 Valentin Trukhanenko Special Police officers arrest illegal Chinese immigrants trading in Vladivostok’s markets. |
By Russell Working
USSURISK — Late last October, Nain Ti Nan and Ti Yue Tsun brought their newborn daughter home to a cargo container in the city’s Chinese market.
The container is paneled in plywood and floored in linoleum, and a poster of a waterfall is tacked over the sleeping platform. On the floor sit a TV and a 100-kilo bag of rice. The container is surrounded by scores of similar homes, sometimes stacked on top of each other.
Nan is a trader who sells leather coats and Lawlton T-shirts and whatever else he can unload in the Ussuri Center Chinese market, the largest in this city of 120,000 people. Tsun is a shy woman with eyebrows that have been plucked off and tattooed back on, in the Chinese fashion. Taria, the baby, is not yet registered, and her parents have no desire to raise her as a Russian. Nan goes home once a month to renew his visa; his wife, who is undocumented, simply lies low.
“Of course, she wants to go home, because she has a mother and father in China,” Nan said in Russian as he and his wife knelt on velvet cushions on the floor. “Sometimes she gets so homesick, she cries.”
In scores of cities from Omsk to Magadan, markets are bustling with Chinese traders. They live in dormitories in Blagoveshchensk, apartment blocks in Vladivostok, and train cars in Ussurisk. Indeed, Ussurisk — a town of 120,000 people 90 kilometers from Vladivostok and 60 kilometers from the Chinese border — offers a glimpse of what the future may hold for the market cities of the Far East.
Nearly 100,000 Chinese illegally live in Russia as traders and laborers, federal officials estimate, and thousands more are here on tourist or temporary worker visas. The population is growing so rapidly that the Chinese could become the dominant population in parts of the Primorsky and Khabarovsky krais in the next century, the Federal Migration Service has stated. Ivan Fedotov, chief of the service’s immigration directorate, has even gone so far as to say this could lead to territorial losses if the Chinese intervene to protect their population.
A Western diplomat in Beijing who is familiar with the Far East says such a scenario is unlikely. Witness the Chinese government’s reluctance to intervene in Indonesia when rioting claimed the lives of ethnic and national Chinese, he said. Nevertheless, the fact that such discussions are being held at high levels in Moscow — and not simply in the Primorye krai administration — suggests the level of concern that illegal immigration stirs up.
Ussurisk has the most established Chinese market in Primorye, though others are following suit. (The city of Nakhodka recently opened a trading street that is a kilometer long and decorated like the Great Wall.) Ussuri Center is a village of 1,000-2,000 people contained within the third-largest city in Primorye. There are mazes of stalls, and wholesale warehouses offering goods from Harbin, Suifenhe, Mudangjiang and other cities. The shops are endlessly repetitive, selling wallpaper, fabric bouquets, calculators, sweaters, sauce pans, TVs, pastel golf caps emblazoned with the Chicago Bulls emblem, bath towels decorated with naked women.
The market bustles for at least 16 hours a day. There are two shifts: from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and from midnight until dawn. While it might seem hard to draw enough night-owl customers to keep a market open after dark, Ussuri Center’s night market is popular with Ussurisk residents. Traders drop their prices to wholesale levels at night. During the day, exhausted merchants often nod off at their trading booths.
The Chinese who work in the market seldom leave the compound, which is surrounded by concrete walls and heavily staffed by security guards. Hundreds of men and women live in cargo containers, rail cars, and a so-called “hotel complex.” On the ground floor, the hotel is a line of stalls, each the size of a cargo container, with roll-up steel doors. The rent for each shop, 2,000 rubles a month ($323), includes a tiny room upstairs for the proprietor. There is barely enough space for a sleeping platform and a counter where residents plug in their woks. There is no running water in most rooms – one woman kept two large milk jugs, one for water, another for sewage. Once a week a truck shows up, traders say, and the residents haul their sewage in buckets to the truck.
“It’s very bad to live in these places,” said Lee Hwa, 23, a trader from Yangbeng. “It’s hot inside, and there’s no water, and sometimes no electricity.”
One room, marked with a hand-painted red cross, doubles as the clinic of Dr. Yang Mingxing. A sleeping platform fills half the room, and shelves are stocked with traditional and Western medicines such as stick-on herbal patches that treat sore backs. One wall is decorated with a poster of a topless blonde. A patient, 23-year-old Van Shang Zheng, lies with an IV tube in his arm. He is suffering from pneumonia from excessive smoking and hard work, he said. The traders brought Yang here last July because they distrusted Russian medicine. When his caseload is slow, the doctor trades in a store downstairs.
The market is not the only place where Chinese live and trade in Ussurisk. Three hotels have turned over their rooms to Chinese traders. At the Hotel Zarya, the halls are filled with bargain-seeking customers until 9 p.m., when the staff begins shooing them out. The rooms look like market stalls, but in the back of each room, behind lace curtains, is a sleeping platform and a small television. Four traders usually stay in each room.
In Zarya’s Room No. 214, Irina Minchenko, 31, and her husband Dzya Chung Ang, 34, sell clothes dresses, skirts, T-shirts and shoes (they live in an apartment in town, and his brother sleeps in the hotel room to guard it at night). Minchenko said the Chinese are instinctive businessmen, unlike their Russian counterparts. “They very quickly react to trends and fashion,” she said. “If some new fashion comes out, it will take two years before Russians start copying it. The Chinese do it right away. They go down to Vladivostok and buy up the latest foreign fashions, and they take it back to China and copy it.”
Chinese merchants often complain of abuse at the hands of the police. Nan, the trader who lives in a container, said police show up regularly and fine the merchants. “We give them money so they leave us alone,” he said.
To hear the Chinese talk, there is a longing for home, a sense of impermanence about their stay in Russia. “As soon as we save up enough money, we will go back to China,” Nan said.
Somehow, however, the departure keeps getting delayed. Nan and his wife have already lived in Russia for five years.
Nonna Chernyakova contributed to this story.
“They try to get into Russia through any possible pretext,” said Sergei Pushkaryov, head of the regional office of the migration service. “They might come to Russia as translators, but knowing no Russian, or as truck drivers, but having no truck or driver’s license.”
Valentin Trukhanenko
Arrested Chinese await deportation.
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