Welcome to episode 126 of the People’s History of Ideas Podcast.

For the past little while now, we have been focused on the political struggle that broke out between the top two leaders of the Red Army, Mao Zedong and Zhu De, and how that political dispute was resolved at the Gutian Congress of December 1929. One thing that I didn’t mention (except briefly in episode 122), because it didn’t really impact that line struggle between Mao and Zhu, was a whole other major set of events happening in northern China during the second half of 1929. What happened was that for a few months a war broke out between the Soviet Union and China. This war is interesting in its own right but is particularly interesting to me (and relevant to the purposes of this podcast), because of the way in which this war influenced the political development of the Chinese Communist Party, and in particular the development of what came to be known as the Li Lisan line. The war also precipitated Chen Duxiu’s decisive break with the party and his turn to Trotskyism.

But before we start talking about the Sino-Soviet war of 1929, let me just mention something. It appears that our discussion of the political struggle between Mao Zedong and Zhu De has resulted in this podcast getting blocked in China. I’m not active on social media, but listeners of the podcast have brought to my attention that whereas previously it was possible to search for and find content related to this podcast on TikTok (a fact that I was unaware of), now that is not possible. Likewise, according to the podcast statistics that I have, while formerly there were a respectable number of listeners in the People’s Republic of China, now there are none since I began tackling the topic of the Mao-Zhu line struggle. Of course, this could happen because all those people suddenly stopped listening, but it seems pretty odd. Anyways, as I’ve mentioned before, it is a sensitive topic for the Chinese Communist Party. I hope that the podcast gets unblocked soon.

OK, let’s shift our focus to northern China now, and in particular to the Soviet-controlled railroad which cut across Manchuria, which was called the Chinese Eastern Railway. This railroad had its origins back in the days when the Russian imperialists were among the several major powers competing to divide up and exploit China. For Russia, there were big advantages to running the trans-Siberian rail line that it built to connect with Vladivostok straight across Manchuria, rather than running inside of Russia’s winding border with China. Not only was the terrain easier to build on, but it also made the trip 1300 miles shorter. But it wasn’t just a matter of making the trip shorter. As the Russian finance minister said in 1903, the year that the railroad opened to passenger traffic, “Given our enormous frontier line with China and our exceptionally favorable situation, the absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese Empire is only a question of time.” And it was understood that the railroad would facilitate both the absorption of Chinese territory, and military competition with Japan for that territory.

It was China’s loss to Japan in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895 (which we discussed back in episode 7) which led China to grant Russia the concession to build the railway across Manchuria, in the hopes that an alliance with Russia would offset Japan’s appetite for Chinese territory. But although China’s grant of the railway concession to Russia in 1896 was framed as a part of a new defensive alliance between Russia and China against Japan, it was always understood on the part of Russia as part of a plan for seizing Chinese territory.

Later, after the fall of the Russian Empire, and as we talked about back in episode 16, the Soviet Union renounced almost all of the concessions that Russia had extracted from China. This act, called the Karakhan Manifesto, after the Soviet deputy commissioner for foreign affairs, Lev Karakhan, was one of the major actions which brought the Bolshevik revolution to the attention of Chinese people looking for a way to fight off the foreign domination of China, including the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. In the original 1919 draft of the Karakhan Manifesto, the Soviet Union agreed to give the railway back to China, but they soon thought better of it, and they retained control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. (In a particularly disorganized and/or Machiavellian move, in 1921 the Soviet government denied ever having offered to return the Chinese Eastern Railway to China while in negotiations with the Chinese government, while simultaneously using the original version of the Karakhan Manifesto for propaganda purposes in the April 24, 1921, Bulletin of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern. Of course, the original version was much more useful as propaganda than the later version, since it was the more thoroughgoing anti-imperialist document.)

Soviet ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway remained a sore point for the Chinese Nationalists, who had come into possession of Manchuria at the end of 1928 when the warlord who ruled Manchuria pledged his allegiance to the Guomindang. The story of how this happened is a big one for unintended consequences in history. As I’ve mentioned in past episodes, in 1928 Chiang Kai-shek had continued the Northern Expedition to conquer/unify China under Nationalist rule, and the final main obstacle for him to accomplish this was the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, who had occupied Beijing.

Seeing that he was going to lose Beijing to the warlord coalition that Chiang Kai-shek had put together, Zhang Zuolin got on a train to return back to his base in Manchuria. But as he was arriving in Shenyang he was assassinated by a bomb placed by Japanese forces stationed in Manchuria. Remember, there were lots of foreign troops stationed in different parts of China at this time, and Manchuria was in the Japanese sphere of influence, so there were lots of Japanese troops there. Anyways, the Japanese armed forces in Manchuria were much more hawkish than their government in Japan, and they hoped that by assassinating Zhang Zuolin, that they would provoke a general crisis that Japan could take advantage of in order to seize more territory. They also thought that Zhang Zuolin’s son, Zhang Xueliang, would be easier to manipulate than his father. Zhang Xueliang had just turned 27 at the time of the assassination and was known as being more interested in women and opium than in politics.

However, the assassination of his father turned Zhang Xueliang decisively against the Japanese, and at the end of 1928 he pledged his allegiance to the Nationalist government. Years later, in events that I would like to eventually talk about in some detail, in 1936 he is going to kidnap Chiang Kai-shek in order to force him to join in a united front with the Communists to fight the Japanese. So, the assassination of Zhang Zuolin had major unintended consequences for his Japanese assassins.

Anyways, returning to the topic at hand, since gaining control of Manchuria at the end of 1928 (through the allegiance of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang), the Guomindang had set its sights on taking back the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Union.

In pursuit of this aim, the Manchurian authorities staged a raid on the Soviet consulate in the city of Harbin in May of 1929. Now, the city of Harbin itself at this time was a remarkable place. It was, basically, a Russian city that happened to be in the middle of northern Manchuria. Harbin rose up as a city from being a little village because of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and very much was the creation of the Russian Empire during the period when it saw Manchuria as its sphere of influence.

In 1917, when the Russian Revolution began, the plurality of Harbin’s population of 100,000 had been Russian, at around 40,000. And when the Russians were combined with other ethnic identities from the Russian empire they made up the majority of the city’s population. During the Revolution a soviet was formed in the city (which was led at one point by the Bolshevik Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin, who is known for later opposing the way in which collectivization had been carried out and for trying to organize opposition to Stalin’s leadership within the Party on that basis). Anyways, Ryutin and the other Bolsheviks were run out of Harbin at the end of 1917 by a combination of Russian white forces and Chinese warlord troops. After that, Harbin became something like the Miami of Siberia, with a combination of counter-revolutionary Russians and more-or-less apolitical refugees making the city home. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, more than 100,000 defeated white Russians retreated to Harbin (although not all of them stayed there). And even after the end of the civil war, the area served as a kind of base for organizing occasional raids on Soviet territory by counter-revolutionary forces.

However, the Soviet Union eventually ended up carrying on some of the Russian Empire’s former business interests in the region, with the Chinese Eastern Railway at the top of the list, and so a Soviet business community, diplomatic presence, and expatriate workforce also became a significant presence in the city during the 1920s, co-existing alongside the large population of war refugees and counter-revolutionary exiles.

Here’s how an American journalist described Harbin in early 1929:

“In appearance Harbin is pure Russian. There is little to suggest that it is not a city of black earth Orel or Tver. Like most Slav cities, it has never been able to pull itself together but wanders over the plain, old Harbin here, new Harbin there and, in a different quarter along the magnificent Sungari River, the Port: all laced together by wide streets and mammoth bridges—the only scale that the Russian seems to know. The cobbled streets are the same as those of Moscow, and the horses’ hoofs that clatter down them. The capacious stone buildings that line the streets, the shops, and the cinema are similar to those that rise in Vladivostok or Leningrad. The steamers on the river are Russian; the twisted green and gold spires of the churches and the little kiosks. The traktirs and gardens are Russian, and in them sit Russian crowds eating sunflower seeds [a traktir is an East European style tavern]. The music is Russian, the gaiety and melancholy, the cafes and the caviar. The smell is Russian. Need anything further be said?

“In the bright Manchurian sun, however, flies one of the most curious flags in the world: the upper half is the Chinese five-barred flag, the lower—not the upper—half is the Soviet sickle and hammer. Down the street clatters a Russian izvostchik [that’s a carriage-driver], swinging his long whip over his shaggy Siberian pony. In the old days that long careless whip would certainly have flicked any Chinese tardily crossing the road. Now the traffic policeman who puts up his hand at which the bearded Jehu stops short has a yellow skin and slant eyes. If there is an altercation the Russian will be slapped or beaten before a crowd and there is no redress. If he is arrested, it is the heavy hand of the yellow that hales him to the yamen [the government offices], and the justice he meets is yellow. The mass of the city is white, but the wires, the antennae that control it are Chinese. The whole administration, in short, of this Russian city of eighty thousand is Chinese. If you rise early enough you may even see the Chinese mayor making his rounds. He is a Buddhist scholar and rises at six to see if the municipal plant is working.”

So, clearly a lot of racial anxiety on the part of the American author of that piece. But I think that it conveys the unusual state of things in Harbin in the late 1920s; a city that was a leftover of the Russian colonization of the region, but now under the Chinese administration of the warlord Zhang Xueliang, who had joined the Guomindang.

In 1929, the Guomindang decided to attempt to seize control of, to decolonize if you will, the Chinese Eastern Railway. The first step that they took was to raid the Soviet consulate in Harbin in May of 1929, and during the raid they arrested the general manager of the railroad along with some other members of the railroad administrative staff. The Soviet Union retaliated by arresting a number of Chinese citizens, including businessmen, living in the USSR.

It’s not clear whether this initial raid on the Soviet consulate was a trial balloon to see what the Soviet response would be, or if it just took a while to organize the next stage of the effort to seize the railroad, because it wasn’t until July 10 that the Guomindang followed up with another, more comprehensive wave of arrests of Soviet administrators of the railroad and other economic enterprises. Over the course of a few days beginning on July 10, over a hundred Soviets were detained (with some deported and some kept in Manchuria), Soviet enterprises were seized and shuttered, and the telegraph offices which were located along the railroad line were seized. The manager of Dalbank, a Soviet-owned bank that operated regionally, managed to transfer the bank’s funds to New York just before the bank was seized by the Guomindang, which I find extra-interesting because it illustrates the degree of interconnectedness that Soviet enterprises maintained with the centers of global capitalism (a fact that is often obscured in the literature on the Soviet Union).

On July 13, Lev Karakhan, the Acting Commissar for Foreign Affairs in Moscow, sent the Guomindang an ultimatum calling for an immediate conference to resolve the dispute, a return to the status quo ante, and the immediate release of Soviet citizens. The Soviets also began mobilizing for war.

In late July and the first week of August, talks were held between the Chinese and Soviets, with the Soviet consul general of Harbin keeping in touch with his superiors in Moscow by telegraph for the purposes of the talks. The talks soon broke down, however, with the Soviets accusing the Guomindang of negotiating in bad faith. The general opinion in the international diplomatic community was that the Soviets would not militarily intervene, and apparently the Guomindang leadership agreed. The French military attaché in Latvia voiced the majority opinion among great power diplomats that: “We all know, of course, that Russia is unable to wage war.” The Guomindang must have been betting on this.

On August 6, Vasily Blyukher, the Soviet general who had played a leading role in cohering the National Revolutionary Army in China and during the first half of the Northern Expedition, and who we last saw when he left China in the summer of 1927 in episode 54, arrived to take command of the Special Far Eastern Army, which had been newly created in order to reassert the Soviet Union’s interests in Manchuria.

Next episode, we will pick up the story when the war gets underway.

Before we end here, I’ve got a short announcement. Since the fifth episode of the podcast, almost six years ago, I’ve used the social media platform Twitter as pretty much the only place where I announce that a new episode of the podcast has come out. I don’t really use social media for anything else, although I have also made myself available there to receive direct messages from people who like using that platform for talking to other people. But things have gotten to the point where that platform is just so vile, that I can’t in good conscience continue to use it. So, after this episode, I won’t be using that platform anymore.

Going forward, I will be using Substack instead as the place where I put out announcements that a new episode has been released. So, if you want to see announcements when a new episode is released, go ahead and subscribe at peopleshistoryofideas.substack.com. Right now, there isn’t a lot there, but going forward I’ll be posting links to new episodes up there.

Now, you might be wondering, if I have set up a Substack, is there a chance that the podcast is going to become paywalled? I really don’t want to do that. I like keeping the podcast free for anyone who wants to listen. And also, we have a decent-sized international audience who may have issues with different payment platforms, and there are also of course some people who guard their internet privacy too zealously to sign up for paid subscriptions. I don’t want to exclude those people.

On the other hand, there is a vocal minority of podcast supporters who think that I have outdated feelings about charging money for content (informed by punk scene norms of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s), and insist that if I were charging money, then I would be able to produce more episodes.

Anyways, in a nutshell, I have no plans to paywall the podcast.

So go ahead and subscribe at peopleshistoryofideas.substack.com if you want to receive announcements about new episodes. And until next time, be well.