Books

Where the bear and the dragon meet

Paul French thumbs three contrasting books on the Amur, a river that separates Russia and China

The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through swamps, forests and, mostly, river – the Amur, or the Heilongjiang to the Chinese. It is controversial, contested and a story of two halves. Much of the Russian side is territory seized from China in the 19th century where now Russia prioritises defence. The Chinese side has exploded economically, outstripping the northern bank. Yet the two have to coexist and the river is their shared ground. And so, a trio of books comes travelling along, analysing, describing and predicting the future of the Amur and the Sino-Russian borderlands.

Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have the most academic and perhaps most detailed analysis of the region and the river in On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border. Billé is program director at the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, University of California while Humphrey is at King’s College, Cambridge, where she founded the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit. Dominic Ziegler’s Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River Between Russia and China is the journalistic account of the region. Finally, Colin Thurbon’s The Amur River: Between Russia and China is the traveller’s account of the region. Together all three books give us a contrasting, but cross referenced, picture of the region.

Billé and Humphrey’s book is particularly analytical and contains a lot of detail. Maritime CEO recently spoke with the authors who explained their general thesis. “High-level diplomatic alignment between China and Russia has only a very diluted impact on the ground. The two countries are both authoritarian, but in very different ways – as we attempt to describe in the book. In the future, we expect the relationship to remain pragmatic but fundamentally distanced, with a good deal of puzzlement on either side about why the people on the other side of the border behave as they do.”

Dominic Zeigler’s journey down the Amur was taken in 2015 though perhaps now seems especially prescient. Ziegler, The Economist magazine’s Asia editor, believes that, “to understand Putin’s imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia’s relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.” This analysis may now be especially interesting given the war in Ukraine which appears to be driving Russia and China closer together – a meeting that, physically at least, occurs at the Amur River.

Thubron, as with all books by the veteran British travel writer, is the most lyrical of the accounts of the Amur. Thubron has visited the area before and so is, in some ways, the most qualified of the authors mentioned here to comment on changes in the region. Thubron’s journey is metaphorical as well as physical – Mongolian camps to buzzing Chinese towns as well as the decline of Russian imperialism and the rise of a pivotal world of cross-border connections. ●

“The Amur’s history is embedded in an ongoing clash of empires”