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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1295

Part of Session 154: A tale of six cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Sociolinguistic history of Harbin: contesting images and problems of (mis)communication

Authors: Fedorova, Kapitolina
Submitted by: Fedorova, Kapitolina (European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation)

For a long period in history the border between Russian Empire and China was a place of intensive cultural and language contacts. With the start of the Chinese Eastern Railway construction in 1896 (Urbansky 2008) Russian settlements appeared in Manchuria, and new city of Harbin was established as an outpost of Western and Russian technology and culture in Chinese Empire. After the revolution in Russia and defeat of the White Army in the Far East many Russians emigrated to China and especially to Harbin. As a result so called Russian Manchuria sprang up and for the next 30 years existed as a multiethnic and multicultural phenomenon. Unlike emigrants to the West where they had to accommodate to the dominant culture of a given country, emigrant groups in Manchuria tended not only to preserve their own way of life and communication but even to ignore the fact that they were now living in other country with a culture of its own. Both in everyday communication and official domains including education and mass-media they used their native language (Oglezneva 2007). Their contacts with Chinese were restricted by several spheres, and as a mean for communication in these contacts they used either Russian or so called Russian-Chinese pidgin, the contact language which had been broadly spoken in the Russian-Chinese border area since the 18th century (Stern 2005). At the same time Chinese authority and nationalist movements tried to develop Harbin as a Chinese city and put many efforts into promoting Chinese. Therefore in the 1930−1950s Harbin existed as a divided city with two speech communities having their own and sometimes contesting (e.g. Russian vs. Chinese names for streets) images of the city and each others. After the Cultural revolution in China many non-native citizens left the country and Harbin became another one Chinese provincial city; its Russian background is still visible through some old buildings and linguistic landscape. At the same time “the old Harbin” was recreated in many memoirs and literary works written by its former dwellers (e.g. Bobin 1994). In a way the contest between Russian and Chinese versions of the city is still actual: whereas Russian émigrés describe it as absolutely Russian, “home away from home”, Chinese sources underline the role of Chinese majority and depict Russians as just one of minority groups (Carter 2002). The proposed paper aims at comparing these versions and revealing sociolinguistic history of Harbin. Special attention is paid to the role of Russian-Chinese pidgin in communication between different communities since it served both as a communicative tool and as a linguistic and cultural barrier maintaining social distance between contacting groups.

References

Bobin O. Proschanie s russkim Kharbinom, Moscow, 1994.

Carter J. Creating a Chinse Harbin. Cornell Univ. Press, 2002.

Oglezneva E. Russko-kitajskij pidzhin: opyt sotsiolingvisticheskogo opisaniya, Blagoveshchensk, 2007.

Stern D. ‘Myths and facts about the Kyakhta trade pidgin’, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 2005, 20, 1: 175–87.

Urbansky S. Kolonialer Wettstreit: Russland, China, Japan und die Ostchinesische Eisenbahn, Campus Publishers, 2008.