Description
This article examines how Russia’s war in Ukraine has shaped representations, and everyday experiences of Russian and Ukrainian women in China, situating these within entanglements of intimacy, sovereignty, and racial capitalism. Drawing on patchwork ethnography, the study combines interviews with diasporic women in Beijing, analysis of Chinese state media portrayals, and investigation of AI-generated “fake Russian” characters used to sell Russian goods online. I argue that these AI-fabricated identities serve dual purposes: reinforcing China’s conditional geopolitical alignment with Russia, and promoting a biopolitical vision in which white, often Slavic, women are idealised as desirable partners for Chinese men and symbols of modernity. These gendered, racialised, and commodified images circulate in both state-controlled television and e-commerce platforms, blurring the boundaries between intimacy, sovereignty, and racial capitalism. Contrasting media portrayals with ethnographic accounts reveal how the war, on the one hand, valorises Slavic femininity for commercial and militarised interests, and, on the other, has fractured previously close-knit Russian-Ukrainian social networks, exposing the fragility of solidarity and the deep embedding of global geopolitical conflict in everyday, intimate spaces.
