ABSTRACT
By 1926, when a census was conducted, around 100,000 persons on Soviet territory declared either their nationality or their main language as Chinese, of which 77,000 were in the Far East (Polyan 2001: 91). In European Russia, 4,000 persons declared themselves of Chinese nationality, and 6,000 declared Chinese as their main language. By 1928, Moscow alone had a population of 8,000 Chinese, most of them from Shandong and 1,000 from places south of the Yangtze. Northerners ran laundries, bakeries, and knitwear shops or were hawkers; some were unemployed. Southerners engaged in the leather business (Larin 1998: 294, 297). Until the early 1930s, Chinese shops and laundries continued to operate in the Soviet Far East, alongside Chinese communes or collective farms, and although the share of the Chinese in the Far Eastern population declined to 3.8 per cent, they accounted for 35 per cent of urban workers (mostly unskilled), 34 per cent of ‘owners’, 11 per cent of clerks, and 36 per cent of servants, in the statistics of the time. Chinese were being recruited again for work in goldmines, as well as in opium farming, which was resuscitated during the NEP as an export commodity, as ‘specially skilled labour’. In 1926, 22 per cent of the population of Vladivostok was Chinese (Larin 2000: 86-7).
