Chinese Workers Sowing Dreams in Siberia

The young Chinese man in a dirty black jacket had a lonely, mournful air about him, but he spoke softly of big dreams.

Zheng Chao was drawn to Siberia’s vast expanse of black earth four years ago, part of a growing wave of Chinese peasants using their greenhouse skills to grow vegetables for Russians in a land where winter lasts half the year.

The 26-year-old gets paid only once a year. But he saves it all. His goal is to start his own farming business here, run it for a few years, then return home modestly rich.

Chinese laborers and entrepreneurs are shaping a powerful presence in eastern Russia. The two countries in October settled the last of their disputes over territory on their long-contested border. The influx of Chinese offers this Russian region a promise of fresh vitality, but also carries risks and frustrations for both sides.

The Chinese who come here are almost universally driven by the desire to earn money and go home. In pursuit of that goal, they often endure tough physical labor, dirt-poor living conditions, separation from family and a constant fear of corrupt police who may demand bribes whether or not documents are in order.

The Russians glance nervously over the border and wonder whether China is destined to control this region in 50 or 100 years despite the border agreement. The population of far eastern Siberia, which includes the cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, has declined from 8 million in 1989 to about 6.7 million today. The three nearby provinces of northeastern China are home to about 105 million people.

“Russians want Chinese products. They don’t want Chinese,” Cui Hongwei, 32, who sells sportswear in Khabarovsk’s main open-air market, said in summing up the relationship. Yet he is on friendly terms with his elderly Russian landlady. He helps clean house, and they often share Chinese meals that he cooks, he said.

Vitaly Prokhorov, 34, who sells fur hats in the market, said it has become extremely difficult for Russian merchants to compete with the low prices of Chinese goods.

“They’re pushing you out,” he said. “In general, people here don’t like them. They make fun of them. But the big problem is, they can no longer exist without the Chinese.... They’re spreading like a forest fire. There’s no way of stopping them now.”

The Chinese have a reputation among Russians as hard-working and willing to take on tough and dirty jobs. And in the eyes of many Chinese, Russians are a bit lazy.

“They have land and don’t plant it!” exclaimed Zhou Yi, 60, a peasant who recently arrived on his first trip to work in greenhouses and fields here.

He earns $100 a month, payable on his return to China, much more than he can make at home, he said.

Guo Lifan, 30, who runs his own vegetable business, said it was not as easy to make money as it was a few years ago because there were too many Chinese to compete with now.

“Russians are no competition for me,” Guo said. “They’re lazy. They drink their vodka and they don’t want to work. Look at all the fields standing idle. Russians see that we work so hard and that we have good harvests, and they say we must go away because we prevent them from enjoying being lazy.”

Very few Chinese lived in Siberia before the 1989 normalization of Sino-Soviet relations, which came after 30 years of bitter political and ideological quarrels punctuated by military conflicts on the border. Estimates of the number of Chinese here now vary widely.

Stanislav Bystritsky, vice director of the Far Eastern Research Institute of Market Economy in Khabarovsk, said he believed there were about 200,000 Chinese in Siberia. “I tried to analyze various aspects of the problem, and I think that’s the correct figure,” he said. “Not 2 million, as some reports say.”

China once considered much of eastern Siberia part of its territory. But Beijing did not press broad territorial claims in the negotiations that led to the agreement in October, which resolved a dispute over three river islands, controlled by Moscow but claimed by Beijing, by allocating each side half the disputed land.

In announcing the deal, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao said the agreement would “create more favorable conditions for the long-term, healthy and stable development of the China-Russia strategic partnership of cooperation.”

Many Russians and Chinese in Khabarovsk, however, think their leaders gave away too much to the other side with the islands deal.

“It’s a horrible decision,” said Georgy Senotrusov, 70, who works on a ferry that serves Bolshoi Ussurisky, a 20-mile-long Amur River island near Khabarovsk that was divided by the border settlement. “The Chinese want it only for their own goals. Their goal is to take this land, to take this water, and to go further. You see, we have a lot of land here and there are very few of us.”

Cui, the sportswear merchant, said the border agreement meant China had abandoned its historical claim to a large part of eastern Siberia. “I’m just not comfortable about giving up such a big piece of land to Russia.”

Cui said he believed that for China’s government, it was more important to ensure the ability to buy Russian oil and timber than it was to hold on to a territorial claim that would be difficult to realize. “Russia’s economy is poor,” he said, “but its military is very strong.”

Fan Xianrong, China’s consul-general in Khabarovsk, said in an interview that “the question of territorial claims between Russia and China was resolved once and for all.”

It seems clear, however, that the Chinese presence in Siberia is destined to grow. The only question is how dramatically.

“Today, it’s quite obvious that we’re incapable of developing the Far East with our own labor resources, and nearby there’s this country with lots of working hands,” said Viktor Smolyak, spokesman for Ali Co., which runs the Khabarovsk market.

“I see the future of the Russian Far East as a Russian territory, but with a very big Chinese population on this territory,” Smolyak said. “The Russian government will have jurisdiction, we’ll have our garrisons, but the economy will be controlled by the Chinese.”

The Russian-owned outdoor market will soon face competition from a Chinese-financed indoor complex now under construction, which will rent space to 3,000 shops and trading firms. That project is supervised by Liu Dexin, 52, one of five private Chinese investors who are putting up $15 million. Liu started on the road to wealth 13 years ago, bartering Chinese sugar for Russian Lada cars.

Most Chinese come to Russia legally with tourist or business visas, but many overstay and relatively few hold work permits or pay taxes. They say police show little desire to deport them but great interest in collecting bribes disguised as fines.

“Sometimes they even fine people who have work permits,” said Li Bin, 21, a woman who has worked in an open-air market for three years. “I think they’re just looking for excuses.” The standard rate for fines or bribes for immigration offenses, she said, has gone from about $1.70 in 2002 to $54.

Zheng, the young man who dreams of launching his own agribusiness, works alongside Russians in a greenhouse built of birch poles and plastic. He cultivates tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, cabbage and other vegetables.

Zheng works for a Chinese boss and earns $120 per month, plus room and board. He believes that in three more years he’ll have enough saved to rent land for himself, and that a few years of running his own farm should enable him to return with $60,000, a small fortune in a Chinese village. For now, he sleeps in a room with three or four other men in a wooden shack with no electricity.

But people like Zheng may be too late to make it big here, said Wu Ziguo, 34, a university graduate who majored in Russian, came to Khabarovsk in 1999 and now runs a farm business through a Russian front company.

He lives in a comfortable apartment with his wife, Shang Lijian, 32, who helps run the enterprise while her mother raises their 6-year-old son back in Shandong province. They’re happy here, aside from missing their child, whom they see twice a year on visits home, he said.

“I rented a piece of land, put up a greenhouse and started selling vegetables, and we settled down here,” Wu said. “When I first came, there weren’t many Chinese. Now there are more Chinese, and everybody’s competing to get their vegetables to market early. A few years ago, people could make money more easily. Now you can still make money, but not so much.”

Chinese won’t overwhelm the Russians in Siberia partly because legal restrictions make it difficult or impossible to get permanent residence, and partly because the great majority of Chinese simply want to earn some money and go home, Wu said.

Wu was enjoying an outing with Chinese friends just outside Khabarovsk, with shish kebab cooking on a campfire as several of the group fished in a stream. The friends included Guo, the other vegetable business owner, who projected brash self-confidence when asked about the territorial issue.

“We know from our history class that it’s our land,” Guo said. “OK. We’re having a picnic now, and fishing our fish in our river.

“Frankly, I don’t care if we ever get this land for real. I don’t care what islands Putin gave to China. All I care about is how much money I’m making here.”