THE SEARCH FOR FRIENDSHIP

Deeper frontier and statist histories will be important to my arguments, particularly as I compare socialist and postsocialist friendships, but contemporary Hunchun presents both an official Friendship and a cross-cultural contact scenario which are of relatively recent vintage. Today's Sino-Russian Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation was signed in 2001 by Presidents Vladimir Putin and Jiang Zemin just as Russians were starting to come to Hunchun. Deng Xiaoping's “opening up” of China and post-Soviet loosening of border controls had permitted movement in both directions since the 1990s, and Hunchun joined earlier starters such as the towns of Suifenhe and Heihe as a popular cross-border destination around 2000. The thousands of Russian Far Easterners who now arrive annually comprise both longer-term settlers and people spending just a few days or weeks. Long-termers holding individual visas include pensioners, students (like the football players), teachers, and nightclub performers, while those on shorter visits come on group tour visas as shoppers (for household goods, clothes, toys, and auto parts, among other things), traders, leisure tourists, or medical patients (private Russian-oriented hospitals are numerous). However, even short-termers make repeat visits and roam Hunchun freely, their “tours” being largely nominal, and so regardless of length of stay extensive local familiarity and reiterative Sino-Russian relationships are common. Fieldwork put me into extensive contact with Russian and Chinese men and women of various backgrounds and durations of stay, and it is on their collective experiences that I draw.Footnote ⁶

Visually, Hunchun bears many trophies of a rapid departure from carefully curated, socialist internationalism (when little cross-border contact occurred) to a new neoliberal internationalization. The town's appearance and demographics have been transformed by income from a post-1990s remittance economy driven by Chosŏnjok sojourning in South Korea and PRC government investment aiming to make this an infrastructural “hub for Northeast Asia” (as ubiquitous publicity posters declare). The local streetscape forms a dizzying patchwork of architectural and linguistic cyphers, from a mock-tsarist Post Office to traditional Chinese gardens, South Korean-style numbered apartment buildings, and shopfronts displaying a jumble of Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean hangeul and, sometimes, Latin script English signs (×image 1). Trade and tourism, both domestic and cross-border, are among the primary local industries today, while the sclerotic remnants of older coal mining and forestry concerns rust on the margins. The Chosŏnjok outflux to Korea has been matched by Han in-migration from northern China. Contact here is thus facilitated by an interstate Friendship with socialist antecedents, but also unfolds in vernacular settings similar to many others globally over recent decades of post-Cold War mobility. These, in turn, lead to plentiful reflections from each side on the possibility for making friends in Hunchun.

Image 1:

Multilingual Hunchun shopfronts. The shop is called “Friends.” Author's photo.

Liuba, a retiree whose biography resembled those of many older Russians in Hunchun, offered a common perspective on the potential for cross-cultural friendship. Having worked as a civil servant in her nearby hometown of Slavianka, she had arrived six years previously and bought an apartment with her husband. An active organizer of Friendship events, she noted during our conversations that life this side of the border had many benefits, from safety and affordability to a bustling and neat atmosphere quite different from dilapidated eastern Russia. But when speaking of relationships, Liuba was less positive. Despite the length of her residency and her involvement in cross-cultural affairs, she had few if any Chinese friends. “The issue is,” she told me one summer day as we sat in a lakeside park, “that Chinese people want to be friends with you in exchange for something [za chto-to]. So, if someone is befriending you, it's clear they have something in mind. Maybe it's not necessarily monetary investment, but anyway it won't just be a straightforward relationship.”

From the opposite point of view, Xiaoling, a twenty-nine-year-old Han Chinese vendor from a Hunchun business family who had arrived from Qiqihar in neighboring Heilongjiang province several years before, voiced an equally common perspective. She ran a shop in the compound surrounding Hunchun's China-Russia border crossing and this job, together with a father who imported Russian seafood and a sister who guided tours to Vladivostok, gave her many opportunities to meet Russians. But her failure to cement relationships had left her frustrated: “Why is it so hard to make a Russian friend [Eluosi pengyou]?” she lamented over coffee. “I've been trying for years. Even studying Russian at a training center didn't help.” Xiaoling was motivated in part by the excitement of cross-cultural communication (jiaoliu) for its own sake, and this had sparked our friendship since she initially assumed I was Russian.

Significantly, she also shared her hope that friendship might facilitate starting a cross-border trading business. “But Russians seem so cold when I suggest this,” she concluded. Xiaoling's day job in the border compound embodied the coterminous limits of her amical and commercial ties. Her shop sold “Russian goods” (Ehuo) to Chinese tourists, but in a common quirk of such emporia, all her Ehuo—matreshka dolls, vodka, chocolate, pleather wallets—were faux-Russian goods made in Heilongjiang. Despite being on the border and trading in the frisson of international connection, this was a node of exclusively Chinese flows.

Liuba and Xiaoling's experiences speak of how encounters often unfold in this setting doubly primed—by the frontier social ecology and constant invocation of Sino-Russian Friendship—for cross-cultural ties. Theirs and others’ explicit, if fruitless, search for friends and friendship (pengyou/youyi in Chinese, drug/druzhba in Russian) sets places like Hunchun apart from settings where scholars have at times found the relationship as analytically slippery as these interlocutors found it practically elusive (Beer Reference Beer1998). Indeed, early functionalist anthropological studies (Fortes Reference Fortes1953; Wolf Reference Wolf and Banton1966), and some sociologists (Pahl Reference Pahl2000), dismiss friendship's existence beyond societies (usually Euro-American ones) where the absence of lineage obligations frees an individual to pursue volitional, affective non-kin relationships. More recent work in anthropology (Desai and Killick Reference Desai and Killick2013; Bell and Coleman Reference Bell and Coleman1999; Descharmes et al. Reference Descharmes, Heuser, Kruger and Loy2011) and elsewhere (Berenskoetter Reference Berenskoetter2007) has applied “friendship” as a flexible heuristic to interrogate various relationships not necessarily labeled “friendship,” complementing capacious reappraisals of kinship (Carsten Reference Carsten2000). But in Hunchun today friendship's overt existence demands an approach which differs from both of these precursors. Active searches for youyi and druzhba here require both that we take it seriously in an at-most-only-partially “European” setting and that we see it as more than an externally applied heuristic. We need to account for how explicitly named friendships are understood and operate rather than fitting diverse relations into a “friendship” rubric.

By returning of friendship qua friendship into the analytical fold I do not intend to posit youyi and druzhba as analytically the same—indeed, this is part of my point. In their own practical and linguistic settings each sits within distinct, if overlapping semantic fields, with dictionary definitions suggesting youyi's association with more generically “friendly” interaction and druzhba's with greater levels of intimacy. Yet crucially, as well as being constantly discussed in daily life in Hunchun the two are a long-equated translational pair, occupying cognate spaces in Russian and Chinese social science, literature, and politics, of which treaty titles are only one expression. Much of this formal equivalence-drawing, I suggest, is itself a product of the long history of socialist internationalism and transference. I thus proceed here from the fact that the two are simultaneously anchored as equivalents within notionally reciprocal and equal (post)socialist state relations, and yet also operate differently in everyday life. Liuba, Xiaoling, and Alesha's frustrations all invite us to consider why everyday Sino-Russian encounters in Hunchun, despite in principle offering chances for a vernacular “translingual” (Liu Reference Liu1995) rapprochement between youyi and druzhba, only rarely produce this. My proposal for how to make sense of this is a scalar one.

SCALES: JUST A DIFFERENCE

Drawn from the Hunchun ethnographic setting itself, a scalar approach allows us analytically to accommodate interpersonal and interstate relations together in a new way. Closer examination of everyday interactions here shows that Russian and Chinese counterparts diverge most in their readiness to make friends with someone seen as Other, and it is these differential approaches to difference—differences over difference—which indicate that interstate Friendship is a “scaled-up” version of the vernacular bond rather than an independently operating level of relationship. Among exclusively Chinese or Russian friends, practices of youyi and druzhba may involve varied approaches to difference of various kinds, but here in Hunchun the most pivotal contours of difference perceived by both sides lie categorically between Chinese and Russian counterparts. These generalized senses of Otherness which determine whether or not relationships work out are constructed in various ways discussed below. But their wider importance is already evident in Liuba and Xiaoling's own interactions. As Liuba reflected further on her encounters with apparently instrumental Chinese people: “Well, at the beginning it bothers you, but then later you realize that's just how it is here, it's just a difference [prosto raznitsa takaia].” “The Chinese,” she continued, “have a different mentality [chuzhoi mentalitet]” around relationships. Her familiarity with this had seen her move from initial frustration, through understanding Chinese relationship practices as an immutable cultural difference, and finally to accepting this difference, notwithstanding its implications for her social life: no Chinese friends. Difference thus posed a potential barrier to relating.

Xiaoling's reference to prospective “Russian friends” was equally revealing. More coded than Liuba's outright invocation of fundamental Otherness, this nevertheless gestured at how difference is less of an impediment to Chinese friend-making: “Russian” may be not simply a modifier for “friend,” but a characteristic of a kind of person whose Otherness is enfolded within feelings of friendship. But Russians on the receiving end of efforts to make them “Russian friends” have less tolerance for the idea that friendship be qualified in this categorical way.

As I demonstrate below, this shows that, notwithstanding extensive intercommunity familiarity in this frontier space, each side largely interacts with the other as Chinese or Russian people first and foremost. This makes the dynamics of everyday relations concurrently active on the state scale since differences running parallel to the Sino-Russian border have simultaneous vernacular and official significance.

The idea that interpersonal and interstate thus represent scales of the same kind of relationship builds on Biao Xiang's (Reference Xiang2013) theorization of “multiscalar” ethnographic practice, and allows us to address blind spots within two existing strands of research into these relations. On one hand, International Relations scholarship has of late made room for growing interest in several “reflectivist” turns (Wehrer Reference Wehrer2019), encompassing everyday International Relations, micropolitical, cultural (Callahan Reference Callahan2001), relational, feminist, non-state, environmental, and social constructivist (Theys Reference Theys, McGlinchey, Walters and Scheinpflug2017) approaches, including in East Asia (Nordin and Smith Reference Nordin and Smith2018; Koschut and Oelsner Reference Koschut and Oelsner2014) and the former-USSR (Bukh Reference Bukh2020; Hopf Reference Hopf2002). Yet as noted by the editors of a recent special issue, there is little consensus on how to theorize “the everyday” within inter-polity relations, and state affairs remain a priority (Björkdahl, Hall, and Svensson Reference Björkdahl, Hall and Svensson2019: 124).

From the opposite point of departure, state-focused anthropology has less difficulty conceiving of the everyday, how the “social life of the state” permeates intimate lived experience (Ssorin-Chaikov Reference Ssorin-Chaikov2003; Humphrey Reference Humphrey2004), or how the state itself operates socially (Scott Reference Scott1998). But these studies rarely discuss everyday experiences of ties among states, even when interstate relations feature obliquely in work on borders (Reeves Reference Reeves2014; Simpson Reference Simpson2014), or in multi-sited (Marcus Reference Marcus1995) or “bifocal” (Inda and Rosaldo Reference Inda and Rosaldo2008) migration studies. Similarly eliding state-state concerns per se, research into intercultural friendships has generally been conducted within single settler-colonial settings (Reina Reference Reina1959; Gudykunst Reference Gudykunst1985; Brandt Reference Brandt2013), or in cosmopolitan cities (Vincent, Neal, and Iqbal Reference Vincent, Neal and Iqbal2018).

Together, whether privileging the interstate and marginalizing the interpersonal or focusing on state effects without scrutinizing actually existing interstate relations, these approaches implicitly separate the two into disconnected levels (Wehrer Reference Wehrer2019). Xiang's scalar paradigm allows us to bridge the gap. Based on research with a Beijing-based migrant community from China's Zhejiang province, Xiang primarily aims to offer an alternative to “multi-sited” approaches which would see Zhejiang hometowns/Beijing as different “sites,” instead arguing that these must be understood as overlaid “emergent” and “taxonomical” scales of action and analysis. This approach shows how actions and events on the more hierarchical and bounded taxonomical scale, exemplified by state regulations to which Zhejiang migrants are subject in Beijing, also have a valence on the emergent scale as they play out in the migrants’ hometown communities. Conversely, developments on the fuzzier, “actor-centric and activity-specific” emergent scale have taxonomical consequences as, for example, individual migrant business dealings carry simultaneous significance across the wider province and country.

Correspondingly in today's Hunchun, while on one hand state-scale postsocialist Friendship activates the downscale possibility for emergent friendships, those vernacular everyday relationships also have analytical value on the state scale. This is because of the importance of Sino-Russian difference to them. Xiang's disruption of the fixity of sites, and his argument that all events, actors, and interactions are “simultaneously located at a particular taxonomical scale and an emergent one” (Reference Xiang2013: 285) is thus equally useful in dismantling the rigid “level”-based approach to interstate and interpersonal relationships. As interstate and interpersonal bonds interpenetrate one another, holding taxonomical and emergent in mind together reveals both the “institutional significance of … daily life” (ibid.: 288) and its inverse. I now return to day-to-day friendship practices in Hunchun to show what they reveal about relations among states. Toward the end of the article, I then turn to reciprocal consideration of how interstate relations have simultaneous significance in everyday interactions.

MUTUAL ETHNOGRAPHIES

While Chinese and Russian interlocutors each see the other as Other, the possibility of befriending someone different is viewed asymmetrically. However, merely observing this is insufficient: as existing studies have shown, difference may be both an impediment to relating (Balibar Reference Balibar2005) and inherent to certain forms of sociality (Stasch Reference Stasch2009), and so there is a need to understand ethnographically how it is constructed in specific settings. With Hunchun exemplifying a little-considered scenario wherein people with different perspectives on difference interact, I will now show how senses of generalized difference emerge on each side.

Depending on the context of an encounter, Hunchun interlocutors discern difference in a variety of ways. While Liuba and Xiaoling diverged over instrumental versus affective concerns, the football match exposed issues around formality and spontaneity. I will treat these in turn, examining more closely Chinese and Russian counterparts’ ethnographies of one another, before showing how specific relationship-making patterns are enfolded within wider “cultural” differences perceived by each side. Russian perceptions of excessive Chinese formality around friendship, or Chinese complaints of unpredictable Russian spontaneity, ultimately reflect only individual strands within wider bundles of perceived Otherness which may or may not be accommodated within friendships. Emergent relations are thus negotiated around taxonomical-scale difference between cultures (Russian kul'tura, Chinese wenhua), mentalities (mentalitet, sixiang), and customs (obychai, xisu).

The dissectional approach taken to show this may appear a somewhat bloodless denial of the processual elements of everyday relationship-making. However, this again is justified by the ethnographic setting which demonstrates precisely that each side interacts with the other through reified notions of culture rather than, for example, as fellow frontierspeople. In general, this allows little opportunity for more durative, processual patterns of relating to get off the ground, something immediately apparent in the field of instrument and affect.

Ideals and Practice

Daily interactions in Hunchun thus see Russians advocating friendship based on spontaneity and affect, and Chinese residents more open to combining instrument, formality, and feeling. As an outsider to both social worlds, I did recognize each side's broad diagnoses of their troubles during my own interactions, both here and extending back to years living in China and Russia. Conversations with local Chinese interlocutors, from shopkeepers to my host family, would cover all manner of topics from global affairs to marital troubles and health. But with striking regularity, discussion would turn to how our friendship would be a good basis for selling something in the Western world I was seen to embody. Conversely, Russian friendships entailed high expectations of affective commitment and I found, for example, that any flaky last-minute change of plan from me would generate a larger cloud of sarcasm about being a “great friend” than I was used to in the UK. My own friend-making thus sometimes seemed to hover in the in-between, since I felt too circumspect about diving into quixotic marketing schemes to blend in with Chinese friends, and too flighty and insincere to live up to Russian demands.

Such broad divergences, as already suggested, resemble the ideal-types documented in more culturalist analyses, yet even as my own experiences suggested that neither side's day-to-day relationships—either within or between groups—hove uniformly to the above-mentioned patterns, I found they were constantly invoked as people reflected on their social lives in Hunchun. Mutual ethnographies saw Russians echoing early functionalist privileging of sentimentality and choice in friendship, while Chinese perspectives more closely resembled recent anthropological openness to formality and instrumentality in the tie. Russian idealizations were no more idealizing than Chinese ones, but as different lines separating friendship from other things were drawn, the fact that Russian views matched those of early anthropologists may be unsurprising if we consider their common broadly “European” outlook, one incidentally also shared by Soviet propagandists during the Cold War (image 2).

Image 2:

“American-Style Friendship,” Veniamin Markovich Briskin, Moscow 1954. The (probably antisemitic) portrayal of the American “friend” shows him buying “national independence” (the words on the letter). The transactionalism and unfreedom of capitalist relationships is thus contrasted with notionally purer, bounded, Soviet socialist bonds. From the Sergo Grigorian Collection, with permission.

While it is beyond my scope here to discuss, for example, “polluted” Russian friendships that do involve business or Chinese ones that deliberately exclude it, important questions remain about why the idealizations documented here play such a prominent role in Hunchun. In cross-cultural interactions, what might normally appear to be culturalist analytical views of friendship float to the surface as intimate, personal concerns: in anthropological terms, it is as though the “etic” interpretive framework of an outsider seeps into each side's internal, “emic” social practice. This means that rather than translingual rapprochement between youyi and druzhba occurring on the frontier, differences between idealized visions of each relationship continue to play a determinant role. The idealization thus becomes the process.

To understand this better, I suggest, we may examine the wider bundles of perceived static cultural difference in which relational elements such as instrument/affect and formality/spontaneity are seen to be embedded. Grasping how each side is in fact negotiating relationships around perceptions of more generalized Otherness will allow us then to recontextualize interstate Friendship.

THE EXOTIC OTHER

The conceptions of difference around which everyday friend-making pivots amount to often-racializing Orientalist and Occidentalist visions of static Otherness, whose exoticism is striking given constant mutual contact. This tendency likely owes something to an inheritance, on both sides, of “vernacular” (post)socialist social science (Kruglova Reference Kruglova2017), which determines that every “people” possesses a particular mentality and customs. Thus, identification of one's counterpart and their behavior as “Russian” or “Chinese” over-determines encounters that might otherwise be more heterodox. As in Mei Zhan's ethnography of Shanghai international students studying traditional Chinese medicine, each side is attuned to the generalized differences that distinguish their encounters with the “other world”: while Zhan's interlocutors are skeptical of things which seem insufficiently “Chinese” to be Chinese medicine (even if they are) (Reference Zhan2009: 130), Chinese and Russian counterparts, despite interacting in countless day-to-day settings, channel their relationships through categorical frameworks of difference that they then match up with idealizations of friendship. This gives Sino-Russian friendship patterns their multiscalar utility, for like the everyday business dealings of Biao Xiang's interlocutors unfolding in intimate hometown settings, the dynamics of these relations are simultaneously “national in scope,” with resonances on the taxonomical state scale (Xiang Reference Xiang2013: 288).

Russian evaluations of generalized Chinese difference are sometimes guardedly positive in tone, since China is seen as a stimulating and alluring destination. The small Russian tour firms, which have just two or three staff and bring shorter-term visitors across the border, attest to this, boasting names that depict the modest distances they cover between decidedly provincial locations as leaps between worlds: “World of Travels” (Mir Puteshchestvii) or “Roads of the World” (Dorogi Mira) (×image 3). Racializing, negative attitudes are also present, and aside from condemnations of “cunning” Chinese instrumentalism, Russians who own apartments say they never lease one to Chinese tenants because “you'll never get it clean again.” But with or without value judgements, attributions of Otherness to “the Chinese” or generic “Asians” are accompanied by statements invoking “just a difference,” “alien mentality,” or that “that's the culture.”

Image 3:

Poster for Roads of the World tour company featuring exotic pagoda. Retrieved from dorogi-mira.ru.

Reciprocal Chinese views of the neighboring maozi (“hairies,” an unflattering northeastern term for Russians) or zhandou minzu (“combative people,” an irony-tinged label invoking purported Russian pugilism and stubbornness) similarly frame direct neighbors as distant and exotic. If the Chinese are “Asian” to Russians, then Russia's essentialization as “Europe” is most evident in Hunchun's main nighttime entertainment spot, “Europe-style Street” (Oushi jie). Built in the mid-2000s, the street forms a confounding parade of lurid Disneyesque buildings with turrets and cornicing, plaster models of Brussels landmark Mannekin Pis atop Corinthian columns, and bars named “Beerlin” (sic) and “Petersburg.” Mirroring Russian tour company names, advertisements for Chinese tours to Russia blur generic views of “European” buildings (image 4). Chinese discussions of how many Russians live in Hunchun invert the numerical inflation of racializing “yellow peril” discourses (Larin Reference Larin, Kotkin and Wolff1995), evoking masses of inscrutable Others. The two hundred some Russians in Hunchun form a small if visible proportion of the population, but Chinese talk of thousands of Russian residents with dozens of children in local schools is ubiquitous. (I was able to discover five children, at most.)

Image 4:

Poster for Vladivostok tour displaying the Moscow History Museum, 4,000 miles away. Flyer handed out on streets of Hunchun.

Yet differences over these symmetrically projected visions of difference are key to friendships. Tellingly, even Russians who, unlike Liuba, see themselves as having successfully befriended Chinese people nevertheless share her perception of immovable Chinese Otherness. Vova, the football team captain and a long-term Hunchun-resident in his thirties, considered himself a master of friend-making and would regale me with evidence of his “cultural” adaptations: “The Chinese never change, so you have to do what they do,” he said, illustrating his point with a story about meeting a local official. “The man was sitting at his desk and I handed him some sweets. Then I saw in the cabinet behind him he already had the same sweets! But he still thanked me and ate mine.” This, Vova observed, showed the importance of ceremony in Chinese friendship. “But,” he added, “although lots of Russians know you should do this and develop ‘feelings’ [he used the Chinese word ganqing], few bother.”

Other Russians with Chinese friends similarly described the need for cultural metamorphosis or smekalka, a uniquely Russian flexibility in challenging situations. I frequently heard the proverbial equivalent to “when in Rome…,” namely “do not enter another's monastery with your own charter.” Although Liuba, Vova and others described opposite outcomes, they shared a view of Otherness as a potential obstacle to friendship which, whether it can be overcome or not, must always be reckoned with. Rather than creating new, hybrid spaces between druzhba and youyi, Russians uphold boundaries, but may at times vault them into a distinct Chinese cultural realm.

Chinese transformation in the opposite direction was not unheard of, and some I met had indeed developed a taste for the spontaneous Russian “singing and dancing” referenced by Zhihao. But more often Chinese friendships in Hunchun showed that difference need not be such a barrier and indeed—as with “Russian friends”—it may be an intrinsic component of affective friendships. Ascription of the label “Russian” reflects a maintenance of explicit status positions in Chinese relationships of a kind noted by numerous scholars. Notwithstanding the recently documented “individualization” in PRC society (Yan Reference Yan2009), relationship-making has been shown to involve reproduction of categorical ties such as “classmate,” “colleague,” or “fellow villager” rather than of a unitary subject (Smart Reference Smart, Bell and Coleman1999; Kipnis Reference Kipnis1997: 36–37). As Xiaowei Zang notes in a comparison of Han Chinese and Hui Muslim friendships, the former often make friends around “status blocks or cultural boundaries” while still valuing individual choice (Reference Zang2003: 65). Even relational dyads which, like Chinese/Russian, imply status differentiation still encode a balance of reciprocal ganqing. Degrees of familiarity or expected commitment of course differ between peers (e.g., classmate/classmate) and non-peers (guest/host), but in Hunchun it is evident that, as between guest and host, from a Chinese perspective friendship with a foreigner whose foreignness is integral to the friendship need not be a qualitatively different, affect-free tie.

Russians, though, have seen minimizing difference, such as that represented by formal or transactional tendencies, as key for druzhba (Kharkhordin and Kovaleva Reference Kharkhordin, Kovaleva and Kharkhordin2009: 74–75), achieved through abovementioned obshchenie, which overcomes boundaries of difference as “everyone's personhood [is] dialogized to produce a common intersubjective sociality” (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006: 148).Footnote ⁷ Russians therefore balk at being a “Russian friend” precisely because the term encodes a category distinction incompatible with intersubjective communion. Thus even as, or rather partly because, Chinese intentions to make friends are translated into Russian at formal Friendship events, little vernacular mediation with youyi occurs and processual approaches are thwarted in their infancy.

Although I wish to avoid origin-seeking or determinism, these patterns might be seen as explicable given wider traits of the two “worlds” (per Mei Zhan or the bus companies) that converge in Hunchun. For one thing, Chinese and Russian societies are institutionalized to differing extents, and so Russian friendship based on deep trust and dissolved difference may befit an environment rich in cultures of informality (Ledeneva Reference Ledeneva2006) and lacking more reliable Chinese-style relationship-anchoring mechanisms, from government to lineages. Mutual contact may also help us understand China and Russia's places within anthropological debates over reciprocity, economic morality, conditionality of relationships, and the place of the sacred. Encounters here appear to bring one group who put work into separating “pure” gifts from commodities (Gregory Reference Gregory1982; Laidlaw Reference Laidlaw2000), and correspondingly sacred unconditional relationships from transactional economic ones, together with a second group whose reciprocity is rooted in an elaborate, if no less sacred, register of entangled gift-based and emotional exchange (Yang Reference Yang1994). As Yunxiang Yan has noted, even in postsocialist northeast China, where “Confucian” and kin-based sociality patterns have diminished amid recent political and social upheaval, even relatively informal postsocialist relationship-making—for example seeking “back doors” into new social networks—still involves a blend of ethical and instrumental concerns (Reference Yan2003: 39–40).

Yet even if Hunchun offers each side ample chances to observe the other's relative interest in material exchange, formality, emotional expression, and spontaneous openness, actually making other-worldly friendships and thus shifting the parameters of the sacred within youyi and druzhba proves difficult. Having accounted for this, we are now equipped with an analytical frame to reappraise Friendship among states. State-scale youyi and druzhba are, as noted, anchored as translationally equivalent. Yet everyday Sino-Russian interactions, whether at Friendship events, in shops, or elsewhere, continue to stumble over several overlaid contours of differentiation—among trade partners, notional hosts/guests, or cultural Others—all broadly coextensive with the interstate border. Emergent relational dynamics thus activate contours of difference which apply at the taxonomical scale, and knowing what these are we can now scale up our analysis to study state relations anthropologically. Categorical difference, it turns out, is of pivotal practical and analytical importance here too.

(POST)SOCIALIST STATE FRIENDSHIP

To see how the dynamics of interpersonal relationships operate among states, it is first useful to explore further how postsocialist friendship compares to that under high socialism. This is a complex picture involving both divergences and important continuities.

As already noted, conception of the Sino-Russian relationship as a Friendship owes much to its forceful promotion as the official bond both between China and the USSR, and among multiethnic populations within PRC and Soviet borders. Application of friendship in socialist international relations grew out of 1930s use of “Friendship of Peoples” (Druzhba narodov) to describe ties between the USSR's many ethnic groups (Martin Reference Martin2001: 270). Following the October 1949 establishment of the PRC, and after several decades of more-than-friendly engagement with Soviet socialism among Chinese revolutionaries (McGuire Reference McGuire2017), a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance was signed during a 1949–50 visit to Moscow by Mao Zedong. Five years later, the alliance between the USSR and the seven European Warsaw Pact states was instantiated by a Friendship treaty whose Russian title differed by only one word from its East Asian antecedent. These Friendships were animated by cultural events, joint building projects (Friendship Bridges link China to Russia and other postsocialist neighbors including North Korea and Vietnam), and a massive transference of Soviet industrial, military, and political technologies to China during the 1950s (Kaple Reference Kaple1994) (image 5), when the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association also became the largest single mass organization in the PRC (Li Reference Li2018: 36).

Image 5:

“We strengthen our friendship in the name of peace and happiness,” in Russian and Chinese. From the Sergo Grigorian Collection, with permission.

However, even during this crimson Sino-Soviet efflorescence—when both also sealed Friendship ties with North Korea—Hunchun remained, as it had been since its 1714 foundation as a Manchu-Qing garrison, a relative backwater. Whatever the formal unity and cross-border “euphoria” (Bulag Reference Bulag2003: 757) of PRC-USSR-DPRK Friendship, this quiet, mostly Korean county town saw at-most-modest and strictly regulated contact across the borders on its outskirts. Minimal movement between Hunchun and neighboring Russian Primorskii region made Sino-Soviet Friendship something borderlanders generally read about in newspapers or celebrated with compatriots. Local Chosŏnjok with kin across the sluggish River Tumen in Korea were more habitual border-crossers, but even this dwindled as competing Kim and Mao cults strained PRC-DPRK relations from the 1960s. Occasional dance troupe or delegation visits were the sole, often literally choreographed expression of frontier amity with which a select few Hunchun attendees engaged.

Increasing fortification all along the 7,600 kilometer Sino-Soviet border during the 1950s (Urbansky Reference Urbansky2012) made Sino-Soviet Friendship resemble cognate projects elsewhere. Similar controls on vernacular interaction existed among most Friendly states, leading scholars of socialist internationalism to question the very idea of Friendship: Soviet Friendship of Peoples (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005), Eastern European alliances (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2019), Vietnamese (Bayly Reference Bayly2007) and North Korean (Young Reference Young2019) Friendships have all been seen as at best empty rhetoric and at worst cynical mobilization of fictive human warmth for imperialist purposes. Even when modest contact among citizens did occur, socialist governments are widely understood to have disliked their populations actually mixing with “foreigners” (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2019; McGuire Reference McGuire2017: 287).

Understandably therefore, Yan Li argues that Sino-Soviet amity “had nothing at all to do with promoting personal relationships between the two peoples” (Reference Li2018: 28), an argument which seems all the more credible given how quickly Friendship turned to enmity. The 1960s–1980s Sino-Soviet split was, as older Hunchun interlocutors on both sides attest, a period of near-total isolation from what was going on just over the Sino-Russian border ridge. Around a 1969 border conflict over Zhenbao/Damanskii Island, 500 kilometers to the north, the town was suffused with hostile propaganda declaiming the USSR's purported “revisionism” and “socialist imperialism”—suspicions of which, as Austin Jersild (Reference Jersild2014) notes, had been present even under high Friendship. While views on the ground of course varied, the transition to enmity may have been smoother for populations who—not really knowing one another—were more easily convinced that the nearby Other was now a foe.

For ordinary people in postsocialist Hunchun, therefore, continuities between Sino-Soviet Friendship and today's intercultural contact are confined largely to the realm of myth. Personal recollections of past cross-border dynamics as often feature the recriminations of the more recent split as they do wistful references to China's “Soviet older brother” (Sulian lao dage). Yet, importantly for our broader understanding of official Friendship, while the tie may have evaporated in the specifically 1960s Sino-Soviet case, neither side abandoned it as a mode of interstate relating. At local and national levels, Chinese and Soviet celebrations of Friendships with, for example, the Global South, endured beyond the split in ways still evident today. As in many spheres, China's post-Mao shift to a more marketized economy has not been accompanied by equivalent changes in the symbolism and institutions of state, and so almost all Beijing's significant international relationships remain suffused in Friendship, from African nations such as Tanzania and Angola to Pakistan, Europe, and Central Asia. In June 2018, Putin was awarded The Order of Friendship, the PRC's highest international honor, at a ceremony in which Xi described him as his “best and most intimate friend” (see image 6).Footnote ⁸ Today's Russian Federation has more formal discontinuities with the USSR than the PRC does with its earlier selves, but, as in many other parts of the (post)socialist world, elements of the friendship-diplomatic complex remain intact here too. Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Cuba, and North Korea all have Friendship Associations to manage external relations and confer their own Friendship Medals on foreign dignitaries: like youyi and druzhba, dostyq, dustlik, amistad, and chinsŏn thus remain one another's formal Kazakh, Uzbek, Spanish, and Korean translations.

Image 6:

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin adorn a wall during a Day of Friendship to mark the opening of a new martial arts club in Hunchun, 2015. Author's photo.

Yet if this explains why socialist-style atmospherics clothe renewed post-Soviet Sino-Russian relations, the fact that postsocialist Friendship now allows for everyday engagements among citizens in Hunchun is not wholly ignored in official messaging. Marking a post-split thaw in relations which began in the late 1980s, the 2001 Jiang-Putin Friendship Treaty includes an element absent in its Mao-Stalin predecessor, namely “good neighborliness” (Chinese mulin, Russian dobrososedstvo). The high formalism of earlier treaties cast states as disembodied entities floating in space, unencumbered by the physicality of frontier relations. But good neighborliness—also featuring in a China-Southeast Asia treaty mooted by Xi in 2013—reflects a new era of acknowledged contact and human mobility. Everyday interaction is indeed a core feature of twenty-first-century international Friendships as Chinese workers, technicians, and others ride Belt and Road vectors outward, and foreign students, traders, and migrants come to China and interact far from established networks. Having already discussed how such transnational interactions unfold in the Sino-Russian case, and the pivotal importance of difference to these, I will now reappraise the official tie in light of everyday friendship and show why the two may be out of step. The socialist-era ignoring of Sino-Russian neighboring is an entry-point here, for it reflects the importance of bounded categorical difference among discrete states as a tenet of interstate Friendship well before high socialism.

BORDERS OF DIFFERENCE

Everyday friendships in Hunchun see each side approach difference asymmetrically, but interstate Friendship, by virtue of its embeddedness in a hegemonic international political system, has a kind of forced symmetry. This is because states must, to use a geometrical metaphor, tessellate as spatially and administratively commensurate units. Categorical differences parallel to those that are pivotal in Hunchun must therefore notionally carry the same weight in, for example, Moscow and Beijing's approaches to druzhba and youyi. Considering interstate Friendship's deeper history sheds further light on this.

As political scientist Evgeny Roshchin (Reference Roshchin2009a: 126–32) shows, Russia's first eighteenth-century encounters with diplomatic Friendship came as growing interactions with European states saw Muscovite Tsars move from issuing “charters” (gramoty) unilaterally declaring “love” for recipient powers to reciprocal exchanges of treaties expressing druzhba. This was coterminous with a process whereby states themselves were being understood as bounded, post-Westphalian sovereign entities. Unlike love among fuzzy polities with blurred boundaries, such as old Muscovy, Friendship described relations between geographically discrete and qualitatively commensurate units, serving as “a defined guarantee for … control over a unified territory, the defense of borders, and a guarantee of order” (Roshchin Reference Roshchin2009b: 410). Friendship, statehood, and exclusive sovereignty thus became mutually constitutive since identifying another state as a friend entailed common submission to a legible regime of linear borders (see also Derrida Reference Derrida2005).

Shifting understandings of everyday relationships underlay this novel application of “friendship.” European conceptions of what friendship is as a personal relationship have long changed in line with sociopolitical transformations (Grayling Reference Grayling2013), and the post-Enlightenment era of burgeoning Westphalian statehood was a time when, at least in intellectual circles, it was seen as a bond among bounded, self-possessing individuals (Kon Reference Kon1987: 9). These ideas, I suggest, were thus reflexively mapped onto states at a time when new political entities and new types of statehood were being born from revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the architects of the era's political transformations and the promoters of rugged personal amity were often the same (invariably) men. In Russia, intellectual architects of Peter the Great's reforms developed the idea of the agentive “self” (samost’) (Kalugin Reference Kalugin2009: 188, 280–81), while robust American republican individualist Ralph Waldo Emerson saw interpersonal friendship as “an alliance of two large, formidable natures” (Reference Emerson1993: 47–48).

Interstate Friendship thus had the culturally specific Euro-American idea of categorial differentiation among bounded entities at its core from the outset. Given their common conceptual inheritance, Westphalian polities and sentimental individual persons were framed as cognate bodies making sovereign decisions to engage in the bond. This, then, was the idealized vision which proliferated from the USSR, a Russian-inflected apotheosis of many of post-Enlightenment modernity's most categorical ideals and formal taxonomies. Twentieth-century socialist internationalism, with its repudiation of colonial border-transgression, ensured that the idea of friendship among agentive entities separated by linear contours of difference was inherited by the PRC, the DPRK, and other states which traced tangled threads of heredity back to European revolutionary republicanism (Skocpol Reference Skocpol1979).

In this context, interstate Friendship's power may indeed have lain in its ability to overstep linear boundaries and forge a kind of pooled political subjectivity cognate with that which Russians seek in Hunchun today: the promise of socialist “internationalism” itself arguably rested on the idea that discrete actors had separately chosen to pursue a common cause. In practice, of course, a tongue-in-cheek reading of the Soviet government's willingness to intervene in the domestic affairs of its Eastern European Friends, and the fact that from Afghanistan to Angola it was only through extensive “help” that Moscow-friendly governments were installed over the twentieth century, might suggest more-than-expected compatibility with a Russian-derived openness to overstepping boundaries of difference. Yet categorical differences among “independent” states (per the Soviet poster in image 2) remained a vital conceptual totem.

Returning to consideration of China, the idea that socialist Friendship entailed the maintenance of formal difference notwithstanding indivisible unity raises curious questions. As a socialist state whose 1949 Communist revolution had come about only partially thanks to Soviet assistance, the PRC rested on cultural underpinnings in which friendship and relationality were understood very differently compared to in Europe or the Soviet Union (Yang Reference Yang1993). Yet Sino-Soviet Friendship, like other bonds among revolutionary socialist states celebrating powerful separateness but also shared political objectives, may in fact have appeared more compatible with vernacular difference-retaining Chinese friendships theorized here. I return to the implications of this.

A scalar approach to the interface between interpersonal and interstate friendships thus shows how Hunchun's emergent ethnographic context helps us reappraise taxonomical ties among (post)socialist states. On both scales, I have shown, parallel contours of difference are pivotal, but while these are approached asymmetrically in everyday relationships, among states they must ideally be seen symmetrically. I now reverse the direction of analysis to show how the actual, and rather less ideal, operation of interstate dynamics has downscale consequences for everyday friendships too. Thus far I have dealt with idealization on both scales, but moving deeper into the practical realm reveals the messy ways in which multiscalar Sino-Russian friendships unfold in Hunchun today. This may offer both an explanation for why everyday friendship is not blossoming here and grounds for reappraising interstate and interpersonal more broadly.

FRONTIER ANTAGONISTS

Interstate dynamics have meaning at an everyday scale as rigid taxonomical affairs play out in Hunchun's looser emergent “frontier” context. Chinese and Russian people here resemble many frontierspeople across time in being both economically and administratively precarious and, to a significant extent, mutually reliant. Most Russians, including long-term residents, speak of feeling like priezzhie—“entrants” or “outsiders.” Even those who own apartments or have regular employment in schools, trade companies, travel agencies, or nightclubs face bureaucratic vulnerabilities. Since PRC migration policies favor white-collar foreign “talents” (Bork-Hüffer and Yuan-Ihle Reference Bork-Hüffer and Yuan-Ihle2014), entities employing Russians cannot sponsor long-term work or residency permits. Not for want of trying, therefore, most retain only “tourist” legal status. Life may be materially more comfortable here, and jobs, however contingent, are easier to find than amid the post-Soviet decay of small-town eastern Russia. But the sense of being priezzhie remains, alongside an implicit contrast to Chinese “locals.”

Yet the Chinese people with whom most Russians interact are usually no more settled. Indeed, Hunchun's vendors or service workers are mostly wailairen—the precise outsider/entrant equivalent of Russian priezzhie—and comprise a shifting cohort of migrants from northeastern industrial towns which, like Xiaoling's home Qiqihar, have struggled economically in the post-Mao market era. Most thus come from further afield than Slavianka or Kraskino, and their mobility is as much a postsocialist phenomenon as Russian border-crossing is. Domestic migrants may encounter fewer bureaucratic hurdles, but differential urban/rural household registrations mean villagers moving to Hunchun (formally a “city”) still face administrative complications. Seeking more comfortable lives just as their Russian counterparts do, these hard-pressed arrivals open shops like those I spent time in, or seek cross-border trade opportunities to zhengqian, an expression for “earning money” which implies saving up day-by-day. Russian custom and cooperation are vital to this, and so if these ventures fail people must try their luck elsewhere. The ever-changing patchwork of shops on Hunchun's streets are testament to wailairen precarity.

Yet parallel precarities and mutual exposure do not beget much relational reconciliation, even as they produce reciprocal familiarity like that also seen in African and Chinese domestic migrant encounters in Guangzhou (Lan Reference Lan2019). One reason for this, I suggest, is to be found in the downscale effects of interstate Friendship dynamics. Even where one might assume unmediated and flexible “frontier” relations could develop, shifts at the state scale carry an everyday valence that may hinder emergent relationships.

Evidence of this emerged during 2014–2015, when a remarkable uptick in celebrations of official Sino-Russian Friendship was accompanied by a significant diminution of friendships on the ground. Warming of the interstate bond came as Russia's 2014 Crimean annexation and war in Ukraine coalesced with strained PRC-West relations, encouraging Moscow and Beijing to redouble affirmations of their Friendship. Presidents Putin and Xi met several times in 2014 and 2015, and, with Western leaders absent, each was a VIP guest at the other's World War II seventieth anniversary parade. Putin's 2018 award of China's Friendship Medal continued this trend. But beyond shifting Eurasian geopolitics, friendly Russian overtures to China also stemmed from insecurity caused by falling global oil prices, which had caused a drastic drop in the value of the ruble. Consequently, the same dynamics underlying deeper interstate Friendship meant that prices in Hunchun suddenly doubled for Russians, making life much less friendly.

Both blossoming interstate bonds and the currency shift played out across the contours of difference already discussed: mushrooming formal Friendship events left Russians more nonplussed than ever, while higher prices increased their resolve to get a bargain and sharpened suspicions of being ripped off by (apparently disingenuously) “friendly” Chinese vendors. Conversely, Chinese shopkeepers now confronted customers more insensitively averse to cultivating feelings in their dealings than ever.

These developments revealed the antagonisms of symmetrically dependent everyday relationships that were also exposed to distant and ungovernable state-scale shifts. Even in normal times, dynamics in Hunchun and other transnational trade hubs exhibit intensified traits of what Clifford Geertz called the “bazaar economy,” in which vendors and clients are “at once coupled and opposed,” mutually reliant but at odds in their goals (buying cheap/selling dear) (Reference Geertz1978: 30–32). Like the “familiar” or even “intimate antagonists” of Geertz's Moroccan souq, parties to transactions in Hunchun are familiar partners in symmetrical demographic positions. But as shifting taxonomical dynamics change the terms of emergent interactions, degrees of both dependency and antagonism can be exacerbated to an unmanageable degree.

Biao Xiang shows how state interventions in the lives of Zhejiang migrants have simultaneous effects on provincial, county, and interpersonal scales. Similarly, the very state border which is constitutive of the whole idea of Sino-Russian Friendship in Hunchun also plays a pivotal role as a divider of economic spheres, and as a widener of differences between friendship practices. As well as intensifying already-problematic divergences over haggling, the currency crash reduced the number of Russians in town. Straining friendships in two countervailing but equally disruptive directions, therefore, this both forced Russia-reliant Chinese businesspeople to shut up shop and move on and yoked those who remained still closer into non-collaborative, mutually antagonistic relationships: fewer and more abrasive encounters further exposed each side's varying tolerance for the other's divergent cultural approaches to affect and exchange.

This twinning of blossoming official Friendship and its deteriorating interpersonal counterpart thus shows how actions across the same contours of difference at different scales may pull in opposing directions. This deduction leads me to conclude with a comparative appraisal of how we might see multiscalar friendships on a broader canvas, including in contrasting socialist and postsocialist cases. Offering Russian- and Chinese-linked examples to illustrate this, I also suggest how interstate and interpersonal bonds might be approached in future research.

COMPARISONS: FRIENDSHIP WITH OR AGAINST THE STATE