On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border

Product Description
A pioneering examination of history, current affairs, and daily life along the Russia–China border, one of the world’s least understood and most politically charged frontiers.The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It’s a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world’s political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world’s most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over the economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border. And Chinese towns make much of their proximity to “Europe,” building giant Russian dolls and replicas of St. Basil’s Cathedral to woo tourists.Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
Review
“A wonderfully illuminating book, filled with insights about the frontier between Russia and China and the peoples who live in and alongside the border zones. Beautifully written and immaculately researched, this is an important book that draws on the past and present―and has obvious implications for the future.”
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Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
“In this rich and wonderfully written book, two giants of twentieth-century socialism meet in the cities, forests, and along the rivers of northeast Asia to show how much is at stake for so many in competing visions of a postsocialist future.”
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Bruce Grant, New York University
“Where the edges of Russia and China meet is perhaps the world’s most politically unknown but consequential borderland. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey provide the missing picture of how multicultural peoples carry on a burgeoning trade that is transforming life along this vast frontier. The authors show that despite different historical imaginations and personal stories on both sides, variant forms of capitalism―mafia and state―help weave friends, foes, and kin across the border.”
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Aihwa Ong, author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life
“Relations between Russia and China are usually discussed through a top-down approach―the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of a Putin and a Xi Jinping. Billé and Humphrey on the contrary turn to the ordinary lives of people living on and working across the border. A beautiful exploration of the daily reality of these border lives, revealing tensions, relations, and emerging trends that top-down approaches have missed entirely.”
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Michael Puett, Harvard University
“For centuries, Russia and China have confronted each other along one of the longest, most important but least understood land borders in the world.
On the Edge is a fascinating ethnographic study of life in this border region today that works on two levels, offering a hi