An Asynchronous Patchwork

Matthew Longo examines Ed Pulford’s studies of culture and temporality within the China-Russia-Korea borderlands.

By Matthew LongoMay 29, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Politics

WHAT WOULD it mean to suggest that a place inhabits a time?

This is one of the questions that motivates Ed Pulford’s most recent book, Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea (2024). Physical spaces, for Pulford, engender discrete temporalities. To really understand a place, then, one must figure out not merely its cultures and practices, its socioeconomic or political currents, but also something more intangible: its sense of time. How do people understand their past, or envision their future? What values do these sensibilities engender or constrain? At the border between different peoples and places, the discrepancies are often stark.

Past Progress is an ethnography set in Hunchun, a midsize city in a part of Northeast China, Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture, that is home to most of the country’s ethnic Koreans (Chosŏnjok). It is a border area par excellence—Yanbian itself translates to “along the border”—and in this case ever more so, as the border is three-sided (China, Russia, and North Korea) and “now a popular tourist site.” A perfect place to house a study of time.

Hunchun, Pulford finds, inhabits many temporalities at once. On one hand, as a peripheral city, it is a faraway, forgotten space, mostly outside the great development currents that define modern China. Its national time, you might say, is backwater. But because it is also on the border, and thus the site of high-octane security and economic projects, Hunchun also embodies an accelerated border time, born of the myriad visions of progress and futurity (nationalist, socialist, capitalist) projected upon it. Pulford writes:

[T]he tumultuous changes that have brought material abundance, high-level attention, and shifting border-crossing opportunities to Hunchun have, for many among the town’s multiethnic Korean, Han Chinese, Russian, and Manchu population, engendered a particular worldview tethered to ideas of “progress.”

These discrete temporalities replicate at the local level—via what Pulford calls a “‘forced’ cosmopolitanism.” Because Hunchun is a space of contact between traders, businessmen, students, and tourists from both sides of the border, locals are constantly encountering sensibilities other than their own. This means that at the same time that grand visions of progress are puffed up, they are also defeated, challenged, and altered through the course of daily life.

For Pulford, these interwoven temporal and spatial divisions provide the key to understanding what a border signifies: it is a place of layered histories and modernities, of constant entanglements. They also show us something essential about visions of progress: they are at once local and transnational, concrete and abstract; they simultaneously produce stories of ascendance and of collapse. And local residents are spectators to these visions as well as agents in their perpetuation. “Progress,” Pulford writes, is “a more textured, culturally freighted and polyvalent idea than its slick first-glance associations […] would suggest.”

Given these complex border dynamics, we might ask: what is it actually like to live in a place like Hunchun—a place with mixed temporality?

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Borders are so familiar, at least idiomatically—they are lines on the map, lines in the sand, digital lines on the GPS apps on our phones—that we think we understand them, including those we have never seen. We are beholden, you might say, to a cartographic imaginary—the conviction that borders in real life look the way they do on maps: uniform, legal dividers without physical presence. In fact, borders vary wildly: some are heavily militarized, others all but open; some cut like scars through the body politic, while others follow geographical features (and thus appear natural, even if they are man-made all the same). By reducing borders to abstractions, maps distort reality as much as they (re)create it. To really see a border, one must look at it up close.

Both of Pulford’s books are situated in the entangled borderlands of China, Russia, and North Korea, but whereas Past Progress is a work of anthropology, Mirrorlands: Russia, China, and Journeys in Between (2019) is a travelogue. Pulford, who speaks fluent Chinese and Russian as well as some Korean, is clearly aware of the problem of misinference that emerges from seeing the border from too great a distance. States, he points out, perpetuate the errors of cartographic representation so as to seem more in control than they are. On maps, a state is always one homogeneous color throughout—one territory, one state, one nation—with edges demarcated by a simple black line. But the Sino-Russian-Korean borderlands, of course, are anything but.

What Pulford discovers in his travels is a mess of characters with mixed identities and hard-to-place accents. This includes various “Asian” Russians and “Russian” Chinese, people trying to escape their states or belong to them, traders and travelers, exiles and castoffs. The book’s thesis, if a travelogue can be said to have one, is that these identities are not simply mixed up or in between, but examples of mirroring: they exist always beside their reflections on the other side. This thesis is given different expressions throughout the text. Starting at the macro level, Pulford describes Russia and China as giant mirrored identities, noting that “throughout their enmeshed histories, both China and Russia have had crucial aspects of their identities shaped by mutual encounters,” and that “the Sino-Russian dynamic [is] like that between two vast mirrors […] offering an image of one to the other that appears at once inverted and yet also extremely similar.”

Mirroring at the border takes a number of forms: with early trade and traffic, it became a space of learning and mimicry—“a zone of reflection.” These days, borderland inhabitants exist in a state of “mirrored mutual dependency.” Pulford distills this point through a memorable discussion of intermarriage, with each population helping the other solve a demographic deficit. For Russia, the 20th century saw the devastation of two world wars that led to tens of millions of deaths. These casualties were predominantly men, generating a surplus of women. By contrast, in China, the one-child policy led to a massive boom of male children (preferred over female children, who were frequently aborted). As Pulford puts it: “The grand events of Sino-Russian history thus played out here in very personal ways.”

This mirroring generates complex politics at the border. The Russian side is populated with nonhomogeneous subjects (often Asian or mixed-race). Such multinationalism is ordinary in states of great size (despite what the map suggests), but at the border, one sees clearly the paradox of state power: territorial breadth is part of what gives Russia its (sovereign) greatness, yet by incorporating so many disparate peoples, it generates (national) weakness. Seen up close, this Russia is one that comes off insecure about its identity. At the border, Pulford writes, “an assertive ‘Russianness’ was seeking to mask inevitable Chinese influence.”

The same could be said of the Chinese side of the border. An exemplar of border mixedness is, in fact, the city of Hunchun—the setting of Past Progress—where Pulford finds “craft beer bars, and stylish restaurants serving pizza, Thai food and burgers.” Border cities, despite being small and seemingly irrelevant, “feel much more cosmopolitan than places even five times their size.” This represents a clear reflection, as Pulford would later have it, of mixed time.

The story of the border, any border, is in the details. The closer one looks, the more idiosyncrasies one finds—often reflective of great trends in geopolitics, but just as often countertrends, or even circumstances esoteric to the border itself. Part of the strength of Pulford’s writing is his ability to capture the border in vastly different registers. Mirrorlands is a travelogue suffused with history and politics; Past Progress is a work of anthropology filled with light, even funny, anecdotes. The books, you might say, are mirrors of one another. In both cases, one is introduced to the up close world of the border, a place unique unto itself.

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If in Mirrorlands we first meet Hunchun as a brief stop within a broader journey, in Past Progress we stop to consider the place for what it is. We can now return to our question: what is it like to live in a place with mixed time?

One way Pulford answers this is by thinking about friendship—or, better put, friendlessness. Despite all the interconnectivity in the borderlands—and the commitment at the macro level to intercultural friendship between China, Russia, and North Korea—locally, people see each other as others, rather than as fellow border dwellers. This is because, Pulford contends, they don’t inhabit “a common historical time.” The three countries have evolved differently since the end of the Cold War. Previously, they existed in “enforced synchrony”; now they are “out of step.” This means that people at once develop new sensibilities, born of disparate hypermodern presents, and also remain anchored to prior conceptions of development or progress communicated during socialism. These out-of-time cultural differences make friendships hard to sustain.

Take, for example, Xiaoling, a young woman who operates a tourist shop at the border but only ever meets fellow Chinese people. When she tries to befriend Russians, she finds them cold. These are people whose temporal sensibilities have diverged in their different postsocialist settings. Like many borderland interactions, the whole circumstance is steeped in irony. Most of what Xiaoling sells are “Russia-themed trinkets” to Chinese tourists returning from Russia—goods which are themselves actually manufactured in China.

Or consider Kolia, a Russian tourist agent, whose company arranges trips with absurd, grandiose titles like “World of Travels” or “Roads of the World”—short trips across the border, nonetheless billed as “leaps between civilizations.” In this exoticizing of difference across the border, one can’t help but revisit the metaphor of mirroring that Pulford used in his earlier work. Such othering happens on both sides of the border. Hunchun’s nighttime strip is called “Europe-style Street” and is filled with bars with names like “Beerlin.”

This circumstance of temporal asymmetry and “frustrated friendlessness” takes us back to the problem of progress. Despite all the overtures of togetherness, the promise of futurity and accelerated border time, people are in fact leaving Hunchun in great numbers—ironically aided by the emergence of high-speed rail. And so, with progress also comes its opposite: collapse. We see this clearly with the precipitous drop of ethnic Koreans in Yanbian from 63 percent in 1949 to just 30.8 percent in 2020. Korean numbers are dwindling not just because Han are moving in but also because they are being lured to South Korea. And so, with the departure of the Chosŏnjok population (who helped make the border cosmopolitan in the first place), Hunchun risks being cast back in time, to the peripheral backwaters from whence it came. Mixed temporality, it turns out, is hard to bear.

Herein, the deeper meaning of Pulford’s title: It’s not just that prior notions of progress remain layered in the present, but also that they may become self-defeating—that progress turns into its opposite and becomes past. So, what can be said about Hunchun’s time? It is a complex, convoluted, “asynchronous patchwork.” This is how time works in the borderlands, just as it does, to some degree, everywhere else. Because, as Pulford tells us, every place has its time. You just need to figure out where to look.