Thomas Lahusen Introduction This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the layered cultures of the city of 1 Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province in Northeast China, and the area formerly known as Manchuria, in the first half of the twentieth century. A by-product of the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was built by the Russians in the period –, Harbin became a major economic and strategic center in Northeast Asia in the first decades of the twenti- eth century. If the foundation of the city on the shores of the Songhua/Sungari River is subject to conflicting interpretations, there is still no doubt that the city was the product of a colonial project. The Chinese Eastern Railway was an extension of the Russian Trans-Siberian, connecting Eastern Siberia with Vladivostok, with a southern branch extending from Harbin to the Yellow Sea ports of Port Arthur and Dairen. As a consequence of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of – all Russian property in Manchuria south of Changchun passed into Japanese control, in- cluding the railway (which became the South Manchurian Railway) and the Kwantung Leased Territory (the Liaodong Peninsula). The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Winter . Copyright © by Duke University Press. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 2 Thomas Lahusen But even if Manchuria was the site of competing colonialism and conflict between Russia/the Soviet Union, Japan, Western powers, and a China rav- aged by warring factions, civil war, and invasion, it was not a colonial place like any other. Most of the colonists were land-hungry peasants and other 2 Chinese immigrants pouring into Manchuria in an unending stream. As to the foreign colonizers, many of them were émigrés who had nowhere else to go. The concept of refugee did not have to wait until the end of the twentieth century to gain in complexity. Jews fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire and, later, the Holocaust; White Russians fled the civil war after ; im- poverished Japanese settlers tried to build a new home in the margins of the empire; Koreans—perhaps the best of all ‘‘Manchurian candidates’’—were caught between Japanese expansion and Chinese nationalism. More than fifty nationalities, including Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Latvians, Arme- nians, Georgians, and Tartars, speaking forty-five languages, came to live in Harbin, added to the Russian and Chinese majorities. Even if the most visible imprint on the cultural landscape of Harbin was Russian, all these nationalities contributed, with the Chinese, to make what has been called at times the ‘‘little Paris of the Orient’’ and, on other occasions, ‘‘the worst of all American Chicagos.’’ Each of the other larger urban centers of Manchuria—Mukden (Shen- yang), Dairen (Dalian), Hailar, or Changchun—had its foreign concessions, but these cities were not comparable to the multiethnic and multicultural Harbin, with its social and religious associations, institutes of higher edu- cation, newspapers, journals, publishing houses, banking institutions, and hospitals. When Harbin became part of the Japanese-dominated puppet state Manchukuo during the s, its international character declined. After the Soviet troops entered Harbin in , the city and Manchuria began a new phase of their history. China regained control over its territory in , and most of the foreign population left during the following de- cade. The memory of previous times was preserved, re-, and deconstructed elsewhere around the globe. Some of the essays in this issue of SAQ were presented in an earlier form at conferences on Harbin and Manchuria, organized in Khabarovsk, Russia, in June and at the University of Toronto in November . By its very form the poster announcing the Toronto meeting indicated that this con- ference endorsed neither the nostalgic celebration of a forever-lost Russia, exiled in an exotic and mysterious ‘‘Middle Kingdom,’’ nor the legitimizing Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Introduction 3 declarations of the ‘‘new’’ nationalisms attempting to come to grips with globalization. In response to those who celebrated in the centennial of the foundation of the city of Harbin by the Russians, or—what amounts to the same thing—the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and to those who claimed for the city a tradition dating from the Jin dynasty, the central part of the poster showed a street of Fujiadian during the s, with a Chinese gate in the foreground and passersby, plus some signs of modernity such as telegraph poles and electric street lamps. Fujiadian was a suburb of Harbin. Situated in Daowai district, literally ‘‘beyond the (railway) tracks,’’ it was predominantly inhabited by the Chinese, in contradiction to the very meaning of Chineseness—a ‘‘person from the Middle (Kingdom)’’ (Zhongguoren). Daoli district, ‘‘within the (railway) tracks,’’ which, by simpli- fying a little, was Russian from the point of view of its architecture and its population, was consigned to the margins of the poster, with three photo- graphs that had been slightly tinted to evoke postcards of earlier times. One of them represented the emblematic station of the Chinese Eastern Railway, another the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in winter, and yet another the Bud- dhist Paradise Temple (Jilesi), with a (Russian) cart parked in front of it. The reader will find these photographs among the illustrations of the present issue. The goal of these spatial permutations was not to expel the ‘‘wretched of the earth’’ from history or to establish a legitimacy a posteriori by play- ing with such representations of space (in Henri Lefebvre’s sense), but to provide an opportunity for the specialists of different scholarly disciplines to open their field to a form of knowing (connaissance) that challenges the 3 hegemony of knowledge (savoir). The mere encounter of East Asian and Slavic scholars in the pages of this issue of SAQ is a response to the challenge. But there is more: each contribu- tion attempts to cross boundaries that transcend the cultural, ethnic, social, and political divisions of a history that definitely refuses to be compartmen- talized by the abstract space of power. Therefore the reader is encouraged to be attentive to the various voices, including those of the illustrations, which figure here as texts in their own right. Each of these voices sounds from— and tells the story of—a concrete place from which the very stuff of history is made. A number of institutions made possible these encounters and, indirectly, this publication. These are, at Duke University, the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc., the Office of the Vice-Provost for Academic and Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 4 Thomas Lahusen International Affairs, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Litera- ture; at the University of Toronto, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sci- ence, the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, and the Depart- ment of History. Notes With respect to names of places and persons, the versions that appear most currently in the scholarly literature have generally been chosen for the sake of consistency (Harbin,in- stead of the Chinese pinyin transliteration Haerbin, or the Russian transliterated version Kharbin; Manchukuo instead of Manzhouguo, etc.). Otherwise, Chinese names are given in pinyin transliteration, except for quotes that use other systems.The same goes for Japa- nese and Korean, where the current scholarly transliteration is used. Russian names are given according to the simplified Library of Congress transliteration system. See Thomas R.Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor, MI, ). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, ), –. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Political Map of Manchuria. From North Manchuria and the Chinese Eastern Railway (Harbin, China, ), . Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Map of Harbin and suburbs. From North Manchuria and the Chinese Eastern Railway, . Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Contemporary map of Harbin (). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Photo of Fujiadian, a Chinese suburb of Harbin (mid- or late s). Courtesy Olga Bakich. The Sungari/Songhuajiang in Harbin, with view of the railway bridge, s or s. Courtesy Olga Bakich. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Contemporary view of railway bridge. Courtesy Thomas Lahusen. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 On the CER: Agents of the service on the CER station Shuangchengpu, on the stretch of the south line, retained by Russia after the Russo-Japanese War of –. From Kitaiskaia Vostochnaia Zheleznaia Doroga (Harbin, n.d.; probably around ; gift edition for senior employees for the tenth anniversary of the CER). Courtesy Olga Bakich. On the CER: Agents of the service on the CER station Maqiaohe. From Kitaiskaia Vostochnaia Zheleznaia Doroga. Courtesy Olga Bakich. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/99/1/1/471690/01.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Three different nationalities on Kitaiskaia Street, Harbin (s).