The Opportunity of a Thousand Years: Chinese Merchant Organizations in the Russian Civil War

Abstract

The Opportunity of a Thousand YearsChinese Merchant Organizations in the Russian Civil War Yuexin Rachel Lin (bio) Historians have recently begun to engage more systematically with the regional and intercultural dimensions of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Attention was first focused on Russia’s provinces, where revolutionary processes adapted to local economies, institutions, and structures of power. The revolution’s impact on various ethnic and religious groups—such as Ukrainians, Jews, and Muslims—has also been studied. The Russian Empire’s size, the diversity of its periphery, and its complex relationships with both European and Asian neighbors made non-Russian and cross-border interests impossible to ignore. Such perspectives are gradually making their way into the historiography of the revolution in Siberia and the Russian Far East. For a long time, scholars working on these vast areas have had the difficult task of tracing the general contours of the revolution and Civil War there. Their accounts of White militarists, the Kolchak regime’s misgovernment, and the diplomatic tug-of-war over Allied military intervention have traditionally centered on domestic or Western narratives. Until now, questions of ethnicity and nationality or of Russia’s position in the wider Northeast Asian region have been under-explored.1 Far less has been written about the revolution in the Far East as an Asian phenomenon, in which Russia was but one contender in a territory marked by powerful imperial conflict, and where porous borders led to significant minority populations in Russia itself. Two recent works, Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak and Ivan Sablin’s Governing Post-Imperial [End Page 745] Siberia and Mongolia, have broken new ground on this issue, but many aspects of the revolution’s Asian dimension remain undiscovered.2 This gap is especially notable given the proliferation of such research on the late imperial period and in the field of émigré and East Asian studies. Several works have appeared on the transnational aspects of Russia’s colonial projects in the Far East, including David Wolff’s To the Harbin Station, Wolff’s and Stephen Kotkin’s Rediscovering Russia in Asia, and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye’s Toward the Rising Sun.3 With rare exceptions, however, they usually conclude their narratives in 1917. Histories of Russian emigration to Manchuria, such as those of Olga Bakich and John Stephan, have also focused overwhelmingly on the Russian experience and less on Asian perceptions of émigrés.4 Finally, although the experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in the Russian Far East have garnered attention among East Asian and Russian-language scholars, cross-pollination with mainstream Western historiography on the revolution has been limited. The formidable linguistic and cultural barriers to a sensitive study of the Russian Revolution’s trajectory in Northeast Asia only compound the problem. The prerevolutionary situation in eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East is now understood in a fair amount of detail. These territories were situated in a deeply contested frontier zone claimed by—among others—the Russian, Chinese, and Japanese empires. Tsarist policies of colonial consolidation were undertaken with the express purpose of fending off perceived Chinese territorial revisionism and Japanese ambition.5 Ironically, these same developmental policies led to a wave of Asian migration into the region. The Chinese formed [End Page 746] the majority of these migrants, making up 10–12 percent of the population in the Russian Far East in 1910 and a third of the population of Vladivostok in 1916.6 It stoked further fears of a “Yellow Peril,” in which the Chinese (and Japanese) seemed poised to out-compete the Russians demographically and economically. The Chinese, for their part, had lost the far eastern territories to Russia a mere 60 years before 1917, in a process beginning with the signing of the Treaty of Aigun in 1858. Aigun became a key episode in China’s litany of “national humiliation” (国耻, guochi), in which the once-great Qing empire came to offer multiple concessions to other imperial powers. Added to the list of territorial losses were the semicolonial China Eastern Railway zone in Manchuria, under Russian control; Russia’s persistent attempts to block China from accessing the Amur River; the imposition...