To browse Academia. The centre orientation and closed character of the Soviet space turned border areas into half-empty places remaining in absolute readiness for confrontation. Frontier forms of socialism were special, not only because of the extremely intense implementation of Soviet methods of modernization, but also because they achieved a particularly high level of political and social sterility of frontier populations.
The paper analyses late Soviet discursive practices concerning the disloyalty of fictional Cossack communities in Inner Asia Mongolia, China, and Transbaikalia with their old-fashioned life style and strong anti-Soviet attitudes.
A History of Sino-Russian Border. We usually think of roads as tools of social and material connection which serve to enchain places, things and people that have not before been as directly, or intensely, linked up. Yet, in the sparsely populated grasslands and deserts of the Sino-Mongolian border zone, it is equally much the other way around. Rather than facilitating more interaction between local Mongolians and the growing number of Chinese employed in mining and oil companies, the many roads that are now being built or upgraded to transport natural resources, commodities and labour power between Mongolia and China serve to curb both the quantity and the quality of interactions taking place between Mongolians and Chinese.
Thus, roads here act as technologies of distantiation, which ensure that the two sides become less connected as time passes. One way to analyze the complex China- is through their respective projects and influence on neighboring states.
In this introduction, to the thematic issue The Daurs on the Sino-Russian Borderlands we provide basic background information on the Daur. Concerning general knowledge on the Daur for the readers of this thematic issue, we give a brief outline of the history of research on the Daur, followed by a description of not only the ethnic issues concerning the Daur, Orochen, and Solons, but also the spoken and written languages of the Daur.
