The Xing An (Jp. Shing An) land reclamation zone was a stretch of not particularly promising nor clearly delineated land in northeast China. Why were the different parties interested in Xing An?

The Trans-Siberian railroad had connected Moscow to Vladivostok in 1916. Soviet influence in the region remained strong even after the Russian empire ceded South Manchuria Railroad and informal control over the region to the Japanese as part of the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). From 1905, Japanese influence steadily increased its presence in the Northeast. A Manchuria-based army, the Kwantung Army, stationed in the region ostensibly to protect Japanese interests and the railroad from bandits, took action to expand Japanese territory even further. In June 1928, officers in the Kwantung Army conspired to assassinate the Manchurian warlord, Zhang Zuolin, who had attempted a dangerous game of playing Soviet and Japanese interests against one another, using one as leverage for demands for more weapons and aide from the other. An already tense political situation threatened to further spin out of control after Zhang’s assassination, which the Japanese had initially attempted to pass off as the work of Chinese bandits. That very fall, three units of men headed to Xing An to begin building a settlement.

For the Chinese military officer Zou Zuohua, the land signified a stance of resistance against foreign encroachment. Click on Zou's name to find out more about Zou and the other military officers involved in the Xing An settlement. Or continue on this path below.

The following is an except of a speech Zou gave to men under his command in November 1928. (Click here for the full translation of the speech.)

The chief motivating principle of tunken is to pursue economic development and reinforce national defenses (開發利源鞏固國防). We need to reinforce our national defenses because today’s international warfare entails economic encroachment in addition to military and political engagement. The Japanese lie in wait to the south of our northeastern provinces while the Soviets press from the north. Step by step, foreigners have moved into the interior and the guests have turned into the host. Of the perilous matters at stake, economic encroachment plays no small part. In order to salvage the situation, we propose moving troops to reinforce the frontiers and take part in tunken. We have carefully chosen the tunken zone with attention to frontier defense and economic development. — Zou Zuohua, 1928

By the 1930s, the Japanese colonial empire had expanded from Hokkaidō to Taiwan, Korea, and Northeast China. Japan’s continental ambitions entered a new phase with Manchuria, where the colonial administration established collective farms at the same time that the Japanese home government promoted the region as an industrial and modern Eden (Young 1998). Through translations beginning in the late nineteenth century, China adopted a number of neologisms coined in Japan. However, Chinese writers rarely ever referred to Han colonization efforts as zhimin 殖民. Instead, Chinese writers almost exclusively used an update amalgam of the classical Chinese terms for military settlement and land reclamation, tunken 屯墾. Borrowing from the far older terms tuntian and kaiken, tunken did not come into use until the 18th century, and then only sparingly, appearing all of two times in the 18th century Qing compilation of the Ming histories. The term tunken started to appear again in the Qing documents from the late nineteenth century, used in the context of the Northeast, but came widely into vogue only from the 1920s. The etymology of the term strongly suggests that tunken was popularized as a response to China’s perceived besiegement from imperialist powers.

For more on the officers, like Zou Zuohua, who headed the tunken effort in Xing An, continue on to the discussion of the colonizers.