Joseph Livesey

In this project I propose an ethnographic study of Chinese economic expansion in the Far East of Russia. By doing so I ask after the potential emergence of a specifically ‘postsocialist capitalism’ coming out of these unprecedented commercial exchanges between China and Russia, the world’s two largest twentieth-century socialist states, each once among the most prominently self-styled alternatives to western social models. Having both embraced market economic-logics in different ways over the past twenty-five years, do their respective socialist legacies and postsocialist practices evidence a distinctive capitalist mode today? And if so, what can this suggest to us about twenty-first century forms of managed exchange and governance in this region?