On Ideas of the Border in the Russian and Chinese Social Imaginaries

Following Liberation and the installation of a communist government in 1949, China set out to resolve numerous border disputes with neighbouring countries. Between 1960 and 1963, China settled outstanding territorial disagreements with North Korea, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. A number of other border disputes have been resolved more recently, particularly with territories formerly included in the Soviet Union. In 1991, China signed the Sino-Soviet Border Agreement, which brought to an end longstanding territorial disputes with Russia and led to a final agreement in October 2004 (Foucher 2007: 33). Delimitation agreements have also been signed over the last two decades with Central Asian countries adjacent to China, namely with Kyrgyzstan in 1996,

If in several of these agreements China frequently flexed her political muscles -claiming as hers significant areas of Tajik, Kazakh and Kyrgyz territory in the process -these demarcation efforts also index a willingness to put to rest outstanding disputes and to normalise border relations with her neighbours.Indeed, if normalisation of borders is essential to the development of border trade, and therefore financially advantageous clearly signals her desire to portray herself as good-neighbourly (Lukin have often been substantial, as it has usually offered to accept less than half of the contested territory in any final settlement.In addition, these compromises have resulted in boundary agreements in which China has abandoned potential irredentist claims to more than 3.4 million square kilometres of land that had been part of the Qing empire at its height in heping jueqi ), many of her neighbours continue to look at her progress with ambivalence and anxiety, and frequently suspect imperialistic designs.In Mongolia, for example, all anxieties relating to continued cultural and of a Chinese takeover of the country remains pervasive and rumours of Chinese malfeasance omnipresent (Billé 2008).Popular discourses in the far eastern provinces of Russia are strikingly similar.Scholars writing on Russian perceptions of Chinese migrant workers (Dyatlov 1999(Dyatlov , 2008;; are coming in vast numbers and that they attempt to stay behind illegally (see Dyatlov, this volume), thereby introducing significant demographic shifts that may eventually lead to a balkanisation of the region and the secession of the eastern regions of Russia to the benefit of China.While it is likely that such fears are grounded, in part, in the demographic imbalance between China and eastern Russia, I wish to suggest here that suspicions of Chinese imperialistic designs may also have emerged in response to differences in Russian and Chinese conceptualisations of the border.Despite China's efforts to settle border disputes and to normalise relations with all her neighbours, Chinese current approaches to the issue of borders appear to be at odds with Russian, or Mongolian, understandings.
since the term can refer both to the political boundary of a state and to the limits of cultural regions, two entities that are hardly, if ever, coextensive.
states and the latter the process of expansion of a political entity, such as the frontier of America's westwards expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or indeed the similar eastwards expansion of the Russian state into Siberia. 1 frontière which etymologically is from borders, within which people negotiate a variety of behaviours and boundaries and the reality of the numerous cultural regions that straddle these lines has proved a fertile terrain for anthropological research, since the national fantasy of complete geophysical and cultural separateness.
illustrate shortly, the difference between the two concepts gains palpability when a linguistic comparison is made of the terms currently used in Russian and Chinese to speak of borders: if in Russian there is a relative paucity of terms to refer to borders, Chinese lexical wealth suggests a much wider set of spatially overlapping concepts.Indeed, while in Russian the border tends to be conceptualised as a firm line, Chinese perceptions are significantly more zonal and frontier-like.I suggest however that the predominance of one particular model is not necessarily culturally specific but that both models coexist and fluctuate in a dialogical process.
A strong differentiator in the way Russians and Chinese currently visualise their common border is the emotional quality they attach to it.While for Chinese the north-eastern border with Russia appears to be seen, predominantly, as a frontier of opportunity where commercial ties can be created and valuable contracts concluded, in the Russian media the border is most often associated with illegal migration and criminality (see Ryzhova, this volume) and tends therefore to be perceived as a source of anxiety.This divergence, whereby the Chinese display more proactive and entrepreneurial attitudes while the Russians remain on the defensive, is in fact also played out in the linguistic realm, with more Chinese proficient in Russian than the other way round.
Undeniably, Russian fears of Chinese encroachment are linked to China's demographics and fast-developing economy.Russians routinely imagine masses of Chinese pressing against their border, encouraged to migrate through state incentives.These perceptions are also escalated by the situation at home: at the same time as China is imagined bursting at the separated the polity from the enemy, by definition an eminently mobile line of both contact and separation.seams and hungry for land, inhabitants of Russia's Far Eastern provinces see their region as becoming depleted, weaker, and increasingly abandoned by the state (Hill and Gaddy 2003).It is precisely this combination, these feelings of abandonment in the face of a populous China allegedly eager to recapture lost territories, that proves so anxiogenic.Dyatlov (2008) notes vtoroe prishestvie): the continuation of prerevolutionary migration trends that had been stemmed by the Soviet government. 2In other words, the presence of Chinese individuals on Russian territory is seen as indexing both the raw demographic power of China, and the weakness of a Russian government no longer able to keep them out.Alexseev (2006a: 46) provides a similar explanation for these Russian anxieties.He argues that the perceived uncertainties about the government's capacity to care turn exaggerated claims into a sensible psychological coping strategy.
And these concerns do, indeed, appear to be widely exaggerated.Research carried out by local scholars suggests that prevalent fears are assert that Chinese migrants routinely evade immigration restrictions and stay behind, data tell a different story.In Primorskii Krai in 2000, only 82 Chinese failed to return home, i.e. a proportion amounting to 0.03 per cent of the total number of Chinese visiting the region that year.The following the Russian media (see Dyatlov 2008), the majority of the Chinese working in the Russian Far East typically stay for the duration of their contract and then return home.Indeed, surveys carried out among them indicate they do not consider the region an attractive prospect for long-term settlement (Hill and Gaddy 2003: 181).For their part, Chinese scholars are careful to distinguish them from traditional migrants (yimin ) and sojourners (huaqiao ), preferring to refer to them as overseas workers (waipai laowu While demographic imbalance and socioeconomic factors go a long way to explain these sentiments, similar fears of Chinese expansion are also prevalent on Sakhalin Island, despite the presence of only a few hundred 3 suggesting that the cause of these anxieties might be located elsewhere.In fact, the dangers thought to originate from China are largely associated with a phantasm of China pertaining to the phrased it.Given that China is not making any territorial claim, 4 and is on the contrary trying to resolve outstanding issues, and given that despite fears of being overrun by the Chinese, actual numbers are hardly threatening (the total annual percentage of Chinese workers employed in the RFE has never exceeded 0.2 per cent of the total work force there, threat than a misalignment between official statements and imagined intentionality.This misalignment may be due, in part, to the different concepts of the border held by Russians and Chinese.Specifically, what does elicit Russian anxieties may be less a matter of aggressive and imperialistic designs on the part of China than her considerably more supple understanding of a brief comparison between the two sets of lexical resources available to Russian and Chinese speakers to refer to borders. In modern Russian, the concept is expressed by two terms, largely synonymous: granitsa and rubezh.Granitsa is etymologically related to gran', rubezh comes from rubit' (to cut, chop) and was previously synonymous with zarubka (Shanskii and Bobrova 1994).The semantic fields delineated by the two terms show some similarity with the opposition found in English between granitsa indicating a linear demarcation and rubezh denoting a fuzzier differentiation between Self and Other.However, in most linguistic contexts rubezh appears to be losing ground in favour of granitsa. 6In other words, a shift in the semantic landscape concerning the lexical resources available to Russian speakers.This linearity is also visible in the adjectival forms of the term granitsa like pogranichny and prigranichny and particularly in words derived from both granitsa and rubezh zagranichny za granitsei, za nationals (Alexseev 2006b: 142).4 Although this is not China's official position, some Chinese groups do make such territorial claims.
for the Amur oblast (Ryzhova, personal communication).6 The term rubezh is never used for instance to speak of an actual border with another nation.Its use is virtually limited to set expressions such as za rubezhom (abroad).
rubezhom), with the preposition za (over, across) which clearly constructs the border as a line rather than a zone.This makes for a stark contrast with modern Chinese where the lexical landscape referring to borders is much broader (see Table 1).The principal lexemes used to refer to borders are jiè ( ), jìng ( ), ( ) and ( ) and these are used in combination with each other as well as with other characters to form a wide array of words.While jiè and jìng unambiguously denote a linear concept of boundary and limit, and are more polysemic.On its own, (as in Xinjiang translates in combined with another character (i.e.: territorial boundary; : border area; : borderland, frontier; : frontiersman; : border region).Thus the lexical wealth of Chinese points to conceptualisations of the border that extend beyond a linear perspective and are significantly more zonal.While in Russian (like in French or German) no clear lexical distinction exists between the range of images of a border -as a line, as a liminal zone, as a margin.The formation of the Chinese state has often been described as a process of gradual expansion outwards, slowly incorporating lands on its of surrounding barbarian groups (Fiskesjö 1999).From a cultural centre zhongyuan neidi ) and referred to the densely populated, ethnic Han region running from north to bianjiang waidi ), enveloped this Han heartland to the north, west, and southwest.
While the process of Sinicisation is somewhat problematic since it assumes a unidirectional transformation and assimilation (Crossley, Siu and Sutton 1991: 6;Billé 2009), what interests me here is the assumed survival of this model.In fact, a large share of anxieties about China gravitates precisely around this idea, namely that China continues to perceive itself as a cultural centre radiating outwards, and that formal demarcation (and resolution) of her national borders continues to exist in parallel with an ever-advancing cultural front.data from various parts of the world, like South-East Asia (Carsten 1998) or Europe (Wilson and Donnan 1998: 8-9) suggest that nations were (Carsten 1998: 218).It is only later, as nations expanded and unclaimed10 From a people-based of the state (Sahlins 1998: 37), i.e. a decline in relationships-inflected views of the nation and a progressive isomorphic identification between the physical and cultural extent of the state.
Traditionally, China's views of her borderlands were predominantly negative: borderlands were places of banishment as well as spaces generating cycles of crisis and catastrophe (Woodside 2007: 21-22).But if these territories formally included within the nation were seen, and frequently continue to be seen, as not quite Chinese and peopled by non-Han groups, the misalignment between political boundaries and cultural frontiers also has a formative impact on common perceptions of territories lying outside the current borders of the PRC.Regions such as Mongolia or parts of the Russian Far East, notably the Maritime region (Primorskii Krai), are not considered Chinese yet remain perceived as somewhat less foreign (Billé 2012).11Frequently described by Chinese nationalists as regions that currently under Chinese control but with strong cultural and historic ties Given China's use of history as a dominant state narrative and its routine insistence on being the country with the longest unbroken existence, historical and archaeological claims suggesting that these ethnic sense) are frequently understood as territorial claims.12Russians living in the Russian Far East have often perceived the Chinese presence as a political and strategic phenomenon rather than a social, economic to the existence of Chinese names to refer to local (Russian) cities (Alexseev 2006: 111).Traditionally the Chinese name for Vladivostok was Haishenwei , Khabarovsk was called Boli , and Ussuriisk was known as Shuangchengzi .While these locales tend today to be referred to by their Russian names, i.e.Fuladiwosituoke, Habaluofisike and Wusulisike, these transliterations have not wholly displaced former names.As historian James Stephan (1994: 19) noted, in the 1970s, Soviet archaeologists and historians were careful to cleanse the territories included within the Russian borders from Chinese historic presence by renaming over a thousand locales.
The attempt by Soviet, and later Russian, government to draw a sharp separation from China and to remove all ambiguity from the border has also left its traces on the physical landscape.As is clearly visible on aerial and satellite pictures of the border (see map of the Manzhouli/ is paralleled by additional markings and lines of defence, reinforcing further this sense of separation.Specifically, two kinds of demarcation are seen at this particular point: a no-man's land (dublirovanie pogranichnoi polosy) that frequently includes ploughed out strips and which, at some points along the border, may extend to widths of several miles; and a zone of fortification (ukreplennye rayony), which typically includes obstructions and/or minefields. 13Also visible on aerial photographs is Val Chingis-Khana), a 340-mile long demarcation line established by Jurchen attempt to insulate themselves from the Tatar and Mongolian tribes abandoned but endures through the differences in the landscape that have developed during its lifetime.
On the Chinese side, by contrast, there does not appear to be such an aspiration to hermetically insulate the national body from Russia or to expunge all traces of former Russian presence.In Harbin, for instance, numerous Russian buildings remain in the old quarters and several Orthodox churches have survived the Cultural Revolution (see Lahusen 2001).In fact, in recent years, the city has actively tried to capitalise on its Russian heritage: today, Harbin is one of the largest centres in China for the study of Russian and it is also there that the main Russian-language news website in China operates.
I argued earlier that the concept of border in the Russian and Chinese imaginaries differ in significant ways, as is suggested by the lexical categories used in these two languages.While in Russia the border is usually visualised as an inflexible boundary line, the limits of the nation in the Chinese national imaginary are much less rigid.Of course, at an official political level, the boundaries of China are just as fixed and subject to policing practices as the Russian ones.However, another dimension also exists in which the extent of the nation is much fuzzier.When speaking with Chinese citizens outside Inner Mongolia for instance, Mongols often note that their interlocutors are never quite sure whether Mongolia forms part of the nation or not.While these responses may be due in part to (Neimenggu ) -the latter being a province of China -and also to a general lack of interest about those neighbouring nations that are perceived as less economically developed, I suggest that it also indexes a certain disconnect between the physical extent of the nation and the cultural realm. 14 However tempting it may be to see this fuzzy conceptualisation of frontiers as something specifically Chinese, it is important to note that Chinese ideas of the border have fluctuated significantly throughout history.At specific times, like during the Ming dynasty, the northern border was perceived as more linear and less ambiguous than during the preceding dynasty (see Waldron 1990).Indeed, my overall reading of Chinese borders as zonal may feel somewhat counterintuitive given the commanding presence of the Great Wall as signal of political and cultural discontinuity.
In the same way, if Russian ideas of the border with China appear to be more rigid, this has not always been the case.In addition to the two words discussed earlier, granitsa and rubezh, a third term, krai, is also occasionally used that comes even closer to the more fuzzy delimitation the term krayati, a dialectal variant of kraiti krais were vast territories located along the periphery of Russia and the term is still used in the name of administrative divisions, notably those bordering China.And if today krai is never used to refer specifically to the border, the concept remains embedded in names like Ukraina, literally While traditional scholarship on borders has tended to see frontiers chiefly as pre-modern phenomena, to be later superseded by borders (see Prescott 1987), it would seem that the process whereby one particular model gains prominence cannot be simply attributed to a historical process 14 Waldron notes that in the earliest period of its history, the idea of clear boundaries was 1990: 42).On ideas of the Great Wall as a transition zone, see Lattimore (1967).See also Waldron (1990) on the cultural construction of the Great Wall as a singular structure.
of development from a pre-modern political system to that of a nation-state, nor indeed to cultural specificities.If Russian concepts of the border appear to have changed over time from a zonal to a more linear understanding, the fluctuations seen in the Chinese cultural region suggest that the two models can, and do, coexist side by side.
I argued earlier that Russian concerns about the Sino-Russian border are inherently tied to the increasing economic and political power of China, and that these fears are exacerbated by the feeling that the RFE is economically and demographically weak, compounded by a pervasive sense of having been abandoned by a geographically distant centre. 16In this sense, it would appear that the predominance of one particular conceptual model of the border is highly contextual and that it emerges in dialogue with the other nation beyond the boundary line but also with the indigenous minority of peoples residing in the borderlands.
Consequently, boundaries with different neighbours are likely to be conceived differently.If Russia's boundary with China is conceptualised as an inflexible line, other Russian borders, and particularly borders that previously demarcated republics within the Soviet Union, will not necessarily share the same rigidity.Over the last two decades for instance, Russia's border with the Ukraine has gradually been transforming infrastructure such as customs posts and border guards (Popkova 2001).Nonetheless, it remains a highly porous border, and, importantly, does not elicit the kind of anxiety seen at the border with China. 17Similarly, if China's view of her northern border with Russia may appear in many ways to be akin to a frontier, this is not necessarily true of her other boundary lines, notably in Xinjiang (see Anthony, this volume).In that part of the country, in stark contrast to the restoration and packaging of Russian architectural heritage for tourism purposes, the modernisation of Uyghur cities has sought to efface all traces of otherness.This difference is also played out in the realm of social exchanges: while at the Sino-Russian border more Chinese usually speak Russian than Russians speak Chinese, at the border with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan Chinese businessmen and traders tend to rely on local Kazakhs and Kyrgyz as cultural and linguistic mediators (Babakulov 2007).
In fact, if political geographers and International Relations scholars are quick to describe frontiers as older concepts that have faded in favour of the more linear understanding of borders, certain state practices suggest the survival of a more complex and multifaceted outlook. 18This coexistence is visible for instance with respect to coastal waters, conceptualised primarily as an outward extension of a given country's territory but considerably complicated by diverging, and at times conflicting, definitions.Thus, due to the existence of offshore islets (some of which may be submerged at high tide) and underwater geography (such as the position of the nation in relation to the continental shelf), zones of ownership occasionally overlap, with one country owning fishing rights over the seabed and another the rights to the mining activities and to the harvest of sedentary species of fish (Prescott 1987: 24).exclusive regimes that are culturally-embedded or specific to certain modes of governnmentality (see Foucault 2004), I suggest that the two in fact frequently coexist.If current Russian and Chinese terminology indicates significant variation in the ways in which the nations' boundaries are conceptualised, it is crucial to look at how these concepts and understandings play out at various endpoints of the nation and how they fluctuate in time and space.As cogently pointed out by Pavel Baev borders are declared sacred and inviolable, but when there is a chance to (Baev 1996: 4, quoted in Kuhrt 2007: 3).
In other words, frontiers are not merely phenomena that gradually become superseded by borders.Rather, the two concepts denote different attitudes about Self and Other, attitudes that are inherently variable and shifting.Even after borders have ossified into rigid and linear boundaries, 18 As Delaplace (Introduction, this volume) nicely illustrates with the story of Gaston Lagaffe, a border is rarely conceptualised by the state as two-dimensional.A border is in fact a line of demarcation with infinite depth, both subterranean and aerial.Indeed, a crucial factor in territorial disputes has consistently been the resources the soil is known or believed to contain.Similarly, with the advent of air transportation and the emergence upwards.
on the geographical and social surroundings.These physical traces of past national and imperial incarnations, like tidemarks, enframe liminal zones where national identities and values routinely find themselves reinforced, contested and challenged. 7

7
The linguistic landscape I have sketched here focuses on the terms used in Russian and Chinese, however along the lengthy Manchurian border numerous minority groups dominant groups.The Mongolian cairn system (oboo) that dots the landscape for instance functions as a mark of physical as well as spiritual boundary.

Table 1 :
8This, I suggest, has an important resonance for the ways in which speakers conceptualise the border and it may help understand the customary visualisation by Russians of the border as a national and ethnic fault line susceptible to be crossed and requiring protection 9 (see Humphrey, this volume), while the Chinese imagine it as a more supple zone, at times rich in opportunities, at other times as regions of danger.8 The headings in the table are morphemes rather than words stricto sensu.The semantic neighbourhood they delineate is refined through association with other morphemes, creating words, given as examples underneath.9 This may help explain the defensive attitudes frequently displayed by Russians and their reluctance to enter into collaborative ventures.Alexseev (2006a: 238) notes for instance that Russian fears about Chinese poachers stealing Russian frogs have not translated into business opportunities.Yet, the breeding and harvesting of frogs to meet the huge demand of the Chinese market could potentially turn into lucrative opportunities for local inhabitants.