Back in the early 1990s, when I was trying to pitch the idea of including Vladivostok-listed stocks in Asian emerging markets funds, I was told by one Hong Kong fund manager that “Asia stops at the Amur River.” Three decades or so on, that aphorism might still serve to summarize the findings contained in Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey’s On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border.

Some borders, such as those in the EU or that between the US and Canada, are—or at least were, pre-Covid—barely noticeable, but the differences between the two sides of the Sino-Russian border have, if anything, grown starker. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, authors of the On the Edge, say (with some possible exaggeration given the number of recent books on the subject) that “in spite of its strategic significance, the Russia-China border remains one of the least studied borders in the world”.

For thousands of miles, Russia and China are hard up against each other, on either side of a border that consists mainly of rivers. This long meandering borderline with Mongolia at one end and North Korea at the other … reveals much about the two countries and their actual relationship that is not obvious from their metropolitan capitals.

The authors’ conclusions are easily summarized and not perhaps terribly controversial: China has, for the most part, got its act together, both in general and in the border regions, while Russia is hapless.

The book’s two main geographical case studies are the (now) divided Bolshoi Ussuriiskii island (to use its Russian name) across from Khabarovsk at the confluence of the Issuri and Amur rivers and the twin cities of Blagoveshchensk and Heihe. Subject to dispute for decades, the Bolshoi Ussuriiskii island was divided between the two countries in 2004. China has developed an eco-park on their side of the island which is said to attract hundreds of thousands of tourists annually. On the Russian side, there is less now than before:

Around one hundred Russians are now said to keep houses on the island… But most housing units are deserted; there is no running water, central heating, or indoor plumbing; electricity is uncertain; and schools, medical centers, and shops are all on the mainland… Marauders and thieves wander with impunity, as there is no police presence on the island. Aged residents were prostrated with despair when their cottages were burned down by arsonists scrounging for scrap metal.

This pattern repeats upstream at Blagoveshchensk. Heihe, just across the river, has grown from “little more than a village” a few decades ago to a sizable city, a transformation in some ways as astounding as that of Shenzhen, given that the economic catalyst was Blagoveshchensk rather than Hong Kong. The “saga of the Blagoveshchensk-Heihe bridge, long since announced but still not yet functioning” seems a metaphor for the relationship: one thing or another on the Russian side always seems to get in the way. Meanwhile, buses drive across the ice in winter.

Billé and Humphrey also discuss cross-border trade, which has driven the growth of Chinese enterprises but seems to have contributed very little to the growth across the border.

Other chapters deal with the divisions wrought by the border on ethnic groups that span it, and how those on each side have grown apart, and on relationships between individual Russians and Chinese, some aspects of which seem to turn traditional East-West prejudices on their head:

Unlike the typical colonial situation where intermarriage normally meant Western men taking native wives … the main arrangement at the Sino- Russian border, in both urban and rural settings, was Russian women marrying Chinese men… The consensus … was that while Chinese men tend to make good marriage partners, Chinese women do not … it is widely believed that Chinese men drink less on average than their Russian counterparts, and that they also help with domestic chores, such as cooking and cleaning. By contrast, unlike in the West, where Asian women tend to be imagined as docile and submissive, Russians view Chinese women as difficult and capricious.

Based very much on on-the-ground observation, On the Edge takes a largely anecdotal, case-study approach, limited—some historical background aside—to the past couple of decades. The book should probably be read in conjunction with others, such Chris Miller’s We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin which outlines Russia’s Asia policy over the past three centuries; Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Sören Urbansky which discusses the gradual hardening of the Sino-Russian border from the mid-19th century; Beyond the Amur by Victor Zatsepine, which is a history of the border; and Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power by Gregory Afinogenov which focuses on the centuries before Russia’s acquisition of the land south of the Amur in 1860. On the Edge is however a much more granular addition to the increasing number of books on the relations between the only pair of superpowers that share a border.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.