Sören Urbansky makes a critical contribution to conceptions of China and Russia's shared border in this study, which brings together key debates and methods of both China studies/Sinology and Russian studies with the interdisciplinary analysis of how groups and individuals deal with the borders imposed upon them.Footnote ¹ Urbansky focuses on the history of political, economic, and social contact in the Argun River region to substantiate his broader argument that both people and states jointly created the Sino-Russian border (p. 2).

The body of this monograph consists of eight chapters presenting a centuries-long narrative of how people who had “Russian” and “Chinese” identities, or were considered neither Chinese nor Russian, maintained economic and social relationships in all types of political weather. Chapter 1 introduces how Russian and Chinese imperial subjects interacted from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, such as Cossacks and Qing bannermen who worked against and with each other through their surveillance of what was regarded as a frontier zone. In chapter 2, about the mid- to late nineteenth century, Urbansky discusses how the political and economic contours of the modern borderland evolved through mechanisms that restricted contact between people, such as railroad development and the establishment of settlements around railroad territory, the trade of alcohol and gold, and the quarantine in response to the Manchurian plague of 1910–11. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the many obstacles that Russian, Chinese, Buriat, and Khalkha nationalist revolutions posed for “routine interactions” (p. 151) across what was an effectively regulated but nevertheless porous border.

Further disruptions to long-standing economic and social relationships in the 1920s and 1930s, such as military conflicts, are discussed in chapter 5, and the phenomenon of the border being “under lock and key” (figure 5.6, p. 189) continues in chapter 6. Chapters 7 and 8 show how the brief reproachment gave way to another period of open hostility caused by the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, when the impact on the borderland became more severe than it was in previous times. At the end of the study, the border becomes permeable again with perestroika and “open and reform” in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Economic profit is the unvarnished driver of official state relations, but also benefits regular relations between traders and other people who seek contact for social as well as economic reasons across the border.

A particular strength of this book is Urbansky's balancing and pairing of far-reaching phenomena with spotlights on specific places and people. The consequences of revolution and nationalism in the twentieth century manifest in the Sino-Russian struggle for control in Manzhouli and the resulting transformation of Manzhouli, as well as Hailar, and other parts of Hulunbuir into societies that are more Chinese rather than Russian or genuinely multicultural.Footnote ² That “trade” and “smuggling” are interchangeable terms, depending on the political mood, is exemplified in his account of individuals like Arkadii A. Ianecek and Xin Fanbin (pp. 132–36), whose life stories show that Chinese-Russian relations were often asymmetrical, with Chinese adapting more to Russians through language acquisition and intermarriage.

Another distinguishing feature of this study is the use of images that put the reader in close contact with the sources. Urbansky intersperses well-known illustrations, such as a Soviet propaganda postcard by Viktor S. Ivanov celebrating Sino-Soviet friendship (figure 6.1, p. 207), and unique images, such as the full-page reproduction of a passport of a Russian worker on the Chinese Eastern Railroad from 1898 (figure 2.1, p. 42) and a photograph of the Mongol nobleman Zorigt Baatar E. Tokhtogo (figure 3.1, p. 96), who resisted Han Chinese rule over formerly de facto autonomous Mongol populations, to apply an anthropological touch to this historical research and to give readers not only an interpretation of a source but an invitation to form their own understandings of it.

Although nationalism has become a tempered element in relations between the present-day governments of China and Russia, this history rightly highlights the gradual scarcity of transcultural people in the northeastern borderland who might have been Russian or Chinese but could be comfortable being both or neither. Citizens who are more attached to a single culture, language, or national identity may be preferable as inhabitants of territories where people must uphold the demarcation of artificial boundaries, but Urbansky's work affirms that they might be less ideal for the cultivation of relationships that helped both states and societies thrive in the past.