As we all know, China is a multi-ethnic country: there are currently 56 ethnic groups officially recognized in China. Among them, the Han population accounts for more than 90% of the total population of the country, while the other 55 ethnic groups are called ethnic minorities because of their small populations. The ethnic distribution in China is characterized by large and small settlements: the Han and ethnic minorities are mixed and mixed in the whole country, but in Xinjiang, Tibet and other border areas, they show the characteristics of ethnic minority settlements. In fact, China has been a multi-ethnic state since ancient times – today all 56 ethnic groups in China are the product of historical national integration.
China is an ancient civilization with a long history: the historical Xiongnu, Xianbei, Khitan and Dangxiang ethnic groups are not included in the 56 ethnic groups today. In our history books these peoples are often assimilated after being conquered by emerging nations. In Mr. Jin Yong's work "Tianlong Babu", there is a character Murong Fu. This Murong Fu's identity was that of a descendant of the Xianbei Murong clan who entered the Central Plains during the Sixteen Kingdoms period to establish the "State of Yan". In fact, today's Han people with the surnames Murong and Yuwen may have ancestors who were Xianbei people. This is actually a typical phenomenon of ethnic integration.
The land area of China's dynasties has not always been fixed, so the migration and integration of ethnic groups in history has formed many ethnic groups living across borders between China and neighboring countries in border areas. The Koreans are the ethnic groups that live cross-border with Korea and Korea in China; the Mongols are distributed in China, Mongolia, Russia and some countries in Central Asia; the Kazakhs are distributed in The Xinjiang region of China and the Republic of Kazakhstan and some other countries in Central Asia; the Miao are distributed in China and neighboring Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.
More than 30 of our 56 ethnic groups are ethnic groups that live across borders between our country and neighbouring countries. First of all, it needs to be clear that no matter which ethnic group is a Chinese national, it means that it is a member of the big family of the Chinese nation. Under this premise, China has given full respect to the cultural customs of ethnic minorities. Cross-border ethnic groups can play some unique roles in state relations and geopolitics. China has always respected the normal ethnic and cultural exchanges between cross-border ethnic groups living in our territory and overseas relatives.
This provides valuable reference and guidance for China to formulate foreign policy and ethnic policy, maintain stability and security in border areas, and promote friendly exchanges among cross-border ethnic groups. Among our 56 ethnic groups, the Ethnic Russians are a typical ethnic group that lives across borders between our country and its neighbours. There are about 140 million ethnic Russians worldwide: about 116 million live in the Russian Federation, about 20 million live in Russia's neighboring countries (including China), and about 3 million are scattered in Western Europe, the Americas and other places.
After talking about the distribution of the Russian ethnic group in the world, let's focus on the Russian ethnic group in our country. According to the statistics of the sixth national census in 2010, the total population of ethnic Russians in China is 15,393. Ethnic Russians in China are mainly distributed in Ili, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Northeast China and other places. The Russians in China generally speak Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh and other languages and scripts while using Russian and Russian: the Russians in China generally use Chinese and Chinese characters in social interactions; russian and Russian are used in their internal interactions with their own ethnic groups.
Russian ethnic origins from East Slavs: In the 5th and 6th centuries AD, during the Great Migration of The Eurasian peoples triggered by the westward migration of the Huns, the Slavs gradually divided into three branches: East Slavs, West Slavs and Yugoslavia. The name "Ross" is the Finnish name for the Normans, and the East Slavs generally refer to them as varyags. In their heyday, the Normans fought all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and traces of their conquests everywhere from Iceland to Italy, and they established a divided Duchy of Normandy in France and crossed the sea to conquer England.
The Norman branch (Rus') that developed eastward in the first half of the 9th century began to appear in the territory of present-day Russia and established its own state. According to the Russian historical work "Past Events", the Norman state had conflicts in its contacts with the East Slavs and was once expelled by the East Slavs. However, after driving out the Normans, the Slavic tribes fell into an endless war, until in 862 AD, the exhausted Slavic tribes decided to go to Northern Europe to bring the Rus' back.
The emissaries crossed the sea to Scandinavia and asked the Rus' to rule over them, thus restoring order and peace to the East Slavs. The Rus' elected three brothers— Rurik the Elder, Sineus the Elder, and Trevor the Elder— to lead the brethren to Novgorod, White Lake, and Izborsk to establish states. However, Sineus and Truvou died soon after, and the powerful Rurik established the first dynasty in Russian history, the seven-hundred-year-long Rurik dynasty.
However, this account of the "Past Events" has caused controversy both in Russia and abroad, and in fact a considerable number of historians believe that the record of the "Past Events" is too illusory, almost like a fairy tale, and they insist that Rurik conquered Novgorod by force, and then concocted a myth that he was invited by the locals to win the hearts and minds of the people. To this day, it is unclear how Rurik became the ruler of Novgorod, but the Rus' he brought with him had long since merged with the local Slavs to become the local indigenous people.
In 879, on his deathbed, Rurik entrusted the country to his close associate Oleg, and entrusted his son Igor to him. During oleg's reign, he used the forces of Varyag's soldiers and neighboring Slavic tribes to conquer many towns, including Smolensk, and gradually took control of the cities along the Dnieper River. In 882 AD, he led an army south to conquer Kiev, killed the princes Ascord and Kiel who ruled there, and moved the capital here, and the Kievan Rus' state, ruled by the Rus' and dominated by the East Slavs, was officially born.
In 988-989, Vladimir I, Grand Duke of Kievan Rus' proclaimed Orthodox Christianity the state religion. In 1235, Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan and the second son of Shuchi, was ordered by the Great Khan Wokoutai to lead the general Subutai and the emperors Baidar, Hedan, Guiyou, and Möngke on a western expedition. In 1243, Batu established the city of Sarai on the Volga River, which stretched from the Irtysh River valley in the east, the Caspian Sea in the south, the Choros in the west, and the Chincha Khanate (Golden Horde) in the upper Volga River in the north. Thereafter, the Khanate of Chincha ruled Russia for more than two hundred years.
The earliest Russian entry into China can be traced back to the period of Mongol rule. The protagonist of the "YuanShi" volume 123 "Pinching the Ancient Thorn" is basically certain to have come from the Russian region under the Golden Horde. In fact, the name "pinched thorn" translates to Nikolai (a typical Russian name that can no longer be typical). During the reign of Emperor Wenzong of Yuan, he recruited 10,000 Russians into the capital as a guard army, and later recruited some Russians to Tuntian, liaoyang province at that time.
A Yuan Dynasty official seal unearthed in Yi County, Liaoning Province, reads in Chinese: Xuanzhong HuiLuoSi Wei's pro-army commanded the envoy Si Baihu Seal. This is basically a relic of Russian soldiers from the Yuan Dynasty in the local Tuntian. However, this group of Russians in the Yuan Dynasty gradually integrated into other ethnic groups, so they did not have much of a relationship with the Russians in China today. For more than two hundred years the Mongols ruled Russia, they set the center of their rule on the southern Russian steppes, while the northern forestlands remained semi-independent of the Rus' principalities.
The Grand Duchy of Moscow took advantage of the Mongol model of rule to try to create its own submissive posture before the Mongols, so the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which gradually gained the Mongol Khanate, was given the privilege of collecting tributes for the Mongols and assisting the Mongol Khan in his conquest of a principality that did not obey orders. The Grand Duchy of Moscow amassed enormous wealth in the process, and its military prowess grew stronger. On September 8, 1380, the Grand Duke of Moscow, Dimitri Ivanovich, defeated the armies of the Mongol Chincha Khan for the first time on the banks of the Don River, after which the Grand Duchy of Moscow became independent from the Mongol Chincha Khanate.
However, the defection of the Khanate of Chincha was lost in 1383 when it invaded the Grand Duchy of Moscow again. In 1480 AD, Ivan III of the Grand Duchy of Moscow confronted the Mongol army across the Ugra River. The Mongol army was forced to withdraw due to the cold and lack of food and the attack of the capital City of Sarai by the Crimean Khan. The Grand Duchy of Moscow thus won the standoff without a fight, marking the end of 238 years of Mongol rule over the Rus' Principality. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Grand Duchy of Moscow had annexed the Rus' principalities of Tver, Pskov and Ryazzan, and had regained Smolensk from the Lithuanians.
At this point, a unified Russian state stretching from the White Sea in the north to the Oka River in the south, bordering the Ural Mountains in the east and the Dnieper River in the west was born. Russia has expanded to the East and west since it was freed from the Mongol Golden Horde, while Russia's expansion in the East has progressed much more smoothly than in the West. By 1637 the Russians had advanced to the sea of Okhotsk. Russia's eastward expansion extended warm and rich from the local Tunguska people of Siberia to the south of the Heilongjiang River Basin.
In 1638, 1640 and 1641 Fyodor Golovin, the Russian military commander at Yakutsk Castle, sent three cossack expeditions to invade the Heilongjiang River valley, but all three failed in the harsh climate and the resistance of the local Tunguska and Daurs. Between 1643 and 1644, the Cossack Vasily Boyarkov went down the Heilongjiang River on expeditions and established fortresses such as the city of Yaksa. The expansion of the Russians in the Heilongjiang River basin finally aroused the alarm of the Qing Dynasty.
From 1685 to 1688, the Qing army launched a Yaksa self-defense counterattack against the Russian army. After the war, the Kangxi Emperor incorporated the Russians captured by the Qing army or voluntarily surrendered into the Seventeenth Zoe of the Fourth Staff of the Manchurian Capital with the Yellow Banner (historically known as the Russian Zora), thus forming a mixed ethnic group (The Albazins) of mixed ethnic groups (The Slavs) with Manchus, Mongols, Han and other ethnic groups. This ethnic group was classified as Manchu and Russian in the 1951 ethnic identification. Today, about 200 Russians with the surnames of Luo, He, Yao, Tian and He in Beijing are their descendants.
At the end of the 19th century and before and after the October Revolution in Russia, some Russians poured into Xinjiang and northeast China from Siberia and other places for political or economic reasons. At first, they were not considered one of the Chinese nationalities until 1934, when the first people's congress in Xinjiang was held, when the First People's Congress was held, Russians who had become Chinese citizens attended the meeting as "naturalized people". In 1935, the Second People's Congress was held in Xinjiang, which made specific provisions on the division and titles of various ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and adopted corresponding resolutions.
Russians who have acquired Chinese citizenship have since been given the name "naturalized ethnic group". After the founding of New China in 1949, the "naturalized ethnic group" was renamed Russian ethnic group. After the founding of New China, Sino-Soviet relations ushered in a honeymoon period of more than 10 years. During this period, more than 20,000 Soviet experts came to China to participate in the construction boom of New China. At first, the Soviet government did not allow experts to come to China to start a family in principle, but later the implementation of this provision was not fully in place, so some Soviet experts married and settled in China.
Although The Russians in China are descendants of Russian immigrants, they have undergone a century of assimilation with the Han, Manchu, Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic groups in China: most of the Russians in China are mixed descendants of Russians and other ethnic groups, so the Russians in China have formed some different characteristics with the Russians in terms of appearance, language, religion, customs and so on. Russians are mostly white, and Chinese Ethnic Russians are mostly of mixed race. The Russians in China use Russian and Russian at the same time as Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh and other languages.