Of the Chinese

Tiny Montenegro goes on war against China, and Communist Party Central Committee in Beijing decides to deploy 100.000 soldiers to subjugate the 700.000 Montenegrins. In Podgorica the Army Joint Chiefs of Staff asks about the size of the enemy. “1.1 billion, sire”. Chief of Staff says “Wow, and where are we going to bury so many people?”.

This is a typical Montenegrin macho-type joke, but towards year 2000 there were already about 100,000 Chinese in Serbia, resulting from the visit that Slobodan Milošević paid to China in 1996, when he encouraged Chinese people to come to his country. It looks that by the end of his mandate Milošević wanted to grant Serbian citizenship to 40,000 of them, allegedly to provide them with voting rights to stop liberal opposition growth in Belgrade.

Since then many other Chinese have come and got installed in the neighbor countries as well, as shown by the numerous “Chinese shops” or kineski shop which spread along the outskirts of every city and where you can buy cheap clothes, shoes and all kind of hardware for your house, vehicle or garden. Actually, only interesting thing in the kineski shop is the surrealism of talking Serbo-Croatian with a Chinese guy.

Some friends commented that in Belgrade they went to one of these shops where the cleaning lady was a Serb woman, all the clerks were Serbs as well, and the only Chinese was at the cash desk. It is a meaningful anecdote, but I don’t know yet if it shows the business skills of that Chinese guy, the low salaries got by Serbs, or both things at once.

Some Chinese clearly have come to succeed. Chin Chin is the artistic name of this girl who has been living for five and a half years in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Croatia, and among other things she has been interpreter and singer. Maybe we are just discovering a new star. Show starts in min. 2.