The River that Divides Civilizations

In Samuel Huntington's seminal work "Clash of Civilizations," one of the underlying assumptions that there are certain geographical boundaries among the different civilizations he identified.  Certainly, some regions can be considered transition zones where two or more civilizations exist side by side, but ultimately, he sees there being visible defining characteristics that can distinguish one civilization from another.  And when a person goes from one civilization to another, one can easily feel the change and thus need to adapt to the new civilization.

For many international travelers, such an observation can be quite obvious.  Flying from a major city in Asia to Europe or vice versa, and the difference in civilization can be seen in different aspects, whether it be differences in architecture, religion, ethnicity, language, fashion, or food.  But relatively few travelers make it out to the edge of those civilizations, to see for themselves where the transition from one civilization to the other happens geographically, and how the transition plays out in practice.  After all, flying means going to big cities, themselves the centers of their respective civilizations. 

The Amur River, without a doubt, one of those civilizational transition zones.  Heihe on the Chinese side and Blagoveshchensk on the Russian side represent not only a political boundary between two countries but two places where physical closeness is in stark contrast with mental and cultural distance.  As one look toward the major urban centers of Asia for inspirations while the other definitively look toward European cities for its identity.  Two different worlds are separated by a mere 10-minute ferry ride across a 500-meter-wide river. 

And the difference exists despite the cross-border trade especially on the Heihe side.  Because the city exist almost solely for the purpose of the cross-border trade, it has tried its hardest to move close to Russia at least in looks.  The city's architecture has a distinct Russian feel.  All street and shop signage are bilingual in Chinese and Russian.  Many of the city's traders, having learned Russian as second language in school and have dealt with Russians in work, all speak passable Russian.  The city's "Russian character" has even attracted domestic tourists from across China to experience the "foreignness."

Of course, being only visibly Russian in feel is not enough to make Heihe part of the Russian civilization.  It is, after all, a place where Chinese merchants do business with Russians, in a distinctively Chinese manner.  And that is precisely why many Russians from across the river come to it.  The ferry is loaded with Russians, carrying four or five bags that are together twice their own body size, full of merchandise to be used or resold back in Russia.  It is no wonder considering that everything from food to electronics in China is half to one-third of the prices in Russia.

Perhaps that very fact, where Heihe has grown from a small village of few thousand people to a city of 200,000 since 1989 when the Sino-Russian border was reopened, is a testament to a civilizational boundary more pivotal than a simple dichotomy between Chinese and Russian, or Asian and European.  The boundary is between a commercially-oriented world in Heihe versus a security-oriented one in Blagoveshchensk.  Heihe became the supplier of goods to Russia because its merchants, and merchants all over China and Asia, created a massive supply chain of manufacturing and trade. 

The Russian Far East, at least, remains steadfastly outside that civilization based on economics.  Just as the day when Blagoveshchensk was first established as a defense post to assert Tsarist authority, the region today continues to sacrifice all else for the sake of political sovereignty.  Anything that may weaken that authority, in particular trade with a more economically dynamic neighbor, will have to take a backseat.  The Russian populace has largely played along, keeping the commerce to the Heihe side while keeping Blagoveshchensk mostly as it is. 

Surely, there is nothing particularly Chinese or Asian about that "civilization of economics." For decades after the communist revolution, China was also outside the supply chain of manufacturing and trade, focused more on preserving an ideology for the sake of maintaining sovereignty and authority.  Even today, North Korea keeps that mentality.  And European Russia has become much more commercial, with vibrant high-tech industries, that, from the looks of it, has not spread their economic benefits to this remote region in terms of direct employment. 

In the global age, civilizations are bound to merge.  Multinational countries that take in both aspects of Europe and Asia will come into existence, and each country will take on both the characters of politically- and economically-oriented "civilizations."  To reject one or the other and at the end, neither can really be had.  Plenty of people already cross the Amur River because it is so convenient to do so.  Short of shutting the border and preventing the flow, nothing can stop the commerce running across it.  It is better to embrace a more comprehensive transition.