Discourses on China in Vostochnoe Obozrenie during the Yihetuan uprising: On the issue of Siberian Orientalism

The article examines the problem of forming discourses about China during the Yihetuan (“Boxer”) uprising of 1900-1901 in the Irkutsk newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrenie [The Eastern Review]. The spontaneously erupted anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-colonial movement of the Chinese population became the most important international event of the early 20th century, as the rebels, supported by Empress Dowager Cixi, posed a mortal threat to a large number of foreign trade, diplomatic, military and religious missions that competed with each other for influence in China. That is why, at the very peak of the military intervention of the Alliance of Eight Powers (Russia, Austria-Hungary, the UK, Germany, Italy, the USA, France and Japan), most large and small newspapers in different countries published daily materials of varying degrees of reliability about the Yihetuan uprising. Each newspaper formed its own complex narrative, which depended both on the policy of the publication and on the government of the country that forms the national discourse, so the authors studied publications about China by one of the leading Siberian publications of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Vostochnoe Obozrenie, in the context of the general mass of the international press. The novelty of the presented study lies in the fact that for the first time the publications of Vostochnoe Obozrenie about China during the Boxer Rebellion are considered in the context of the concept of Siberian Orientalism, which is a set of Siberian intelligentsia’s ideas about the imperial and colonial practices of the world, divided into West and East, in which Siberia gradually discovers its own specific narrative. The authors believe that this concept is able to explain the specifics of Vos-tochnoe Obozrenie’s Chinese theme: (1) all the materials are semiotically presented as mostly science discourse in which the constituent parts are perceived not separately, but in relation to an integral image of China, which did not go beyond Russian and Western ideas of Orientalism; (2) the authors of Vostochnoe Obozrenie initially chose a balanced analytical tone, critical of the official government (imperial) discourse; (3) an important feature of the Chinese theme of Vostochnoe Obozrenie is the frequent use of the technique of “self-orientalization” when describing the policy of the Russian government and the actions of the Russian population in Siberia and the East as “eastern” for the purpose of self-criticism; (4) all publications about China were made in two main perspectives: civilizational and socio-economic, allowing readers to imagine the similarities and differences between Russia and China, as well as analyzing the role of the Chinese factor in the economy of Siberia, which was acquiring its unique (within Russia) cultural voice. The authors of the article conclude that, in general, under the leadership of I.I. Popov, during the period of the Yihetuan uprising, the dynamic balance between the self-orientalization of Russia and the orientalization of China formed the basis of the information policy of Vostochnoe Obozrenie. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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