Dicing with death on Burma's border
Gambling and vice have turned the pretty market town of Ruili into China's Aids capital. Richard McGregor reports
Financial Times; Mar 24, 2001
By RICHARD MCGREGOR
By day, there is little about the small border town of Ruili that lets on that it is China's Aids capital, an incubator for the disease that is spreading rapidly through the world's most populous country.
Amid the gentle mountains on the border with Burma, the town sparkles in crisp weather that the locals call a "permanent spring". Even the river that glides alongside the town, and in some parts marks the border, is free of the debris and stench that blight most Chinese waterways.
The market bustles with Pakistani and Burmese Muslims, stealthily unwrapping pieces of cloth to reveal their wares of jade, while back- packers on the Mekong trail straggle by.
But by night, Ruili sparkles with a different energy. Narrow lanes are transformed, with scores of pink-lit brothels facing on to the street. Heroin users with the gaunt, hunted look of serious addicts lurk on dark corners.Ruili has a touch of Las Vegas, too -a24-hour casino that operates on a narrow, sandy isthmus in the middle of the river, and is reached only by a privately run boat from the Chinese side.
Prostitution and drug use can be found throughout China, although rarely, if ever, as blatantly as here. But the casino's free rein is astounding in a country in which a ban on gambling has been rigidly enforced since the communist takeover in 1949.The drugs, the prostitution, the frontier atmosphere symbolised by the casino and the growing cross-border trucking trade, all make for a potent cocktail in the era of Aids.
A map of Yunnan province, used by the local authorities to track the disease, tells the story. From a small dot in 1989, when China's first case of Aids was officially acknowledged in Ruili, the disease has spread to blacken the entire provincial map, and beyond.
The victims of the epidemic are not hard to find. I see a tiny and barely pubescent Burmese girl walking the streets with the innocent sparkle of a cheeky teenager just making her way in the world. Her playful perkiness somehow never leaves her, even as she plies her trade of prostitution.
She is like the scores of Burmese girls who come out at night in Ruili, paint their faces a ghostly traditional white, and take their positions on a shadowy curve of a busy traffic roundabout. Only 14, though she at first coyly claims to be 18, she and her co-workers have slipped over the porous border a few kilometres away to sell themselves for a week or so, before heading home.
She, at least, has learnt something about Aids. She insists she will not have sex without a condom. "I don't want to get the sickness like the others," she says in a scattergun pidgin-Chinese, which seems better practised at talking about money than conversing about herself. But her co-workers do look sick. Haunted eyes, cavernous cheeks and hungry, desperate solicitations for customers lend the Burmese girls' corner a freakish, frightening air.
It is something the authorities understand well. When the UK's minister for international development, Clare Short, visited Ruili last year to back a British Aids aid project, the streets were cleared for the night.
China's border with Burma is now also the main transit point for another form of traffic - heroin from the Golden Triangle. A long campaign has choked many transit routes through Thailand, so the drug lords have turned to China.Some of the white powder travels through Ruili and the surrounding districts on its way to the rest of the world. But an increasingly large amount feeds China's own growing number of heroin addicts.
Many are hidden away in remote villages in Yunnan, especially among the province's minority groups, where the drug is cheap and the idea of clean needles is as distant as the country's rulers in faraway Beijing.More and more, heroin is not a drug that users graduate to. It is the first, and often last, drug they take.
"For people in Ruili, there are three main forms of entertainment - gambling, women and drugs," says our guide. "Drugs are the most dangerous. Women are the safest."
The heroin, prostitution and other border trade all create a large pot of cash, much of which finds a home at the "Sino-Burma Casino - New East Entertainment City".
To get there, you jump on a boat, or more accurately, a few jerry- assembled planks of wood with a diesel outboard motor attached. The hefty gatekeeper prevents only one category of gambler from jumping on board - anybody without a Chinese face is barred.Gamblers say that, once on the premises, patrons march through another set of black-suited guards, walkie-talkie in one hand, truncheon in the other, and then an outdoor gambling bazaar using dice with animals on each side instead of spots.The two main gambling halls are about 50 metres long, spacious and brightly lit, with scores of tables offering roulette, blackjack and other card games.
Credit is not a problem here. Pawn shops on the island offer instant cash loans at a compound interest rate of 10 per cent a day. In extreme cases, the casino allows gamblers to borrow money using themselves as security. The indebted gambler becomes a virtual hostage on the island until he or she is bailed out by family or friends.
The mystery of whether the casino is in China or Burma, or just some grey area in between, is partially solved by a sign offering a 24-hour telephone advice service for gamblers. The number given is for a Chinese mobile phone.
The "border crossing" itself - where you jump on the boat to go to the casino - tells you all you need to know about the rule of law in this wild town: two uniformed customs officials barely glance at the gamblers arriving to board the craft.
In Ruili, China's border is policed, not by the government, but by the private security staff of the casino.