Dr. Fu Manchu in Harbin: Cinema and Moviegoers of the 1930s

To the memory of Diao Shaohua

During his November 1997 visit to Harbin in Northeast China, formerly called Manchuria, Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin placed flowers at the memorial for fallen Soviet soldiers in the center of the city. The celebration honored men who had given their lives in a war that started on August 9, 1945, when Soviet troops invaded Manchukuo, the Japanese-dominated puppet state of the “last emperor.” There was also a short and emotional meeting between the president and a tiny group of elderly Russian inhabitants. Before his arrival, one of them had lit a candle in the recently restored Cathedral of St. Sophia and prayed for the success of the visit and the president’s health. Yeltsin’s visit to Harbin was not welcomed by the Chinese authorities, who would have preferred him to visit Dalian, the modernized port on the Yellow Sea. But he insisted.¹ The reason for the Chinese reluctance and the president’s stubbornness was, of course, the Russian past of Harbin.

The era of Manchukuo (1932–45) was the last stage of a drama that had unfolded during the first decades of the twentieth century. The creation of a Russian colony in Manchuria had failed. For most of Harbin’s Russians what had once been conquest and opportunity was succeeded by emigration and survival in precarious conditions. But the waves of émigrés, who had nowhere else to go after the October Revolution, contributed, together with other foreigners and the Chinese majority, to an impressive cultural development of the city. In the mid-1920s Harbin’s population counted about a half-million inhabitants. About 150,000 of them were Russians, who formed the second largest ethnic community after the Chinese, who had gradually taken control of the city after 1917. Following a relatively short period, during which the Chinese Eastern Railway was jointly administered by the Chinese and the Soviets, came the Japanese invasion of 1932. The hope to reverse the course of history, which had filled the hearts of many Russian inhabitants of Harbin after the Japanese troops entered the city, turned out to be an illusion. Those who could leave, left. Many did not make it farther than Tianjin, Shanghai, or Tokyo. Some returned to the Soviet Union and disappeared in Stalin’s labor camps. Most of them remained in Harbin and other parts of Manchuria as stateless citizens represented by the Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Emigrés, controlled by the Japanese police. After Soviet troops “liberated” Harbin in 1945 and China regained control of the city in 1949, most foreigners departed. Some went back to the Soviet Union; others left for Australia, the Americas, Europe, or the Middle East. What remained were buildings and memories. Both are still part of the contested space of Harbin’s identity.²

How can one explain why tens of thousands of former citizens of Harbin and Manchuria of more than fifty nationalities, who are now living in various parts of the world—from Tel Aviv to Nagano in Central Japan, from Sydney to San Francisco, Novosibirsk, and Warsaw—simply cannot forget their past? They continue to gather in associations, with their descendants, to whom they transmit their longing. Sometimes they visit their former home when they can afford it financially and psychologically. What kind of home was this place? What made it unforgettable? Memoirs and other works written by these former residents of Northeast China give many versions, some positive, others negative, about the interracial and intercultural relations that they lived through and negotiated there. Some seem to idealize the past, like Georgii Melikhov, who, in his Man’chzhuriia dalekaia i blizkaia [Manchuria far away and near by], nostalgically celebrates the “mutual enrichment and influence of two great cultures—the Russian and the Chinese,” stressing the predominant and enlightening role of the former. One cannot help perceiving...