SUMMARY:

These are prepublication versions of two sections from Mark Gamsa, Harbin, City between Russia and China: A Cross-cultural Biography (University of Toronto Press, 2020). The first section, taken from a chapter entitled “Of Ethnicity and Identity,” considers the Russian-Chinese military confrontation during the Boxer Uprising in Manchuria in 1900 as the scene of an encounter not just between armies, but between different conceptions of national and social belonging. The attitudes of early Russian colonizers and Chinese migrants toward Manchuria are compared by focusing on Chinese burial customs, and the general terms “Russians” and “Chinese” are analyzed to reveal ethnic and cultural variety on both sides.
The second section, taken from the chapter “Intermediaries and Channels of Communication,” is concerned primarily with the common pidgin language that served Russian- and Chinese-speakers in Harbin in their daily lives. The cultural assumptions inherent in this hybrid spoken language, which drew on simple Russian alongside words in Chinese, and some whose origins could no longer be untangled, are analyzed. A close reading of a Harbin memoir by the Chinese writer Xiao Hong demonstrates how the speech of the other was represented as inferior.