Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Middleman Minority in a Transnational Era (review)

Chinese migrants in Russia and Eastern Europe is a topic that has been largely ignored over the past two decades in Anglophone scholarship. Pál Nyíri's highly readable Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Middleman Minority in A Transnational Era provides a broad picture of Chinese migration and diasporas in the region. Drawn heavily from the author's PhD dissertation (published in 1999)¹ and the existing research works in Russian on the topic, and supplemented with information gleaned from local Chinese newspapers and government statistics, this short monograph offers an overview with a focus on the period after 1989 which has seen a great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia.

The book is divided into two parts comprising nine chapters. While the first part, which covers the history of earlier Chinese migrations to Russia and the former Soviet Union, is mainly a summary of the research findings made by Russian historians and Chinese scholars, the second part gives a detailed ethnography of the new Chinese migrant communities in Russia and part of Eastern Europe, together with the author's own observation and insightful analysis.

Chapter 1, "Early Contacts," gives a brief account of the early migrations from imperial China to the Russian empire. Chapter 2, "Chinese Farmers, Hunters, Workers and Merchants in Russia, 1858–1914," looks at the economic activities of early Chinese migrants in Russia from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. According to Russian and Chinese sources, Chinese migrants during this period came mainly from the northern Chinese provinces such as Shandong, Manchuria (consisting of the present-day provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang), and Zhili (present-day Hebei Province), with a small number of poor peasants from Zhejiang and Hubei. The author agrees with Mette Thunø's earlier studies on the Zhejiang Qingtian migrants in Europe,² and believes that this group of migrants may have made up the first flow of Chinese migrants to Western Europe, and established patterns of the ethnic economy that became typical in migrant communities during and after World War I (p. 28). Chapter 3, "Chinese as Labourers and Soldiers in Russia's Wars, 1914–22," describes the activities of Chinese migrants in Russia during World War I by summarizing the research findings made by Russian historian A.G. Larin. Chapter 4, "Chinese in the Soviet Union, 1922–89," is a very short description. Again, it is a summary of the research works by A.G. Larin and the recent publications of a few other Russian historians.

The following five chapters in Part II constitute the main body of this monograph focusing on the Chinese migrant community in Budapest. Chapter 5, "Chinese Migration to Russia and Eastern Europe since 1989," is an extremely detailed discussion of the rise and evolution of the Chinese inflow to Russia and Hungary, looking at the migrant sending regions, migration patterns, migrant numbers, residential patterns in the host societies, gender roles, and social stratification within the Chinese migrant communities. Chapter 6, "Employment and the Ethnic Economy," examines the ethnic Chinese economy in Russia and Eastern Europe. The detailed ethnographical analysis presented in the chapter is insightful and impressive. Different types of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs and ethnic businesses are discussed, ranging from contract workers in the Russian Far East, shuttle traders plying between Russia and China's northeastern provinces, peddlers in the Chinese markets of Budapest, clothes business, to shops and restaurants. A number of cases are used as examples to show convincingly how a unique Chinese ethnic economy was gradually established and consolidated on foreign soils before businesses moved beyond the national boundaries and became transnational. Chapter 7, "Transnational Practices and Politics," is a particularly interesting piece of research. A number of important issues such as the establishment of voluntary associations by new Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe, the rise of the migrant commercial elite represented by Zhang Manxin...