They came from everywhere: the people of the Amur

Speakers: Dr. Victor Zatsepine (University of Connecticut)

Type: Public Lecture

Time and Date: 12:00PM-1:30PM, March 13th, 2017 (Monday)

Location: Room 1197, Buchanan Tower, UBC. (1873 E Mall, Vancouver)

Sponsors: Institute of Asian Research, Centre for Chinese Research

About the Event:

Victor Zatsepine is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Connecticut. He grew up in Samara, Russia, where the Volga River crosses the Trans-Siberian Railway. From 1989 to 1993, he was an exchange student in Beijing, majoring in Modern Chinese, and later working as a researcher for major US media outlets. After finishing his MA at Harvard (1998) and PhD at the University of British Columbia (2006), he returned to Asia, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Peking University (2007), and a Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong University (2008-2013). While majoring in modern Chinese history, he taught courses on China’s international history, on the Russian state and society, and on social dimensions of the 20th-century wars.

About the Speaker:

Drawing on both Russian and Chinese sources, Victor Zatsepine shows that the border between the Russian Far East and Manchuria remained porous. Neither Russia nor China could control the flow of goods, people, or ideas into the region. Various peoples — Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol — crossed the border in pursuit of work and trade, exchanging ideas and knowledge as they adapted to the harsh physical environment. Much to the chagrin of bureaucrats, whose loyalties remained tied to distant capitals, trade, railways, and towns flourished in step with a distinctive regional culture. By viewing the Amur as a unified natural economy caught between two empires, Zatsepine highlights the often-overlooked influence of regional developments on imperial policies and the importance of climate and geography to local, state, and imperial histories.

 

 

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