USSURISK - During a trip home to China this summer, Jin Lian Sun invested $1,129 in leather coats of a style she thought she could sell in Russia as autumn approached.
The coats are bulky, zippered and sheepskin-lined, the sort of thing men wear in the far eastern Primorye region, where the Sea of Japan freezes for three months a year.
But Jin, 40, who runs a clothing booth in the sprawling outdoor Chinese market called Ussuri Center, hadn't counted on the collapse of the ruble. A dollar was worth 6.5 rubles when she bought her stock. On Sept. 6, it was selling for 17 rubles. And that means she must either jack up her prices to levels unaffordable to most Russians, or sell at a loss. She expects to recover only a third of her investment.
"I have been selling at a loss just because I want to go back home," said Jin, who has been trading here for three years. "If things go better, I might come back in the future. But not now."
Some 2,000 Chinese who live and trade in Ussuri Center face a similar dilemma in this town of 120,000, 72 kilometers from the Chinese border. As the ruble collapses, foreign products undergo a rapid inflation. And the alarm expressed here is echoed throughout a vast stretch of Russia.
The Chinese come from a land where small manufacturers crank out watches, electric teakettles, fake Nike shoes that fall apart in a month, and tee shirts labeled "Washington Rednecks." They have found a lucrative niche: selling goods to Russians, whose domestic industry has largely collapsed but who can't afford expensive imports from America or Europe.
For many Chinese, who borrowed from families or built up small trading businesses over the years, the fall of the ruble is devastating. Throughout Ussuri Center, stalls have sprouted pieces of cardboard hand-lettered with a simple message: "$." The merchants are seeking to cash in their rubles for dollars at a time when banks refuse to trade their scarce supply of U.S. currency.
"The problem is that Chinese sell their stuff here for rubles, and buy dollars before going back to China," said Nikolai Nazarenko, chief administrator for Ussuri Center. "In China they change the dollars into yuan. But right now they can't do that. And there's nothing they can take back into China to sell there. What could we export, anyway? Watermelons? They don't need that."
The Chinese traders aren't the only ones hurt by the fall of the ruble. Hundreds of Russians also trade in the market, and some, like Aleksandr Kim, 28, have an expensive stake in offering higher quality products. Kim bought $50,000 worth of women's fur coats in Turkey last year, and he expects to lose most of his investment.
"I have plenty of rubles right now, but they are 'wooden,'" he said. "I can't do anything with them."
Despite the problems for Chinese vendors, the market is still bustling with customers hoping to unload their rubles before they fall in value even more. Viktor Romashenko, a 44-year-old company driver who lives in Ussurisk, wandered the market recently looking to spend his life's savings on clothes. "Inflation has already taught us a lesson once before," he said. "We have been through this before [in the early 1990s]."
Despite the recent crisis, the market is open for at least 16 hours a day. But with the devaluation, half the night market traders have closed up shop, said Nazarenko.
For now, at least, the Chinese presence in Ussurisk may dwindle. Lee Ok Tya, a 35-year-old Chinese trader, says she expects her three years of trading in Russia to end in failure.
"We need to go home," Lee said. "That's why we sell anything for whatever we can get. I won't come here again, and none of my friends are going to come back, unless the situation stabilizes."
By Russell Working
Russell Working
A Chinese trader surrounded by his wares at the Ussurisk market.
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