Another ‘Yellow Peril’: Chinese Migrants in the Russian Far East and the Russian Reaction before 1917

Abstract

The description provided by John Foster Fraser, a British journalist wandering through Siberia and Manchuria in the autumn of 1901, is of Khabarovsk, a town of some fifteen thousand people. Such scenes were not peculiar to Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, but could be witnessed in other towns throughout the Russian Far East such as Chita, Blagoveshchensk, Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii, and Vladivostok. Who were these ‘weak, withered-faced’ Chinese that one was likely to encounter? What were they doing within the boundaries of the Russian Empire? What were the attitudes of the Russian population towards the Chinese and what policies did the provincial and central authorities adopt with respect to them?