{"id":45645,"date":"2016-02-15T20:31:58","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T20:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45645"},"modified":"2016-03-23T20:58:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T20:58:03","slug":"invisible-bridges-life-along-the-chinese-russian-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45645","title":{"rendered":"Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2016-02-09<\/p>\n

Peter Hessler<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the summer of 2014, Davide Monteleone<\/a>, an Italian photographer who had lived in Moscow<\/a> for more than a decade, began to travel to the Russian-Chinese<\/a> border in search of something that felt real and reliable. \u201cI had been covering the uprising in Ukraine<\/a>, and then the civil war and the occupation of Crimea<\/a>,\u201d he told me. \u201cI was disturbed by how hard it was to remain neutral when there was so much press attention. I felt like whatever I did was going to be used for propaganda. So I thought about doing something far away.\u201d After the European Union<\/a> and the United States<\/a> levied sanctions against Russia<\/a>, the country began signing high-profile gas and trade agreements with China<\/a>. \u201cThere were a lot of articles in Russia about this new friendship between Russia and China,\u201d Monteleone said. \u201cSo I figured, let\u2019s go and see what\u2019s going on. Is this relationship real?\u201d<\/p>\n

In Moscow, Monteleone had read about a new bridge across the Amur River<\/a> that the Russians were supposedly building at the city of Blagoveshchensk<\/a>. \u201cBut you go there and there is no bridge,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople in Moscow knew about this bridge, but the people in this place didn\u2019t even know they were planning to build it.\u201d In the regions around the phantom bridge, he noticed other things that were also missing. \u201cOn the Russian side, there\u2019s no agriculture,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s forest and that\u2019s it. You ask the Russians why they don\u2019t grow anything, and they say, \u2018The weather is not very good; you can\u2019t grow anything.\u2019 And then you cross to the Chinese side, and there are plantations everywhere! It\u2019s only two hundred metres, so the climate must be the same.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Over the past two centuries, there have been periodic tensions between Russia and China, including some serious border conflicts, and historically Russia has usually held the upper hand. But nowadays, at the personal level, Monteleone notices a different dynamic. \u201cIn a remote place like this, the Russians just wait for something that is going to happen, while the Chinese try to do something,\u201d he said. This disparity seemed to shape the interpersonal dynamics of many Russian-Chinese couples that Monteleone met on his travels. In Blagoveshchensk, he spent time with a Chinese businesswoman who runs a small empire of Russian hotels and restaurants. Back in her hometown of Harbin<\/a>, she has a husband and a child, but across the border she has acquired a kind of modern-day concubine\u2014a Russian husband, along with another child. \u201cI suspected that the Russian husband\u2014it\u2019s also for practical reasons,\u201d Monteleone said. \u201cChinese cannot open companies in Russia if they don\u2019t have a Russian partner.\u201d He found it fascinating to watch them interact: \u201cShe was saying, \u2018Go and get the car!\u2019 \u2018Bring me there!\u2019 \u2018Call this person!\u2019 He was a husband, but at the same time he was an employee. She was speaking Russian, but in a strange accent.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was one of the few mixed couples that Monteleone encountered in which a Chinese woman was paired with a Russian man. \u201cThe combination is usually Chinese men and Russian women,\u201d he said. This may be a result of simple demographics: in Russia, there are only eighty-seven men to every hundred women, whereas in China there are a hundred and six men to every hundred women. But, in Monteleone\u2019s view, it\u2019s also a convergence of different social and economic forces. \u201cIt\u2019s because men die much sooner in these parts of Russia,\u201d he said bluntly. \u201cIn this kind of remote region, there\u2019s no jobs, no activities, no way to spend time, so the men just drink.\u201d He continued, \u201cAnd Russian women here seem to be much more responsible than men. I\u2019m sorry to say it, but they\u2019re the ones taking care of things.\u201d On the southern side of the border, he noticed that language schools are full of young Russian women who seem dedicated to acquiring Mandarin, and perhaps a Chinese husband…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border The New Yorker 2016-02-09 Peter Hessler In the summer of 2014, Davide Monteleone, an Italian photographer who had lived in Moscow for more than a decade, began to travel to the Russian-Chinese border in search of something that felt real and reliable. \u201cI had been covering the uprising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,24,16,28,8],"tags":[221,22992,22993,147,7706,3886],"class_list":["post-45645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-arts","category-asia","category-europe","category-media-archive","tag-china","tag-davide-monteleone","tag-peter-hessler","tag-photography","tag-russia","tag-the-new-yorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45645"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46190,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45645\/revisions\/46190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}