Still, the establishment of this frontier would have a long lasting impact on how space and identity were to be practiced and imagined.
Kazakhs inhabited a somewhat liminal space: dwelling on both sides of the border, they paid allegiance to both the Qing and Tsarist Russia. Although the Kazakhs were classified as tributaries of the Qing, many were beyond their direct control.
Following Qing conquest, Uyghurs were moved into the Ili River Basin area in order to form agricultural colonies. The entire border region, from the Tian Shan to Altai, rose up in revolt to form the East Turkestan Republic which lasted from to Lias ; Benson When Xinjiang fell to the communists, the region re-integrated into China proper. In , following the Sino-Soviet split, between 60 and thousand Kazakhs and Uyghurs, escaping famine and the political purges of the Great Leap Forward, migrated across the border to the Soviet Union.
The border was shut shortly after this Millward The primary task of these soldiers, known as the bingtuan or the Production-Construction Military Corps Shengchan jianshe bingtuan , was to reclaim desert land, farm it and fortify the border regions McMillen By there were , personnel assembled Toops ; by the s the figure rose, to over one million. The bingtuan , who own several large border-trading companies, are also heavily invested in border trade. With the rise of the market economy, this border region has also recently developed national parks, the most famous of which is the Kanas Lake Nature Reserve.
The border has moved place several times and has re-aligned ethnic identities. This has necessitated a fundamental shift in the articulation of how space is divided.
David Sneath et al. While the authors insist that any such technology is never totalised 26 , it is equally true that large-scale projects, such as that of the nation state, distribute homogenising technologies in an attempt to create collectively stable imaginaries.
As in most other nation states, maps of China are disseminated through books, television, stamps, propaganda posters and various other media.
Although many people in China remain map illiterate, the map of China functions as much as a powerful symbol as it does an actually-existing representation of the nation-state, taken from a vantage point several kilometres above the sky. This top-down gaze — what James C.
For Scott, this is part and parcel of a larger modernist project which strives to produce communities that are unmbiguous and clearly legible. While this paper touches on the multiple affordances of the border in daily practice, we also see that the nationalist discourse of a single, unified, unambiguous border is equally persistent. By way of a conclusion, I argue for the continued importance of the study of the nation-state project and its continuing role in shaping the way in which people think about space.
I visited several border towns and travelled up to mountainous areas near the border. Three episodes from these travels were particularly instructive. The man was married to a Mongolian woman and his brother to a Tuvan. He spoke fluent Kazakh and some Mongolian. When I met him, he and his family were living with a Kazakh household. The man would act as a tout for tourists, mostly Han Chinese from Eastern China who would be invited to stay the night in the house. There was money to be had in the trade of fox, wolf, bear and the gathering of the high-altitude caterpillar fungus.
Nevertheless, hunted animal goods are still traded in the area. Businessmen from the booming Chinese medicine industry in south China purchase goods from hunters by paying bribes to the park officials. Hunting, the man told me, was a difficult, risky affair. Because he and his hunting companions carried out their expeditions in December, the snowy terrain was treacherous and the weather bitterly cold; on one occasion, a member of his hunting team froze to death. Although some of the valleys had military patrols, the area was remote, lacked roads and was inaccessible in the winter.
Thus, it was possible to cross the border undetected. However, it was equally possible to cross and be caught.
The man revealed that he had once been captured by Kazakh officials and was forced to hand over his hunting catch in return for release.
On another occasion, he was handed over to the Chinese authorities, who made him chop wood for 15 days on the Chinese side of the border as punishment. The hunter informed me that this year would be his last year of hunting. He felt he was becoming too old for such high-risk activity.
Although Jimunai aspired to be a thriving border town, the bulk of international trade was conducted in the border town of Khorgos, several hundred miles to the south in the Ili River Basin. On my way to the trading area at the border, I met a Kazakh man of Chinese nationality in his early twenties who was doing contract work for the government. Every morning he would travel twenty minutes to the border where he was helping to build a new road that led to the border itself.
The man told me that he had already tried to make a life for himself in the coastal provinces of China. But before he even managed to leave Xinjiang, he got bogged down in the capital city, Urumqi, where he drank all his money away.
He then worked in Turpan for several months to make enough money to travel to eastern China. He finally made his way to the Chinese north-east Dongbei where he sold kebabs on the side of the road. The young man informed me that they are now far more prosperous than his family in China. With government assistance, they had started up a chicken farm and now had enough money to buy tractors.
He had never been to Kazakhstan but it had now become his dream to go. He explained to me that it was his hope to raise enough money building the border road so that he could enrol in a Russian language programme in Urumqi. From there he would continue on to Kazakhstan where he would join his extended family. He now faced the dilemma of how to return to Urumqi and avoid squandering his money again.
In the town itself, I began to enquire about how to access the glaciers. A local taxi driver said he could take us there the next morning. However the next morning, he arrived with bad news: it was not possible for me to visit the glaciers because the area was out of bounds to foreigners.
Usually, a military friend of his who patrolled the border would allow us through the check-point. However, because the Olympic Games were only weeks away, security had become much tighter.
After hearing of our attempts to get to the glacier, he insisted he could take us there; he had many former colleagues working at the border. Because this chapter is concerned with the persistence of the singular, I will touch briefly on issues of multiplicity, before providing a more in-depth analysis of the border as a singular, abstract entity.
By mainstream Han Chinese standards, this kind of heavily overlapping identity is increasingly rare. There is a phenomenological dimension present: namely that when the hunter is illegally crossing the border, he is not so much crossing an abstract line as he is immersed within a landscape in which the risks of animals, weather, border patrols and the like are all serious elements with which the hunter has to engage.
Regarding the young Kazakh man, this entails his daily travel to the border and his literal construction of it through his work as a builder. For the taxi-drivers, a dimension of their everyday experience of the border was ferrying travellers to and from Jimunai; as we have seen, it also occasionally involved taking tourists into the glaciated valleys along which the border ran. We can deduce from my trip to Jimunai that entry into the more sensitive of the border regions was itself a question of temporality and flexibility.
The tightening of the border during the Olympics indicates that the literal zone which constitutes the border, at the level of enactment, was an entity that literally expanded and contracted according to context. The hunter stands out as a case in point. It appears as if it was important for him, particularly when crossing illegally, to imagine the border precisely as a singular threshold. Deep in the Altai, there were no border fences and military patrols were widely interspersed.
Therefore, as he explained to me, he had to make estimations as to where the precise location of the border was. Whereas tracking a bear involved imagining its movements coupled with interpreting traces of its presence pawed trees; fresh dung , engaging with the border entailed imagining not only the potential presence of border patrols and their locations, but also the very real, but also very abstract, line that helped determine his legality at any given moment.
Of primary importance to Ingold is how one experiences and recalls the environment as one engages in it — not how it appears in abstract form, such as on a map. He states:. It is at the point where maps cease to be generated as by-products of story-telling, and are created instead as end-products of projects of spatial representation, that I draw the line between mapping and mapmaking. This suggests that even when an individual engages with the border in the dynamic way that the hunter does, it nevertheless persists as a single dividing line, akin to those drawn on maps themselves.
In his case, it was as if the border itself had become a line of desire beyond which lay future prosperity. Whereas before, this future prosperity seemed to lie a great distance away in inner China, it now lay beyond the fence that he lived so close to. While I occasionally met nationalistic Kazakhs who believed that northern Xinjiang should be incorporated into Kazakhstan, their nationalist aspirations were far more diluted than, say, the Uyghur population living predominantly in southern Xinjiang.
I never saw, for instance, a map that claimed northern Xinjiang as part of Kazakhstan. Many ethnic groups have a representative body and cultural centers. The Russian Constitution guarantees the right of all internal republics to have their own state languages, apart from Russian. It also guarantees the right of ethnic groups to preserve their native language and create conditions for their study and development.
Unfortunately, many Asian people from Russian republics are moving from their homes to Moscow or other economically developed cities. In more than half a million internal migrants moved to the European part of Russia.
Statistics on government salary arrears might explain the urge to leave. The Russian government census divides the population on the basis of ethnicities, but it is difficult to objectively decide as to which group can be classified as Asian.
The definition of the term Asian varies in different countries. Both western and eastern non-governmental researchers do not concur on the definition of Asians, and although they mostly tend to use the term Mongoloid there are exceptions. For example, Dr. A style guide by professor David Blakesley recommends using the term Asian to refer to people living in Asian countries such as "China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam" unless a given situation makes using a specific national term more appropriate than using the broader Asian term.
This article is part of the "Why Russia…? If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material. This website uses cookies. Click here to find out more. Why do some Russians look Asian? May 10 Many Russian citizens can technically be classified as Asians.
Getty Images. There are more than ethnic groups among the million inhabitants of Russia, from ethnic Russians who form 78 percent of the population to the Ket people of Siberia who number just over a thousand. Most ethnic Russians have a so-called European appearance, but there are many Russian citizens who could be classified as ethnically Asian. Why Russia History of Russia-Asia relations. Subscribe to our newsletter!
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