CHAPTER VITHROUGH RUSSIANIZED CHINA
The changes which burst suddenly upon the traveler at Changchun would be startling if he were not almost certain to be prepared for them. Unless his memory is short or his age brief he can scarcely be unaware of the fact that the Treaty of Portsmouth on our own New England coast made Changchun the meeting-place of that portion of the Chinese Eastern Railway which remained to the Russians after their trouncing, and that long section of it which their conquerors have made over into the South Manchurian Railway. One steps from what is essentially an American express-train upon the station platform, and from that into an express-train that is European down to its most insignificant details. Cars of the “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits” offer him the comfort of their separate compartments, brilliantly lighted by frosted bulbs, furnished even with thermometers, roomy with the five-foot gage of Russian railways, on which trains use the right- rather than the left-hand track. The heavy-stacked engine is as different from the one across the platform still panting from its race northward as the densely bearded Russian trainmen are from the alert little brown men of the same calling. Suddenly there were Russians everywhere, and by no means all of them were of a type to make one unduly proud of the white race; some indeed were roustabouts and station hangers-on living by petty graft upon uninformed travelers, such as the latter are never subjected to on the Japanese railways of Manchuria. There was such a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Russians at Changchun that one could only surmise who was really in control. It was a Russian who asked me for my passport—and who raised his hat, bowed low, and retired with an almost subservient “Thank you” when I answered that I was American. Booted and spurred Russians in khaki, in woolen trousers and cotton smocks, in the best they could do in the way of an individual uniform, their waists compressed to maidenly slenderness by tight belts, strutted the platforms in long swords with an air that said plainly that they would far rather die than have to work andnot be able to strut about in uniform, boots, spurs, and sword. European civilians of both sexes, tow-headed women and children, mere Russian farmers, leaned on station barriers or made their way to and from the third-class coaches. One type in particular was very familiar,—the half-subservient, half-cocky, always vulgar Russian Jew, much assured of himself now, since the new turn things have taken in Russia, but still more or less openly despised by the non-Jewish Russians. In our car was one of the most offensive of these fellows, head of the opium ring of Harbin, who acted as if he had purchased the earth from its original owners and was making it a personal plaything.
The train made incredibly long stops at every station, but excellent speed between them, though it burned wood and thereby saved us from soot and cinders. I had a sense of being in an utterly foreign land, many times more so than among the Japanese. For one thing station names were in Chinese and Russian, equally illegible to those of us who recognize a word only in Roman letters, while from Yokohama to Changchun even the most insignificant stopping-place announces itself in English. Hitherto at least the head trainman was almost certain to have a smattering of my tongue; at worst I could produce a few short but highly valuable phrases of Japanese; but these black-bearded fellows were separated from me by an utterly impenetrable linguistic wall. They might quite as well have been Hottentots or Zulus as far as any possibility of communicating with them either by spoken or written word went. Perhaps it was mainly this sense of strangeness that made the air seem surcharged with something ominous, something akin to hopeless political conditions.
But through it all the endless plains of corn and beans, millet and wheat, beautiful in their deep green, spread as far as the eye could reach in every direction, hour after hour, all afternoon long. The plodding Chinese peasant, who is the mudsill of all the struggles of rival empires to control this vast rich territory, was still toiling here and there when the sun touched the flat western horizon. But at frequent intervals Russian boys in soldierly caps came running out of yellow brick farm-houses surrounded by a kind of Chinese wall. Many more of them lived in villages, some of which might have been lifted bodily out of European Russia. At these, Chinese and tow-headed venders appeared on the off side of stations, until they were chased away by policemen, offering live chickens, ducks, eggs by the basketful. A wonderful land, Manchuria, whether for cultivating ormerely for the grazing of stock; no wonder crowded Japan covets this broad, half-wasted region, yet she has already shown that she would exploit rather than people it.
Rain was pouring when we reached Harbin, and seemed to have been for weeks. At least never in all my wanderings have I floundered through worse sloughs of mud than in thedroshkewhich lost itself in the inky blackness and the downpour in what looked for a time like a vain attempt to get me from the station to a hotel. By morning light there seemed no particular reason for this, for though every street was covered at least with slime, there were enough of them roughly stone-paved to carry all thedroshkeswith which Harbin swarms. Perhaps it was merely an example of the impracticability of the Russians, of which I was to hear so many more before I moved on.
At Harbin, though still well inside China, the traveler finds himself back in Europe. Unless his geography is proof against such deceptions, he might easily believe that he had crossed the line into Russia and brought up in one of its most typical cities. Streets, architecture, customs, inhabitants are all on the Russian model. Instead of rickshaws there are two types of carriages,—thedroshke, of barouche effect, drawn in most cases by two horses, the shaft animal under a great arched pole and the off one with its head tied down to a level with its knees and twisted well to the outside, thanks to some time-honored Russian idea of style or efficiency; then there is theamerikanka. The “American woman,” as foreign residents facetiously translate the word, is a two-wheeled cart with a plain open box on top, on a corner of which sits the driver, apparently wholly inured to the jouncing with every step of the horse and every unevenness of the road which the passenger or two beside him seldom gives evidence of enjoying. But theamerikankais ridiculously cheap by Western standards, and the Russian who manipulates it is almost sure to be cheery and pleasant, filled with naïve tales of what is and what he believes is going on inside Russia proper, if one chances to have a companion who can act as interpreter, and in any case a relief merely as a Caucasian after months among squint-eyed Orientals. Already, however, the motor-buses which probably have by this time driven most of the leisurely Russian wielders of horse-whips out of business had begun to appear on the streets of Harbin.
The houses have double windows, with a space of two or three feet between the panes of glass; and great cylindrical stoves built into the walls from floor to ceiling, preferably in a corner where they canbulge into two, and even four, rooms, are almost as universal as in Russia. In a July heat which left one drenched after a short stroll, even by moonlight, and which made the briefest interview in any of Harbin’s dungeon-like, double-walled offices a kind of “third degree,” it was hard to believe these evidences of long winters during which, barely four months thence, it would often be forty below zero and the wearing of furs indispensable. To its residents and to most of its visitors Harbin, all Manchuria in fact, is a land of snow and ice and bitter gales; to me, who happened to be there in the very climax of the brief summer, it will always bring back memories of a climate compared to which that of the tropics is mild and invigorating. Nor can I remember meeting in all Japan such battalions of flies as helped to make life miserable in summer-time Harbin, with its brief nights and its interminable days.
I know at last why one’s hat is always snatched from him when he enters a Russian-Jewish restaurant in New York. In Russia, and equally in Harbin, it is an inexcusable discourtesy to go into an office, even for the briefest instant, wearing, or carrying, hat or overcoat. There are always flunkies waiting to take them away from you outside the door, and obviously they expect to be remembered when you leave. I am overcome with grief to think that, in my appalling ignorance, I so long fancied one of the least beloved customs of our metropolis a mere scheme to extort tips, instead of a transplanted refinement from urbane Russia. Equally Russian is the Harbin practice of shaking hands with the entire personnel, from proprietor to errand-boy, of any shop one enters, however slight the purchase one has in view. Indeed, the more genuinely well bred shake hands all around again before they leave.
Several gaudy blue, green, and gold churches of the Russian Orthodox faith rise in fantastic domes and puffed-out, cross-surmounted spires above the general level of Harbin, and religious ceremonies imported direct from pre-Bolshevik Moscow may be seen any day in the week. Funerals, for instance, were of more than daily occurrence. Most often they were those of impoverished refugees, and were brief and inconspicuous; but there were frequent processions of the elaborate, typically Russian character. I passed two such within half an hour one noonday. The first was of the wife of the Russian station-master. He had discharged a Chinese employee for negligence and “squeeze,” and the latter had returned to kill him, his bullet accidentally strikingthe wife instead. The second was of the head of the HarbinGymnasium, or upper school, once a colonel and a man of great wealth in Russia, now so impoverished that his wife and children, on foot behind the hearse, as is the Russian custom, were almost in rags and virtually barefoot. Mummers in fantastic costumes, including long, light-colored robes, walked before and on either side of the deceased, who were carried in canopied vehicles gay beyond anything western Europe or the New World has to offer the dead, even the horses draped from ears to fetlocks in flowing white coverlets fancifully embroidered. But the most surprising, not to say repulsive, Russian feature of the ceremony was the public display of the corpse. In each case the heavy lid of the coffin was laid diagonally off to one side, and during all the miles from church to cemetery, with several stops for the burning of incense and priestly blessings on the way, the yellow face of the departed rolled from side to side as the open hearse jolted over the stony pavements.
It is an old saying that to scratch a Russian is to find a Tartar, but I had taken this to be a mere figure of speech until I came to Harbin and northern Manchuria, where the European and the Asiatic Orientals live side by side. The Chinese and the Russians, one quickly realized there, understand each other better than we of the real West can ever hope to understand either. They have the same complicated Oriental way of thinking, a similar point of view in such matters as “squeeze,” not very dissimilar business methods. In a Russian department-store of Harbin the purchaser gets two checks, one of which he pays at the desk under the personal eye of the owner or manager, getting the other stamped and presenting it, not to the clerk who served him, but to another so far away that collusion between them would be difficult, before he is finally handed his purchase. The mere loss of time on both sides no more worries the Russian than it would the Chinese. At every turn I found myself startled to recognize as another Russian trait what I had fancied was characteristic merely of eastern Asia. Every important house in Harbin had its private policeman, usually a Russian ex-soldier, and wherever one attempted to enter a gate watchmen and domestic hangers-on sprang up from all sides as thickly as at the entrance to a Chinese residence oryamen. Perhaps the greatest surprise was the discovery that the Russian uses the abacus or swan-pan for doing his arithmetic, just like the people of Japan, Korea, and China, except that with him the contrivance is much larger, as if his heavier fingers needed wooden balls worthy of their strength. Mentalarithmetic seemed to be as impossible to him as to a Chinese shopkeeper or to the subjects of the mikado. On my first visit to a dining-car on the C. E. R., it being two or three hours before dinner-time, I had merely a glass of tea and some Russian form of pastry. The bill of fare announced these as costing 15 and 45senrespectively—Japanese money is most widely used now in the Russianized zone of Manchuria. The ikon-faced man at his desk in a corner of the car, his mammoth black beard looking like a wig that had fallen from its place on his utterly hairless head, solemnly picked up his counting-board, rattled the balls back and forth for a full minute, and finally wrote down with an air of intellectual triumph the total of the two items on my check before him. No Westerner can ever hope to sandwich himself in between two peoples who prefer the abacus to pencil and paper for their arithmetical problems.
Yet the Russians are white men, and thereby hang certain problems that are sure to thrust themselves upon the visitor to northern Manchuria in the present days of Russian upheaval. It was a distinct pleasure to find myself again where Westerners were not incessantly stared at, even though it was useless to attempt to speak a word with men and women who would have looked perfectly at home on the streets of any large American city. But it was quite otherwise suddenly to realize that some of the weaknesses of our Western civilization are much more conspicuous, or at least more public, than similar flaws in Oriental society. Neither China nor Japan are model lands in many respects, but during all the time I had spent in the Far East I had not seen a fraction of the open indecency, the unashamed vulgarity, the deliberate flaunting of sexual wares that raged in the several conspicuous café singing-halls of Harbin. It was almost a shock even to see white women again in any number; to find them dressing and behaving as no Japanese geisha, no singsong-girl of Korea or China, would ever think of doing outside her semi-domestic circle, was more impressive, more suggestive of the vices of our civilization, than the average of us would have called to his attention during a lifetime of Western residence. The contrast, added to a little knowledge of the point of view of the Oriental as to the proper place of the sex appeal in life, made such things stand out with the vividness of electric sign-boards. As Westerners we might understand that Harbin, under undefined economic conditions and somewhat chaotic government, with overturned Russia pouring its vices and its hungers down into it, was not a normal sample of the West; to the occasional fat, smug Chinesevisitors to these blatant places, and through them to thousands of their race, such parading of our vices could do more to give a false impression of Western life and the Western character than a thousand decent Occidentals, working for years to no other purpose, could correct.
Two decades ago, while I was wandering across Asia during the Japanese-Russian War, an English-speaking Hindu expressed to me his great astonishment that the white world should permit the yellow race to show its superiority over even what seemed just then the most widely disliked branch of the Caucasian family. He realized what at least the untraveled bulk of the Occident does not to this day, that every sign of weakness in any white nation, almost in any white individual, is immediately applied by the average Oriental mind to the whole white race. The effect of Japan’s victory over Russia, working like a leaven through the masses of Asia for a score of years, was quite apparent in certain general changes of attitude toward Westerners, some of them fortunate, many of them quite the contrary. Now, with the second catastrophe of Russia flooding Asia with new examples of Caucasian weaknesses, of white men reduced to a lower level than Asia had ever before seen them, one could not but feel that it behooves the Western world in general to look to the impression Russians in China are making for the Caucasian family as a whole, and to know what their treatment is at the hands of the Chinese. For while we may recognize the Russian as essentially an Oriental, really more closely allied to the Chinese than to ourselves, the latter thinks of him entirely as a Westerner, typical in his faults and his weaknesses of that other side of the earth toward which the Oriental attitude is of growing importance. I do not know whether or not the continued supremacy of the white race is best for the world at large; but I have rather strong personal opinions on that subject, and those who are like-minded would do well to look into the question of the present-day conditions of Russians in China, where at least the respect on which much of that supremacy depends is being gradually eaten away.
Along all the principal thoroughfares of Harbin squatted scores of white beggars, women and children among them, appealing to Chinese as well as to European passers-by. In the market-places of this and of other towns along the C. E. R. I saw many a Russian covered with filth, sores, and a few tattered rags, a noisome receptacle of some kind in his hands, wandering from stall to stall pleading with the sardonic Chinese keepers to give him a half-rotten tomato or a putrid piece ofmeat. Barefooted refugee children roamed the streets, picking up whatever they could find, including some of the nastiest of Chinese habits. Former officers of the czar, and wives who were once the grace of any drawing-room, speaking French with a faultless accent, lived in miserable pens with only ragged cloth partitions between them and their teeming neighbors, eating the poorest of Chinese coolie food, some of them unable to go out unless they went barefoot. In the so-called thieves’ market every conceivable kind of junk, from useful kitchen utensils to useless bric-à-brac of Russian ancestry, was offered for sale; any morning one might see several hundred Russian men and women shuttling to and fro there, trying to sell an odd pair of boots, an all but worn-out garment, a child’s toy, for the price of a handful of potatoes or a measure ofkaoliang, or attempting to exchange something they had at last found they could do without for something their fellow refugees still had that seemed to them indispensable.
The few Americans in Harbin at least were doing what they could to relieve the needy Russians. But it was an even more complicated task than we of the West would suppose, for here again the essential Orientalism of the victims came out. Young men with fine faces, on which the signs of semi-starvation were in plain evidence, would come imploring any kind of assistance, any position that would give them enough to buy bread. “Why,” they would cry, as if they were going the utmost limit in describing their horrible state, “I will even work with my hands!” But this was merely bluff; nothing could make your typical Russian of the class which Bolshevism chased out of the country debase himself to any such degree as that, starve, beg, or steal though he must. With a plethora of hungry, yet still sturdy, Russians of both sexes all about them, it was almost impossible for the American residents to get servants, unless they took Chinese from the native city. They could get innumerable teachers of Russian, almost none of whom had any conception of how to teach, nor the persistence, patience, and punctuality which that calling requires; but when it came to washing dishes and mopping floors chances went begging in the very houses which were being bombarded with frantic appeals for help against incipient starvation. It was not merely that these former well-to-do did not know how to work; they would do anything rather than learn.
Fifteen boys who worked their way across Siberia and were found jobs by the Y. M. C. A. secretary of Harbin all ran away very shortly afterward, taking with them money or clothing, or both, belonging to their employers. One went home all the way across Siberia again tofind his mother, discovered no trace of her, was caught by the “Red” army, and finally turned up in Harbin once more with frozen feet and looking like an old man, though he was only seventeen. This same secretary had countless appeals for help and at the same time a job of pumping water at his own house, but he was never able to make the two meet. Time after time he offered some hungry young Russian this task, which meant less than two hours’ work a day, at any time of the day that the worker might choose, the salary to be all the food he could eat and $7.50 “Mex” a month—a very liberal offer in China, even for high-priced Harbin. Invariably each applicant for aid bowed low at this offer, assured the secretary that he had saved his life, thanked him in the deepest Russian manner possible, which might include the kissing of the benefactor’s hands—and invariably never turned up again. One case was so obviously deserving that the secretary dug a good suit of clothes out of the bottom of his trunk, had it dry-cleaned, and gave it to the poor fellow, along with the pumping job, from which he discharged the Chinese boy who had recently been filling it very satisfactorily—and the next day, when his water ran out, he found that the man and the suit had gone to Vladivostok.
American representatives of such organizations as the Red Cross, who were spending money and energy for the betterment of Russian refugees in Harbin, Kirin, and other towns of northern Manchuria, could not get a man among all the big sturdy fellows they were feeding to build a brick stove, to patch a roof, or to dig a trench for their own benefit; Chinese laborers had to be called in to do all such “work with the hands.” Indeed, the refugees expected their benefactors to hire servants to sweep out and keep in order the buildings that had been found for them. There were some well-to-do Russians in Harbin—more C. E. R. officials than there were positions for them to fill lived there in style, and a few families had escaped from Russia early enough to have been able to bring much of their wealth with them, not to mention others who had long been in business in Manchuria. But these were the last people in Harbin to help their unfortunate compatriots. They might flaunt their own comfort and extravagance in the lean faces of the unfortunate; they were even known to “squeeze” some of the poor devils among the refugees of the working-class who found and accepted work; but they were as Oriental as the Chinese in looking callously on while their own people starved about them, or were succored by men from across the sea.
For a time the Y. M. C. A. secretary helped young Russians to immigrate to the United States under the guise of students, there being some special ruling for these in spite of the new immigration restrictions; but so many of them turned out to be men who had helped to start the revolution in Russia and hoped to do the same in America that the plan proved to be unwise. Those who succeeded in finding tasks to the liking of the hand-sparing fugitives had their own troubles. “Hire a Russian and you have to hire another man to watch him,” was the consensus of opinion among all who had had that experience. Russian ideas of honesty were frankly Oriental; moreover they were idealists, dreamers, with no business sense, no conception of economics or economies, no “go,” not a practical trait in their whole make-up, unless they had some German, Swedish, or French blood in their veins, which the few enterprising ones in Harbin did. For all that they were a most likable people, childlike in their manners as well as their irresponsibility, with nothing of the surliness of the Japanese, nor of the Chinese love of ridicule. They gave one the feeling that they were not fitted to cope with the practical every-day world, that they should not be wandering about it without guardians and advisers. One soon ceased to wonder that the trade of Harbin was almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews and the Chinese; a few days in northern Manchuria were enough to explain why the Jews are so powerful and so hated in Russia, why it has been considered necessary to curb them, almost enough to make clear the incredible success of Bolshevism over common sense.
Distinctly a chip of the degenerate old régime was Harbin, inhabited mainly by people whom nothing would drive to manual labor but who were quite ready to spread intrigue and false propaganda against the new rulers in their native land. The Bolsheviks, it seems generally admitted, are at least sincere, wildly impractical as they are in their ideas of human society; these refugees of Harbin, one felt, would be just as bad as ever if once they got back into power, would have learned nothing whatever, thanks to their incapability, their temperamental ineptitude, from their bitter experiences. “Propaganda aside,” said foreign residents who were in a position to know, and who certainly were not friendly to the new order in Russia, “if the bulk of the Russian people were able to vote between the old régime and the present one they would choose the latter as the least of two evils”; and any one who has made even a brief stay in the Russian metropolis of China would probably be inclined to agree with that statement.
The night life of Harbin, even passing over the vicious part of it, was in great contrast to that of Japan and the adjoining lands I had so far visited. Whatever else they might have to do without, the Russian exiles plainly did not propose to deny themselves the gay times, the mingling together in social concourse, the rivalry of dress and public squandering of money, the joys of good music, which had been so important a part of their life at home. Countless anecdotes floated about Harbin of refugees dressing like lords though they had not a crust left at home, of selling necessary things, even of spending money that had been given to keep them from starvation, to get raiment in which they were not ashamed to appear in the frequent social gatherings. In the park of the Railway Club, to which members and their families were admitted free and passing strangers at a goodly price of admission, there was an immense crowd on the evening I spent there, as there is almost any night of the week, so purely European a crowd that it took a distinct mental exertion to realize that one was still in China. Yet in all the big audience that stood and strolled about the huge shell-shaped sounding-board, from within the mouth of which a large orchestra gave an all-Tchaikowsky program that would have been loudly applauded by music lovers anywhere, there was scarcely a visible sign of straitened circumstances, to say nothing of poverty. Ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races strolled with men faultlessly garbed, by European standards, who swung their “sticks” with the haughty grace of aristocrats to whom the lack of an adequate income had never so much as occurred. Men and women sipping iced drinks on the veranda of the club paid their checks and tipped their waiters with as lavish an air as if the World War had never happened. Not a few men were in a kind of combination smock and uniform, with collars buttoning high about the neck; but these looked as much like an exuberance of fashion as like subterfuges to save shirts or cover the lack of them, just as their tightly belted waists were more of a fad than an open admission of the meagerness of their suppers.
It was like such a concert in a Spanish-American plaza, yet in many ways different. The hearers stood during the numbers and walked between them, reversing the usual practice south of the Rio Grande. There was endless hand-shaking; beards were not conspicuously numerous and even mustaches were little in fashion, at least among the younger men, but closely clipped, even shaved, heads seemed to be as much the style as among the modern Chinese, who, now that they are doing away with the pigtail, are doing so with such a vengeance thattheir scalps show white through the bristles. Short hair was not uncommon among the women, too, though less as a fashion, it was said, than because so many had had typhus during their fugitive days. It was strange to see the women all wearing hats, quite aside from the fact that they were almost all new ones; it was strange to see women openly treated with respect, for that matter, and walking arm in arm with their men; strangest of all was the queer feeling of mingling again with thousands of white people, after months of never having seen more than a dozen of them together. Not a few of the girls and young women were more than good-looking, in form as well as face, a fact which many of them seemed to take care not to conceal, for some of the newest dresses were startlingly thin, and rolled stockings barely covering the ankle were almost the rule among the younger set. But Russians do not appear to be prudish about the display of the human form; during July and August great numbers of both sexes, quite of the decent class, bathe together perfectly naked in the muddy water of Harbin’s uninspiring river.
I was introduced to princesses in simple but very appropriate garb, to people with strange and with sad stories, to men who had run away from Russia and left their wives to follow—if they could—to women who had performed incredible feats and suffered unbelievable hardships to escape from the blighted land or to join such unworthy husbands, and who in some cases still retained their striking beauty and in many their Russian charm. Yet numerous as were the fine faces in the crowd, it hardly needed the experience of foreign residents to call attention to the fact that in so many instances these looked proud and impractical and—well, inefficient in the matter-of-fact things of life. Now and then there passed through the throng that made respectful way for them old generals still wearing their uniforms, blazing from shoulder to shoulder with decorations, and the same haughty expression of men expecting instant obedience as in their bygone days of power and emoluments. I could not quite get the point of view on some Russian prejudices. Not one of that race with whom I spoke during my journey through northern Manchuria lost an opportunity to curse the Jews, whom they always spoke of as synonymous with the new régime in their native land. Yet the leader of this orchestra was a Jew, and he not only got wild applause at the end of almost every number, even from men who left off vilifying his people just long enough to add to it in the heartiest fashion, but when he raised his baton to start the first number the almost entirely Russian orchestrahad given him a “rouser” instead, a sudden burst of music entirely different from what they were about to play, which is considered in Russian musical circles the highest honor that can be paid a musical director.
Harbin consists of four towns, each with its individual name. There is the old one where the Russians first settled when they built the Chinese Eastern Railway, now almost deserted but for tillers of the surrounding fields, a makeshift home for orphan refugees, and the like. In Pristan, popularly called “Jew-town,” most of the business is carried on, as well as the far-famed singing-halls. Up the hill from this and separated from it by an open space in which Chinese executions take place is the more commodious railroad town, with important offices, the better-class residences, the garish Russian Orthodox churches which rise like unnaturally gorgeous flowers above the rather drab general level. Lastly, there is Fu-chia-tien, the Chinese city, a mile or more away from the others, as completely Chinese as if there had never been a Russian within a thousand versts of the place. There are many rickshaws in Fu-chia-tien, but not one in all the other three towns, and rarely indeed does a foreigner ride in one, though they are more comfortable on the horrible streets than thedroshke, and certainly more so than the excruciating “American women.” The severed heads of bandits hung in cages on several street corners in Chinese Harbin, and many other such touching little details showed that the town clung strictly to its own ways in spite of the many foreign examples so close at hand.
Until the debacle of the czarist régime in Russia, the three Russian towns of Harbin were entirely under their own rule. Even now, since they have formally taken over the jurisdiction of them, the Chinese still let the Russians largely alone in their municipal affairs, but they are more and more prone to “butt in” and gratuitously assert their authority, just as they have in the Chinese Eastern Railway. This now has a Chinese as well as a Russian president and the whole category of Chinese officials down to the last clerk, in addition to Russian duplicates of the same in the greatly over-staffed offices. Some say the Russian railway officials are deliberately selling out to the Chinese; others claim that they are running this important link in world communication into wreckage and bankruptcy while they and the Bolsheviks quarrel, on paper and at a distance, as to whether it belongs to the Russian Government or merely to the Russo-Asiatic Bank. Meanwhile it staggers along under its top-heavy double staff, paying salaries toChinese who do nothing and to many Russians who do not do much. The latter, old officials cut off for years now from higher authority, avow that they are merely administering the line for the benefit of the czarist régime that appointed them, until such time as this shall recover its rightful place in the world, but in practice they act as if the C. E. R. were the private property of the little clique of reactionary Russians who hold the power and wealth of Harbin. How public-spirited these are is suggested by such actions as their refusing to transport, except at full rates, food and clothing furnished by the Red Cross for the relief of their compatriots in the various towns of northern Manchuria.
At Versailles in 1919 and again at the Washington Conference two years later the Chinese delegates demanded the abrogation of extraterritorial jurisdiction in China, as a derogation of her sovereign status as a nation. The request was denied, but at the second gathering it was decided to appoint a commission to examine on the spot the assertion of the delegates that the administration of justice in the former Celestial Empire has so far improved that foreign jurisdiction may safely be abolished. Since then certain occurrences in China which have not been testimonials in her favor have caused the commission indefinitely to postpone its coming; but in the meanwhile there is considerable evidence at hand in the treatment of the Russians by the Chinese since the former were deprived of their extraterritorial status.
It is probably not necessary to explain that extraterritoriality, as it is familiarly called, consists, briefly, in the right—or is it privilege?—of foreigners in China to be tried only by their own consuls or judges, under the laws of their own countries. Eighty years ago, closely following the Treaty of Nanking, which ended one of her “opium wars” with China, England forced this concession upon the Chinese Government, the Americans and the French quickly followed suit, and soon there were very few foreign residents indeed who were not protected by treaty from Chinese courts and prisons. This state of affairs remained unbroken until about the time of the Washington Conference, when China took advantage of conditions in Russia to repudiate her treaty with the czarist Government, and the many thousands of Russians in China suddenly found themselves on a par, legally, with the Chinese themselves. A new treaty between China and Germany, in which the latter either inadvertently or purposely left out any mention of extraterritoriality, and lack of treaties with some ofthe other countries on which China declared war at the behest of the Allies has left Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and some other nationalities in the same boat with the Russians.
Since then life has not been quite the same in Harbin and the other Russian towns of northern Manchuria. On one hand the change has caused some just retribution. In the olden days Russians kicked the Chinese about almost at will; now when a Chinese carriage driver in Harbin gets a good excuse and opportunity, Russian heads are likely to suffer. Russian railway-men used to throw Chinese passengers back into third class or out on the platform, if they felt in the mood, even though they held first-class tickets; now the minions of Chang Tso-lin suddenly levy a new tax and Chinese soldiers go out and “beat up” Russian farmers to such an extent in some cases that ships lie waiting for cargo in Dairen while crops rot in the fields. Unfortunately things do not often stop with mere retribution. The Chinese along the C. E. R. seem sometimes to go out of their way to be insolent toward any Westerner, to jostle and to annoy him without cause; taxes have been levied on the property of foreigners other than Russian, and men arrested in spite of treaties of extraterritoriality still in existence. An Italian woman who complained that her purse had been stolen by a Chinese pickpocket was taken to jail along with the thief, as openly as was a Russian who tried to get back his fur coat, and the latter at least was imprisoned for weeks. You cannot expect the garden variety of Chinese soldier or policeman to recognize a difference in foreigners, and in a town where 98 per cent of these are Russians we others have to watch our steps. Perhaps this inability of their Chinese comrades to distinguish between foreigners without and those still with extraterritorial status is the reason that there are Russian police in Harbin, splashing through its mud in their heavy boots as if they still had the czar’s authority behind them—until the passing of some supercilious Chinese official causes them to snap to attention and salute.