Where Empires Collided by Michael Share
Michael Share’s Where Empires Collided is an ambitious work. Share has taken on the history of Russian and Soviet involvement on China’s ocean periphery in an effort to, as he says, “demarginalize” the history of Russian and Soviet relations with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao. His urge to do this comes from access to previously closed Russian archives. Access to a mother lode of new and unmined primary material as an historian’s dream and Share works hard to make the most of it.
Share is clear in the introduction that this is a preliminary work with much more research needed. Judged against Share’s caveat of the preliminary nature of the work, Share delivers some fascinating history.
The task of creating coherence is daunting. Consider that on the Russian side there is Imperial or Tsarist Russia, briefly Kerensky’s Russia, the Soviet Union and its variations and, finally, at present, Russia in the guise of the Russian Federation. Macao, the marginal of the marginal or as Share puts it, the “permanent afterthought”, saw at least four regimes including, a kingdom, a brief republican period, the Salazar dictatorship and finally a military coup leading to democracy. Mainland China and Taiwan are no simpler. The least complicated is Hong Kong, which saw a British colonial administration, a brief period of Japanese rule, then back to British administration and finally the return to China.
The trees are pretty numerous and seeing the forest for them is a challenge that Share has difficulty meeting: the multiplicity of points that Share wants to make together with the many regimes involves leaves one wondering if there is any overarching theme. There are several, in fact, but so many points are thrown up that the larger themes are often obscured.
The problem with coherence seems modest compared to the difficulty of arguing for the significance for these areas which are by definition peripheral. Share identifies the problem clearly: “Throughout the entire period when it ruled Hong Kong, on the whole, Great Britain was suspicious or even hostile toward Russia and its post-1917 Soviet successor.” As a result, from about 1920 until the mid-1990s, there was no Soviet diplomatic presence in Hong Kong and only in rare cases were Soviet citizens granted visas to visit. The same was true of Macao which did not permit Soviet contact from the start of the Salazar regime in 1926 until the mid-1970s and also Taiwan, for obvious reasons, since 1949. Clearly, the “collision of empires” promised in the title is a bit overstated; it is difficult to have a collision when there is little in the way of a presence. This situation also points to the limits of the archives that Share is working with: With no diplomatic missions, there is little diplomatic correspondence and much of what is in the archives is secondhand reports from missions in neighboring countries like Thailand or the Philippines.
Nevertheless, in the end Share has made three points clearly. First, Russian and Soviet relationships on the periphery with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao were determined by Russian policy and relations on the world stage. In other words, Russia and Soviet relations with Hong Kong were a function of Russian and Soviet relations with Great Britain. Second, the Russian and Soviet expansion of empire to the Pacific had Russians and Soviets eyeing covetously all three territories. Third, the Soviet Union was more than willing to trade practical economic concerns for politics in dealing with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.
Relating to this third point is the intriguing story of the Soviet drug trade with China in the 1920s. Short on foreign exchange due to the Western embargo of the Soviet Union and in urgent need of trade goods to support the economy, the Soviets turned to the drug trade in a desperate effort to generate the needed funds. Sadly, the confirmation is buried in a footnote, for the history speaks directly to Share’s thesis that the Soviets were willing to abandon ideology in the interest of economics and that it was an economic interest in the peripheral territories that engaged Russian and Soviet interest.
Ambiguity and conflict of particularly Soviet interests in the periphery abounded. The Soviets were in conflict between wanting to make money from Hong Kong, trying to undermine the colonial government, relying on Hong Kong as a refuge from an anti-Communist KMT or other anti-communist colonial powers and wanting to use Hong Kong as a listening post to China after the Sino-Soviet splits. Share illustrates these conflicts well arguing that the Comintern and Soviet Foreign Ministry had separate and conflicting plans. The conflict was resolved only when the Comintern came under Stalin’s control.
Noting Share’s caveat that this is a preliminary work, one presumes the story is fuller and richer than presented here, but this is a good start. One looks forward to seeing Share fill out the history sketched here with future works.