A $150-million-plus Chinese real estate and tourism deal that is
slated for a suburb of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, is creating a
quandary for many Georgians. The project is feeding a long-standing
desire for foreign investment, but it is also stoking wariness about
foreign influence.
Set against a broad backdrop of crumbling, Soviet-era apartment
blocks, the project -- run by the Hualing Group, a privately owned,
Xinjiang, China,-based company with banking, timber, and hotel
investments in Georgia – is projected to remake about 420 hectares of
land in the working-class district of Vazisubani.
In the first, $150-million phase, housing will be built on four
hectares for the European Youth Olympic Festival, an event of young
athletes from 48 European countries that Tbilisi will host in 2015. A
subsequent step is expected to include a retail and residential area, to
be built at an unknown cost.
Last year, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government praised the
Hualing Group for bringing in much-needed investment and employment to a
poor, densely populated part of Tbilisi. The level of investment for
the first phase amounts to more than five times the size of total
Chinese foreign investment in Georgia in 2012.
At the same time, rumors that the project will bring 127,000 Chinese
immigrants into the city to work and live are generating local concern –
increasingly prevalent since the 2008 war with Russia -- about foreigners pushing Georgians off their own land and depriving them of hard-to-find jobs.
“Nothing will be left for us [if so many Chinese come],” complained
Gulara, a 62 year-old female pensioner who lives near the planned
development site. “Where did all these ethnic groups come from? […] God
gave us this land.”
In recent years, Tbilisi has experienced an influx of immigrants from Africa and
South Asia, as well as occasional Chinese traders, and Arab investors.
But in a country of 4.49 million people with estimated rates of
unemployment over 50 percent, these visitors are sometimes seen more as
an economic threat than as a source of opportunity.
“People are not aware of how to deal with, how to cohabitate … with
others,” said Nana Berekashvili, the head of the Department on
Minorities and Gender at Tbilisi’s International Center on Conflict and
Negotiation. “In [the] case of [the] Chinese, I think it is … [people]
having the notion about China that it is huge and enormously populated,
and their idea is somehow to expand.”
Representatives of the Hualing Group denied that there are plans for a
massive resettlement of Chinese to Tbilisi. The residential buildings
that will begin construction once the Olympic Village is finished will
be sold on the open market, and are not sufficient to house 127,000
people, commented the company’s Georgia spokesperson, Tina
Shishinashvili.
She emphasized that 531 of the project’s 659 workers are Georgian
citizens. Hualing has also taken on Georgian architects to design its
overall strategic plan, she said.
But such assurances mean little to figures such as Jondi Bagaturia,
the outspoken head of the right-wing Kartuli Dasi (Georgian Troupe)
political party. The party has played a prominent role in stoking
popular discontent over the project with claims of a pending Chinese
resettlement.
Bagaturia says he bases his opposition on what he purports to be a
copy of the contract between the Georgian government and the Hualing
Group. Although the investment itself is “very good,” he said any influx
of Chinese immigrants is “unacceptable” since the government “must
protect the labor market.”
Neither the Economic Development Ministry nor Tbilisi City Hall
responded to requests for comment about the planned investment. The
project’s architectural plan is still awaiting municipal approval.
Hualing Group’s interest in Georgia is not unusual. Chinese companies
in the past have been involved in large-scale investments ranging from
the construction of a hydropower plant to a railway tunnel. With a trade
turnover of $591.5 million, China in 2012 ranked as Georgia’s fourth
largest trading partner.
Yet Georgians’ attitudes toward the Chinese -- and immigrants in
general -- remain complex. A 2010 survey by the Caucasus Research
Resource Center in Tbilisi found that while 57 percent of 2,089 Georgian
respondents supported doing business with the Chinese, 80 percent were
against the closer tie of marriage.
While Georgian culture stipulates hospitality and respect toward
guests, Berekashvili commented, Georgians are selective about which
ethnic groups are welcomed. They “are very hospitable toward people from
Western cultures, from Europe, from the United States, but very little
to others,” she said.
For Yu Hua, a Chinese businessman, Georgia is still a land of
opportunity. After 14 years in the country, Yu serves as the president
of the newly formed Chinese Chamber of Commerce and is married to a
Georgian.
He says that he has never experienced racism or discrimination, but
underlines that the government and media need “to offer… correct
information” to dispel rumors that could spoil Chinese-Georgian business
ties.
Right now, opinions are decidedly mixed.
As a small crew cleared mounds of earth from the European Youth
Olympic Village site one day last month, a group of male onlookers
dismissed the Chinese project with shrugs and a curse. But one
65-year-old woman selling sunflower seeds near the site remained
optimistic.
“Let’s see what happens,” she said. “I don’t think it will be bad.”
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66764
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