Window on Eurasia

Chinese Migration to Russian Far East Said Vastly Exaggerated

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 24, 2006 – Given declines in the population of the Russian Far East – officials there suggest that the number of residents will have declined by almost 50 percent between 1991 and 2020 – and China’s burgeoning population next door, many Russians fear their country is about to be swamped by waves of Chinese immigrants.

But these fears, genuine in and of themselves, have given birth to wild
and exaggerated projections about the number of ethnic Chinese already
in the Russian Far East and other parts of the Russian Federation and
to even more baseless projections about the number of Chinese likely to
settle there in the future.

Last week, Kamil’ Iskhakov, the Presidential envoy to the Far Eastern
Federal District, said that the population of the Russian Far East had
declined by 20 percent over the last 15 years and would, unless
something dramatic was done, decline by an additional third over the
next 15 to 20 years, Novosti reported don July 21.

Such projections themselves almost certainly accurate have given birth
to often extreme and unwarranted fears among some in the population
that the country will be overrun by immigrants – fears that some
nationalist media outlets seem interested in whipping up as much as
possible.

An example of such efforts was a letter posted on the Movement Against
Illegal Immigration web page last week. The writer described how in one
Russian village, ethnic Russians were either leaving and dying out
while immigrants from the south were moving in and having four or five
children.

“Death is hanging in the air,” the writer said, and consequently,
“after ten or 20 years, these lands already will not be Russian. …
What is to be done in such a situation? There is only one thing
possible: Gather the last Romans together. There is no other way out”
[http://dpni.org/index.php?0++6374].

But an analysis of immigration data posted online last week suggests
that such fears are overblown, at least as far as Chinese immigration
is concerned. Indeed, Dmitriy Verkhoturov reports, it may even be the case
that Russia would benefit from more immigration
[http://www.apn.kz/publications/print4840.htm].

Government figures show that in no case between 1991 and 2002 (the last
year for which data are available) did the number of Chinese crossing
into the Russian Federation exceeed a million a year and also that most
of the time the number of Russians going into China had exceeded the
number of Chinese going into Russia by 1.5 to 2 times.

Despite that, he continues, no one can or does conclude that the
Russians are colonizing China, but neither are the Chinese occupying
Russia. Overwhelmingly, the Chinese arriving in Russia are either
tourists or individuals on a short-term assignment. And the number
planning to say permanently is very small.

In the period 2000-2002, nearly 2.5 million Chinese visited the Russian
Federation, but only 36,000 of them said they planned to remain there
permanently – only one-27th of the number of people from CIS
countries who moved to the Russian Federation from other CIS countries.

Indeed, Verkhoturov says, “the total number of the Chinese workforce
in the Far East does not exceed 20,000 people,” a tiny fraction of
the admittedly smaller workforce there now and a miscroscopic number
compared to the scare numbers that Russian nationalists both official
and unofficial regularly claim.

And to those who suggest that official figures fail to capture the
total number of Chinese who are crossing and remaining in the Russian Far
East, Verkhoturov points both to figures about the number of Chinese
expelled for violating their visas and to academic studies showing that
the official numbers are more or less correct.

One of the latter studies, conducted in 2002, reached four other
conclusions of note, Verkhoturov reports. First, it found that the
basic mass of Chinese coming into the Russian Federation are from the
northern provinces of China, an indication that peoplle from across that latter
country are unlikely to move.

Second, it discovered that three out of four of the Chinese who do live
for some time in the Russian Federation do so for less than four years,
although the study reported that almost a third would like to stay
longer if that were in fact to become possible.

Third, the study found that, contrary to many Russian fears, those
Chinese who do come to Russia are overwhelmingly well-educated and
financially well-off. Many are students, corporate representatives, or
others with higher educations or professional training.

And fourth, the 2002 research showed, the Chinese are not intermarrying
with Russians as some nationalists fear. Only 3.6 percent of the
Chinese citizens living in Russia had married a Russian, although as many as
10.6 percent said they would like to. But 79.7 percent – nearly four
out of five – said they had never considered doing so.

Given these patterns, Verkhoturov said, Russians should view the
Chinese who come as a resource rather than a threat and take steps so that
these immigrants can “become a bridge for the development of trade and
economic relations” between the two countries.

At the very least, he concluded, it is time “to get rid of various
baseless fears about Chinese migration and instead to put it to the use
of Russia itself.”

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