The Emperor Far Away (41 page)

Back in Baiyinna, Jiang Feng waited with me for the evening bus to Huma. He invited me to return one day and stay with him, and I told him I would try, although I knew I never would. Saying thank  you for all his help seemed desperately inadequate, just as the hospitality shown to me when I walked by mistake into the wedding party was inconceivable to someone raised in a western culture. But for rural Chinese it is a natural thing to invite a strange Englishman to join them at an intimate celebration, an expression of both their conviviality and their belief that any foreigner who comes to their home deserves to be treated as a guest.

Huma was another Tahe, a small town becalmed on the border with Russia. I arrived in a swirl of snow. The following morning was crisp and bright – the sun shining, the snow clouds gone. But the heavy overnight fall had made the roads too dangerous to drive and the bus to Heihe had been cancelled. Along with a couple of locals, I found a taxi driver willing for a hefty fee to risk the ice hidden beneath the snow.

For the first time since I had left Yanji, there was blue sky above me. It was invigorating, the sun’s rays glancing off the snow crystals so they sparkled like thousands of diamonds lining our route. We trailed the contours of the Amur, with the densely forested Russian side across from us, for much of the way, winding carefully around sharp corners for three hours until we entered Heihe.

Sean was waiting for me, a tall twenty-nine-year-old whose shaggy hair and casual clothes belied a sharp entrepreneurial streak. A friend of a friend, he had spent two years living in Luton as a student and four more in Brisbane designing websites – completely polarised experiences which had left him with a twangy Anglo-Australian accent. Han and originally from Bei’an, a city further south in Heilongjiang known for its high-security jail, large psychiatric facility and a preponderance of criminal gangs, he was now running his own English school in Heihe.

‘There are lots of schools teaching Russian here but none teaching English,’ said Sean, as we drove through Heihe towards the Amur in a new Japanese land cruiser. ‘I did a lot of market research before I set up my school, and Heihe is perfect. It’s smaller than other cities, but it’s full of wealthy people because of the trade with Russia and they all want their kids to learn English so they can study abroad like I did.’

Cindy, Sean’s stunning, big-eyed girlfriend, was at the wheel of the car. Her father was one of Heihe’s new rich, the owner of a construction company erecting the riverside apartments being snapped up by those prospering from the city’s proximity to Russia. Cindy was a former member of the PLA’s elite dance troupe, a collection of beauties who tour military bases entertaining the soldiers, as well as performing at major state functions. When he wasn’t screwing China, Mao used to select his mistresses from the dancers. I thought Sean had done well for himself in every sense.

Heihe’s population is minute in Chinese terms, a mere 250,000 people, but like Pangshang in Wa State there are an awful lot of expensive vehicles jamming the roads and it took a while to reach the Amur. We walked along the promenade, looking down on the frozen river – wider here than at any other point I’d previously seen. A small pool had been carved out of the ice and a couple of hardy swimmers gave us a wave before jumping in. On the other side of the river, perhaps 500 or 600 metres away, was Blagoveshchensk.

The closest place to Russia of any size along the entire Heilongjiang–Russian border, Heihe is China’s principal trading post with the former Outer Manchuria, just as Dandong is with North Korea. Russians come from Blagoveshchensk to take advantage of far cheaper prices, as well as for weekends of fun in the restaurants and clubs. Cyrillic signs are as common as those in Mandarin, and every foreigner walking into a shop is greeted by an assistant who can say at least a few words in Russian.

Only in the late 1980s did the frontier between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk reopen, after being closed for twenty years following the border clashes between the PLA and the Soviet Army in 1969. Back then, the commercial traffic headed north, as people from across Dongbei flocked to Russia to buy household items that were not available in China at the time.

That shopping spree ended soon after the fall of the Soviet Union and its subsequent break-up – a spectre that haunts Beijing as it nervously eyes the obstinate peoples of Tibet and Xinjiang. For the CCP, the collapse of the USSR, and Russia’s rapid decline from global superpower to the gangster state it has become, is further justification for its unwillingness to tolerate either unruly minorities or dissent – a vast empire gone in a matter of months, its former leaders forgotten or reviled.

Now China has taken Russia’s place as the world’s second strongest nation. In Heihe, one of the signs of that status is Da Dao, literally ‘Big Island’ but in fact a promontory jutting into the Amur housing markets and warehouses. Set up solely to cater to Russians – Chinese are mostly barred from the shops here – Da Dao is the true heart of Heihe and the first stop for almost all the people who travel across the river.

Anything and everything is available at Da Dao – with coffee machines, cosmetics, furs, fishing equipment and liquor particularly popular. So cheap were the bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Johnnie Walker on display that I assumed they must be fake. ‘I don’t think the Russians care if it isn’t real,’ said one store owner, guffawing when I asked him if the whisky was genuine.

Yang Chao’s stall was doing a brisk trade in kitchen utensils and hairdryers. ‘It’s a much better business than my previous one, which was a clothes shop, and it’s easier dealing with Russians than the Chinese,’ she said. ‘Russian people are quite honest and they buy things quickly. They pick up an item, decide if they like it and then pay for it. The Chinese spend ages trying to decide if they want it and then they start bargaining, which is tiring.’

So many Russians are in Heihe at any one time that the locals treat them more as a minority than as visitors, an odd-looking bunch who speak a different language but are part of the scenery. And just as the Han are always keen to demonstrate that they are in charge in the borderlands, so Heihe’s government is not shy about letting the residents of Blagoveshchensk know that the balance of power has shifted to their side of the river.

Each evening at 11 o’clock sharp, the street lights of Heihe dim abruptly. The electricity that fuels them is instead diverted to the multitude of neon signs and displays on the buildings overlooking the Amur. A Dongbei version of the glittering Las Vegas Strip, it is an unsubtle boast of how Heihe is thriving at the expense of far less luminous Blagoveshchensk, a nightly show whose significance is understood by every Russian. ‘This was all slums a few years ago,’ one told me, as we stood on the promenade gazing up at the flashing, blazing lights.

26

An Empire Expanding

Heihe’s apparently never-ending energy supply isn’t the only way it likes to intimidate its neighbour. The Wu Jing at the border control by the Amur were the rudest I had ever encountered. They pushed and shoved the long lines of Russians waiting to return home with their shopping, making many open up their purchases only to look inside for a moment before walking away, leaving them struggling to reseal their boxes and bags.

Sean, who had come to see me off, was shocked. ‘No wonder Russians say bad things about the Chinese.’ In contrast, I was treated as a special guest. Hardly anyone crosses this frontier apart from Russians and Chinese. At the sight of my unfamiliar passport, I was waved through customs ahead of everyone else. The senior officer on duty left his office to usher me out of China and was charming with it.

I emerged on to the slippery, snow-covered banks of the Amur faced with having to persuade someone to take me to the other side. In the summer, boats ply between Heihe and Blagoveshchensk, while in the winter dinky little hovercraft make the run, skimming over the ice in a matter of minutes. But a rigid system of apartheid operates on the transport across the river, with some vessels for Chinese and others for Russians. I fell into neither category and had already been refused a ticket on a Chinese craft.

Russians, though, buy return tickets in Blagoveshchensk for specific boats, leaving little space for stray travellers. I traipsed up and down for half an hour before I found a hovercraft both willing to take me and with a spare seat. I handed over 200 yuan (£20) for the cramped five-minute ride, an unwelcome but salutary introduction to the difference in living costs between Russia and China.

At the Russian frontier post, I was greeted with a mixture of bewilderment and suspicion. Obstructive, vodka-grumpy Russian officials are less common now than they once were, but they still exist. Surprised by my arrival, they made me fill out numerous forms while my passport was examined minutely. I made sure to stay polite, sprinkling every sentence with
spasibo
, the Russian for ‘thank you’, and was eventually rewarded with an entry stamp.

My hotel room was typical of lodgings in the Russian Far East: a massively overpriced shoebox with a bed, furniture and TV dating from a couple of decades before. But it was very warm and the small window afforded me a sliver of a river view. I didn’t stay long to enjoy it. Waiting for me downstairs were Elena and Anastasia, lecturers at the local university whose names had been passed on to me by a Russian journalist contact in Vladivostok.

Elena was a vivacious, middle-aged blonde, Anastasia younger and dark and pretty in a severe way. They asked what I wanted to eat. I suggested Russian food, which caused them to pause. ‘Well there is one place we know,’ said Elena. ‘We mostly eat at Chinese restaurants. There are so many now and they are a lot cheaper than Russian ones.’ Outside, it was bitter in the late afternoon, and after a few minutes the tip of my nose was tingling and my chin felt raw. ‘It’s frosty today,’ said Anastasia, an understated way of describing a temperature of -26 degrees Centigrade.

Both were wrapped up in voluminous fur coats. I asked if they had bought them in Heihe. ‘Of course,’ they answered in unison. ‘The only thing I buy in Russia is underwear,’ said Anastasia. We walked along the riverfront, while Elena recalled how the Chinese used to broadcast deafening propaganda from Heihe twenty-four hours a day during the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to scare Blagoveshchensk’s residents. Unlike in Dongbei, there were no teams of workers clearing away the snow. It was deep enough for some of the locals to take to snowboards towed by cars at night, a Russian winter alternative to waterskiing.

We passed the university Elena and Anastasia taught at, housed in an imposing redbrick former boarding school from the tsarist era. Blagoveshchensk, known to Russians as ‘Blago’, has a number of elegant nineteenth-century buildings, mostly lining the riverfront and its main street named after Lenin. Along with the city’s ageing apartment blocks, they are the most obvious difference between Blago and Heihe which, like most Chinese cities, has been almost entirely rebuilt over the last two decades.

But Blago, despite appearing to be much older than its neighbour, is a relatively new creation. It was founded on the tsar’s orders in 1858, the same year that the Treaty of Aigun confirmed Russia’s appropriation of Outer Manchuria. Long before then, it was the site of a Manchu town and fort. And even after it became Blagoveshchensk, much of its population remained Manchu or Daur. Few Russians were willing to venture thousands of kilometres east from the country’s European heartland to such an isolated spot.

Han migrants moved north to join the minorities. As in Vladivostok, another of the cities created in Russia’s newly acquired lands in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the Chinese who controlled much of the local trade. Well over a century before Da Dao in Heihe opened, imports from China to the Russian Far East already vastly outnumbered the goods sent south across the Amur.

That imbalance provoked jealousy and discontent among Blago’s Russians. In the summer of 1900, the decision was taken to deport the entire Chinese community. Around 4,000 people were marched to the shores of the Amur and, with no boats to take them to the other side, were pushed in to drown or swim home. Those who struggled to stay on dry land were beaten to death by willing bands of Cossacks and locals. The massacre is the subject of a museum outside Heihe. It was closed when I was there, but Russians are banned from visiting it, an indication that the Chinese have not forgotten or forgiven what occurred over a century ago.

The slaughter by the banks of the Amur was the first notable expression of the schizophrenic attitudes towards China and the Chinese that continue to be held today by most Russians in the region. Elena and Anastasia, like everyone else in Blago, knew their lives would be far less pleasant without the presence of Heihe across the river to shop, eat and drink in. As academics, they were aware too that Chinese investment in the local construction and timber industries makes for a vivid contrast with the indifference displayed towards the Far East by their own government in far-off Moscow.

Yet they were typical too in their dislike and distrust of the Chinese migrants to Blago, who starting returning across the Amur in significant numbers from 2000 onwards, even if both women were happy to eat in their restaurants. ‘Too many Chinese are here now. If too many come it won’t be beneficial to Russia,’ stated Anastasia, picking her words carefully. Elena had a problem with their personal habits. ‘They spit and smoke everywhere and they eat too much garlic,’ she said.

In part, Anastasia and Elena were merely being Russian. Intolerance of immigrants is something of a national trait, notwithstanding the fact that Russia is the largest country in the world, as well as being hugely under-populated. ‘I think Russians in general don’t really like foreigners. Here it’s the Chinese. In other parts of Russia it’s people from the Caucacus or Serbs or Africans,’ one of Anastasia’s students named Sergei told me. ‘A lot of Chinese walk around Blago like they own the place, and many unemployed Russians resent that they take jobs away from them because they’ll work for lower salaries.’