Статья в сборнике: Borders and Transborder Processes in Eurasia / edited by Sergei V. Sevastianov, Paul Richardson, and Anton A. Kireev. - Vladivostok: Dalnauka, 2013. - P. 188 - 203.
The empirical analysis in the paper raises serious doubts about the adequacy of the conventional liberal approach to studying political and administrative authorities’ efforts in crossborder cooperation, at least in the non-western world. Economic benefits were not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, incentive for the Heilongjiang bureaucracy to promote cross-border cooperation. Although I use the term “cross-border cooperation” in this paper, the most appropriate question is to what extent claims to promote “cross-border cooperation” are about collaboration with international partners, and to what extent they are about bargaining or simple imitation internal to the discourse of the bureaucracy within the political field of China.
Over the past 25 years, provincial authorities represented the border territory under their jurisdiction initially as an important facility to implement national foreign economic strategy and later as a platform through which other territories of the state could cooperate with Russia. The meaning of this representation was twofold: first, to produce the same discourse as the central government, and second, to gain symbolic capital that could later be transformed into material resources or political benefits in bargaining with Beijing, the major consumer of provincial information about cross-border cooperation. That’s why the message of the provincial bureaucracy was in line with the liberal ideology adopted by the central government and aimed to increase the power of the province within the state with regards to foreign economic activity with Russian border regions.
