When Solitudes Collide, The Dragon Stings The Bear

The people of northern China used to fear and respect their powerful neighbours, but today the balance has reversed: The booming Chinese economy has reduced a Russian border town to a Chinese tourists' playground. And as GEOFFREY YORK reports, the change has revived historic resentments on both sides

BLAGOVESHCHENSK, RUSSIA -- Late at night in this Russian border town, a Chinese judge and a Chinese businessman are comparing the pleasures of their evenings: The businessman lost 4,000 rubles (about $165) in a night of gambling at a Russian casino. The judge opted for a Russian prostitute. "You spent 4,000 rubles?" the judge says to his friend. "You could have enjoyed five women for that money."

As they stroll the corridors of their cheap Soviet-era hotel, the judge boasts of the prostitutes that he and a fellow tourist have hired on every night of their Russian tour. One of their girls, he says, was just 13 years old. "That would never be allowed in China."

The judge and his friend are among the hundreds of Chinese tourists who pour into this Russian city every day and gape at the decaying urban landscape.

On one guided tour, the Chinese murmur to one another: "Look at those dirty streets. Why are there so few people on the streets? Why are the buildings so small and old?"

Strolling past the fading Lenin monuments and log cabins, they remark, "Remember how powerful the Russian military and economy used to be? The giant is weak now."

Here on the frigid edge of Siberia, a rising empire is colliding with a declining empire. The emerging Chinese superpower is spilling over its borders, capturing a new sphere of influence -- an economic colony in the heartland of its former rival.

The two leading powers of 20th-century communism have been speeding in opposite directions. Since the early 1990s, the Chinese economy has expanded by a stunning 9.7 per cent annually. The Russian economy -- hobbled by heavy corruption, lack of reforms and lingering state control -- has declined by an average of 2.7 per cent a year in the same period.

With their booming economy and aggressive business instincts, the Chinese have poured into the Russian Far East and Siberia. At first, it was just a place to sell their goods. Now, it's also a playground for China's nouveaux riches.

Not long ago, the Chinese feared and respected the strength of their neighbours. As late as the 1980s, their long border with Russia was a tense zone of fortified bunkers and heavily armed troops. It has erupted in violence many times over the past four centuries, most recently in bloody skirmishes in 1969 that killed hundreds of soldiers.

Today, the Russian pillboxes are empty and abandoned. Their menacing gun slits are still pointed across the river at China, but their concrete walls are crumbling.

The Russian border city has fallen into a humiliating new position, as a market for cheap Chinese products and a sleazy entertainment zone for Chinese men.

Almost every day, from spring to fall, hundreds of tourists pile onto a double-decker ferry on the Amur River (known to the Chinese as Heilongjiang, the Black Dragon River) and cross the border to Blagoveshchensk.

Most of the tourists are men. Most cannot even pronounce the name of the Russian city -- they call it simply bu shi, "B-city." But they know what they want: They head straight to the tawdry collection of neon-lit gambling palaces and strip clubs and pimps that have sprung up to serve them.

"I often go there with my friends," says Guo Jinian, a taxi driver in the Chinese border city of Heihe. "For each Russian girl, you pay 300 to 400 yuan [about $50 Canadian]. They provide very good service. The Russians treat us very well now. They know that China is richer and stronger than before."

More than 20 casinos have sprung up in Blagoveshchensk, and 80 per cent of their customers are from China, where gambling is illegal. "They're not interested in our history or our culture," a Russian tour guide says. "I once asked a Chinese tour guide why the Chinese people were coming here only for casinos and prostitutes. The guide said: 'What else is there?' " While hundreds of Chinese tourists a day come northward to sample Russian amusements, an equal flow of Russians rides the ferries in the opposite direction.

Few are tourists, however. Most are employed by Chinese businesses as porters. They go to warehouses to pick up huge bags of up to 100 kilograms of trading goods and carry them back across the border for sale in Russia's shops and markets. A decade ago, it was the Chinese who lugged the bags and sold the goods.

Kolya and his wife, Ira, are two of the Russians who make a living selling Chinese goods. He was once a radio technician and she was a teacher, but they could barely survive on their salaries of less than $100 each a month in the post-Soviet economic collapse. Now, they earn three times that much by selling Chinese-made children's clothing at an outdoor market at Blagoveshchensk. But they are not happy about it -- especially in the dead of winter, when the temperature falls to minus 40.

"Of course we don't like this work, standing here all winter and getting frost on our noses, but we have no choice," Kolya says. "The Chinese businessmen are sitting on our necks, and our authorities are doing nothing to stop it -- they're only interested in getting money from it. Soon, this whole territory will belong to China."

Until recently, the Russians were disdainful of China, seeing it as a poverty-stricken Third World country that could only produce cheap and shoddy goods. Now, they must come to grips with the reality of Chinese power. Some have accepted it, but others are deeply resentful of their mounting dependence. And worse news looms on the horizon: A bridge across the Amur River is scheduled to be built next year, making it even easier for the Chinese to do business here.

"They are like a flood," complains Marina, a middle-aged woman who sells Chinese-made jackets in the outdoor market. "Soon, they'll be more than half of the people in this city."

Like many Russians, she is strongly opposed to the bridge. She claims it will bring too much pollution -- and too many Chinese. Indeed, the project has been stalled for more than a decade because of Russian ambivalence, even though China offered to pay for the construction cost.

Vitaly Chub, a 40-year-old businessman who hawks leather jackets from Turkey at the outdoor market in Blagoveshchensk, says he used to sell 10 jackets a day before the Chinese arrived. Now, he is surrounded by vendors selling cheaper Chinese jackets, and sometimes he sells only three jackets a week.

"Business is getting worse and worse," he says bitterly. "Soon, all the Russians will lose their jobs because of the Chinese. The Chinese might behave in a friendly manner, but inside they dislike us. They see us as enemies."

He recalls how the Soviet Union gave aid to China in the early Communist era, before the border clashes. "We gave them a chance, we helped them to develop, and now they don't help us. Everything they do is for themselves."

Paradoxically, as the Russians have grown more resentful, their city has benefited from the Chinese economic boom. The casinos and tourism have created hundreds of jobs in Blagoveshchensk. The cross-border trade has boosted incomes and Chinese construction companies have built new trade centres and apartment towers in the city, creating more jobs.

Mr. Chub grudgingly admits the gains. "Our town has developed, but it's dirtier too," he says. "Of course we live better, but most of the money is going into a few pockets. Most of us think that the casinos are bad. Our town's reputation is not very good because of it. Even in southern China, they know about our city."

Younger Russians are more accepting. Kostya Butuzov, an 18-year-old computer student in Blagoveshchensk, goes across the border to China once a week to carry bags of goods for the Chinese traders. He earns 200 to 500 rubles ($8 to $20) a day, but he sees it mainly as a chance to enjoy Chinese food and cheap beer and to amuse himself in Chinese bowling alleys and steam baths.

The Chinese say they have noticed an outward change in Russian attitudes. "When I started being a tourist guide in the early 1990s, the Russians were still behaving as the 'older brothers' of the Chinese, and they often talked about how the Soviet Union had supported China," one guide says. "Now, the Russians talk about how rich we are."

"We don't like the Chinese businessmen," says Pasha Yesenin, a student at a technical institute who has been carrying bags in the border trade for the past three years. "They're cunning like a fox. They want to make money from everything. They want to take over our region, but our government won't allow it."

After a decade of trade, the cross-border business on the Amur River has become a well-organized network of labourers and middlemen. At the bottom are the fonar, the "streetlamps," as they call the porters who carry the heavy bags of 50 to 100 kilograms. Above them is the brigadier, a foreman who buys ferry tickets and handles paperwork for the porters. Above the brigadier is the kirpich, the "brick," who stays on the Russian side to hire the labourers and serve as liaison to the Chinese businessmen who control the trade. (Nobody seems to know the reason for the nicknames.) As many as 50 "streetlamps" can be working for a single "brick."

Almost all are Russians, including many who are supplementing low-paying day jobs as teachers or librarians. The Chinese traders devised this system after discovering that their Russian employees are better at negotiating bribes with the Russian border officials.

Delaying the construction of the much-needed bridge over the Amur River has been a crude way of limiting Chinese influence here. Without the bridge, the traders must use a makeshift system of boats and ice roads. When the ice begins to choke the river in the fall, the traders switch to smaller hovercraft that can skip over the ice and water. In winter, they travel on buses over an ice road across the river.

The traders endure lengthy delays as they wait for the boats or buses under the stern watch of thuggish Russian border guards, who shout and push to maintain order.

In another effort to control the border trade, Moscow has imposed a ceiling on cross-border business, limiting each person to one trip a week. But when the border was closed during the SARS crisis last year, prices in Blagoveshchensk quickly skyrocketed, and residents held protest rallies to demand the reopening of the border.

"You can see how dependent they are on China," the Chinese tourist guide tells his group. "It's not good for a country to depend on another country so much."

China's influence over the Russian city is increasingly visible. The Russians eat at Chinese restaurants, wear Chinese-made clothing, talk on Chinese cellphones and buy Chinese fruit and vegetables at the markets. The most active construction company here is a Chinese enterprise, Huafu, which has built the newest and biggest buildings in the city. Even the Russian souvenir shops are usually owned by Chinese entrepreneurs -- and the souvenirs themselves are often made in China.

"Russians are very lazy," says Liu Manhua, the owner of a travel agency on the Chinese side of the border. "It usually takes them a few years to complete the construction of a building. They never have much money because they don't think about tomorrow. When they get their salary, they spend it."

As the Chinese presence continues to grow, Russian nationalists are raising the alarm about what they call the "Yellow Peril" -- the spectre of massive Chinese migration across the Amur River. They claim that a million Chinese migrants have already infiltrated the Russian Far East, although most reliable estimates say the number is only in the tens of thousands, even including short-term traders.

Chinese northward migration has a certain logic to it. Only 16 million Russians live in the vast territory of the Russian Far East, compared with the hundreds of millions of Chinese just across the border in northern China. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Chinese could soon become the main language in Russia's Far East if the economic trends continue.

Across the river from Blagoveshchensk, the Chinese city of Heihe was just a small town before the cross-border trade began to boom. Its population has soared in the past decades from 60,000 to about 250,000, giving it roughly the same population as Blagoveshchensk today.

At night, the river is dominated by the neon lights of Heihe's skyline, while the Russian city is dimly lit. The Chinese city is filled with seafood restaurants, glass-and-steel towers and even a hotel with a revolving restaurant, along with bustling businesses on every street corner, often with their signs translated into Russian in hope of attracting cross-border shoppers.

On the Russian side, by contrast, you can walk for blocks without encountering a shop. Most Russian shops are closed by 6 p.m., while on the Chinese side businesses stay open late into the night.

Chinese entrepreneurs have even figured out a clever scheme to capture the spending of the Chinese tourists who travel to Russia. They have opened their own Russian souvenir stores on the Chinese side of the border, selling the same vodka brands and wooden dolls that are sold on the Russian side -- only cheaper. Chinese guides often urge tourists to delay their souvenir purchases until they return to Heihe.

Russia has one key advantage: its natural resources. Just as Canada sells its raw materials to its giant southern neighbour, so too is Russia shipping its natural resources southward. Its timber, oil, natural gas and minerals are increasingly vital to China's economic boom.

Beijing is lobbying hard to persuade Moscow to build an oil pipeline to northern China, and in exchange it has promised to invest $15-billion in Russia's energy sector. It even gave favourable terms to Russia to settle the last disputes on their 4,300-kilometre border.

Despite their growing economic links, the Russian and Chinese border cities have remained two solitudes, divided by mistrust and suspicion. The Amur River takes only a few minutes to cross by ferry, but the gulf of cultural and political misunderstanding between the two places is much wider.

They cannot even agree on basic historical facts. Most ordinary Russians believe that the Chinese never lived on the northern side of the Amur River. The Chinese are convinced that the region north of the Amur had belonged to China until its people were brutally evicted by savage Russian soldiers.

Don't look to the local historical museums to resolve the disagreement. They are tools of political propaganda. On the Chinese side, near Heihe, a new $8-million museum is filled with garish paintings of innocent Chinese women and children being slaughtered by Russian Cossacks in a massacre in 1900 that expelled the Chinese from the northern side of the river. On the Russian side, the historical museum makes no mention of that massacre, but displays its own paintings of a Chinese military invasion in 1689 -- an incident ignored by the Chinese museum.

At the entrance to the Chinese museum, guards are under strict orders to prohibit Russians from entering. They carefully scrutinize passports to ensure that no Russians can see the inflammatory exhibits. "Our two countries have friendly relations now," a guard explains. That diplomatic relationship could be jeopardized if the Russians knew they were being portrayed as brutal killers.

Chinese school groups are brought to the museum for mandatory lessons on the need for patriotism and power. First, they are shown a life-sized tableau of the 1858 treaty-signing ceremony that allowed Russia to gain control of Chinese-held territory in Siberia and the Far East. They are told that Russia used military force to impose unfair treaties on China.

Then they are taken to a huge diorama of the 1900 massacre, where a sound-and-light show gives a gruesome account of the killing. Houses are in flames, babies are flung into the river, soldiers wield axes and swords against the innocents and the screams of women and children are punctuated by bursts of machine-gun fire as the Chinese are herded into the Amur River to drown.

"The czar's army cruelly killed more than 5,000 Chinese people," the narrator intones. "The world was shocked."

At the end of the show, there is a solemn martial beat, and a female and male narrator join together to chant slogans on the need for economic and military strength. "We should never forget our history," they recite loudly. "Those who are backward will be beaten."

In a downstairs room, another life-sized display shows Russian troops rampaging through a Chinese village in the same massacre. A Chinese baby is dying in the arms of his mother, while a Chinese peasant with a spear is trying to resist Russian soldiers who carry machine guns. "Look how backward our weapons were," a museum security guard tells a visitor.

The propaganda is effective. "I'm full of anger," a tourist says as he leaves the museum. "Those horrible soldiers -- how could they kill so many people, how could they throw people into the river?"

In the Blagoveshchensk museum, meanwhile, tourists are shown a painting of evil-looking Manchu soldiers invading the northern shore of the Amur River in 1689, while heroic Russian soldiers use a religious icon to fend off the invaders. Chinese tourists are outraged by the Russian view of history. "How can they do this?" one complains.

Many Russians are convinced that China secretly harbours ambitions of regaining the land it once held in Siberia and the Far East. The Chinese deny the allegation, but in private conversations they readily confirm that they still consider the northern bank of the Amur to be their rightful property. "This land should be ours," the museum guard says.

At the entrance to the Chinese museum, a display of memorial bells is a vivid symbol of China's lingering grievances. There are exactly 1,858 memorial bells tinkling in the breeze -- for the Chinese government, the 1858 loss of territory is a bigger cause for mourning than the thousands of lives lost in 1900.

But even as the museum does its best to fuel patriotic anger, the Chinese boom is relentlessly producing new facts on the ground. Even if it legally belongs to Russia, the disputed territory is falling back under Chinese economic control.

As the narrators proclaim in the Chinese museum show, "The wheel of history keeps turning."

In not too many years, China may well be able to simply buy the eastern half of Siberia from the poverty-stricken Russia. Even at the height of the Union, eastern Russia was only a part because they had nothing better to do. Moscow could barely support the most minimal skeleton infrastructure out there. Of course, China now has the might to simply walk in and take it, or soon will, so their ability to buy it may be moot.

If they do get it, they will have access to a vast source of natural resources such as timber, oil/gas, gold and other heavy metals, and I believe coal as well. They will also own the only quiescent tectonic plate boundary on earth (as far as I can tell, and not that such a thing matters to anyone).

Is there even still a real border? Sometimes, I have to wonder if we will not see another Yuan Empire but this time around with the Han instead of Mongols at the eastern node. Also, the way this horsetrading works, the Chinese bring money, manpower and access (eventually) to the Indian Ocean to the table (not to mention their economic access to and influence over the US, both legitimate and illegal) and the Russians bring their niche technical know how, their vast nuclear arsenal and their oil, land and other raw materials. Set all of this in the context of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Don't like the looks of any of it.

The thing is, they have a point. The Czars screwed 'em. My take on Russia's current pro-PRC policy is that Vlad is buying time in the hope that Russia will be better situated 10-20 years hence when the PRC gets full nuclear parity with it. Unfortunately, by then Russian missiles from Chinese ships might have killed thousands of American sailors, which won't help any eventual turn to the West by the Kremlin.

doesn't the bible mention something about the dragon and the eagle will combine to defeat the bear from the north?

Don't know about that one, but there is another prophecy at least as interesting, or terrifying, from the disciple John in Rev. 9.
He speaks of two hundred million soldiers near the Euphrates, and killing "a third of the people". The Euphrates river is also mentioned a little later {ch 16} in the context of the river being "dried up", in order to prepare the way of the "kings of the east".

Being a Taiwan-born Chinese, I have never under communist rule but I have to tell you the truth, the unbiased truth. Territories on the northern bank of Amur River and eastern bank of Ussuri River is the Chinese lost land. No doubts about this fact. Chinese people have been consisting of multi-ethnic groups through long-term integration for thousands of years. Although Han Chinese form the majority ( 94% of overall Chinese ), there are some prominent minority such as Manchu people. The Manchus invaded China proper south of the Great Wall in 1644 and finally conquered the whole China including today's Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet and established Qing Dynasty ( 1644-1911 ). Before Manchu Empire completely conquered Han Chinese. the Manchu Empire had extended its territories into inner Mongolia and the greater Manchuria including the northern bank of Amur river. Actually the Manchu Empire before 1644 was formed by the alliance of Manchus-Mongols tribes plus some defect Han Chinese. Today Manchu languages are almost extinct since the Manchu people are completely assimilated by Han Chinese. I must tell you that ethnic Manchus were conquerers but later assimilated by Han Chinese. Their ancestors inhibited in the northern bank of Amur River and under administration of Manchu lords. It is Han Chinese, Manchus and Mongols who form today's China; It is NOT Han Chinese who conquered Manchus and Mongols and enslaved those ethnic groups; therefore, Manchus are Chinese. How dare do Russians say there was no Chinese living in the northern bank of Amur River before they arrived in the 17th century. Russians are shameful liars. We Chinese must regain our lost territories, the outer Manchuria, with any available means including force. Chinese are destined to be the next super power. Nobody can block our ambitions!</p>

Unlike Manchus, Koreans were not completely integrated with Chinese Empire. Koreans own their history, languages as well as border line with China; therefore, Koreans are never considered as Chinese. In history, Manchu people started infiltrating into South of the Great Wall as early as the 10th century. For example, Jin Dynasty ( 1115-1234 ), a jurchen ( Manchu ) kingdom in " Northern China ". Its territories extended into China proper south of the Great Wall and almost occupied half of China proper four centuries before Manchu Empire was formed. Every Chinese regards Jurchen or Manchus as ethnic minority Chinese groups, even Jurchen and Manchus have seen themselves as Chinese. After coming into China proper, their next generation soon spoke perfect mandarin but lost their parents' languages. That's the most compelling evidence that integration of Manchus with Han Chinese took place in Chinese history. After Russians arrived in the banks of Amur River during the late 17th century, the Manchu Empire had already conquered all Han Chinese. It represented sole legitimate government in China. The Manchu Empire was equal to Chinese Empire at that moment. Whenever Russians dealt with Manchus, it dealt with Chinese. Whenever Russians dealt with Chinese, it had to come to deal with Manchus. However, during the late 17th century, Manchus regarded themselves as conquerers of China, an alienized Chinese minority, simply saying, Manchus were Chinese then. Manchu tribes inhibited on the banks of Armur River were all under administration of Manchu Empire. Those tribes were paying tributes to Beijing. They regarded themselves as Chinese, too

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