Massacre of the Chinese Population in Vladivostok, the History That Beijing Covered Up

Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin, left, and then Chinese President Jiang Zemin hug each other after a joint press conference in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Nov. 10, 1997. Greg Baker/AP Photo

Historically Russia and the former Soviet Union have not only invaded Chinese territories but also massacred innocent Chinese citizens on many occasions, and many Chinese know very little about the ethnic cleansing that took place in Vladivostok.

Li Yuanhua, a Chinese historian now living in Australia, recounted the history of Vladivostok (Hai Shen Wai) on NTD TV’s Pinnacle View program.

The Vladivostok region was part of Chinese territory during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. However, the situation changed after 1630 when a Russian exploration team discovered Vladivostok, an ice-free port, which was the Far Eastern seaport they had been seeking. Subsequently, they began to greedily yearn for this land, Mr. Li said.

As the national power of the Qing Dynasty declined, Russia’s desire to seize this land grew stronger and stronger. When Britain and France went to war with China in the Second Opium War, Russia took advantage of the situation and forced the Qing government to sign the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, which stipulated that the 400,000 square kilometers (about 154,441 square miles) of land east of the Ussuri River would be under the joint administration of Russia and China.

Two years later, after the end of the Second Opium War, Russia took advantage of the crisis and, on the pretext of helping the Qing government to mediate, demanded that the Qing government sign the Treaty of Beijing (1860), which further ceded the territories directly to Russia, including Vladivostok. The greatest concern of the Qing government at that time was to put down the Taiping Rebellion, an uprising in southern China that began as a peasant rebellion and turned into an extremely bloody civil war. Therefore, it agreed to cede land in exchange for the help of Russia, Britain, and France to conquer the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a theocratic monarchy based on Christianity.

Guo Jun, The Epoch Times’ Hong Kong edition editor-in-chief, added that Vladivostok holds immense significance for Russia.

“The Russian monarch Peter the Great, having studied in Western Europe, sensed the advent of the age of maritime hegemony and dreamt of possessing a seaport,” Ms. Guo said. “Consequently, Russia waged wars against Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, securing two outlets to the sea: the Gulf of Finland—where Saint Petersburg was established, and Crimea. However, the Baltic Sea, accessed via Saint Petersburg, is an inland sea, as is the Black Sea accessed via Crimea, both under the control of other countries. Thus, Russia’s maritime access options were narrowed down to two: southward, hoping to reach the Indian Ocean through Iran or Afghanistan, which ended in failure in Afghanistan; and eastward, which involved the conquest of Siberia and eventually acquiring the lands east of the Ussuri River from the Qing Dynasty, among which Vladivostok was the most significant.”

Vladivostok is the only Russian port with direct access to the ocean that does not freeze in winter. Therefore, Vladivostok, which means “conquer the East” in Russian, represents their dream of accessing the Pacific Ocean from this location, she continued. It also once served as the base for Russia’s Pacific Fleet, which was completely annihilated by Japan during the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

The Massacre of Chinese Migrants

Li Jun, a Chinese independent TV producer, said on the Pinnacle View program that if World War I and the Red October Revolution hadn’t happened, the Vladivostok region would have become like Singapore.

Due to the transportation conditions at the time, few Russians were willing to move there. In the span of about 20 years, from 1860 to 1881, there were only about 10,000 immigrants from Russia, while for the Chinese, especially those from Northeast China and Shandong, it was relatively easy to migrate to Vladivostok. As a result, there were more and more Chinese in Vladivostok.

Russian settlers were mostly soldiers or pioneer farmers, who came to live in the countryside. In big cities such as Vladivostok, the Chinese accounted for more than half of the population.

At that time, much of the infrastructure, including the Vladivostok Railway Station and the Siberian Vladivostok Railway, was built by Chinese. The main shopping streets in Vladivostok were mostly owned by Chinese, and some of the busiest pedestrian streets in Vladivostok today were run by Chinese businessmen at the time. This was similar to the situation in Southeast Asia, where many cities were built by Chinese immigrants. It is fair to say that the Chinese and the Russians developed the Far East together. Militarily and politically, the Russians were in control. But commercially it was the Chinese who dominated.

Mr. Li said that if World War I and the Red October Revolution hadn’t happened, it’s possible that more and more Chinese would have migrated there and it would have become the Singapore or Malaysia of Northeast Asia.

“The slogans of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were very tempting, such as ‘equality of all people’ and the ‘abolition of exploitation and oppression.’ At that time, it was said that there were at least 50,000 Chinese participants who helped the CPSU fight against the Czarist Russians. But later on, after the USSR had gained power, the situation slowly changed,” Mr. Li said.

According to relevant documents, the number of Chinese in the Far East began to decrease continuously, from 200,000 to 60,000, then to 40,000. By the 1930s, there were only about 30,000 Chinese left.

“At that time, in the midst of the Russian Great Purge, the Soviets began to take coercive measures and carried out a series of large-scale arrests, including the arrest of more than 6,000 people in Binhai Prefecture, believing that these Chinese were spies. More than 3,000 Chinese were shot in a single operation,” Mr. Li said. “Many Chinese were then sentenced to reform through labor, and many died in the labor camps. Statistics later showed that the number of Chinese killed by the Soviet Union in the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938 was about 8,000. Together with those who died in labor camps, more than 10,000 Chinese lost their lives.”

“The remaining 8,000 or so Chinese were already terrified, living in constant fear, because their relatives and friends had been killed. So the government of the Republic of China finally brought back this group of Chinese. After that, it was said that there were only about two or three hundred Chinese left in the Far East. The era of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Vladivostok in the Far East came to a complete end,” Mr. Li continued.

According to Mr. Li, there could be two reasons why the CPSU decided to carry out a massacre against the Chinese population.

“Perhaps on the one hand, the communists wanted to eliminate private ownership, and since the Chinese were all businessmen and capitalists there, they considered most of the Chinese to be their class enemies. They took all sorts of measures to suppress and oppress the Chinese, to make them leave. On the other hand, after the establishment of the Soviet Union, the nationalist tendency became increasingly strong. The Russians considered non-Russian and non-European Asians as a threat to them, so they began to adopt a policy of deportation against the Koreans, the Japanese, and the Chinese,” Mr. Li said.

The CCP’s Coverup

Shi Shan, senior writer and contributor to the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times, said on the show that the CCP often hypes up the so-called anti-Chinese trend or Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, Canada, and Australia, but kept the massacre in Vladivostok from the Chinese people.

“Russia occupied a very large amount of land in China, probably 3 million square kilometers if you count it all,” he said. “The fate of the Chinese in Vladivostok was unfortunate, but the CCP never mentioned these tragedies, such as how the Russians or Soviets killed the Chinese in Vladivostok. They rarely talked about it. Of course, in my opinion, it was not Russia that did the real evil, it was the Soviet Union. So this is a taboo topic for the CCP.”