The Nanai, Hezhe and mobilized loyalties along the Amur

As communities of the once broadly unified indigenous Nanai/Hezhe people were incorporated into separate Russian/Soviet and Chinese states during the twentieth century, official portrayals of their ‘loyalty’ became a powerful index of their separation. Authorities in both countries cast the Nanai (Russia) and Hezhe (China) both as inherently loyal, ‘noble’ but naïve beneficiaries of state-promoted civilisational uplift, and as specifically loyal to the respective ‘homelands’ which they now inhabited. This paper shows how loyalty has been ‘mobilised’ by state centres demanding Nanai/Hezhe fealty through military service, and how this has been represented in narrative accounts of their heroism. Balancing this top-down perspective with ethnographic cross-border examination of the role of ‘loyalty’ as a contemporary discursive category among each group, I shed light on an under-considered narrative-based dimension to the relations of minority peoples with larger states.