Manchuria is a historical region, which roughly corresponds to Northeast China. The Manchu people, who established the last dynasty of Imperial China (the Qing, 1644–1911) originated there, and it has been the stage of turbulent events during the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese war, Japanese occupation and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Soviet invasion, and Chinese civil war. This innovative and accessible historical survey both introduces Manchuria to students and general readers and contributes to the emerging regional perspective in the study of China.
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Manchuria and a Regional Approach to Chinese History
On today’s maps, you will not see Manchuria. The common historical definition of this region comprises the three north-eastern provinces of China, which were known under the Qing dynasty as Dongbei san sheng
, the north-eastern edge of Inner Mongolia and the northernmost part of Hebei province around Chengde
. At present, the term Dongbei is more often used in a narrow sense, to indicate the three provinces of the Northeast: Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. In this book, I will refer to ‘Manchuria’ and ‘the Northeast’ interchangeably when discussing the region’s history before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but will only use ‘the Northeast’ for the period thereafter.1 Some scholars, like the linguist and anthropologist Juha Janhunen, speak of a greater or ‘outer’ Manchuria, which extends the scope of this historical term further to the north and east so as to include the territories ceded by the Qing to Russia by 1860, from the Amur and the Ussuri to the Stanovoy mountain range between Yakutia and the Pacific Ocean, and even encompassing Sakhalin Island beyond the Strait of Tartary.2 A broad transnational perspective on this region has been proposed recently in a monograph by historian Evelyn S. Rawski.3
Historical research on Manchuria as contained within the borders of present-day China can be situated within the regional approach to the study of Chinese history as opposed to discussing China as a whole, or focusing on particular provinces. One rationale for this is the often arbitrary nature of provincial borders (indeed, those of the three north-eastern provinces have changed repeatedly, as have their names). There are clusters of culturally and economically homogenous areas in China,4 and the Dongbei is among the most important of these. The second part of this book surveys the three provinces and the Mongol element in Manchuria, combining historical and geographical perspectives. Another discipline relevant to research on Manchuria is border studies: the Northeast is one of the border regions where China has experienced the reciprocal influence of other cultures.5 Lastly, since the later 1990s, research on the two port cities in Manchuria, Harbin
and Dalian
, has emerged as something of an alternative to the customary focus on Shanghai as the urban centre where contact between China and the West was a catalyst for modernization.
To find a comprehensive history of Manchuria in a Western language one has to go very far back indeed, perhaps as far back as Manchuria: Its People, Resources and Recent History, by the British diplomat in China, explorer and botanist Sir Alexander Hosie (1853–1925). This book first came out in London in 1901, saw two editions and was republished in the handsomely illustrated ‘Oriental series’ in Boston in 1910.6 Immediately after the Russo-Japanese War and, once again, when Manchuria attracted worldwide interest because of the Japanese invasion in 1931, several books about this region were published in English. The work of Owen Lattimore (1900–89) stands out within this literature and will be mentioned again here. Most recently, the veteran historian of international relations Ian Hill Nish (born 1926) published a two-volume History of Manchuria, 1840–1948, of which the first volume surveys the region’s history and the second reprints select historical sources.7
Research on various aspects of Manchurian history has been large but fragmented. The present book stems from a seminar, which I have taught at Tel Aviv University for over a decade. To bring the story of Manchuria to my students, I had to collect and systematize the historical literature as well as follow the latest publications on the subject; and because no textbook on Manchuria existed, I gradually wrote one. Many of the sources on which the present book is based, therefore, have been debated in class, and my interpretation of them is indebted to those discussions. As this concise history is meant to be a textbook, I have mostly aimed to refer readers to publications in English. When important sources in Chinese or Russian are cited, their titles are translated into English in the bibliography.
No historian works on Manchuria as a whole: I, too, specialize in one facet of the story, the relations between Chinese and Russians in this region.8 My aim here has been to synthesize the most important scholarship so as to offer readers a new resource: an up-to-date history of Manchuria from the seventeenth century to the present, combining the perspectives of politics, culture and economy. Beyond any professional bias towards Russia, I also hope to demonstrate that Manchuria’s history has been intertwined with the history of Russia’s advance towards the Far East since the early Qing and especially from the late nineteenth century.
Russian–Chinese relations have not been limited to the Northeast (there has always been contact and military friction between the two states over Xinjiang) and, in turn, the history of the Northeast did not always involve Russians. Some aspects of life in Manchuria did not involve any foreigners, whereas in some periods the most important outside factor in the region were the Japanese. Indeed, Japan will often be mentioned here. However, it cannot be denied that from the late nineteenth century on Russia made an enormous impact on life in Northeast China. Although we do not have space to discuss it here, the impact of proximity to China was also important on the Russian side of the border. While Russian–Chinese relations will be a recurring theme, this book centres on the Northeast itself.
Before considering the name Manchuria, let us look at the Russian word for China: ‘Kitai’, comparable with the English Cathay, the name of (northern) China as used in medieval Europe. Kitai evolved from the ethnonym of the Qidan
(also Khitan, or Kitan) people, and was probably brought to Russia via India in the fifteenth century.9 The Qidan founded the Liao state in 916; in 1125 they were defeated by the Jurchen people. The Jurchen (Chinese: Nüzhen
