Chinese Peasants and Chinese Agrarian Capitalism: Simulacra of Agriculture in the Russian Far East

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of object ambiguity in studies of the Chinese presence in the agriculture of eastern Russia. Although since the mid-2010s there has been an intense discussion about the scale, motivation, and influence of Chinese agro-producers on local communities in the Russian Federation, it most often focuses counterproductively on an ethnically and socially homogeneous object. The author shows that Chinese researchers use the category "peasants," although when describing Russian realities, it becomes only a simulacrum that allows to imagine nationalistic narratives about the success of the Chinese abroad, but analytically has no value. Since the mid-2010s, scholarly discourse in the PRC has focused more on corporate actors rather than peasants, but it presents the former as a homogeneous community of investors, at best differentiated by official typology (by the scale and nature of its ownership). A more specific definition of actors has been proposed in the English-language literature. Western researchers adopted the typology of agro-producers in the PRC to describe the Chinese presence in the eastern regions of Russia. However, this mechanical transposition was based on the analysis of media discourse, which created the illusion of the existence of a detached Chinese agrarian capitalism in Russia. The author of the article, noting the complexity of the object under study due to limited access to empirical materials, sees a way out of uncertainty through the analysis of the individual cases of producers or their types. This approach, in addition to specifying the object, makes it possible to show that Chinese producers are integrated into cross-border and local networks that are not ethnically homogeneous.