Dakuan was right. The news that night reported that the police had seized a total of $5 billion worth of goods belonging to the migrants. The authorities claimed that the products had been illegally smuggled into Russia, without explaining why they had turned a blind eye to smuggled goods for more than a decade.
‘We spent a lot on the containers for the products,’ said Ah Sheng. ‘On top of that we had to deduct the cash we spent paying penalties to the police. Every time we made money, we lost some. In fact, only three months out of the entire year were relatively good ones, when we made money instead of losing it. But now our $30,000 worth of containers – one million roubles’ worth of products – have been taken by the authorities.’
The market had been the only place the migrants knew well in Moscow. It was ten minutes’ walk from their flat. Each day, this short trip to and from work was fraught with fear: They feared the police, the frequent random arrests resulting in heavy penalties each time, the name-calling, and, worst of all, the skinheads and robbers lurking on street corners, awaiting the most vulnerable. For this reason, many migrants hadn’t left the market’s confines in years.
Xiao Ning and Ah Sheng recalled being regularly stopped and searched on the street. ‘The officer would tell us that our tourist visas were too old,’ Xiao Ning said. ‘And then he would ask us where we lived, although it was obvious that he had been told already. It couldn’t have been a coincidence for him to find us in the street right in front of our flat.’
Ah Sheng thought that the large number of Chinese migrants was seen as a threat by the Russian authorities. There are currently 200,000–400,000 Chinese working in Russia, and about 30,000–50,000 new Chinese migrants entering each year, mostly as traders and temporary workers. But with the Russian population decreasing, particularly in the Russian Far East, the Chinese presence became alarming. ‘The real reason they’ve closed the market, I think, is to put a halt to migration into Russia, particularly Chinese migration,’ he said.
Indeed, more than 100,000 migrant workers were immediately made jobless by the closure. Some Tajik migrants were camping out, as they had nowhere to go to outside their workplace. The atmosphere in Chinese-occupied flats was dense with anxiety. A group of long-term Chinese migrants decided to do something: a hundred of them, joined by a number of Vietnamese migrants, attempted to block traffic on a highway. The police acted quickly and deported them all.
‘We can’t do anything about it. They make the rules and they can change the rules,’ said Xiao Ning. ‘I thought we should leave and see what happens after a while – maybe things will quiet down and we can come back to Russia later.’
Unable to recover their confiscated goods, two thirds of the Chinese migrants were returning to China. Most of those who stayed couldn’t afford to go home.
Ah Sheng mentioned that Dakuan was known among their community for the rap songs he wrote in his moments of depression during his time in Moscow. He recalled one his friend had written after their release from the police station:
Trading in Russia is a lousy life!
Our goods go cheap, there’s too much strife.
Twelve cents’ worth we sell for four,
Then come the cops to ask for more.
Strip your ass, they’ll search you all!
Give em cash to keep your stall,
Drag you down to the bloody station,
Pay the slap to stay in their nation.
Aren’t we here to make good cash?
No ticket home, not enough in the stash.
Every single day feels like a year,
Better go back, even China beats here.
I’ll never get rich from farming the land,
But at least I will have peace of mind.
Yet another ordeal awaited the Chinese at the border. Those who had been working on Siberian farms, who had a different immigration status, had to leave our train at the Russian border town and follow a ‘facilitator’, who would negotiate with the border officers and lead them back to China by bus. Many would be fined for ‘minor visa problems’ and others detained – then charged by the facilitator for ‘accommodations’ while they were being held. Most had not even been paid by their farm employers, and here they were held at the mercy of the border authorities, terrified about being prevented from returning home.
As I entered China, just before arriving at Manzhouli, the border officers insisted on checking all my laptop files. It was all ‘part of the anti-terrorist procedures’, the other passengers later said, against the Uighur ‘splittists’ – a key word used by the state to silence ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, and to justify, for the sake of national identity and security, the repression of discontent.
From that moment on, I heard two distinct, conflicting voices. The first was that of the Chinese state, emphasizing the national progress of the ‘Chinese nation’, material bounties, and a bright, sustainable future for all. Sometimes paternal in tone – lecturing and condemning, as during the Olympics and anti-terrorist campaigns – it proclaimed: ‘Unite against the separatists and splittists’ and ‘The twenty-first century is the Chinese century.’ At other times maternal, it persuaded, cajoled and encouraged: ‘Love your country’; ‘The Chinese astronaut takes the nation’s first step into space, with tears in his eyes – he has triumphed for the Motherland’; and ‘The five-star flag is greater than my own life.’ The voice lingers permanently in the air, permeating every inch of society.
But another voice could always be heard from below – all over the cities and the countryside, in the factories and down the coal mines, by the brick kilns, at the job centres and the labour markets in every city. This was the cry of China’s mobile proletariat, always on the move, from the rural interior into the cities of their unevenly industrializing country and from those cities to the metropolises of north and southeast Asia and the US, and Europe. These workers were struggling to survive –and barely subsisting – through all the upheavals of the global market economy.
Their journey began three decades ago, and since then the global economic downturn has exacerbated the causes of their migration: rural poverty, the collapse of urban job security, mass unemployment and rapidly falling living standards.
Despite state proclamations of a ‘rising China’, the reality is that China has been struck hard by the global recession and is as bitterly divided as the rest of the world. The ‘iron rice bowl’ no longer exists. More than 600,000 small- and medium-size firms closed in China in 2008, throwing millions out of work. The deepening slump has encouraged a reverse migration, back to the countryside. The area most affected has been the export-led manufacturing heartland of southern China, where millions of migrants from rural Sichuan, Henan, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan and other provinces normally congregate for work.
China’s agricultural adminstration revealed that 15.3 percent of the 130 million rural migrants in the cities – about one in seven – had returned to the countryside jobless following the mass layoffs between 2008 and early 2009.7 By spring 2009, more than 25 million migrant workers had found themselves without a job. Though the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reports that ‘the average (annual) urban wage rose 13 percent in the first half of 2009 to $2,142’, these figures exclude the private sector, which accounts for 40 percent of China’s GDP, more than 120 million workers, most of them migrants.8
One can be easily fooled. The skyscrapers continue to shoot up in Beijing. Top-range department stores are doing well; 27.5 percent of the world’s luxury goods are consumed in China, more than in the US and second only to Japan. Money is made and spent by the middle classes as if they were still living in a boom. A successful Beijing filmmaker, Li Yang, on his first visit to Britain sneered at the housing