting up committees for the Promotion of China’s Reunification in various countries, became the chairman of the European Committee for the Promotion of China’s Reunification and spearheaded the organization of the first World Chinese Congress for Opposing Taiwan Independence and Supporting China’s Reunification (Shijie Huaren Fandu Tongzu Dahui) in Berlin in August 2000, information about which was spread to Chinese embassies by the United Front department of the CCP. In the speech written for the Berlin congress, Zhang used even more hard-line nationalist rhetoric than two years before, but stayed close to the Chinese government’s line and quoted a poem by Jiang Zemin. He warned that if a weak China had been able to ‘defeat the Japs’ and ‘stop the Yanks’ (in the Korean War), then today’s strong China could not fail to defeat a Taiwan that declared independence, no matter how much assistance ‘Taiwan independence elements’ receive from their ‘foreign devil “godfathers” ’ (Zhang Manxin 2000). A vice-chairman of China’s People’s Political Consultative Conference acted as honorary chairman of the congress, and Zhang Manxin told a Chinese researcher that the chairman of EFCO ‘should be a member of the Political Consultative Conference’.11 Zhang is now something of a political celebrity among Chinese organization leaders in both Eastern and Western Europe, touted in the Chinese-language press as a ‘patriotic overseas Chinese leader’ and ‘the archetype of the new overseas Chinese who left the country since Reform and Opening’ (Liu 1999). He is the subject of two biographies – one published by the prestigious People’s Literature Press in Peking (Liu 1999) – and of one of only a few

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entries carrying a photo on the Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas (Huang 2002). For a man who is neither rich nor educated – that is, who does not meet the usual criteria of ‘success’ for a migrant – and who has once been expelled from Hungary for travelling on a forged passport, to enjoy such fame and recognition is a remarkable feat. Consequently, Zhang Manxin’s and HCA’s activities are something of a model for other Chinese organizations in Eastern Europe. Although the bases of their constituencies range from native place to age group and occupation, their activities and rhetoric appear to be very similar to those of HCA. In Hungary itself, some of the first Chinese organizations after HCA – a women’s association, a youth association and a business association – were in fact set up by HCA itself following the logic of mass organizations in Communist countries (one organization to cover each social group as defined by the leadership). Apart from the women’s organization (Xiongyali Huaren Funü Lianhehui), they never took on a life of their own (Nyíri 1999: 99). Beginning in 1994, a flurry of new organizations appeared. Most of them were based on native place. By now there are dozens of these in Hungary, including those representing migrants from Qingtian, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, the three northeastern provinces, Peking, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong, Fujian, Henan, Sichuan, and even Yunnan. They are based on current administrative divisions in the PRC rather than, as older tongxianghui in Southeast Asia and North America, on traditional linguistic or local identities. In addition, organizations claiming to represent various intellectuals appeared, including a Writers’ Association and an Artists’ Association. (These were based largely on the occupations of their members of China, as currently they were all businessmen and -women.) Several more business associations and an organization of restaurant owners were also set up, as were a sports association and a Buddhist association (see Nyíri 1999: 101–4). Some of them, such as the European Society of Chinese Artists, claimed to have a European rather than just a Hungarian scope, but such claims merely reflected a desire for added importance and cosmopolitanism. Most organizations had a dozen or so active members and were quite limited in both influence and scope of activities. Often they would hold a founding banquet, inviting representatives of the Chinese embassy, which would be reported in the local Chinese papers, never to be heard of until the first anniversary of the founding, when a new banquet was due. Some organizations would disappear even before their first anniversary, although since most never did formally incorporate themselves, one could not properly speak of disbanding either. Others engaged in activities similar to HCA’s. For example, the Women’s Association donated around US $5,000 to the Chinese embassy for flood victims in China in 1998 and received an invitation from the Qiaolian and the Chinese Women’s Association to China Central Television’s 1999 Spring Festival show.12 A leader of the Sichuan tongxianghui gave 200,000 yuan (US $23,000) to his home village to build a school.13 The Wenzhou Foundation hosted a

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delegation of the Wenzhou City People’s Political Consultative Conference (OuYa Xinwenbao 2001). What united most of these associations was that rather than being motivated by common dialect or – real or imagined – kinship ties that bound together members of traditional overseas Chinese organizations, they reproduced the logic of ‘mass organizations’ in the PRC. Given the small Chinese population in Hungary, by the late 1990s, there was an organization for every 200–300 Chinese if one takes into account all that have ever claimed to exist. Yet the scope of people who were interested in active participation, even if all this involved was time and money for a few banquets, was limited. Consequently, there has been considerable overlap between the lists of lishihui of various organizations. Why, then, such a proliferation of organizations? Given the largely interchangeable scope of their activities and the fact that their constituencies (unlike those of traditional overseas Chinese organizations) are not really divided along lines of mutually unintelligible dialects or differences in social status, the scramble to have organizations corresponding to certain administrative divisions in the PRC, whether territorial or ministerial, is driven by a desire for a formal basis of preferential access to the bureaucracy and, more generally, cultural and economic capital in China (Nyíri 2001: 646–7). The chairman of the Fujian tongxianghui in Italy told me that one of the reasons for setting up the organization was that it was becoming increasingly awkward in the face of a growing number of visits by delegations from Fujian that there was no organization to formally receive them (Nyíri 2001: 646). A similar situation existed in Hungary. One of Zhang Manxin’s advantages was that he could mobilize a number of territorial identities: adversaries commented that, ‘according to his needs, sometimes he says he was born in Qingtian, Zhejiang; sometimes he says he is from Ningxia; then again that he is from Guizhou, Sichuan, Shandong, or born in the Philippines’ (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). As Madeline Hsu points out in her study of early twentieth-century transnationalism among migrants from Taishan, Guangdong, to America, the basis of the native-place network was the traditional perception of the ancestral village that overrides in importance the actual place one was born in. The perception that the homeland is part of a larger ancestral land, China, began to imbue the native-place network only in the late 1920s, but even then, there was no question that contributions must be made to the ancestral village (Hsu 2000). The new native-place associations in Eastern Europe are not based on this logic: instead of building loyalty to the state from loyalty to the nativeplace, they use the traditional form of native-place association to demonstrate and build contacts with various levels of national and provincial bureaucracies. Provincial, county and village identities are firmly subsumed in a single national discourse of patriotism and socialist modernization. Delegations from China they entertain are most often a mixture of prefecture- or county-level (sometimes province level) officials in charge of overseas Chinese affairs, foreign

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economic relations, and other matters and managers of state-owned and private enterprises. The organizations that host them – often more than one, or in cooperation with companies – are responsible for arranging the programme and the logistics of the delegation, including helping setting up meetings with local government bodies or companies that interest the visitors, as well as accommodation and sightseeing. Their role of middlemen also entails conveying requests and policies of the relevant organs of Chinese bureaucracy to the organization’s constituencies. The Fujian tongxianghui in the Czech Republic has enshrined in its statutes that: ‘It shall spread relevant information from the Fujian provincial government, Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, and Exit and Entry Office.’ What motivates transnational apparatchiki such as Zhang Manxin? The creation of organizations to gain access to connections in China is the product of a migration whose connection with China as a state is much more continuous and unproblematic than that of previous cohorts, and one whose economy is strongly linked to contacts with China. As the president of the Czech Chinese Association (founded in 1998) said, ‘For us as Chinese, it is obviously of primary importance to rely on support coming from the motherland’ (Hanxu 2005). Critics of HCA have, however, accused its leaders of using the organization to gain personal support from China: [. . .] Some people who left China recently and want to achieve undeserved fame cover themselves with social influence gained through ‘reportage’ in the official Chinese press in order to engage in political and economic confidence tricks in China with even greater effect. [. . .] They [. . .] use geographical distance to produce false news to trick public opinion in our country. (Shichang, 18 January 2000, p. 4.) In a letter to EFCO protesting the choice of Zhang Manxin as next chairman of the federation, the authors, signed as ‘The Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots in Hungary’, were less reserved. Zhang, they wrote, ‘goes about bragging that he is a cadre in ministerial rank, appointed by the Chinese government . . . HCA is Zhang’s personal organization . . . He never makes its accounts public; sooner or later he should change leadership [but] he never does; he only wants to use HCA’s name as a card to conveniently trick people in China and abroad into giving him money’ (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). Another letter alleged that a Chinese Embassy official in Budapest had protected Zhang’s successor at the helm of HCA, Zhou Yongping, from his creditors in China. According to the letter, in his correspondence with the creditor – a state enterprise – Zhou ‘repeatedly bragged that he was an executive vice-president of the Hungarian Chinese Association who had often been personally entertained by President Qiao Shi and Vice President Chen Muhua of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen’ and other high officials (You 1997).

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While photos with high Chinese officials and newspaper articles commending someone for patriotism can be assets of considerable importance when doing business or dealing with official procedures back in China, there also appear to be more direct benefits from hosting official delegations, which use state funding generously. The organization in charge of arranging the visit can farm out the lucrative business of accommodating, banqueting and escorting the delegations to local Chinese companies and get a commission for it. But if the delegation is short of funding, the hosts may incur substantial expenses.14 On the other hand, they may entice business people hopeful to score points with officials to contribute to entertaining the delegation. Thus, much of the cost of the Budapest congress was EFCO was borne by restaurant owners on whom Zhang Manxin called to pitch in (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). A particularly interesting case was that of the Hungarian Chinese Industry and Trade Federation (Xiongyali Zhonghua Gongshanglian). The Gongshanglian was established in 1994 by a well-known successful businessman, Li Xuechun, with Zhang Manxin as honorary president, and after two years claimed 170 members (Renmin Ribao 1996b). The name it chose was that of a large official organization in China, the one of the eight ‘democratic parties’ officially sanctioned next to the CCP that supposedly represented the ‘national bourgeoisie’. The most famous personality associated with the (original) Gongshanglian was Rong Yiren, a vice-chairman of the PRC, who was the son of a famous pre-war Shanghai industrialist. The choice of name was no coincidence but a deliberate attempt by the founders to represent themselves as an overseas branch of an official body in the PRC. Its benefits were not only political but, more importantly, economic. The organization sent a delegation to China, which met with the secretary-general of the ‘big’ Gongshanglian, Hu Deping, son of former CCP secretary-general Hu Yaobang (Nyíri 1999: 100). In 1996, according to a report in the People’s Daily, another Gongshanglian delegation from Hungary became the first group of overseas Chinese to participate in Project Brilliant (Guangcai Shiye), a programme to promote private investment in poor areas of China launched by the CCP’s United Front Department and the (original) Gongshanglian in 1994 (Renmin Ribao 1996a).15 The delegation signed contracts and MOUs to invest a total of 640 million yuan (US $73 million) in Hunan and Inner Mongolia as well as reaching ‘agreements on trade cooperation and labour export’ and was rewarded with a reception with the head of the United Front Department, Wang Taoguo (Renmin Ribao 1996b). The People’s Daily described their planned investment as a manifestation of their ‘spirit of patriotism’ (Renmin Ribao 1996b). Given such benefits of setting up organizations and the fact that the various organizations differed mostly in name, with leaderships interchangeable, it is not surprising that HCA’s claim to represent the Hungarian Chinese as a whole did not remain unchallenged for long. In 1994, leaders of an organization called Association for the Promotion of Chinese-Hungarian

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Friendship (Xiong-Zhong Youhao Cujinhui, APCHF), native-place and other organizations, including the Chinese Christian Church, established the Joint Conference of Hungarian Chinese Organizations (Xiongyali Huaren Shetuan Lianxi Huiyi). APCHF was associated with the first Chinese newspaper in Hungary, Ouzhou Daobao, which for many years had displayed the association’s name on the colophon as publisher. One of the organizers, Wang Yifei, was a journalist for Ouzhou Daobao and a former dissident who had participated in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement in Canton (Nyíri 1999: 87). (This fact was not widely known, and Wang had not participated in any dissident activities after leaving China.) Ouzhou Daobao’s editorials differed from those in HCA’s newspaper Ouzhou zhi Sheng in that they stressed the need for the Chinese to ‘enter mainstream (Hungarian) society’ and cautioned of ‘excesses’ in ‘loving the motherland and maintaining the fine national traditions [. . .] especially now that we are asking others not to practice racial discrimination’ (Nyíri 1999: 97). Unlike HCA, which had sought either business contacts with Hungarian officials or ceremonial ones – such as inviting highly positioned officials to banquets – APCHF appeared to be interested in public dialogue about the role and future of the Chinese. In September 1995, together with the Budapest city government and a Hungarian NGO, the Joint Conference of Hungarian Chinese Organizations organized a high-profile two-day conference on the subject in the building of the city assembly. At this conference, according to reports by some Hungarian media, a suggestion was made for the government to grant the Chinese minority status in Hungary. This initiative, which some of APCHF’s leaders denied taking, was seen as a clear departure from the idea of primary loyalty to China and was rejected by most of the participants that I spoke to. Hungarian media made ironic comments, pointing out that minority status could only be granted to a group of Hungarian citizens (Nyíri 1999: 87). HCA, which had in the meantime changed its name to Xiongyali Huaren Lianhezonghui, inserting the character zong, meaning ‘general’, ‘overall’, sensed a threat to its public hegemony as representative of Chinese in Hungary, and took measures to defend it. In August 1995, the chairman of APCHF, a restaurant owner from Qingtian named Ying Wanghuai, sent an open letter to the Chinese ambassador, protesting against a threat the ambassador allegedly made in his address at a banquet just after Zhang Manxin’s meeting with Jiang Zemin in Budapest. The threat, Ying claimed, was merely because he had attempted to invite Jiang to a banquet in his restaurant, and had the effect of ‘supporting one faction (HCA) and attacking another faction’ within the Chinese community (Ying 1995). At the same time, Wang Yifei said that evidence of his dissident past had been forwarded to the Chinese embassy. Wang said he was being subjected to a boycott by other businessmen, that made him unable to continue the business on which his living depended. He therefore left Hungary for the USA. (Others claimed that Wang had left because of debts he had accumulated.) Whether or not the embassy was as strongly involved in supporting HCA as Ying alleged,

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the incident did reveal two facts: the importance of official connections and the stigma of having the reputation of someone opposed to the Chinese government. At the banquet mentioned in Ying’s letter, in the presence of the ambassador who expressed his support, Zhang Manxin announced the creation of a new umbrella organization, called Representative Committee of Hungarian Chinese Organizations (Xiongyali Huaren Shetuan Daibiao Weiyuanhui), and leaders of other associations present to join. With three exceptions, they did. The Representative Committee declared in its charter its ‘right and duty to represent all Chinese living in Hungary’ and issued a mission statement, the first item of which was ‘Spread the fine tradition of patriotism [. . .] Promote the reunification of the fatherland. Do not tolerate any behaviour not in line with the interests of the fatherland’ (Nyíri 1999: 104). With that, its mission to preserve HCA’s leading position accomplished, the Committee ceased functioning and soon faded into oblivion. Another tactic HCA briefly employed after these events was creating loyal ‘organizations’ on paper that duplicated the scope of existing ones. Thus, after the organizers of the Shanghai Entrepreneurs Association refused to join the Representative Committee, Zhang Manxin had a group of market peddlers from Shanghai organize a rival association (Nyíri 1999: 105). A few years down the road, however, such tactics no longer worked. In 1998, when HCA leaders proposed one of their vice-presidents, Yang Yijia, to be elected as president of the Women’s Association – one of the few that maintained activities over a number of years, organizing both such traditional ‘women’s’ activities as sightseeing tours and political meetings in support of government policies – the association split, and the faction opposing Yang’s election came out stronger.16 Despite the disappearance of APCHF, HCA’s hegemony quietly eroded, due not to clashes of positions over political orientation or the problems of Chinese in Hungary but to conflicts of personal ambitions. Although some organizations occasionally appear as more ‘hawkish’ in their political position than others, all of them promote the same imaginary of belonging to the PRC polity that has been described above. While HCA in Hungary was so committed to the party line that its newspaper, Ouzhou zhi Sheng, earned the title of ‘the People’s Daily of Hungary’,17 its rivals occasionally attempted to ‘outdo’ it. Liu Wenjian of the General Federation of Chinese Organizations in Hungary accused HCA of promoting the ‘theory of a Taiwanese nation’ on the basis that Ouzhou zhi Sheng had used the expression ‘Taiwan’s national holiday’ (Liu Wenjian 1997). In a letter to the Ministry of Public Security in Peking, three rival Chinese association leaders and two newspaper editors, complaining of the same, added that this was particularly offensive since it took place during PRC Chairman Jiang Zemin’s visit to the USA, when ‘many Chinese newspapers in Europe forcefully promoted’ the reunification effort, and claimed that Zhang Manxin had ‘close relations with Taiwan’s office in Budapest’ (Zhang et al. 1997). In his open letter to the Chinese

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ambassador, APCHF Chairman Ying Wanghuai used the adjective ‘patriotic’ six times to describe himself (Ying 1995). The Shichang article that criticized Zhou Yongping questioned not his priority to organize a demonstration protesting the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, but his merit in organizing it: ‘In the report by the China News Agency, the national wrath and sincere patriotic outburst of the Chinese in Hungary is portrayed as some blind obedience of a group of bandits under the command’ of Zhou (Shichang, 18 January 2000, p. 4). In 2001, after an American spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan, the General Federation organized a ‘seminar’ with the long title ‘Resolutely support the Chinese government in protecting national sovereignty; oppose the hegemonic act of an American warplane intruding in Chinese airspace and attacking our warplanes’, and noted that two of China Central Television’s channels broadcast the statement issued at the ‘seminar’ as top international news (General Federation 2001). These debates illustrate the transnational nature of community politics: public statements are made for a readership not only in Hungary but also in China. In a different article, another author angry with Zhou for allegedly slandering him writes: ‘Your purpose is to spread slanderous information about me to Chinese around the world on the Internet, using the online version of [your newspaper] Lianhe Shangbao. And your main aim is to shape a certain image of me in China, wishing to discredit my writings there by means of the opinion formed about me’ (Fang Yongjun, Shichang, 22 February 2000 pp. 3–4). The contiguity of migrant-published press with officially controlled press in China, especially through the Internet, not only means that the former is strongly influenced by the latter, but also allows the former to contest the latter in some cases: Official Chinese press enjoys high regard among Chinese overseas . . . no one has ever doubted the truthfulness of news reported by an official news agency. [. . . Yet] Chinese in Hungary realize that this official agency makes untruthful claims about them. [. . .] False rumours from such a respected source accumulate political capital for those craving fame. [. . .] Can’t we say that you are accomplices of such people, who can be accused of economic crime? (Shichang, 18 January 2000) One organization that, for a short time, captured the attention of Chinese in Hungary was the Committee of Traders at the Four Tigers Market (Sihu Shichang Huashang Weiyuanhui, Huashanghui), set up by Ye Jianxin, Chairman of the Qingtian tongxianghui and a prominent merchant at the market, in September 1997. The initiative came after security guards at the market beat several Chinese peddlers. The Huashanghui emphasized, first, that its leaders, unlike HCA’s, were elected by secret ballot by all traders at the market (they had taken the ballot boxes around the market) and,

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second, that they would maintain an office at the market that would intervene in disputes, help traders encountering problems, and keep a record of all conflicts. But these activities ended in less than a year. By May 1998, the organization had been renamed Lü Xiong Zhonghua Zongshanghui (General Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Hungary) and was busy hosting banquets for a visiting delegation of the Qiaolian (Ouhua Shibao 1998). In 2000, Ye Jianxin turned most traders against him by siding with the market’s owner in a rent dispute. In 1998, two vice-presidents of the Fujian tongxianghui, along with another Fujianese, a man from Zhejiang and one from Shandong, founded the Xiongyali Huaqiao Huaren Shetuan Lianhezonghui (General Federation of Chinese Organizations in Hungary). In that year, Zhang Manxin became chairman of EFCO, leaving HCA in the hands of Zhou Yongping. As Zhou carried much less weight than Zhang did, challenges to HCA became bolder. Thus, HCA’s top leaders were absent from the high-profile San Qing Huodong Weiyuanhui (Triple Celebration Committee), which organized celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the PRC and of diplomatic relations between the PRC and Hungary, as well as of the Macao handover, in 1999. The celebrations included an open-air show in Budapest’s central Heroes Square and then a march on to the Chinese embassy. This committee, too, was headed by a vice-president of the Fujian tongxianghui. As the standoff between HCA and its rivals became less topical, who joined which organization became increasingly a matter of personal acquaintanceships and favours. The proliferation of presidents, executive vice-presidents, secretaries-general and board members devalued these titles, but they still carried a certain prestige, especially back in China. In addition, it gave wider opportunities to forge useful connections. For example, in 2001, leaders of the General Federation participated in the EFCO congress in Vienna, taking the opportunity to visit Chinese associations in several Western European countries; attended trade and investment fairs in Harbin, Hangzhou, and Chengdu; sent a ‘trade delegation’ to the USA; and organized a Spring Festival banquet with embassy officials in attendance (General Federation 2001). While displays of ‘patriotism’ and contacts with China have accounted for most of the activities of Chinese organizations in Hungary, it has understandably been their attempts to intervene in solving migrants’ problems that attracted the attention of the latter. Since 1992, the Chinese economy in Hungary has revolved around the Four Tigers Market, and though additional spaces have been opened up beyond the original market’s territory, stall rents and other conditions at the original market impact the entire ethnic economy. As a result, disputes at the market have been the focal points of conflict between Chinese and locals and for a long time the only occasions on which Chinese protested against their treatment. HCA has periodically backed Chinese traders’ complaints against the management of the market, mainly those of an economic nature such as

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relating to rents and sizes of stalls, but occasionally also those about the brutality of security guards. In 1993, HCA opened its own market – shares in which were owned by leaders of the association – but it failed to attract a sufficient number of traders and was forced to close after only two months as the district government claimed it violated zoning regulations (Nyíri 1999: 107). In 1994, in response to harassment of Chinese traders, HCA initiated the forming of a joint commission that included representatives of the management and of the Chinese and was headed by Zhang Manxin. Later, it made the management withdraw a demand that Chinese who had until then rented their stalls must now purchase them. In 1995, HCA initiated talks with customs officials in which its leaders tried unsuccessfully to renegotiate new, higher customs duties on Chinese goods (Nyíri 1999: 99). In return for all these efforts, HCA attempted to collect fees from the traders (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). By 2000, when another rent dispute arose, HCA’s influence had declined because of Zhang Manxin’s departure. HCA President Cheng Shilin and Liu Wenjian, president of the General Federation of Chinese Organizations in Hungary, appointed themselves vice-heads of a ‘joint negotiating delegation of Chinese and Vietnamese merchants’ that went to see the management. The chairman was Vietnamese, and the team included representatives of traders from other ethnic groups, namely Turks and Afghans (Lianhe Kuaibao 2000). After what the General Federation claimed were month-long talks, they reached a compromise, agreeing on a 25 per cent rent rise. The General Federation also claimed credit for similar protests at a smaller market and for getting, ‘with support from the Chinese Embassy in Hungary’, legal help for traders beaten up by police (General Federation 2001). The Chinese Autonomy of the Market (Shichang Huashang Zizhihui), born out of the Chinese part of the negotiating committee, rapidly assumed its place amidst the paper organizations. Then, in July 2001, when a Hungarian news agency released a report about alleged body-snatching by Chinese criminal groups who supposedly re-used the papers of their compatriots to smuggle in immigrants, a new committee sprang up to protest the reports, called Committee to Protect the Lawful Rights and Interests of Chinese in Hungary (Weihu Lü Xiong Huaren Hefa Quanli Weiyuanhui). This ad hoc body became the most inclusive Chinese organization in Hungary to date. It comprised most of the Chinese members of the previous committee, but most organization leaders and other well-known Chinese personalities joined it. In addition, it recruited a spokesman, a former student, who spoke good Hungarian and successfully argued against the accusations on television, and several Hungarian advisors, including a former ambassador (Preparatory Committee 2001). The committee scored a partial victory in that the news agency that had released the report agreed to apologize for hurting anyone’s feelings, though stopping short of actually publishing the apology. The committee released another statement in 2002, when the business of Chinese restaurants was negatively affected by the discovery of a drug in

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frozen chickens originating in Thailand and a subsequent ban on meat imports from China. It appears that the activities of Chinese organizations in other Eastern European countries are similar to those in Hungary. For example, in Bucharest, the Fujian and Henan tongxianghui (established 1994) and the Association of Chinese Merchants – dominated by migrants from Wenzhou – organized a protest against the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. 18 The Moscow Chinese Association (Mosike Huaren Huaqiao Lianhehui, also founded 1994) organized a silent protest in front of the American embassy. ‘Three thousand people turned up, we had flag-burning, some people threw eggs, and we sat there for three days’, says Hong Ye, the organization’s chairman.19 In both instances, organizers said the demonstrations had been preceded by consultations with the Chinese embassy, and stressed that international and Chinese media had reported on them. Reflecting the shifting priorities of Chinese authorities’ ‘overseas Chinese work’, in the 2000s, most emphasis has been on activities opposing Taiwan’s independence and promoting unity and, increasingly, on promoting Chinese-language education. The organizations’ ‘principles’ (zongze, zongzhi) invariably include ‘patriotism’ (vis à vis China and the home area) and other general principles such as ‘unity’. They have charters that establish membership regulations, rights and responsibilities of the general assembly and of officers, but these charters, as Li Minghuan notes, are merely to satisfy local registration requirements and are not adhered to (Li Minghuan 1995: 220ff). They do not keep accurate membership lists, but membership often requires paying considerable fees, and the higher the membership level, the higher the fee. Therefore formal membership, which ranges from the dozens to the hundreds, is not a good indicator of the influence of the organizations. Their activities – mainly those celebrating major festivals – draw significant numbers of those they claim to represent. Through these events and the media, their identity construction has some impact outside the elites. Organizations from Hungary, Russia and Romania participate in the work of EFCO. In addition, many organizations represent themselves at various other international fora of Chinese organizations. Hong Ye, secretarygeneral of the Moscow Chinese Association (Mosike Huaqiao Huaren Lianhehui), a board member (lishi) of EFCO and overseas member Harbin Overseas Exchange Commission, is also executive secretary-general of the World Federation of Chinese Associations (Shijie Huaqiao Huaren Shetuan Lianyihui). Hong says creating the federation, which meets every one or two years, was the Qiaoban’s idea: it brought together delegates from all over the world to form it at a congress in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, in 1997.20 An organization leader may easily go to China two, three, or more times a year to attend meetings of organization leaders, some of which can attract thousands of participants and have become important ad hoc clearinghouses of merchandise, business information, and capital at which contacts are forged and investment decisions made. Explaining why he was attending the World

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Fujianese Fellowship Conference, held in Quanzhou on 5–7 September 1999, Su Guoli, Chairman of the Fujian association in the Czech Republic, said: We want to liaise with many other organizations. We introduce Chinese products and investment [opportunities] to Czech businesses and vice versa. We introduce Hong Kong entrepreneurs to Europe, or entrepreneurs from the North, not limited to Fujian. What matters is that they are from China. Chinese investors are interested in building roads and electronics plants in the Czech Republic. Rich business visitors from Hong Kong go to Europe thanks to my introduction. Now we will use the contacts we made at this congress to spread information about investment in the Czech Republic to Singapore, Japan, the US, and so on[I1].21 The congress had 2,638 delegates (Quanzhou Wanbao 1999a).22 While – owing to historical emigration to these places – most of them came from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe was represented by the Fujian tongxianghui of Czech Republic, Romania, and Hungary. (Meanwhile, from Western Europe, only Italy and France sent delegations.) The organizing committee of the congress consisted of provincial government and party leaders and was chaired by vice-governor Wang Yifu. Various administrative regions of Fujian organized seminars during the congress to promote investment in their jurisdictions. While the rhetoric of the congress celebrated fellowship and patriotism – according to one newspaper, ‘participants expressed their wish to contribute further to the great enterprise of unifying the motherland and to the construction of the homeland’ (Quanzhou Wanbao 1999b) – for participants from Europe, it was essentially a venue to mill around in hotel lobbies and make potentially useful contacts with officials and businessmen from everywhere. The event was scheduled so as to precede the popular Xiamen International Trade Fair. Su Guoli, President of the Fujian tongxianghui in the Czech Republic, said: ‘We will use the contacts we made at this congress to spread information about investment in the Czech Republic to Singapore, Japan, the USA, etc.’ Yeung Pak Kan, the president of the Fuzhou Ten Counties Hong Kong Association told us that he only met Fujianese who live in Europe through world associations and international meetings. ‘If people living in those countries don’t visit back home, we won’t know about them.’ Yeung was impressed with Zheng Siyong, the president of the Romanian Fujian tongxianghui, whom he met in Quanzhou for the first time: ‘He has done very well with shoes; he also has a plant in Fuzhou.’23 It appeared that the recommendation of the officials present played a role in forming an opinion of a potential business partner. People inducted in the official pantheon of ‘overseas Chinese leaders’, either by having been given honorary positions in the PRC or by being mentioned as such by officials or in the press, were often better known to participants than migrants with some business success from their own county, indicating that the network

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brokered by officials was becoming a more important source of information than the native-place/kin network. For example, most of my interviewees at the congress knew about the chairman of the Fujian tongxianghui in Hungary (about whom the provincial newspaper Fujian Qiaobao has reported) and about Guo Jiadi, its honorary chairman who was also member of the Fujian Province People’s Political Consultative Conference. At the same time, they did not know about Chen Qi from Fuzhou or He Jiajin or Weng Ruilong from Fuqing. Both He and especially Weng are successful businessmen very well-known and influential among Fujianese in London and Moscow respectively, but they and Chen all head tongxianghui that had recently formed and whose activities had not yet been reported in the media or attended by officials. Meetings such as this structure the transnational social space of the ‘new migrant’ community, creating a critical density of encounters at which the officially supported discourse is recycled to significant numbers of people. (On some occasions, explicit political instruction is also given. Thus, an official of the Hungarian Chinese Women’s Association related that when she attended the official celebrations of the PRC’s state holiday in Peking on 1 October 1999, the delegates were privately told by officials that ‘overseas compatriots should promote the reunification of the fatherland because they are no longer Communist Party members, so they represent a middle ground’. They should also use every occasion to speak out against then ROC President Lee Teng-hui and against the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. 24 ) The discourse is then further rehearsed and spread through the visits of delegations and the media (Nyíri 2001). Organizations in different countries often send delegations to attend each other’s founding meetings or other major celebrations, or at least send congratulatory letters and telegrams that are read out aloud at the congress. (The EFCO congress in Budapest received such letters from organizations in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Réunion, and Cambodia; see Mou and Liu 1998.) In Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Russia, many organization leaders, especially if they share a native place, know each other from before the organizations were established, or even have served in an organization in one country before moving to the other. This is a further step in the transnationalization of the organizational structure, suggesting that the organizations in various places have a common standard, and their functionaries are members of a single apparat. The Qiaoban at provincial level and below also serves as a ‘switchboard’ between organizations, who until recently did not have enough personal contacts with each other to know whom they should invite. Therefore, such mediation by the Qiaoban serves as a ‘matchmaking service’, but it also makes sure that those at odds with the PRC authorities are left out of the network. Leaders of Chinese organizations in Eastern Europe are mostly middleaged, in their thirties, forties or early fifties. The type of octogenarian patriarchs characteristic of ‘traditional’ overseas Chinese organizations is absent, if only because of the short history of Chinese in Eastern Europe. The fact

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that economic polarization among Chinese in Eastern Europe is less pronounced than in most other regions, with the majority being proprietors of their own businesses, has probably contributed to the fact that political connections to the PRC, rather than individual wealth, has become the decisive factor in organizational leadership. On the other hand, due to the fact that these migrants have maintained the cultural capital they had accumulated in China before their departure, wealth accumulated abroad is not the only way to forging such ties. Finally, the fact that Paul Kwok, a Hong Kong Chinese, became the first president of an organization that consisted of mainland Chinese, attests to the diminishing importance of traditional divides in the new Chinese transnational community. A differently oriented, but no less vibrant transnationalism is manifested by Christian churches. There are Chinese Christian congregations in Budapest, Moscow, Bucharest, Belgrade and Prague, with five in Budapest alone. While each of them attract from a few dozen to 200 members or so – far fewer than the Buddhist temples that have also been set up as part of Taiwanor mainland-based transnational networks – they are noteworthy for having created functioning social networks available to members, rather than only leaders like the transnational networks or secular organizations. They are ministered to by ethnic Chinese missionaries sent by Chinese evangelical Christian organizations based in the UK or the USA; by contrast, they have little contact with local churches. They transmit an identity that is based on a mixture of a global evangelical, messianic consciousness and ethnic exclusivism, spelled out sometimes in the formulation that the Chinese are the new chosen people. This Christian network is heavily anchored in the institutions and values of American fundamentalism on one side and in similar institutions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere on the Pacific Rim on the other. Through the daily interaction of members, through small prayer groups and through frequent visits by mission teams, the social networks forged by these churches have created business ties and even migratory pathways as some Chinese move to the USA with their help, but they do not take up local concerns any more than secular organizations do (Nyíri 2003a). In sum, the activities of Chinese organizations can be said to take place more on a transnational arena than in a particular country of residence. As Moore and Tubilewicz (2001) write, they are content to remain ‘perfect strangers’. Yet in daily life, Chinese have intense contacts with local populations. And, as manifest in the quotes earlier, the organizations are widely discredited as irrelevant and serving primarily the interests of their leaderships in building connections in China. Even though their leaders may have overtaken some of the roles of the patron-type community leaders of ‘traditional’ organizations who bankroll cultural and charitable activities, their acting in those roles is not credible, and their main source of legitimation is personal contacts with PRC authorities. Because many rival leaders can have such contacts, the influence of such leaders can be short-lived.

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The degree to which the transnational identity of the organizations is internalized by non-elite migrants is therefore questionable. Nonetheless, there are elements of transnational politics that enjoy clear support despite going against the grain of the traditional (post-Second World War) logic of nation-state sovereignty. Thus, HCA’s Zhang Manxin has been criticized, among many other things, for boasting of his ties to the State Security Bureau in China and claiming that those that oppose him will have to face Chinese police (Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots 1998). Given that HCA has previously accused its adversaries of being ‘anti-party’ (Ying 1995), when Chinese police, in the framework of Interpol cooperation, did arrive in Hungary in April 1999 and placed an announcement in the local Chinese press calling on Chinese in Hungary to denounce suspected criminals directly to them, one had reasons to fear that Zhang’s personal adversaries could be on the hit list. Yet when I expressed such reservations to the reporter of a Hungarian newspaper (B.R.-L.L.K. 1999), I was angrily denounced as ‘antiChinese’ by one of those very adversaries. This could be seen as merely another instance of political opportunism but, in the face of Hungarian police inefficiency or unwillingness to tackle crime among the Chinese, the sentiment that their policing should be left to China appears to be widely shared. Indeed, the Hungarian Wenzhou Foundation, a native-place organization, has called on China to send a permanent police force to Hungary (OuYa Xinwenbao 2001). Because of the mobility of the Chinese population in the region, the diversity of places of origin, largely shared backgrounds, migration history, and occupations, and a Mandarin lingua franca, Chinese in Eastern Europe are not divided into clearly discerned dialectal or subethnic communities in the same way as Chinese in Southeast Asia, North America, or even Western Europe have been. As suggested above, tongxianghui are organized not to represent the particular interests of a native-place group but to forge connections with the corresponding territorial administrations in China. This is not to say that native place is not an important factor in forging business ties or friendships, particularly in the case of migrants from the Wenzhou area, from certain areas of Fujian, or ethnic Koreans from Yanbian, who have built rapidly growing migration chains. In some situations, place of origin can be operationalized to distance oneself from a group considered delinquent, such as Fujianese (and, in particular, migrants from Fuqing).25 Sometimes, when in a particular location or in a certain occupation the demographic balance shifts in favour of one group, a sense of community can emerge, such as among migrants from Fuqing in Szeged, Hungary, or ethnic Koreans from Yanbian at the Moscow market. Yet generally, the dividing lines are fluid, and as often as not are presented in terms not of place of origin but, more generally, of northerners versus southerners, or, more commonly, of (educated) urbanites versus rural ‘peasants’.

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Chinese media Early in the history of recent Chinese migration to Eastern Europe, Budapest became the main entrepôt not only of trade but also of information in the region. (Several Chinese newspapers have also appeared in Moscow, including the dailies Lusens/Luxun Cankao, founded 1996, and Mosike Wanbao, 1995.) Driven by higher education levels as well as greater access to news and multimedia, the growth of media run by Chinese migrants has been much more rapid than in earlier periods of migration. Newspapers have proliferated in numbers quite out of proportion with the Chinese population, especially in comparison with Western European countries. By the time the first Chinese newspaper was launched in Italy, Hungary already had several. The National Association of Hungarian Journalists had nearly twenty Chinese members in 2002, the largest number of any foreign nationality. They have never participated in the association’s life or used it to network with Hungarian journalists, their purpose in joining apparently being to gain more standing in the eyes of Chinese readers. Nonetheless, in 2001, the editors of two Chinese papers filed complaints of unethical behaviour against each other with the Ethical Commission of the association, accusing each other of slander. As both were members of the association, the commission investigated the complaints, even though the incriminated articles were, of course, in Chinese. The first attempt to launch a newspaper took place in 1991 but stopped after three issues. In 1993, the Hungarian Chinese Association began publishing a handwritten – later text-edited – and photocopied bulletin, Huikan, initially in three hundred copies. The first newspaper, Ouzhou Daobao (Europe’s Way Weekly), was launched in 1994, and in the same year HCA replaced Huikan with the weekly Ouzhou zhi Sheng (Voice of Europe). By 1997, there were six weeklies; by 2000, ten, around which their number has remained since. At any given time, some of the papers published are ephemeral ventures that last only a few issues, while around six have become stable ventures. The first Chinese daily, Mei Ri Guancha (Daily Observing) was launched in 2001. A Chinese magazine, Huaye (Career) survived only a few issues in 1999. Several of the editors have worked as professional journalists in China. The founder of Ouzhou Daobao had been a journalist at the Mingxi County CCP Propaganda Department in Fujian. Owners of other newspapers (Ouzhou zhi Sheng, Lianhe Shangbao) have invited editors from China. One of them had worked for Hua Sheng Bao, the Qiaolian newspaper for overseas Chinese, another for Ningxia Ribao, the official daily of the Ningxia Autonomous Region’s Party committee. While not disclosing circulation figures, most of the papers claim distribution all over Eastern Europe, and some also in Western Europe, America, or China. It is likely that much of the distribution consists of complimentary issues being sent to businesses and government officials within the network

124 Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia of the editor or publisher. Before Chinese papers were established in neighbouring countries, such as Romania and Yugoslavia, Chinese traders travelling from there to Hungary would take back papers with them. Recognizing this, Lianhe Shangbao for a while devoted a page to Chinese in Yugoslavia and carried advertisements of Chinese businesses there. Zhonghua Shibao (China Times Journal ), by arrangement with the Qingtian tongxianghui in Austria, prints a special Austrian edition, of which it sells several hundred copies. In Hungary itself, the papers are sold at a few centrally located newsstands and at railway stations and Chinese grocery shops (their price in 2002 was around 60 US cents), but most of them appear to be distributed free of charge through Chinese restaurants. All papers carry a large number of advertisements, mainly by Chinese businesses but occasionally by Hungarian businesses such as casinos or telephone card companies. Due to the low costs of publication – most of the content is taken off the Internet or contributed by freelancers, and most papers are family operations with only an occasional employee – income from advertising can apparently keep many of them modestly profitable. In 2000, Liu Wenjian, who founded Ouzhou Luntan (Europe’s Tribune Weekly) the previous year, said that his paper made US $2,000–3,000 a month. But direct income is often secondary to indirect benefits a newspaper can generate. In Liu’s words: ‘A newspaper is good [because] it allows me to make use of the fact that I can write well; I can express my opinion; at the same time, I can develop a business and be in touch with friends.’26 It is because newspapers serve as auxiliaries to other business or organizational ventures and increase the visibility of their publishers and editors that so many of them remain in such a small market. All publishers also engage in other business. The publisher of Budapeisi Zhoubao (Budapest Weekly), for example, is a restaurant owner, while Shijie Qiaobao (The World Press) was published by the Asia Center. Most newspapers also double as ‘service companies’ that provide assistance with visas, residence permits, real estate, etc. A newspaper makes such businesses, which have to do with information, appear more credible, and it attracts callers and potential customers. Several newspapers are, or have at some stage been, affiliated with organizations. Apart from Ouzhou zhi Sheng, Qiyejia and later Lianhe Shangbao have been associated with HCA through its publisher Zhou Yongping, who served as HCA’s chairman. Ouzhou Daobao has featured the Association for the Promotion of Chinese-Hungarian Friendship on its masthead as publisher, while Ouzhou Luntan put the General Federation of Chinese Organizations in Hungary, of which Liu Wenjian is president, on the masthead. In the clashes between the organizations in the mid-1990s, these papers carried the messages of one side or the other. Now-defunct Ouzhou zhi Sheng, in particular, was nicknamed ‘the Hungarian People’s Daily’ by local Chinese for its solemn reports of both CCP and HCA activities. While it appears that most Chinese in Hungary regularly read several local Chinese papers, they generally dismiss them as low-quality, pointing out that

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they lack original content. Reliance on the same pool of Internet articles results in a uniformity of content and style. Each paper has a section of national news from China. Political commentary on China generally strictly conforms to the PRC government’s line, particularly on the subjects of Taiwan and the USA, although occasionally, the papers publish analysis representing a more Taiwan-friendly or independent point of view on issues such as the Chinese economy, corruption, or power struggles within the Communist Party. Several papers have pages of ‘homeland news’ devoted to Fujian and Zhejiang and pages for children and teenagers with dating advice, pop music and video game news. All have pages of Hungarian and international news; pages devoted to overseas Chinese in the world; sports and gossip pages (the later concerned mainly with Hong Kong stars, as well as juicy ‘true stories’ involving sex and crime); pages of health and sex advice illustrated with soft-core pornographic photos; and instalments of such books as Shanghai Baby or The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Finally, there are pages of original fiction or ‘true stories’ written by local Chinese, which range from travel notes about Hungary or another European country to ‘notes from prison’ and poetry. Much of this is reminiscent of tabloid press in the PRC. The layout of the papers, including the wording and positioning of and choice of fonts for titles and subtitles or the choice of photos, is also remarkably similar. Only Xin Daobao (New Herald, www.xindb.com) has a distinctive tabloid layout, with colourful covers featuring full-size photos of Hong Kong film stars. With its ‘lifestyle’ positioning, including pages on travel and fashion, ‘adult pages’, and selected entertainment listings for Hungary, and such features as ‘Four Fashionable Lifestyles for 2000’ (ranging from ‘Internet + Workout’ to ‘Single and Wise;’ Xin Daobao 2000), Xin Daobao targets a more leisure-oriented readership, presumably the younger, wealthier, and/or better educated. The papers share style, content, and layout not only among themselves but also with a corpus of transnational Chinese media of which they are part. These media engage in a triumphalist construction of a ‘global Chinese’ identity with shared values, raising cultural Chineseness and transnational modernity in importance above the immediate environment the reader happens to be in. This global orientation becomes obvious from the titles of the papers, most of which emphasize Chineseness, Europeanness/globality, or both: Voice of Europe, Europe’s Way Weekly, China Times Weekly, OuYa Xinwenbao (European-Chinese News Weekly), The World Press, European Chinese Forum. (It is noteworthy that most papers also carry English titles, and one also has running heads in English, intended not for an Englishlanguage readership but to symbolize the global and modern nature of the paper.) On the one hand, the papers reproduce the discourse of Chineseness of the PRC, focusing on cultural heritage and ‘Chinese virtues’. On the other, pages on ‘Chinese worldwide’ offer fiction and reporting that frequently depict the dynamic, resourceful, transnational Chinese businessman, portray

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the experiences of Chinese in their countries of residence in a humorous way, or report on atrocities committed against Chinese (these can range from the rapes and murder of ethnic Chinese residents in Indonesia to the spying case of Wen Ho Lee, the Chinese-American physicist). A periodical entitled Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide (Shijie Huaren Mingrenlu), published for a while by the World Chinese Press in Budapest, was expressly conceived with a ‘global Chinese’ positioning. The magazine carried the slogan ‘Saluting the Descendants of the Dragon, saluting the Chinese race’ and was formatted as a society magazine. It contained interviews with personalities ranging from the ethnic Chinese governorgeneral of Canada through overseas Chinese businessmen and artists to party officials and generals in the PRC; the one thing most of them had in common is photos with high PRC officials as well as local dignitaries (preferably presidents). Apart from advertisements of luxury hotels in Budapest and the address on the masthead, there was no indication that the magazine had anything to do with Hungary. It was in Chinese, with an editorial in English, and carried a price tag in US dollars, German marks, and Chinese yuan. As we have seen above, the papers are two-way communication tools in transnational politics: they are used not only to convey messages from China to the diaspora but also vice versa. State-run media in China regularly pick up stories from these publications, because they are written in the same style and sometimes by the same people as their own. This allows aspiring local elites accumulate social capital in China by showing themselves as successful and patriotic. Apart from local papers, another important medium for Chinese in Eastern Europe is satellite television. In the mid-1990s, Channel 4 of state-run China Central Television (CCTV-4), as well as commercial stations such as Phoenix and Star TV, began broadcasting to Europe via satellite. By the end of the decade, nearly all Chinese that I spoke to in Hungary regularly watched CCTV: Chinese newspapers published programmes of CCTV and Chinese Channel, the first Chinese satellite station broadcasting specifically for Europe;27 and Asia Center, offering shop space for rent, specifically mentioned the availability of CCTV and Phoenix in its advertising. These television channels, too, with their flexible ‘global Chinese’ programming, impress upon viewers the discourse of Chinese transnationalism and can sometimes have considerable mobilizing effect. For example, CCTV news broadcasts conveying the PRC leadership’s condemnation of the bombing of their embassy in Belgrade in 1999 likely played a role in the ensuing demonstrations by Chinese across Eastern Europe.

Homeland politics The above sections, on organizational life and the media, have highlighted the importance of homeland politics for Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe.

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This is closely related to the economic dependence of most Chinese businesses in Hungary on business with the PRC for merchandise, cash, and market information on capital, goods, and business information. Due to the heavy presence of the state in the Chinese economy as both owner and regulator, this is in turn strongly influenced by relations with Chinese authorities. Since 1978, Chinese leaders have repeatedly reaffirmed that they see overseas Chinese as an important force of China’s ‘socialist modernization’ and in ‘developing international friendship’ (see Deng 1990, Jiang 1999, Hu 2004, quoted in Cheng 2005: 19); in other words, as sources or conduits of investment, technological innovation, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy. In return, they have made strenuous efforts to gain the trust of previously alienated overseas Chinese, including a sharp discursive shift from treating them as traitors to emphasizing their achievements and contributions to both China and their countries of residence (Nyíri 2001). In the 1990s and 2000s, putting the money, skills, and human networks of recent migrants to the use of ‘homeland development’ has been an increasingly clear priority of ‘overseas Chinese work’. As Zhuang Guotu, a senior scholar of overseas Chinese in the PRC who is also involved in various overseas Chinese affairs organs and can be seen as representing the official point of view, writes, ‘two . . . changes . . . have attracted the attention of the Chinese government from 1978 onward. One is the Overseas Chinese wealth, and the other is the new Chinese emigrants’ (Zhuang 2000: 45). New migrants are recognized as a highly useful resource for economic construction in China, for attracting foreign investors and business partners, and for providing leadership to overseas Chinese communities in Japan, the USA, and Europe, which are judged as losing touch with the homeland and Chinese culture. This approach is reflected in a series of publications in the overseas Chinese studies journals Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu and Bagui Qiaoshi as well as other periodicals by officials of the Returned Overseas Chinese Association (Qiaolian) and the Overseas Exchange Commission (the ‘NGO’ that duplicates the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, or Qiaoban) and interviews with them (Zhongguo Xinwen 1999; Cheng Xi 1999ab; Tan Tianxing 1997; Zhu Huiling 1995; Shanghai New Migrants Research Project Team 1997). The Chinese government has been building its contacts with new migrants and overseas Chinese through a strategy known as ‘going out and inviting in’ (zouchuqu – yinjinlai), i.e. sending delegations overseas and inviting migrants to visit China. The legitimacy of both of these forms of interaction relies on the participation of migrant organizations. As, in compliance with the policy of the national Federation of Overseas Chinese, an increasing number of prefectures, counties, and even villages form their own overseas Chinese associations (they now number over 3,300; see Fujian Qiaobao 2004a), these in turn search for and encourage the formation of migrant organizations based on the locality of origin. At the same time, professionals to whom the idea of a rural homeland does not appeal are encouraged to set up alumni and professional organizations (Zhuang 2000: 48–9). These

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associations can then be interpellated by overseas Chinese affairs bodies when they wish to strengthen contacts with migrants in a particular foreign country for diplomatic or economic purposes, or simply to organize a visit. Furthermore, the authorities encourage the formation of global federations comprising Chinese associations of a particular nature in different countries, ranging from the World Fu Tsing Federation (based on Fuqing County as place of origin) to the World Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the World Association of Peking University Alumni. The congresses of these organizations are elaborate affairs attracting thousands of people, and they serve as occasions for interaction with Chinese officials. In addition, there are a few organizations created with a clear domestic political goal, notably the Associations for the Support of Peaceful Reunification set up across the world in the early 2000s in response to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau’s policy to put the support of Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland at the centre of its priorities and with support from the United Front Department of the CCP (the Party organ that supervises overseas Chinese affairs). On the other hand, migrant ‘leaders’ such as Zhang Manxin and Guo Jiadi have received official posts in the People’s Political Consultative Conferences. All of this has created a strong transnational political arena and a public discourse within which political claims, if any, are articulated in the framework of the homeland rather than that of the place of residence. Thus, Chinese organizations in Hungary have called on the Chinese embassy and on Chinese police organs to protect their rights and safety, and have accused each other of being unpatriotic. On the other hand, when APCHF called for the recognition of Chinese as a national minority within the framework of Hungarian laws, its suggestion met with widespread incomprehension among other organizations and in the Chinese-language press.

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8

Finding a place in Eastern Europe?

Not only political and economic activities but also everyday lives of many Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe are shaped by transnationalism. Most travel to China for business and to visit family members at least once a year, and the wealthier ones as often as once a month. Organization leaders also travel to China or to other places up to several times a year for native-place congresses, official celebrations, and the like. They are in frequent, either daily or weekly, contact with relatives, friends, and business partners in China and elsewhere by telephone, fax, and e-mail. International telephone calling cards with Chinese instructions are marketed to Chinese in Hungary both by Chinese and non-Chinese companies, who recognize their potential as consumers. Young Chinese are frequent visitors to both Chinese and English Internet chatrooms. Yet all of this does not mean that Chinese in Eastern Europe are isolated from their local environments. On the contrary, their connections to it are stronger than those of earlier migrants. Because of the nature of their business, they are in constant touch with locals as customers, business partners, employees (drivers, saleswomen, secretaries, waiters, managers), service providers (accountants, interpreters, lawyers, agents who help with immigration procedures) as well as neighbours. Often there is a special relationship between the Chinese family and the nanny or foster family taking care of their child. The nanny or the secretary would also often be the person to keep in touch with the child’s school, with the doctor, or other institutions. Like other (particularly non-Western) foreigners, Chinese in Eastern Europe face informal discrimination that ranges from selective checks and extortion by police, ticket checking personnel in public transport, customs and public grounds inspectors, to the refusal of landlords to rent them flats and rude treatment in shops. This is most pronounced in Russia, where a strong sense of a need for protection has kept Chinese in ethnic hostels for a long time. An 1998 tax police raid on one of these, Kodun, which resulted in the ‘confiscation’ of so much cash (US $720,000 according to Russian officials) and merchandise (worth US $10 million) whose origin the merchants ‘were not able to document’, was so brutal that it, unusually, provoked a protest from the Chinese embassy and went down in official overseas Chinese history as an ‘incident’ (Lin 1999). In light of this, it is not surprising that Chinese migrants often prefer to rely on local proxies in dealing with local institutions.

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This means that most Chinese build a relationship of trust, involving spending some leisure time together, with at least one local. On the other hand, despite the fact that some Chinese children grow up bilingual or never learn to write Chinese, their families expect them to continue living in a transnational space or to move on to the West for education and better jobs. What they are not expected to do is end up in Hungary. Older members of this generation are now of college age, and while many identify with their parents’ goals, an increasing number of them is studying in Hungarian universities. Mixed marriages and life partnerships between Chinese and Hungarians are not uncommon, particularly between the more disenfranchised of both groups. Hungarian spouses or partners tend to come from the circle of employees or service providers who learn to speak some Chinese. Since Chinese, particularly in rural areas, often employ Gypsies or Romanians because they accept lower wages or absence of legal work contracts, marriages between these groups occur as well. At the same time, many Chinese share the majority society’s prejudice toward Gypsies, and there has been some tension between Gypsy and Chinese children in schools with large numbers of both. By contrast, while Chinese often have acquaintances from other ethnic groups doing business at or around the market such as Arabs, Israelis, and Vietnamese in Hungary, or Azeris in Russia, personal relationships with these groups are rare.

Political and social incorporation State policy towards Chinese, and indeed other non-European, migrants displays considerable differences across Eastern Europe. Most of the countries have adopted a tacit policy of containment towards Chinese immigration, constructing hurdles in the way of obtaining visas, residence permits, citizenship, and property, but not denying them altogether. The Czech Republic is the only state in the region that has set up a task force to deal with the integration of immigrants; other countries continue to treat them as merely a policing problem. Although a number of these countries, particularly those that have joined the European Union, have laws and policies to protect ethnic minorities and to combat discrimination, these have not been extended to migrants, most of whom are not citizens. Thus, migrants fall in the crack between these laws, which deal with ‘native’ minorities, and programmes that target the welfare and integration of refugees (Nyíri 2003b). Russia stands out among Eastern European countries as the state with a comprehensive migration policy, designed primarily to deal with ethnic Russian migrants from the former USSR, but this policy operates in parallel to an ambitious, but disjointed and dysfunctional, legislative framework. The actual status of foreigners is largely defined by federal and regional regulations on entry, entrepreneurship, labour, and household registration outside the purview of these laws. These local policies, whether in Moscow or the Far East, are laxly enforced, but reflect a strongly negative attitude to Chinese migrants that is often expressed by local politicians. Long-term residence

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permits are extremely difficult to obtain. In Moscow, according to Hong Ye, Chairman of the Moscow Chinese Association, only seventy families had long-term residency at the turn of the millennium. The situation is no more favourable in the Far East, where politicians regularly raise alarm about Chinese ‘demographic expansion’. Thus, the powerful former governor of the Maritime Province, Yevgenii Nazdratenko, has prophesied that migration will turn ‘Vladivostok into a suburb of Harbin’. Similarly, it is impossible for Chinese or other foreign migrants to own real estate, a rule whose popularity is repeatedly confirmed in opinion polls. In fact, in European Russia, Chinese traders have largely confined themselves to Chinese-run hostels, both for safety and convenience, and perhaps due to difficulties even in renting housing. Yet these hostels, too, have been subject to attacks. After the first outbreak of SARS in 2003, Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov announced on 10 June that city authorities have closed down about nineteen dormitories occupied by citizens of China and Vietnam because they were ‘incubators of infection’. Luzhkov noted that efforts to prevent the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have led to the expulsion of 600 illegal immigrants from Vietnam and China. Earlier in the month, the head of the Moscow police, Vladimir Pronin, reported that some 500 citizens of China and Vietnam have been deported from the capital in order to prevent the spread of SARS (RFE/RL Newsline, 4 and 12 June 2003). While outbreaks of SARS and bird flu have provoked reactions associating Chinese migrants with a threat to public health in other Eastern and Western European countries, none of them have taken the overt and active form they did in Moscow. Indeed, while bullying by police and harassment by tax and customs authorities, frequently not without cause, but often taking on intimidating, humiliating and discriminatory forms, is generally present throughout Eastern Europe, in Russia and especially in its Far Eastern region, such actions are discursively backed by a revived a Yellow Peril discourse. In turn, Chinese migrants are perceived not just as a threat to public order and economic security, but also as a menace to the environment – through indiscriminate logging and poaching of everything from ginseng to sea cucumber, snow leopards and deer antlers – and to the bodily and spiritual health of Russia, and ultimately as an instrument of a ‘demographic expansion’ intended to ‘peacefully reoccupy’ the region (Lomanov 2005). Invoking hugely exaggerated figures on migration, these discourses conjure up horror images of Russian villages collapsing into drunken stupor and disappearing, their places taken by industrious Chinese farmers. As an aide to the governor of Altai Province parodistically put this position to me, ‘The Chinese will come, they will take our women, they work a lot and don’t drink. We don’t work and drink a lot.’1 The caricature he drew may not have been that exaggerated. In the Altai region, despite repeated government declarations on both sides, the construction of a road between Russia and China has repeatedly faltered over local opposition. As the manager of a tourist camp on Lake Teletskoe, near the Chinese border, said to me, ‘Only the mountains save us’ from the Chinese.2 A member of the Russian Duma ran for governor of Irkutsk in 1997 on a ticket of stopping ‘Chinese expansion’ and ‘creating unbearable conditions for foreigners’ (Diatlov 1999a: 93).

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Outside the Far East and Eastern Siberia, Chinese have rarely been in the focus of xenophobic politicians, and outside Moscow and St Petersburg, they have not been subjected to politically motivated violence. A small nationalistic party in Hungary, Jobbik, campaigned for the restriction of Chinese immigration in 2004, and in the 2006 election campaign, the major (nationalist) opposition party picked up the theme, one of its candidates accusing the government of wanting to bring in ‘Chinese guest workers’ to the detriment of Hungarian jobs (Ungár 2006), and the party’s leader adding that a government that planned the massive importation of Asians did ‘not deserve our respect’ (Csuhaj 2007). Mainly, however, sentiment against Chinese migrants has been fuelled by the media, the manufacturing lobby, and small merchants. In 2004, seventy Hungarian shopkeepers in the town of Mohács petitioned the mayor to ‘expel’ the town’s eleven Chinese shops, arguing that ‘often, the Chinese do not possess valid permits to remain in Hungary, work illegally, and obtain their merchandise in violation of rules’. The mayor refused to do so but claimed that ‘in the long term, the introduction of certain restrictions may foster healthier competition’ (Magyar Hírlap, 3 June 2004). In the same year, in a gesture against Chinese and Vietnamese vendors, the mayor of a Budapest district said that in granting licences for market trading, it would be justified to prioritize those that were familiar with Hungarian culture, for example by asking them to recite poetry. In the early 2000s, anti-Chinese graffiti appeared in a Budapest underpass with the texts ‘Do not buy Chinese goods’ and ‘The Chinese dragon will kill you’. The media and the manufacturing lobby, and until recently government officials, have sometimes accused ‘the Chinese’ of customs and tax fraud, smuggling and counterfeiting. The Leather, Footwear and Tanning Industry Scientific Association, for instance, claims that Chinese importers defraud the treasury of HUF 40 billion (US $200 million) in customs duties each year (Demeter 2002). Such accusations – regardless of their veracity – fit into a general media pattern of reporting on Chinese migrants in the context of reporting on crime, illegal migration, smuggling and counterfeiting (Tóth 1997, Nyíri 2005). For example, on 5 May 1997, the largest daily, Népszabadság, identified with the left wing, claimed that ‘several Chinese shops and restaurants were probably established by the triads’ (Chinese criminal groups operating in Hong Kong). In August 2001, a series of newspaper articles appeared claiming that the corpses of dead Chinese mysteriously disappear so that their documents can be re-used. Both occasions drew strong protests from Chinese organizations (e.g. Budapeisi Zhoubao, 24–31 August, p. 1). An analysis of the press in Irkutsk, a Siberian city, yielded very similar results to Tóth’s in Hungary, showing that, across the political spectrum of the papers, most of their reporting on Chinese migrants focused on criminality, illegal migration, smuggling, and the low quality of the goods they sold (Diatlov 1999a: 90). In addition, both Hungarian and Russian media routinely recycle fantastically exaggerated figures regarding the number of Chinese migrants (for example, 100,000 in Hungary and millions in Russia), sometimes citing government spokesmen who say these are ‘estimates’. Such reporting reflects, and fuels, hostility towards Chinese migrants in society. A regular survey by Sik has shown that the share of Hungarians opposed to

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Chinese immigration has been steadily rising to 81 per cent in 2007.3 A study of attitudes to various groups using the Bogardus social distance scale in 1997 showed that 53 per cent of Hungarians would oppose their close relatives marrying Chinese (Nyíri 2003b). In an ethnographic study of Hungarian and Chinese schoolchildren in Budapest, all Chinese children complained of encountering low-level (usually verbal) racist harassment in public places such as city buses (Nyíri and Paveszka 2006), while nearly all Hungarian children agreed that there were ‘too many’ Chinese in Hungary, and some accused them of profiteering, ‘parasitism’, and rudeness (Szilassy 2006). As one of them put it, ‘I am not a racist, I just hate Chinese and Negroes’ (ibid.). An immigration official reportedly advised a friend to avoid skin contact with Chinese because they tended to carry a severe and infectious skin disease (Váradi 2006: 59). Interestingly, in Russia, attitudes to Chinese seem more complicated. Although two-thirds to three-quarters of respondents in two studies conducted in the late 1990s thought that Russia faced a ‘Chinese threat’ (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 115, Larina 1999: 96), and two-thirds of those polled by Paliutina in Irkutsk thought that there were ‘too many’ Chinese in the city, only 20 per cent of those polled actually expressed a negative attitude toward them (Paliutina 1996: 343, Gelbras 2001: 150–1, Larina 1999: 95). This tallies with Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia’s finding that in Russia, the reasons provided for negative attitudes towards Chinese migrants are mostly abstract and pertain to some future danger (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 114). Perhaps for this reason, while nearly 80 per cent of Russians agree that Chinese should be allowed to trade, they almost unanimously oppose allowing them to purchase real estate or even lease land on long-term contracts (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 114, Larina 1999: 96). While a full 55 per cent of students would like to work for a Chinese entrepreneur perhaps due to the scarcity of well-paid jobs in Siberia, 38 per cent would not like to have a Chinese neighbour; and four-fifths of respondents are opposed to their close relatives marrying Chinese (Vitkovskaia and Zaionchkovskaia 1999: 115–16). Similarly, in Gelbras’s survey, only six per cent agreed that Chinese should have the right to be naturalized, 11 per cent agreed to a right to permanent residence, 15 per cent to a right to purchase real estate, and fewer than half of the respondents thought Chinese should have the right to legal representation in court (Gelbras 2001: 54). These opinions reflect a view of Chinese migrants as ‘useful but potentially dangerous second-class people’ (Diatlov 1999: 90). It must be noted that in both Russia and Hungary, the rejection of Chinese migrants is part of a generally high level of intolerance towards foreigners, and is in fact relatively lower than hostility to migrants from the Caucasus (in Russia) or Arabs and Gypsies (in Hungary). Thus, in a 2000 survey by Sik and colleagues, two-thirds of Hungarians thought there were too many foreigners in Hungary; in 2005, 68 per cent of respondents in a survey by the same team were opposed to allowing legal immigrants to naturalize; and in 2007, 27 per cent believed that no refugees at all should be admitted to the country (Nyíri 2003b, Népszabadság 2005).4 In 2002, 65 per cent of Muscovites agreed that all migrants from the Caucasus should be deported from the city (Lokshina 2002: 92). Although ‘measurements’ of xenophobia

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should be treated with caution, surveys suggest that while its intensity has been rising in Hungary and Russia, it has been declining in some other Eastern European countries, notably Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Poland. For instance, 41 per cent of Polish respondents in a 1999 survey agreed that foreigners should be allowed to settle in Poland, compared to 17 per cent in 1996 (Kaczmarczyk 2001: 209).5 As we have seen, Chinese organizations and media have sought protection from crime and economic violence from the Chinese government, with little effect except for the relatively high-profile government protest over the 1998 raid on the Kodun hostel in Moscow. It is notable, by contrast, how little they have done to make a stand in the national or local political arenas of their countries of residence against the vilification and harassment they have been subjected to. Apparently, the intense transnationalism of Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe, and their lionization in transnational Chinese media, allows them to shrug off, at least publicly, experiences of marginality and discrimination, and conceptualize their social position vis à vis Chinese society instead (Nyíri 2005). The first instance of participation in host-country politics that I am aware of took place in September 1995, when the Joint Conference of Hungarian Chinese Organizations co-organized a conference on the situation of the Chinese in Hungary with the Budapest city government and a Hungarian NGO. At this conference, according to reports by some Hungarian media, a suggestion was made for the government to grant the Chinese official minority status in Hungary. This initiative, however, was rejected by most of the participants and had no legal basis (Nyíri 1999: 87). In the following six years, the only initiatives by Chinese organizations reported in the Hungarian media were negotiations about rents and conditions at the Four Tigers Market. In 2002, Hungarian elections became a subject of debate among Chinese for the first time. Hungarian law allows permanent residents who received this status before 2001 vote in such elections. A Chinese man, misunderstanding this law, decided to run in the elections to one of Budapest’s district assemblies himself. He argued that a Chinese candidate could not win, but if he maintained a high profile over the next election cycle, he could gain recognition and run with higher chances the next time (Chang Liu Shui 2002: 11).

Recreation and leisure Leisure activities provide only limited space for interaction between Chinese and locals. Gambling is the most popular recreational activity among Chinese. Budapest casinos were the earliest Hungarian businesses to discover Chinese as a target consumer group, and they have published advertising in Chinese-language newspapers, organized evenings with free Chinese food, and even installed Chinese games since the early 1990s. Similarly, casinos in Moscow employ Chinese-speaking hostesses to help Chinese customers. As more Chinese accumulated wealth and information, dining at some Hungarian restaurants, visiting hotel swimming pools and spas, and day or weekend car trips to countryside castles and Lake Balaton became popular.

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Among Chinese with permanent resident status, who could obtain tourist visas to other countries, foreign travel, mainly to Western Europe and the USA, also became more common in the late 1990s, with some Chinese travel agencies in Budapest organizing bus trips to Western Europe. Chinese students participate in a wider range of leisure activities together with their non-Chinese peers.

Children and education For Chinese families with pre-school and primary school age children in Hungary, it is common to hire Hungarian nannies or foster families – generally retired women or couples – who take care of the child during the day or even during the week at their homes, while the parents work. Most children who come to Hungary at pre-school age grow up bilingual but often lack native fluency in either language. Most school-age Chinese children study at local schools, but parents with better financial resources often send their children to English-speaking ‘international’ schools. Some of these children do not learn the local language beyond the practical minimum of the pidgin. Unlike ‘international schools’, local schools rarely have provisions for teaching children who are not native speakers. Because of the pressure of parental expectations, the frustration caused by the language barrier, and the fact that these schools sometimes place non-Hungarian speakers in classes with much younger children, some Chinese children are unable to catch up and drop out. In general, however, Chinese children have acquired a reputation for high academic achievement, especially in mathematics. Depending on how much time they spend with their foster family and on the type of school they go to, their socialization ranges from mainly Chinese to mainly local company, as do the behavioural models they follow. Most parents want their children to learn to speak, read and write in Chinese well enough to be able to work in China. While most take care of this by schooling the child in China for a sufficient number of years, there are also two private Chinese schools in Budapest, which teach Chinese reading, writing, history, geography, art, as well as mathematics and English on weekends and during the summer school holiday, using textbooks from the PRC. Only a minority of Chinese children in Budapest (approximately 150) go to these schools. In 2003, a Hungarian private primary school began offering Chinese reading and writing classes in addition to its regular curriculum, as well as room and board during the week, specially for Chinese. In 2004, the first publicly financed school targeting Chinese children opened in Hungary. It operates within the Hungarian curriculum with bilingual education and is open to Hungarian children, but eighty-two of ninety children enrolled in the first year were Chinese. The Chinese curriculum, textbooks and teachers were selected in cooperation with the Chinese government. This construction was intended to provide a particular transnational group with ‘dual-use’ education, rather than to integrate them into the Hungarian education system within a multiethnic environment. The school was opened during the visit of a high-level Chinese delegation.

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Prospects Although the Chinese in Eastern Europe have shared common patterns of economic, social and political development over the first 15 years of their recent presence, they are set to be increasingly divided by the new European Union border that separates the western half of Eastern Europe (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania) from its eastern part. In 2007, the ‘new members’ that joined in 2004 are scheduled to be included in the Schengen treaty that provides for the free circulation of people; goods are already supposed to circulate freely between the new and the old members of the Union. This has upgraded the value of residence permits in these states for Chinese citizens, as well as of trade and manufacturing facilities in them for Chinese companies. In December 2005, the Chinese government has announced an interest in purchasing the Asia Center and the China Mart in Budapest to set up a European trade distribution centre. Companies active in these two locations have increasingly attracted a younger and more educated work force, including both first and second generation migrants. If Chinese entrepreneurs in the new EU member countries succeed in finding positions in channelling investments and higher-value imports from China into the local manufacturing and trade sector, the position of their families is likely to become more stable, and their relationship with the local economies closer. After 15 years, the number of Chinese citizens who hold permanent residence permits is slowly increasing. More children are joining their parents and going to school in these countries. Family reunification and cultural and economic rights will eventually become facilitated by European Union standards. But, counterintuitively, it is part of the elite with the most intense transnational connections – those who feel comfortable enough in Hungary but who can hedge their bets by spreading their business across countries, acquiring Canadian or Australian residence permits, and sending their children to British or American schools – that will be able to wait and benefit the most from these trends. Lower-income migrants have already started to leave, driven out by increasing costs of local labour and overheads, tightening trade regulations and a persistently hostile immigration system. In Russia, by contrast, the unstable situation of Chinese migrants has been aggravated by rising Russian nationalism and xenophobia during President Vladimir Putin’s second term. In 2006, a group of Russian students firebombed the Cherkizovo market, aiming to drive out Chinese and other foreign merchants, and shortly afterwards, with the explicit intention, voiced by Putin, of returning control over markets to ‘the local population’, the government issued a decree banning the employment of foreign citizens in retail. While the Far Eastern region’s dependence on Chinese imports and labour is unlikely to subside, the Western Siberian regions have developed such fear of a ‘Chinese invasion’ that the construction of a direct road between the Altai Republic (a part of Russia) and China has effectively been sabotaged by the local government under pressure from public opinion (Nyíri and Breidenbach 2007). The position of the Chinese in Russia therefore remains highly sensitive to the economic and political changes of the moment.

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9

Conclusion A transnational middleman minority

Both the pre-First World War and the post-Cold War waves of Chinese migration into Russia and Eastern Europe have taken place in periods of intense globalization, characterized by relatively free flows of goods and people (although curbs on the latter are currently much stronger than during the first period discussed here) and separated by a period of nation-state closure. During the first period, Chinese migration to the region replicated the ‘coolie trade’ and the seafaring merchant tradition in the colonies, with the distinctive element of farmer and trapper migration to the Russian Far East that is better seen as the expansion of domestic migration to Manchuria. The current period, once again, displays close parallels to Chinese migration to South America, Africa, and China’s neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia. But if both waves of migration can broadly be seen in connection to the demand for Chinese labour and goods abroad within a framework of global structural changes, the current one is more strongly driven by the imperatives of an expanding Chinese economy. As 200,000 to 400,000 Chinese migrated to Russia and another 50,000 or so to Eastern Europe, the expansion of low-price Chinese consumer goods imports has been accompanied by the migration of tens if not hundreds of thousands to Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Burma, Central and South America (especially Argentina) and Africa (see Nyíri and Saveliev 2002; Chin 2003). South Africa and Argentina have attracted an estimated 30,000 migrants each from the province of Fujian alone (Fujian Qiaobao 2004b). In many of these countries, Chinese merchants have established nationwide networks of wholesale and retail shops catering to urban and rural populations (Nyíri 2006; Østbø Haugen and Carling 2005). Trade across China’s border with Russia has notably been paralleled on its southwestern borders. Cambodia, after the UN-supervised election, and Burma, led by a cash-strapped junta, began to selectively open the market to foreign businesses. Both were transitional economies of scarcity with poor populations. Burma signed a border-trade treaty with the PRC in 1988 and, Lintner writes, the cross-border trade in various commodities was estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Edwards observes that in Phnom Penh, Chinese clothes and consumer goods sold at

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the market were ‘the most chic and “modern” commodities available’ in 1991. ‘From 1995–1997, visitors from China topped Cambodian airport statistics, with Chinese visitors totalling 22,886 in 1995 alone, or 62 per day’ (Edwards 2002). Less lucrative markets, like Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Laos, have seen their share of Chinese traders as well. Post-apartheid South Africa can also be seen as a transitional economy in the particular sense of an abrupt change in consumption and retail patterns formerly governed by strict segregation; and in Argentina, Chinese migrants’ economic positions improved after the retail bankruptcies caused by the late 1990s currency crisis. According to Chinese sources, in 2004, 90 per cent of the 1,300 groceries in Buenos Aires were owned by Chinese (Fujian Qiaobao 2004b). New Chinese migrants on the Western peripheries of South America and Eastern Europe, as well as in Africa and Southeast Asia, share several characteristics that distinguish them from most of their contemporaries in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Most of the new migrants to the West enter their countries of destination as students, family members of immigrants or citizens, or else asylum seekers; seek legal or illegal employment in the existing – ethnic or mainstream – economy; and while they too maintain strong transnational practices and imagination, they are also more likely to gain local citizenship, make some claims in the local public arena and wish for their children to stay in the country they live in and attain upwardly mobile lifestyles. In Eastern Europe and other transitional peripheries, Chinese migrants are entrepreneurs who display a particularly intense transnationalism that is manifested in very high levels of international mobility and economic dependence on China. Combined with limited social mobility in the local society, due in part to lack of jobs that would be recognized as attractive on the globalized Chinese hierarchy of modernity, and in part (in Eastern Europe, at least) to hostility towards migrants and the closure of locally accepted avenues of upward mobility to them, Chinese migrants in these places largely follow the model of a ‘middleman minority’, modified to account for the particular features of twenty-first century globalization and transnationalism.1 The ethnic networks serve the flexible mobilization of labour, capital, and business information in order to provide goods and services that are either inaccessible locally or only accessible at a higher price. Since locally accepted avenues of upward mobility are closed to the middleman minority, their livelihood depends on the ethnic economy. To remain competitive, they have to keep costs down. Therefore, and because of their vulnerability, they are inclined to take on economic roles or methods seen as deviant (‘sweatshops’, ‘flea markets’). This leads to an increased identification of the entire group with a particular business in the eyes of the local population, which sees it as an economic threat. Although locals and migrants meet daily, the typical contact situation is one in which the migrant appears as seller and the local appears as buyer. This deepens hostility rather than helping to overcome it. Locals perceive the migrants not as members of society but as a familiar, useful, sometimes exotically interesting

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but potentially threatening alien element. Combined with legal vulnerability, this situation deters the migrants from long-term financial or emotional investment. Middleman minorities are familiar from premodern Europe and colonial Africa and Southeast Asia. They have been absent from postwar Western Europe with its strong social mobility, its well-developed and regulated retail networks and its lack of discriminatory laws and practices. In Hungary, the memory of the Jewish village shopkeeper, the Bosniak peddler and the Gypsy tinker had faded into oblivion, to be reincarnated after 1989 as the Chinese village shopkeeper and the Arab money changer. Chinese migrants to Eastern Europe found themselves in economic environments with poorly functioning retail networks (often in the grey economy), underdeveloped imports, and strong social and psychological barriers in front of local entrepreneurship. Chinese migrants in the early 1990s exploited the fact that the economies they encountered were all, to different degrees, economies of scarcity. They found an important unoccupied market niche, which they filled with cheap but popular clothing already mass-produced in China for Western budget retail chains. Unlike earlier Chinese migrants to Western Europe, many of these newcomers possessed the cultural capital, mobility, and channels of communication to develop close contacts with state enterprises that could supply them with merchandise at low state-subsidized prices and with favourable credit conditions. Their extensive transnational connections enabled them to supply capital, goods, and labour rapidly and flexibly in order to satisfy the needs of the market. The same connections made it unnecessary for them to rely on cultural capital accumulated locally. They could afford to ignore their peripheral position in Hungarian society and follow instead the models of transnational entrepreneurship transmitted by global Chinese media. Though the niche they occupied was between those locally superior and those locally subordinate, they became, even more importantly, middlemen in another sense, mediating between the cultural and capitalist logics of Western and Chinese globalizations in places that were peripheral to both. Despite differing modes of economic and social incorporation of Chinese migrants in the Eastern and Western halves of the European continent, family and hometown ties, frequent information sharing and shared ideas of economic success, as well as visits between new Chinese migrants to Eastern and Western Europe, have resulted in the spread of business models in both directions. If, in the early 1990s, Wenzhounese restaurateurs brought the concept, the décor, and even the tastes of the Chinese restaurant from Western to Eastern Europe, then ten years later, the markets of Budapest and Moscow and the regional trade networks emanating from them served as testing grounds for an emergence of import and retail hubs in Rome (in the Piazza Vittorio) or in Athens and for the Chinese-run ‘100-peseta shops’ in Spain. The greatest challenge to the established Chinese economy of clothes and leather workshops in Italy today is competition from Chinese clothes and footwear imported

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by Chinese entrepreneurs (Ceccagno 2004). In 2004, several wholesale shops of Chinese shoe importers burned down in Elche, Spain, in apparent arson attacks fueled by tensions with Spanish shoe manufacturers and merchants (Xingwen 2004). Clearly, these changes in the ethnic economy have the potential of altering the modes of social incorporation of Chinese in Western Europe, a process that is visibly accelerated by the new mobility within the expanded European Union. One of the shoe importers whose shop was burned down in Elche had only moved there a few months beforehand from Poland. This book has been concerned with the on-the-ground facts about a relatively minor segment of European immigration. Nonetheless, in closing, it offers a modest contribution to the ‘big debates’. The story of the Chinese in Eastern Europe adds a cautionary note to the favoured migration paradigm of EU decision makers: attracting investor and high-tech elites; shutting out low-skilled migrants; promoting ‘integration’. It shows, notably, that among recent Chinese migrants at least, the hypermobile elites of transnational entrepreneurship, for whom the options of ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong 1999) – boarding schools in Britain, real estate in China, universities in the USA, retirement in Canada – are actually accessible rather than only imaginable, are less likely to ‘integrate’ in the neocommunitarian spirit favoured by current politicians than the likes of Yan, the fisherman from Fujian who made his way up from market to shop in Szeged. He is now in Morocco, but his retirement plans involve buying a new flat in Szeged. He doesn’t mind police antics and xenophobic graffiti. He likes the place.

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Notes

1 Early contacts 1 This concise history of migrations is taken from Grousset (1970: xxiii–xxiv), an excellent history of the steppe from the Huns to the last Mongol empire. 2 On the growth of Muscovy and its Tatar policy, see Dvornik (1962: 259-82). 3 See Grousset (1970: 489-90), for the fall of the last Genghiskhanite khanates of the North. 4 See Clubb (1971: 22-33) for the history of Russian expeditions east of the Baikal. 5 See Clubb (1971: 33-4) for the history of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. 6 For artifacts documenting the existence of these routes, see Matveev et al. (1997). 7 ‘Majmacsin’ in Révai Nagy Lexikona (a Hungarian encyclopedia). Budapest: Révai Testvérek Irodalmi Intézet Rt., 1915. 8 See ibid. 16-8 on early Russian efforts to establish trade with China. 9 The negotiations are described in Clubb (1971: 83-6). 10 Soloviev (1989: 5), also citing Przheval’skii (1949: 78-87), and (1989: 37), citing documents of the East Siberian government of 1884 and of the Siberian Railway Committee of 1893-1905. 11 See Soloviev (1989: 18-25), on the history of Han population of Manchuria. 12 On the railways, see Clubb (1971: 119-31). 2 Chinese farmers, hunters, workers and merchants in Russia, 1858–1914 1 ‘Khunkhuzy’ in Sovetskii Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’. Moscow: Sovetskaya Entsiklopediia, 1979. 2 Zhengzhi Guanbao (Peking), 14 February 1909, p. 284, quoted in Soloviev (1989: 27). 3 Arseniev’s books have been reissued many times. See, for example, Arseniev (1960), especially map between pp. 220-1. 4 On the ‘toponymic catastrophy’ in the Maritime Province and attempts to reverse it since 1991, see Gruzdev (1992), especially pp. 39-46. In the early 1990s, there was a campaign to return the old place names, but it fizzled out as Russian nationalism gained strength. 5 All of these statutes are appended to Soloviev (1989). 6 Also ‘Wladiwostok’, ‘Chabarowsk’, and ‘Blagoweschtschensk’ in Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1904, 1908. 7 ‘Vladivosztok’ in Révai Nagy Lexikona. Budapest: Révai Testvérek Irodalmi Intézet, 1926.

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8 Also ‘Habarovszk’ in Révai Nagy Lexikona. Budapest: Révai Testvérek Irodalmi Intézet, 1913. 9 Also Igor R. Saveliev, personal communication, 1 September 2001 10 ‘Wladiwostok’ in Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon. Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1908. 11 Igor R. Saveliev, personal communication, 1 September 2001. 12 Idem. 13 Another source (Li and Lin 1999: 95) says the organization was established in 1906. 14 Lectures in St Petersburg in 1911, quoted in Soloviev (1999: 68 n. 27). 15 Igor R. Saveliev, personal communication, 1 September 2001. 16 In the Historical Photograph Collection of the Hungarian National Museum. Reproduced in Jalsovszky Katalin and Tomsics, Emöke, Budapest világváros [Metropolis Budapest]. Budapest: Helikon, 1996, p. 143. 17 ‘Relie qingzhu Lü He Huaqiao Zonghui chengli sanshi zhou nian’ [Fervently celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the General Chinese Association in the Netherlands], speech by Yu Zhong, founder of the Ouhai Tongxianghui (the General Chinese Association’s predecessor), Huaqiao Tongxun (Amsterdam), 17 August 1977; reprinted in Lü He Huaqiao Zonghui / Algemene Chinese Vereniging in Nederland wushi zhou nian jinian tekan [Special commemorative volume for the fiftieth anniversary of the General Chinese Association in the Netherlands]. Amsterdam: 1997, p. 60. 4 Chinese in the Soviet Union, 1922–89 1 Ekho, 17 May 1919, quoted in Buiakov (1992: 67). 2 Interviews with officials and researchers at the ‘Perspectives of the Far Eastern Region [of Russia]: The Chinese Factor’ Roundtable, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Far Eastern Division, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, 28-29 June 1999. 3 Bruk does not discuss migration to Central Asian parts of the Russian Empire and its independent successor states. This migration has mainly been from Chinese Turkestan, and consisted predominantly of Uighurs and Kazaks. For a Chinese account, see Tan (1998). 5 Chinese migration to Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989 1 Interview with Chen Yan, a trader in Hungary since 1990 who is familiar with guest workers in Gyo´´r. Budapest, October 1999. 2 Citing Der Standard (Vienna). 3 Data confirmed by the International Labour Organization. 4 Interviews with officials and researchers at the ‘Perspectives of the Far Eastern Region [of Russia]: The Chinese Factor’ Roundtable, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Far Eastern Division, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, 28-29 June 1999; interviews with traders at the Cherkizovo (Container) market in Moscow, 26 June 1999; interview with Elena Lukina, student of Sinology from Yakutsk and employee of a Chinese company, at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, June 1998. See also Luova (2007). 5 Interview in Budapest. 6 Interview with Chen Xuesong, trader in Hungary, Budapest, November 1999. Chen learned about shuttle trading on the Soviet border in 1988 in Tianjin. She wanted to engage in it herself, but instead went to university. See also Nyíri 1998: 351.

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7 According to some, the term daoye (female daonainai) has previously been applied to traders, mostly from the Wenzhou area, who engaged in itinerant trade in China during the strict prohibition of private enterprise under the Cultural Revolution. (Interview with Chen Xuesong, Budapest, November 1999.) The Russian term for shuttle traders is chelnoki (shuttles). 8 For a discussion of shuttle trade, see Konstantinov (1996), Wallace et al. (1997), and Wallace (1998); on ‘Comecon markets’, see Sik (1997). On Russian shuttle traders, see Hann and Hann (1992), Humphrey (1999), and Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin (2001). 9 Mayakinfo.ru, 18 August 2003, www.mayakinfo.ru/news.asp?msg=10236. 10 Data provided by the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. 11 On the rise of irregular migration to America, see Smith (1997). 12 This term is variously applied to all migration brokers, i.e. people who help Chinese get from one country to another for a fee, or specifically to smugglers, i.e. those who employ illegal means such as forged passports or clandestine crossing of borders. 13 And to a much lesser extent, from farther away: north and Latin America and southeast Asia. I have spoken to migrants who had come to Hungary from the USA, Panama, Malta, and Sri Lanka. Their most frequently mentioned motive was lack of business opportunities at their first destination, sometimes compounded by unfavourable changes in immigration policy. 14 Interviews in Budapest in 1992-99. 15 Interviews in Germany, Hungary, Russia, and China in 1999. 16 Data provided by Ye Jianxin, chairman of the association, in February 1999. 17 Interviews in Belgrade in December 2000. 18 Interviews with leaders of the Fujian and Henan tongxianghui in Bucharest, May 1999. 19 Interview with Prof. Judit Hidasi in Budapest in September 1995. 20 Also remarks by Vilya Gelbras at the ‘Perspectives of the Far Eastern Region [of Russia]: The Chinese Factor’ Roundtable, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Far Eastern Division, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, 28-29 June 1999. 21 Interviews with students at Moscow State University in March 1998 and with a trader from Harbin in Budapest, June 1999. 22 Interviews with migrants in Moscow, Budapest, and Fujian, February-September 1999. 23 Interview in Bucharest in May 1999. 24 Interview with a migrant from Sanming, Fujian, in Budapest, February 1999. 25 Also interviews with Paul Kwok, Honorary President, Chinese Association of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Budapest, 1997-99. 26 Interviews in Prato in April 1999. 27 Interviews with migrants from Shandong and Zhejiang, Budapest, October 1999 and April 2002. 28 Interview in Budapest in November 1999. 29 Interview in London on 22 September 1999. 30 Interviews with irregular migrants in Amsterdam and the Tilburg immigration detention centre in March 1999. 31 Data provided by the Hungarian Border Guard. 32 Interviews with apprehended border violators at the Nyírbátor and Szombathely communal residences of the Hungarian Border Guard on 12 and 20 July 1999, with migrants’ family members in Fuqing, Fujian on 21 August 1999, and with Paul Kwok in London on 22 September 1999. See also Milutinovic´ (2005: 153). 33 Interview in Freiburg im Breisgau in March 1999.

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34 Interviews in Prato in April 1999. 35 Interviews in Subotica, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, July 2000, and in Fujian, August 1999. 36 Oral communication with Ivan Krastev, Bulgarian member of the international observers’ team at the Yugoslav elections in 2000. 37 Interviews in Subotica, Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, July 2000. 38 Interview with Ms. Zhao, Budapest, 2 May 2000. 39 Interviews with commanding officers at the Kiskunhalas and Nyírbátor border guard divisions, 2000-01. 40 Interview in Moscow, 20 June 1999. 41 ‘Official’ figures from Huaren jingji nianjian (1994: 410) and Qiaoqing (2002b). Other Chinese sources (Li and Lin 1999: 98) cite a number of 100,000. 42 Interview with Weng Ruilong in Moscow on 23 June 1999. 43 Data from the Czech Interior Ministry’s website, www.mvcr.cz 44 Data from the Immigration Department of the Romanian Border Guard furnished to the Hungarian ambassador. I wish to thank Ambassador Ferenc Szo ´´cs for sharing them. 45 Interviews in Szeged, Hungary, and Subotica in June-July 2000, and in Belgrade in December 2000. 46 Interview with a self-styled snakehead in Prato, Italy on 26 June 2000. 47 Interview in Budapest, 17 February 1999. 48 Demographics resulting from this study should, however, be treated with some caution due to a high percentage of students in the sample. A large number of questionnaires were returned from student dormitories (Gelbras 1999: 6), and 30 per cent of Moscow respondents said that their occupation was something other than commerce (Gelbras 1999: 19). 6 Employment and the ethnic economy 1 The director of the Institute of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia of the Chinese Academy of Sciences considers the damage to the image of Chinese products and to that of the Chinese people (in that order) the main problems of Chinese migration to the Russian Far East (Li Jingjie 1999). 2 Data of the State Employment Service and the International Labour Organization. 3 See Motrich (1999b) for Khabarovsk, Tokarskaia and Tokarskii (1999) for Irkutsk, as well as Shkurkin (2002). 4 Conversation in Budapest, August 2001. 5 I use the term ‘ethnic economy’ loosely in the sense first defined by Bonacich and Modell (1980): the economy that comprises the self-employed and their coethnic employees, but excludes those employed by non-co-ethnics. 6 Interviews in Budapest, 1995-2000. 7 Personal observation. 8 Interviews with migrants from Shandong, Gansu, and Peking, Hungary, 2000–1. 9 Speech at the opening congress of the association, Budapest, 27 December 1999. 10 www.wink.hu. See Milutinovic´ (2005: 154). According to Milutinovic´, Wink is perceived as an American brand in Hungary, but as a Hungarian one in Serbia. 11 Guo’s case has been described in Pieke et al. (2004). 12 Following Basch et al. (1994), I use the term ‘transnationalism’ to denote sustained social, economic and political practices that tie a person to the institutions of more than one nation-state. 13 www.sandic.hu 14 Interview in Putian on 22 August 1999. 15 During a visit to Chen on 21 August 1999. 16 www.sandic.hu

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17 Chinese traders are seen, both by themselves and others, as unusually successful in making money in Hungary, where they had little competition. But Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin (2001: 24) note that in Russia, where many locals engaged in shuttle trade, they too expected a 100 per cent profit. 18 He Qinglian (1997: 129) writes that bad debts accumulated by state-owned enterprises in the period 1991-94 alone amounted to nearly US $9 billion. 19 One such case is described in a letter by You Mingfa, ‘Xiongyali Budapeisi Maoyi Gongsi xianxing ji’ [A record of the present circumstances of Budapest Trading Co., Hungary], dated 30 December 1997 and sent to the European Federation of Chinese Associations. 20 Tchoudinovskikh and Zhulin (2001: 32) name a similar pre-1998 figure for another market in Moscow, Luzhniki. 21 One example of this kind of strategy involved Haier, a Chinese manufacturer of air conditioners (interviews in Budapest, 2000). 22 www.asiacenter.hu/hun/press/releases.csn (accessed 10 Febuary 2003). 23 Advertising supplement, Lianhe Shangbao (Budapest), 23-9 August 2002. 24 ‘Kebenhagen Guoji Zhuanxiao Shichang’, advertising booklet. 25 Presentation by Sándor Molnár, Hungarian Ministry of the Economy, at the First Hungarian-Asian Business Forum, Budapest, 27 March 2002. Trade volume has continued to expand rapidly since, reaching US $4 billion in 2005, of which US $3.5 billion represents Chinese exports to Hungary (speech by Ambassador Zhu Zushou at the Confucius Institute, Eötvös University, Budapest, 21 December 2006). 26 Vilya Gelbras, personal communication at the ‘Perspectives of the Far Eastern Region [of Russia]: The Chinese Factor’ Roundtable, Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography, Far Eastern Division, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok, 28-29 June 1999. 27 Tóth (1997: 227) confirms this. 7 Transnational practices and politics 1 This section draws on my Afterword to Nyíri and Saveliev (2002). 2 For more examples, see Chapter 5, ‘Transnational practices and politics,’ in Pieke et al. (2004). 3 Sic, despite the fact that Croatia was about to secede from Yugoslavia in a bloody war. 4 Further details on HCA can be found in Nyíri (1999: 90-101). 5 Interview with Zhao Yanfen, vice-president of the Hungarian Chinese Women’s Association, Budapest, August 1998. 6 Paul Kwok, in a conversation in London in February 1999, expressed confidence that he would become a member too. He was only not sure in which province. 7 ‘Guanyu nuli cujin Zhongguo tongyi da ye di jueyi’ [Resolution on the effort to promote the great enterprise of Chinese reunification], Document No. 3 of the Sixth Congress of EFCO, Budapest, 9 August 1998. 8 ‘Jiu chukou dianying cunzai yanzhong sunhai Zhonghua minzu xinxiang di wenti zhi Jiang Zemin zhuxi di xin’ [A letter to Chairman Jiang Zemin on the problem of exported films causing serious damage to the image of the Chinese nation], Document No. 9 of the Sixth Congress of EFCO, Budapest, not dated. 9 ‘Guanyu chu Zhongguo zhongxibu diqu kaizhan touzi he jishu hezu di changyishu’ [Recommendation on investment and technological cooperation in Central and Western China], Document No. 6 of the Sixth Congress of EFCO, Budapest, August 1998. 10 My emphasis on these activities does not mean that the congress did not deal with some of the issues of actual concern for Chinese in Europe. Among other

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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matters, it passed a resolution calling on Chinese to do more to become part of European society, including abandoning an attitude of solving their own problems by themselves; discussed a report on the problems of Chinese women in Europe (Yang and Wang 1998) and a recommendation to set up a summer Chinese language camp for children. Li Minghuan, personal communication. Interviews with Vice-President Zhao Yanfen in Budapest, August 1998 and January 1999. Interview with Vice-President Zhao Yanfen in Budapest, August 1998; General Federation (2001). Thus, a migrant from Henan in Budapest complained that he had to lend hundreds of dollars to a member of the Henan Qiaoban’s visiting delegation, treat him to dinner, and buy him shoes. The Gongshanglian has also been active among migrant entrepreneurs inside China. For example, the Gongshanglian branch of Ruian, Wenzhou, supported the establishment of a chamber of commerce of migrant business people from Ruian in Peking, one of whom also contributed to Project Brilliant (Yuan and Wang 1996). In this way, the Gongshanglian has played a part in the emerging parallel system of state control over domestic migrants who evade the territorybased network of neighbourhood committees and state workplaces. This system consists of various flexible tripartite arrangements between migrant associations, native-place governments and host location governments (cf. Xiang 1999). Interview with Zhao Yanfen, vice-president of both Women’s Associations, Budapest, August 1998. People’s Daily is the central newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Interview with Chen Jian, Executive Vice-President of the Fujian tongxianghui, Bucharest, June 1999. Interview in Moscow, 20 June 1999. Other Chinese organizations in Moscow active in the 1990s included the Moscow Association of Chinese Enterprises (Mosike Zhongzi Qiye Lianyihui, 1997) and the Moscow Association of Chinese Women (Mosike Huaren Funü Lianhehui, 1998). Interview in Moscow, 20 June 1999. Hong spoke with admiration of Zhang Manxin, whom he apparently considered a role model. Interview at the World Fujianese Fellowship Conference, Quanzhou, 5 September 1999. This material, based on my field notes, has been presented in Pieke et al. (2004). Interview in Hong Kong on 10 September 1999. Conversation with Zhao Yanfen, Budapest, 17 October 1999. See Chapter 4 in Pieke et al. (2004) for more on this. Interview in Budapest, 25 September 2000. Chinese Channel, based in London, began broadcasting in March 1994 (see China News Digest, 21 January 1995).

8 Finding a place in Eastern Europe? 1 Interview with Sergei Nozhkin, foreign policy adviser to the Governor of Altai Province, Barnaul, 29 September 2004. 2 Interview in Artybash, Altai Republic, 13 September 2004. 3 Survey results courtesy of Demcso ´´ Blanka and Sik Endre, Tárki, February 2007. 4 Results of 2007 survey courtesy of Demcso ´´ Blanka and Sik Endre, Tárki. 5 See Nyíri (2003b) for an overview of data on attitudes towards foreigners in Eastern Europe.

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9 Conclusion 1 The concept ‘middleman minority’ has been in use in sociology since the 1950s. Its features as described in this paragraph are based mostly on Edna Bonacich’s classic article (1973). The term was popular in American sociology in the 1980s but fell out of favour with the rise of literature on diaspora and transnationalism in the 1990s.

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Index

accommodation 69, 72–3, 79, 99, 129, 131 advertising 60, 66–7, 89, 93–4, 96, 124, 126, 134 Afghanistan 117 Africa 27, 57, 63, 89, 91, 102, 137–9 agriculture see farming Aigun, treaty of 6–7, 12–13, 26 Albania 64 Altai Republic 136 Amur 4, 7, 9–12, 18–19, 21, 26, 51–2 Amur Workers Union 27, 31, 33 ancestral villages 110 Arabs 84, 130, 133 Argentina 137–8 Arseniev, Vladimir 7, 12–14, 19, 26–8 Asia Center 94, 136 Asian steppe 3 asylums 25 Auchan 91 Australia 63, 136 Austria 29, 53, 59, 61, 65–6 Avars 3 Azeris 130 Baikal, lake 5, 50–1 Barnaul 38, 41, 44 Belarus 52, 62, 69, 86 bird flu 131 Blagoveshchensk 11, 17–19, 22, 26, 38, 51

Bolsheviks 27–8, 32–3; China and 32–9 bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade 67, 70–1, 105 Bosnia 64, 67, 89 Brazil 90 bribery 17, 23, 66, 99 Britain see Great Britain Bulgaria 29, 61, 64, 70, 136 Burma 137 Cambodia 137 Canada 63, 101–2, 136 Canton 6, 36, 57–8, 62 Central America 78, 137 Chefoo 13, 17, 19, 31, 42 Cherkizovo market 136 childcare 129, 135 China: border 6, 17–22, 42, 51–2, 55–6, 136; Chinese Communist Party 31, 37–9, 42, 108, 112, 123–4, 128; consumer goods 20, 51, 55; embassies 31–2, 67, 70–1, 105, 107, 109, 116–17, 129–30; Exit and Entry Office 111; exports 15, 21, 69; history 3–8; language 20, 45, 63, 128, 130, 135; neutrality in World War I 33–4; Overseas Chinese Affairs Office 111; Peoples’ Republic of China 31–2, 36, 42, 51, 54, 57, 64, 67, 69–70, 85, 105–10, 112–16, 119–27, 135, 137; recession 52–3; religion 13, 17, 109, 113, 121;

168

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

reunification 107–8, 114, 120, 128, 136; social stratification 74–5 China Mart 94, 136 China News Agency 115 Chinatown: Budapest 72; Moscow 4; Vladivostok 19, 22–3, 45 Chinese Eastern Railway 8 Chinese organizations: Artists’ Association 109; Association for the Promotion of Chinese–Hungarian Friendship 113–14, 128; Association of Chinese Workers in Russia 35, 38; Association of Chinese Workers in Siberia 36; Buddhist association 109; Chinese Autonomy of the Market 117; Chinese Women’s Association 109, 114; Committee of Traders at the Four Tigers Market 115; Committee to Protect the Lawful Rights and Interests of Chinese in Hungary 117; Czech Chinese Association 111; European Committee for the Promotion of China’s Reunification 108; European Federation of Chinese Associations 104; European Federation of Chinese Organisations 107–8, 111–12, 116, 120; European Society of Chinese Artists 109; Federation of Overseas Chinese 127; Gansu Province People’s Political Consultative Conference 106; General Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Hungary 116; General Federation of Chinese Organisations 114–15, 117; General Federation of Chinese Organisations in Hungary 116; Harbin Overseas Exchange Commission 118; Hungarian Chinese Association 104–17, 122–4; Hungarian Chinese Industry and Trade Federation 112; Hungarian Chinese Women’s Association 120; Joint Conference of Hungarian Chinese Organisations

113, 134; Moscow Chinese Association 118, 131; Moscow Chinese Chamber of Commerce 104; National Federation of Overseas Chinese 106; National Federation of Patriotic Projects 106; Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau 106–8, 118, 120, 127; Project Hope 106–7; Representative Committee of Hungarian Chinese Organisations 114; Rijeka Chinese Association 104; Shanghai Entrepreneurs Association 114; sports association 109; Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress 111; Wenzhou Foundation 109–10; World Association of Peking University Alumni 128; World Chinese Chamber of Commerce 128; World Chinese Congress for Opposing Taiwan Independence and Supporting China’s Reunification 108; World Federation of Chinese Associations 118; World Fu Tsing Federation 128; Writers’ Association 109 Chinese workers underpaid 20 Chita 30, 37, 51, 89 clothing 32, 54, 74, 83, 85, 89–90, 95, 137–9 Cold War 137 collective memory 3 Confucianism 35 construction 49–50, 56, 79, 119 consumer goods 20, 51, 55, 80–2, 83–91, 103, 137–8; market saturated with 91–5; mopeds 93; scarcity of in Soviet Union 54–5; see also clothing; shoes contract workers 49–51, 62, 78–9 Cora 91 Cossacks 7, 9–11, 19 Crimea 31, 44 Croatia 66–7, 71, 89, 104

Index 169 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Czech Republic 89–90, 119–20; Czech Chinese Association 111; decline in racial discrimination 134; EU 136; migration to 54, 57, 61, 63–8, 70, 72; Vietnamese in 50, 83 deer 13–16, 21, 25, 131 demographics 71–3 deportations 56 distilleries 9, 21–2, 27, 55, 88 domestic servants 20, 23 Dubai 55 duty-free 22, 52, 55 Eastern Europe 29, 42, 49–50, 54, 62, 72, 78; in EU 91, 136 education 74–5, 128, 129, 135; see also students engineering 49–50 entrepreneurs 21, 27, 41, 52–4, 62, 67, 71–5, 77–84, 87–99, 131 espionage 43–4, 115 Estonia 69 EU 67, 91, 136, 142; see also Western Europe family businesses 21, 58–61, 72, 89–90, 101–2 fanzas 9, 13–14, 27 farming 7, 9, 12, 14–15, 25, 41–4, 49, 56, 59, 78–9 fascism 3 Fashion Mart 94 Federal Migration Service 51, 55 film industry 93 First World War 28–9, 31–9, 137; Chinese widows 42 fishing 13 forestry see logging Four Tigers Market 61, 72, 74, 83–8, 90, 92–7, 115–16, 134; Committee of Traders at the Four Tigers Market 115 France 6, 31

Fujian Province 58–65, 74, 90, 101, 122; ‘gangsters’ 102 furs 12–16, 22, 24, 54–5, 131 gambling 14, 16, 23, 67, 134 gender 11, 43, 72, 73–4, 109, 114 Genghis Khan 3, 4 Germany xiii, 29, 50, 61, 65–6 ginseng 12–16, 22, 24, 62, 131 globalisation 137–9 gold 10–11, 13, 19 Gorbachev, Mikhail 49 Grave, Vladimir 7, 17–21, 28 Great Britain 6, 33, 35, 72, 95, 121, 136 Great Wall of China trade centre 95 Guoshi Group 90 Gypsies 86, 130, 133, 139 Han dynasty 3 Harbin 118, 131 hashish 42 healthcare 129 Heihe 51–2, 56 Heilongjiang 4, 11–12, 50–1, 56, 61–2, 78 Hong Kong 90, 102, 119, 121 Hualu 87, 92 Hungary: Arabs in 84, 130, 133; Association for the Promotion of Chinese-Hungarian Friendship 113–14, 128; Broad Masses of Chinese Compatriots in Hungary 106, 108, 110–12, 117, 122; Budapest 29, 50, 52–3, 65, 71–2, 105–6; casinos 134; childcare 135; China Mart 94, 136; Chinese Christianity in 121; Chinese imports 88, 93; Chinese newspapers 113, 114, 123; Customs Office 105; Chinese embassy 67, 70–1, 95, 105, 116–17; Chinese education 130; Chinese population in 54–5; Committee to Protect the Lawful Rights and Interests of Chinese in Hungary 135; decline in trade to

170

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

90, 91–5, 97; and EU 136; and European Federation of Chinese Organisations 118; fascism 3; Four Tigers Market 61, 72, 74, 83–8, 90, 92–7, 115–16, 134; General Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Hungary 116; General Federation of Chinese Organisations in Hungary 116; Gypsies 133, 139; Hualu 87, 92; Hungarian Chinese Association 104–17, 122–4; Hungarian Chinese Industry and Trade Federation 112; Hungarian Chinese Women’s Association 120; Hungarian restaurants, Chinese eat at 134; illegal re-entry 101; Israelis in 130; Joint Conference of Hungarian Chinese Organisations 113, 134; language 54, 60, 103; media 113, 114, 123, 132; migration to 3, 29, 49–50, 63–6, 70; national myths 3; number of Chinese businesses in 82; racial discrimination 132–4; railways 92; Representative Committee of Hungarian Chinese Organisations 114; Szeged 102, 140; telephones 129; tourism, Chinese engage in 134–5; Vietnamese in 84, 130; wages 97; Wenzhou Foundation 122 Huns 3 hunter-gatherers 7, 9, 14, 18 illegal exports 98 illegal immigrants xv–xvi, 8–9, 41, 67–8, 101, 131, 132–3; Chinese stereotyped as 132 illness 24 International Organization for Migration 61, 63–6 Internet 115, 124–5, 129 Interpol 122 Irkutsk 5, 20, 33, 36, 62; press 133; Province 50, 98, 132; Shanghai Market 83–5 Israelis 130

Italy 61, 64–7, 93, 139; Chinese newspapers in 123 Japan 4, 11–12, 19, 33–4, 44, 57–8, 119, 127 Jews, Chinese compared to i Jilin 15, 50 Jin empire 4 Jordan 90 Kazakhstan 45, 55, 83, 138 Khabarovsk 22–4, 26, 38, 62, 78, 98; barracks 17; Chinese in 18–19, 68, 73, 89; history 6; railway 13; smuggling 88–9; tourism 56 Korea 4–5, 7, 11, 35, 43–5, 122; Korean War 108; migration from 4, 9, 18–19, 23; North Korea 50; South Korea 57, 90 Kuomintang 42 language 20, 45, 59, 63, 128, 130; English 72, 105, 135; Hungarian 60, 107, 135 Laos 138 Latvia 32, 69 laundries 20, 28, 41–4 Lebanon 90 literacy 43 Lithuania 3, 64, 70 logging 31, 49, 131 Macau 119 McDonald’s 97 Maersk 81 Malozemoff, Andrew 7, 10–12, 20 Manchu 4–5, 7, 9–11 Manchuria 4–5, 7, 8, 11, 14–15, 26, 28, 31, 41, 58, 137; rust belt 52 Manza 7, 9–10, 18, 22 Manzhouli 19, 51 Mao Chun 43, 53–4, 58–61, 65 Mao Zedong 38, 125

Index 171 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Maritime Province 4–5, 7, 10, 15–20, 24, 56–7; bans Chinese immigrants 27, 31; smuggling 88 markets 82–91, 92–5; prices 86; see also Asia Center; China Mart; Four Tigers Market; Great Wall of China trade centre; Irkutsk, open-air markets; supermarkets marriages 42, 130, 133 media 54, 64, 68, 98, 118, 123–5, 132–3 merchants, Chinese 4–5, 9, 12, 14–17, 20 migration routes 63–8 Millionka see Chinatown mining 19, 31–8 mixed marriages 42, 130, 133 modernity 103, 110, 125, 127, 138 Mongolia 49, 55, 62, 112, 138 Mongols, history of 3–6 Montenegro 67, 71, 89, 95 Moon 90 Moscow 4, 6, 28–31, 34–8, 41, 60–2, 118, 122; Chinese newspapers in 123; Moscow Chinese Association 118, 131 Murmansk railway 31, 33 Mutual Help Society 24, 39 Nadarov, Ivan 7 New Economic Policy 41 newspapers 15, 24, 27, 44, 50, 91, 109, 115; Asia Center publishes 124; Chinese 123–5; distribution 124; Hungarian Chinese Association 124; in Hungary 113, 114, 122–3, 132; National Federation of Overseas Chinese 107; and transnationalism 125; in Western Europe 123–4 open-air markets 55 opium 6, 9–10, 13, 17, 23, 25, 42 organizations: see Chinese organizations

Orochon 7, 16 Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau 106–8, 118, 120, 127 Overseas Chinese Affairs Office 111 Overseas Chinese Investment Company 29 Peking 3, 4, 15, 26, 32, 42, 51, 58; Treaty of 7, 26; University 128 Philippines 137 Poland 29, 32, 53–5, 64, 70, 83, 89–90, 95; decline in racial discrimination 134; and EU 136 population, Chinese: in Amur 7, 18–19; in Bulgaria 70; in Czech Republic 70, 72; in eastern Europe 68–72; in eastern Russia 28, 41, 68–71; in European Russia 28, 41; fear of 131–2; in Hungary 70, 72; in Maritime Province 18–19, 27; in Poland 70; in Russia 50; in Serbia; in Ussuri 7 18–19, 21; in Yugoslavia 71 Putin, Vladimir 136 Qiaoban see Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau Qiaolian see National Federation of Overseas Chinese Qing empire 5–8, 11, 24, 31 Qingtian 4, 28–9, 58, 61, 63, 105, 108–10, 113, 115, 124 Qingtian County Overseas Chinese History Exhibition Hall 28–9 Qingtian statues 4, 27–9 Rába 50 racial discrimination; see xenophobia railways 8, 17–19, 23, 27, 31–3, 52, 54 religion 13, 17, 109, 113, 121; remigration 61, 63, 65, 101

172

Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia

Republic of China see China residence permits 7, 17, 57, 60, 64–72, 99, 101–2, 124, 130–1, 136 restaurants 27–8, 60–1, 66, 77 95–8, 117–18; Middle Eastern 98 reunification, Chinese 107–8, 114, 120, 128, 136 Romania 29, 50, 54, 63–4, 72, 82, 86, 90, 96–7, 101, 120; Chinese newspapers in 124; decline in racial discrimination 134 Rules on the Hiring and Shipping of Workers of the Yellow Race 31 Russia: Altai Republic 136; Amur 4; Azeris 130; Chinese border 51; Chinese Embassy 32, 130; Chinese hostels 131; Chinese schools 43; Cold War 137; coolies 17, 34, 137; customs 55; deportation from 17, 21, 24, 26, 32–4, 43–4; devalues ruble 51; discrimination against Chinese 129–32; drinking 17, 131; Duma 22, 27, 67, 132; and European Federation of Chinese Organisations 118; Far East 19–29, 33–4, 37–8, 41–5, 49–52, 63, 78, 130–1; fears mass Chinese immigration 131–2, 136; Federal Migration Service 51, 55; history 3–8; media 132; migration policy 130; migration routes to 9–18, 28, 30, 31, 33–8, 41–5, 49–64; national myths 3; racial discrimination 43, 136; revolution 31–9, 42–3; Rules on the Hiring and Shipping of Workers of the Yellow Race 31 St Petersburg 6, 28–9, 63; Soviet Union, collapse of 45, 49, 50–1, 55, 63; study in 62 Sandic 89–91, 96 SARS 131 schools 26, 57

seasonal labour 18, 49 Second World War 3, 29, 45 Serbia 67, 70–1, 89, 96 serfdom, abolition of 7, 18 Shandong 28, 31, 41–2, 49, 51, 62 Shanghai 31, 57–9, 62, 114 shipping 22 shoes 54, 74, 85, 87, 89–90, 99, 103, 119 shopping centres 93, 94–5, 97 shops 9, 21–7, 41, 71–3, 84–9, 93–8; see also shopping centres; markets; supermarkets shuttle traders 49, 52–8, 68, 80–2, 86–8, 95, 101 Sichuan 50, 57, 62, 118 Singapore 55, 119 skilled labour 41, 50 Slovakia 90, 134, 136 Slovenia 64, 136 smuggling 21, 44, 58–9, 66, 88, 98–9, 117, 132–5 snakeheads 54–8, 64–7, 71 Soloviev, 7–12, 15, 17–28, 51 South Africa 27, 57, 137–8 South America 78, 90, 137 southeast Asia 58, 78, 105, 109, 119, 122, 137–9 Soviet Union, collapse of 45, 49, 50–1, 55, 63; see also Russia Spain 90 spies see espionage stereotypes 132 students 35–6, 42–3, 49, 57–8, 63, 69 supermarkets 84, 91, 93, 95, 103 Szeged 102, 140 Taiwan 90, 105–8, 114, 118–19, 121, 125, 128 Taza 13–16 telephones 129 television 109, 126 Tesco 91 Thailand 137; imported chicken, drugs in 118, 135

Index 173 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 44 45111

Tiananmen Square 25, 52, 105 Tianjin 17, 51, 60, 95, 109 Tibet 57 tourism, Chinese engage in 134–5 Trans-Siberian Railway 8, 52 Transbaikal Province 17, 19–27, 37; bans Chinese immigrants 27, 31 transnationalism i, xiii, xvi, 74–5, 89–91, 101–8, 110–11, 115, 120–30, 134–7, 138–40; and everyday life 129; newspapers and 125 Trenin, Dmitrii 49, 85 triads 132 Tungus 7, 15 Turkestan 31 Turkey 3, 55, 94, 117 Udege 7, 13–14 Ukraine 3, 32, 34, 62, 64, 69, 72, 86, 89 unemployment 33, 37, 41, 52, 79 USA 27, 63, 72, 90, 93, 101, 115, 119; Chinese Christianity in 121; fundamentalism 121 Ussuri 7, 9, 10–13, 15, 21, 26, 28; railway 17, 27 Ussuriisk 19, 22–4, 38, 62, 95 Vietnam 50, 55, 72, 83–4, 130–1 visas 17, 32, 60, 65–6, 71, 103, 130, 135 Vitkovskaia, Galina 7, 12, 18, 27, 44, 49–51, 62–3, 68–9 Vladivostok 8, 9–15, 19–20, 22–3, 45, 62, 79; Chinatown 19, 22–3, 45; Chinese population 26, 38–9,

41, 73, 82; General Chinese Trade Society 24–6; Harbin as suburb of 131; history 17–18; Mutual Help Society 24–5 wages 20, 35, 52–3, 79, 92, 97, 130 Wenzhou 109–10 Western Europe 28–9, 54, 78, 91, 93; illegal entry to 58; see also EU Wink 89, 93 World Fujianese Fellowship Conference 118–19 World Trade Fair 29 Xenophobia: 53, 77, 113, 129–36, 138 Xiamen International Trade Fair 119 Xinjiang 37, 42 Xiongnu see Huns Yeltsin, Boris 55, 67 ‘yellow peril’ 27 Yugoslavia 29, 50, 61, 64, 67, 71–2, 86, 90; Chinese newspapers in 124 Zainchkovskaia, Zhanna 7, 12, 18, 27, 44, 49–51, 62–3, 68–9 Zhang Manxin 105–17, 122, 128 Zhejiang Province 28, 57–65, 63, 65, 74; Import-Export Corporation 87, 101 Zhili 28, 31, 42