Manduhai Buyandelger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
This is a fascinating book. It is bold, nuanced, and a great contribution to anthropology, Mongolian studies, and the interdisciplinary study of ethnic and national conflict.
Douglas Rogers, Yale University:
Sinophobia is a compelling, lucid, and enormously insightful account of recent anti-Chinese sentiment in Mongolia, and its findings should resonate broadly across both Asian and Eurasian studies. Throughout, Billé combines careful ethnography and instructive analyses of affect, language, desire, and anxiety. The result is a truly novel synthesis, an important contribution to social and cultural theories of violence.
Henrietta L. Moore, Cambridge University:
The greatest threat to the prosperity and well-being of our time is intolerance and hatred of others. We urgently need new insights into these processes and their historical development. Billé supplements ethnographic analysis with psychoanalytical insight to bring us a compelling, wide-ranging, and powerful account of the mechanisms of subjectivity and affect that inform and shape national identities and their frequently, and worryingly, violent reinscription.
William Jankowiak, University of Nevada Las Vegas:
This powerful ethnography offers delicious insights into a fascinating people known largely through myth and legend. Bille's argument, that present-day hostility of Mongols toward Chinese is more symbolic than pragmatic is intriguing, and his explanation that there are new forces promoting social closure among Mongolian peoples is revealing. The author brings to his task an impressive analytical perspective based on his mastery of Mongolian, Russian, and Chinese sources.
Legrain Laurent, Universite libre de Bruxelles:
Franck Bille's book makes a great contribution to the study of Sino-Mongolian relations, but more broadly also racial and ethnic studies. It will please all anthropologists who grapple with the analysis of the production of embodied subjectivities and, in my opinion, it should be essential reading for every scientist interested in contemporary Mongolia and Asia.
Jack Eller, Anthropology Review Database:
This well-documented phenomenon supports his claim that Sinophobia is not an effect of real experiences of China or the Chinese but of exactly the lack thereof. Sinophobia... is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of the insistent production of national identity through othering, with wide applicability beyond Mongolia or even beyond ethnicity
In going beyond the merely theoretical or rhetorical to consider this issue on the psychological level, Billé has produced an engaging analysis of Chinese Mongolian relations that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the connections between nationalism, identity and xenophobia. Its relevance will only grow as China’s expanding wealth and influence finds the presence of its citizens more deeply felt in neighboring countries such as Mongolia.
Sinophobia is an interdisciplinary work combining anthropology, history, social psychology, linguistics, and cultural studies . . . Each of the seven chapters is filled with insights about the various representations of Sinophobia in Mongolia, which are often divorced from realities. . . . the anthropologist offers a useful analytical framework to examine the intersection of anxiety, anti-mainland Chinese sentiments, and identity crisis among Hong Kong people.
In Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity, author Franck Billé explores the swell of anti-Chinese feeling that has accompanied Mongolia’s post-Soviet independence. . . . Billé has produced an engaging analysis of Chinese-Mongolian relations that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the connections between nationalism, identity and xenophobia.
In his short coda, Billé adds that those Mongolians who actually travel and meet Chinese people tend to be less Sinophobic. This well-documented phenomenon supports his claim that Sinophobia is not an effect of real experiences of China or the Chinese but of exactly the lack thereof. It is what China stands for—backwardness, excess, rapaciousness, in a word Asianness—that scares Mongols, especially when they see it in themselves. . . . Sinophobia, then, is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of the insistent production of national identity through othering, with wide applicability beyond Mongolia or even beyond ethnicity.
Franck Bille’s Sinophobia should be considered as one of the best books for enabling people who live in English-speaking countries to understand the Mongols’ contemporary culture. . . . The book not only contributes to the understanding of Sinophobia in Mongolia, but also provides a solid footing for people to look at anti-Chinese sentiment in other regions, such as Turkey.
This book sheds light on a poorly understood phenomenon in contemporary Mongolia and contributes to our understanding of how identities are formed through the imagination of a remote and yet omnipresent ‘other’. Making use of impressive linguistic skills and both discursive and ethnographic analysis, Billé examines both inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic dynamics to demonstrate how xenophobic discourses act to constitute the Mongolian nation. Scholars working on contemporary Mongolia can hardly afford to overlook this work, and it may also be of interest to students and scholars seeking to understand these issues from a comparative perspective.
Franck Billé’s book makes a great contribution to the study of Sino-Mongolian relations, but more broadly also to racial and ethnic studies. It will please all anthropologists who grapple with the analysis of the production of embodied subjectivities and, in my opinion, it should be essential reading for every scientist interested in contemporary Mongolia and Asia.
