“They are not Tourists …”: Modes of Categorizing the Chinese Presence in the Digital Discourse of Zabaykalsky Krai

Abstract

The article examines the formation of perceptions of a neighboring country in the digital discourse of the Russian–Chinese borderland after February 2022. Drawing on public discussions on VKontakte, it analyzes how China’s proximity coexists with the maintenance of a symbolic boundary between local residents and Chinese people, concerns over resources and territory, and everyday dependence on Chinese imports. The empirical corpus comprises 81,108 comments on 3,316 posts from 31 regional communities in Trans-Baikal Territory; 3,022 excerpts were coded in MAXQDA 2024. Quantitative content analysis was used to compare the distribution of evaluations, while discourse analysis was employed to identify recurring interpretive frames. The findings show that evaluations are distributed across three distinct objects: China as a state, Chinese people as a social category, and the “Chinese” as a category encompassing goods, technologies, and services. Comparing these dimensions demonstrates that the expansion of transborder interactions does not dissolve the symbolic boundary but reproduces it through classifications of states, people, and things.