Taiwan’s Russians: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Island’s Russian Diaspora

Abstract

In the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which ushered in a wave of emigration from Russia, gaining an ethnographic understanding of the global Russian diaspora is timelier than ever. Taiwan’s small Russian diasporic population has thus far largely escaped anthropologists’ attention. This thesis—which is based on ethnographic research I conducted in Taipei of Russians residing in Taiwan and Taiwanese studying Russian—treats this small diasporic population as a serious object of inquiry. In this thesis, I argue that Russians living on the island can be productively understood as racialized and haunted subjects. I advance each aspect of this argument through two distinct body chapters. The first of these chapters contends that, because of their somatic whiteness, my Russian interlocutors are racialized as Western and English-speaking by Taiwanese people. The second of these chapters argues that my Russian interlocutors experience contemporary Russian political violence as a vampiric haunting. The unifying idea that links these disparate chapters is that Russians are ‘strangers’ in Taiwan. In other words, this thesis as a whole supports the conclusion that Russians occupy an obscure, ambiguous place in the Taiwanese national imaginary.