Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [171]
How much money do you calculate we are today transferring to China in this way, and how much are we spending on purchases from the Chinese? I don’t think we can say very accurately how much we are buying and selling. There is a massive black market, and blatant corruption.
On the part of the Chinese?
No, it is Russian corruption surrounding Chinese trade. For instance, Chinese delegations have recently turned up in the European part of Russia seeking contracts for lumbering timber. Is there no wood in Siberia? We discovered that along the railways in Siberia the Chinese have been allowed to fell the forests so completely that we are in danger of losing larch altogether.
Do the Chinese particularly prize larch?
It is an extremely precious wood. Larch emits a fragrance in perpetuity. It is a delight to live in a house built of larch.
It is surely not because of the fragrance that the Chinese are cutting it down here?
They use it in all kinds of ways, the oil, the seeds and the cones. Everything is processed. They are no longer felling their own forests. From an ecological viewpoint, if a territory has less than 12 per cent of forest cover, natural disasters are inevitable. China has barely 13 per cent, and that is why rarely a year goes by without torrential rain followed by flooding. It is a result of their having stripped their forests in the past.
Was the plan you spoke of approved by the Politburo?
That is unclear. Much is classified in China. My friends there tried to persuade me not to say anything on the subject. They were afraid of leaks, but now it is clear that there is a second similar plan to move via Heihe to Blagoveshchensk and via Suifenhe to Amur Province and beyond. Heihe and Suifenhe are major population centers. The plan provides for the inflow of both migrants and goods. If in 1998–9, even in 2000, these flows were spontaneous, today major Chinese companies have sprung up which give people precise instructions to sell particular goods.
So you’re saying this is already political?
It was political from the outset. Now, my Chinese sources tell me, if a man marries a Russian woman in Russia, he is paid for it.
Who pays him?
The Chinese Government, for putting down roots on our territory. With their policy of birth control (couples are allowed just one child, and preferably a boy) the Chinese have unbalanced the natural reproduction of the sexes. In some districts there is a huge bias in favor of men. Forty to fifty million of them have no prospect whatsoever of finding wives, and now their leaders are looking for palliatives.
What has been the increase in Chinese living permanently in Russia between 2001 and 2004?
It is impossible to say, because the Chinese immigration is forever ebbing and flowing. At present we are talking about half a million or more. Hotheads say two to three million, but that is premature.
What kind of person is the modern Chinese who has settled in Russia?
In the main it is town dwellers, because they are the most literate.
What do the Chinese understand by literacy?
Mostly a Chinese coming to Russia can sign his name. He can read and count, and he is shrewd, able to think quickly in the market. There are only a few peasants in the overall total, and they will have been invited specially. To grow vegetables, for example.
And are they completely illiterate?
It is difficult to say. The Chinese world is such that the foreman speaks for everyone.
And who is the foreman?
The person who assembled the brigade. Nobody will talk to you without his agreement. On many occasions we had to make great efforts to get people to fill in questionnaires themselves. The first surveys were useless because all the questionnaires were filled in by the brigade leader, so they were identical. In agriculture and construction the brigade leader is completely in charge. It is different in trade, where he is more of a supervisor. Very often now in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod a brigade leader