A backlash builds up against China

The Economic Times, 22 Dec 2009, 0153 hrs IST, NYT News Service

HANOI: Trung Son, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the local residents hoped.

Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing completion. But only a few hundred Vietnamese ever got jobs. Most of the workers were Chinese, about 1,500 at the peak. Hundreds of them are still here, toiling by day on the dusty construction site and cloistered at night in dingy dormitories.

“The Chinese workers overwhelm the Vietnamese workers here,” said Nguyen Thai Bang, 29, a Vietnamese electrician. China, famous for its export of cheap goods, is increasingly known for shipping out cheap labour. These global migrants often work in factories or on Chinese-run construction and engineering projects, though the range of jobs is astonishing: from planting flowers in the Netherlands to doing secretarial work in Singapore to herding cows in Mongolia — even delivering newspapers in the Middle East.

But a backlash against them has grown. Across Asia and Africa, episodes of protest and violence against Chinese workers have flared. Vietnam and India are among the nations that have moved this year to impose new labour rules for foreign companies and restrict the number of Chinese workers allowed to enter, straining diplomatic relations with Beijing.

In Vietnam, dissidents and intellectuals are using the issue of Chinese labour to challenge Vietnam’s governing Communist Party. A lawyer has sued Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung over his approval of a Chinese bauxite mining project, and the National Assembly is questioning top officials over Chinese contracts, both unusual moves in this authoritarian state.

Chinese workers continue to follow China’s state-owned construction companies as they win bids abroad to build power plants, factories, railroads, highways, subway lines and stadiums. From January to October 2009, Chinese companies completed $58 billion of projects, a 33% increase over the same period in 2008, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. From Angola to Uzbekistan, Iran to Indonesia, some 740,000 Chinese workers were abroad at the end of 2008, with 58% sent out last year alone, the Commerce Ministry said. The number going abroad this year is on track to roughly match that rate.

Chinese executives say that Chinese workers are not always less expensive, but that they tend to be more skilled and easier to manage than local workers. “Whether you’re talking about the social benefits or economic benefits to the countries receiving the workers, the countries have had very good things to say about the Chinese workers and their skills,” said Diao Chunhe, director of the China International Contractors Association, a government organisation in Beijing.

But in some countries, local residents accuse the Chinese of stealing jobs, staying on illegally and isolating themselves by building bubble worlds that replicate life in China, not unlike American military bases in the Middle East. “There are entire Chinese villages now,” said Pham Chi Lan, former executive V-P of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “We’ve never seen such a practice on projects done by companies from other countries.”

At this construction site northeast of the port city of Haiphong, an entire Chinese world has sprung up: four walled dormitory compounds, restaurants with Chinese signs advertising dumplings and fried rice, currency exchange shops, massage parlors — even a sign on the site itself that says “Guangxi Road,” referring to the Chinese province that most of the workers call home. One night, eight Chinese workers in blue uniforms sat in a cramped restaurant that had been opened by a man from Guangxi at the request of the project’s main subcontractor, Guangxi Power Construction Company. Their faces were flushed from drinking Chinese rice wine.

“I was sent here, and I’m fulfilling my patriotic duty,” said Lin Dengji, 52, an equipment installation manager. Such scenes can set off anxieties in Vietnam, which prides itself on resisting Chinese domination, starting with its break from Chinese rule in the 10th century. Vietnamese are all too aware of the economic juggernaut to their north. Vietnam had a $10-billion trade deficit with China last year. In July, a senior official said that 35,000 Chinese workers were in Vietnam, according to Tuoi Tre newspaper. The announcement shocked many Vietnamese.

“The Chinese economic presence in Vietnam is deeper, more far-reaching and progressing faster than people realise,” said Le Dang Doanh, an economist in Hanoi who advised the preceding prime minister.

Conflict has broken out between Vietnamese and Chinese labourers. In Thanh Hoa province in June, a drunken Chinese worker from a cement plant traded blows with the husband of a Vietnamese shopkeeper.

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