Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

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 to find 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 that their 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 orchestra had 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 the droshke, 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 to Chinese 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.