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Saturday, June 23, 2007
The new Great Wall - in the Pacific
Friday, May 25, 2007
Forced Abortions Under China’s One-child Policy Spurs Riots
By Ching-Ching Ni, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, May 24, 2007
BEIJING — During a recent family planning drive, villagers say, officials chased people down the streets and into the fields of a southern province searching for violators of China’s one-child policy.
Men and women were rounded up for forced sterilizations, the villagers reported. Expectant mothers are said to have faced mandatory abortions.
“I know a young woman who was six or seven months pregnant with twins,” said a woman villager interviewed by phone who was only willing to give her surname, Wang. “She did not have a permit to give birth. So she had to have an abortion. It was such a tragedy.”
Over the weekend, the peasants had finally had enough. As many as 3,000 people in several counties of Guangxi province clashed with police, Chinese state media confirmed Wednesday, some burning government buildings and overturning cars to vent their anger. Twenty-eight people were detained, according to the New China News Agency.
The one-child policy was instituted in the late 1970s to curb the world’s most populous country’s runaway birthrate. It limits most urban families to one child and allows rural couples to have two children, if the first is a girl.
In the early years, the restrictions led to many forced sterilizations and late-term abortions. Resisters could lose their homes. Such coercive measures had become much less common in recent years as the country put on a more humane face.
Both the nation’s rich and poor have been finding ways to skirt the rules: the rich because they could afford to and the poor because of a refusal to give up the traditional quest for a son.
In an effort to level the playing field, the government made an example last week of one businessman in eastern China for ignoring the one-child policy by fining him a whopping $77,000.
For those who are poor, fines are enough to ruin a family.
“They are asking me to pay almost $2,000. Where am I going to get that kind of money?” said Liu Shamei, a 29-year-old mother of a 5-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl who said she saw two truckloads of armed police arrive in her village in Shapi Township, Bobai County, to quell the unrest. “They are destroying our families and killing our children. How can we not revolt?”
The rioting makes it clear that local officials are still under pressure to meet birth control quotas. But their motivations to act often are selfish, critics say.
“They want to protect their political futures, and they can make a lot of money while they are at it,” said Li Jinsong, a lawyer who represented a blind activist arrested for exposing excesses in the carrying out of family planning in eastern China. “It is easy for them to abuse their power and act against the best interest of poor peasants.”
Villagers in Bobai County talk of a reign of terror that has forced many into hiding to avoid forced abortions or sterilization.
“A woman working in the sugarcane fields got caught and was told to get her tubes tied, even though her husband had already been sterilized,” said a 50-year-old middle school teacher surnamed Peng. “Another woman I know was six months pregnant. But they forced her to have an abortion because it was her second child and she already had a son. She was so sad she cried for a long time.”
Villagers say almost every family has more than one child. Some who had already paid fines have been asked for more money, they say.
Wang, the woman who told of the aborted twins, said she has two sons, 15 and 7. When her second son was born, she said, she paid a fine of about $50. Last week, officials came back and told her to pay an additional $1,900, she said.
“There’s a family down the street who didn’t have the money to pay,” Wang said. “They took whatever they wanted, even the scallions in the kitchen, and they tossed out the food that was being prepared for the kids.
“We are not happy to burn down the government building. But how could they treat us that way?”
In some cases, officials reportedly have frozen the bank accounts of alleged violators and given them an ultimatum to pay up or have their life savings confiscated.
“I heard a lot of people are taking their money out of the banks,” said Shen Haidong, 16, youngest of four children, “because they are scared that they’d never be able to get it out again.”
Forced Abortions Under China’s One-child Policy Spurs Riots
By Ching-Ching Ni, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, May 24, 2007
BEIJING — During a recent family planning drive, villagers say, officials chased people down the streets and into the fields of a southern province searching for violators of China’s one-child policy.
Men and women were rounded up for forced sterilizations, the villagers reported. Expectant mothers are said to have faced mandatory abortions.
“I know a young woman who was six or seven months pregnant with twins,” said a woman villager interviewed by phone who was only willing to give her surname, Wang. “She did not have a permit to give birth. So she had to have an abortion. It was such a tragedy.”
Over the weekend, the peasants had finally had enough. As many as 3,000 people in several counties of Guangxi province clashed with police, Chinese state media confirmed Wednesday, some burning government buildings and overturning cars to vent their anger. Twenty-eight people were detained, according to the New China News Agency.
The one-child policy was instituted in the late 1970s to curb the world’s most populous country’s runaway birthrate. It limits most urban families to one child and allows rural couples to have two children, if the first is a girl.
In the early years, the restrictions led to many forced sterilizations and late-term abortions. Resisters could lose their homes. Such coercive measures had become much less common in recent years as the country put on a more humane face.
Both the nation’s rich and poor have been finding ways to skirt the rules: the rich because they could afford to and the poor because of a refusal to give up the traditional quest for a son.
In an effort to level the playing field, the government made an example last week of one businessman in eastern China for ignoring the one-child policy by fining him a whopping $77,000.
For those who are poor, fines are enough to ruin a family.
“They are asking me to pay almost $2,000. Where am I going to get that kind of money?” said Liu Shamei, a 29-year-old mother of a 5-year-old boy and 1-year-old girl who said she saw two truckloads of armed police arrive in her village in Shapi Township, Bobai County, to quell the unrest. “They are destroying our families and killing our children. How can we not revolt?”
The rioting makes it clear that local officials are still under pressure to meet birth control quotas. But their motivations to act often are selfish, critics say.
“They want to protect their political futures, and they can make a lot of money while they are at it,” said Li Jinsong, a lawyer who represented a blind activist arrested for exposing excesses in the carrying out of family planning in eastern China. “It is easy for them to abuse their power and act against the best interest of poor peasants.”
Villagers in Bobai County talk of a reign of terror that has forced many into hiding to avoid forced abortions or sterilization.
“A woman working in the sugarcane fields got caught and was told to get her tubes tied, even though her husband had already been sterilized,” said a 50-year-old middle school teacher surnamed Peng. “Another woman I know was six months pregnant. But they forced her to have an abortion because it was her second child and she already had a son. She was so sad she cried for a long time.”
Villagers say almost every family has more than one child. Some who had already paid fines have been asked for more money, they say.
Wang, the woman who told of the aborted twins, said she has two sons, 15 and 7. When her second son was born, she said, she paid a fine of about $50. Last week, officials came back and told her to pay an additional $1,900, she said.
“There’s a family down the street who didn’t have the money to pay,” Wang said. “They took whatever they wanted, even the scallions in the kitchen, and they tossed out the food that was being prepared for the kids.
“We are not happy to burn down the government building. But how could they treat us that way?”
In some cases, officials reportedly have frozen the bank accounts of alleged violators and given them an ultimatum to pay up or have their life savings confiscated.
“I heard a lot of people are taking their money out of the banks,” said Shen Haidong, 16, youngest of four children, “because they are scared that they’d never be able to get it out again.”
Friday, March 23, 2007
The Sinicizing of the South Pacific
| CHINA'S THIRD WAVE, Part 2 |
By Bertil Lintner - Asia Times Online - http://www.atimes.com
18 April 2007
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea, and NUKU'ALOFA, Tonga - There is nothing particularly unusual about the food at Ang's Chinese restaurant. In fact, the roast duck served there is excellent and the Lonely Planet guidebook assures you that its hot-and-sour soups are especially tasty. Rather, it's the eatery's ambiance that is a tad offsetting.
The yard is surrounded by high walls topped with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Two security guards watch the entrance and open the sliding gate only if the callers appear to be genuine dining customers. Those allowed entry are met by another steel door guarded by more watchmen, who not only shut but lock the door behind the restaurant's guests. Only then may they enjoy Ang's oriental fare in relative peace.
Welcome to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea - and, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, the worst place to live among 130 world capitals and major cities. Major hotels advise their guests not to venture out on foot - even in broad daylight in the poshest downtown areas.
Unemployment rates here hover anywhere between 70% and 90% and crime has become a way of life for gangs of young men born into a culture where tribal warfare, vendettas and violence are deeply ingrained. Add the easy access to firearms in urban areas, and it's not surprising that most of Port Moresby's homes resemble high security prisons and that the 50,000 Western expatriates who lived there when independence was achieved from Australia in 1975 have since dwindled to a few thousand.
But, as the chatter in Ang's restaurant indicates, newly-arrived mainland Chinese migrants are fast filling the gap as the impoverished country’s leading businessmen, contractors and import-export dealers. Throughout history, Chinese migrants have shown a willingness to endure harsh living conditions to prosper economically in new countries - and the Chinese in Port Moresby are no exception.
Nowadays, Chinese migration to areas like far flung Papua New Guinea is also welcome in Beijing, which is seemingly eager to establish a human presence along with its expanding business influence in the resource-rich region. In a local newspaper, former Papua New Guinea defense minister Jerry Singirok recently wrote that, "Australia has always considered Papua New Guinea its backyard [but] ... since 2000, Papua New Guinea has increased its bilateral relations with China in areas of trade, investment and the military ... China is here to stay."
According to Australian National University (ANU) senior lecturer Benjamin Reilly, China’s military assistance to the few Pacific island states that maintain military forces - Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and Papua New Guinea - has so far been modest, consisting mainly of training and logistical support rather than weaponry, but has increased sharply in recent years. Its business investments, on the other hand, have been more overt.
Following the money
In October 2006, Papua New Guinea's Governor-General, Paulias Matane, met Chinese President Hu Jintao and welcomed Chinese investment in the country’s mining, forestry and fishing sectors. China had already invested in the development of the US$1 billion Ramu nickel mine in remote Mandang province, where working conditions are so harsh that the country’s labor unions have threatened to shut it down. With those investments has followed a steady stream of Chinese migrants - many of whom appear set to stay for the long term. According to official estimates, there are currently about 10,000 Chinese citizens in Papua New Guinea - though some believe that figure is considerably higher. Many of them are here illegally, but Papua New Guinean passports, and therefore citizenship, are not difficult to obtain. In 2000, for instance, a major passport scam involving high-ranking Papua New Guinea officials from the department of foreign affairs was uncovered - which until it was closed down likely benefited many Chinese migrants seeking permanent residence.
Meanwhile, growing Chinese financial aid appears to have tempered any official concerns about growing Chinese migration and has definitely lessened the economic blow when traditional aid donors such as Australia threaten to cut their assistance because of official corruption, nepotism and abuse of power.
"China's rising status as an economic and military power is becoming an important pillar for developing countries like Papua New Guinea," Tarcy Eri, a high-ranking foreign ministry official, said at China's national day celebrations on October 1 in 2005. China's voice at the United Nations, he said, was "one for the developing world".
Apart from the Russian Far East and contiguous parts of Southeast Asia, the South Pacific in general and Papua New Guinea in particular is becoming one of three areas of the world where Chinese influence is spreading so rapidly that it may soon make not only an economic but also a significant demographic difference.
The South Pacific is important to Beijing for several strategic reasons. One is that Taiwan, or, as it is officially called, the Republic of China, has long endeavored to win diplomatic recognition from the impoverished island nations of the Pacific - and Beijing has driven hard to deny the island it considers a renegade province claims to international legitimacy.
Taiwan's efforts in the Pacific region have always come with generous offers of aid, something that many of the impoverished island states desperately need. As a result, the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru and Palau still recognize Taiwan, not China. Beijing has more recently taken a page from Taipei's check book diplomacy by providing funding for new government buildings in Vanuatu and Samoa.
Beijing also helped pay for the construction of the venue of the 2004 South Pacific Games in Suva, Fiji. And China has invested heavily in Papua New Guinea, which is rich in natural resources but because of its volatile law and order situation has been unable to attract significant Western investments. Chinese aid to Papua New Guinea - the largest state in the Pacific - is now second only to Australia's US$300 million per year.
But there are bigger geostrategic stakes in the Pacific. While the US is focused on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, China is making substantial human inroads into a region that has long been regarded as America’s sphere of influence. Some analysts have even suggested that the Pacific Ocean could in future become the venue for a new Cold War, where the US and China compete for client states and strategic advantage.
China is expanding its influence over the Pacific with the "long-term aim of challenging the United States as the prime power in the area", says ANU's Reilly. "It can no longer be taken for granted that Oceania will remain a relatively benign 'American lake'." Tonga is a particular case in point.
Tilting demographics
For years, Tonga was Taiwan’s staunchest ally among the Pacific’s various island states. But in 1998, Tonga suddenly shifted its recognition to Beijing. Its then king - Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, who died in September 2006 - received a red-carpet welcome in Beijing along with promises of aid. Two deputy chiefs of the People’s Liberation Army have visited Tonga in recent years. Tonga may be tiny - no more than 100,000 people live on its 700 square kilometers - but it is strategically located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Mohan Malik, a China analyst at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, said in an interview that increased Chinese tourism and migration are also part of Beijing's "economic and strategic penetration of Oceania". In recent years, thousands of Chinese have settled in the Pacific, running grocery stores, restaurants and other small businesses.
The numbers may not seem significant in a global context, but both Reilly and Malik argue that Chinese migration into these lightly populated Pacific states has upset traditional ethnic and economic patterns. For example, in the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa there was not a single Chinese-owned grocery store 20 years ago, according to locals. Now, more than 70% of them are owned by newly-arrived Chinese migrants.
Chinese dominance of the Tongan economy was the main reason why violent riots erupted in the Tongan capital in November last year. Ostensibly demonstrating for democratic reforms, the mobs looted and burned at least 30 Chinese-owned stores before Australian and New Zealand peacekeepers arrived. The Tonga riots followed widespread rioting in the Solomon Islands, where angry mobs also attacked and ransacked Chinese-owned stores, prompting Beijing to send an airplane to evacuate more than 300 of its nationals.
In Fiji, many ethnic Indians, whose ancestors were shipped there over a century ago by the colonial British to work on sugar plantations, were recently forced to leave as ultra-nationalist Fijian politicians assumed power. But the departure of the Indians, most of whom were businessmen and shopkeepers, created a commercial vacuum that is being filled by Chinese immigrants. A stroll along Victoria Parade, the main thoroughfare in the capital, Suva, reveals as many shop signs in Chinese as in English, and considerably more than in Hindi.
Following the May 2000 coup in Fiji, China volunteered to fill the gap left by the suspension of Australian and New Zealand military assistance. According to Reilly, the realization of China's ambition to develop a blue-water navy, or a maritime force capable of operating across the deep waters of open oceans, will only increase its interest in the Pacific region. He points out that China has noted how Japan and other influential countries have historically used the Pacific islands in the service of building a Pacific empire.
Recent Chinese ministerial visits in the region have stressed "common interests" between Chinese and Pacific defense forces and Reilly believes that present military contacts with Pacific island military forces could easily be expanded in the future. Though there is no evidence yet that China seeks to expand its influence through military might, as more and more Chinese migrants settle into the region and contribute to changing the region's ethnic demographics, the Pacific is steadily becoming a Chinese sphere of influence.
PART 3: How-to guide for fleeing China
Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review and is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services. This series of articles is part of a larger research project conducted with support from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
A New Breed of Migrants Fans Out
CHINA'S THIRD WAVE, Part 1
By Bertil Lintner - Asia Times Online - http://www.atimes.com
By Bertil Lintner - Asia Times Online - http://www.atimes.com
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - A disorderly line of Chinese citizens jostle through check-in at the airport in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai on their way to boarding a flight for Bangkok. They are jabbering away, though not in the rough Teochew dialect spoken in nearby Yunnan province and long familiar in the markets of northern Thailand. Rather, they are speaking in the standard Mandarin of mainland China.
Nor are they tourists: ill-fitting suits, battered briefcases and mobile phones mark them out as business people flying to Bangkok to seek trade deals or land jobs. They're among the new wave of Chinese migrants who have over the past decade opened shops and eateries in Chiang Mai and other towns in northern Thailand - a creeping invasion that a growing number of local Thais are watching with unease.
"As a Thai, I feel overwhelmed," says a Bangkok-born woman who now lives in Chiang Mai. "Of course, Chinese have been moving south for centuries. But we have never seen as many new businessmen, and settlers, as now."
Northern Thailand is only one of their destinations. Large numbers of Chinese are also moving into northern Myanmar, northern Laos, Cambodia and further abroad - including the Pacific islands, Australia, the United States, the Russian Far East and Japan. More recently, South Korea has become a popular destination for Chinese migrants - both legal and illegal - as it's easier to enter than tightly sealed Japan.
China's new migrants are a breed apart from their peripatetic forebears, who spoke regional dialects and exhibited little nationalism, identifying more with the localities in China from which they hailed. The recent arrivals not only speak the national Mandarin language, but also tend to identify with China as a whole.
This new wave of Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia and beyond - what some Sinologists are referring to as the "Third Wave" of outward Chinese migration - is unprecedented in Chinese history not only because the migrants originate from northern and central Chinese provinces, but also because travel has become easier due to better transportation links both inside and outside of China. That's resulting in potentially larger numbers than previous waves of Chinese migration throughout the globe.
"The new-wave Chinese are very different from those who migrated in the past," says Andrew Forbes, a Chiang Mai-based China expert who has spent more than 20 years studying China's relations with Southeast Asia. "They've grown up in a country which is far more unified than before. There's now a different sense of being Chinese: the new migrants are patriotic and loyal to the motherland."
Nyiri Pal, a Hungarian Sinologist and academic, agrees that unlike earlier Chinese settlers in Southeast Asia, the United States and Australia, these new migrants do not feel they have stopped being part of China. According to Nyiri, they see themselves not as local minorities, but as a "global majority" with an attachment to China that has nothing to do with territorial nationalism. Not only is China their ethnic and cultural base, but it remains the foundation of their economic success - a place where they continue to invest in and draw on, he says.
Official blind eye
It's quite possible that Chinese authorities are not actively encouraging this migratory development. But there seems little doubt that Beijing's mandarins appreciate the benefits of the large-scale migration out of its overpopulated and resource-constrained country. First, the new wave of outward migration serves as a social safety valve at a time when unemployment is high and masses of young people are on the move looking for jobs inside the country.
Second, the foreign currency-denominated remittances they often send back to their families in China are an important source of national income. The third consideration is longer term: outward migration strengthens China's presence and economic influence around the world.
To underscore official thinking on the trend, Nyiri refers to an article in a Chinese magazine which quoted the State Council's "Opinion on Unfolding New Migrant Work":
Since reform and opening, people have left mainland China to reside abroad (called "new migrants" for short) and have continuously become more numerous. They are currently rising up as an important force within overseas Chinese and ethnic Chinese communities. In the future, they will become a backbone of forces friendly to us in America and some other developed Western countries. Strengthening new migrant work has important realistic meaning and deep-going, far-reaching significance for promoting our country's modernizing construction, implementing the unification of the motherland, expanding our country's influence and developing our country's relations with the countries of residence.
One such country is Nyiri's own: Hungary. Fifteen years ago, Chinese migrants were few and far between in Hungary. But the fall of communism in Eastern Europe opened new markets for private entrepreneurs and, ironically, many of them came from the world's last major communist-ruled country: China.
There are currently between 20,000 and 40,000 Chinese in Hungary, and most of them have arrived by a very long train ride from Vladivostok across the border in the Russian Far East.
It is increasingly obvious that China's growing political and economic clout has given the recent arrivals in Hungary, Southeast Asia and elsewhere greater ethnic confidence and assertiveness. But this sense of national pride is also a factor that has provoked tensions between new generation migrants and older settlers, who fear that the new arrivals' outward displays of nationalism could reignite latent animosities and rekindle longstanding suspicions towards ethnic Chinese communities in their adopted countries.
There have been incidents of anti-Chinese hostility that bear out those concerns. For example, in May 1999, 300 "new" Chinese massed outside the US Embassy in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh to protest against the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which at the time the Americans asserted was a unintentional mistake.
A smaller gathering of ethnic Chinese Cambodians, who had been in the country for generations, then held a counter-demonstration, heckling the protesters: "You're not our brothers," one of them yelled. "Your people killed my people during Pol Pot's time." Cambodia's Chinese suffered particularly badly during the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot, which was backed by Beijing.
In the northern Myanmar city of Mandalay, newly arrived Chinese settlers have bought shops, restaurants, hotels, karaoke bars - and identity papers. Given the relative wealth of the Chinese with regard to the local population, officials in Myanmar are reluctant to enforce immigration laws. Indeed, a well-known Burmese novelist, Nyi Pu Lay, was even arrested as early as 1990 - when the first groups of Chinese began to pour into Mandalay - and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for writing a story called "The Python", a satire on Chinese settlers moving into the city and squeezing out the local Burmese.
Myanmar's old Chinese communities - mostly of Fujianese and
Cantonese origin - feel uncomfortable with this renewed racial tension; older Sino-Burmese remember how mobs ran amok in Yangon's Chinatown in 1967, burning and plundering Chinese shops at a time the country was in deep economic crisis.
New-age diaspora
So what drives this new Chinese diaspora? Chin Ko-lin, a Myanmar-born Chinese who is currently a professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in the United States, says the exodus stems from policy changes in China after 1978, when Washington and Beijing reestablished diplomatic relations. To qualify for most-favored-nation status, China relaxed emigration regulations in 1979, and the flow of migrants began.
"And beginning in the later 1980s, some of those who did not have legitimate channels to emigrate began turning to human smugglers for help," Chin explains. Thus, the movement of people out of China became a partly criminal and highly profitable enterprise. In the 1980s, China's so-called economic "reform and opening up" program under Deng Xiaoping paved the way for Chinese to seek business opportunities abroad.
The shift from people's communes to private agriculture, massive lay-offs at state-owned enterprises and rapid industrialization in coastal provinces all led to dislocation and more migration. And the migrants soon discovered ingenious ways to avoid official immigration rules and regulations both at home and abroad. If land borders and airports were well guarded, the migrants took to boats; if coastguards stepped up patrols, the migrants entered by air.
Back-door routes were found and multiplied. One example: would-be migrants trekked overland to Thailand, flew from Bangkok to Bucharest, Romania - the cheapest airfare to Europe - then slipped unnoticed into nearby European Union countries. This month, Romania, a new European Union member, started importing Chinese workers to resolve severe labor shortages in its textile industry. Others were smuggled into the outlying US territories of Guam, the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico, where controls are less stringent than on the US mainland.
While exact figures, of course, are not available, Western intelligence officials believe that nearly 2 million Chinese have migrated legally and illegally since 1978, and the outward human flow continues. They estimate that 30,000-40,000 a year make their way to the US, and the same number throughout the rest of the world. Chin and other experts on Chinese migration say this is the third time in Chinese history that such a massive exodus has taken place.
The first wave, they say, came after the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and consisted mostly of non-Mandarin speaking southerners who opposed the Manchu seizure of power in Beijing. These migrants established overseas Chinese communities all over Southeast Asia, which now control large swathes of the region's economy and means of production.
The next wave came after the Taiping rebellion and other upheavals in the mid and late 19th century as the Manchu Qing dynasty crumbled and warlords tore the country into lawless fiefdoms. Not only did the migrants - again mainly from the southern coastal provinces - swell the existing Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, but newly invented steamships took them to North America and Australia.
Nationalistic migrants
Now, Forbes notes, the "Third Wave" migrants have come from all over China. Better overland routes have led to a steady movement of Chinese to Southeast Asia - and air travel makes it easier for them to go anywhere in the world. He argues that Chinese migration may actually have a more profound economic and social impact on the countries they settle in than was the case in the past.
In Japan, for instance, Chinese newcomers who have been smuggled into the country now by far outnumber the small communities of Chinese who have been living for generations in Yokohama, Kobe and other port cities. Chinese human traffickers, widely known as snakeheads, are making fortunes bringing in illegal immigrants from China by boat, air, or posing as "students" through dodgy educational exchange programs.
Because of Japan's strict labor laws, many of the newcomers have little choice but to work in bars and night clubs, which are often controlled by organized crime gangs. Now, ethnic Chinese gangs have even begun to challenge the yakuza, Japan's own powerful organized crime syndicates. Fierce rivalries between gangsters from Shanghai, Fujian and Beijing have erupted into shoot-outs in the usually peaceful cities of Tokyo and Osaka.
This strong "Chineseness" of the new wave of migrants could lead to demographic changes in the countries and territories to which they have moved.
A Chinese immigrant in the United States may become a "Chinese-American" and a Chinese in Australia an "Australian-Chinese". But Chinese migrants to the Russian Far East - where Chinese influence is growing rapidly - are unlikely to become "Russian Chinese". That is, their identification will remain with China, not Russia. Likewise, Chinese who migrate to smaller Pacific island nations such as Tonga and the Marshall Islands will also remain Chinese, with little or no loyalty to their new countries of residence.
In many ways, this is not an unprecedented development. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans migrated in large numbers to other continents, which led to the formation of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other new countries. The Chinese are not reaching out to establish colonies, but, if they begin to outnumber the native population in areas such as the Russian Far East and the Pacific islands, it will inevitably lead to entirely new ethnic, social and political structures in those territories. And even where they form only a powerful minority, their political influence will be considerable and a factor to be reckoned with.
The "Third Wave" of Chinese migration has already helped to strengthen China's influence, especially among its nearby neighbors. Myanmar and Laos have established close economic and even military ties with China. Trade between Thailand and China is booming, and so are cultural and political exchanges. China is Cambodia's closest foreign ally, and a growing source of aid, trade and migration. China's influence in the Pacific is growing at the expense of America's. Intentionally or not, the large-scale migration of its people is reinforcing China's emergence as a big - and global - power.
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