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Introduction: Entangled Histories: The transcultural past of Northeast China -- I Transgressing Cultural and National Borders -- ‘Vasily’ of China and his Russian friends. Smugglers and their transcultural identities -- Intercultural speakers in Harbin: The Sociolinguistic Profile of Chinese Pidgin Russian -- Mixed Marriages in Russian-Chinese Manchuria -- Globalization of Death – Foreign Cemeteries in a Transnational Perspective -- II Constructing Identities: The Harbin Example -- Russian Émigrés in Harbin’s Multinational Past: Censuses and Identity -- Yuandongbao: A Chinese or Russian Newspaper? -- ‘Kharbinger’ of Trouble. Anti-German Protest and Power Relations in a Manchurian City 1933 -- Russian Fascism in Harbin and Manchuria -- III Soft Power and Imperialism -- Late-Qing Adaptive Frontier Administrative Reform in Manchuria, 1900-1911 -- Surveying Manchuria: Imperial Russia’s topographers at work -- The Ambivalent Enterprise: Medical Activities of the Red Cross Society of Japan in the Northeastern Region of China during the Russo-Japanese War -- Projecting a Fiction of the Nation-state to the World: the Manzhouguo News Agency in Japanese-occupied Northeast China, 1932–45.

The authors of this book focus on transcultural entanglements in Manchuria during the first half of the twentieth century. Manchuria, as Western historiography commonly designates the three northeastern provinces of China, was a politically, culturally and economically contested region. In the late nineteenth century, the region became the centre of competing Russian, Chinese and Japanese interests, thereby also attracting global attention. The coexistence of people with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures in Manchuria was rarely if ever harmoniously balanced or static. On the contrary, interactions were both dynamic and complex. Semi-colonial experiences affected the people’s living conditions, status and power relations. The transcultural negotiations between all population groups across borders of all kinds are the subject of this book. The chapters of this volume shed light on various entangled histories in areas such as administration, the economy, ideas, ideologies, culture, media and daily life.