Representing Foreignness: Encounters in the Sino-Russian Borderlands

Abstract

This dissertation examines concepts of foreignness as they are lived, experienced, and reproduced in the contact zone in the borderlands of two empires. It is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Russian migrants and local residents in Northern China between 2017 and 2019, as well as three months in Siberia and the Russian Far East in 2016. Tracing the tensions between colonial heritage as a generative component of local identity and the contemporary presence of a new wave of Russian migrants in the Chinese Northeast, I focus on the idea of “Russian presence” that is both physical and symbolic, as well as reproduced in media and tourism industry.Set against the backdrop of the complex history of Sino-Russian relations and shifting power dynamics that included periods of colonization, this study is further contextualized by China’s rapid social and economic changes, the rise of China as an international migrant destination, and the legal landscape that determines the treatment of foreigners and the foreign. By attending to these entangled phenomena, “Representing Foreignness” asks how “Russianness” can be an integral part of placemaking in a country that otherwise attempts to control “foreign influence” over its territory and culture; and how contemporary migrants negotiate their livelihoods between these conflicting trends. More broadly, this dissertation is located at the intersection of postcolonial, postsocialist and borderland studies. It also discusses challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork under the condition of mistrust.