A “Direct Danger” to “Our Far Eastern Oblasts”: Manchurian Grain, Chinese Governance, and Russian Views of Economic Development, 1900–16

By the 1900s, influential Russians at the frontier and in St. Petersburg began to discuss whether to place a tariff on grain imported into the Far Eastern Oblasts from neighboring Manchuria, under Chinese rule.  Following familiar arguments regarding economic growth, these discussions were divided between giving priority to industry, or to agriculture—with the first sector requiring, in theory, cheaper grain to reduce wages, and the second, higher price imports to protect local farmers. 

Russian debates over Manchurian grain introduced new factors into this classic paradigm of economic theorization: race and foreign governance.  Tariff supporters saw in Manchurian grain the “crystallization of yellow labor,” Chinese grain growers whose presence, in the form of their product, would undermine the settlement of Russian workers in the region. To tariff supporters, the grain also represented Chinese governmental power, which could be directed at waging economic war against the Russian Far East. 

These debates revealed the ambitious futures that many Russians imagined for the Far Eastern oblasts, which often entailed the rapid transformation of the region through such projects as the development of Vladivostok and the small port of Nikolaevsk-on-the-Amur into international harbors.  Many were uncertain, however, about the extent this future Russian Far East would necessarily be “cosmopolitan,” or could be rendered “Russian,” and whether the region’s development needed, or should do without “yellow labor.” Facing these uncertainties, Russian policy advocates frequently sought to legislate new boundaries separating “Russians” from Chinese indigenes (inorodtsy), and Russian from “yellow” workers. 

 My paper shows that Russian efforts to delineate these boundaries, read in conjunction with both Russian and Chinese documentation of the effect of Russian developmental projects in this region, reflected the extensiveness of non-Russians’ presence in the Russian Far East, and the interwovenness of the Russian oblasts and Manchuria through migration, labor for hire, and commerce.