The 1929 Sino-Soviet War Read online

  Map 1. Manchuria

  These competing interests, combined with Warlord Era (1916–1928) chaos, shaped the governance in the Northeast, and by 1929, it was a complex tapestry of overlapping authorities. The entire Northeast was under the rule of Chang Hsueh-liang, also known as the Young Marshal. Below him were governors-general who ruled the three provinces of Fengtien, Kirin, and Heilungkiang along with the Harbin special administrative area, which included the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) Zone under joint Chinese and Soviet Russian management and administered by a general appointed by the Kirin governor (although the Heilungkiang governor had responsibility for the zone in that province). Finally, the Kwantung Leasehold and SMR Zone fell under Japanese jurisdiction.

  Of the three Northeastern provinces, Fengtien was the richest and most populous. Much of it had long been part of the Chinese Empire, and the first to have a foreign concession carved out of it: the Russian naval base at Port Arthur and the commercial port of Dairen. The surrounding lands, encompassing some 3,500 square kilometers, was a possession that passed into Japanese hands after the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. Kirin, located northeast of Fengtien, was larger in size but had a smaller population and was less developed. It was the home of Harbin, the multiethnic city and site of the CER headquarters. Heilungkiang, stretching from the Sungari River in the east to the Argun River, 1,200 kilometers to the west, was the largest, most diverse, and least populated of the provinces. It also shared the longest border with Soviet Russia. The population was predominantly Chinese except in the far western border region that followed the Argun, which was home to Bargut–Mongol herdsmen and ethnic Russian farmers of the Starovery (Old Orthodox Believers) who had arrived in the 1880s. During the Russian civil war (1917–1922), other Old Orthodox Believer families fled the fighting in the Russian far east and joined the original settlers.5

  Economically, Manchuria was China’s richest and fastest-growing region, an agriculture dynamo with 30 million acres under cultivation and another 30 million awaiting development. John B. Powell, an American newspaper reporter who covered the 1929 war, reflected on the lands around Tsitsihar, the capital of Heilungkiang province located in the northern end of the plain: “I was constantly reminded of the fertile farm lands and the deep black soil of northern Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa.”6 The range of agricultural goods produced was breathtaking: fruit trees and sugar beets, the traditional staple of kaoliang (sorghum), and grains such as barley, corn, millet, rice, and wheat abounded. The greatest source of agricultural wealth, which had only been cultivated on a large scale for a few decades, was the protein-rich soybean, a crop that Manchuria exported across the globe in the form of dried beans, oil, and cakes (hardened bean paste formed into densely packed cylinders measuring roughly two feet in diameter and five inches in thickness). Hemp, tussah, tobacco, and cotton were also produced. Most farmers also possessed a few head of livestock and fowls; the estimated number of domestic animals, flocks, and herds was put at over 20 million, with over 4 million pounds of wool exported annually.7

  The abundance of land allowed farmers to follow a different path from the rest of China, as it mitigated the ill effects of rural landlordism and helped account for the fact that Manchurian farmers were generally better-off than their counterparts elsewhere. The most richly cultivated region began in the south where the Liao River entered the Bay of Pohai, an area that had been integrated into China for centuries with an agricultural system based on the long-established market town model. To the north, a region populated by newer immigrant farmers, the model changed to larger stand-alone family farms; ethnicity also played a role, as farmers of Korean descent dominated rice production. Geography and climate were the final determinants of Manchuria’s unique agricultural profile. The alluvial lands of the Tsitsihar Plain held vast fields of soybeans and kaoliang, while corn grew better farther south toward the Liaotung Peninsula and wheat grew best in the northern reaches of the plain. Finally, the valley formed by the upper Sungari River offered soils ideal for cultivating wheat, millet, and soybeans. A variety of mofang or local mills, usually employing fewer than ten people, distilled the kaoliang or milled the soybeans into oil or cakes and the grains into flour, although large-scale mills, known as huomo or fire mills, using steam or electrically powered machinery, often government owned, were becoming commonplace by 1929. One advantage for the farmers was that none of the main agricultural regions was located along the border with Soviet Russia, sparing the large majority of the population from any direct involvement in the war.8

  Timber was another source of natural wealth, with over five hundred billion cubic feet of timber available that could be easily shipped by rivers and streams, but the numbers were deceiving, as the sustainable supplies were in the north in Heilungkiang while parts of Fengtien province in the south were undergoing a process of afforestation resulting from earlier overharvesting. Mining centered on the two essentials of a modern 1920s economy, coal and iron ore, and Manchuria possessed ample reserves of both, with control over the resources dominated by the CER and SMR. The most productive mine at Anshan, located forty kilometers southwest of Mukden, held a projected 200 million tons of iron ore, while the Fushun open-pit coal mines, stretching fifteen kilometers in length and located forty kilometers to the southeast of Mukden, contained over one billion tons of bituminous coal that supplied not only large quantities of coal and coke but also oil (all under consignment to the Imperial Japanese Navy), natural gas, gasoline, tar, and sulfuric acid. By 1929, the output from the Fushun mines accounted for one third of all the coal produced in China. Together, they made the Mukden region the largest steel-producing center in China, and both had been developed by and were under the control the SMR. The CER controlled the Muleng coal mines near Mishan in northern Heilungkiang, at Dalainor in the far west, and at Koshan, northeast of Tsitsihar in central Manchuria.9

  Japanese steel mills, both in Japan and the Northeast, fed by ore from Anshan and coal from Fushun, combined with the specialized Ta-Hua Electro-Metallurgical Company, helped explain in part why Japan was both the largest steel producer in East Asia and so insistent on its special position in Manchuria. While the manufacturing facilities in the Kwantung Leasehold and the SMR Zone did make Japan the industrial power in Manchuria, there were extensive Chinese holdings as well. Situated near Mukden was the Penchihu Coal and Iron Mining Company, a joint Sino-Japanese enterprise that employed over 5,000 Chinese miners, and another joint venture, the Chenhsing Iron Ore mining Company, provided jobs for another 3,000 Chinese workers at six facilities in Fengtien province. All told, 95 percent of the pig iron and steel produced in China came out of the furnaces at Anshan and Penchihu by 1929.10

  The Northeast was a textile center, second only to the Shanghai region, with over 700 looms in operation, and the Chinese-operated Textile Mill of the Three Provinces, employing 1,800 workers, was one of the most profitable in China. In pure dollar terms, the machinery and ceramics manufacturers generated more revenue than the iron and steel industries, with the chemical industry not far behind. The Northeast’s rulers influenced the economy through two agencies. The first was the Bureau of Industry, which included agroindustry; it had responsibility for licensing private-sector businesses for the purpose of taxation. The second was composed of a combination of government-sponsored enterprises such as utilities, telephone companies, and the previously mentioned large-scale soybean processing mills, plus a few odds and ends such as the government Sugar Mill in Heilungkiang and saltpeter mines, essential for the manufacture of gunpowder. Finally, there was the Mukden Arsenal, which was actually composed of several arsenals and munitions works; it employed 20,000 people and produced everything needed for a modern army, including heavy artillery and rifle cartridges.11

  Along with the legal economy, there was an underground economy that ranged from human pipelines for moving people and families fleeing the Soviet Union to illicit dealings in smuggling, opium, prostitution, and gambling. Lawlessness in the spar
sely populated wildernesses gave rise to bandit gangs with names like Yellow Spears, the long-established Red Beards or hunghutzu, and the Heavenly Gate Society. They roamed the countryside, remote mountain areas, and isolated border areas. Harbin, whose cabarets never closed, had long been known for drunkenness and prostitution since its inception as a wide-open railroad town, and the more isolated stretches of the Sungari appealed to river bandits. They could not only pirate cargo but also pull thousands of freshwater pearls from its waters, while the adjacent lands favored opium cultivation. The rapid growth of the Sungari River town of Fuchin was attributed to its location in the heart of the poppy-growing region, and some argued that the settlement of the lower Sungari was largely due to the attraction of the poppy as a cash crop. Despite this unsavory underside, the Northeast remained a magnet for immigration and investment.12

  The combination of population, natural resources, agricultural strength, and growing industrial base made the Northeast one of the most coveted economic regions in the world. The value of foreign trade reached nearly $500 million in the year leading up to the 1929 war, and the CER, connected to the Soviet Trans-Siberian Railroad (TSRR) and the Japanese SMR, was a critical tie that held the region together. This was the golden era of railroads. They were the engines of economic growth, and the CER was one of Asia’s most important. Stretching some 1,500 kilometers from the Manchouli station in the west to the Suifenho station in the east and linked to the SMR at the Kuancheng station, just north of Changchun, as well as the shipping trade along the Sungari River at Harbin, the CER headquarters, it was the backbone of the economy. The railroad, containing dozens of tunnels and over 1,400 bridges of all sizes and shapes, was divided into three divisions, with Harbin as the hub: the eastern line (550 kilometers in length), the western line (950 kilometers), and the truncated southern line (240 kilometers). It possessed some 500 locomotives, over 700 passenger coaches, and 11,000 freight cars in 1929. It carried Manchuria’s agricultural bounty north to the Soviet border, then along the Ussuri line to the port of Vladivostok or south to Changchun for transfer to the port of Dairen in the Japanese Kwantung Leasehold along the Japanese-owned SMR.13

  The CER was more than trains and tracks. The railway zone encompassed a quarter million acres. In the far west, at Manchouli, the rail ran in an eastern direction past Dalainor and toward Hailar. Built by the Russians in the 1890s around a thriving fur and pelt trading center, Manchouli sat in a basin ringed with low rolling hills that began five kilometers inland from the Russian border. By 1929, the city was a small but prosperous community housing rail yards, a roundhouse, train repair shops, and a station, along with consular offices, hotels, banks, stores, schools, two hospitals (one run by the CER and the other by the municipality), and hundreds of houses for the town’s workers and other inhabitants. Named after Lake Dalai, the much smaller town of Dalainor was located twenty kilometers southwest of Manchouli and just west of its train station. The nearby Dalainor mines employed about 700 Russian and 400 Chinese miners who produced over a quarter million tons of coal per year, almost all for use by the CER but some to run the western region’s only electric plant, which powered both western towns.14

  Fifteen hundred kilometers away, the CER’s eastern terminus was near the picturesque town of Suifenho, also built by the Russians in the 1890s and often referred to by its Russian name, Pogranichnaya. In 1929, it was a cosmopolitan city that retained its Russian architectural flavor, and like Manchouli, Suifenho contained a hospital and extensive rail facilities. Some 140 kilometers northwest of Suifenho were the Sino-Soviet Mishan–Muleng coal mines, which opened in 1924 and added another 200,000 tons annually, making the railway self-sufficient. In addition to the hospitals at Manchouli and Suifenho, the CER boasted another five hospitals, augmented by a number of clinics. Together, nearly fifty doctors and 550 other medical personnel staffed the CER system. They represented only a fraction of the over 20,000 mostly ethnic Russian employees who ensured its smooth operation—engineers, mechanics, conductors, stationmasters, accountants, and telegraph operators. By 1929, nearly every major city in the Northeast depended on a CER rail station as its link to the outside. Tsitsihar, Harbin, and Changchun had all blossomed after the arrival of the CER.15

  Roots of Conflict

  The purpose of the CER had always been politically volatile; the Ch’ing dynasty, just defeated in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War, granted Russia building rights as a reward for entering into the secret Li-Lobanov military alliance, which was designed to halt further Japanese expansion. To make the railroad a reality, two Sino-Russian government-sponsored entities were created.

  To handle the finances, the Russo-Chinese Bank was established in December 1895. China agreed to deposit 5 million gold taels, to be returned upon completion of the railway. In return, it would obtain a share of the bank’s profits. Damning to China’s interests, however, CER holdings were kept in the bank’s St. Petersburg headquarters, directed by a board composed of eight Russian shareholders with a lone Chinese chairman and under the oversight of the tsar’s Ministry of Finance. Because neither country possessed the funds needed to build the railway, Finance Minister Sergei Witte—with the approval of young Tsar Nicholas II—decided that the bank would sell CER bonds on the Paris market to raise the capital.16

  With the financing in place and the Li-Lobanov treaty signed on 3 June 1896, on 8 September, the bank entered into an agreement with China to form the Chinese Eastern Railway Company to oversee construction and operation of the line. To keep control of the railroad, only 1,000 shares would be issued, with 700 going to the tsar’s government and the other 300 going up for sale. As added precautions, only Chinese or Russian citizens could own CER company stock, and the Russian government reserved the right to buy up any unsold stock. The process was a sham. It was not until the day of the offering that the sale was announced, and shares could only be purchased that morning. After a few minutes of inactivity, the sale was pronounced closed, and the Russian government possessed all 1,000 shares by day’s end.17

  The CER would also own the lands needed for the operation of the railway, along with possessing the materials needed for the railway’s construction and upkeep. Once construction began, thousands of square kilometers became part of the CER Zone. As for control, the agreement stipulated, “The Company will have the absolute and exclusive right of administration of its land.”18 In addition to the September agreement between China and the Russo-Chinese Bank, the status of the railway also rested on an 1896 second agreement, the Cassini Convention, that strengthened Russian control over the company lands by allowing Russia to station troops and operate mines in the zone.19

  For the Russians, the CER was not only directed against Japan or a means to simply obtain a shorter route for the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok (it shortened the trip by over 500 kilometers); the railway could also be used against China. Witte wrote in 1897 that the railroad would “provide Russia with the possibility of transporting her armed forces at all times . . . and of concentrating them in Manchuria . . . at a short distance from the capital of China.”20 Japan’s Yamagata Aritomo—general, prime minister, and one of the leading statesmen of his generation—saw the emerging rivalries. He put it bluntly: a Russian railway would turn the Northeast into “a pile of meat among tigers.”21 If anyone was mistaken as to Nicholas’s objective, they were disabused by 1898, when he extracted further concessions from the Chinese, permitting the building of the Port Arthur naval base on a leased stretch of land at the southern extreme of the Liaotung Peninsula known as the Kwantung Peninsula, as well as providing a concession to connect the leasehold with Harbin by expanding the CER through the South Manchuria branch line. Japan, who had been forced in 1895 to give up the land during the Russian-led Triple Intervention, was outraged. Even Witte saw this as overreach, calling the acquisition “child’s play which would end disastrously.”22

  Cumulatively, the tsar became the de facto ruler of the CER and its as
sociated zone, encompassing vast tracks of land along the railway and the city of Harbin, which came to possess its own administrative, military, and police forces with implied judicial authority, all under Russian supervision. The landscape of the Northeast was transformed: the last great untamed region in East Asia had been opened to the modern world and placed under Russian dominance. The CER became a great success, but the situation in the Northeast would remain unstable, from the 1900 Boxer Uprising and the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, through the fighting during the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the Great War, the 1917–1922 Russian civil war, and beyond. Even the impetus for its creation in the secret Russian-Chinese Alliance was born out of war: had it not been for China’s defeat by Japan, there never would have been a CER. With the building of the railway, Manchuria had become, to use Owen Lattimore’s phrase, the “cradle of conflict.” These conflicts set the stage for the 1929 war, and it is necessary to review the role they played in shaping the rivalries and creating the animosities that led to a tragic war between the Republic of China and the Soviet Union.23