Introduction

Summary

In the early 1980s, in the town of Heihe on China’s northeast border with the Soviet Union in what was formerly northern Manchuria (Bei Man), a teacher, editor, and local Party official named Liu Banghou unearthed documents containing transcribed interviews that had been hidden away for more than a decade during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Fifteen years earlier, the Heilongjiang provincial government had sent a group of researchers to the Heihe vicinity to seek out and interview elderly residents who had migrated to the area before 1900 from “China Proper” (mostly from Shandong and Hebei Provinces). Specifically, they targeted individuals whose destinations had included Blagoveshchensk, the city directly across the river from Heihe on the Russian side, and an area just to the east of Blagoveshchensk formerly known as the “Sixty-Four Villages East of the River” (jiangdong liushisi tun) that had long been a source of dispute between the two countries.