The last phase of the Russian Empire’s expansion into East Asia, and of the consolidation of its far eastern frontier, was marked by the building of the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) in 1896 and the Amur Railroad in 1908. Completed in 1902, the CER traversed the Chinese territory of Manchuria to connect the Siberian Railroad to Russia’s Priamur frontier and the Pacific Coast, establishing, at the same time, a Russian colonial sphere of influence in China. Its builders, equating the extension of the railway tracks with the forward movement of historical evolution, saw in the railroad the advance of “Europe” into “Asia,” and the strength of the “Russian nationality” that enabled Europe’s eastward march. Conceived in the aftermath of Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the Amur Railroad represented a two-fold disenchantment – with the explicitly “colonial” vision of territorial expansion embraced by the advocates of the CER, and with the efficacy of such a strategy for Russifying the distant frontier. Having as its stated goal to help “Russians” appropriate the Priamur, a region whose Russianness was supposed to have already been ensured by the CER, the building of the Amur Railroad signaled a clear turn toward an exclusionary and racialized mode of frontier management and population control to prevent what the very existence of the CER had promoted, the migration of “yellow labor” into the Russian Empire.
This paper argues that racialist ideas and practices emerged in this final phase of Russian expansion in part as a means for confronting multinationality at the eastern frontier of an empire that was being reconceived as a nation. The building of the railroads highlighted demographic concerns relating to the source of labor for frontier development and frontier “colonization,” and relating to the composition of the frontier population. These concerns, in turn, reflected increasing ambivalence among Russians regarding the empire’s multinationality and demographic diversity, and growing efforts to construct a national identity for the empire based on a Russianness that was itself being reinvented. In an age when European domination over non-Europe seemed natural and inevitable, the CER helped define for its builders Russia’s place in the world, which they perceived in geographical and civilizational terms framed by the Europe-Asia divide. By the time of the construction of the Amur Railroad, this essay suggests, Russian perceptions of the eastern frontier, as well as the place of Russia in the global context, became more sharply defined in demographic and racial terms shaped by the imagined opposition between the “yellow race” and the Russian “nation.” The second part of this essay discusses some of the moments when this new sensibility of Russianness emerged. The first formulation of Russianness, produced in conjunction with imperial visions that inspired the CER, affirmed Russia as European. The second, produced in conjunction with the Amur railway, worked to posit a racialized limit to the notion of the empire’s multinationality. Both visions of Russianness helped to assert the boundedness and cohesiveness of the Russian Empire as a national community, at a time when the mutually necessary projects of railroad building and imperial expansion pointed to both closer ties between far-flung places and peoples, and the erosion of preexisting geographic sense of place and demographic groupings.
Planning the extension of the Siberian Railroad, Russian officials first traced out a route on the Russian side, following the course of the Amur River that marked the boundary between Russia and China.^[1] In 1896, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War the year before, the planners of the extension chose another route, a shorter and almost “direct line” lying entirely on the Chinese side of the Amur River.^[2] The Amur Railroad returned to the original plan for the Siberian Railroad extension. Critics of the project, however, objected to the “extravagance” of the project, given its high construction cost and the redundancy of offering similar transport connections already provided by the CER.^[3] Moreover, the Amur Railroad was tied to a colonization agenda that promised to be costly: the settlement of Russian peasants in the often difficult terrain of the Priamur frontier,^[4] on the one hand, and, on the other, a labor policy reserving railroad work for Russians – who in general were significantly better paid – by excluding Chinese and Koreans, or “yellow labor.”
The building of this railroad was undoubtedly spurred by Russian defeat in 1905; or, as an official account of the railroad put it, the “changed situation in the Far East.”^[5] But the extravagance of the project cannot be explained by strategic defensive considerations alone. This paper offers a reading of the Amur Railroad as a counterpoint to the visions of empire embraced by the builders of the CER, itself an extravagant project that, I argue, marked a departure from previous modes of Russian imperial expansion. Taken together, the two railroads reveal seemingly contradictory conceptions of Russianness, which sometimes cast “Russians” as an agent of European expansion, and sometimes as an object of state protection against the “yellow race.” At the same time, the railroads pointed to a cumulative progression of defining Russianness that built on defining Russia as European in order to construct the “yellow race” as a policy category that helped to delimit the boundaries of Russianness.
In speaking of race, I refer to a categorization of humans that, in theory, explained difference by biology. Unlike nationality (narodnost’)^[6] – which Russian ethnographers often defined in terms of mutable cultural characteristics, such as language, clothing, and “way of life” (byt’), and which allowed for assimilation as a process of transformation – race was often construed as a category that implied the permanence of difference. Yet racialized boundary making almost always carried judgments based on culturally shaped notions of behavior, propensity, and social character. As Ann Stoler shows, race, relating to the definition of Europeanness and whiteness in the colonial context of the Dutch East Indies, was bound to cultural and social attributes such as demeanor and economic status, attributes that needed to be cultivated and maintained.^[7] Racial categorization was thus in practice neither inalterable nor permanent. This lack of fixedness regarding race was the case as well in the Russian far eastern frontier.
Examining both incipient racialist conceptions, based on cultural and civilizational categories referring to Europe and Asia, and explicitly racialist articulations referring to skin color, this paper highlights the tension between the clarity of classifying difference promised by reference to race, and the actual indeterminacy of the content of racial categorization. This tension helps to explain both the appeal for a number of Russian publicists and Russian policy makers to focus on race, even though the content of the category of “yellow race” remained unstable. As employed by Russians regarding the far eastern frontier,^[8] “yellow race” most frequently referred to Chinese and Koreans. At times Japanese were included, and at times some Koreans were exempted. Suggesting that race was envisioned as a tool for separating the populations within from those outside the Russian Empire, the inorodtsy groups of the region were, as far as I know, not included in the category of the “yellow race.”

THE CHINESE EASTERN RAILROAD

Following China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, S. Iu. Witte, as the finance minister of Russia, concluded a financial and alliance treaty with the Qing government in 1896. The financial component of the treaty offered to help service the Qing’s debt to Japan. In exchange for procuring foreign loans for the Qing to pay the war indemnities, Witte obtained from the Chinese government an agreement allowing a Russian railway, the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER), to be built on a territorial concession in Manchuria.^[9] The historiography on the significance of the CER at the level of international relations, (Russian) domestic politics, and European imperialism in China is extensive.^[10] This section takes a different turn from the existing historiography to highlight how Witte’s views departed from previous Russian understandings of imperial expansion. Witte envisioned the making of an explicitly “colonial” space in relation to the empire proper, which he recast as the territorial extent of the Russian “nation.” Incorporating ideas that positioned Europe and European nations at the pinnacle of evolutionary development, Witte’s rethinking of the spatial organization of the empire was, in turn, integral to his program for transforming Russia into Europe, and for asserting Russia’s identity as European. The CER, instrument and product of Witte’s policies, embodied his visions of Russia’s Europeanness.
Witte’s concern with nation-building, understood as the building of a “Russian” nation, was reflected in the functions he assigned to the Siberian Railroad, a central project of Witte’s policy before he turned toward China. Inseparable from a resettlement program to populate Siberia and the Priamur with peasant-settlers,^[11] the railroad was seen by Witte as an economic and cultural agent for transforming frontier territorial possessions into an integral part of Russia. The railroad, according to Witte, would break down the “centuries-old immobility” of Siberia, due to an isolation that left the region in a “low level of civil development (grazhdanstvennost’),” and “its aborigines [lacking in] the basic traits of Russian nationality (russkaia narodnost’).”^[12] Spatially, the railroad was to “unite (soedinit’) Siberia… with the European Russian rail network”; it was to “join (priobshchit’) it to Russian life and bring about the very conditions of existence and development that are prevalent in other parts of Russia.”^[13] Thus for Witte, uniting Siberia to the Russian railroad network also meant “Russifying” it, in the sense of imparting to the region and its inhabitants the economic and cultural traits of the Russian nationality. As a policy goal, the Russification of Siberia was echoed in the resettlement officials’ perception of railroad building as enabling, in Steven Marks’s words, the “eastward movement of the Great Russian ‘tribe.’”^[14] This goal was also echoed in the work of the Siberian Railroad Committee, which, according to Marks, built Orthodox churches and Russian schools in new settlements, and “actively encouraged the conversion of Siberian natives” – to prevent the “Iakutization” and the “Buriatization” of Russian settlers.^[15]
Regarding Manchuria, rather than giving priority to peasant resettlement, or the “colonization” of the region, Witte envisioned the creation of a “colony.”^[16] In various discussions on the subject when the CER was nearing completion in 1900 and 1901, Witte argued against proposals to settle “the Russian element” in the railroad concession zone in Manchuria. At times citing similar observations that brought others to a contrary conclusion, Witte pointed to the presence of an already large local population, the lack of security and stability in the region following the Boxer Rebellion, and the supposed scarcity of available arable land.^[17]
How Witte imagined differentiating Manchuria from Siberia, and situating Manchuria in relation to the empire, was an outgrowth of his contemplation on nationhood, articulated in a pamphlet on “nationalism” and the “national economy” that was both a translation of and a tribute to the German thinker Friedrich List.^[18] Appropriating List’s concept of “national economy,” which challenged the ideology of free trade by privileging national interest in the shaping of the international market, Witte emphasized the “colonial” dimension of this concept. Understanding the nation as a given, and drawing on ethnographic views, Witte defined the nation (natsiia) as “an organic whole, tied to faith, distinctness of territory, blood, language, literature, the creativity, customs and mores of the people; to the state principle and state institutions.” Emphasizing the economic dimension of this community of humans, Witte further defined the nation as the “unique (osobaia) economic unit” that mediated between “individuals” (otdel’nyi chelovek) and humanity.^[19]
The task of a nation was to strive for “national independence and power.” Witte, following List, classified nations according to economic form and evolutionary status. An industrial nation was one that could make use of its industrial power to better “the general well-being of the population, state income, and state power,” allowing the state “to extend its activities to all parts of the world and establish colonies (kolonii) [Witte’s emphasis].” By contrast, bound to the less advanced, agrarian stage of evolution, “a purely agricultural nation” was a stagnant nation that could neither “develop its internal and external trade,” nor achieve “intellectual, social, and political” success. It could not acquire “a political significance that corresponds to its place in nature,” nor “exert its influence on the civilization and progress of backward peoples and found colonies.”^[20] Informed by this perspective, Witte’s commitment to peasant colonization in Siberia thus did not translate to Manchuria. In Witte’s scheme, Manchuria, separated from the territories of the Russian Empire by a formal national boundary, was to become the colony that Russia would establish.
Writing in 1899, three years after Russia obtained the CER concession and as many before the opening of the railroad, Witte saw Russia as an agrarian nation providing “advantageous markets” to the industrialized Western European metropole, and serving Western Europe as “colonial countries” served “their metropolises.”^[21] In Manchuria, Witte saw the opportunity for Russia to evolve from a “handmaiden” of industrialized Europe to becoming “a metropolis herself.”^[22] As is well known, Witte envisioned Russia’s transformation from “backwardness” through industrialization.^[23] Less recognized in Witte’s industrialization program is the place of “colonies,” a site where – coded as unindustrialized and, in Russia’s case, Asian – Russian “losses in the European trade” could be turned “into profits in the Asiatic trade.”^[24]
Whereas nation-building pointed to the production of homogenized space, the acquisition of colonies presupposed the making and the reproduction of uneven space.^[25] This unevenness referred objectively to the differential extent of industrial development and financial integration into the European controlled world market, and subjectively to perceptions of civilizational development that was racially inflected, and that in turn impinged on Russians’ self-perception as European. In Witte’s view, Siberia was to be “joined” with the rest of Russia, and to be made into Russia. By contrast, Manchuria’s difference from Russia was to be preserved for the region to function as the “handmaiden” to Russia.
Becoming the metropole of a colonial empire, Russia would also take its place among European nations, Witte suggested in a report on his visit to the Far East in 1902. Speaking of what the CER could accomplish, Witte observed that, in time, the Russian people, a “European race (evropeiskaia rasa) [separated] from the nations of Asia (narody Azii),” would carry out their civilizing mission and push the border of Europe to “the endpoint of the Chinese Eastern Railroad.”^[26] But this civilizing and Europeanizing mission did not imply a leveling of spatial and cultural difference, as did the Russifying agenda that Witte envisioned for Siberia. Positioning Russia from the vantage point of Manchuria, Witte observed that rail connection between Europe and Asia enabled the “coming together (sblizhenie) of the yellow and white races (zheltaia i belaia rasy).” The railroad “opens a gate for Europe into [a] hitherto closed-off world” of “numerous tribes of the Mongol race… Further isolation of the peoples of the East would be virtually impossible.” As the privileged “intermediary” between Europe and Asia that enabled the East-West exchange (of commodities), “holding in its hands the road along which this coming together [of races] will take place,” Witte proclaimed, “it falls to Russia’s lot a serious responsibility in dealing with this coming together.”^[27] Russia’s task, Witte suggested, was not to promote integration, as in Siberia, but to stand “on guard at the gates from Europe to Asia that it opened, [so that] it can regulate and direct this coming together in the direction that is the most favorable for it.”^[28]
For Witte, standing on guard at the gate between Europe and Asia translated into the use of a network of railway cities to control the flow of trade. Where he referred to the populations of these cities, Witte imagined that the coming together of white and yellow races would take the form of segregated cohabitation. Witte objected to peasant colonization in Manchuria, as mentioned above. However, he envisioned that the newly built city of Harbin, the CER administrative center located at the midpoint of the railway line, should have “the character of [an] exclusively Russian settlement.” Selecting the migration of the most suitable estates and personal statuses to the city, Witte aimed to settle Harbin “primarily… by solid trade and manufacturing firms and desirable private persons (nadezhnyia chastnyia litsa),” who, by transforming the city “into a major trade and manufacturing center,” would also help implant “a large Russian city in the very heart of Manchuria.”^[29]
Complementing Harbin, Dalnyi – another new city, one that was to serve as a port at the terminus of the southern branch of the CER – was planned as a “center of international trade” divided into three sections, an administrative center and two trading quarters, one “European” and the other Chinese.^[30] Intending for “Russian commercial forces” to become a prominent presence in Dalnyi, Witte also asserted the Europeanness of Russians by placing the city’s Orthodox church in the European quarter.^[31] Vladivostok, an existing city located at the eastern terminus of the CER and on Russian territory, was to combine the functions performed by Harbin (a closed commercial city) and Dalnyi (an open port). Witte argued for establishing the city’s port as a “free harbor” (vol’naia gavan’) to attract European and Japanese trade. To prevent the goods of these countries from “flooding” Priamur and “further penetrat[ing] into the Zabaikal” region, the border of the free harbor was to be secured by customs checkpoints and the interior of Russia by a tariff system.^[32]
Speaking in particular of Dalnyi, where extensive construction work was planned, Witte saw Chinese workers and craftsmen as “extremely indispensable.”^[33] He maintained this view for Russian territory as well, defending the need for Chinese labor in frontier development.^[34] The racialist component of Witte’s conception of this commerce and commodity-market driven colonial empire thus emerged as an inclusionism that nevertheless articulated a hierarchy of difference through the appropriation of the colonial European mode of spatial segregation.
With regard to the Russianness of the frontier with China, Witte’s concern was with the “penetration” of foreign goods into Russia. Others, however, increasingly focused on the “penetration” of foreign labor, especially as the vision of Russian commercial primacy Witte promised appeared to be far from realization. By 1903, critics of the CER project began to voice their doubt over the usefulness and the purpose of the railroad network. The war minister A. N. Kuropatkin pointed to the 40 million rubles in annual deficit incurred by the CER.^[35] Dalnyi was deemed, according to Theodore Von Laue, a “conspicuous failure.”^[36] The construction of the CER, like that of the Siberian Railroad before it, depended heavily on equipment, contractors, and technical help from Europe, Japan, and the United States,^[37] rather than channeling state investment into Russian industry. Observing the demographic changes since its construction, many believed the railroad benefited the Chinese at the expense of Russian workers and Russian state interest. Around 60,000 Chinese were recruited for the construction of the CER; several thousands more crossed the border into Russian territory to work on the section of the Siberian Railroad near Lake Baikal.^[38] In addition, according to a Japanese magazine report in 1902, some 40,000 Chinese were hired by the Russo-Chinese Bank – founded by Witte to finance the CER – for seasonal employment in Vladivostok every year.^[39] Kuropatkin, in particular, fearing that the CER facilitated the growth of Chinese settlements in Manchuria, warned against Chinese domination of the neighboring Primorskaia oblast,^[40] where Vladivostok was located.
One critic, S. D. Merkulov, an entrepreneur and public figure in the Priamur,^[41] rejected altogether the notion of making Russia into a colonial empire. Challenging the view, by then commonly held, that “Russia, by its historical tradition and by its geographical position, had and has a natural inclination to the Far East,” Merkulov insisted that “China proper [south of Manchuria] was not and cannot be our market.”^[42] According to Merkulov, railroad building in Manchuria, the emblem of the efforts invested in making the region Russia’s bridgehead into China, only succeeded in “destroy[ing] the natural barriers” – that is, a vast territory without transport arteries – that prevented the “penetration of foreign goods” into Manchuria, and in holding back the “colonization” and industrialization of the neighboring Priamur.^[43] Faulting especially the building of the southern branch of the CER, which connected Harbin to the port of Dalnyi and opened northern Manchuria to central China, Merkulov went so far as to hypothesize that the “destruction of the entire southern branch [of the CER]” would “return us to our previous favorable position” in Manchuria.^[44]
The Portsmouth Peace Treaty of September 1905, signed to conclude the Russo-Japanese War, in effect “destroyed” Russian control over the southern branch of the CER, as the treaty turned over to the Japanese government a good portion of this branch, from Dalnyi to Changchun. Along with the southern branch – renamed the Southern Manchurian Railroad by the Japanese – the Russian government also lost to Japan the Liaodung Peninsula in southern Manchuria, and the two warm-water ports at the tip of the peninsula, Dalnyi and Port Arthur.^[45] Expressing disenchantment with the colonial project vested in the CER, Merkulov’s critique also anticipated a new Russian policy and discursive orientation that turned away from envisioning China proper and the “East” as Russia’s natural colony. The new turn reflected a heightened concern with the “penetration” of foreignness into Russian territory, and with the “colonization” and Russification of the Priamur.

THE AMUR RAILROAD

Between 1906 and 1907, geological surveys were again conducted to investigate the feasibility of a railroad line connecting the last stretch of the Siberian railroad to the Far East that would lie entirely on the Russian side of the Amur River. In June 1908, approved by the Duma and confirmed by the tsar, funds were allocated for the “immediate” construction of the Amur Railroad, as the new railway was named.^[46] The terms for the construction budget stipulated that the Amur Railroad was to be “completed exclusively by the labor of Russian workers.”^[47] Aziatskaia Rossiia, an official publication of the Resettlement Department in the Ministry of Agriculture, clarified this exclusionary term: “without the least participation of the yellows (zheltykh).”^[48]
The building of the Amur Railroad was often justified by its strategic function in the event of a war in the region, as the Portsmouth Treaty banned the transport of troops on the CER.^[49] But the Amur Railroad was also intended by its advocates as the instrument for reversing policies and practices associated with the CER. The CER, built on a Chinese territorial concession, was, in theory, to be eventually returned to China according to the concession agreement.^[50] The Amur Railroad, to be built on Russian territory, would be securely and permanently Russian. The construction of the CER relied heavily on Chinese migrant workers. The Amur Railroad was to employ only Russian workers, so that “tens of millions of rubles in wages, instead of disappearing into China, [would remain] in Russia.”^[51] Witte envisioned the CER as a centerpiece in the formation of a colonial empire that profited from differentiating between national and colonial space. P. A. Stolypin, an “ardent supporter” of the Amur Railroad and successor to Witte as prime minister in 1906,^[52] saw the new railway as a nation-building project that was, in effect, to produce a homogenized national space at the frontier, through agricultural colonization.
However, arguing for the construction of the Amur Railroad against those who questioned the soundness of a policy focused on the Far East after the 1905 defeat, Stolypin articulated a vision of nationhood that, like that of Witte, identified the “East” as an object of Russia’s national mission. Echoing Witte’s insistence on the railroad as a peaceful tool for attaining this mission, Stolypin dismissed the concern that the Amur Railroad would serve to provoke a new war at a time when “profound peace” was needed: “we have to be strong in our Far East not for fighting, but for defending our national cultural work (natsional’naia kul’turnaia rabota), which is also our historical mission.”^[53] Calling the railroad project a “national construction” (narodnoe stroitel’stvo), Stolypin justified the return to a focus on the far east: “the Russian nation (russkii narod) has always been aware that it inhabited and grew strong on the border of two parts of the world, that it pushed back the Mongolian invasion, and that the East is dear to it.”^[54] Moreover, the Russian nation, for Stolypin, was an organic whole of which the far eastern frontier was a part. “If we lack sufficient vital sap (zhiznennye soki) for the work of healing all the wounds inflicted on [Russia],” he warned, “then the most distant, the most lacerated (isterzannye) parts of her, rather than strengthening the center, would fall off, dry up, slip off without illness and unnoticed, as if hit by gangrene.” The East is tied to Russia by blood, Stolypin suggested, for “our eagle, the legacy of Byzantium, is a two-headed eagle,” and “cutting off a head from our Russian eagle, the one turned to the East, you will only make it to bleed.”^[55]

YELLOW PERIL

Witte anticipated with caution the “coming together” of nations and races, enabled by the CER, but he also saw increased cross-border population mobility as a new opportunity for securing the labor needed for the frontier. Contrasting with Witte’s privileging of labor needs, the Amur railroad signaled a new commitment to erect a demographic barrier between Russia and China. Stolypin pointed to the high population density of neighboring China as a threat to the immense riches of the far eastern frontier. Warning of the “infiltration” of “aliens” (chuzhestranets), and a quasi-biological invasion by “an outside body (postoronnee telo)… wedging into our state organism (organizm),” Stolypin called for vigilance at the frontier. “If we continue to sleep our lethargic sleep, then this frontier would be immersed with alien sap (chuzhoi sok), then when we wake up… it would seem Russian in name only,” he asserted.^[56]
Russian fears of demographic threats coming from China and Korea were articulated since the 1880s, after the Priamur was formally established as an administrative region separate from Eastern Siberia.^[57] Efforts to prevent new in-migration of Chinese and Koreans to the region were inconsistent, however, as frontier administrators often found, the need for settlers and food producers outweighed their aim to Russify the frontier.^[58] The use of the term “yellow race” in the context of the frontier appeared by the 1890s. An issue of the Journal of the Siberian Railway Committee, for example, cautioned against the “waves of the yellow race,” and appealed for “increas[ing] the supply of lands where [Russian] peasants can be settled” in order to prevent the settlement of “foreign elements” in Siberia.^[59] War Minister A. N. Kuropatkin, who oversaw the construction and operation of the CER, frequently expressed concerns that the empire’s far eastern territories would be invaded by a “yellow tidal wave.”^[60]
Kuropatkin’s racialized views of the danger at the frontier have often been noted.^[61] Less known are the writings of those based in the Priamur and Manchuria – such as Benevskii, the acting governor general of the Priamur during the years marked by the violence of the Boxer Rebellion (1900 and 1901), and I. S. Levitov – who helped to supply the yellow peril discourse with the authority claimed by knowledge of the local situation. In 1901, a proposal submitted by Benevskii to the minister of interior attempted to establish systematic immigration control. The term “yellow race” – used in the explanatory note for the proposed legislation to refer to Chinese and Koreans in the Priamur – seems to have first appeared in official policy discussions in this proposal. The proposal reaffirmed the regulations that were already implemented, such as the requirement for passports and residence permits; it recommended tightening existing prohibitions, such as those against Chinese and Korean ownership of land and real property; and it introduced new restrictions based on health and fitness for labor. Arguing for the need of these restrictions, Benevskii noted that similar measures directed against “the representatives of the yellow race” had long been adopted in “European colonies in East Asia and in America.”^[62]
Levitov, described variously as a CER official and a journalist based in Port Arthur,^[63] was probably an engineer employed by the CER for the railway workshops in Harbin.^[64] His view of the yellow race reflected an ambivalence shaped by the fear of Chinese dominance, on the one hand, and, on the other, by an appreciation for the economic value of Chinese labor. In his 1900 pamphlet, Yellow Race, Levitov saw – in Andrew Malozemoff’s words – “a triumphal march of the yellow race, specifically the Chinese, into the north and… eastern parts of the Russian Empire” as a result of the CER and other Russian constructions at the frontier.^[65] Evoking his own personal experience as a carpentry workshop supervisor in Harbin, Levitov observed in his next pamphlet, Yellow Russia, published in 1901, that Chinese workers received about one-third the pay of Russians, but learned to do the same work so quickly and with such “great success” that they could “drive Russian artisans away completely” in two or three years.^[66]
Levitov tempered his anxiety over Chinese dominance by presupposing an innate “moral” divide between Europeans (including Russians) and Chinese, and by proposing a geographical-administrative barrier. The Chinese, Levitov asserted, were incomparably endowed with “such lesser moral qualities as endurance, [capacity for] mental and physical labor, and persistence at work,” but lacked the “loftier moral qualities” possessed by the “European worker,” such as “the sense of duty, public spirit (obshchestvennyi dukh), true strength of character (nastoiashchee muzhestvo).” Levitov predicted that the use of Chinese labor would lead to an “economic revolution” promising unprecedented productivity, provided that the Chinese were placed under the “direction of Europeans and expert European managers.”^[67] To neutralize the danger this source of labor posed for Russia, Levitov designated Lake Baikal as the “natural barrier” for separating the “wave of yellow race” from Russia proper.^[68] Levitov called the territory to the east of this barrier – that is, the pre-1906 administrative unit of the Priamur General Governorship that included the Zabaikal, Amur, and Primorskaia oblasts – “Yellow Russia.”^[69] In Yellow Russia, “the strictest registration” of the Chinese would be enforced, such as that “set up by the French in Saigon” that included taking “anthropological measurements.” For Levitov, the containment of Chinese labor would be a superior solution to exclusion, as demonstrated by the American import of Chinese labor to the Philippines twenty years after instituting the exclusion of the Chinese. Levitov anticipated with hope that Chinese presence would turn “the Amur and the Ussuri region… into Russian India.” The Chinese, the “Egyptian slaves” of Russia’s colonial empire “who so willingly offer us their service,” could not be a danger to Russia so long as “not one Chinese be permitted to cross the Baikal,” he insisted.^[70] Yellow Russia was thus conceived to be both a labor “reservoir,” to use David Wolff’s term,^[71] and a migratory buffer zone. In serving these functions, Yellow Russia was also imagined as an overseas colony of Russia, with Lake Baikal recast as an ocean protecting the Russian metropole from the colonial population invasion.
The report “Yellow Bosporus,” which Levitov presented to a St. Petersburg industry and trade society in 1903, offered a more alarmed view of the Chinese that reflected an awareness of the increasing militarization of Japan, as well as of China. This revised view turned Levitov’s attention to the immigration regulations in the “lands of the Anglo-Saxon race” (zemli anglo-saksonskoi rasy) such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.^[72] Levitov’s interest in immigration laws followed on Benevskii’s. In turn, a similar interest was echoed by the ministry of the interior, which presented a study of these laws – from Canada, Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, dating from 1886 to 1907 – to the Duma in 1908, in discussions considering immigration restrictions for the Priamur.^[73] This interest also reverberated with the governor general of the Priamur, N. L. Gondatti, who, in 1912, inquired with the U.S. consul-general in Vladivostok about the exclusion of Orientals in the United States.^[74]
The report’s title referred to the Korean Strait, whose strategic importance Levitov equaled to that of the Bosporus.^[75] Linking geopolitical competition at both the European and East Asian frontier to a global racial struggle taking the form of Chinese and Japanese migration, Levitov observed that this racial struggle was already won by the “Anglo-Saxon race” in their countries, such as Canada and the United States.^[76] As before, Levitov dismissed the danger of using Chinese labor in Russia, believing that the numerical superiority and the low cost of the Chinese would soon give way to faster European population growth and increased formation of Chinese industries and unions.^[77] Nevertheless, Levitov now also saw the low wage demand of Chinese (and Japanese) laborers as a “social” (sotsial’nyi) threat arising from the cultural and civilizational differences that set Chinese and Japanese apart from Europeans. Chinese and Japanese workers lived on several kopeks a day, Levitov noted, while “the European must spend rubles.”^[78] Characterizing the anti-immigration movement in Australia as “the struggle of the working class in Australia for its social rights (sotsial’nyia prava),” as a fight “until death” to protect high wages, Levitov applauded the Australian workers who took up this fight and who “succeeded in stopping the migration of the yellow race.”^[79]