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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that labor recruitment for railway construction in northern Manchuria fostered circular, short-term migration that created unstable settlement patterns and uneven development. While railways spurred population increase, these patterns partially hindered the long-term growth.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of migration and settlement in northern Manchuria between the late 1890s and early 1920s, catalyzed by the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER). Drawing on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, it argues that the recruitment practices used to mobilize construction labor—characterized by circular and short-term migration—produced an unsustainable demographic structure that contributed to uneven regional development. Although railroad construction led to the emergence of new urban spaces and an overall increase in both the Chinese and Russian populations, these patterns partially hindered the long-term stabilization of the settler population and, in some ways, constrained economic growth until more substantial and permanent migration flows emerged in the 1920s.

Railroad construction and operation also engendered new colonial spaces that were alienated from Chinese territory and reorganized under colonial administration. The transfer of the CER’s southern branch to Japan in 1905 and the gradual expansion of Japanese influence over northern Manchuria after the Russian Revolution of 1917 heightened the differences in interethnic interactions and regional development between southern and northern Manchuria. The diverse and uneven patterns of settlement reveal the complexity of relations among various political forces and ethnic groups, as well as the resistance of local Chinese communities to oppression by imperial “developers” and railway constructors.