If the online spread of incendiary information has recently been hotly debated in the West, then related phenomena have been longer-standing concerns in China and Russia. Since 2009, explosions in ...social media use in both countries have seen internet "rumors" proliferate, alongside governmental efforts to curb them. The postsocialist environment is pivotal to these rumors' spread, as shown by their fixation on symbols of the postsocialist era - particularly the mysterious dealings of political elites. Because the powerful leaders which these rumors target continue as they did under socialism to promote top-down ideological visions of social reality, these rumors appear to represent a form of anti-establishment "resistance." But an anthropological approach to Chinese and Russian rumors, including comparison with magic and witchcraft practices studied elsewhere in the world, reveals that the authorities' attempts to combat them with "fact" are misguided, and offers a new understanding of this highly contemporary phenomenon.
The Chinese town of Hunchun has been at the heart of Northeast Asian cooperation and development plans since the early 1990s, but in a region where maritime connections are essential, Hunchun lacks ...direct sea access. I explore how the sea has remained a powerful animating force behind Chinese visions for Hunchun's future. After providing an ethnographic account of the contemporary place of the sea in local discourses of Hunchun's identity, I draw on archival material to analyze the politico-linguistic history of maritime affairs in this part of China and beyond. I examine how the notion yang (ocean/foreign) transformed from being a label of foreign interventions in China to serving as a metaphor for domestic economic progress. The sea is both a distant dream and a source of concrete developmental potential for Hunchun today. It is also an optic through which to observe the town's future.
Relations between states are usually framed in human terms, from partners to rivals, enemies or allies, polities and persons appear to engage in cognate relationships. Yet whether or not official ...ties and relationships among people from those states actually correspond remains less clear. “Friendship,” a term first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulates with particular clarity both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Understandings of friendship vary interculturally, and invocations of state-state friendship may be accompanied by a distinct lack of amity among populations. Such is the case between China and Russia today, and this situation therefore raises wider questions over how we should understand interstate and interpersonal relationships together. Existing social scientific work has generally failed to locate either the everyday in the international or the international in the everyday. Focusing on both Chinese and Russian approaches to daily interactions in a border town and the official Sino-Russian Friendship, I thus suggest a new scalar approach. Applying this to the Sino-Russian case in turn reveals how specific contours of “difference” form a pivot around which relationships at both scales operate. This study thus offers both comparison between Chinese and Russian friendships, and a lens for wider comparative work in a global era of shifting geopolitics and cross-border encounters.
On a background of increasingly draconian state policies targeting transnational migrants across the world, anthropologists and other scholars have documented the insidiously discriminatory operation ...of controls over movement of people. Often focused on Europe and the United States, this work has revealed how migrant crackdowns amount to "spectacles of illegality" (per De Genova 2013) in which processes of illegalization and racialization proceed hand-in-hand: a migrant's lack of legal status is made to stand in for traits against which it would be impolitic to discriminate, particularly race and class. These critiques, often framed in universalizing terms, carry considerable weight when levelled at polities which, at least on paper, claim not to differentiate on the basis of such differences. But authoritarian and postsocialist states such as the People's Republic of China present a different case: official approaches to ethnic minority and "low-end" members of the populace show that systematic and explicitly articulated differentiation on the basis of ethnicity, race, and class is central to the operation of the state itself. As this article demonstrates by focusing on a Russian community in northeast China, migrants to China have recently been subjected to enforcement measures mirroring those in Euro-America. However, unusually for a group of racialized migrants, Russian involvement in illegalizing "spectacles" collides with their participation in an entirely different more valorizing performance, a gendered staging of their Russianness to celebrate the "Friendly" state-state relationship between China and Russia. Russians are caught between two kinds of spectacle which operate along parallel lines of racializing differentiation. Their situation thus offers anthropologists and others new insights into how the PRC's inward and outward-facing approaches to difference intersect, in turn shedding light on broader questions of ethnic and racial privilege, and the limits to universalizing critiques of state migratory enforcement.
The region sometimes known as Manchuria entered 1900 as a frontier of blurred boundaries. Inter-polity borders between the Qing and Russian empires, and between both empires and Korea, had been drawn ...in earlier centuries, but no power center exerted full control. Multiple populations—Manchu, Korean, Han Chinese, Russian, and also Japanese for a time—lived among one another. This changed by mid-century as borders hardened under new rationalist-Westphalian states, the PRC, USSR, and DPRK. Yet, as this article argues in a revisionist, multi-perspectival account, the Manchurian frontier had a long afterlife in the politics and culture of the PRC and its avowedly modern socialist neighbors. Historical and anthropological insights at the local level reveal how ubiquitous Manchurian frontier “bandits” were supplanted by Chinese, Russian, and Korean “partisans” during the 1920s–1940s revolutionary conflicts. As guerrilla fighters drew on romanticizations of noble, masculine bandit-heroes, the socialist causes—and ultimately states—they fought for became embedded in both the Manchurian wilderness and local imagination.
As communities of the once broadly unified indigenous Nanai/Hezhe people were incorporated into separate Russian/Soviet and Chinese states during the twentieth century, official portrayals of their ...'loyalty' became a powerful index of their separation. Authorities in both countries cast the Nanai (Russia) and Hezhe (China) both as inherently loyal, 'noble' but naïve beneficiaries of state-promoted civilisational uplift, and as specifically loyal to the respective 'homelands' which they now inhabited. This paper shows how loyalty has been 'mobilised' by state centres demanding Nanai/Hezhe fealty through military service, and how this has been represented in narrative accounts of their heroism. Balancing this top-down perspective with ethnographic cross-border examination of the role of 'loyalty' as a contemporary discursive category among each group, I shed light on an under-considered narrative-based dimension to the relations of minority peoples with larger states.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The once-unified indigenous northeast Asian people known as the Hezhe in China and the Nanai in Russia are little-discussed in any discipline, but their long experiences of cross-border division and, ...more recently, renewed inter-community contact, offer us a new framework for understanding both Chinese and Russian states in the region. As I show here ethnographically, today's Hezhe in northern Heilongjiang province (China) and Nanai in Khabarovsk territory (Russia) live amid the physical furniture of very different polities. But rather than merely reflecting their separation, I argue, these distinct surroundings in fact invite us to consider how the incorporation of Nanai/Hezhe into China and Russia have been constituted in important ways by the uses and flows of material objects. In support of this argument, which draws on recent anthropological insights concerning materiality to push back against existing identity-, landscape-, or production-focused theories of Chinese and Russian power, I examine sources in several languages to develop a longue durée account of materially mediated interactions between Nanai/Hezhe and China and Russia. From early imperial tribute through to socialist command economies to postsocialist cross-border trade, I show how—with notable continuity—states have been embodied in flows and usage of goods, bringing about the incorporation of Hezhe and Nanai into separate realms with immanent material existences.
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