The Amur River - Between Russia and China

 

There was a time when the reach of China penetrated deep into Siberia with its peoples owing allegiance to its distant Emperor. Then rapidly in the seventeenth century, the Russians arrived. At first, the ensuing conflict went primarily in the direction of China but Russia's growing power and the Qing dynasty's slow unraveling tipped the balance in the direction of Russia, finally settling on a boundary that for hundreds of miles is marked by the Amur River. 

Yet it remains unsettled.  Though on the surfaces of global diplomacy all is well between China and Russia, the communities adjacent to the river tell a different, more uneasy story.

Colin Thubron at eighty, having been an accomplished traveler in and chronicler of both countries decades before, travels in his latest book, 'The Amur River: Between Russia and China' down its length, acutely observing and beautifully describing, amongst much else, these anxieties, these differences.

The first most obvious is how the balance has apparently tipped - settlements on the Chinese side glisten with all the gaudy attractiveness of rapid, if unequal, economic growth. If not exactly booming, this part of northern China is fully engaged with China's actual great leap 'forward'. The Russian side is typified by decay - the hopes of the 90s and 00s have given way to stagnation. Even on the Chinese side, this is noticeable, the Chinese tooled up to receive Russian tourists but with the rouble's slide, these have evaporated. Meanwhile, on the Russian side, populations are falling - especially in the countryside - and Thubron chronicles pervasive anxiety of the Chinese whether as the 'banned' traders who skillfully avoid the ban or in the massive, and destructive, logging that is now the most visible sign of trade with China or simply with noticing the ever more unbalanced demographics.

This unease is also displayed in the two countries' museums. I noticed this myself when I visited Tuva's National Museum. Tuva, before the arrival of the Russians in the nineteenth century, had been in China's sphere of influence but you would not have known this as you worked your way through the museum. It was eloquent precisely by its absence - China is simply not mentioned and several centuries of history are left barely touched upon. Here Thubron discovers similar hesitation on the Russian side to display anything relating to China excepting the treaties affirming Russian control. These very same treaties on the Chinese side are dismissed as ''unequal" imposed during China's nineteenth-century weakness. Chinese museums stress China's Siberian presence - and in one particularly vivid diorama play up a horrifying massacre perpetuated by Cossacks on the local population. Whatever the diplomatic bromides, something less settled flows between the two powers.

It is the brilliance of Thubron's ability to befriend and listen to people - ordinary people - that brings this more nuanced, vivid picture to light but beyond this to enter into the more everyday aspects of people's lives. His Chinese companion's mixture of sorrow and pride as his only daughter makes a success of life yet so far away from home, in a society where one's children remain the best source of hope for a secure old age. Or Alexander, one of his Russian guides, exalting in being free to roam the beauties of the natural world about him - and engage in illegal fishing - but worrying over how to initiate his children into this love - and whether such an initiation will be successful.

Meanwhile the fate of the region's indigenous populations - on both sides of the border - are mirrored in the mixture of active oppression and benign neglect - and the slow decay of memory of traditions and language.

Wrapped around these human stories - historical, geopolitical, intimately personal - is the river itself. Traversed from its source down to the ocean - and vividly described in its changing patterns and moods. A river little known not only by the outside world but, ironically, by the two countries for which it is a border being distant from both their centers of power and population. But a river nonetheless of importance and within whose stories are portents of the world's becoming.