Explores the change most of rural China is undergoing via the story of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed apartments for farmers in exchange for their land rights.

Yosano Akiko was a highly acclaimed Japanese poet. She was also a prominent feminist. In 1928 she was invited to travel around areas with a strong Japanese presence in China's northeast. This is her account of that journey.

"In this history of Japanese involvement in northeast China, the author argues that Japan’s military seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 was founded on three decades of infiltration of the area. This incremental empire-building and its effect on Japan are the focuses of this book. The principal agency in the piecemeal growth of Japanese colonization was the South Manchurian Railway Company, and by the mid-1920s Japan had a deeply entrenched presence in Manchuria and exercised a dominant economic and political influence over the area. Japanese colonial expansion in Manchuria also loomed large in Japanese politics, military policy, economic development, and foreign relations and deeply influenced many aspects of Japan’s interwar history."

"Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.In this study, Emer O’Dwyer traces the history of Japan’s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria—and especially its principal city, Dairen—was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army’s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers’ determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire."

In China, both opium and alcohol were used for centuries in the pursuit of health and leisure while simultaneously linked to personal and social decline. The impact of these substances is undeniable, and the role they have played in Chinese social, cultural, and economic history is extremely complex. In Intoxicating Manchuria, Norman Smith reveals how warlord rule, Japanese occupation, and political conflict affected local intoxicant industries. These industries flourished throughout the early twentieth century, even as a vigorous anti-intoxicant movement raged. Through the lens of popular Chinese media depictions of alcohol and opium, Smith analyzes how intoxicants and addiction were understood in this society, the role the Japanese occupation of Manchuria played in their portrayal, and the efforts made to reduce opium and alcohol consumption. This is the first English-language book-length study to focus on alcohol use in modern China and the first dealing with intoxicant restrictions in the region.

Volume I covers in detail the background, strategic regrouping, and strategic planning and conduct of the offensive.

Manchuria, the name given to China’s North-eastern provinces by foreign powers, has been contested by China, Russia and Japan in particular over many centuries. This book surveys the history of Manchuria, focusing particularly on the Russian and Soviet perspective. It outlines early colonisation of the region and examines the importance of the Chinese Eastern Railway, a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and the remarkable railway city of Harbin for consolidating the Russian presence in the region and for developing the region’s economy. It goes on to consider twentieth century developments, including the Japanese invasion and the puppet state of Manchukuo. Throughout, the book reflects on the nature of empire, especially Russian/Soviet imperialism and its similarities to and differences from other nations’ imperial ventures.

This study seeks to lay bare the relationship between the sociopolitical structures that shaped peasant lives in Manchuria (northeast China) during the Qing dynasty and the development of that region’s economy. The book is written in three parts. It begins with an analysis of the ideological, political, and economic interests of the Qing ruling house in defending its homeland in the northeast against occupation by non-Manchus, and examines how these interests informed state policy and the reconfiguration of the region’s social landscape in the first decades of the dynasty. The book then addresses how this agrarian configuration unraveled under challenge from settler peasant communities and gives an account of the resulting property and labor regimes. The study ends with an account of how that social formation configured peasant economic behavior and in so doing established the limits of economic change and trade growth.

In War and Geopolitics in Interwar Manchuria Kwong Chi Man revisits the civil wars in China (1925-1928) from the perspective of the often-overlooked "warlords," who fought against the joint forces of the Nationalist and Communist parties. In particular, this work focuses on Zhang Zuolin, the leader of the "Fengian Clique" who was sometimes seen as the representative of the Japanese interest in Manchuria. Using primary and secondary sources from China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, this work tries to revisit the wars during the period from international, political, military, and economic-financial perspectives. It sheds new light on Zhang Zuolin's decision to fight against the Nationalists and the Communists and offers an alternative explanation to the Nationalists (temporary) victory by revealing the central importance of geopolitics in the civil wars in China during the interwar period.

In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wife's family. Their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights. Once a commune, Wasteland is now a company town, a phenomenon happening across China that Meyer documents for the first time; indeed, not since Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth has anyone brought rural China to life as Meyer has here. Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer takes us on a journey across Manchuria's past, a history that explains much about contemporary China--from the fall of the last emperor to Japanese occupation and Communist victory. Through vivid local characters, Meyer illuminates the remnants of the imperial Willow Palisade, Russian and Japanese colonial cities and railways, and the POW camp into which a young American sergeant parachuted to free survivors of the Bataan Death March. In Manchuria is a rich and original chronicle of contemporary China and its people.