Loyalty and disloyalty along the Russian–Chinese border

In this issue of History and Anthropology we have tried to do two things: to provide fresh and original ethnography of border peoples and to use these materials to suggest a rethinking of the notions of ‘loyalty’ and ‘disloyalty’. State borders are perhaps always likely to provoke anxieties over loyalty, but this is particularly so in the case of the Sino–Russian border in the twentieth century because it brought into confrontation not only two radically different and long-standing ‘civilizations’, but also highly ideological regimes that claimed exclusive possession of the truth and frequently clashed with one another. In the twentieth century the region saw revolution, civil wars in both countries, attempts to achieve autonomy, invasion by the Japanese, forced labour, flows of refugees, and intensive use of intelligence and counter-intelligence by both sides. In these circumstances, how could any study of the border not consider loyalty and disloyalty, when they have been (and still are to a great degree) such a vital currency for the people who live here?

Apart from ethnic Russians and Han Chinese, who form the majority of the population, the Sino–Russia border has always been home to a number of autochthonous peoples who live on both sides of the international frontier. The Northeastern border consists almost entirely, along its immense length, in three meandering rivers, all of which freeze over in winter and are relatively easy to cross. These people range from relatively small hunting/gathering/herding/fishing groups, such as the Evenki, Nanai/Hezhe and Orochen, to larger agglomerations, such as the pastoral Buryats and agricultural Koreans. However, due to hostile relations between the USSR and Maoist China, the border was militarized and firmly sealed for a period of 30 years (c. late 1950s–late 1980s), cutting virtually all contacts between these cross-border groups. Now that the border has opened, albeit in a limited way, one of the topics of this issue is to consider the historical build-up to this long separation, its ideological character and the present-day tentative attempts to repair it (see papers by Namsaraeva and Pulford).

Many of the people earlier crossing the border were, however, not local herders, fishermen and hunters, but refugees of all ethnicities – above all escaping from expropriation and persecution on Russian territory to seemingly freer lands on the Chinese side. The wild, thinly inhabited and porous nature of the border made repeated exodus possible for large numbers of people, with the result that almost all residents of the frontier zone became subject to suspicion. Surely, it was imagined, they would be fermenting plots, since they must be maintaining links with their kin (‘co-conspirators’) whose earlier crossing of the border and abandonment of the homeland was by definition disloyal. This mistrust was the case on both sides, but it was mostly strongly elaborated in Russia during the mid to late Soviet periods. A highly militarized security regime was clamped onto border territories. After the USSR and China actually engaged in a border war in the 1960s (Humphrey, this issue), the Soviet authorities as well as soldiers sent to guard the frontier held entrenched suspicions of the local inhabitants peacefully toiling in their collective farms (Peshkov, this issue). But is this surprising? In fact, all of the armies involved in this most turbulent and complex of arenas (the Soviet Army, the Chinese Army and the Japanese Kwantung Army) and the relevant security services made extensive use of members of the local ethnic groups for intelligence sorties across the border and counter-intelligence against them. In this issue, we try to understand both sides of this relation. In the minds of the Soviet rulers, the imaginary construction of disloyalty (Peshkov, this issue) has been as potent and historically long lasting as that of loyalty to the state (Pulford and Martin, this issue). As for the ordinary people mobilized to be ‘loyal agents’, who by the same token were forced in many cases to be disloyal to their own kin across the border, several of the papers attempt to understand their thinking and emotions, for example, Buryat refugees used by the Japanese (Namsaraeva) and the Nanai/Hezhe scouts employed by both the Soviets and the Chinese (Pulford).

But in all this, how does loyalty shape the configurations in which people take action? The essays in this issue do not aim to establish a single theory of loyalty. At this stage in reconsidering the idea, we think it is an advantage that each paper addresses the question in its own way. Nevertheless, even in using the word ‘loyalty’ in our articles, we are introducing a concept based in the English language into a Russo–Chinese environment where other vocabularies are used, so some discussion of our common starting point is required. But arguably there would be the same analytical issue in any investigation, even in English-language situations, of how far a singled-out concept can help understanding of people’s social actions. Benveniste’s (1973) study of ‘personal loyalty’ in Indo-European languages showed that the modern idea can be separated out into several different clusters of meanings, among which he emphasized a Germanic ‘Treue’-based set (firmness, reliability, resistance) and a Latin ‘fides’-based group (placing confidence in, evolving later into ‘having belief in’). Meanwhile, the word ‘loyalty’ itself is traced back to fifteenth-century French, where it meant fidelity in service and was rooted in the Latin lex [law]; a person who was loyal in the feudal sense was contrasted to an outlaw and he had legal rights as a consequence of his faithful service to a lord (see discussion in Chisholm 1911, 80). This background in feudalism has meant that in contemporary Europe ‘loyalty’ is often understood to refer primarily to a political relation, and indeed popularly the idea is often associated with patriotism. However, a glance at actual usage shows that this link is misplaced. People speak of many diverse objects of loyalty: to principles, causes, religions, families, a spouse, teams, regions, or ethnic groups, as well as to leaders, governments, or parties. This implies that it is not the object, but the kind of relationship, that we should focus on.

First, however, a brief comment on concepts that are commonly translated as loyalty in Chinese and Russian. Chinese philosophers have expounded on loyalty (Chinese: 忠, zhōng) over millennia, it being one of Confucius’ key ethical virtues. Socially, the main arena for demonstrating this kind of loyalty was in the relation between an ambitious young man aiming to become an official and the ruler with whom he took service. Over the centuries, the implications of this scenario became the subject of intense debate, as, with repeated invasions, Chinese people in numbers worked willingly assiduously for rulers hitherto classed as enemies or barbarians. Naomi Standen’s splendid study Unbounded Loyalties (2017) attempts to work out how the placing of allegiances worked in the tenth century A.D. when ‘China’ was not a coherent entity and loyalty was not seen as a corollary of identity, ethnicity or a bounded state, but was itself the framing category and mainspring for action. She argues that the late-Imperial concept of zhōng, implying moral commitment to one dynasty under a paradigm of loyalism, betrayal and justification, does not work for the earlier period. Then Chinese officials might well decide to switch allegiance to a leader from the invading Jin, and this was not the result of a shift in borders, as a modern interpretation might have it, but was rather a symptom of a political change. The official remained in place, only under a new boss (Standen 2017, 24). Standen argues that the Confucian moral obligation to one’s master only became a political concept later, from the eleventh century onwards. Subsequently, zhōng came to have two senses, an absolute and a relative. The former was a relational loyalty: the official should be prepared to put his life on the line for his lord. The latter, which Standen terms idealistic loyalty, focused on that lord’s obligations to higher considerations, such as moral imperatives, cultural survival, or to the dao [destiny, or code of behaviour in harmony with the natural order]. In this case, the official’s true zhōng would require him to concern himself with whether the ruler he was serving was worthy in respect of such higher ideals. The idea of xin [faithfulness to a lord] came to jar with zhōng, which now came to imply action in the long-term interests of the state rather than the ruler as a person (2017, 42–45). In this line of thought, the loyalty of officials had to be earned by the ruler; it was not an obligation. Unsurprisingly, however, Emperors increasingly looked with disfavour on this neo-Confucian reasoning, which seemed to justify fickleness by their subordinates. Their advisors devised a synthesis aimed to convince them that ministers could be trusted, while at the same time ensuring they were not simply obedient. This was done by equating the state with the dao and the ruler’s interests with those of the state (2017, 47).

There are important points we can take from this regrettably short outline of complex Chinese debates. One is that giving loyalty implies the existence of alternatives (a point to which I shall return), and another is the observation that loyalty looks different from the perspective of one receiving it from that of the one giving allegiance, a topic that is central to the papers by Humphrey and Peshkov in this issue. The ruling Communist Party in both China and Russia made it an essential tenet that the state was identified with the higher moral ideology (socialism) and that the ruler’s interests coincided with those of the state.

Turning to Russian concepts, the field seems at first very different. We need to distinguish two ideas: loyal’nost’ [‘loyalty’] and vernost’ [fidelity]. Loyal’nost’, a word clearly acquired from Western Europe, is deceptive, for in Russian hands it means loyalty only in a specific and limited sense. It has come to refer to mere quiescence in some political situation, a disposition not to rock the boat. It is not used in interpersonal situations, so the suggestion that a husband might show loyal’nost’ to his wife arouses only laughter. Vernost’, by contrast, is far closer to the idea of loyalty conveyed by the English word and it is used for an equivalent range of objects of allegiance. The word, however, arises from a religious and indeed theological context, as distinct from the feudal-legal origins of ‘loyalty’ mentioned earlier. This means that its primary spheres are the religious, ethical, and political, or these melded together as in the following poem, entitled, ‘faith is proven by loyalty’ (vera dokazyvaetsya vernost’yu: Shevelev 2009).

Vernost’ – there is nothing dearer in the world.

Vernost’ – there is nothing kinder or stricter.

Vernost’ – is that which is never sold out.

Vernost’ – is a great heart, like the Motherland.¹

When loyalty is so closely tied to faith, it presents the problems so thoughtfully analysed by Dominic Martin in this issue. First, to whom should vernost’ be offered, to God or to the Tsar? And second, when the ruler is offered loyalty, be this the Tsar, the Soviet Politburo, the Motherland, or the current Russian President, is this done, as it should be for this word to make sense, faithfully, that is, ‘with conscience’ and sincerely? I will write no more on this issue here, since as well as in Martin’s paper further aspects of Russian understandings of fidelity are discussed in Humphrey’s article on soldiers in the Soviet army facing the Chinese in the 1960s and in Namsaraeva’s paper on the inner motivations of a Buryat, a former Russian subject, who fought for the Japanese during the Second World War. We may note, however, one point where Russian debates about loyalty coincide with the Chinese. This is a structural similarity, rather than one of content, but in both cases, it boils down to the question: what if the expected object of loyalty (the Tsar, the state) is judged lesser, or even unworthy, in respect of a more unequivocal example of the true and the good?

At this point, I should clarify that, while some papers in this issue discuss the vocabulary mentioned above, not all of them do, and this is for a reason: that the people involved in the ethnographic situations described do not themselves use these words. In other words, we have observed allegiances and attachments, conflicts over these, or accusations such as ‘traitor!’, that seem to the authors to concern the theme of loyalty/disloyalty, even if the actors concerned do not explicitly talk in these specific terms. In effect, as anthropologists and historians, the authors have been doing all that can be done when trying to explore the social span of a concept, which is to take their idea of loyalty, run with it, and see if it illuminates hitherto unexposed areas of people’s feelings and actions.

Although the authors have different takes on loyalty, nevertheless, they share the idea that loyalty is an interactional relation (as distinct from being, say, a moral virtue, a personality trait, a specifically political allegiance, or a psychological stance). At its heart, loyalty implies the possibility of alternatives. It suggests a steadfast adherence to one tie in the face of other possible ties: one is loyal to someone or something despite being tempted or pressurized by alternatives, or when the person or thing to which one is showing loyalty is faced with possible defections. From this perspective, we assume that social actors live within a meshwork of intersecting ties, each having their own levels of intensity, which come to influence people’s expressions of loyalty at different times. To the extent that a particular tie is made supreme, this necessarily entails its intensification over all others, and will involve ‘disentanglement’ from some, or possibly all, other potential objects of loyalty. For example, to uphold strong loyalty to a nationalist political project would involve cutting or sidelining other ties, such as to multi-ethnic or religious identifications (Sablin 2013, and this issue). Thus the ‘structure’ of loyalty is not dual, as is often imagined, but triple at least, consisting of A, the one to whom loyalty is given, B the giver, and C the indefinite number of alternatives to which loyalty might have been given (but was not). Events, circumstances and changes of heart would determine when an object from C switches into the position of A, while A fades into the residual memory (Humphrey, this issue). Loyalty is rarely constant. Perhaps a seeming exception to this is the religious believer’s determined ‘loyalty to God’, which is explored in Martin’s and Humphrey’s papers in relation to the constant counter-call for loyalty to the Tsar/Soviet state. But even in this religious case, the very form of loyalty as we have outlined it contains the ever-present possibility of suppressed propensities, doubts, bad faith, or public falsities that paper over the potentiality for a radical switch. It is because of the dynamic capacity of this way of understanding loyalty that we find it to be a more interesting hermeneutic than ‘identity’ or ‘ethnicity’, both of which are beset by the problems of the oneness of the actor and the object of adherence.

There could be some objections to such an outline. Cannot someone have multiple simultaneous loyalties? This question is raised by the philosopher Stephen Nathanson’s work (1993, 106–109), in which he distinguishes between exclusionary loyalty (that is, excluding loyalty to other people, groups, ideas, etc.) and non-exclusionary loyalty, which allows various other loyal attachments. This possibility is explored in this issue in the paper by Aurore Dumont, who argues that Evenki living in China are loyal simultaneously to many things: to their own territorially localized communities, to their memories of an earlier existence in Russia, to the state-invented overall category called ‘Evenki’, and to the Chinese state. Nevertheless, as Dumont’s ethnography suggests, in actual situations one of these has to have precedence, while the others fall away. Yet the ethnography also indicates that Evenki do not draw attention to these moments of sorting out loyalties, or at least tend not to turn them into open conflicts. This is certainly not an accident. For one thing, the Evenki are a tiny minority amid a vast, wealthy, and powerful sea of Chinese and cannot afford to assert their particularized loyalties too openly. But the other factor, which raises a more serious objection to the account of loyalty given above, is that for peoples like Evenki and Buryats that do not have a monotheistic religious background, the issue of raising one single object of loyalty above all others does not occur. In other words, the very concept of loyalty may be the product of a religious-cultural history that does not obtain for many indigenous people of the Russia–China borderland.

This issue is raised in the paper by Sayana Namsaraeva, who argues that for a Buryat like her protagonist Urjin Garmaev, with a whole pantheon of deities, spirits, and ancestors to keep in mind, the notion of exclusive loyalty would be foreign to his cultural upbringing. Yet, however salient an observation this may be, it is also true that all of the peoples of the Russia–China frontier have been subject to Imperial state power for many centuries. Their own inclinations may have been ‘not to choose’, but state rule insisted on it, with accusations of defection and disloyalty to rulers and states flying around ever since borders were imposed in the seventeenth century. The notion of a separate ‘indigenous culture’ in which loyalty does not figure can only work as a partial explanation. The history of the region shows migratory ancestors to have been constantly caught in the trap of state-promulgated exclusionary loyalty, and justifications of ancestors’ exploits in these terms were part of, not excluded from, indigenous narratives. These issues are most clearly raised in Ed Pulford’s paper, which discusses in historical detail the inexorable absorption of the Nanai/Hezhe into state categories and ‘loyal’ actions. The reverse side of this coin is provided by the article by Ivan Peshkov, which provides a deep understanding of how the Soviet paranoid insistence on the total exclusiveness of loyalty had the effect of transforming any frontier dwellers (not only indigenous peoples) suspected of lingering ties across the border or fidelity to long-extinguished oppositions into undoubted traitors and ‘enemies of the people’.

We suggest that the relational interpretive lens outlined earlier is able to capture the complicated, flexible and historically contingent attachments present along the Sino–Russian border, and to reveal amongst this multiplicity the lineaments of loyalty and disloyalty – both as those ideas have been stipulated and trumpeted by post-imperial states in relation to their subjects and as they are lived out (also traduced, manipulated, and performed) by people who also have their own ideas, and many other matters, to consider. As the articles in this issue show, some new configurations of loyalty have emerged in this strategically important and culturally complex region; but at the same time certain other groups, such as armies and Old Believers, stubbornly uphold extremely old ideas of what loyalty is, and for whom and how it should be enacted.

The map attached to this Introduction (Map 1) was kindly designed by Ivan Sablin. It illustrates the Far East as it was in 1939 but also includes place names relevant to the articles dealing with later periods.

Map 1

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

All of the articles in this special issue was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J012335/1] under their ‘Rising Powers’ Programme.

Notes

1. By Mikhail Plyatskovskii, quoted in Shevelev (2009).