Chinese workers in the Kama region during sovietchinese friendship: the problems of everyday life and adaptation

Abstract

The essay analyses circumstances of arrival, live and work of the Chinese people in Molotov region in the 1950–1960s. Based on previously non-published documents, archive resources, transcripts of the interviews, the essay reconstructs the specificities of everyday life, social and cultural adaptation of Chinese workers in the USSR. More than 1,000 Chinese workers lived and worked in Molotov region in 1954–1965. Most of them were people of 1935-1940 years of birth from poor peasant families (from Hebei and Shandong provinces) and without education. The life of the Chinese in the USSR in the 1950s is considered to be one of the least surveyed parts of the history of Chinese immigration to Russia. The Chinese workers who had come from poor and devastated by the long-term war country to the “closed” Soviet society were pleasantly surprised by a genuinely warm welcoming, which often crossed the line of mere official political “friendship”. The Chinese, who lived in the USSR, managed to accept a number of behaviorist norms and traditions of the locals without losing their own ethnical identification and traditional culture. Even after 60 years of constant staying in the USSR, they kept the citizenship of their own country, though they could not use social benefits available to the Soviet citizens. For the Soviet society those immigrants were extremely interesting in terms of their culture, which influenced their work, interaction and communication, and everyday life. Many of the Chinese created international marriages and though it was widely believed that a child in an international marriage with the Chinese was always born the Chinese, the children of such unions became truly Russians in the second generation already, resembling the Chinese only in their ethnical features of appearance. It is possible to use Soviet-Chinese friendly relationship as an example for studying the ways and patterns of adaptations of the Chinese in foreign ethno-cultural environment. Nowadays, Chinese immigration is becoming a problem for many developed countries, therefore this example can be viewed as a good empirical basis for analysis of the evolution of ethnical self-identification of Chinese immigrants, for further surveying of the image of their own origins in 2-3 generations, for developing the policy of adaptation of the Chinese and including them into the local society.