University of Heidelberg

Conference Report, by Susanne Hohler and Sören Urbansky

In June, an international conference on “Global Challenge and Regional Response. Early 20th Century Northeast China and Harbin: Their Social, Cultural, Economic and Political Encounters with the World” was held in Harbin, China. It was organized by DAN BEN-CANAAN of the School of Western Studies at Heilongjiang University in Harbin, FRANK GRÜNER of the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg together with INES PRODÖHL of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC.

Northeast China, known to the Western World as Manchuria, became the focus of global attention in the early 20th century, when Japanese and Russian imperialism struggled for hegemony over a region, increasingly important as a crossroad for trade between Asia, Europe and North America. Manchuria itself was rapidly transformed by the construction of major railways and the often conflictual exploitation of rich mineral and agricultural resources by Russia respectively the Soviet Union, Japan, the United States and other countries, also involving a massive migration into Manchuria.

Harbin, a city that emerged at the eve of the 20th century due to the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, was home to many different nationalities and cultures, among them for example Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and Tatars, together creating a unique international city. Although Harbin was situated remote area of the world, the city was deeply affected by global events like the Bolshevik Revolution, the 1929 economic crisis and the Second World War.

The Conference focused on Manchuria as an example of “Glocalization” – a phenomenon in which global and local interests converge and the city of Harbin as a multicultural, global place between 1898 and 1949 and Manchuria. The main goals of the organizers were to encourage methodological approaches that do not rely on ethnic, cultural or national narratives but combine theories of transculturality with empirically substantiated research. The conference, in combination with a summer school, brought together scholars and students from various countries and different disciplines to achieve a more complete picture of the dynamic and complex interactions that shaped the history of Manchuria and its inhabitants.

The meeting was opened by a lecture on “Changing Identities: Harbin Censuses” delivered by OLGA BAKICH (Toronto). Bakich, a Harbin born scholar, analyzed the ways in which multinational residents of Harbin were labeled and identified in terms of nationality and citizenship in censuses and estimates of Harbin population in the four major periods of Harbin’s history as a multicultural place: before the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War, in 1918-1931, the years which can be characterized by such factors as a significant influx of Russian émigrés and China’s assertions of its sovereignty, in the Manchukuo period, and in the two postwar decades. Bakich revealed how demographics were affected by geographical factors and political considerations.

The first panel was on “Imperialism and National Aspirations in Northeast China”. In his talk on “The Russo-Japanese War and Northeast China: Global and Local Perspectives” ROTEM KOWNER (Haifa) examined different strategic goals of Russia and Japan on the eve of the war and asked who won and who lost the war by looking at short- and long-term geopolitical achievements. The victory over Russia allowed Japan its imperial expansion in and domination of Northeast Asia, which lasted until 1945, whereas the Russian Empire lost not only its momentum in the region but also much of its economic gains and political influence. CHRISTIAN STÖRTZ (Heidelberg) in his presentation stressed the “Global impacts of the Local War” of the Russo-Japanese War, the first war that was lost by a European power against an Asian country. Störtz identified a multitude of processes on the spheres of regional, national, supranational and global politics such as (anti-)colonialism and the emergence of national movements in the colonies. RUDOLPH NG (Heidelberg), in his presentation “Yuandongbao. A Chinese or Russian Newspaper?” analyzed the impact of ownership on the control over this first modern Chinese newspaper of Harbin. Although the Russian Chinese- Eastern Railway Company financed the paper, the editorial staff remained entirely Chinese. Journalists could publish sinophile articles and anti-Russian news reports. Hence, the newspaper was not just a simple Russian propaganda instrument in Manchuria. VICTOR ZATSEPINE (Hong Kong) in his talk “Surveying Manchuria: Imperial Russia’s topographers at work” analyzed the process of collecting knowledge about the conditions of the region. Although geographic expeditions to Manchuria were persistent and wide-ranging, maps of Manchuria remained inaccurate over decades due to a lack of knowledge of Chinese and local languages and other obstacles. The discussion’s focal point was the question of the impact of the global on the local. How did the Russian topographical and mental maps influence the local population? To what extend did the Russian owned Yuandongbao affect the minds of Chinese in Harbin?

The second panel dealt with different aspects of economy and trade. FRANK GRÜNER (Heidelberg), in his talk “When the Ruble Rolled: Currency and Money Exchange Business as Part of Daily Life in Northeast China”, examined ways in which the problem of multiple currencies had an effect at a regional and local level and how various social, as well as national population groups dealt with the given circumstances. The lack of a single monetary system affected daily urban life of Harbin and other cities well into the 1930s, fostering money exchange and phenomena of gambling and speculation. SÖREN URBANSKY (Heidelberg), in his presentation “Is there a border? Smugglers and their proto national and transcultural identities”, suggested a new approach to phenomena of smuggling along the Sino-Russian border, which can be of interest to historians not only in terms of economy. He argued that from smugglers’ careers one could also learn more about transcultural identities and interethnic contacts in border regions. While using transcripts of interrogations of arrested smugglers Urbansky analyzed smuggler’s biographies to question their “Russian” or “Chinese” identities. INES PRODÖHL (Washington DC), in her presentation “A Miracle Bean: How Soy Conquered the West, 1905–1945”, analyzed the history of soy cultivation. She described the emergence of the United States as the main producer of this valuable commodity, overtaking the China’s Northeast in the 1940s. By examining its causes, such as new chemical processes, which made it possible to manufacture an astonishingly broad range of affordable products from soybeans, and effects on both northeast China and the US, she demonstrated that Manchuria also influenced the West. The subsequent discussion focused on characteristics of transcultural identities and the ordinariness of chaos. Identities of people living in proto national societies are retrospectively difficult to define. Chaos, such as the existence of multiple currencies, can also be interpreted as a means of stabilizing a fragmentized society.

Panel three attempted to analyze different “Aspects of Modernity in Manchukuo”. Focusing on media and news propaganda policy as an imperial soft power-tool TOMOKO AKAMI (Canberra) analyzed Japan’s attempt to secure its dominance in Manchukuo not only through “railway imperialism” but also by creating “news imperialism”. While focusing on the Manchukuo national news agency, created in 1932 in Changchun, she demonstrated that Japan’s colonial strategy in Manchukuo was experimental and new in a few points and was to become a base for its policy in the military occupied areas in China in the following war. NORMAN SMITH (Guelph/Ontario), in his presentation “Shifting Narratives of Alcohol Use in Manchukuo”, emphasized the importance of considering the “glocal”, in terms of alcohol and its many connotations. He investigated shifting alcohol narratives in advertising in Manchukuo to argue that transformations in alcohol’s depiction – from an essential article of modern life in the 1930s to a dangerous substance in wartime of the early 1940s – evidence changing notions of healthful living, popular dissatisfaction with the regime and the collapse of a nascent urban consumer culture. Various comparisons of German and Italian strategies with those of Japan’s in its “puppet state” were a central subject of discussion. How did the Japanese propaganda machine worked in Manchuria and China, compared to the German and Italian? What were the features of Manchukuo representative architecture?

Panel four “Political Entanglements and Cultural Transgression” saw various methods of exploring transcultural encounters in Manchuria. KARL SCHLÖGEL (Frankfurt/Oder) in his talk “Reading Time in Space. Mapping cultural junctions” gave a theoretical approach of how the method of spacing history could be used successful for further in-depth analysis of a place like Harbin. According to Schlögel, bringing back the spatial dimension into historiography means first to analyze the urban texture of the city and second to reproduce the cultural topography of the city. MARK GAMSA (Tel Aviv) discussed phenomena of mixed marriages in Russian-Chinese Manchuria. The usual pattern was Chinese man married to a Russian woman. With only few Chinese women in the frontier zones and impoverished Russian women, these marriages had commonly economic backgrounds with Russian women seeking “economic” protection. Both, men and women were facing pressure and discrimination from their own communities for “crossing the line”. YOSHIYA MAKITA (Tokyo) analyzed cultural representations of Manchuria by physicians and nurses of the Japanese Red Cross Society in the first decades of 20th century by underscoring local intersections of global expansions of imperialism with (western-style) medicalization. YUAN XIN (Heidelberg) in her talk “Language Contact Induced by Social Contact between the Chinese and the Russian Communities in Harbin” examined the function Chinese pidgin Russian, a mixed, simplified language that was used as an inter-language between the Chinese and Russian communities of Harbin. While only parts of the elites were educated with proper knowledge of foreign languages, the majority of people had to use this “trading language” – a phenomenon that can commonly be observed in economic contact zones. In the discussion, participants primarily reflected about space as an analytical tool in historiography, which cannot be simply reduced to a “spatial turn”. They further discussed various cultural influences, coming from the outside initiating a strong change of the mental and material landscape of the city and region.

“Memory – Heritage and Governing of History” was the topic of the fifth panel. The architect CHEN ZIGUANG (Harbin) discussed the conservation or reconstruction of historical buildings and ways to integrate them into the architecture of modern Harbin using the example of Sofia Cathedral. He stressed that the protection of old buildings strengthens the identity of the city and promotes the specific cultural characteristics of Harbin stemming from its multi-ethnic past. In his presentation “Cultural Construction of Harbin and Manchuria in the Early 20th century: An Academic Reflection” SHU ZHAN (Harbin), a member of the Office for Minorities and Religious Affairs at the Heilongjiang People’s Congress, gave an outline of the history of Harbin, focusing on the colonial rule of Russia and Japan as well as the contribution of different ethnic groups to Harbin’s development. SU LING (Guangzhou), a journalist at the Chinese Southern Weekly, gave an account of her investigations at the Heilongjiang Academy of Social Sciences, where rent-seeking behavior among resident scholars sometimes takes precedence over academic pursuits. Though there have been attempts to intimidate her and others, Su Ling has succeeded in publishing her article. Based on her personal experiences, Su Ling tried to show ways for foreign scholars to conduct research in China. Due to Chen Ziguang and Shu Zhan’s early departure, the discussion focused mainly on how to conduct research and investigative journalism in China using techniques like networking and cooperation with universities and Chinese scholars.

Panel six, another panel on memory, focused on “Global Memories and Shared Identities”. MARIKO TAMANOI (Los Angeles), in her presentation “Sensibility Required. Exploring new approaches to the history of Northeast China”, suggested a new concept of sensibility for scholars dealing with history and memory. Using the case of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, she showed how descending from “national” to “local” levels, and/or connecting “local” to “local” could help overcome hostility and to avoid a doubtful “international apology boom”. DAN BEN-CANAAN’S (Harbin) presentation, “Problems of Memory and Nostalgia in Historical Reality: Imagined Communities-Imagined History”, dealt with methodological and theoretical problems that emerge when scholars work with memories and specifically oral history records. He stressed historians as interpreters should not only critically examine the documents themselves, but try to understand the context and the motives of the storytellers as well using methods from psychology like neurocognitive mechanisms. ALENA KOZLOVA (Moscow), in her presentation “Russian View on Harbin Past on Materials of Oral Testimony of Former Harbin’s Residents in 1932-1955”, presented a project by Memorial society of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, which conducted interviews with 29 former Kharbintsy who resettled in the Soviet Union. She touched on topics like reasons for returning, repression and exclusion by the Soviet state and society, as well as the effects on identity and self-perception. MADELEINE HERREN (Heidelberg), in her presentation “Globalization of Death – Foreign Cemeteries in a Transnational Perspective”, discussed growing global entanglements as expressed in the foundation of foreign cemeteries using the Jewish cemetery in Harbin and World War I military cemeteries as examples. She argued that foreign cemeteries shape the way people memorize the past of their former communities in a global context. The discussion mainly revolved around memory and narrative. How should we talk and write about memory, especially memories of suffering? What is the use of bypassing the national and descending to the local when dealing with, for example, war crimes? Why did those who suffered persecution on return to the Soviet Union merely raise issues of circumstance and abstractions, conspicuously failing to criticize their tormentors?

The seventh and last panel examined the role of civil society in Harbin and in particular the impact of Russian Fascists and the Jewish community. In his presentation, HEINZ DIETRICH-LÖWE (Heidelberg) showed that the ideology and Weltanschauung of the Russian Fascists was not deeply influenced by Hitler and Mussolini. Rather, both were mainly characterized by the Russian radical right movement in the later czarist empire. Löwe gave several examples like notion of the nation or the role of religion. SUSANNE HOHLER (Heidelberg) used the anti-German boycott by the Jews in Harbin 1933 as one example to show how reactions to global events, in this case the ascendance of the Nazis, can be shaped by local particularities. Compared to the boycott movement in other communities, Harbin was a special case due to the presence of two fairly strong and self-confident antagonistic groups: Revisionist Zionists and Russian Fascists. LI SHUHUA (Harbin) described the relation between Jewish publications in the Soviet Union and by the Jewish Community in Harbin. After 1922, when favorable Soviet attitude towards Jewish publications worsened and censorship intensified, the importance of the publishing work by the Jewish Community of Harbin increased. The discussion focused mainly on the ideology of the Russian Fascists and their influence on daily life and society in the multiethnic city of Harbin. It was established that the Russian Fascists played an important role during the Manchukuo period, especially through their leading position in the Bureau for Russian Emigrants, but at the same time they consistently depended on the goodwill of the Japanese officials.

Main Terms and Questions in the Conference: The various contributions and discussion showed the complexity of the history of northeastern China entangled between different nationalities, cultures and influences, as well as the problems and disputes that arise when dealing with the diverse history of this region. Different concepts of history, and especially memory and identity, were recurring themes during the conference and the summer school and served as a link between a wide range of approaches and topics. Between 1898 and 1949 Manchuria was home to several populations engaging in transcultural processes that enabled the interpenetration of national, ethnic, or religiously defined boundaries. After the exodus of emigrants from Harbin, however, these boundaries were reconstructed to conform to the new national identities. Some questions raised during the conference probably still require further reflection and discussion. What role do historians play in the reconstruction of memory and identity? How are conflicts of influence connected to the construction of memory and identity? Other questions still remained unanswered. For example, how and to what degree did Manchuria have an influence on the West?

Another conference dedicated to the analysis of transcultural processes in urban spaces and public spheres in Harbin in comparison with other multicultural cities is planned for autumn 2010.