Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011, c2010. x. 285 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illus.) C$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7748-1657-1.
During almost a decade, from 1921-1929, the Chinese government administered Russians, Chinese, Manchus and other foreigners living in the former Tsarist Russian concession in northern Manchuria under the name “Special District of the Three Eastern Provinces.” However, the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) undermined this “administrative experiment,” and Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, followed by the 1932 creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo, quickly destroyed any remaining vestiges of this innovative system. After the end of World War II and following the Communist victory in 1949, almost all remaining Russians living in Manchuria were forced to leave China. The history of the “Special District,” and its remarkable impact on northern Manchuria, was soon forgotten.
Blaine R. Chiasson has revived this important history by using a wide range of Russian and Chinese secondary sources, augmented by extensive primary research at the Jilin Provincial Archives, Changchun, Jilin Province, the diplomatic archives held by the Ministère des Affairs Etrangère, Paris, France, and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, MD, plus access to a varied group of rare books, private papers and manuscript collections at Columbia University, Stanford University and Yale University. The majority of the endnotes are to primary sources or to contemporary press accounts, making this book the most authoritative source available on this topic.
Russian influence in China was often portrayed as being less rapacious than the other foreign powers, but this overlooked enormous Tsarist land acquisitions at Qing expense during the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the single largest Russian enterprise in northern Manchuria, and so later the biggest bone of contention, was the CER. Built after 1896, when Count Sergei Witte and Viceroy Li Hongzhang agreed to cooperate in discouraging Japanese aggression, Li was later accused of creating even greater problems by “letting the Russian wolf into Chinese territory” (20). While building this railway shortcut from Chita to Vladivostok cut off almost a thousand kilometres of track from the longer and more difficult route in Russia proper, its construction also gave the Tsarist government a dominant political and economic position throughout northern Manchuria.
After the Russian revolutions of 1917, China tried to retake control over this strategic area, only to meet with Russian resistance. In October 1920, however, the Chinese government based in Beijing successfully abolished the Russians’ extraterritorial rights, making them subject for the first time to Chinese laws. It was at this time that the Special District was created to administer the Tsarist institutions. The Special District’s courts, for example, adopted Chinese—not Russian—as their principal language of business. The formerly Russian-run prisons were taken over by Chinese administrators, and conditions were improved to show that China could rule foreigners in a “fair and humane fashion” (88). Education was also a priority, and new schools were built and additional teachers—both Russian and Chinese—were hired.
During most of the 1920s the Chinese administrators of the Special District worked hard to exert greater control over the CER and its adjoining territory by pressuring the Soviet government to abide by its 1924 promise to discuss terms that would return the railway line to Chinese control. It was this rights-recovery policy, which intensified after the Nationalists took power and moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928, that resulted in China’s unsuccessful attempt during July 1929 to retake the CER by force. Mounting tensions with the USSR resulted in war, during which tens of thousands of Red Army troops invaded northern Manchuria. One unfortunate shortfall of this book is that Chiasson spends too little time discussing this war’s impact on the Special District. After the Soviet victory in December 1929, it appeared that Russian power throughout Manchuria would increase, perhaps even turning it into a Soviet puppet state similar to Mongolia. Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria completed the job of undermining the Special District.
Behind the high politics surrounding control over the CER, Chiasson discusses the significant changes brought about by the Chinese administrators: “The case of the Special District reveals that, given the opportunity, the Chinese could not only take over a European administration but also improve it” (222). Renowned for its “spirit of practical and pragmatic compromise” (224), the Special District represented a path not taken in Chinese history. Rather, after 1949 most foreigners were forcibly ejected from the PRC, not just in Manchuria but throughout China proper. If things had gone differently, and compromise had trumped conflict, other foreign concessions might have one by one fallen under Chinese control, only to be governed by administrative entities similar to the Special District.
Bruce A. Elleman
U.S. Naval War College, Newport, USA
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