Nationalism in an international city: Creating a Chinese Harbin, 1916-1932

The city of Harbin, China's northernmost major city, has long been at the geographic and intellectual periphery of China. What attention the city's history has received has tended to focus on Harbin's unique Russian background, from its founding in 1898 as a center for the Russian Chinese Eastern Railway to its status, after 1917, as a center for Russian emigration. This dissertation attempts to bring Harbin nearer the mainstream of Chinese history by illustrating and documenting the ways in which its Chinese residents sought to make their city into a modern, Chinese metropolis. Using Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English sources--many previously unused--I portray the development of Chinese nationalism in Harbin: the methods and strategies of Harbin's Chinese, but also the fatal divisions that afflicted this stage of nationalism, not only in Harbin, but throughout China.; Starting in 1916, when educator Zhang Boling (founder of Tianjin's pathbreaking Nankai School) lectured in the city, Harbin's Chinese majority began to assert a Chinese identity for this city. When the Russian Tsar was overthrown in 1917, Chinese troops occupied Harbin; and the challenge of making the city Chinese began. In this early period, nationalist efforts in Harbin were characterized by a "conciliatory nationalism," which saw Chinese patriots like Deng Jiemin seeking to unite Harbin's cosmopolitan environment under Chinese rule.; Chinese rule in Harbin expanded along several fronts. Architecturally, Chinese-style buildings like the Buddhist Paradise Temple, the Harbin Confucian Temple, and the Harbin Third Middle School were erected in strategic locations. Politically, new laws promoted the Chinese language and Chinese institutions. In public, nationalist protests confronted foreigners with increasing hostility, leading to anti-foreign riots and marches.; But foreign pressures and internal factionalism endangered hopes for a Chinese Harbin. In November, 1928, nationalist protesters were fired on by Chinese troops backed by Zhang Xueliang and Japanese interests. Earlier alliances among young radicals, bourgeois merchants, and military officials collapsed. By February, 1932, when Japanese troops occupied the city, little resistance was encountered, and many of the same officials who had advocated Chinese patriotism endorsed the new Japanese-backed state of Manchukuo.