from Sepia@mander.xyz to world@lemmy.world on 04 Jan 17:45
https://mander.xyz/post/44886952
cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/44886373
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been waging war for nearly four years on the western edge of his vast country to preserve what he sees as a vital part of the “Russian world,” citizens of Ukraine who speak Russian and have blood ties to Russia.
More than 3,000 miles to the east, however, Russia has already lost a centuries-old foreign outpost of its language and culture — a remote patch of northern China entombed in ice and snow.
Set up by the Chinese government, nominally to protect the folk traditions and identity of China’s tiny Russian minority, the “ethnic Russian township” of Enhe has lots of birch trees, thick snow, Siberia-style log cabins, Cyrillic script and vodka.
All it does not have is actual Russians.
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After generations of intermarriage with Chinese, Mongolians and other locals, Enhe’s “ethnic Russians” have lost touch with the language, traditions and Orthodox Christian faith of their forefathers.
“In a few years, we will be just like every other place,” the village head said. A member of the Communist Party, he described the steady disappearance of a separate Russian identity as the happy result of the Chinese state’s policy toward ethnic minorities. That policy is aimed at fusing the country’s diverse ethnic group into a single indivisible China united in obedience to President Xi Jinping.
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Mr. Xi told Inner Mongolian officials in Beijing in 2022 that China’s ethnic groups — including 55 officially designated minorities — must “stick together like pomegranate seeds.” That order that has drastically shrunk the space for all languages other than Mandarin Chinese and cultures other than that of the Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the population. It has led to harsh crackdowns in places with large and sometimes restive ethnic minorities like Xinjiang and Tibet. Officials have also increased pressure in Inner Mongolia, where some ethnic Mongolians have protested restrictions on teaching their language.
Even in Enhe, where the assimilation campaign has evidently been highly successful, the authorities were nervous. When a New York Times reporter and a photographer visited, officials from the region’s foreign affairs office followed their every step and interrupted interviews in an unusually intrusive way.
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Russian culture in Enhe survives largely as a folkloric caricature designed to draw Chinese tourists. It has been kept on life support in a local museum featuring samovars, Russian nesting dolls, Stalin plaques, a wooden sauna and wax models of Russians wearing antiquated traditional dress.
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Enhe’s primary school does not teach Russian, the kind of omission that Mr. Putin has denounced as an intolerable violation of ethnic Russians’ rights in countries like Ukraine and the Baltic States. Restrictions on the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia are also regularly denounced by Moscow.
In Enhe, the Orthodox Church has vanished. An Orthodox Christian cross that used to adorn the top of a golden dome on a shuttered wooden building in the center of the village has been torn down. Local officials deny it was ever there, despite the cross being clearly visible in old pictures.
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A long red banner on the church fence demands the “Sinicization of religion,” a reference to a policy announced by Mr. Xi in 2016 to strengthen party control of religious life.
Numbering only around 16,000, ethnic Russians live scattered along China’s 2,615-mile long border with Russia. Enhe is the only place that has been designated as an area set aside for ethnic Russians.
Russians first started arriving there in large numbers in the 19th century after the discovery of gold deposits. Russians managed gold mines as well as the construction and operation of a railway line while Chinese laborers, nearly all single men, poured in for work on Russian-led ventures. Many married Russian women.
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Like China’s other minorities, ethnic Russians suffered during the Cultural Revolution, a period of political turmoil from 1966 until 1976. Previously close ties between Moscow and Beijing ruptured, leading to armed conflict in 1969 along the border. Ethnic Russians were denounced by Mao Zedong’s fanatical Red Guards, who destroyed their churches. Many fled to Russia or beyond.
That episode has now been erased from official history as Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin embrace each other in what they call a “friendship without limits.”
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Mr. Zou, the culture expert, said that the erosion of Russian language and lifestyle in the region was a result of mixed marriages, which have mostly involved ethnic Russian women and Han Chinese men.
“If a woman marries a chicken, she follows the chicken, if she marries a dog, she follows the dog,” he said, using a Chinese idiom reflecting the traditional view that women must bend to their husbands.
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