Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands (Asian Borderlands)

The first English-language book to focus on northeast Sino-Russian border economies, Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands examines how trans-border economies function in practice. The authors offer an anthropological understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the state. They argue that the history of suspicion and the securitized character of the Sino-Russian border mean that trust is at a premium. The chapters show how diverse kinds of cross-border business manage to operate, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust. Cover 1 Table of Contents 6 Introduction 10 Trusting and Mistrusting Across Borders 10 Caroline Humphrey 10 Déjà vu of Distrust in the Sino-Russian Borderlands 38 Sayana Namsaraeva 38 Economies of Trust 66 Informality and the State in the Russian-Chinese borderland 66 Tobias Holzlehner 66 Can Kinship Come to the Rescue? 88 Trust and Cooperation across the Border between China and Mongolia 88 Nasan Bayar 88 Betrayed by Trust 102 Inter-Korean Relations across Northeast Asian Borders 102 Hyun-Gwi Park 102 The Trade Town of Manzhouli 122 Trust Created and Undermined 122 Ivan Peshkov 122 Différances of Doverie 144 (Mis)trust and the Old Faith in the Russian Far East 144 Dominic Martin 144 Trust, Chance and Disappointment 180 Real Estate Business in Russia’s Far East 180 Caroline Humphrey 180 Searching for Trust 206 Indigenous People in the Jade Business 206 Tatiana Safonova, István Sántha, and Pavel Sulyandziga 206 The Emergence of Cross-Border Electronic Commerce 230 Creativity and Declining Trust 230 Natalia Ryzhova 230 Index 252 List of Figures 7 Figure 1 Map of north-eastern Russia-China borderland 9 Figure 2 The Coat of Arms and official flag of Kyakhta, Russia 44 Figure 3 Advertisement for job vacancies in Russian border cities, Manzhouli commercial press, 2013 58 Figure 4 Map of the Russian Far East border region 71 Figure 5 The border crossing at Hunchun-Kraskino 72 Figure 6 The ‘Green Corner’ market for used Japanese cars, Vladivostok 78 Figure 7 Trucks lining up to cross the border to transport coal from Mongolia to China, 2013 92 Figure 8 Buyan standing reflectively by an unused railway, 2013 98 Figure 9 Chinese market in Ussuriisk, 2016 119 Figure 10 ‘Patriotic’ chairperson of the Vladivostok Old Believers Aleksandr Frolov (left) with Episcop German (centre) 160 Figure 11 A s”ezd (‘congress’) of Far Eastern Old Believers in the mid-1990s held in Bolshoi Kamen’ 160 Figure 12 A young couple negotiates a purchase in the ‘Eastern Breeze’ development, Vladivostok, 2013 191 Figure 13 The ‘Eastern Breeze’ complex, Vladivostok, 2013 192 Figure 14 Chinese buyers scrupulously explore an old Chinese object put on sale at Sotheby’s auction house in London, UK 213 Figure 15 Carl Fabergé’s Easter egg, made predominantly of jade from a private collection of Viktor Vekselberg, the fourth richest person in Russia. The object is on display at special private museum in Saint-Petersburg, Russia 216 Figure 16 One of the Sunshine’s operations. Guards reload raw jade to transport it across a river. Jade is on its way from mine to warehouse 220 Figure 17 Advertisement for a company offering help with on-line purchases in Manzhouli, China 242 This book focuses on northeast Sino-Russian border economies and how trans-border economies function in practice, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust. Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia – the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra- and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/30582/1/645265.pdf "The first English-language book to focus on northeast Sino-Russian border economies, 'Trust and mistrust in the economies of the China-Russia borderlands' examines how trans-border economies function in practice. The authors offer an anthropological understanding of trust in juxtaposition to the economy and the state. They argue that the history of suspicion and the securitised character of the Sino-Russian border mean that trust is at a premium. The chapters show how diverse kinds of cross-border business manage to operate, often across great distances, despite widespread mistrust."

In the series Solidarity and Identitya highly readable study of gift-giving in seventeenth- century Holland across the social spectrum of the period.