Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands

Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands PDF Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789089649829
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book focuses on northeast Sino-Russian border economies and how trans-border economies function in practice, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust.

Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands

Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands PDF Author: Caroline Humphrey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789089649829
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book focuses on northeast Sino-Russian border economies and how trans-border economies function in practice, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust.

On the Edge

On the Edge PDF Author: Franck Billé
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674269497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the Russia–China border, one of the world’s least understood and most politically charged frontiers. The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It’s a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world’s political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world’s most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to “Europe,” building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil’s Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Post-Soviet Borders

Post-Soviet Borders PDF Author: Sabine von Löwis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000642887
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book investigates how borders in former Soviet Union territories have evolved and shifted in the thirty years since the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to fifteen independent states and numerous de facto states; but this process of rebordering is not finished, and social, economic, infrastructural, cultural and political networks and spaces continue to develop. This book explores the intersection between these geopolitical shifts and the individual lived experience, drawing on cases from across border regions in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Throughout, the book introduces and frames the case studies with well-informed theoretical, conceptual and methodological overviews that situate them within border studies in general and post-Soviet border spaces in particular. Overall, the book demonstrates that like a kaleidoscope, the dynamic elements in these newly evolved border regions are similar yet strikingly different in their juxtapositions, with the appearance of new configurations often dependent on changing geopolitical constellations. This timely guide to the post-Soviet world thirty years after the Cold War will be of interest to researchers across border studies, politics, geography, social anthropology, history, Eastern European Studies, Central Asian Studies, and Caucasian Studies.

Beyond the Silk Roads

Beyond the Silk Roads PDF Author: Magnus Marsden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108976506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.

Past Progress

Past Progress PDF Author: Ed Pulford
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503639037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound "end of history" which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

On the Edge

On the Edge PDF Author: Franck BillŽ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the RussiaÐChina border, one of the worldÕs least understood and most politically charged frontiers. The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. ItÕs a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the worldÕs political giants. Franck BillŽ and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the worldÕs most consequential and enigmatic borderlands. It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as BillŽ and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to ÒreviveÓ their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to ÒEurope,Ó building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. BasilÕs Cathedral to woo tourists. Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.

Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia

Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia PDF Author: Philipp Schröder
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040019382
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Translocality, Entrepreneurship and Middle Class Across Eurasia is a comprehensive, multi-sited ethnography about the unfolding of capitalism across Eurasia and the advent of a new middle class since the late Soviet era. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book follows three generations of ethnic Kyrgyz in three distinct eras and sites: The early bazaar traders of Novosibirsk (Russia), the post-2000 middlemen operating in Guangzhou (China) and the ‘new entrepreneurs’ who have emerged at home in Kyrgyzstan around 2015. The book advocates translocality as an innovative concept to better understand the dialectic of mobility and emplacement in contemporary livelihoods and value chains that transgress not only political borders, but also less tangible socio-cultural boundaries. Through this lens, the chapters forcefully demonstrate how ways of business-making align or conflict with notions of ethnic belonging, diaspora, sociability or gender, in and in-between various locations. Proposing the imaginary of commercial journeys, the book documents the aspirations, adjustments and struggles of an emergent middle class, whose neoliberal subjectivity is inspired by a flexible entrepreneurial spirit of ‘Kyrgyzness’, and who navigate in a market environment that recently has been shifting towards more actor diversification, service orientation and rule-based formalization. This book will be of interest particularly to scholars in the fields of (economic) anthropology, post-socialist studies, migration, mobility and area studies with a focus on Central Asia and Eurasia.

In Search of Good Energy Policy

In Search of Good Energy Policy PDF Author: Marc Ozawa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481167
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Offers an innovative look at why science and technology cannot alone meet the needs of energy policy making in the future.

Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia

Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia PDF Author: Akihiro Iwashita
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000625990
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia focuses on the dynamics of Northeast Asia as a region. The chapters in this book offer a nuanced approach for understanding the geo-politics of this strategically critical area of the world. Focusing on China, Japan, Russia, and the Koreas, as well as the involvement of the United States, the contributors to the volume offer a timely and critical analysis of Northeast Asia. They collectively emphasize the different scales at which the region holds significance, and particularly note how the region is often granted significance by local political forces as well as national interests. Borderlands and sub-regions are especially important in this perspective, and the contributors show both how regionalism influences the people living in these areas and how they in turn shape the political priorities of states. At the same time, the worsening of relations between Japan and the Koreas and the increasing assertiveness of both China and Russia make it essential to understand the dynamics of the region, as well as how they have changed during and following the Trump era. Geo-Politics in Northeast Asia is essential reading for students and scholars of Political Geography, International Relations and Strategic Studies, as well as for those with a research focus on Northeast Asia, or the wider Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier

Beyond the Steppe Frontier PDF Author: Sören Urbansky
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
"Over two thousand miles long, the boundary between Russia and China is the world's longest land border. Though sometimes considered a backwater, the border region was always of critical geopolitical importance and has a fascinating history. Not only did this border divide the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and settled peoples mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia, China, and Japan clashed, and where both conflicts and gestures of friendship between the world's largest Communist regimes were staged. This book is a history of this border from the late nineteenth century until the fall of the Soviet Union. The border has undergone a remarkable transformation since the late nineteenth century. As late as the 1920s, Russian, Chinese, and native worlds were intricately interwoven in the region, and the frontier was barely regulated. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the two countries had succeeded in cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections between the two sides through deportation, forced assimilation, and nationalist propaganda campaigns. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union would China and Russia reopen the border, but even today the line between countries demarcates two distinct regions with remarkably different worldviews and cultures. Drawing on sources in seven languages, including extensive archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Urbansky stresses the significant role of the local population in supporting, or more often undermining, the two states' border-making efforts"--