Russians in China

Russians in China are one of the 56

Russians have been living in China for centuries, the earliest being Cossacks that settled in China during the late 17th century. There are currently over 16,000 ethnic Russians in China. In the 1957 census, there were over 9,000 ethnic Russians. The 1978 census counted just 600 Russians, but the figure rose to 2,935 in the 1982 census and 13,504 in the 1990 census.

The first generation of Russians built the city from scratch. By 1913, Harbin had become an established Russian colony for the construction and maintenance work on the

In the decade from 1913 to 1923, Russia went through World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. In the 1920s Harbin was flooded with 100,000 to 200,000 White émigrés fleeing from Russia.^{[citation needed]} Harbin held the largest Russian population outside of the state of Russia.

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With Russian influence in Harbin coming to an end, Harbin had to live under Chinese and Japanese control for the next several decades.

In 1920, the

From 1932 to 1945, Harbin Russians had a difficult time under the

During the late 17th century, the

Almost all the Kerjaks were devout Christians; they rarely communicated with other groups. According to the census in 1943, there were 1,200 Kerjaks in Bulqin and Kaba. Many moved to Australia after the establishment of the People's Republic of China.^[5]

In 1851, the

An anti-Russian uproar broke out when Russian customs officials, three Cossacks, and a Russian courier invited local Uyghur prostitutes to a party in January 1902 in Kashgar. This caused a massive brawl by the inflamed local Uyghur populace against the Russians on the pretext of protecting Muslim women because anti-Russian sentiment had built up. Even though morality was not strict in Kashgar, the local Uyghurs clashed violently with the Russians before they were dispersed. The Chinese sought to end the tensions to avoid giving the Russians a pretext to invade.^[7][8][9]

After the riot, the Russians sent troops to Sarikol in Tashkurghan and demanded that the Sarikol postal services be placed under Russian supervision, the locals of Sarikol believed that the Russians would seize the entire district from the Chinese and send more soldiers even after the Russians tried to negotiate with the Begs of Sarikol and sway them to their side, they failed since the Sarikoli officials and authorities demanded in a petition to the Amban of Yarkand that they be evacuated to Yarkand to avoid being harassed by the Russians and objected to the Russian presence in Sarikol, the

From 1931 to 1938, the Soviet government forced a lot of Chinese and their Russian relatives to move to China. More than 20,000 Russians entered China through the Crossings of Xinjiang and after 1941, many refugees fled to Xinjiang.^[13]

Under the reign of Yang Zengxin, the Russians in Xinjiang were mainly divided into 3 parts: some of the refugees had joined the Chinese nationality, were called "Guihua ren" (Chinese: 歸化人, lit. "Naturalized people") and had to fill out applications and write volunteer certificates. Yang ordered officials from various regions to distribute land for them, and gave them farm animals and seeds. Some had joined the USSR nationality. Others refused to join either nationality.^[14]

In 1928, when Jin Shuren came to power, he strengthened supervision and taxation of the Russians. Freedom of movement and trade were curtailed. According to the records from Xinjiang Gazette, from 1930 to 1931 there were 207 Russians who went through the Guihua procedure in Ürümqi and 288 in Chuguchak.^{[citation needed]}

In 1933, Jin abdicated. In 1935, the 2nd People's Congress was held and the Guihua people were officially recognized as a minority group of Xinjiang.^[14]

Besides damage done by previous European explorers,

When Ma Zhongying heard that the coup had taken place in Xinjiang, he promptly led the army to the west and sent his general Ma Heying to Altay. In May 1933, the Russian and Kazakh peasants of Bulqin armed themselves to fight against Ma's army, but were forced to give ground. Sheng ordered Guihua colonel Helovsky to reinforce them, and defeated Ma Heying after two days. In June 1933, Sheng Shicai and Ma Zhongying fought a decisive battle at Ziniquan, Ma was defeated, and was forced to flee to Turpan.^[19]

Zhang Peiyuan then defected and joined forces with Ma Zhongying. Together, they almost defeated Sheng Shicai at the

Georg Vasel, a Nazi German agent, was told "Must I tell him that I am a Russian? You know how the Tungans hate the Russians." by his driver, a White Russian when meeting Dungan (Hui) Ma Zhongying.^[20]

In the 1930s, during the Kumul Rebellion, the traveler Ahmad Kamal was asked by Uyghur men if the veils donned by Turki women in Xinjiang were also worn by women in America (Amerikaluk).^[21] The label of "whores" (Jilops) was used for Russian (Russ) and American (Amerikaluk) women by Uyghur men when what these women wore in public while bathing and the fact that no veil was worn by them was described by Ahmad Kamal to the Turki men.^[22] Chinese swines and Russ infidels was a saying by Turki Muslims (Uyghurs) in Xinjiang.^[23] Anti Russian hatred was spouted by Tungans (Hui Muslims) to the adventurer Ahmad Kamal in Xinjiang.^[24] Ahmad Kamal saw Russians in the bazar at Aksu.^[25] he saw Russian soldiers and Russian girls in the bazar at Urumchi.^[26]

In the summer of 1934, when the war ended pro tempore, Sheng retracted the Guihua Headquarters, and selected about 500 Russians to form the 6th Cavalry to quarter at Ürümqi. In 1937, the Cavalry and the Red Army finally defeated Ma Hushan's troops during the Islamic rebellion in Xinjiang (1937). And later it was disbanded, all the Guihua soldiers became ordinary people.^[27] The White Russians again sided with the Soviets during the Ili Rebellion in 1944.

During the Ili Rebellion, American telegrams reported that the Soviet secret police threatened to assassinate Muslim leaders from Ining and put pressure on them to flee to "inner China" via Tihwa (Ürümqi), White Russians grew fearful of Uyghur Muslim mobs as they chanted, "We freed ourselves from the yellow men, now we must destroy the white.^[28]

In the last days of World War II, the

While soils on the left Russian bank of the Argun are poor, those in the Trekhrechye are fertile, enabling agriculture as known in Russia proper. Forests in the east provided wood and game, the steppe to the South offered ample pasture.[34]

The Argun river served as a

The Russian Civil War and its aftermath changed the make-up of the Trekhrechye Russian community. Four waves of immigrants might be distinguished: firstly, the Cossacks which had lived on the Russian side on the Argun and now settled down on the Chinese side; secondly, other refugees of the civil war from the remainder of Transbaikal, many hoping to return soon; thirdly, the largest wave of refugees from Soviet collectivization, starting in 1929 (known as the tridtsatniki '1930-ers'); and lastly, laid-off employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was run largely by Russians up until that time. As a result of these, ethnic Russians represented more than 80% of this region's population in the late 1930s to the early 1940s.^[36]

The Cossack settlers organized an administration of their own, consisting of village elders, with a chief elder in the village of Suchye (Russian: Сучье), where there was also a Chinese district chief. Chinese authorities attempted to assimilate the emigrants in the 1920s by introducing passports, raising taxes, prohibiting Orthodox feast days. When the archbishop of Harbin visited Dragotsenka in 1926, he was arrested.^[37]

At its height, there were 21 Russian villages in the Three-River Country, with Dragotsenka (Russian: Драгоценка, modern Sanhexiang Chinese: 三河鄕) as its political and socioeconomic center. Dragotsenka counted only 450 inhabitants in 1933 but grew to 3,000 in 1944. Only half of those inhabitants were Russians whereas there lived 1,000 Chinese and 500 Japanese. (Most of the other villages were almost exclusively inhabited by Russians.) There was also a 500-strong garrison nearby. It was the seat of the head cossack, responsible for the Russians in the area, as well as the seat of regional police and a Japanese military mission. There was a small power station, a refinery for vegetable oil, a steel-rolling mill, a dairy factory, auto repair shops, saddleries, leather and felt factories, a post and telegraph office, a bank, and branches of national trading houses. Most of the Chinese worked in small own businesses. The Russian community could find here its only high school in the area, the seat of the Russian Association and the local branch of the nation-wide Office for the Russian Emigrants' Affairs (BREM) which published the weekly newspaper The Cossack Life (Russian: Казачья Жизнь).^[38]

To Soviet visitors of the late 1940s, the Tryokhrechye villages seemed like curious, almost museum-like images of life in prerevolutionary Siberia. The villages were grouped around long straight streets and consisted of

In this climate of anti-Soviet fear, the Three-River Russians initially welcomed the Japanese invasion. In December 1932, they greeted the new "era of order and justice" and promised their cooperation. Japan permitted a certain degree of cultural autonomy for minorities like the Russians, mainly to counter the numerically dominant Han Chinese in their new puppet state, Manchukuo. Russian language propaganda of Manchukuo painted local life in idyllic colors.^[41]

This initial optimism was weakened by strict Japanese surveillance. The main tool for this was the BREM with which they had to register. In 1944, the BREM district for the

Japanese scientists conducted human experiments on White Russian men, women and children by gassing, injecting and vivisecting them in Unit 731 and Unit 100. There were multiple Russian victims of Unit 731 and testimonies and records show that a Russian girl and her mother were gassed and one Russian man was cut into two and preserved with formaldehyde.^{[52][53][54][55]}

Some children grew up inside the walls of Unit 731, infected with syphilis. A Youth Corps member deployed to train at Unit 731 recalled viewing a batch of subjects that would undergo syphilis testing: " one was a White Russian woman with a daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian woman with a boy of about six or seven."^[56] The children of these women were tested in ways similar to their parents, with specific emphasis on determining how longer infection periods affected the effectiveness of treatments.^[56]

Senior Sergeant Kazuo Mitomo described some of Unit 100's human experiments:

"On some of the prisoners I experimented 5-6 times, testing the action of Korean bindweed, bactal and castor oil seeds. One of the prisoners of Russian nationality became so exhausted from the experiments that no more could be performed on him, and Matsui ordered me to kill that Russian by giving him an injection of potassium cyanide. After the injection, the man died at once. Bodies were buried in the unit's cattle cemetery."

Unit 100 staff poisoned and drugged Russians with heroin, castor oil, tobacco and other substances for weeks at a time. Some died during the experimentation. When survivors were determined to no longer be useful for experimentation and were complaining of illness, staff told them they would receive a shot of medicine, but instead executed them with potassium cyanide injections. Executions were also carried out by gunshots.^[57]: 323

The small Russian community beyond the Argun drew a disproportionate interest of Japanese imperial researchers: ethnographers, anthropologists, agronomists. The number of their publication exceeds the Russian and Chinese ones by far, and much of what we know about the community comes from Japanese research.^[58] They idolized the Cossacks and their way of dealing with the harsh climate, drawing potential conclusions for the settlement of Japanese in Manchuria.^[59]

With the Soviet invasion in 1945, the secret service (NKVD) entered the area and arrested about a quarter of the male population, especially the larger number of the tridtsatniki, which were deported to the Gulag. The other residents received Soviet passports. In autumn 1949, the farms of the remaining Russians were forcibly collectivized. Most of them were repatriated to the Soviet Union over the following years, with the last significant wave going to Kazakhstan from 1955 to 1956; Chinese farmers took over the vacated areas. Most of the Russians who stayed, emigrated to Australia or Latin America after the Chinese government permitted them to do so in 1962. The few remaining Russians relocated back to the left riverbank during the Cultural Revolution. Soviet citizens were not harassed but those of mixed ancestry (polukrovtsy 'half-bloods') were accused of espionage, often tortured and killed. Speaking Russian was forbidden during this time.^[60]

Many local Russians in China are of mixed Russian and Chinese ancesty due to intermarriage; this is evident in genetic studies that were conducted on them. Russians in China that migrated to China after the 18th century absorbed local East Asian males marrying Russian females into their population, with one sample showing most of the Russians had European mtDNA, though East Asian haplogroup O made up 58% of their Y haplogroup. O3-M122 specifically made up 47% of the Russian sample.^[61] The East Asian Y haplogroup O3-M122 was found in 47% of Russian males in China. In another test the East Asian paternal Y Haplogroup O made up 58% of Russian males samples in China, while European-origin mitochondrial DNA predominated in the Russian population in China, showing that the ethnic Russian population receive male East Asian paternal lineages.^[62]

O3-M122 is the commonly shared genetic signature of Sino-Tibetan speaking ethnicities.^[63]

The 1957 census counted over 9,000 ethnic Russians in China, while the 1978 census counted just 600. That number rose again to 2,935 in the 1982 census and 13,504 in the 1990 census, mostly in northern Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Some of them live in Enhe and Shiwei, the only Russian ethnic townships in China. Beijing's Yabaolu commercial district also maintains a visible Russian (specifically Siberian) presence due to its active fur trade and import market, although business has deteriorated since the Russian financial crisis of 2014.^[64][65]

There continues to be disagreement over the number of ethnic Russians living in China.^[66] Statistics as of the 2002 Census are shown below.^[67] Pink designates native region.

• PLA Air Force
• Fotii Leskin (Chinese: 法铁依·伊凡诺维奇·列斯肯); Russian: Фотий Иванович Лескин), lieutenant general, commander of the 5th Corps of the People's Liberation Army
• Prime Minister of pre-Bolshevik Russia
• Republic of China
  in 1978–88
• Nikolai Ivanovich Lunev (Chinese: 尼古拉·伊萬諾維奇·盧尼奧夫; Russian: Николай Иванович Лунёв), deputy to the tenth Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
• Misha Ge (Chinese: 戈米沙), the figure skater of Russian, Chinese, and Korean descent, had Chinese nationality from 2001 to 2010.

• Harbin Russians
• Shanghai Russians
• Russians in Hong Kong
• China Far East Railway
• Chinese Eastern Railway Zone
• Grigory Semyonov
• Chinese Tatars
• Burhan Shahidi
• Chinese Orthodox Church
• China–Russia relations
• Russians in Japan
• Russians in Korea