China Reform Monitor: No. 1145

January 25:

Over the last year Chechnya evicted 102 illegal migrants, “mostly citizens from Vietnam and China,” an officer of the Russian Federal Migration Service Directoratetold Kavkazskiy Uzel. Citizens of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, were also among those evicted. Fifty illegal immigrants were deported in 2013, 37 in 2012.

January 26:

Congolese protesters in the capital Kinshasa attacked and looted about fifty Chinese-owned shops in working-class neighborhoods. Demonstrators shattered windows, broke down doors, and picked shelves clean. “Nothing was touched besides the Chinese stores,” said one businessman who owns dozens of businesses in the area. Thousands of Chinese laborers are now in DRC working on Chinese financed infrastructure projects or running businesses that serve their compatriots. Many live together in tight quarters in and around Kinshasa or on infrastructure construction projects. Congolese resent the Chinese self-segregation, and preference for their own customs, habits, and language, Agence France Presse reports. “They sell everything, (and) we’re no longer doing any business because of them,” complained one local telephone card vendor, who said he hoped the looting would be a “lesson” to his Chinese rivals. “The Chinese slash prices,” said another resident who said Chinese competition was “too much.”

January 30:

On January 19, the CPC issued guidelines published by Xinhua requiring universities to prioritize ideology, party loyalty, Marxism and party leader Xi Jinping’s ideas, Xinhua reports. Ten days later at a meeting in Beijing with prominent university leaders, Education Minister Yuan Guiren laid out new rules restricting Western textbooks and banning those sowing “Western values.” According to another Xinhua report, Yuan said: “Strengthen management of the use of original Western teaching materials. By no means allow teaching materials that disseminate Western values in our classrooms. Never allow statements that attack and slander party leaders and malign socialism to be heard in classrooms. Never allow teachers to grumble and vent in the classroom.” China’s universities must ensure that Xi’s ideas “enter teaching materials, enter classrooms and enter minds.” For an English summary see the New York Times.

Four “Chinese citizens” (often euphemism denoting Uighurs) have been given 1½ year sentences in a penal colony for “knowingly illegally crossed the Kazakh state border without proper documentation.” In July, they scaled the border fence at the section of the “Narynkol” border post, the Kazakhstan Today reports.

January 31:

Sudan’s minister of finance, Badr al-Din Mahmud, and the director general of China’s Ex-Im Bank (unnamed) have agreed on a new round of loans. Sudan will also adopt the Chinese Yuan for all bilateral foreign exchange and investments, Sudan’s officialSudan Vision reports. A $700 million “preferential loan” for the new Khartoum Airport and “interest-free loans and grants” valued at 400 million yuan for the construction of productive projects, such as “slaughterhouses for meat, and a City for the manufacturing and exporting of leather,” were among the deals inked. In Sudan, China has financed and built critical infrastructure including the new presidential palace, electricity stations (e.g. Alfula power plant) and transmission lines, Omdurman-Bara and Western Salvation road, the Blue Nile and Tamboul sugar projects. Sudan is under pressure because “the decline in the flow of oil will affect the flow of foreign exchange,” the Minister said.

February 1:

Hong Kong’s program to destroy 30 metric tons of illicit ivory lacks transparency, theSouth China Morning Post reports. Unlike other Chinese and non-Chinese cities, independent observers are banned from the closed-door destruction of Hong Kong’s massive stockpile. China is the world’s largest consumer market for ivory, much of which transits Hong Kong. In 2013, about 8 metric tons, 15 percent of all the illegal ivory seized around the world, was confiscated in Hong Kong, while 80 percent was seized in East Africa. In 2013, Hong Kong licensed 447 undisclosed individuals to sell 117 metric tons of ivory obtained between 1999 and 2008. The government has not released new figures for the number of license holders nor the current size of the legal stockpile in 2014. Many believe the list contains rich and powerful speculators who are hoarding ivory with the hope that the price will rise when elephants become extinct.

[Editor’s Note: The UN Environment Program found that Uganda’s Lord's Resistance Army makes up to $12 million every year in ivory trafficking. Al-Shabab, a Somalia-based cell of al-Qaeda, funds 40 percent of its salaries from selling “white gold.” Cross-national crime syndicates are also key players in the trade.]