Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916–1932

by James Carter

James H. Carter outlines the birth of Chinese nationalism in an unlikely setting: the international city of Harbin. Planned and built by Russian railway engineers, the city rose quickly from the Manchurian plain, changing from a small fishing village to a modern city in less than a generation. Russian, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Jewish, French, and British residents filled this multiethnic city on the Sungari River. The Chinese took over Harbin after the October Revolution and ruled it from 1918 until the Japanese founded the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. In his account of the radical changes that this unique city experienced over a brief span of time, Carter examines the majority Chinese population and its developing Chinese identity in an urban area of fifty languages. Originally, Carter argues, its nascent nationalism defined itself against the foreign presence in the city--while using foreign resources to modernize the area. Early versions of Chinese nationalism embraced both nation and state. By the late 1920s, the two strands had separated to such an extent that Chinese police fired on Chinese student protesters. This division eased the way for Japanese occupation: the Chinese state structure proved a fruitful source of administrative collaboration for the area's new rulers in the 1930s.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 2002

About the author

I first visited China in 1992. Studying in the Manchurian city of Harbin, I saw a grim, post-industrial present but a remarkably vibrant past that opened windows onto the ways that Chinese and western cultures had influenced one another to create something unique.

Since then, in my training at Yale and my work as a professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, I have explored the interaction between China and the West, focusing my writing, teaching, and research not on big stories and great leaders but on smaller moments. The travels of a Buddhist monk from Manchuria to Hong Kong. Basketball games turned violent at the Harbin YMCA in the 1920s. Most recently, the Shanghai Champions’ Stakes of 1941