Victims of Russia's flawed policy

Russia's Federal Migration Service apprehended about 150 Chinese businesspeople at Moscow's Cherkizovsky Market last Wednesday, on the ground that they had violated the country's residency regulation.

This was the third time that Chinese people were detained by the Russian authorities in two days. It is a continuation of the "Gray Customer Clearance" trade activities recently launched by Russia.

The detention of foreign businessmen happened two years and five months after the mayor of Moscow ordered the largest market in Eastern Europe to shut down. The market, established in the early 1990s, is the biggest daily wholesale market in Russia; and, a place of business for about 80,000 Chinese, many of them from Wenzhou in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. Since the Soviet era when the country had a huge demand for light industrial products, cheap but quality Chinese goods have been popular among the Russians.