Manchuria has been for at least 400 years a contested land. In the 17th century, it was a zone of contact between Han Chinese and Manchus, who eventually moved south and conquered all of China, and between the Manchus’ Qing dynasty and the expanding Russian empire. The first treaties between a Chinese and a European state were concluded in the region, establishing the Sino‐Russian border. Two hundred years later, China, Russia, and Japan competed to claim this resource‐rich, sparsely populated region. Russian influence and interest in the region reached a peak in the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, centered on the virtual colony of Harbin, founded in the 1890s. Although technically a joint administration of the Chinese and Russian states, Harbin existed in its first two decades―until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917―was ruled and developed by Russians, and the legacy of that era remains.
Much of Harbin’s 20th‐century history revolved around struggles over the city’s identity, and also struggles for control of the city’s colonial legacy. This paper suggests that the competition over Harbin’s identity continues to evolve in the early 21st century. After many decades of denying and dismissing Harbin’s colonial past, local, regional, and national Chinese governments are now exploiting that past as an asset for the city’s economic development. Building on trends that first emerged in the 1990s, Harbin’s Chinese rulers are now turning to the city’s non‐Chinese past as a means of competing in a global cultural and economic environment.