PACIFIC RIM TRADE : Profiles : Millions of Engines Rev Up the Asian Economy : To start a family. To start a business. To travel. Such goals help make individual workers productive. : YANG LINGQUO, 44, <i> Beijing ragman </i>

Among the wonders of the Chinese capital is the warren of clothing stalls surrounding Beijing’s Ritan Park that locals call the Russian Clothing Market.

The reason for the name is fairly straightforward: Most of the customers of the 1,300 market stalls selling bulk quantities of Chinese-made clothing are Russians.

At one point last year, said Vasily Yefimov, a Moscow University graduate in economics who arranges tours and air-freight forwarding services for Russian clothing buyers, his company was running 50 charter flights and 20 cargo flights a month between Beijing and Russian cities.

The Russians shop in Beijing because the quality of clothing made in China is vastly superior to that of Russian-made clothing. To meet the demand, many of the Chinese shopkeepers have learned to speak Russian. Many signs are in both Chinese characters and Russian Cyrillic script.

Yang Lingquo, 44, sold fruit in the market before the Russian trade began to grow explosively a few years ago.

When he saw how much money others were making selling brightly colored nylon jackets to Russians, Yang decided to jump into the rag trade, specializing in acrylic sweaters manufactured in Fujian province.

Yang lives only a few minutes’ walk from the market. He pays only $2 a month rent for a two-room apartment, which he shares with his wife and 14-year-old son. The apartment is subsidized by his work unit, a wholesale drug company that sells to hospitals and drugstores.

Yang is supposed to work 44 hours a week at that job. The license for the stall is actually in his mother’s name, and his three brothers and a sister take turns working in the stall.

Yang likes doing business with the Russians but warns against trying to cheat them:

“The Russians’ intellectual/cultural level is much higher than that of the Chinese. One of every five Russians has a university education, whereas only one out of several hundred Chinese has one.”