Manchurian Railways and the Opening of China: An International History

An International History

Bruce Elleman, Stephen Kotkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780765625144
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317465461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Banks & Banking
• Index: History

The railways of Manchuria offer an intriguing vantage point for an international history of northeast Asia. Before the completion of the Trans-Siberian railway in 1916, the only rail route from the Imperial Russian capital of St. Petersburg to the Pacific port of Vladivostok transited Manchuria. A spur line from the Manchurian city of Harbin led south to ice-free Port Arthur. Control of these two rail lines gave Imperial Russia military, economic, and political advantages that excited rivalry on the part of Japan and unease on the part of weak and divided China. Meanwhile, the effort to defend and retain that strategic hold against rising Japanese power strained distant Moscow. Control of the Manchurian railways was contested in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5; Japan's 1931 invasion and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo; the second Sino-Japanese War and World War II in Asia; and, the Chinese civil war that culminated in the Communist victory over the Nationalists. Today, the railways are critical to plans for development of China's sparsely populated interior. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to explore this fascinating history.

PART I

Competing Railway Imperialisms

In Manchuria, the strategic goals of outside powers were not always attained. As Sally Paine shows, Imperial Russia’s primary aim in building the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) linking it to Vladivostok, was strategic. Russian leaders hoped to tip the balance of power in Northeast Asia in Russia’s favor, and poured vast sums into the building of its Asian railway network. But Japan opposed Russia’s strategic advance, and following its unexpected victory in the Russo-Japanese War, Japan secured possession of the southern sections of the railway line, as well as the crucial ports of Lüshun and Dalian. In the end, the Chinese Eastern Railway did not give Russia unchallenged power over Northeast Asia, but instead put enormous strains on Russia’s budget, as well as becoming a major strategic liability.

Japan’s windfall, at Russia and China’s expense, helped shape the course of the entire twentieth century in East Asia. Y. Tak Matsusaka examines the Japanese acquisition of the southern part of Manchuria as a result of Tokyo’s victory in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War. The division of the Chinese Eastern Railway into two parts, with Japan obtaining the 400-mile railway line connecting Port Arthur and Dalian with the interior, began the lengthy series of events that culminated with the September 1931 “Manchurian incident” and the subsequent formation of the puppet state of “Manchukuo” under Japanese tutelage. During this twenty-six-year period, Japan’s principal agency of colonial transformation was the “steam locomotive” and the “iron rail” under the control of a quasi-official corporation known as the South Manchuria Railway (SMR) Company. The SMR not only provided the “bones and sinews” of Manchukuo, but helped to shape the Japanese imperial ethos, while resulting in feats of architecture, engineering, and industry. Perhaps most importantly, the SMR became a symbol of man versus nature, with an iconic Asia Express Locomotive racing across the Manchurian prairie.

Meanwhile, Soviet Russia, as Bruce A. Elleman discusses, attempted to open diplomatic relations with China, as well as to reclaim its lost rights and privileges over the Chinese Eastern Railway. Following the chaos and turmoil in Russia due to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the management of the Chinese Eastern Railway was disputed between the new Soviet government and the warlord-dominated Republican government in Beijing. Bolshevik propaganda in 1919 promised that the CER would be returned to China without compensation. The 25 July 1919 Karakhan Manifesto annulled all of the tsarist government’s former “unequal” treaties with China, but it did not replace them with new treaties. But Elleman details how the Soviet government used a series of secret agreements with Beijing, as well as support for the southern-based Communist-Nationalist United Front, to put pressure on the northern government. In the event, Moscow was able to retake majority control over the CER. But Soviet “Red imperialism” backfired. The Nationalist reunification of China set the Soviets and China on the path to conflict.

Felix Patrikeff shows how these frictions led to the 1929 Sino-Soviet War. Following the 1928 assassination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, his son, Zhang Xueliang, quickly became locked in a military struggle with the USSR over control of the CER. By the end of the brief hostilities the Soviet Union had managed to retain physical control over the railway, but Russia’s position in northern Manchuria was weakened, economically and socially. When Japan invaded northern Manchuria in 1931, on a pretext, it was supported by a wide cross-section of people living in northern Manchuria, including many émigré Russians, who greeted Japanese troops with rousing Banzais. By 1935, the Soviets were forced to sell the CER to Japan. This sale allowed Japan to unify the Manchurian railways for the first time since 1905, and made Manchuria the primary base from which Japan could extend its power into China proper, beginning in 1937. That was the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War, or World War II in Asia.

1
The Chinese Eastern Railway from the First Sino-Japanese War until the Russo-Japanese War

S.C.M. Paine

From 1891 to 1916, Russia constructed the Trans-Siberian Railway. Until its completion in 1916, Russia relied on a trans-Manchurian line to connect European and Asiatic Russia. This was the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), with 1,782 miles of track linking Chita with Vladivostok, and with a spur to the south to Port Arthur. This railway system constituted an enormous public investment, in some of the most sparsely populated regions of the Russian and Chinese Empires, by a government chronically short of investment capital, and by a country with a grossly inadequate transportation grid even in the most densely settled parts of European Russia. To understand why the Russian government chose to allocate its scarce public funds in this way, this essay will examine the political, economic, and national security reasons that led to the building of the Chinese Eastern Railway.

Why Russia Built the Chinese Eastern Railway

Expanding the Russian empire was one primary reason behind the decision to build the Chinese Eastern Railway. Russia had long-standing ambitions in East Asia, as suggested by the name “Vladivostok,” Russia’s most important eastern port, whose name translates to “Ruler of the East.” Russia’s most talented public servant of the late-tsarist period, Minister of Finance Sergei Iul’evich Witte, saw Russia’s eastward expansion in terms of manifest destiny and social Darwinism. Each European power was competing to take “as large a share as possible of the inheritance of the outlived oriental states, especially of the Chinese colossus. Russia, both geographically and historically, has the undisputed right to the lion’s share of the expected prey” because Russians had been spreading eastward for over five hundred years. Manchuria was simply the latest phase. Witte stated in 1903: “Given our enormous frontier line with China and our exceptionally favourable situation, the absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese Empire is only a question of time.”¹

Anticipated economic benefits were another reason. Minister of War General Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin wrote in 1900: “When Russia has in her hands a railway between the Baltic Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and when she reaches her feelers down to the Bosporus on to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, then with her inexhaustible supply of natural resources she will offer all the powers of the world awesome economic competition.”² Tsar Nicholas II also believed that the Russian East Asia would become self-supporting.³

National security was the third and most immediate reason from the point of view of Russian leaders. In the period leading up to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and continuing beyond the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Russian railway development in Asia can be seen as a function of foreign policy. Railway building in Asia ebbed and flowed largely in response to regional and national security needs.

In 1881, China forced Russia to evacuate territories occupied in 1871 during the massive rebellions of China’s Muslim subjects in Xinjiang (Sinkiang) from 1862 to 1878. When China suppressed these rebellions, it had large forces deployed in Xinjiang that could have forcibly retaken the occupied territories had Russia not backed down. Because of these large Chinese deployments and because of Russian financial problems caused by the expensive Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), Russia agreed to scrap the 1879 Treaty of Livadia giving it these territories, in order to sign the 1881 Treaty of St. Petersburg.

The key Russian negotiator for the Treaty of St. Petersburg blamed this unusual Russian setback in its dealings with China on the lack of a railway system capable of deploying troops to defend the borders. He advised the Russian foreign minister: “It is absolutely necessary to have defensive naval forces in Vladivostok and to consolidate our military presence along the entire Siberian frontier.” He continued: “Of all the means for defense, the most effective and at the same time, the most economical—because it would be productive—is the Siberian railway! I ardently hope that we can proceed with it as rapidly as possible.”⁴ Later he added: “The only way to reduce these unproductive expenses for defense is, I repeat, a Siberian railway. It has become a political necessity of the first order for us.”⁵

Since as early as 1857, there had been intermittent discussion among Russian officials to lay such a line. Railroads did not reach the Ural Mountains, the geographic divide between European and Asiatic Russia, until 1878 with the links to Orenburg and Ekaterinburg.⁶ In 1887, Russia undertook preliminary surveys of the route from the western Siberian city of Tomsk to Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, and from the southern shores of Lake Baikal to Sretensk, a town located on the Amur River, which forms the Russo-Chinese border. Then on 29 March 1891 a special imperial rescript announced the intention to build a Trans-Siberian railway.⁷

The first major section of the Trans-Siberian Railway, from the Urals town of Cheliabinsk eastward to the Ob River, opened in 1896; the section between Vladivostok and the Amur town of Khabarovsk in 1897; the section between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk in 1898; the Irkutsk-Lake Baikal Line as well as the Ussuri River section in 1899; and the section between the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to Sretensk in 1900. Due to the extremely rough terrain, the section around the southern end of Lake Baikal was completed only in 1904; before that time ferries linked the railway line.⁸

In other words, by 1904 the Russians had completed railway lines connecting European Russia to the Chinese border south of Lake Baikal and connecting Vladivostok via Khabarovsk to the Chinese border in the east. This left a major gap in between. Until 1896, the route for the final section connecting Lake Baikal to Vladivostok remained unresolved. It was in this period that a major foreign relations crisis, the Sino-Japanese War, precipitated a decision to build the Chinese Eastern Railway.

The First Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Eastern Railway

The First Sino-Japanese War overturned the long-standing balance of power in East Asia to make Japan the dominant regional power at Chinese expense. China had unsuccessfully attempted to maintain Korea’s tributary status and limit Japan’s increasing influence there. But China’s rapid defeat, resulting in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, forced China not only to abandon claims of suzerainty over Korea, but also to cede Taiwan, the Pescadore Islands, and the Liaodong Peninsula in southern Manchuria, to Japan. Russia, however, successfully intervened to stop the cession of Liaodong, with the support of France and Germany. In the Triple Intervention, Japan was forced to give up the Liaodong Peninsula and its strategically important harbor of Lushun (Port Arthur), located within easy striking distance of Beijing.⁹

During the war, Russian officials repeatedly discussed the possibility of Russia’s absorbing part of Korea and northern Manchuria.¹⁰ The governm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part I Competing Railway Imperialisms
• Part II Competing Railway Nationalisms
• Epilogue: Rivers of Steel: Manchuria’s Railways as a Natural Extension of the Sea Lines of Communication
• Selected Bibliography
• Index