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Article Excerpt
The "yellow peril" is rising.... We see the overpopulation of the neighboring nation. They will come here, give birth to multitudes of slit-eyed people and then claim political autonomy.... Even if we shoot and kill a million Chinese a year, this problem won't go away.
--Vitalii Poluyanov, Chieftain, the Ussuri Cossack Army, interview with the first author, Vladivostok, June 1, 1999
Since the opening of the Sino-Soviet border in 1988, governors of Siberian and Russian Far Eastern territories, Russian federal government officials, and the media have been warning the Kremlin and the Russian public about "peaceful Chinese infiltration" and "Sinification" of the Russian Far East (RFE). (1) In national polls conducted by the Levada Analytical Center, Russia's leading survey agency, the number of respondents who wanted to restrict the settlement of ethnic Chinese in Russia rose from 39 percent to 46 percent from 2004 to 2005. (2) Resembling responses to migration in host societies from California to the suburbs of Paris--and nurturing premonitions that the French urban riots of late 2005 may repeat themselves at the juncture of Eurasia's two most powerful states--these dire warnings and exclusionist sentiments have been counterintuitive in several important respects. Migrants have been associated with threats to group and national security precisely where they are much needed to offset the decline of the working-age population and to revitalize local economies. Moreover, hostility emerged despite the widely recognized willingness of migrants to work harder and for longer hours in lower-paid jobs than host populations do and to move where workers are scarcest. (3) Alarmist reactions have also persisted regardless of the decline in illegal migration rates from the early 1990s to the present, and regardless of the fact that for over more than a decade, migration has not produced any sizeable Chinese ethnic enclaves in the RFE. (4) Finally, the tenacity of anti-Chinese sentiments in the region has been impervious to the improvement of Sino-Russian relations in the 1990s--as marked by the settlement of border disputes, regular summit meetings, substantial arms trade, and a friendship treaty. (5) These puzzles about the persistence of "yellow peril" alarmism in the RFE relate to a broader theoretical problem identified in a recent review of research on migration and conflict: "Whether migration heightens tensions ... often depends on whether it is viewed as undermining national security or domestic harmony, but the process by which threats are constructed and by which boon is transformed into bane remains poorly understood and under-theorized." (6) In this article, we develop a theoretical explanation of antimigrant alarmism and hostility by drawing on the security dilemma perspective, especially as it applies to relations among ethnic groups. (7)
At the heart of the security dilemma is a desire for self-preservation strongly associated with the absence or decline of central government authority. (8) According to John Herz's original definition: "Whenever such anarchic society has existed--and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level--there has arisen what may be called the 'security dilemma' of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated or annihilated by other groups and individuals." (9) Thus, threats blown out of seemingly rational proportion would nevertheless have solid bases in social reality and human psychology. Regarding ethnic relations, the security dilemma refers to obsession with relative power "when proximate groups of people suddenly find themselves newly responsible for their own security." (10) Emphasizing the critical role of perception and misperception during periods of uncertainty, the security dilemma provides an internally consistent and parsimonious explanation for precisely why fears may arise and become endemic, pervasive, irrational, symbolic, exaggerated, and potentially uncontrollable, even in the face of a stated commitment to peace and cooperation by all groups or states. In this sense, the security dilemma directly addresses the central theoretical puzzle of the present study--the emergence and persistence of what may be called "migration phobia," even when migration yields net economic benefits, when most migrants are temporary, and when intergovernmental relations between migrant-sending and -receiving states improve. And because the security dilemma logic has to do with competing interpretations of the nature, scale, and outcomes of migration, we define migration broadly as the movement of people--permanent or temporary-from one country or locality to another. (11)
As cross-border movement of ethnically heterogeneous groups, migration is one process that would make various groups proximate and potentially insecure. First, the very fact of migration could be perceived as a symptom of "borderlessness" and, hence, of declining state sovereignty and government authority. And by raising uncertainty about the future ethnic makeup of states (regardless of actual migration scale), migration would make incumbent ethnic groups more likely to view competition for power as key to their security. Second, ethnic incumbents could rarely be certain that temporary migrants would return home and would not settle down, bring in their relatives and friends, and claim jobs, resources, or territory (that is, "offense" is indistinguishable from "defense"). Histories of territorial claims and records of violent conflict between the migrants and the host populations would also decrease credibility of the migrants' intent. Third, migration often brings together ethnic populations who have a sense of distinct "groupness" and entrenched negative stereotypes--giving xenophobic politicians opportunities to manipulate ethnic mythologies in the struggle for power. Fourth, migration may engender economic rivalries and competition, activating the sense of economic vulnerability in host societies. The more intense these perceptions--the "security dilemma complex"--the more would one expect migration to engender fear and hostility despite efforts of all groups to assert their good will.
However, Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis caution that the security dilemma is "a social situation with social and perceptual causes, not simply a fact of nature. None of the elements that fuel the security dilemma--neither anarchy, nor offensive advantages, nor expectations that others will defect--can be taken for granted as unproblematic givens." (12) Actual or anticipated shifts in ethnic balance would not automatically harden into security dilemma situations, even in near-anarchical environments. Individual fears of ethnic "other" newcomers may differ widely in the same fear-producing environments. In two areas of the world in which interethnic security dilemma conditions have been most apparent--Africa and the former Soviet Union--violent conflict occurred in only a fraction of interethnic dyads. (13)
Whereas previous research on the interethnic security dilemma has offered us increasingly sophisticated theoretical refinements, empirical studies have relied on descriptive case studies--in which mass violence had already occurred. (14) However, such methodology is insufficient to address critical questions about the long-term social and psychological dynamics of ethnic conflict that concern us in this study: How do perceived shifts in ethnic population balances translate into fear and hostility toward ethnic "others" long before incendiary speeches are written and guns are fired? Do threat perceptions actually emerge among living, breathing human beings under structural conditions and leaders' behavior that one associates with the security dilemma as specified by theory? Under these same conditions, do some individuals find their futures more threatening than do others, and why? Which perceptions may mitigate fears? To address these questions--in a way previous studies could not do by design--we focus on the RFE as a case where no mass interethnic violence had occurred as a result of migration, yet where antimigrant alarmism and hostility have been palpable. We analyze migration phobia with a hope to advance our understanding of the security dilemma logic, before governments actually break down and violence erupts, by systematically testing its claims with large-N, individual-level data for the first time. (15)
Our focus is on individual perceptions plausibly associated with migration phobia and interethnic hostility through Russian views of Chinese migration in Primorskii Krai (Maritime Territory), located in the southeastern part of the RFE and representative of Chinese migration issues in Russia's regions along the border with China. (16) These perceptions were measured in a survey conducted in September 2000, of 1,010 local Russian respondents comprising a probability sample of the Primorskii Krai population. Although our tests of diverse theoretical explanations of migration phobia have been designed to probe their plausibility in one setting rather than to provide conclusive proof of any specific claim's validity, the location of the study in Primorskii Krai, as we show later, offers an ideal demographic, political, and socioeconomic context for this study.
MIGRATION AND THE INTERETHNIC SECURITY DILEMMA: THEORY AND THE CHINESE IN RUSSIA
Although not necessarily resulting in mass violence, the arrival of a new ethnic group in any society explicitly or implicitly triggers the fundamental security dilemma question formulated by Barry Posen: "Is it a threat? How much of a threat? Will the threat grow or diminish over time?" (17) The security dilemma specifies conditions under which individuals in host societies would view migration as increasingly threatening.
The Problem of "Emerging Anarchy"
The very fact that ethnic "others" are capable of crossing state borders and are hard to control once inside the host state sets the stage for increasing concerns on the part of the host populations about security. The weakening of central government authority--while most evident in failing states after the demise of colonial and communist rule--has also been associated with the rise of transnational governance and, more broadly, with globalization. (18) One recent study of immigration and ethnic relations in the European Union linked the rise in "explosive public conflicts and deep rifts among political elites" over migration and state identity with simultaneous "threats of globalization from without and pluralization from within." (19) Myron Weiner notes that with the proportion of noncitizens now ranging from 5 to 25 percent in most industrialized countries and reaching more than 50 percent in the oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf, at the global level, migration creates "nations without borders." (20)
If a nation-state's capacity to control migrant flows weakens, fears of status quo groups in host societies that ethnic balance may change in favor of the newcomers would parallel concerns of statesmen on the international stage about the military balance changing in favor of others. This logic could induce some members of the host societies to seek windows of opportunity for preemptive aggressive and violent responses to migration: "If those with greater advantages expect to remain in that position in superior numbers, then they may see no window of opportunity. However, if they expect their advantage to wane or disappear, then they will have an incentive to solve outstanding issues while they are much stronger than the opposition." (21) Anarchy-related concerns over security and competition for political power (as the key to security) will thus be higher when: migrant-sending states or regions have larger and/or faster-growing populations than do host states or regions; the capacity of host governments and nongovernmental actors to resolve or prevent conflicts with migrants or to protect local populations from adverse effects of migration declines; and migrants come from states that have a preponderance (current or projected) of military power over host states.
In the Russian Far East, widespread fears of "Sinification" (kitaizatsiia) emerged in the 1990s in a demographic and political context consistent with these conditions. First, migrants arrived from a vastly more populated state, with migration, by its very occurrence, symbolizing the population disparity between Russia and China. In Primorskii Krai, 2.2 million Russians faced 38 million Chinese in one neighboring Heilongjiang province alone, with Russian scholars commonly estimating Heilongjiang's population at 70 million. (22) Only about 7 million Russians in the late 1990s populated the entire Russian Far East--about 37 percent of Russia's territory, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean and bordering China with over 1.2 billion people. Moreover, the Russian Far East population in the 1990s declined by almost 9 percent due to the prevalence of deaths over births and out-migration to European Russia. (23)
Implying the threatening nature of these population disparities, Russian academics and policy analysts see them as resulting in China's "demographic pressure" on Russia. By one estimate, this pressure amounts to 63,000 Chinese nationals per one Russian, per one kilometer of the Russian-Chinese border. Population density pressure was estimated at 380,000 Chinese per one Russian per one kilometer inside a one-kilometer band of the same border. (24) The former Vice-Governor of Primorskii Krai, Vladimir Stegnii, also said he feared that by 2050, China's population growth would overextend that country's carrying capacity, necessitating territorial expansion to satisfy the need for water, air, and land. (25) Assessing the effects of migration on Sino-Russian relations, Dmitry Trenin of the Moscow Carnegie Center argued that "even a relatively small number of Chinese immigrants would be enough to completely upset the current ethnopolitical balance.... In those circumstances, the absence of clear and consistent immigration policy practically guarantees the rise of interethnic tensions that could relatively easily escalate into an interstate conflict between Russia and China." (26)
What Trenin describes as a "demographic overhang" (demograficheskii naves) of China over the RFE casts a long and threatening shadow over perceptions of Chinese migration. (27) It is understandable in this context that even a small number of short-term Chinese migrants such as "shuttle traders" (chelnoki) would serve as a powerful reminder of this demographic overhang to RFE residents and engender exaggerated estimates of migration scale among the latter. Indeed, perceptions that Chinese migrants would keep coming like a flood tide were widespread among respondents of the Primorskii 2000 survey. When asked what proportion of the Primorskii Krai population was Chinese, 46 percent of respondents (excluding the "don't knows") said that this proportion amounted to 10 to 20 percent (modal response). Looking five to ten years ahead, 41 percent of respondents said that the proportion of ethnic Chinese in Primorskii would grow to 20 to 40 percent, and another 20 percent said that it would reach 40 to 60...
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