New Future for New City Residents: Traces of Russian Presence in Chinese Borderland Cities

Transformation processes changed formerly isolated and militarized borderland «bastion» towns into places of informal transborder contact, which in the case of Chinese borderland regions resulted in both spatial and temporal consequences in the form of a direct confrontation of their residents with the traces of Russian presence. Opening the borders and a sharp increase in borderland residents» mobility inspired attempts at creating new history for the new borderland territories. The neighbor (Russia) is no longer an enemy or a threat and turned into a source of cultural diversity. In Inner Mongolia the simultaneous overlapping of four national narratives of the past (Chinese, Mongolian, Evenki, and Russian) stimulated unique practices of separating the experience of negatively evaluated Russian colonization from the material traces of Russian presence perceived as positive. This paper aims at analyzing the role played by the traces of Russian presence in Northern Chinese urban public spaces. It will mainly focus on the mechanisms of reproducing the Russian (in Manchuria) and developing the Siberian symbolic fields in the syncretic environment of Chinese borderland Inner Asian regions. In contemporary China the growth of interest in Russian inhabitants is subject to neoliberal rewriting of the cultural space of the region from the perspective of their investment attractiveness and still with the idea of local residents» frontier loyalty. In this context it is worth emphasizing that demilitarization of the region lead to attempts of including Russian inhabitants in the contemporary life of borderland cities. Models of this inclusion to a great extent reflect the new demographic and cultural situation created by the frontier variations of socialism - the search for new forms of collective memory and local identity. Dr-problematizing Russia as a part of local history, the region develops completely new cultural models. New hybridity includes northern Chinese cities and towns in the barely noticeable systems of signs that differentiate them from the rest of the country. The new decoration of openness and multiculturality is not only a tool for cultural policy, but also to the majority of new city residents is a basis for new identity that creates the context of the Russian»s presence and cultural richness of area. In this context city spaces have become a place of materialization of the political consensus related to the past.

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