So Canada's taking word of anti-smuggling crackdown straight to China

TANTOU, China - Hang Liu has come home again.

For seven years he lived a clandestine existence in North America that left him exhausted and demoralized. Defeated by the harsh Canadian winter, he returned last year to his ramshackle hometown and to the wife and children he had left behind.

Now Liu works as one of several English teachers in this town of 20,000, tutoring young men who dream of following in his footsteps to America, or, if all else fails, Canada.

For all the emigrés like Liu who return to the motherland, many more dream of taking their place abroad. Undeterred by the obstacles, locals borrow money to pay the $50,000 demanded by human smugglers - known locally as ``snakeheads'' - who spirit them away to one of North America's Chinatowns.

``I tell them how hard it is to live there, but they are determined to go,'' Liu says softly, shaking his head. ``So many young men go there to work and it's terrible.''

All around them, townsfolk see the palatial villas decorated in garish pink and turquoise hues built with money sent back from North America. And they pine for the promised land.

It's against that backdrop that Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan is coming to Fujian to announce a crackdown on human smugglers and new restrictions on Ottawa's refugee determination policy.

Her trip comes in the wake of last summer's armada of smugglers' boats caught off Canada's west coast carrying more than 600 illegal migrants en route to America.

Yet even as Caplan prepares to visit this coastal province tomorrow to spell out Canada's get-tough policy, many Fujianese are preparing for a new life abroad. Here in Tantou, for example, she faces a tough sell.

Down a dingy alley off the main street, past gutters reeking of sewage, a sign announces the entrance to TETC, which stands for Tantou English Training Centre. A creaky wooden staircase leads to a crammed second-floor classroom where teachers drill students on survival skills for North America.

At their desks, students hold their passports to success: not forged documents - that comes later, from the snakeheads - but tattered copies of the school's customized textbook that teaches them ``restaurant English.''

Lesson One is headed ``Conversation at the Airport,'' followed by tips on talking your way past the immigration ``station.''

``If they speak English, they can find a good job abroad,'' the school's owner says proudly in his halting English, declining to give his name. ``I hope these young men will have a happy future.''

But Liu, who gives lessons in his own house across town, knows better. After smugglers dropped him in Bolivia, he snaked his way through Central America to New York, where he worked 12-hour days, six days a week.

It took him years to repay his $45,000 debt to the snakeheads and he spent thousands more on long-distance phone bills to stay in touch with his family. He ended up working at a Chinese restaurant in Toronto.

``We had nothing, just work and more work,'' recalls Liu, 37.

But he had money.

Before he left Tantou, Liu's salary amounted to $50 a month. In North America, he earned about $3,500 a month, tax-free.

It is the lure of economic success that so many here find irresistible. Although some detained migrants have sought refugee status in Canada - claiming human rights abuses by China - the subject never came up in dozens of interviews here over the weekend.

However, some cited retribution for violating the official one-child policy in this country of 1.2 billion people. Liu, for example, said he was fined the equivalent of $500 when he had a second child.

The impulse to emigrate from Fujian goes back centuries, to the days when workers sailed to Taiwan, Borneo and the Malay peninsula, and later to America and Canada, where many helped build the railways. By the 1700s, China's Manchu rulers banned all emigration, but the Fujianese ignored the central government's edicts, as they have to this day.

Now, the province benefits handsomely from the Fujianese diaspora in the form of remittances from overseas Chinese. And from investments made by descendants of Fujianese living across the straits in Taiwan.

The flow of hard currency - up to 80 per cent of the $45 billion in foreign investment last year came from overseas Chinese - contradicts claims by some analysts that those who come from Fujian are economic refugees escaping abject poverty. Few people here can be said to be fleeing dire circumstances when compared to the rest of China.

Bamboo scaffolding and construction cranes are sprouting up across the skyline of the provincial capital, Fuzhou, which also boasts a gleaming new airport. A massive new convention centre is being completed, fashionable restaurants are opening and modern highways span the province.

``It's not that people who try to go are dirt poor,'' says Ying Chan, a University of Hong Kong professor who has studied the phenomenon. ``If you're poor, you can't borrow the money, you don't have the savings'' to pay off snakeheads.

``They want to make more money, they want to have a television - a 27-inch set, not a 19-inch set - that their next-door neighbour has.''

With Fujian's roots as a trading centre, it has become one of the country's most cosmopolitan areas. And those foreign influences have planted the seeds of wanderlust. Many young people here - men in blue jeans and denim shirts, women in miniskirts and platform shoes - say they would jump at the chance to leave.

Yet so powerful is Fujian's economic engine that thousands of labourers are pouring into the province from Szechuan, Hunan and Hubei, taking the lower-paying jobs that Fujianese won't touch and sometimes even moving into abandoned villas as squatters.

With so many young men emigrating, some areas of Fujian have been dubbed ``widow's villages.''

Liu Yu Qing, 36, is one of those so-called widows. She has been without her husband since snakeheads smuggled him into New York five years ago.

Now, she is hoping to join him if he can gain refugee status by claiming his family has suffered persecution for having two daughters. The fact that he - like Hang Liu, the English teacher - left their wives and children behind to face the apparent persecution does not seem to deter them from filing the claim.

How does she feel about her husband's decision to leave? ``I can't say what's in my heart,'' she replies.

For those who try to flee, but fail, the experience can be shattering. A woman who gave her name only as Cheng described the agony of a cousin who boarded a boat for America last year, only to be caught off the coast of Canada.

The naive and poorly educated cousin had hoped to gain refugee status and then send for her family to follow. Instead, she is in detention and in debt to the snakeheads.

``We were so depressed in our hearts when we heard she was caught,'' says Cheng. ``We hope she'll be released and earn some money. We want her to stay in Canada.''

Not everyone who is caught gives up quite so easily.

Chen Li Yuan, 23, paid snakeheads $20,000 to smuggle him into Japan, but was deported two years later when he was found without proper documents.

Now the price to North America keeps getting higher and the trip increasingly risky.

``Can't your government make it easier for us to go to Canada?'' he asks plaintively.