>Hey! The immigration _IS_ illegal.
John Gulick sez:
Yeah, I used the scare quotes for some reason ... perhaps residue from my p.c. past.
CD:
>It is damn hard to get a work permit in Russia, much less citizenship.
>Hell, it's hard to work legally in >Moscow even if you're Russian and don't
>have a residence permit (The >obnoxious invention of Yury Luzhkov). Which
>doesn't keep lots of >people from doing it anyway, of course.
JG:
The border patrol and the local police in the RFE make a pretty good living from allowing the Chinese to "do it anyway," from what I've heard and seen. And mafiosi construction contractors in Vladivostok are peachy keen about it: hard-working labor cowed by the prospect of deportation. In any event, a story repeated over much of the world.
CD:
>There's already a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment in the Russian Far >East.
JG:
My sense is that it peaked at least a half-decade ago, when Primorsky Krai guv Nazdratenko was at his race-baiting worst. The migration service stiffened their policy a bit, and the corrupt ranks of the border patrol were cleaned out to some degree. In my estimation, when Iowan corn and Brazilian soybeans hit the Chinese market full force and Northeast Chinese farmers take it on the chin, the rampant border crossing will return, and so will the "anti-Chinese sentiment."
CD:
>That territory has been contested by China for a long time ...
JG:
Yep, despite official denials that Beijing has any designs on land north of the Amur River, because this territory was absorbed by the early Qing (like Tibet, like Taiwan) and then lost to Tsarist Russia in the 1850's, it is the garden variety Chinese opinion that demographic reconquest is thus fully justified (however indirectly this garden variety sentiment may be expressed). Justifying demographic reconquest, of course, is qualitatively different from claiming that the PRC should exercise sovereignty north of the Heilongjiang.
CD:
>ethnic tensions are increased by the rapid decline of the ethnic >Russian
>population there (mainly because of mass emigration of >Russians from the
>Far East and Siberia to European Russia, where >living standards are an
>order of magnitude higher unless you're lucky >enough to work for a big
>natural-resource monopoly like Nikoil).
Indeed. There is a section of the productive property-owning class and the remaining European Russian professional class which acknowledges that the salvation (from a conventional economic growth perspective) of the RFE must necessarily combine Japanese/South Korean capital and Chinese labor. (The Chinese capital for the most part is too fly-by-night and not oriented enough toward fixed investment for their tastes).
CD:
>BTW in internal Russian politics there's a lot of debate between the
>"Eurasionists" who want a close alliance between Russia and China to
>counteract Western influence, and those that view China as the main >threat
>in the future, esp. because Russia is selling it lots of high->tech
>weapons, and therefore want to anchor Russia in the West to >counteract the
>influence of the southeastern flank. It's a bitch being >a country so huge
>you border on both the EU and the PRC.
JG:
Yes, I've taken a gander at some of what you've posted on this over the last several months. Tres interessante. The tango's being played out in the UN Security Council at the moment, and in the oilfields of Iraq all too soon. If Bush and company played their cards right, they could solidify their romance with Russia, an alliance that would come in handy when the U.S.' "strategic competitor," the PRC, cranks up its consumption of RFE natural resources. But they keep on high-hatting Pootie-Poot with this unilateral war in Iraq thingy and a dozen other thingies (forcing Putin to save face with the Kremlin et. al.). All of which about you have a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated angle than I.
John Gulick
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