The Golden Horde Strikes Again!
According to leaked results of the 2002 census of the Russian Federation, Chinese are now the fourth largest ethnic group in the country. In 1989, the year of the last Soviet census, Chinese in Russia numbered just over 5,000, a number insignificant one that Goskomstat SSSR publications included Chinese in the category "Other." Today, they number 3.26 million (2.2% of the total population). This is more Chinese than in the United States, a country with almost twice Russia's population and a history of Chinese immigration a century and a half longer.
More than three-fourths of this population lives in two of Russia's seven federal okrugs, Siberia and the Far East. Demographic data by administrative division has not yet been released (or leaked), but it is safe to say that most of this population lives in three regions of the Far East: Primorye Kray, Khabarovsk Kray, and Amur Oblast. Even if half of the Chinese cited as living in the two federal okrugs live in Siberia (which is quite unlikely), the Chinese population of the Far East is over 18%. 24% is more probable. Opportunities for these immigrants abound. Vladimir Radyuhin writes that:
Russia's main Pacific port and naval base of Vladivostok, once closed to foreigners, today is bristling with Chinese markets, restaurants and trade houses. The former Mayor of Vladivostok, Viktor Cherepkov, estimates that Chinese businessmen control 30 to 40 per cent of the economy in the Far East and 100 per cent of its light industry. Russian officials concede that the region needs Chinese workers to compensate for a shrinking local population. "We face a bad shortage of manpower as Russians are leaving the Far East by the million," complains the presidential representative in the Far East, Konstantin Pulikovsky.
Indeed, even with the effects of the Chinese influx, the population of the Far East fell from 7.9 million to 6.7 million from 1989 to 2002. Many Russians no longer want to live in the region; many Chinese are quite willing to replace them. The population of Heilongjiang, the province of Chinese Manchuria across the Amur River from the Russian Far East, is 38 million, more than that of the Far East and Siberia combined. The population of Manchuria as a whole (including Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning) is 107 million, about three-fourths of Russia's declining population. Economic ties in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk are shifting east as well. "Only 10 per cent of the region's economic ties today are with other Russian regions," Radyuhin writes, "as sky-high rail and air tariffs have forced Russian eastern provinces to turn to China, Korea and Japan for supplies. While elsewhere Russians drive left-hand-wheel cars, in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk and Irkutsk they have long switched to right-hand-drive Japanese cars."
President Putin himself has warned that Sinicization of the Far East is likely. He has said that "If people here will not regenerate their region and economy, they will all be speaking Chinese or some other Asian language." It is unclear, however, whether the Russian leader's nationalist or nativist impulses outweigh his desire to revitalize the Far Eastern economy (and through it revitalize the national one). Modern Russia has never been tested by immigration at this scale, and thus has never been tested by the impulse towards nativism. The future of the Chinese north of the Amur may yet be bleak; Chinese populations in certain parts of North America, such as northern California in the 1840s, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and Baja California in the 1900s, once reached similar proportions. They developed the region economically, and then were either deported or were forced to live in Chinatowns, with future immigration (in the United States) banned. The character of the Chinese settlement in the Russian Far East is, of course, different. It is not an exclusively male population, it is a short distance migration, and it is occurring in a region already economically tied to the global economy. The impulse toward nativism though, is sadly increasing:
The Khabarovsk Region Governor, Viktor Ishayev, has banned granting citizenship to Chinese men who marry Russian women, even though foreigners have this option under federal legislation, while authorities in Russia's easternmost Sakhalin Island have restored the Soviet-era border checkpoints to prevent illegal Chinese migrants from getting to the island from mainland Russia. (Radyuhin)
"However," Radyuhin continues, "these measures are ineffective, and demographers predict that the Chinese may become the dominant ethnic group in the region in 20 to 30 years from now." The new orientation, no pun intended, is only natural.
Thanks.  tazadebevita. for the title.
Edit: I just found a website about Vladivostok in Chinese. Its purpose seems to be to promote investment and settlement in the city, which is called Haishenwei (海参崴) in Chinese. It also includes some brief information about the history which led to the region becoming part of Russia. The Yüan and Qing dynasties (and to a lesser degree the Ming dynasty) included the region that became Primorye Kray, and the Qing dynasty also ruled what became Khabarovskiy Kray and Amurskaya Oblast, but all these regions (along with territory in Turkestan) were ceded to Russia as a result of the Sino-Russian war of 1858-60.
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