CHINA: Beijing worried migrant workers vulnerable
Updated
Huge numbers of people from China are leaving the country to work abroad, both for foreign businesses, and for Chinese enterprises setting up overseas. The vast movement of people includes both short-term contract workers and permanent migrants, and it's creating a new problem for Beijing - how to protect its nationals from anti-Chinese sentiment and attacks.
Presenter: Bill Bainbridge
Speakers: Professor Wang Gungwu, Director of the East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore; Anita Chan research fellow at the contemporary china center at the Australian National University; Dr Sasha Gong former Senior Program Officer, Solidarity Center, Washington
BAINBRIDGE In April nine Chinese workers were among 74 killed when gunmen attacked a Chinese run oil-Field in Ethiopia, in 2004 11 Chinese construction workers were killed during an attack on a construction site in Afghanistan, and most recently three Chinese nationals were shot dead at an auto-rickshaw company in Pakistan. As China steps up its investment around the world, including in many poor countries that Western businesses find unrewarding or too dangerous, Chinese workers have become more vulnerable. As a result China's assistant Minister of Commerce Chen Jian has asked Chinese businesses to improve security for their workers and said the government also needs to do more to protect them. Professor Wang Gungwu, Director of the East Asia Institute at the National University of Singapore, says the presence of so many Chinese citizens abroad is a new issue for Beijing.
WANG: This is an absolutely new phenomenon, completely unknown in the past. Certainly not in Africa, and in Australia and South east Asia, in the past, were there Chinese companies bringing in Chinese workers.
BAINBRIDGE: In Africa officially there are only 100,000 Chinese workers but unofficially there are said to be many more. The OECD says Chinese firms hold investments of $6.3 billion. Sasha Gong, a researcher who until recently worked with the Solidarity Center in Washington, she says wherever Chinese firm go Chinese labour follows.
GONG: A lot of workers, especially the illegal ones or semi-legal ones, are held against their will and paid a very high upfront amount, and then be made to work as a slave for years.
BAINBRIDGE: Anita Chan is a research fellow at the contemporary china center at the Australian National University. She says Chinese labourers are resented by some in Africa.
CHAN: Why should an African country that's already poor, has very little industries and the employers, mainly Chinese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong chinese, bring in PRC workers, employ PRC workers, bringing in PRC workers, to replace African workers.
BAINBRIDGE: It raises the spectre of the kind of anti-Chinese feeling that's been seen in other parts of the world before. Anti- Chinese feeling has sporadically raised its head in Asia, as it did when Indonesians targeted ethnic Chinese businesses during riots over price rises a decade ago. They were once called the "Jews of the East", by Thailand's King Rama Six and have been targeted at different times in Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere. But Wang Gungwu cautions against generalising about anti-chinese sentiment.
WANG: Indonesia inherited a particular set of problems which doesn't for example apply to Thailand. It doesn't occur in the Philippines. And Singapore, and Malaysia are a very specific case again, under the British, they handled it differently to the Dutch. So the variations are very great, and I find it very difficult when people generalise about "the overseas Chinese". There is no "the overseas Chinese". There are Chinese in Malaysia, Chinese in the United States, in Australia. They have some things in common but most of the time they have nothing in common.
BAINBRIDGE: Anita Chan says the way Africans feel about the presence of the Chinese will depend on whether they have to compete with them for jobs or not.
Rich people may welcome the Chinese to come and invest. Poor people don't want the Chinese to come because they exploit them. In Africa the trade unions are very angry with the Chinese employers, but the African governments are very interested in having the Chinese coming.
