Parallel identities

Dominic Martin, COMPAS, Oxford University

If “Emptiness” is a consequence of the intersection of the state and capital with population and territory (space), then its genesis, its presence and essence should be almost at its most visible at the margins, the edges, the borders of polities. In their reflection and analysis of the border encounter between Russia and China, Billé and Humphrey assert that, despite sharing what Gilbert Rozman has called “parallel identities” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 8), these two countries are “unlike ‘all the way down’ to their very peripheries” (ibid.: 1). On either side of the border, space (and indeed emptiness) is constructed upon diametrically opposite models: the Chinese side is densely populated, stratified, tightly governed, and arterially connected, politically as well as physically, to the center; the Russian side is sparsely populated and exhibits that anisotropic character defined by Russian geographer Boris Rodoman (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 27)—its vertical links strong and its horizontal ones weak—manifest not only in the administrative structure but also in the entire socio-cultural landscape. No roads run consistently beside the border, and the few tiny villages mostly have to make do with dirt roads.

The importance of its enormous Far Eastern territory for Russia has always been political, not economic (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 96). As an economy, the region has never paid its way and had to be subsidized even in the relatively prosperous 1970s and 1980s. When the Soviet enterprises collapsed, with them went the entire social system they had supported and much of the associated employment, infrastructure, public transport, and maintenance of local roads. On the Chinese side, Billé and Humphrey identify not an emptying but a filling up: a conscious and proactive commitment to establish dense networks of both railways and roads covering all inhabited land. The result is a grid-like infrastructure, updated and extended in the 2000s, with new roads driven even into unfriendly terrain, often in advance of projected settlements. This network serves a far denser population. The population of China's North East is now about 13 times that of the Russian Far East. China seems to pursue occupancy and plenitude, while Russia almost seems to deliberately cultivate Emptiness.

Russia's “turn to the Asia-Pacific” commits to reversing old patterns of underdevelopment in the Far East and setting up new opportunities for international and particularly Chinese investment. Enclaves for spectacular projects are being set up and designed to “outstrip” the rest of the country. However, these projects look set to empower new groups of people and displace others or bypass them entirely. Amid the plethora of “zones” and various kinds of “out of bounds” places along the border, some former “Closed Administrative-Territorial Formations” (ZATO) have metamorphosed into Territories of Advanced Socio Economic Development (TOR). Thus, the most prohibited and secretive of places have become in a sense the most open—that is, open to global investment sources, often Chinese. My own recent fieldwork has identified an upsurge of Chinese interest and investment in the revival of large scale agro-industry in formerly moribund kolkhoz lands in Primorskii Krai. This trend may spread and perhaps accelerate in the current climate of enforced rapprochement between the two countries brought about by the Ukraine emergency. However, in several sites, the closed-ness and openness is intertwined in ways that are difficult to disentangle. Natalia Ryzhova (in her review) observes a more restrictive, stultifying climate with regard to enterprise in her experience of the TORs. Despite their supposedly radical intention, she finds they are dogged down by “hyper centralized political will and hierarchical personal patronage,” resulting in more of the same. This contrasts with the Chinese system, which while confidently fortifying the vice-like grip of the Communist Party on all aspects of development at the periphery, allows a degree of freedom to local, regional actors and decision-makers. In the Russian system, local, regional actors are marginalized: in the words of one commentator, money from Moscow whistles over the heads of regional bosses like missiles aimed at some other target.

China's Belt and Road Initiative concept of rejuvenation and renewal proposes a new geocultural imaginary beyond the concept of the nation-state. In looking to extend Chinese investment and political hegemony, out through Inner Asia toward the Middle East and Europe, connections have been established that have also created pockets of remoteness. Roads and corridors do not always annihilate distance; they also increase the remoteness and illegibility of border areas outside their immediate scope (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 16). As new hubs are created, they bypass local economies and border trading posts. In contrast to the virtual blank canvas on which China has built new border trading cities, Russian capitalism, although unashamedly neo-liberal in its approach, retains manifestly socialist vestiges: visible physical ruins and human habits that still cling. The respective cultures of capitalism differ because current capitalist activities take place amid the remnants of previous non-capitalist structures and involve people whose habits were formed in those earlier eras. If everyday commerce has been a thread throughout Chinese history with only a brief gap during the Cultural Revolution, after which it was supplemented by mass state-managed capitalism (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 96), Russia established a far longer regime (seven decades) that was not just non-capitalist but anti-capitalist. The USSR created an entire socialism-inspired environment (and culture) of resource extraction, wealth distribution, built structures, communal services, and labor trained to work in certain ways, much of which abruptly became redundant in the 1990s.

By and large the authors avoid anthropological theorizing. Almost their only theoretical resort is to Anna Tsing's fertile metaphor of friction. “Friction” in this context denotes primarily an affective force, not reducible to negative or positive outcomes, but potentially spanning both. Friction stands here as the generative energy produced through the physical and involuntary coming together of two different cultures. They point out that, notwithstanding the sharp differences in the respective cultures of capitalism, “hustling” flourishes on both sides of the border: illicit casual labor, selling scrap, hunting, fishing, forestry, gold mining, shuttle trade, and so forth (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 98). Each of these is an engagement with a global circulation of commodities, not mediated through Moscow or Beijing, as the ideal of a coherent national economy would stipulate; rather, working sideways, directly across the borders, particularly between Russia and China, but also via networks extending to Japan, Mongolia, and Korea. This dynamic may presage a more general emergence of new “horizontal” subjectivities and previously unknown kinds of wider social association (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 140). This implies not physical migration but a shift in perspective. There are mental alignments and disjunctions that did not exist earlier. One of these is the disconnect between ethnic attachment to a locality and the fact that economic opportunities are far away. But others concern the more psychosocial questions: 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. Billé and Humphrey highlight the almost universal use of smartphones, pointedly among indigenous groups, to create social groups with their own conversations (2021: 140). While digital technology helps people reorder and extend their views of the world, it is also policed by the metropolitan powers that be in the digital public sphere in both countries, but particularly in China, which not only has a firewall to prevent access to Western search engines but also allows government access to personal data on messaging systems. Controlling media of all kinds is central to all state-led projects, but particularly relevant is the state's patrolling of historical memory in the service of current visions of national integration.

Natalia Ryzhova, Palacký University

Although the authors of On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border claim at the very beginning that they did not “intend [to] . . . see diverse material through the lens of a single idea” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 5), I would say that there was such an encompassing idea. In my view, the central idea of the book was to understand whether the recent “changes on the ground” may alter the “pyramid of subordinated places encapsulated within one another,” which in turn shapes the social organization of Russian society (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 27). The connection between the geographical and social organization of Russia is most clearly presented in Chapters 1, 2, and partly 7, but it is underlying the logic of the whole book and every part of it, at least, all parts devoted to the Russian border. That is, the book is essentially about Russia, not about China: even contrasting the Russian approach, which has endured since the time of Catherine the Great (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 27) and the constantly evolving Chinese spatial imagination (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 40–42), the authors do not draw any generalizing conclusions about the social organization of Chinese society. Hence, the book is not so much about the border, rather about the depth of recent social changes in Russia, for the understanding of which Billé and Humphrey use the Sino-Russian border as an analytical lens.

So, what changes do the authors argue can tell us much about situations “that are not (yet) perceptible in macro analyses” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 4) and which, more importantly, can change “the Russian traditional matrix.” This “matrix” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 27), a concept promoted by geographer Rodoman, sets out the “anisotropic” relation between the Russian center and the peripheries, where “vertical” connections to the center of power take precedence over “horizontal” connections to the geographically adjacent. Since, as the authors argue, Russian society is vertically oriented, they seek to discern anything that might be seen as “horizontal” subjectivities. They include, for example, cross-border marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters (Chapters 4 and 5). They also include cross-border small joint businesses, poaching, illicit casual labor, selling scrap, hunting, fishing, forestry, gold mining, shuttle trade, underground deals, investments, and smuggling networks (Chapters 3 and 4). All this illicitness is “horizontal” because it is not mediated through Moscow but “work[s] sideways, directly across the borders, particularly between Russia and China.” Horizontal connections lead to new mental alignments and disjunctions that did not exist earlier. Finally, the authors posit that even some of the initiatives launched from the Kremlin could be breakthroughs, which infringe the age-old spatial order. This is precisely the role that the authors argue that TORs (Territorii operezhayushego razvitia = Advanced Special Economic Zones, see Eastern Economic Forum n.d.) could play. However, after a celebratory explanation of why TORs could change everything, the authors explain that radical ideas ran in the usual vicious circle: the hyper centralized political will and hierarchical personal patronage turn TORs not so much as an anomaly with regard to the old spatial order but rather as an example of a new version of it, or a resetting that still has to struggle to free itself from active aspects of the old one.

I concur with all these conclusions and might add that the horizontal ties have further deteriorated since the authors conducted field research. Even before COVID-19, cross-border exchanges began to decline—the weakening ruble, further monopolization of cross-border transport infrastructure, tightening of fiscal and customs discipline were to blame. With the on- set of COVID-2019, daily horizontal activity ended in the form of cross-border trade or the precarious work of Russian hostesses and dancers in China. The pandemic also ruined the business of Chinese farmers in the Russian Far East. As a matter of fact, “ruinization” started earlier—when the Far Eastern lands suitable for agriculture attracted agroholdings (Ryzhova and Ivanov 2022). These large companies with capital usually formed in the political center entered the Russian Far Eastern regions thanks to the establishment of TORs. In turn, Russian political elites and bureaucrats stopped talking about TORs as berths for foreign investment, and, as a result, the “radical idea” that could potentially change Russian spatiality has turned into ordinary mechanism for siphoning off resources from the Siberian regions.

However, my agreement with the conclusions leaves two questions open; these questions may deepen the book's main idea. The first one is why does everyday commerce, which the authors referred to as one of the main ways of destabilizing the matrix, fail to achieve its task? The second one is why the Russian spatial matrix remains so persistent and coherent (if the authors believe in its coherence).

The authors address the first question when introducing the concept of “the culture of capitalism.” In particular, they posit that such cultures in Russia and China are different. Seventy years of anti-capitalism in the USSR resulted in building modern Russian capitalism on the remnants of collectivism, incidentally, unlike China, which was lucky enough to build its version of capitalism on so-called everyday commerce. Nevertheless, a more profound explanation is needed—what is wrong with Russian capitalist culture? After all, the Russians also participated and often built everyday cross-border commerce. Why is this commerce now dying and not turning to the “new economy”? Why did agrarian capitalism begin to grow due to the arrival of large agroholdings and did not begin with the activity of small, including Chinese, farmers? If everyday activities were forming capitalism (or whatever we call it), why have they proved so fragile?

The question about the persistency of the “matrix” needs to be clarified and expanded. The authors note that Russia almost intentionally cultivates emptiness in peripheral regions. They insist that Russia wants to have liminal space to ensure security while liminal space is produced through differentiated access restrictions, openness, and closedness. I can agree to some extent with these assertions. Nevertheless, I think Russia appears in this claim as a coherent whole. However, suppose different regional and federal governments and very different pop- ulations have similar—yet not entirely consistent—understandings of security and closedness as well as the same desire to create empty space along the border. In that case, one needs to explain how such coherence is achieved. I am afraid I disagree with coherence. The same perception of security or closeness may arise, but it would result from a complex interweaving of over-arching strategic incentives and perhaps less consistent attitudes reflecting narrower, local, or short-term motives.

I will illustrate my comment with a small ethnographic case. The book mentions the city of Svobodny and the ZATO Tsiolkovsky. It says that the ZATO was created based on Uglegorsk, but it does not say that Uglegorsk was created based on the secret, closed settlement Svobodny-18. Surrounding Svobodny was another secret, closed settlement: Svobodny-21 (see map, Billé and Humphrey 2021:36). In Soviet times nuclear warheads were stored in Svobodny-21, while in Svobodny −18 missiles were stored. Although the military abandoned these spaces, both towns preserved the infrastructure, barracks, officers’ buildings, even clinics, schools, and kindergartens. The government decided to use the former Svobodny-18 for the ZATO and the cosmodrome. The residents of Svobodny-21 who renamed it as Orlyny, also hoped that something valuable would be placed in their town. One of the options was that Gazprom would accommodate builders and then employees of the Advanced Development Zone (TOR). The regional administration strongly supported the idea. Most importantly, the people who stayed in Svobodny-21 dreamed of such opportunities, including that skilled migrants from Turkey would come to live there. As a result, the town would finally totally cease to be closed. Dreams about Orlyny did not come true. Gazprom housed its employees in a completely new place.

However, it is curious how people in these two very similar, genealogically related towns felt about emptiness and occupancy. The people in Orlyny were eager to have the town filled because otherwise, they were in danger of becoming a marginalized village. The people in Tsiolkovsky were happy to remain closed, and therefore relatively empty. However, was there an absence of coherence, or a contradictory impulse in this story? Hardly so. Returning to coherence, people in Tsiolkovsky agreed with the central government while locals of Orlyny were coherent with the regional government.

Moreover, the situations of Tsiolkovsky and even Orlyny (with at least a temporary promise of (re)development) were rather unique. In most cases, Russian former military towns, frontier garrisons, and secret towns are not even destined to share the fate of Orlyny, but the fate of abandoned, empty, dying, and ruining spaces. At the same time, most—not all, but most—new development zones like TORs are built on entirely empty, new places. I agree with Humphrey, who proposed long ago that using empty space for development is the Russian governmental perception of peopling, managing, and controlling the Russian Far East. These perceptions and actions irritate the population. People simultaneously see empty and crumbling towns and new facilities not connected with them. That is again a point about incoherence. So, if the spatial matrix includes emptiness on the borders and if the authors insist that people and government have a coherent policy concerning it, what is the apparatus for achieving this coherence?

Alessandro Rippa, LMU Munich and Tallinn University

One of the stories featured in Billé and Humphrey's On the edge: Life along the Russia-China border (2021) describes the “jade bonanza” that took over the Sino-Russian borderlands in the 1990s. At the time Evenki hunters and herders in northern Buryatia, on the Russian side of the border, found nephrite stones as they were panning for gold. A member of the community who was of Chinese origins realized that this could yield high profits in China, and her family began mediating between Evenki miners and Chinese buyers. The collaboration brought riches to all involved: the Evenkis set up a highly successful company with a monopoly on the extraction of the precious stones, while Chinese buyers could import the nephrite not as jade but as a “stone for building and decorative purpose,” thus avoiding high taxes and ensuring larger profits from the finished product. This success was, however, ultimately based on a particular economy of ignorance: Evenki miners and employees of the company were not allowed to set up independent relations with Chinese partners, nor were they able to visit sites of jade extraction and trade in China. Largely unaware of the price jade was fetching in that country, they accepted low wages. Chinese buyers, on the other hand, were never allowed to visit the mines, while traders in China did not know where the stone came from (and often sold it as originating from more renowned mines in China, for higher prices).

This story encapsulates many of the dynamics that On the edge brings to the fore. On the one hand, the border is a site of growing connections—economic but also social and cultural. On the other hand, there remains a profound—and perhaps even growing—sense of distance, misunderstanding, and mistrust between the two sides. As Billé and Humphrey point out at the very beginning of the book, Russia and China are “unlike ‘all the way down’ to their very peripheries” (Billé and Humphrey 2021:1). This unlikeliness is explored in the pages that follow, through both a close appreciation of the many overlaps, relations, and exchanges that characterize daily life at these borderlands and the key gaps in representations of the neighboring “other.” The result is a complex and compelling exploration of border lives, beyond theorizations and top-down approaches that often miss such complexities entirely.

The first chapter, for instance, addresses the trope of remoteness that is frequently associated with this particular “meandering borderline.” Rather than taking it for granted, however, Billé and Humphrey show how remoteness takes very different meanings in the two countries, due to different “spatial arrangements” shaped by current political priorities as well as historical dynamics. On the Chinese side, a thick network of roads ensures access to the border, and roads run parallel to it—a particular kind of connectivity infrastructure principally entrusted with the task of enforcing security. On the Russian side, on the other hand, what is striking is the lack of roads in proximity to the border. In Russia, Billé and Humphrey point out, “border security is maintained not by building roads, as in China, but by their absence” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 25). Russia's “remoteness-creating” administrative machine is thus opposed to China's approach to border governance, in which direct control is given utmost primacy.

This has not, as the authors describe, always been the case. The genealogy and history of the Sino-Russian borderlands that the authors explore throughout the book rather point constantly to the changing and shifting meaning of border markers, objects, and features—one that is ripe in contradictions and conflicts. Great rivers, like the Amur, changed in a few decades from representing key passageways to being boundaries without passage and movement along them. On the Chinese side today the remains of the Maoist past exists but are rather “insignificant” compared to ongoing development. On the Russian side, on the other hand, features of Soviet developments are still a major part of the landscape, and of how border spaces are represented and lived today. Currently in China, Billé and Humphrey show, the dominant approach to border spaces is to reimagine them not as spaces of confinement but rather of connection and development. For Russian elites, on the other hand, state borders are a “sacrosanct closure.”

These conflicts and contradictions are not necessarily exceptional but are part and parcel of border spaces that, like the Sino-Russian one, were imposed upon indigenous people and land in an era of imperial expansion. Chapter 4 of the book is particularly rich in stories that explore some of the emerging interactions against this particular (post)colonial backdrop—something that remains little studied in the growing literature on Chinese borderlands in particular, and that is one of the key contributions of this book. Billé and Humphrey thus describe how indigenous people of the borderlands are reaching across this administrative divide to revive pre-imperial and pre-colonial connections and allegiances. At the same time, on the Chinese side of the border, growing efforts have been made by local authorities to develop and commodify “cultural heritage” according to the PRC's minzu system. Not only particular items such as clothing and artwork but also local festivals and ceremonies have become key moments for the promotion of indigenous areas for tourism development. While this particular approach provides opportunities for the economic development of indigenous areas, it also ties indigeneity to a particular understanding of “minority” culture, as well as to China's own political and security priorities.

Chapter 7 touches upon another common aspect that can be observed across China's borderlands: the development of a particular form of border urbanism. The protagonists of the chapter are the two border cities of Heihe (in China), and Blagoveshchensk (in Russia), separated by the Amur River. While the two cities are comparable in size, their recent development and key features are strikingly different. Some 30 years ago Heihe was but a small village—today, it features a compact, vertical cluster of skyscrapers that lights up at night. “Blago,” on the other side of the Amur, maintains its Soviet feature: a more horizontal and sparser layout, and scarce use of lighting. While the story of Heihe's development is similar to that of other centers at China's borderlands, from Ruili to Hekou, On the edge does more than simply accounting for China's stunning growth over the past few decades and observing its repercussion on the Russian neighbor. Rather, Chapter 7 maps out several ways in which the proximity of Heihe and Blago leads to “processes of cultural enmeshment, borrowing, and mimesis” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 230), often to surprising outcomes. These include Russian views of Heihe's riverfront not so much as a symbol of China's development, but rather as a facade, a trick, a Potemkin village of sort. Chinese urban modernity, in this sense, does not equal nor project strength: rather, it reinforces a sense of pride in Blago's history and its perceived “authenticity.” The chapter weaves such ethnographic account into a discussion of what modernity is for border residents, and of where it can be located: across the river, in a far-away place, or in the historical formation of the two cities’ architectures.

Importantly, this is a book that throughout its seven beautifully written chapters, explicitly targets a broader readership than a strictly academic—let alone anthropological—one, and that avoids “capturing” the Sino-Russian borderlands through a particular theoretical framework or conceptual approach. Instead, On the edge aims to “present a general picture of many interrelated phenomena” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 5), adhering as much as possible to the ethnographic complexities encountered by the two authors over decades of research. While this might not satisfy all readers, I contend that the book offers not only precious and novel ethnographic insights into the lives of borderland communities but also a broader reminder that contradictions and conflicts do not always need to be domesticated into a particular analytical framework. That ethnographic complexities are, at times, best left to it—enmeshed with the manifold lives that it attempts to recount.

In conclusion, I find On the edge not only a great contribution to the growing field of border studies but also of great value for scholars of modern and contemporary China. First, the China Studies field is re-orienting itself, trying to move away from some of the methodological nationalism, and a certain exceptionalism that has characterized such sinological research to date. And as studies of global China are multiplying, On the edge should be ranked among those. Secondly, this book is particularly important in the current pandemic and political moment in which very little ethnographic research in China is possible and increasingly polarizing views on the PRC are becoming normalized in academia as well as outside of it. Now more than ever we need more nuanced takes based on careful ethnographic work that can engage with and fully bring to the fore the on-the-ground complexities that make up life in China. On the edge is a masterful example of how this can be achieved.

Madeleine Reeves, Oxford University

A recurrent theme in On the edge concerns what we might call the variegated institutional presencing of capitalism after socialism. Russia and China, Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey argue, are unlike “all the way down” and to their very peripheries (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 1). We see this in their respective “cultures of capitalism” (Chapter 3), in contrasting memories of forced dislocation (Chapter 4), in divergent systems of tribute and trade (Chapter 6), and in their hierarchies of spatial organization (Chapter 1).

In developing this argument, the authors challenge both conventional assumptions that all illiberal states are illiberal in the same way and Eurocentric readings of state formation grounded in distinctive (read: European) histories of territorial production (e.g., Elden 2013). Thus, even as China has invested heavily in roads connecting small border towns and villages and actively sought to populate its northern peripheries, Russia's radial model—in which distance from Moscow and from provincial centers is what matters in a nesting hierarchy of connectivity—has allowed large swathes of land and significant rural populations to be literally and metaphorically cut off from wider economic and political currents. Indeed, we learn that most border villages are disconnected from the recently constructed Amur Highway, creating communities that are “marooned at the end of their own transport spurs” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 25).

This marooning, the authors argue, is at least in part intentional, if not habitual: the Russian authorities are profoundly skeptical about too much connectivity with their much more densely populated neighbor: the Amur River has historically been conceived as a “sacrosanct closure” for Russia, a marker of a civilizational boundary, rather than a source of contact and exchange (Billé and Humphrey 2021:54). Today this results in a variety of phantom projects that haunt the present: docking ports that have no boats to dock at them; “territories of advanced development” that cannot attract employees, and a much-vaunted bridge across the Amur River, the opening of which has been repeatedly deferred. China, meanwhile, is busily stressing that the “Great Wall” constitutes less a boundary between different civilizations than a “cradle of communication and fusion” and is actively investing in a miniaturized and sanitized version of Russian culture for sale to inland tourists (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 53).

As the authors show, moreover, this is not just a story of connectivity on one side of a vast international border and an absence of such connection on the other. We see, for instance, how China's very ambition to create connection to distant land and seaports through the Belt and Road Initiative creates new kinds of disconnection, new forms of economic stratification and new experiences of estrangement: places rendered newly remote or unreachable by the channeling of transport past rather than through them. Emptiness, just like “disconnection”, is the product of action and inaction, rather than a preexisting state: and just like disconnection, it can be amplified by the very discourses and practices that promote connectivity and consumption as markers of modernity. A question arises as to how we make sense of the political logic of Russia's policy of “marooning”—and how to square this with, for example, active programs of resettlement for “compatriots” (sootechestvenniki) to the Russian Far East. How does the evident ambivalence about (over-)connection play out within different parts of the Russian state. The book stresses the centralized and hierarchized nature of the Russian polity, but in domains such as migration policy, there is quite a lot of divergence at a provincial level and often discrepancy between the political agendas of different government ministries, as well as between federal and provincial authorities (see e.g., Schenk 2018). How does this manifest, for instance, in the question of whether or not to open the long-heralded bridge across the Amur, or what to do with those besperspektivnye sela—futureless villages—that haven't been earmarked for special economic development? Where and in what forms do those acts of abandonment get contested?

Pondering the relationship between emptiness and the economy at different scales, the book, it seems to me, inhabits two registers simultaneously, shifting in its mode of seeing between a wide-angled and a much more focused lens. On the one hand, there is an intervention into an anglophone public debate that tends to exaggerate similarities between Russia and China and to disregard altogether the places where these two vast nations meet. Here, the authors pull no punches. The long border between “these two gigantic, nationalistically-oriented countries”, they argue, “is not merely a line between two countries,” but between “two entirely different worlds” (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 19).

And yet the book also inhabits a different kind of register—one more traditionally associated with ethnography—in which the specificity of particular lives, with all their contingencies of biography, history, love, friendship, and curiosity leads to quite different kinds of insight: about intense if unregulated practices of trade; about borrowing and mimesis; about friendship and adventure; about long, expensive, and uncomfortable journeys to sacred sites undertaken by minoritized groups, journeys that cannot be reduced to any simple economic rationality but speak to much more encompassing senses of historico-mythical connection and incorporation; of time measured in generations rather than years.

Moreover, while it is clear that Russia leaders and policy makers view too much connection with China with some trepidation (shaped by not insignificant differences in demography and economic might), we also see how the very fact of spatial and social variegation creates new opportunities for connection and new exigencies to mobilize the different regimes of value as a matter of economic survival; exigencies that operate amidst vestiges from the past, whether physical ruins, human habits, or memories of forced displacement. We see this, for instance, in the new forms of sociality produced around the illegal trades in jade, the body parts of bears, or fangfeng root—a weed turned valuable commodity that, as Hedwig Waters shows in a recent dissertation (Waters 2018), has created a proliferation of economic ties (and chains of indebtedness) across the Mongolia-China border (Chapter 3).

These glimpses of contingent and unexpected collaboration are some of the most interesting parts of the book. They are freighted with fascinating theoretical implications, both for our understanding of the differences that go “all the way down” and the possible ways in which such expectations of civilizational difference are refused by those whose family history or personal biography do not fall easily into binary national narratives. We get hints of this—for instance, varying attitudes toward the Chinese in Blagoveschensk inflected by family histories of trading, or the desire for cultural connection demonstrated by Buyrats and Bargas. The implications of these forms of connection for the over-arching argument that civilizational differences run both “thick” and “deep”, are of profound interest. There may be little presence of prosperous trader groups sympathetic to China, such as the Dungans, but what of the significant numbers of Kyrgyz and Uzbek pereselentsy moving to the Russian Far East, enticed by promises of swift according of citizenship (see e.g., Woodard 2019)? What of the new forms of cross- border communication opened up by WhatsApp, or by the consumption of forms of media originating from other elsewheres (such as Korean K-pop)? Do these forms of connection have the potential to be truly disruptive, or are they merely the exceptions that “prove the rule”?

As I read the book, I found myself wanting more specificity—in the sense of more ethnographic depth about particular biographies, particular encounters, particular lives, and their entanglements with this border over time. I also wanted more candor about the generation of ethnographic data and its limits: what were the temporal and spatial parameters of the fieldwork in this sensitive space? Where could and couldn't the authors travel, and what restrictions were put on their research? We learn, for instance, that a Portuguese diplomat trying to visit the contested border island that is the focus of Chapter 2 was interviewed by the security services (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 78), but the authors seem to have visited there effortlessly. To what extent did the authors rely on ethnographic data generated by other members of their research team, given the vast distances involved between research sites, the difficulties of researching illegal trades, and the constraints upon fieldwork in a hyper-securitized environment? How did the powerful perceptions of “the West”, which the authors describe in Chapter 1, shape particular ethnographic encounters? To me, these are not just trivial questions, but ones with significant implications for how we come to generate anthropological knowledge about something as vast and variegated as the Russia- China border. Nor are such elisions reducible to the constraints of trade book in which the conventions of referencing or discussions of methodology may be different from a standard academic monograph. This reader, at least, wanted to be shown more of the authors’ workings. Such candor seems particularly important for a text that—in contrast with an IR literature that is critiqued—draws upon ethnographic authority: the insights that derive from “firsthand field research” along the border (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 2).

This brings me to a reflection that relates to “ways of seeing” and other ways of knowing—and more generally on the relationship between emptiness, ethnography, and affect. In our ocular-centric public culture, emptiness is paradigmatically conveyed through the visual field. We might think of the iconic scenes of abandoned Pripyat’ in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster or the urban vistas of Chinese “ghost towns” that figure in Sunday supplements, inviting their viewer to wonder at the hubris of a pristine planned future. There is a lot of that visual field in this book, too; we are invited to “see” the abandoned Nanai village of Sikichi-Alyan and the fortress-like church on the contested island of Bolshoi Ussuriiskii. We (like the readers of Russian Amurskaya Pravda) are also invited to see—and thus wonder at—the striking contrast between the waterfront scene separating the two towns in the late 1980s and today (Billé and Humphrey 2021: 229). Research participants in Blagoveschensk and Heihe were invited to to describe their impressions of the “other side”, and many of the descriptions focus on the contrasting visual impacts of the two cities: the lights that come on at 9:00 p.m. in Heihe to create a festive atmosphere; and the grids over here and the sparkles over there (Chapter 7).

All of this poses a question about the particular relationship between difference, consumption, and the visual field. It is noticeable how much the encounter that occurs at the border is one mediated through sight—not just in the infrastructure of watch-towers and border barracks that are intended both to see and to be seen but also in the ways that border residents and visitors are invited to encounter an often-sanitized version of difference by viewing it, at a distance, from a viewing platform, raised walkway, or hotel window. What dynamics are driving this visual imperative, and what are its implications for the way that “difference” across this border is experienced, felt, and consumed? Given that our informants, as much as ourselves, are inhabited by hyper-mediated worlds, how is their own “way of seeing” shaped by heightened awareness of how others might see them? And given that ethnography, too, is increasingly conducted in all sorts of mediated ways—where, say, we, like our informants, can wonder at the differences exposed by a google earth perspective on the border or the vista from a multi-story hotel—what implications does this have for ethnography as embodied practice? In other words, how can we bring the tools of ethnography as a mode of attentiveness that entails, if it is not defined by, spatial proximity, to forms of encountering that are themselves premised upon a suspension of such proximity?

Civilizational differences and pragmatic connections