On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria, Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead.
Manchuria
Harbin was a new city around the end of both the Qing dynasty and the Russian Empire. It was built to support the Chinese Eastern Railway and also became home to a sizable Jewish community numbering around twenty thousand. That community has long vanished and all that remains are the old synagogues and other buildings constructed by Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs. Why the Jews left Harbin is the most lasting consequence of the events recounted in Scott Seligman’s new book, Murder in Manchuria, a true crime narrative along the lines of Paul French’s Midnight in Peking and James M Zimmerman’s The Peking Express.
China shares borders with 14 other countries, more than almost any other nation. Its near neighbors represent a diverse collection of countries, from dominant powers such as Russia and India, to the smaller emerging nations of Laos and Bhutan. Throughout China’s history, it is through these borders that the influencing forces of trade, ideology and imperialism have traveled. China’s border regions have resumed their importance in recent years with political protest among the country’s ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and the development of the One Belt, One Road initiative—which seeks to further bind China’s neighbors to its economic agenda through the creation of a “New Silk Road”. As it currently stands, China’s borders represent an opportunity for trade and cultural exchange, but also a risk from political agitation, terrorism and even military conflict.
When the end came, it came quickly and, for most of the Japanese inhabitants of occupied Manchuria, unexpectedly. Kiku Kyuzo, protagonist of Beasts Head for Home, was of one of the great many Japanese left behind when Manchuria fell to the Soviet Army in August 1945.
The recurring themes of Manchuria’s history—and Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria, edited by Norman Smith—are colonization and the environment.
Over centuries, Manchuria—the region covering the remote northeast of modern-day China—has been fought over by competing imperial powers. Its geographic location at the intersection of three of the 20th century’s most powerful empires—Russia, China and Japan—has seen Manchuria play host to a series of conflicts (both hot and cold) from the 1600s until the end of the Chinese civil war in the mid-20th century.
In the triumvirate of superpowers, only China and Russia share a border. In Beyond the Amur, Victor Zatsepine discusses how that border, or rather the eastern section of it, came to be.
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