Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. xiii, 367 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-691-18168-4.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 360 pp. US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 9781787381384.
China and Russia have well-established academic disciplines dedicated to the study of their historical relationship across the vast territory separating their former empires (Imperial Russia and Qing China) and successor nation-states (the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China). Yet the history of their shared borderlands, until recently, has been told mostly from the point of view of political centres, and not of the periphery. The Cold War and the Sino-Soviet split from the 1960s to the 1980s produced dominant narratives of a fixed militarized border, obscuring the fact that for most of its history, starting from the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) to the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), this border was peaceful and, until the 1930s, remained porous. Writing a comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border is complicated because the shared borderlands were home to various indigenous, Manchu, Mongol, Korean, Japanese, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Uyghur, and other peoples, with distinct experiences and perspectives compared to their Chinese and Russian counterparts. The two books reviewed here analyze the borderland society from the multidisciplinary perspectives of political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as geography and anthropology, paying attention to local and state perspectives.
Urbansky’s experience of crossing the Sino-Russian border by train from Zabaikalsk to Manzhouli determined his long-term interest in one section of the long Sino-Russian border along the Argun River, which became the focus of his book, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. The book examines the transformation of the Argun River basin and surrounding territories from a distant Sino-Russian frontier to an extensive Eurasian land border from the seventeenth century to 1991, by combining a history from above with history from below, and by focusing on the lives of local people and their role in transforming the border. The introduction promises a “radically new perspective” that challenges the “conventional vertical macro narrative of diplomatic, economic, or military history” (3), but it does not pay tribute to published “horizontal” perspectives, mentioning only a few English-language frontier studies of Inner and Northeast Asia, most notably by Owen Lattimore, and omitting recent studies of this frontier published in Russian or Chinese by scholars in the Russian Far East and in China’s Northeast.
Instead of the promised longue durée, only chapter 1 discusses the early Argun frontier, up to the late nineteenth century, by introducing the frontier people (Tungus, Buriats, Solons, Mongols), the first formal border demarcation between the Russian and Qing Empires, Cossack and Banner frontier settlements, early trade, and a balance of power shifting in Russia’s favour. The complex history of the Mongol presence and Manchu-Mongol dynamics in this frontier receives scarce attention here. This chapter leaves more questions than answers, with generalizations such as “their national identities may still have been nascent, their racial ones were not, as ethnic Russians and Manchu or Han Chinese were physically different” (38). The rest of the book is about twentieth-century border-making policies and challenges, and the borderland society. Each chapter is organized thematically and chronologically, although in many instances the narrative jumps back and forth in time, with entire decades covered within a single page. Chapter 2 discusses Russia’s railway imperialism, the establishment of customs control, Chinese and Russian agricultural colonization of this frontier, contraband trade in gold and alcohol, territorial disputes, and epidemics. It argues that despite state efforts to control the imperial border at the newly established Manzhouli railway station/town, local cross-border trade thrived there. The next two chapters analyze how the Xinhai (1911) and October (1917) Revolutions and civil conflict offered short-lived freedoms to the Mongols of Hulunbeier, and how Chinese and Russian state interests divided local communities and lands, displacing the Argun Cossacks and Transbaikal Buriats. The militarization of the border and the decline of the nomadic lifestyle as a result of the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1929 and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (1931–1945) are analyzed in chapter 5. Urbansky argues that the establishment of border zones by the Soviet Union starting in the 1920s, and ideological and military conflict between the Soviet Union and the Japan-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo created a “border regime that would endure until the demise of the Soviet Union” (194). Nomadic cultures, people with questionable loyalties, and religious and political exiles became the victims of this new political order. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss the post-WWII borderland environment, which changed again with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the honeymoon in Sino-Soviet relations in the 1950s, China regained Manzhouli and its rights over the former Chinese Eastern Railway, yet each state reinforced its own control over shared borders, while “local and informal forms of border trade did not rejuvenate under two communist states” (216). From the 1960s to the 1980s, bilateral relations between Moscow and Beijing directly affected cross-border ties: the rift between Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev resulted in closed borders and a border conflict in 1969, while post-Maoist economic reforms and opening up in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in the revival of cross-border economic ties. The last two chapters predictably demonstrate that high politics emanating from political centres determined local developments, and that both governments remained cautious about their shared borders, despite the promise of mutual benefits in cross-border trade and tourism.
This book offers a fresh look at the process of border making along the Argun frontier region. It pays nuanced attention to the establishment and operation of customs, border control, surveillance, and propaganda on both sides of the border, while portraying daily life in border towns and rural settlements, based on media sources, documentary evidence from the provincial Russian archives, and personal memoirs. Urbansky relies mostly on sources in Russian, English, and German, and as a result pays more attention to the Imperial Russian, Soviet, and émigré Russian perspectives and to a lesser degree Chinese, Mongol, and indigenous ones. For comparison, Loretta E. Kim and Jonathan Schlesinger’s studies focus on indigenous, Manchu, Mongol, and Qing China’s perspectives on this frontier region (Loretta E. Kim, Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Border Administration, Harvard University Press, 2019; Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of the Qing Rule, Stanford University Press, 2017). Beyond the Steppe Frontier complements my own study of this border, which examines the entire Amur River Basin, of which the Argun River is only a part (Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850-1930, University of British Columbia Press, 2017). The early chapters of Urbansky’s book echo the organization, topics, and arguments about the porousness of the border, the illicit gold trade, the role of the environment, and the impact of railways, revolutions, and wars on the emerging border regime from my study of this frontier. While the Argun River basin offers a distinct perspective on the long Sino-Russian border, it cannot represent the entire border, because the physical, geographic, cultural, and economic environment along the basins of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, as well as the western part of the border between the Qing and Russian Empires and their successor states were different. Despite this conceptual drawback and far too many unnecessary generalizations about the Russians, the Han Chinese, the Mongols, indigenous peoples, the metropole/periphery paradigm, and all-encompassing “borderlanders,” Beyond the Steppe Frontier, in delineating the history of Manzhouli and the Argun border, will be a welcome addition to the history of the Eurasian borderlands.
Pulford approaches the Sino-Russian borderlands from a different multidisciplinary perspective, as a traveller who begins his journey in Moscow, proceeds to multiple urban places on both sides of this border in Eastern Siberia and Northeast China, crossing it in several locations, and ends in Beijing. Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between is partly a history and partly a cultural travelogue in which the history and the present complement each other. For Pulford, borderland life shows how “China and Russia have had crucial aspects of their identities shaped by mutual encounters, often very localized ones, in which each has served as a reflection of the other” (xv). He travels to both sides of this vast border as an anthropologist, observing the lives of ordinary people, and reflects on how each local setting represents this shared history in museums, monuments, informal conversations, and popular memory.
Each of the nine chapters discusses a particular city or region, and a few themes related to their past and present. Chapters 1, 7, and 9 describe the author’s visits to the cities of Moscow, Harbin (Imperial Russia’s former semi-colonial outpost in Manchuria), and Beijing, reflecting on the long history of Russia’s asymmetrical relationship with China, defined by misguided dreams, geopolitics, railway imperialism, trade, ideological romance and divorce, and economic cooperation. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 explore the borderland regions of Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, while chapters 4, 6, and 8 are dedicated to northeast China, where the author’s random encounters with street vendors, drivers, indigenous Nanai activists, museum guides, and the descendants of people with mixed cultural heritage reveal the complex multicultural and multiethnic demographic composition of the Sino-Russian borderlands. Indigenous Nanai (in Russian) or Hezhe (in Chinese) people best represent long-term policies of Russification, Sinification, and cultural/ideological appropriation of official ethnic minorities on each side of this border. Despite sharing the same Tungusic language, the Nanai and the Hezhe “have separate names, because of their respective incorporation by mirror states over the twentieth century” (167). Pulford’s descriptions of several border towns facing each other across the tightly controlled international boundary either separating a stretch of land or running along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, are the best parts of his travelogue, because in these places the ambiguities of state control, the chaos of cross-border trade, cultural anxieties, and stereotypes are most obvious. Die-hard historians may find this book’s bibliography too thin, but the author’s engaging narrative, which includes travel accounts by Chinese and Russian/Soviet writers and revolutionaries Qu Qiubai, Hu Yuzhi, Yin Fu, Anton Chekhov, Boris Pilnyak, and others, makes this book an informative and pleasant read. This book joins the club of other notable travelogues about this frontier region (Dominic Ziegler, Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River between China and Russia, Penguin Books, 2016; Michael Meyer, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, Bloomsbury Press, 2015).
Beyond the Steppe Frontier and Mirrorlands enrich our understanding of the Eurasian borderland’s past and present by challenging nationalist and nation-centred historical narratives and by giving voices to the ordinary people who have often found themselves living in or being removed from the borderlands against their will, while never having a chance to share their personal experiences with the rest of the world. Urbansky’s peculiar details of the border-making process and of displaced communities may be of interest to scholars of Sino-Russian and Eurasian history and politics, while Pulford’s informal writing style, free from academic jargon, will appeal to the general reader interested in China, Russia, border crossing, or travel writing, especially now, when both countries are enjoying yet another romance, while their borderlands are beyond the reach of the average Western traveller.
Victor Zatsepine
University of Connecticut, Storrs