SUMMARY:

The article explores administrative debates about and policies toward the Chinese in the Russian Far East in the 1860s–1880s. Uniquely in imperial Russia, the annexation of what became the Amur and Ussuri provinces was not accompanied by the automatic extension of Russian subjecthood to the Chinese who either resided in the area or visited it for work. In the 1880s the Russian authorities moved to implement a far-reaching program of separating the population of the area into Russian subjects and foreigners. The latter were required to produce national passports and Russian visas, as well as acquire residence permits and pay fees to stay and work in Russia. At the same time, the exterritorial status of the Chinese in Russia was ended and Qing subjects on the territory of Russia were placed under the jurisdiction of the Russian courts. Inspired by the European and American colonial examples, the Russian authorities also attempted to physically separate the Chinese population in urban spaces by decreeing special quarters for the Chinese. Although this regularization and rationalization was part of the broader process of movement toward universal citizenship, the Russian authorities still faced the fundamental problem of governance of the Chinese population. Facing the perennial challenges of imperial authorities, such as demographic and institutional weakness, the Russian authorities failed to properly control the border or enforce segregation in the cities. They treated the Chinese as an unrecognized estate, thus producing a hybrid form of imperial subjecthood. Poorly realized, these policies still created a legacy of exclusion and contributed to later attempts (ultimately successful in the Soviet period) to limit or eliminate the presence of the Chinese in the Far East.