Ethnic Russian 'Uncle Petrov' sparks debate over what it means to be Chinese
(CNN)With bright blue eyes, fair skin and bushy brown hair, Peter Petrov doesn't look like a typical Chinese man.That's because Petrov, whose legal name is Dong Desheng, lives in his birthplace of Heilongjiang province and is an ethnic Russian, one of China's 55 officially recognized minority groups. In a country where the predominant ethnic group, Han Chinese, accounts for 92% of the population -- or 1.2 billion people -- Petrov, 44, says his appearance and heritage makes him stand out. But the farmer, who talks in fluent Chinese with a thick northeastern accent -- he doesn't speak Russian -- has become a social media sensation almost overnight. In late 2017, Petrov started posting videos of his life on one of China's most popular streaming apps, Kuaishou. The clips saw him playing with his dog, Little White; eating dumplings with his family; tending to his corn and soybean crops.Within a year, he had gone viral.Some viewers were confused by his appearance: One Kuaishou user asked where Petrov had bought his colored contact lenses, unable to believe his bright blue eyes were real. But more were drawn to his infectious enthusiasm and boyish charm.Today, Petrov, has nearly 1.5 million followers. Some fans have even traveled from China's southern-most provinces to his small village, near the Chinese-Russian border, to meet Uncle Peter, bringing a range of gifts -- including so much alcohol Petrov said he still hasn't finished it all. At first, I really didn't like using social media, said Petrov. But in the end, it was great.But more than creating a social media star, Petrov's videos have stirred debate online about what it means to be Chinese in a society where ethnic homogeneity and social conformity are the norm. Russians flee to ChinaThe October Revolution of 1917 led to the collapse of Imperial Russia. Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin rose to prominence during the revolution, and eventually seized power of Russia and formed the Soviet Union -- the world's first communist state. From 1917 to 1922, a brutal civil war broke out between the Red Army and anti-communist forces as they fought to determine Russia's political and economic destiny. During the conflict and post-war upheaval, thousands of Russians -- including Petrov's ancestors who lived in Poyarkovo, a small rural village near the Russian-Chinese border -- fled to China.During this time, China was split into competing military cliques and was only nominally unified in 1928 by the Chinese Nationalist Party, after more than a decade of political maneuvering and warfare. In 1926, Petrov's great grandparents took their two sons across the frozen Amur River into China by horse sled and resettled in Xunke County, in Heilongjiang. After a few years, Peter's great grandparents divorced and his great-grandmother married a Han Chinese man and adopted his surname, Dong. The family has remained in the region for almost a century. They were among thousands of ethnic Russians who
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Ethnic Russian and x27 . Uncle Petrov and x27 . sparks debate over what it means to be Chinese CNN
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