On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border
Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey
Harvard University Press: 2021
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Mekong Dreaming: Life and Death Along a Changing River
Andrew Alan Johnson
Duke University Press: 2020
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Nearly 7,000 kilometres from the Mekong River’s opening into the South China Sea, East Asia’s most northern river, the Amur, flows into the frigid Sea of Okhotsk. The Mekong originates in the glaciers of China’s Himalayas but quickly becomes tropical in the land of rice paddies and bamboo groves, while the Amur begins in the melting snow of Mongolia’s sacred Burkhan Khaldun Mountain and spends much of the year covered in ice thick enough that trucks drive on it as a highway. Such different environments and climates, and yet, like separated twins, the two rivers are similar in size, the Amur being only a few kilometres longer while the Mekong carries more water. The two rivers face similar challenges in flood management, climate change, environmental degradation and contrasting views of development, and both border on Asia’s superpower, China.

In On the Edge: Life Along the Russia-China Border, Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey offer a close examination of a stretch of the Amur where Russia and China stare at one another in a fragile friendship. In a needed reprieve from all-knowing policy experts in distant capitals or from the drive-by journalists who interview taxi drivers, bureaucrats and professors, these two authors have long careers in the area and approach their topic through the perspective of the people who live there and make the river border work or, in some cases, not work.

• Tags: Andrew Alan Johnson, Caroline Humphrey, China, Franck Billé, Issue 26, Russia