Efforts by Russian Regions in Far East to Attract Chinese Investment and Tourism Often Backfire, Gabuyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – China is an ever more important source of foreign investment and tourism for the regions of the Russian Federation each of Baikal, Aleksand Gabuyev says; but efforts by regional governments there have been halting and ineffective and often do more to put the Chinese off than attract them to Russia.

            The head of the Moscow Carnegie Center’s Russia in the Asia-Pacific Region says that these problems and the need for change have been highlighted in a new study by the iMARS communications research firm which looked at the efforts of the regions very broadly (rbc.ru/opinions/politics/30/11/2019/5de10d6a9a79474f9581895e).

                iMARS considered whether the regions have sites in Chinese and the quality of these sites, the presence of experts on China in the regional governments, the use of regional officials of WeChat, which is, Gaburyev says, “the main channel for promoting information about oneself in the Chinese segment of the Internet.” 

            The company concluded that many of the regions east of Baikal do recognize that they need to reach out to the Chinese but have not yet taken the necessary steps to be effective. Few officials use WeChat, for example, and their websites serve to put off the Chinese rather than attract them.

            Often, iMARS said, the sites were written in the Chinese of Taiwan rather than that of mainland China, they are seldom updated, and perhaps worst of all, the translations the Russian regions use come from online translation services rather than being made by expert linguists. This leads to truly absurd statements.

            For example, the company found that in one case, “Red Square” was translated into Chinese as “Smoked Sausage” and “the Patriarch’s Residence” as “the Woman Hater’s Place.” Such things only “demonstrate the incompetence of potential Russian investors, the Moscow Carnegie Center expert suggests.

            And iMARS said that its research had found that in many cases, when the regions send officials and businessmen to China, these are not trade missions but rather occasions for such people to take vacations on the tax payers’ tab.

            Even if the regions were doing everything right, Gaburyev says, there is no guarantee that they would attract Chinese investment or tourism. But when they are making such mistakes, two outcomes are likely. On the one hand, Chinese firms will decide that these regions aren’t ready for China and will go elsewhere.

            And on the other, this means that what investment and tourist flows there are will reflect only Chinese needs and not Russian ones. To prevent that from happening, the expert says, the regional governments must hire specialists on China so that they can get things right and now assume they can simply copy whatever someone else has done.