The Nanai (Нанай), who number around 12,000 in the Russian Far East, and the Hezhe (赫哲), which have population of approximately 4,600 in northeastern China, are peoples long identified as belonging to a single Tungusic group, but who for decades have inhabited very different political and economic environments. The string of settlements clinging close to the banks of the River Amur (Амур, Russia) or Heilongjiang (黑龙江, China) which are today the main Nanai/Hezhe population centres speaks of their historic position as a group which subsisted largely on fishing and seasonal hunting on the surrounding floodplains.
In China: Tongjiang (同江), Jiejinkou (街津口), Fuyuan (抚远), all in northeastern Heilongjiang (黑龙江) province on the right bank of the Heilongjiang river.
In Russia: Khabarovsk (Хабаровск), Naikhin (Найхин), Troitskoe (Троицкое), in Khabarovskii krai (Хабаровский край). The latter two small settlements are situated in Nanaiskii raion (Нанайский район) on the mid-lower reaches of the River Amur, also on the right bank.
Research
The Nanai, who number around 12,000 in the Russian Far East, and the Hezhe, which have population of approximately 4,600 in northeastern China, are peoples long identified as belonging to a single Tungusic group, but who for decades have inhabited very different political and economic environments. The string of settlements clinging close to the banks of the River Amur (Амур, Russia) or Heilongjiang (黑龙江, China) which are today the main Nanai/Hezhe population centres speaks of their historic position as a group which subsisted largely on fishing and seasonal hunting on the surrounding floodplains. Close ties to the River have remained a key aspect of both Nanai and Hezhe lives to the present, not least because during twentieth-century Soviet and Chinese collectivisation drives, each group was incorporated into the command economy of their respective country through organisation into industrialised fishing brigades. But whilst the Nanai/Hezhe thus continue to live within a geographic range inhabited and travelled by their ancestors for centuries, transformations in Nanai and Hezhe lives according to the logics of two very different states on either side of the Amur/Heilongjiang have resulted in the existence of two groups which on the face of it today have very little in common. Russian and Chinese are the languages in which each group communicates, and very few speakers of any of the various dialects of the Nanai/Hezhe language remain (although there are more - always elderly - speakers on the Russian side). Equally striking are divergences in aspects of the material lives of the Nanai and Hezhe who respectively experience the continuing challenges of post-Soviet economic depression, and the benefits of a resurgent China keen to demonstrate its care for minority groups via financial subsidies. These differences are thrown into particular relief given contemporary efforts by actors on both sides to renew cross-border ties.
As is the case with other cross-border groups under examination as part of this project, scrutiny of the past and present experiences of the Nanai and Hezhe provides a compelling optic through which to view shifts in the broader relationship between Russia and China, and how these changes have been experienced by people present in the region since well before either state was asserting effective sovereignty here. What sets the Nanai/Hezhe apart from other such groups, however, is both the historical importance to them of rivers, key arteries in the establishment of Russian and Chinese statehood in Northeast Asia, and the existence of compelling and relatively detailed ethnographic observations of the region dating as far back as the mid-eighteenth century.
By combining contemporary ethnographic observation with examination of these sources, from the accounts of French missionary travellers under the Qing Dynasty to those of Russian explorers and prominent early ethnologists such as Ling Chunsheng, Ivan Lopatin and Owen Lattimore, this fieldwork has revealed a past and a present of Nanai/Hezhe interaction with Russia and China which to a significant degree has been mediated and expressed through material objects. From tribute-levying efforts by agents of Romanov St Petersburg and Qing Beijing, through haphazard trade on both sides of the Amur in the political turmoil of the early twentieth century, and subsequently the above-mentioned incorporation into vast collective economies, the extent of Nanai and Hezhe involvement in circulations of material goods with political meaning has moved in step with the very same processes which have seen them become distinct Russian ’Nanai’ and Chinese ‘Hezhe’ existing today. Increased cross-border links in the post-Soviet era, including the arrival in Nanai areas of unmistakably ‘Chinese’ goods and the movement to-and-fro of Nanai and Hezhe delegations headed by ethnic Russian and Han Chinese leaders suggest that the two groups are now largely able to interact only under the aegises of the national entities into which they have been politico-materially incorporated.
Today the same eddying river confluences which once served both as seasonal Nanai/Hezhe fishing grounds and tribute-collection posts for the imperial Russian and Chinese states are among the larger cities and power centres on both sides of the border, from Khabarovsk, capital of Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, to Tongjiang, location of the first bridge (still under-construction) linking Russia and China over the Amur. But despite very apparent differences in Nanai and Hezhe lifestyles, time spent with the good-humoured and hospitable inhabitants of these places, and the picturesque riverside villages downstream from each, equally revealed striking parallels between the experiences of each group, and widespread interest in increasing mutual understanding over the border despite decades of separation.
