The Back to Jerusalem movement

For the Centenary of the World Mission Conference, to be held next year in Edinburgh, Kim-kwong Chan has written a paper on the Back to Jerusalem movement, a movement among China’s house churches to evangelise the area between China and Jerusalem (essentially the Middle East), with the original aim to send 200,000 Chinese missionaries there within ten years. This project is consistent with the notion, popular in Chinese evangelicalism, that the Chinese are called upon to’”fulfil the Great Commission” of world evangelism by completing the last leg of the global evangelical relay. It also dovetails with secular sense of China´s mission as the new global modernizer that has picked up the torch the U.S. and Great Britain had carried before it.

Chan locates the origins of the BTJ movement in the 1940s, when a number of Chinese missionary groups were dislocated to the relatively peaceful Xinjiang. The Reverend Mark Ma, at a Bible school in Shaanxi, received a series of visions that “the Chinese church should assume responsibility to take the Gospel”to Xinjiang and, in order to complete the Great Commission, to the rest of the world.” An American missionary began to promote Ma’s group in the U.S. and the UK. The group was soon disbanded and its members imprisoned, but in the 1990s, veterans of this and other groups were joined by new evangelists. A veteran named Simon Zhao, who had spent twenty years in prison in Xinjiang, declared upon his release that he had received a vision similar to Mark Ma’s. Liu Zhenying, who escaped from prison and fled to Germany in 1997, has been popularised in a book by the New Zealand missionary Paul Hattaway. As a result, a number Western mission agencies have become interested in supporting the BTJ movement in what Chan calls an “outsourcing model:” they provide money and training, and China provides the missionaries. “Currently there are at least a couple dozen mission agencies who are actively involved … with more than a dozen [clandestine] training centers in China and at least another ten abroad, training potential BTJ missionaries.” They also hold clandestine international conferences. BTJ missionaries are found in at least 12, mostly Muslim countries, as students, entrepreneurs, and contract workers. Most are between 20 and 25, come from rural areas and poor backgrounds, and have a high school education. There is an abundant supply of recruits and selection is competitive.

Chan notes that much of the interest is practical: keen to evangelise the Middle East, Western churches have limited funding, and presumably there aren’t many missionaries willing to take the risk. The money that is spent on supporting one Western missionary is enough to finance ten Chinese, who live in much poorer conditions and are used to hardship and illegality from China (where they belong to the illegal house churches and most are rural). Some Chinese house churches have an explicit ideology of martyrdom (shared perhaps with traditional millenarian movements and the Falungong).

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is ‘turning a blind eye’ to the training facilities. One can see why: technically, they are illegal. In the case of a crackdown on these missionaries no blame can be laid at Peking´s door, and it will not protest against their punishment. On the other hand, they can be a useful instrument of rapprochement between China and the usually anti-Chinese but powerful American Christian Right.

Chan does not discuss how successful the movement has been in gaining converts, but presumably not highly so. Yet this may be a new development in worldwide Chinese evangelical proselytising, which has so far been overwhelmingly directed at other Chinese. I wonder how easy this transition might be, as in my view the success of Chinese proselytising lies partly in ethnically homogeneous congregations for which shared experiences of migration and entrepreneurship or studying, as well as transnational links to mainland China, are central. If an army of outsourced Chinese missionaries arises, it is likely to merge in this network of Chinese evangelism rather than stay under Western command.

International Crisis Group’s new report on China-Burma relations

Following the conquest of Kokang by Burmese government troops and the reported flight of tens of thousands of refugees to China (described as Chinese businessmen in Chinese media; see earlier entry), the International Crisis Group has published a new report entitled China’s Myanmar Dilemma. The report suggests that there is a conflict of interest between Peking, which supports the Burmese government, and the Yunnan provincial government, whose primary interests lie in maximizing profits from border trade and which hence prefers to deal with the so-called “ceasefire armies” and keep the Burmese government at arm’s length. Many Burmese border towns rely on China for electricity, water, and telecommunications, which of course also provides China a powerful weapon: thus, after a series of abductions of gamblers in early 2009, the Yunnan government cut off utilities to the casino town of Maijayang to pressure the local authorities to shut down the casino. The closest relations are maintained with the 20,000-strong United Wa State Army: in March, a Yunnan Province official participated in the 20th century celebrations of the UWSA’s victory over the Communist Party of Burma (!), and its political leader, Bao You-Xiang, epxressed its thanks to China for its support. At the end of last year, both Kachin and Wa leaders wrote a letter to Hu Jintao appealing for investment and aid.

The report also details Chinese involvement in hydropower projects (at least 63, including the Tasang Dam on the Salween, which is to be the largest dam in Southeast Asia) and mining (the latest and largest project, the Tagaung Taung nickel mine, was approved in 2008 with an investment of $800 million). Official Burmese figures say that 99% of the foreign investment in 2008, or about $900 million, came from China.

While the authors of the report seem to have had privileged access to officials in China, parts of it — particularly those describing on-the-ground sentiments — appear to be based on flimsy evidence. Thus, in reporting on anti-Chinese sentiments in northern Burma, statements like “Burmese feel that they are being pushed out” and “It has been estimated that 60 per cent of Myanmar’s economy is in Chinese hands” are based on a single interview.

It is tempting to see the “special zones” in Northern Burma as a return to the “overlapping sovereignty” of precolonial times when many of the principalities in the region paid tribute to China but were under the loose military control of Burma. What continues to interest me is the role and conceptualisation of Chinese ethnicity in these borderlands today. Do people like Bao You-Xiang see themselves as Chinese, Wa, or both? And how are they seen by others?

Shan organisation reports fighting around dam site in Burma

According to 1 September press release by the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organisation, disseminated on the International Rivers mailing list,

Shan activists are calling on China to immediately halt all investment in dams on the Salween River following the recent heavy fighting between the Burmese military regime and the Kokang ceasefire army near the site of the Upper Salween Dam planned by Chinese companies in northern Shan State.

Heavy clashes have taken place just east of the town of Kunlong, about 15 kms from the planned dam site. Fighting broke out on August 27, 2009, after the regime deployed thousands of troops to seize control of the Kokang territory, shattering the 20-year ceasefire and causing over 30,000 refugees to flee to China. Kokang forces have sought to repel the Burma Army troops.

Plans to build the Upper Salween Dam, also known as the Kunlong Dam, were announced in April 2007 by two Chinese companies, Hanergy Holding Group (formerly Farsighted Investment Group) and Gold Water Resources Company. Since then a team of Chinese and Burmese technicians have been conducting feasibility studies for the 2,400 MW dam, 25 kms from the Chinese border.

The Kunlong Dam is one of five mega dams being planned on the Salween in Burma by the SPDC and Chinese and Thai companies, to produce electricity to be sold to China and Thailand. The Shan Sapawa Environmental Organisation, together with the Salween Watch coalition of environmental groups from Thailand and Burma, has been monitoring the controversial dam plans for ten years and advocating for their immediate halt.

“The renewed fighting and the flood of refugees into Yunnan should be a wake-up call to China about the risks of investing in Burma,” said Sapawa spokesperson Sai Khur Hseng.   ”Not only is there no free and informed consent to these dam projects, but they are being built over the dead bodies of our people.”

The other mega dam being planned in Shan State is the giant 7,110 MW Ta Sang dam, 100 km from the Thai border. In early August, the regime renewed a scorched earth campaign in townships close to the Ta Sang dam site, torturing and killing civilians and driving 10,000 villagers from their homes.

In an earlier post, I noted the cooperation (or perhaps sometimes multiple identities) between environmental and ethnic organisations in northern Burma, how they represent a certain potential form of sovereignty in that highly contested terrain, and how the ethnic Chinese enclaves (like Kokang) represent another, more real form. What is particularly interesting in this news release is the claim that 30,000 refugees have fled the fighting to China. China is not a state that officially allows refugee flows across its border, so if this is true it raises additional questions about the nature of sovereignty and border in Kokang and the other “special zones.” Or are these people who possess Chinese citizenship?

China Newsweek cover story on Africans in China

A month after the clash between Nigerians and the police in Canton (see my 17 July post), the cover story of the curent (17 August) China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊, no relation to Newsweek) is entitled “Does China need an immigration bureau?” Of the series of articles, three are about the background of the clash in Canton. Although it notes that Africans are blamed by locals and police for a rise in crime and drug use, the tone of the articles is generally sympathetic or neutral; the authors talk about stereotypes on both sides.

The articles say that Africans increasingly avoid going out in order not to run into police checks. But one case the authors describe of a man who, like the one who died, jumped out of the window to avoid being caught, was not deported, his earnings were not confiscated, and his medical treatment was paid by the police.

The report says that there are officially 20 thousand African residents in Canton, but that many Africans’ visas and even passports have expired. Some African interviewees  say that this is not a crime, and it seems that while the city authorities have since 2005 conducted several campaigns to ferret out and deport such people, they do not treat it as quite serious a crime as their European or American counterparts do. In fact, the protest by African traders in front of the local police precinct had to do with indignation over their lack of legal papers, suggesting that these “illegals” have not been deprived of their voice to the same extent as in Europe.

Researchers and police officials interviewed (in private capacity, as officially police refused to comment on the topic) by the authors offer views that are strikingly similar to those about Chinese traders in Europe: they are illegal, they all look alike, they spread diseases (although AIDS is particularly associated with Africans). But the reporting is less strident than mainstream European media tend to be, and at least partly along the lines of “Chinese people need to learn to live with foreigners.”

The latest on the Baoding Villages

Today at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Daejeon there was a panel on “Exporting China’s Development.” Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman presented a paper on their fieldwork at the Chambishi copper mine in Zambia, which I had much anticipated. In response to a question, they told me that they thought the Baoding Villages were a total hoax. Yan Hairong has visited Baoding and interviewed Liu Jianjun (the self-styled founder), and he repeated his story, but refused to share any contacts in Africa. In the ten African countries Yan and Sautman visited, no one has heard about Baoding villages.

Li Guangyi, a PhD student at UCLA, came to the same conclusion in his presentation. But he affirmed that the East Africa Trade Development Zone does exist, and Ugandan officials gave a press conference in Peking about it. The 518 square kilometers and the 99-year lease seem to be right, although it is less clear whether the legislative rights, the Chinese policing and judiciary structures will exist, or indeed if the zone has any investors. Liu Jianjun and the other main investors were, apparently, adamant that residents and workers of the zone will have to obey its rules, giving the specific example that three (sic) prayers a day for Muslims will not be allowed as they disrupt production. A flag of the zone has been circulating on the Internet, very similar to Hong Kong, with five red stars at the centre.

Li also discussed the reactions to this on Tianya. According to him, some expressed suspicions that this too was a hoax. Others wrote that China should be more equitable and fair in its dealings with Africa and not repeat Western colonialism and brutality. But most expressed satisfaction about the Chinese “concession,” saying it demonstrated that Chinese civilization has stood up again.

China in Latin America book out

Finally, after a dozen China in Africas, here is a China in Latin America, written by R. Evan Ellis. His post as “professor at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies” made me wary, but, even though the book is based on the usual combination of newspaper accounts and interviews, it is in fact good. It has a wealth of country-by-country information that is exceedingly difficult to obtain elsewhere (unlike the now-considerable overlap of sources about Africa), which includes very useful brief descriptions of Chinese immigration and everything else you would expect (from trade and infrastructural projects to military cooperation and what he calls “intellectual infrastructure,” which includes the teaching of Chinese). One shortcoming here is that there is no separate discussion of development aid, even though Ellis does mention low-interest loans.

The book really does fill a gap. For instance, I have long known about the large and new Fujianese immigration to Argentina and the fact that these migrants run a lot of groceries, and have wanted to know whether this group has anything to do with infrastructure investments from China. Ellis tells me that it does not, yet. He also confirms that although Brazil has the largest number of Chinese, Chinese megaprojects here have been relatively insignficant (partly because of a lack of excitement about Chinese loans and labour) and there is no rush on the Chinese language, unlike in Chile (though this section is made less reliable by the fact that Ellis uses only Spanish and English sources, no Portuguese ones). His data in some cases go up to December 2008, so that he is already able to account for some of the effects of the recession. As of that date, it appears that the ambitious transcontinental rail and road projects in which Chinese companies and banks have been mooted as investors and contractors have not yet taken off.

The book is not led by a preconception of what China is doing in Latin America — perhaps because it is not so easy to have such preconceptions, unlike in Africa. This makes the continent all the more interesting as a case study. Indeed, Ellis details how the resource-shopping of Chinese mining and metallurgy companies in South America often takes the form of joint ventures that are not unidirectional; thus, Chilean-Chinese and Chilean-Brazilian joint ventures have announced plans to open smelters and fertilizer plants in China, a Brazilian company owns Chinese nickel mines, and a Chilean wine makers has invested in wine production in Xinjiang. While nearly all current South American administrations are keen on contacts with China, this has not prevented them from taking measures such as Chile’s ban on Chinese fishing vessels using port facilities as retaliation for what they say is Chinese overfishing of the sea outside Chile’s territorial waters.

Ellis also notes that despite all the attention of China’s “strategic partnership” with Venezuela and its warm welcome by leftist Andean presidents, Chinese investors, like all others, prize political stability, transparency, and developed infrastructure. This means that they have been far keener to provide loans to Chile, Argentina and Brazil than, say, Venezuela. Like in Africa, Chinese companies (and presumably politicians) are keen to leverage their comparative advantage in unstable places shunned by Western investors (or where Western investors are unwelcome), but they are equally intent to enter larger, stabler countries and play by the rules if they have to.

Nigerians clash with police in Canton

On this blog we tend to write about the link between Chinese migration and development projects, but there is also migration from poorer countries to China: brides from North Korea, Vietnam, and Burma, entertainers and businessmen from Central Asia, and traders from Africa. This is an underresearched subject, but there are at least two ongoing research projects on the African trading community in China: by Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong in Hong Kong, and by Michal Lyons and Alison Brown in England.

A few days ago, Chinese media reported that about 300 Africans clashed with police at a police station in Canton. They were protesting the restrictions police sweeps on foreigners ahead of the 1 October anniversary celebrations of the 60s anniversary of the founding of the PRC, which combined with visa restrictions introduced ahead of the Olympics (resulting in African citizens being unable to get PRC visas in Hong Kong) meant that many traders became not only illegal migrants but also subject to deportation. In particular, the demonstrators were incensed about the death of a Nigerian, described as an illegal money changer, who fell from a building while trying to escape a police raid. According to the report, authorities in Canton are concerned because the man was a Muslim, and his death came just after the clashes between Uyghurs and Hans in Urumqi (also reportedly triggered by the death of two Uyghur Muslims in a fight in Guangdong).

There are several remarkable aspects about this report. First, the fact that it was allowed to appear: this probably reflects growing government confidence that readers would side with the police against ethnic groups they see as troublemakers (Tibetans, Uyghurs, Africans).

Second, even though the tightening of checks on foreigners ahead of the celebrations seems appeared to target political dissenters (say, human rights of Falungong activists), it was in fact used for an entirely different purpose, one that was much more in line with the practices of Western states. The report alleged that although officially Canton has 20 thousand African (mostly Nigerian, Ghanaian, Cameroonian and Liberian) residents, unofficial estimates are as high as 200 thousand, the population grows by 30-40% every year, and the two trading centers where Africans concentrated have been identified by police as areas of drug dealing. Such reports associating Africans with crime and illegal immigration are very similar to the portrayal of Chinese traders in Eastern European and African media, and having to hide from police sweeps is a familiar experience for businesspeople in Eastern Europe’s Chinese markets. In other words, what first appeared to be a party-state crackdown on dissent turned out to be more a “security” measure that victimizes economically or culturally undesirable foreigners from poor countries and makes China look more, rather than less, like the West.

Third, the fear that the conflict may escalate because the victim was Muslim is again similar to paranoid reactions of Western governments, but also shows sensitivity to the possible repercussions of the incident for China in Muslim countries. Indeed, as our Jakarta correspondent Johanes Herlijanto reports, while China has gone a long way bolstering its image as a source of Islam-friendly modernization in Indonesia, demonstrations were planned in front of the Chinese embassy today to protest the government’s treatment of Uyghurs. (They were cancelled after the firebombing of the Ritz-Carlton and the Marriott this morning.)

Clashes with Africans are not an entirely new phenomenon in China. In 1989, Chinese students in Nanjing demonstrated in protest against Africans students’ alleged harassment of Chinese girls in an incident that, according to some, was one of the triggers of the protests that later went down in history as the democracy movement.

Russian scholar says Chinese are paid to marry Russians

Recently I gave a talk in Paris and met Olga Alexeeva, who is doing her PhD at Paris VII and has written a few articles on Chinese businesses in Russia. In one of these papers, which she kindly sent me, she quotes Vilya Gelbras, the top authority on Chinese migration in Russia, as claiming that Chinese migrants who marry Russian women receive a bonus payment from the Chinese government.

Naturally, I thought this must be a mistake, so I checked the source. It is a 2005 interview with Gelbras in Novaya Gazeta, Russia´s premier independent (anti-Putin) newspaper, authored by none other than Anna Politkovskaya, the woman who was Russia´s best-known investigative journalist before she was assassinated.

In the interview, Gelbras indeed claims that he has seen a plan, which “has been discussed by” the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, to “organise the settlement of Chinese migrants all over Russia through Amur Province in order to control merchandise by concentrating it in their own hands in the hubs of the Transsiberian Railway” (чтобы через Амурскую область организовать вселение китайцев по всей территории России и таким образом, держа в своих руках товарную массу, сосредотачивая ее в своих руках в узловых пунктах Транссиба вплоть до Москвы, излучать свое влияние). Further on, Gelbras claims that now there is a second ” infiltration plan”. And, no kidding, he does say that Chinese men who marry Russian women get paid by the government. Then he goes on to talk about how the Chinese have cut down all the forests along the Transsiberian railroad and are poaching frogs.

Gelbras says that he wrote a special report for the UN on this issue. I have not come across it. The whole thing perplexes me. To be clear, I cannot imagine that these claims are true. What I can imagine is that Chinese companies, including state-owned ones, have plans for expanding their business in Russia, much of which has to do with timber and other primary resources. But Gelbras is a reasonably serious researcher, who has criticised Yellow Peril fearmongering in the past, and even in this interview the main target of his criticism is Russian corruption.

I have come across a number of articles written by Chinese academics on Russians’ fears of Chinese immigration, one of them by Li Lifan of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, who is a senior figure in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (the one that comprises Russia, China, and the Central Asian republics). These articles tend to deal with the fears as xenophobic responses to social instability and other factors, and in my view they are largely right. I wonder how Li would respond to the Gelbras interview.

VU student’s critical book on development aid in Cambodia

In her new book, somewhat mysteriously titled Swimming in a New Aquarium, Gea Wijders, a PhD student at the Culture, Organisation and Management department of the VU and until recently an advisor to Cambodia’s Ministry of the Environment, concludes that Western development aid to the country has failed. More generally, it is a critique of the idea of “doing good” in a “different culture” (or a new aquarium, in her metaphor). Gea is now engaged in a project looking at the role of Cambodian returnee migrants, most of them Sino-Khmer. I am looking forward to discussions with her about China’s position in the process.