Trust and Mistrust in the Economies of the China-Russia Borderlands

Abstract

Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia -the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra-and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities. Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) Series EditorsThe authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Breeze ' development, Vladivostok, 2013 190 Figure 13 The 'Eastern Breeze ' complex, Vladivostok, 2013 191 Figure 14 Chinese buyers scrupulously explore an old Chinese object put on sale at Sotheby's auction house in London, UK 212 Figure 15 Carl Fabergé's Easter egg, made predominantly of jade from a private collection of Viktor Vekselberg, the fourth richest person in Russia. The object is on display at special private museum in Saint-Petersburg, Russia 215 Figure 16 One of the Sunshine's operations. Guards reload raw jade to transport it across a river. Jade is on its way from mine to warehouse 219 Figure 17 Advertisement for a company offering help with on-line purchases in Manzhouli, China 241 List of Figures IntroductionTrusting and Mistrusting Across Borders Caroline HumphreyThis book is a collection of essays based on recent fieldwork along the Northeast frontier between Russia and China, 1 and it has two main aims that are closely interconnected. The first is to explore how trust and mistrust are negotiated in a situation beset with doubts and misunderstandings, in a border region where previously hostile states with very different histories, cultures, and languages face one another. The second is to suggest some ways in which these studies can contribute to understanding the import of trust and mistrust in small-scale economic activities. It should be added straight away that the book does not propose a theory of trust of its own to add to the numerous conceptualizations of this idea already available (Luhmann 1979;Gambetta 1988;Hosking 2010;Cook 2001; O'Neill 2002; Baier 2004;Hawley 2014). Rather, it provides anthropological ideas and ethnographic materials that will enable readers to explore and probe these models. What is new here is that, while the great majority of theories of trust assume that actors have a common back...

Transnational marriages in Yiwu, China: tensions over money

“…This to some extent challenges Aslanian's idea that a 'closure' network -namely people from the same community and in this case sharing the same national roots -generating networks of trust. Instead, it is closer to the work of those scholars who note that trust in trading activities is not based solely on ethnic, religious or regional bonds, but also requires business strategies like 'personal fidelity' (Humphrey 2018) and 'diplomacy' (Marsden 2016b).…”

“…Many scholars see trust as a future-oriented positive expectation about the intentions or behaviour of another in circumstances of uncertainty or risk (Dietz et al 2010: 10;Humphrey 2018;Luhmann 1988). Yet, scholars also note that mistrust (as an initial stance towards others) and distrust (as a consequence of being let down) are equally important as they may be mobilized to predict the intentions and capability of others (Cook et al 2005;Humphrey 2018). Thus, the mistrust involved in married relations reinforces a sense of uncertainty about the future, which affects behaviourin this case, in terms of dealing with money or exchanging gifts.…”