The so-called “rise of China” and changing global order have attracted the attention of scholars and laymen alike in recent years, with particular attention given to China’s attempts to expand its economic and cultural influence. Elena Barabantseva’s new book skilfully and convincingly demonstrates that China’s ascent and aspirations to becoming a global power cannot be separated from sexualized and racialized imaginings of nationhood and family ideals. Through the concept of “intimate geopolitics,” the book weaves together the experiences of post-Soviet women who marry into China with border politics, migration policies and cultural representations, studying the impact of political power across scales and beyond public–private divides. Barabantseva achieves this by combining different methodologies (policy research, media analysis, digital ethnography, life interviews and film-making) and crossing disciplinary borders.
Besides its comprehensive and varied methodology, meticulous research and accessible language, one remarkable strength of the book is that it tackles a complicated topic with attention to the nuances of racial and ethnic categorizations, hierarchies and stereotypes. For example, Barabantseva explains how the existence of a Russian ethnic group in China (Eluosizu) complicates the women’s position in the self–other dichotomy as potentially assimilable (p. 21), stresses how the “Western Other” is not a homogenous category in Chinese representations and imaginaries (p. 69), and shows how women’s decision to settle in China after marriage is partly due to the racial prejudices that Chinese people and mixed-race children face in post-Soviet countries. Her observation about Chinese men imagining themselves “replacing white men” rather than “demolishing the world order” is also quite insightful (p. 16).
A second framing theme of the book is the blurring between reality and imagination in “the idealised and romanticised portrayals of these relationships that are often perpetuated through media and popular culture” (p. 6). Barabantseva attributes this “hyperreality” – a term she borrows from Umberto Eco – to the symbolic role that a domesticized white femininity plays in support of the China Dream and of China’s growing power. While the book argues this convincingly throughout the chapters, I wonder if it might be more accurate to speak of enhancing or amplifying reality, rather than “fabricat[ing] the absolute fakes” (p. 6), as the growing membership of the WeChat groups during the time of the author’s research, and more recently the number of accounts posting mixed couples daily vlogs on Chinese social media, could indicate an actual rise in Slavic women marrying Chinese men.
Following this theme, the introduction narrates the author’s disappointing journey to a village on the border between China and Russia, which, according to media representations, should be the home of many mixed couples. Eventually, the challenges in locating such couples lead her to shift to conducting digital ethnography and interviews through WeChat groups where the women exchange advice on navigating the legal and cultural challenges of living in China. Reflecting on her positionality, Barbantseva discusses the conditions of her partial and conditional access, facilitated by shared linguistic and cultural references, but limited by not being in a relationship with a Chinese man, which led some women to distrust her. Due to these constraints and the book’s focus on geopolitics, the ethnographic data mainly discusses the women’s legal positioning and their marital struggles, while offering more limited information about their everyday lives.
The first two chapters provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the context in which these marriages take place. In chapter one, an analysis of the changes in China’s marriage migration laws and attitudes towards foreigners shows the significance of gender and race for matters of national security and imagined belonging. Chapter two looks at the portrayal of relationships between Chinese men and Russian women in three Chinese TV dramas and one film as emblematic of the state support and promotion of these intimacies and of certain ideals of racialized femininity and masculinity. The following four chapters describe the women’s aspirations and predicaments in their migration journeys to China, with the “marriage trap” of family visas offering easier long-term stay, but placing them in a dependent status towards their husbands (chapter three), navigating patriarchal norms in their relationship to their husband and in-laws (chapter four), trying to secure their parental rights while providing good opportunities to their children under the hukou and single citizenship regime (chapter five), and dealing with the WeChat groups which offer belonging and support while also taking on “violent and exclusionary forms” and reproducing the objectifying nature of the marriage market (chapter six). The last chapter (chapter seven) is particularly innovative in terms of its methodology, as it is based on Barabantseva’s use of audiovisual ethnography to document an international wedding group ceremony on the China –Russia border, bringing together Russian and Chinese wedding couples. Against the backdrop of the Russia–Ukraine war, the conclusion addresses hyperreality through the case of a Ukrainian YouTube influencer being cloned to promote Russia, sell Russian products and express the desire to marry Chinese men. As Barabantseva argues in the conclusion, in our current “post-truth era,” where the line between AI and human reality is increasingly blurred, it is even more necessary to do research that combines different methodologies across different scales.
While there is no reliable data to validate the increase of post-Soviet women marrying Chinese men (p. 27), and the author remains sceptical about the extent to which the phenomenon is being spotlighted and amplified for nationalist imaginaries, the book can be regarded alongside other recent publications documenting the transformation of global hierarchies in the domain of intimate relationships, such as Liu’s Seeking Western Men: Mail‐order Brides Under China’s Global Rise (Stanford University Press, 2023). The book will certainly be of interest to scholars working on intimate relationships, migration, citizenship, nationalism, race, gender and China studies, and it would be a suitable reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on these topics. More general readers interested in China, Russia or cross-border relationships will also find the book appealing.
