Intensive and illegal wood logging in the Russian Far East: How emerging representations on China hide Russian internal malfunctions

• Main Author: Daniélou, Maxime
• Other Authors: Centre de recherches pluridisciplinaires multilingues (CRPM), Université Paris Nanterre (UPN), Ghent University
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2019
• Subjects: Russia; China; Siberia; Russian far east; Ecologic issues; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; taiga
• Online Access: https://hal.parisnanterre.fr/hal-04319162

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, relations between China and Russia have steadily improved, making China the first trading partner of Russia and one of its main military allies. Nevertheless, the growing contrast between the two states in terms of economic power and political influence seems to bring out new fears in Russia. In the press or in the social networks, voices are rising against the structure of bilateral trade, fearing that Russia will become a mere reserve of resources for its neighbor (Kolossov 2018). The representation of a plunder of Russian natural resources by China has brought out an eco-nationalist discourse that now seems to dominate anti-Chinese narratives in Russia. Topics such as deforestation of the Siberian Taiga, pollution of farmland or of the Baikal Lake have become the main objects of local and national contestation towards economic cooperation with China (Kondratenko 2017). Based on the study of Russian-language media, academic sources and two field studies with interviews in the Russian Far East, our research leads us to believe that the theme of deforestation is the one that has the most significant impact on the national level nowadays. In this paper, we propose to present the main features of the discourse that accuses China of destroying the Russian forest by intensive or illegal logging. Then, we will try to demonstrate how this discourse conceals the fact that intensive and illegal harvesting actually appear as an internal problem in Russia, based on the illegal practices of landowners and shortcomings in state management (Smirnov 2013).