About Gunbao (Harbin)

Gunbao (Harbin)

Gunbao ("The Public Newspaper") was a newspaper published in Harbin, Heilongjiang, from 1926, and it held a distinction no other Harbin paper could claim: it was the only newspaper in the city with both Chinese and Russian editions. The comparative study of Harbin's Russian and Chinese press by Frank Grüner and Rudolph Ng, published in the journal Comparativ, records Gunbao (1926) among the most popular newspapers among the Russian readership in Harbin, together with Zaria (1920) and Rupor (1921), and explains its unique position: the paper "was financially supported by the joint Sino-Soviet administration of the CER, because it apparently 'supported the Chinese administration and restoration of Chinese sovereignty in the Northeast in general and in Harbin in particular.'" A bilingual newspaper, paid for by the jointly administered Chinese Eastern Railway because it argued for Chinese sovereignty over the railway zone, Gunbao embodied the brief Sino-Soviet condominium of the mid-1920s and the Chinese determination to recover control of Harbin that destroyed that condominium before the decade was out. Its issues of 1929 to 1932 were preserved on microfilm by the Hoover Institution, and Gun-Bao was chosen among the sixteen inaugural titles of Hoover's Russia Abroad Digital Collection. No closing date for the paper was established by the sources consulted for this profile.

Harbin's multilingual press and the Chinese Eastern Railway

Harbin owed its existence to the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), the Russian-built line across northern Manchuria, and its press grew up inside the railway's zone of influence. Grüner and Ng record that Harbin and indeed northern Manchuria did not have any newspaper until the Russians arrived, and that the first generation of the city's newspapers was inherently multilingual: numerous papers in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, English and other languages were printed in Harbin and circulated freely throughout Manchuria and beyond. The city's first Chinese newspaper, the Yuandongbao, was born in 1906 under CER management and continued to be managed by Russians until its closing in 1921. Russian and Chinese newspapers in Harbin passed through common phases — a certain level of censorship before 1917, more freedom afterwards — and between 1918 and 1931 a high number of publications appeared, before the total dropped drastically in the Manchukuo period after the Japanese takeover of 1932. The Russian Revolution and Civil War filled the city with émigré readers: some 15,000 refugees arrived from Russia in 1920 alone, and by the mid-1920s roughly 150,000 Russians lived in a city of about half a million. It was into this crowded, argumentative, railway-centred press world that Gunbao was launched in 1926.

A newspaper of 1926 in two languages

Grüner and Ng's central fact about Gunbao is its bilingualism: it was "the only newspaper with both Chinese and Russian editions" in Harbin. Other Harbin papers addressed one community or another — the Russian dailies Zaria and Rupor the émigrés, the Chinese papers their own readers — but Gunbao spoke to both of the railway zone's principal publics at once, in their own languages. Even its name, rendered in the scholarship as "The Public Newspaper", announced a civic rather than a communal ambition: a public paper for a city whose public was divided by language, nationality and sovereignty. The bilingual format was also a practical instrument. News and argument printed in a Chinese edition could be read again, in Russian dress, by the railway's Russian staff and the émigré community, and the positions of the Chinese administration could be put before Russian readers without the mediation — or distortion — of translation in rival papers. Among Harbin's many experiments in print, Gunbao's two-edition structure remained, on the scholarly record, unique.

Backed by the joint Sino-Soviet railway administration

The paper's finances matched its format. Grüner and Ng record that Gunbao was financially supported by the joint Sino-Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway. That administration was the product of the agreements of 1924, under which the railway — built by tsarist Russia, seized amid revolution, and claimed by China — was to be run jointly by the Soviet Union and the Chinese authorities of the Northeast. A jointly administered railway needed a voice in both of its working languages, and Gunbao, appearing from 1926, filled that need. But the support, on Grüner and Ng's account, was not neutral: it flowed because the paper "supported the Chinese administration and restoration of Chinese sovereignty in the Northeast in general and in Harbin in particular". Gunbao was thus a subsidised paper with a declared side in the central political question of the railway zone — not the Soviet side, and not the émigré side, but the side of the Chinese authorities who were working, step by step, to convert nominal sovereignty over Harbin and the CER into real control.

A voice for Chinese sovereignty, and a contrast with Yuandongbao

The contrast with Harbin's first Chinese newspaper measures how far the city had travelled. The Yuandongbao of 1906 had been a Chinese-language paper under Russian railway management, an instrument by which the CER's Russian managers addressed Chinese readers; it remained in Russian hands until it closed in 1921. Gunbao, twenty years later, inverted that relationship: a paper in Chinese and Russian editions, financed by a railway administration in which China now sat as partner, arguing for the restoration of Chinese sovereignty in the Northeast. The argument was aimed at Russian readers as much as Chinese ones. Harbin's Russians — railway employees, merchants and émigrés who had built their lives in a city they long regarded as Russian — were being told, in Russian, in one of their own most-read newspapers, that the future of the Northeast was Chinese. That a paper carrying this message could rank among the most popular with the Russian readership, as Grüner and Ng record, says something about both the paper's quality and the realism of a community that could see the direction of events.

Popular with Harbin's Russian readers

Grüner and Ng name the trio of the 1920s plainly: among the numerous new publications of the decade, Zaria (Dawn, 1920), Rupor (The Mouthpiece, 1921) and Gunbao (The Public Newspaper, 1926) "were the most popular newspapers among the Russian readership in Harbin". The company is instructive. Zaria and Rupor are described in the same study as anti-Soviet, moderately liberal and independent of specific political forces; Gunbao differed from both in its subsidy and its pro-Chinese-administration stance, yet stood beside them in the market. In a city where the Russian readership numbered in the tens of thousands — officials, railwaymen, professionals, merchants and refugees — popularity across such different editorial positions marked Gunbao as a paper read not only by those who agreed with it. Its Russian edition was evidently a fixture of the same breakfast tables as the émigré dailies, even as its Chinese edition carried the railway administration's sovereignty argument to the city's Chinese majority.

Gunbao and the railway crisis of 1929

The sovereignty Gunbao championed was asserted, with force, in 1929. The American consul at Harbin, George Hanson, reported to Washington that July 1929 "proved eventful in the history of North Manchuria and of the Chinese Eastern Railway": following the raid on the Soviet Consulate General at Harbin on 27 May 1929, the Chinese authorities took decisive steps against Soviet influence in the district, curtailing the powers of the Soviet general manager of the railway, seizing the railway's fleet of steamers and barges and the Harbin telephone system, and pressing to increase the authority of the Chinese assistant manager, hitherto largely a figurehead. Hanson noted that "the local Chinese official inspired Chinese and Russian press devoted much space in setting forth the Chinese desires in regard to increasing the powers of the Chinese Assistant Manager" — a description of exactly the press campaign, in both of Harbin's principal languages, that Gunbao existed to conduct. The crisis escalated into the Sino-Soviet conflict over the railway later in 1929 before a settlement restored, for a time, the joint administration. The Hoover Institution's microfilm of Gunbao begins in 1929, so the paper's own coverage of the crisis year is among the portions of its file that survive.

The Manchukuo turn and the limits of the record

The world that had made Gunbao possible collapsed within a few years. Japan occupied Harbin in 1932 and erected the puppet state of Manchukuo; Grüner and Ng record that during the Manchukuo period, from 1932 to 1945, the high number of Harbin publications dropped drastically. The joint Sino-Soviet railway administration that had financed the paper was itself living on borrowed time: the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo in 1935. The Hoover microfilm coverage of Gunbao runs from 1929 to 1932, ending in the year of the Japanese takeover, but the sources consulted do not establish the paper's closing date, and this profile does not invent one. What can be said is that Gunbao belonged, by finance, by language and by argument, to the interval between the Sino-Soviet agreements of 1924 and the Japanese seizure of Manchuria — the brief years when the future of the Northeast was contested between China and the Soviet Union, in print as in diplomacy, and when a bilingual newspaper could stand at the centre of that contest.

Preservation: Hoover microfilm and the Russia Abroad Digital Collection

Gunbao's afterlife has been distinguished. The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford, which collected Russian émigré newspapers in Harbin from the interwar years onward — its collectors received extensive runs of current émigré papers from Harbin among other cities — preserved Gun-Bao on microfilm for the years 1929 to 1932. When Hoover built the Russia Abroad Digital Collection (RADC), its project to digitise the press of the Russian diaspora of 1917 to 1991 in collaboration with the Slovanská knihovna (Slavonic Library) in Prague and other partners, Gun-Bao of Harbin was named among the sixteen inaugural titles of the collection, alongside Harbin's Kharbinskoe vremia and Zaria and diaspora papers from Paris, New York, Belgrade and elsewhere. The RADC's own scholarship is careful to note that the years attached to its titles indicate the Hoover library's microfilm coverage and are not the papers' actual publication dates — a caution this profile follows. The completed collection was designed to make hundreds of diaspora titles openly searchable worldwide; that a bilingual Sino-Soviet railway paper from Harbin was in its first sixteen is a measure of Gunbao's documentary singularity.

Assessment

Many Harbin newspapers were louder, longer-lived or more literary than Gunbao, but none was quite like it. It was the city's only bilingual Chinese-and-Russian newspaper; it was financed by the joint Sino-Soviet administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway precisely because it argued, in both languages, for the Chinese administration and the restoration of Chinese sovereignty in the Northeast; and it achieved, on the scholarly record, a popularity among Russian readers equal to the leading émigré dailies that opposed much of what it stood for. It belonged to a specific and vanished political arrangement — the Sino-Soviet condominium over the railway — and it perished from the record with that arrangement's destruction in the early 1930s. Its survival on Hoover microfilm and its place in the first rank of the Russia Abroad Digital Collection preserve, for historians, the printed voice of the moment when Harbin's future was argued out, in Chinese and Russian at once, on the pages of a single public newspaper.