Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. xiii, 376 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674979482.
This wonderful book provides more information than any other single source on the contemporary Russo-Chinese borderlands, defined by the border itself stretching 4000 kilometers along the Amur River and its tributaries. Co-authored by two anthropologists, the book juxtaposes not only their own participant observations from different points along the border, but also adds a plethora of insights, from theory to street-level, derived from a unique joint research and training program that ran under Humphrey’s leadership at Cambridge, UK, from 2012 to 2015. We will continue to reap the benefits of that kruzhok for years to come.
Even now that travel to the “edge” has become so much more difficult, the experts who came out of the Cambridge program continue to provide valuable publications, many cited in this book’s twenty-page bibliography, not the least of its contributions to scholarship. Aside from the authors’ fieldwork, the fieldwork, published results and insights of others in the kruzhok, first-person journalism and anonymous personal communications from acquaintances in the field, all provide an on-the-ground feel to the book.
The book provides valuable data on the political economy of the borderland, caught in the grip of two kinds of authoritarianism, but waffles on the question of whether the “two different life-worlds” are “ranged across from each other” (49) or “hard up against each other” (1)? The more positive former evaluation matches with claims that “significant cross-fertilizations” (267) are taking place across the border through “significant undocumented processes” (20), but when the more negative version asserts itself, we are told that “real dialogue appears to be lacking” (195) due to a “relative absence” of contacts across a border that delineates separate cultural worlds with “no gradients or transition” (323).
Such macro-level ambiguities aside, the book delivers on the promised “complexity of local experiences” (22) with the main data coming from the period 2005 to 2019, when enterprising anthropologists could take the road less traveled. Humphrey seems to have been mainly responsible for a magisterial chapter 4 on minority ethnic relations on both sides as well as across the border. It also details her identification of a key source found next to the bar in a restaurant in Manzhouli, the border station between China and the Transbaikal. The excitement of discovery is palpable. Billé’s visits to Heihe and Blagoveshchensk are a key feature of fine chapters 5 and 7 on the ever-shifting urban and regulatory landscape in which contacts and representations across the Amur from Russia to China and back again must take place.
Chapter 3 on the economy also delivers seeming contradictions, with Russo-Chinese trade recording record levels year after year, passing US$200 billion in 2023, but with the big-money projects completely bypassing the “borderlanders.” The Power of Siberia gas pipeline and the Eastern Cosmodrome are instructive cases, providing little employment for locals and few opportunities for cross-border exposures. Both Russia’s fitful neglect of its periphery and China’s purposeful reining in of border development for “ecological” reasons have not favored the economy and demography of the borderland. Clearly, the capitals have not been focused on development, rather on limiting “frictions” that might cause problems (268). Urban growth in China’s far north and east were originally premised in the 1990s on cross-border drivers, but have now shifted to service domestic demand (259–260). The “phantom bridge” (4, 275) discussed in the Introduction and Coda is now in operation, but only for long-distance freight. It connects Beijing and Moscow, but not the two banks of the Amur river which it spans.
The book is explicitly multidisciplinary, drawing data from all directions. Economists will not be satisfied with the statistics and historians will complain about dating. That only 17 percent of airstrips in Siberia are functional says a great deal about the withering years after 1991, as well as the state’s investment priorities. But it is a very specific piece of data and should probably be sourced (29). Similarly, with research trips reported here that spanned over a decade, it would be useful to know which observations stemmed from which year, as the region has experienced many subtle shifts. A photo dated “today” is a case in point (229). Of course, none of these quibbles in any way weakens the core value of the thick description.
This historian, with all due respect, would allow himself the luxury of several minor corrections: Murav’ev-Amurskii did not actually negotiate the Beijing Treaty of 1860; Ignat’ev is usually given credit for this diplomatic and territorial coup (50); Harbin was absolutely defined by the Songhua (Sungari) River, since it was the location of the railroad bridge across that river. Although overshadowed by the Chinese Eastern Railway, headquartered at Harbin and causing regional frictions for over half a century, the Sungari remained important, with thousands of boats dropping anchor every year at Harbin (51); heavy industry in Dongbei was not initiated by Mao, but by the Japanese wartime empire (97); the seventeenth-century fort of Albazin was not located near Blagoveshchensk, but 500 kilometers upstream, near the eponymous town of Albazino (233).
Most importantly, the book delivers on the credo for kraevedenie presented in chapter 4; namely, that there are “self-understandings that are distinct from state-imposed identities; the emotional presence of hitherto buried memories that differ from public memorialization; the spiritual devotion to homeland places but at the same time the emergence of new cross-border quests; and a desire for globalized liberal modernity that grates against renewed conservatism in certain cultural patterns” (140). With its rich empirical base and tapestry of interwoven local and regional stories, this book is an essential reference work for all those who study the Amur basin, compiling the parallel histories of Priamur and Zaamur, of Dongbei and Waiman.
The use of Chinese and Russian terms and phrases is extremely useful for the specialist readers and adds significant local color. Maybe a glossary can yet go up on a related website?
David Wolff
Hokkaido University, Sapporo