Over the last ten years, Western leaders and media have worried about China and Russia gaining power and threatening the liberal world order dominated by the United States. Putting China and Russia in a basket of “bad actors” may be a recent trend, but each of these countries has its own history of resentment toward the West going back to the Opium and Crimean Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, when, defeated by Europe, they faced internal turmoil and were forced to reform. While addressing these challenges and selectively borrowing Western ideas, imperial China and Russia and their successor states also had to deal with each other as two great land powers with a long shared border. Culturally different, they went through similar historical cycles of crumbling empires, revolutions, civil wars, frail republics, World War II, and socialist and postsocialist states, finally settling into their own peculiar blend of state capitalism. The nature of their evolving relationship with each other cannot be fully explained by diplomacy and leadership. The two books reviewed here offer a refreshing look at how culture, geography, ideology, and socioeconomic interactions along their borderlands shaped their understanding of each other during the turbulent decades of the 1920s and post-1990s, respectively.
Edward Tyerman's Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture is a timely interdisciplinary study of how Soviet writers, journalists, and filmmakers rediscovered Republican China in the 1920s and interpreted it through various cultural mediums for Soviet and global audiences. This book examines how Soviet intellectuals experienced, imagined, and reinterpreted Republican China in their work by discussing the process of artistic production and its meaning and acceptance by the Soviet audience and critics. Much has been written about Soviet involvement in Chinese politics during this time, when Moscow secretly supported rival political groups (Chinese Communists, Nationalists, and warlords) to spread socialist revolution while pursuing its own national goals.
International Aesthetics examines Soviet reportage, fiction, films, plays, and ballet featuring China, and it discusses the aesthetic debates of the Soviet 1920s, such as “documentary versus fiction, fragmentation versus smoothness, modernism versus realism,” in the context of a broader debate about socialist internationalism (p. 5). This is a study of literary and cultural history of mostly Soviet Russia and—to a lesser extent, of Republican China—that introduces several Soviet and Chinese intellectuals and analyzes their literary works and visual productions from the perspective of Western literary and postmodern theory. Those interested in such concepts as aesthetics, bio-interview, chronotope, literature of fact, internationalism, Marxism, modernity, montage, observation, Soviet avant-garde, and so on, will find this study rewarding, replete with textual analysis and case studies.
International Aesthetics argues that despite Soviet criticism of Western stereotypes about exotic China, its own “realistic” depiction of China suffered from cultural ignorance, a search for perceived common Eurasian roots with China—popular in Russian émigré writings of the 1920s—and a revolutionary urge to connect with Asia. The key protagonist discussed in this book is Sergei Tretyakov (1892–1937), a Soviet writer, reporter, playwright, and theorist who promoted socialist internationalism and produced powerful images of a changing China for a mass audience in the revolutionary Soviet Union. He traveled to China in the 1920s, where he taught Russian at Peking University and collected materials for his later China-related publications, including poems, articles, fiction, and plays, which are compared with the works of other Soviet intellectuals in this book.
Chapter 1 is about Soviet travel literature in China, comparing Tretyakov's travelogues and his innovative method of immersive writing based on observing and collecting facts on the ground with another prominent Soviet writer, Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938); both embraced Soviet avant-garde and contributed to various interpretations of internationalism related to China. Chapter 2, “Translating China on Stage,” discusses Tretyakov's work in theater and compares his play Roar China! with the Bolshoi Theatre's ballet Red Poppy, both staged in 1927 and based on a similar “moment of self-sacrifice that affirmed and sanctioned both the progress of China's revolution and the bond between the Russian and Chinese revolutionary masses” (p. 92). These productions revealed deep cultural gaps between the two countries. Despite the ballet's anti-imperialist theme and success in Soviet Russia, its title had a negative connotation in China, where the poppy flower was associated with the humiliating Opium Wars and British imperialism.
Chapter 3, “Through an Internationalist Lens,” argues that early Soviet films about China were a continuous “experiment in rethinking cinema as medium of international connection” (p. 185). Like factual literature and plays about China, Soviet films such as Great Flight (1925–26), a documentary account of an expedition from Russia to China by air, employed aerial filming as an innovative technique to create new spatial and temporal forms of Sino-Soviet cultural encounter. Tretyakov wrote scripts for some of these films, yet their production was affected by deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations in 1927, when Chiang Kai-Shek purged Chinese Communists and expelled Soviet advisors from China. Chapter 4 discusses Tretyakov's “mediated autobiography” of a model Chinese revolutionary, based on interviews with Gao Shihua (Gao Xingya, 1903–80), an author and translator who was his former Chinese student in Peking. Here Tyerman reflects on the role of translation and mediation in producing internationalist collaboration. The themes of collaboration, mediation and Stalinist turn to “national form in art” in the 1930s are discussed in epilogue, together with Chinese cultural mediators like poet Xiao San (1896–1983) and actor Mei Lanfang (1894–1961).
The promise of internationalist cultural dialogue and solidarity between Soviet Russia and Republican China in the 1920s, together with the Comintern's support for Chinese revolution, was an attempt to bridge two different cultures and historical experiences and to find common ground in pursuit of internationalist solidarity. Tyerman convincingly argues that these early efforts had mixed outcomes, because they were based on utopian assumptions and depended on domestic politics, which radically changed after 1927 in China, and a few years later in Russia. Many Soviet intellectuals, including Tretyakov, diplomats, and Comintern agents in China were purged by Stalin in late 1930s, and domestic ideological and cultural priorities, including national art forms, diverged in both countries for years to come.
International Aesthetics abounds in rich factual and theoretical interpretations and can be read in the context of different historical cycles in Sino-Soviet/Russian encounters, when the seeds of revolutionary and cultural contacts of the 1920s resurfaced in the 1950s, when China became a socialist state, and again in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and left the socialist camp, paving the way for a new Eurasian dialogue predicated on new internationalist terms.
Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey's On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border is a socioeconomic study of cross-border encounters between people and local governments living in the borderlands along the Amur River and its tributaries Argun and Ussuri since the 1990s. Billé and Humphrey are European anthropologists specializing in Eurasian frontiers and transnational border studies. In this part of the world, two continental powers are separated from each other by an international border that runs along the river, providing multiple challenges for local governments and an abundance of ideas about how borderland societies are organized in their relationship with the environment, natural resources, animals, culture, the border, and each other. On the Edge is based on their field studies and on recent international scholarship on the Russian Far East and China's Northeast.
This book is about asymmetrical economic and urban development and different visions, laws, and administrative management that discourage closer ties between Chinese and Russian societies living in proximity to each other across this border. On the Edge explores multiple interrelated phenomena as experienced by people on the ground.
Each chapter deals with a different theme, such as the ambiguity of border spaces with its uneven distribution of closed/military and open/economic zones and transportation routes described in chapter 1. Chapter 2 is about Heixiazi and Bolshoi Ussuriiskii Island at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers near Khabarovsk, divided by China and Russia in 2014, as a case study of different approaches to boosting nationalism, sovereignty, and ecological development. Chapter 3 describes cross-border economy suffering from weak central support, corruption, and illegal activities. Chapter 4 is about diverse visions of this border among marginalized Indigenous people, who maintain their identity through cultural practices, different from those prescribed by the state.
Chapter 5 demonstrates that cross-cultural ties, education, and intermarriages across the border create new opportunities and rewards while challenging deep seated cultural perceptions about each other. Chapter 6 argues that the exploitation of natural resources and environmental protection offers opportunities for state cooperation, while weak NGOs on both sides are helpless in checking state mismanagement of the environment. Chapter 7 explains why two border towns of Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, separated by the Amur River, remain disconnected, physically and culturally. Billé and Humphrey suggest that these border towns, like their regional and central governments, have different pasts, priorities, notions of modernity and progress. The success of Heihe and hundreds of similar Chinese cities represent “the reversal of hierarchies” between two countries after 1989, in which China is no longer Russia's “little brother” (p. 256).
The general picture emerging from this book is that of two contrasting countries locked in a marriage of convenience, in which the rhetoric of strategic partnership hides mistrust and unwillingness to let the border societies across the Amur to interact more freely. Behind official statistics of growing bilateral trade, the borderland communities developed their own coping mechanisms and unique understanding of their neighbor in ways divergent from political centers.
Both books offer nuanced analyses of literary, social, and cultural encounters between China and Russia during different stages in their recent history, and challenging reductionist narratives of top leaders, their capitals and markets, which tend to strip both countries of long complex history, rich culture and traditions. Tyernman's book will appeal to those interested in the culture and literary theory of early Soviet Russia and Republican China, while Billé and Humphrey's engaging narrative and personal stories will appeal to a general audience interested in Eurasian borders and travel. When I finished reading their book, I felt like being stranded on the half-finished bridge across the Amur River, eager to reach the global city of Heihe.
