Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9781503639027.
Hunchun is a small city of about 250,000 people, territorially tucked into the easternmost pocket of the PRC’s Jilin Province and its Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Hunchun today is of interest for its strategic interfaces with the regional extremities of Russia (Primorskii Krai, with Vladivostok) and North Korea (North Hamgyong Province). Ed Pulford arrived in Hunchun as a researcher around 2014, which was some two decades after the doomed peak of the Tumen River Area Development Project in the mid-1990s, and at a historical moment when high-speed rail connectivity of peripheral Hunchun to the urban trunk of Northeast China was just getting underway.
Various Western and US-allied government bureaucracies are surely hungry for insights into Hunchun, given the working assumption that the city is, or may be, a hub for nefarious activities or insights into North Korean munitions shipments to or technology transfers from Russia, restricted North Korean mineral exports, or heavily populated by North Korean workers in seafood processing centres. These are sanctions-adjacent topics which one might find covered in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, or in satellite imagery and customs data mashups from Beltway or Whitehall think-tanks. The book cover design for Past Progress, with its quasi-atomic clock ticking, suggests that Pulford might indeed have embarked upon a book which lays bare the sinews of trilateral criminality in Hunchun—activities which, like any other number of professionally marketable topics, are fuelling North Korea’s nuclear program. But the author has a different goal in mind for his intended readers.
Pulford slips the reader into a series of overlapping meditations on time in North Korea, Russia, and China. His text leaps restlessly over national borders and creates a dynamic and broad backdrop of historical changes receding ever further back (or looming ever closer?) into post-socialism, socialism, and imperial frontier histories. Readers with a penchant for banditry and the warlord era of “territorial inchoateness” (162) in China’s northeast will take particular pleasure in chapter 5, “Ends and Beginnings of Frontier History,” but there are also fantastic discussions of post-Soviet disintegration and Chinese and North Korean history. One of the book’s greatest cumulative strengths is its author’s strong (if usually implicit) conviction that analysis of bilateral relationships (Sino-North Korean, Russian-North Korean, or Sino-Russian) in the region is insufficient in itself; a more triangular or trilateral approach will yield more benefits.
Pulford, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist, makes ample use of his notebooks and research annotations from his travels, and he is quick to produce anecdotes, personalities, and dialogue to illustrate his novel claims and gradually bend the reader’s temporal sensibilities. Hunchun here is not a zone ripe for “transnational civilizational projects” such as the Greater Tumen or Belt and Road initiatives, but a site of interpersonal friendships, discordant memories, and linguistic confusion. Pulford’s larger tapestry of themes include Sino-Russian relations and frontier management, Chosunjok/ethnic Koreans in Yanbian and Yanji, depopulation and out-migration, developmentalism, colliding expansionisms, socialist friendship practices, mythic pasts and futures, PRC continuities with the Qing era paired with Russian continuities with the Tsarist era, landscape, modernism, North Korea’s status as “frozen in time,” modernism, tourism, and the history of Primorye/Primorskii krai.
Pulford’s occasional flights into academic abstraction are redeemed or underpinned by harder data or anecdotes. Indeed, his regular encounters with people are one of the most enjoyable elements of the work. Pulford takes the reader with him on a car ride around a border development zone in 2015, conveying dialogue from a former PLA border guard, a Russian, and a Korean Russian. Here he strikes just the right tone, with insights into “a shiny vision of the not-yet” (52) amid a sea of Hunchun’s unfinished villas, later producing striking binaries of “regressive Kraskino vs. futurist Hunchun” (326). Pulford pulls the reader to Russia’s Kraskino, a bleak and small “settlement of urban type” of about 2500 souls over the border which has yet to recover economically from the Perestroika era reduction of local military forces. Pulford’s writing here is effective without being overly sentimental or purple:
A far cry from Hunchun’s festive neon, Kraskino has no functioning streetlights to illuminate its potholed roads, and along the dark roads flit the specters of drug addiction, alcoholism, and premature mortality: at thirty, Alesha [a Kharkiv-born classmate of Pulford’s] had already learned of the gruesome deaths of three of his middle-school classmates. Having lived here since the age of two … Alesha had been raised in tandem with this unimaginable upheaval. Kraskino, he states darkly, is now squalid (ubogii), an ‘anti-utopia’ (anti-utopia) and arse (zhopa) of a place. (59–60)
The prospect of a future economic boom in the broader region is raised in a trip to the North Korean “special economic zone” of Rason, via the Chinese border crossing at Quanhe. This journey finds Pulford roomed up with a Mr. Liu, a Chinese granite merchant looking for business opportunities, who pledges to move North Korea’s mountains if given a shot. Liu tells Pulford: “North Koreans are so easily satisfied. No TV channels during the day and that road we came in on—fuck. Must be because of their Military First policy taking all the money” (67). Later Pulford describes Liu peeling back the layers of his family background while “consuming 5 percent alcohol Taedonggang at a rate better suited to 3 percent Chinese lagers” (70), and revealing that he had come to North Korea in part to escape his disintegrating marriage. Throughout, without wasting occasional moments of comedy or incongruity, Pulford manages to elicit empathy rather than scorn for his travel companions and interlocutors, and somehow his thesis weaves it all together.
Past Progress is an enjoyable read, a worthy and more academic sequel to Pulford’s travelogue Mirrorlands, bringing together the many strands of a talented researcher’s experience and fieldwork. It seems likely to be an important fixture in future discussions of the constantly reconfiguring histories of the borderlands spaces shared by Russia, North Korea, and China, and the interrelationships of the states within the “Tumen Triangle.” It is highly recommended for historians of Northeast Asia, anthropologists of the region, and scholars of China and North Korea seeking routes toward understanding the Russian Far East.
Adam Cathcart
The University of Leeds, Leeds