Xi’s visit to Russia is unlikely to spur more initiative from Russia to expand bilateral ties beyond trade agreements. This is mainly due to Russia’s misconceptions about China and the nature of their relationship.

As I first crossed the China-Russia border from Heilongjiang Province into Primorsky Krai back in 2007, I stepped into a different world. On the bus that took me across the border, the many Chinese passengers were far more friendly and talkative than the few Russian travellers on board, hauling back Chinese merchandise. I had left Suifenhe, a town bustling with activity, including Russian tourists and traders, and suddenly found myself in a desolate and unwelcoming Pogranichniy.

Most people who have crossed that border will recognise those contrasting impressions, which are symbolic of the two countries’ unequal standing. Last year, China’s GDP grew twice as fast as Russia’s. At the same time, investment as a part of GDP, a measure of potential future growth, was 46 percent in China versus only 23 percent in Russia. China’s growth in influence is truly global and multi-dimensional. Russia’s is mostly limited to the “Near Abroad”, and seems highly correlated with the price of oil and gas. Bilateral trade relations also reflect rising inequalities. Whereas in 2010 China became Russia’s leading trading partner, Russia was not in China’s top 10.Despite an 11 percent rise in the value of trade between the two countries in the past year, the potential for collaboration is far from fulfilled.

While Xi’s trip to Russia was widely discussed by China’s netizens and the media, it received much less attention in Russia. Other than the TV coverage of official ceremonies, there was little discussion beyond a few reports and opinion pieces. Those mostly emphasised the importance of Russia for China. An article about the visit in the well known business daily, Kommersant, was titled “China Needs a Successful Russia”–a phrase Xi used in his Moscow address. An op-ed in the reputable publication Vedomosti concluded by arguing that the difference in height of the two presidents should not be mistaken for a sign of Russia’s relative weakness: “Let China’s economy grow many times faster than Russia’s—its very growth is supplied by Russia’s oil and gas! Without it Xi would not be able to make Chinese relatively wealthy,” read the closing line. An editorial by a prominent Russia expert praised Russians “for having adjusted to China’s meteoric rise…” The extent of that adjustment was described by two words: “not panicking”.

Russians’ misconceptions about China extend far beyond these reactions to Xi’s visit. When I met a prominent Moscow-based investigative journalist in 2010, he seemed shocked by my interest in comparing the two countries’ media practices. “How can you compare us? We have absolutely nothing in common!” he said, in an accusatory tone. My conversations with intellectuals and scholars in Moscow revealed that many held similar opinions. Some even pictured today’s China as the Soviet Union of the 1970s. Others were in disbelief when I spoke about China’s investigative reporting, environmental activism, and the adaptiveness of the Chinese regime. Very few of my contacts in Moscow exhibited genuine curiosity for learning about their counterparts in China and for potentially engaging with them. Some Russian top officials appear more aware of China’s current standing and talk of a China “model”, but don’t seem to dwell too long on what this model entails.

Even in the Russian Far East, a region where more residents have been to China than to Moscow, the understanding of China is limited. While conducting research on Chinese migration to the Russian Far East, I found many Russians to be fearful of Chinese migrants and convinced that most of them wanted to settle permanently in Russia. That conviction is the result of a misperception of Chinese migrants’ priorities. “Russia is definitely not my first choice for work or living,” affirmed Zhu, a trader I met in Vladivostok. “My first choice was Australia, followed by Japan and Korea. I’m only here because the other options did not work out. I definitely plan to return to China eventually.” The hesitance to go to Russia is also notable among Chinese students and professionals. Students I talked to in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province, are more eager to study in Kazakhstan than Russia, while those from cities like Beijing or Shanghai aim for the United States and Europe. While some Chinese still end up settling in Russia, many do so out of necessity. My research with Professor Balzer at Georgetown University, found missed opportunities in labor cooperation between the two countries, rather than imminent threats of a Chinese takeover.

 While China could also do more to deepen bilateral ties, the unequal nature of the relationship calls for Russia to perfect its understanding of, and engagement with its neighbour. One of the cornerstones of China’s success is its willingness to learn from others. “Regarding economic development, we learn from whoever we can and bring back the best practices to China,” I was told by a research associate at the State Council. Ezra Vogel’s recent biography of Deng Xiaoping eloquently analyses these learning patterns, including the party’s thorough examination of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Russia has much to gain from adopting some of China’s curiosity and humility for its partners.

*This post was first published on http://www.thinkborders.com

Sayana’s work was recently featured on the website of Cambridge Research. For the interview and the video, click here.

Call for papers for the 5th “Asia Pacific Worlds in Motion” Conference. This year’s theme is Migration Beyond Borders.

The Conference will be taking place at the University of British Columbia on May 30-31st, and the deadline for abstracts is February 8th.

Inhabitants of the north Asian borderlands get used to seeing a mixture of scripts and languages all about them in their daily lives, though this can be a source of confusion as well as of illumination.

Nakhodka-Tsuruga Japanese Rock Garden, Nakhodka, Russia

SCO Stand at 2011 China-Eurasia Expo, Urumqi, Xinjiang, China

Only a small proportion of this mixing appears in the context of the governmental ties which exist across the region.  The rock garden declaring Nakhodka’s official friendship with the Japanese city of Tsuruga and the international stands at Urumqi’s China-Eurasia Expo provide orthographically and grammatically correct exceptions in an arena of communication often fraught with incomprehension and approximation.  Well-translated and well-presented bi- or trilingual examples such as these help to reinforce the sense of mutuality in circumstances where diplomatic cordiality is key.  Nevertheless, it is notable that, be it because of formatting, the density of meaning inherent in hanzi / kanji, or, the cynic might postulate, for more utilitarian reasons of one-upmanship, characters often seem to win out in terms of size.

Korean Restaurant, Vladivostok, Russia

Route 60 Bus, Vladivostok, Russia

Instances of Korean hangul in Vladivostok sometimes lend a much-needed air of authenticity to Korean establishments housed in unmistakably Soviet buildings.  The effort put into arranging a sign such as that on the Khangukkvan restaurant (to provide a suitably baffling Korean-Cyrillic-Latin transliteration) is in marked contrast however to some of Vladivostok’s city busses, imported second-hand from Pusan and still displaying route information for that city as they chug along Svetlanskaia, Okeanskaia or Aleutskaia Streets.

Mongolian / Chinese Printing and Packing Shop, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

Harbin Electronics, Suifenhe, China

In destinations which serve as key trade entrepôts it is commerce which drives diversity in scripts, often well beyond the binary complexity of the above examples.  Shops near Hohhot’s railway station advertise their services in both Cyrillic and Mongol bichig variants of Mongolian, as well as Chinese.  Suifenhe emporia compose mosaics of Russian, Chinese and both pinyin and Cyrillic transliterations of Chinese to suit, or possibly dazzle, every reader.

'Good Health' Chemists, Urumqi, Xinjiang, China

"For Your Baby", Suifenhe, China

Sometimes only half the message gets across: how would any Russophone passerby know that a chemists in Urumqi is called ‘Good Health’?  Perhaps they wouldn’t need to though, just as they wouldn’t need to be able to read the Uyghur street sign on the same shop.  Language after all is merely a tool, and a Russian with a weak stomach would not care to linger and pontificate about local branding practices.  Shoppers in Suifenhe might however stop for a moment to wonder about the decision of one children’s clothes supplier in the Chinese border town to effect a mid-sentence switch from Russian to English.  Although as likely as not even this would not slow down the trans-border shopper as he or she dashed around town before cramming a bursting baul onto a packed bus and returning home to similar linguistic trickery.

Lenin, Lenin Square, Khabarovsk, Russia

Lenin, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, Russia

Less jaw-dropping than their towering counterparts in Khabarovsk or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, diminutive Lenin effigies dotted around the former Sino-Soviet frontier nevertheless speak eloquently of the border’s complex past.

Lenin Bust, Sary Tash, Kyrgyzstan

The road which leads south from Osh, Kyrgyzstan divides in Sary Tash, with a southern branch swooping and soaring into the Pamirs and Tajikistan, and an eastward route snaking its way into Xinjiang, eventually leading to Kashgar.  Near the junction of the two mountain roads lies a small fenced-in building with a silver bust, the features of Vladimir Ilich just about discernable on what would otherwise look like any other frostbitten lump of eroded cement.  Formerly home to a Soviet border post, the dusty village provides lodging and a couple of small shops for travellers stopping off on the way south or east, a dead end within Kyrgyzstan, but a gateway to international possibility to those with the right papers.  Heavily laden Chinese lorries thunder past the bust at the crack of dawn, Uyghur drivers frantically keen to make it to the Irkeshtam Pass crossing as early as possible.  The overloading of such vehicles accompanying recent growth in cross-border trade completely destroyed the old Soviet route to the Pass, but a new Chinese road now makes the journey much smoother.  What Lenin would make of this florescence in commercial activity will forever remain unclear, indeed he might also wonder what his bust is still doing in Sary Tash at all.  In the face of the vicissitudes of history colossal mountains brood in the background, a gleaming snowy ridge providing this dusty village with a breathtaking backdrop.  Perhaps Lenin, and anyone else disorientated by historical change, might find solace in such powerful visions of nature’s eternal solidity.  Or perhaps not, for the reason many travellers stop off in Sary Tash is to climb one particular 7,000-metre Pamiri peak.  Its name?  Pik Lenina.

Lenin Bust, Yili Hotel, Yining, China

Stalin Road, Yining, China

 Just north of Hongqi (Red Flag) Square in Xinjiang’s Yining sits the Yili Hotel, a resort-like complex of low red buildings surrounded by pine forest.  Yet welcoming you to this tranquil idyll is an unlikely gatekeeper.  In gold this time, and in much better condition than Sary Tash’s sorry example, Lenin once again looks on.  The hotel buildings behind him have documented the tumultuous history of the town, and of this region where worlds overlap.  Before being a hotel, the buildings served as the Yili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture Sanatorium, and then its Number One Lodging House.  Further back though, and of more relevance to Lenin, it was the Russian presence in Yining and the surrounding Yili valley, which played a significant role in the region’s experience of the first half of the 20^th century.  Without moving or changing externally, the Hotel buildings served as five different kinds of consulate in their first eight decades, providing links between all possible combinations of Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, Qing Dynasty China, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic of China.  The Sino-Soviet split saw the final incarnation close in 1962 but the bust remained, presumably at home amongst the 19^th century Russian architecture with which Lenin would have been very familiar.  Soviet forces of various kinds swept in and out of Xinjiang throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, leaving Lenin and one of the town’s main thoroughfares, Stalin Road, as frozen epitaphs to a political brotherhood which died in its infancy after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech.  Nowadays, Kazakh businessmen and tourists staying at the hotel embody exchanges of a very different sort which now occur at this intersection of the old Chinese and Russian worlds.

In Belogorsk, Ussuriisk, and other smaller towns in the Russian Far East, Lenin statues point to a past which, whilst complex, mostly lies within the bounds of a single country: international as he was, Lenin was at least born in a place people called ‘Russia’.  In Kyrgyzstan, China and elsewhere, such images represent much more.

Lenin Statue, Belogorsk Railway Station, Russia

Lenin Statue, Ussuriisk Railway Station, Russia

Perhaps it is the shared experience during an otherwise unsettling transition, but crossing the borders between China and its Russian-speaking neighbours by road is always a more sociable experience than flying.  Or maybe it’s the weather, for shuffling from one foot to the other in valiant attempts to stay warm during a north Asian winter draws people closer together, both physically and emotionally.

Harbin - Vladivostok Bus

Loading / Unloading, Approaching Pogranichnyi

The heroic feats of the chelnoki and Primorye shop-owners heaving their bursting sacks from bus to border post, border post to car park, and back to bus again were entertainment enough.  Men and women alike sweated and swore, manhandling bedding, car parts, footwear, tea, fake foliage, household electronics and much more besides on and off scales as invariably sullen border guards glared at them, ensuring no one breached their personal weight allocation.  But beyond the spectacle of export in action, making the Pogranichnyi-Suifenhe crossing and back again in January 2008 also provided a memorable chance meeting.  Liza’s busy life had taken her to every corner of the former USSR, to the peak of sporting excellence as All-Union Badminton champion, through four husbands including an Armenian illegal gold-trader and a Captain in the Pacific Fleet, and from Nakhodka to Ekaterinburg in a battered Toyota imported from Japan.  As her story swept from Latvia, where her father had fought in the Great Patriotic War, to Dushanbe where she had lived before exchanging her apartment there for a new one in Nakhodka on the Pacific coast, it felt appropriate that we were now sitting in a Suifenhe side-street enjoying salat po-Kharbinski, one of a number of transnational dishes popular with Russian visitors to China’s Dongbei region.

Yining - Almaty Bus (note Cyrillic inversion)

Staying Warm?

Four years later in December 2011, the seventeen-hour bus ride from Yining/Ghulja in Xinjiang to Almaty featured far less food, but just as much interesting company.  Sustained for the entire journey by only an early morning nang flatbread and a bowl of milk tea, I lay shivering slightly under a pile of duvets on the top bunk of the bus.  Later, as our driver dabbled in the dark arts of Sino-Kazakh customs controls, I sat on the pile of rugs below and listened to tales of Kazakh experience on both sides of the border.  One lady, a Xinjiang Kazakh who had learnt excellent Russian, told me of life in her non-Russian-speaking husband’s aul in Kazakhstan, and about how her mum’s disapproval had put paid to her long-dreamt-of career as a spy.  During a power cut at the border post on the Kazakhstan side, a pogranichnik quizzed me about how far I thought Kazakhstan was behind the UK.  With the lack of electricity in the building preventing me from officially entering Kazakhstan I was able to say truthfully that even if I were interested in making such assessments, I was as yet completely unqualified to do so.  Only after being left in a dark alleyway in Almaty later that night would I have been in any position to compare any country to Kazakhstan.  But in the event I was much more interested in reflecting on how informal social experiences can be carved out of the formal administrative act of crossing a border surrounded by frozen scrub.

Road to the Border, Primorye, Russia

Parked on a Frozen Lake, Korgas Border Crossing, Kazakhstan