In this post I’ll give you a short and informal introduction to the topic that my Ph.D. project is about. I’ll also say a few words about the more focused project and how going to China this fall relates to this website.
(For those interested in a slightly longer, more academic-worded introduction, scroll down to the bottom for the link to the latest draft of my dissertation proposal.)
Who?
Ex-prisoners of war on the run from Siberian camps in the turbulent years of the Russian Civil War, conspiring and plotting Austro-Hungarian sailors in Chinese port cities, Jews of the Hongkew Ghetto and missionaries of wartime China, artists in the service of Manchurian warlords, architects that made Shanghai what it was known like in most of the 20th century, adventurers and ordinary people – they are subjects of my research.
Where and When?
‘Republican China’ refers both to the geographical space and the historical period in question. In the first sense it designates the lands that the Republic of China (ROC) was able to exercise some degree of sovereignty over, inheriting most of what use to constitute the Qing Empire and what became also part of the following People’s Republic. Nevertheless, the Northeastern provinces (aka Manchuria), Northern China (Beijing) and the eastern, coastal region (especially the port cities from Tianjin to Shanghai) are overrepresented due to the concentration of foreign presence in these areas. The timeframe of the Republic (1912-1949) roughly overlaps with the main period when previously unprecedented number of (East-)Central European communities lived in this part of East Asia. The arrival of the first Austro-Hungarian refugee POWs in 1915, the influx of largely German-speaking Jews in the 1930s, the Sino-Czechoslovak economic approaches and the heyday of missionary movement in post-Trianon Hungary all took place in an age that was marked by internal (warlords, civil war) and external (Western colonialist presence, Japanese imperialism) threats for China.
The larger project and the more focused one
As the subtitle of this website as well the lines above suggest, there’s a larger project out there, that opens up the lens to examine all the diasporas and communities of Central Europeans in Republican China. That is something I’ll be mindful of while focusing on the more specific and narrower target. As for the current stage of my dissertation proposal, I’m going to look at the group of people whose lives really bridge over these more than three decades. I am going to examine what happened to the former Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, who arrived either in the years of Chinese neutrality in World War One, or after the Beijing’s declaration of war to the Central Powers as well as in the years of the Russian Civil War. Building on my researches for my Master’s thesis published in two articles in Chinese and in English, I want to follow up on the lives of those, who ended up staying in the “Far East”. I want to see on one hand how the various regimes administered them both on state and local governmental level, while on the other hand I’d like to learn about their communities’ self-organizing strategies.
How it started. A 3-months research trip to China in Fall 2019
Thanks to a travel grant awarded by ACLS-Henry Luce Foundation and the financial support provided by NYU’s Global Research Institute, I spent three months in fall 2019 researching archival sources in China. In order to prepare my dissertation proposal by the end of the semester, I had been looking into primary materials in various municipal archives throughout the country. Since its start, this website has been serving two purposes: to help me keep on track with my project by writing regular blogposts and to share my results and developments in an accessible tone.
See also: link to my dissertation proposal’s draft
UPDATE: Back to New York, the research continues
Starting from spring 2020, I continue my research using materials available to me here in the U.S., including archival records from the United Nations Archives, refugee memoirs in my collection and old newspaper databases.