China [Ukr: Китай; Kytai]. Country in eastern and central Asia with a territory of 9,596,961 sq km and a population in 2025 (est) of 1,404,890,000. In 1949 the Chinese Communists established the People’s Republic of China, while the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retained control only over the island of Taiwan (Formosa).
It is difficult to trace the origin and development of Ukrainian-Chinese relations, which until recent times were only sporadic. At the end of the 17th century they were a part of Russian-Chinese relations (Ukrainian monks took part in Russian Orthodox church missions to China, etc). Later, several Ukrainian travellers were acquainted with China: Ye. Tymkovsky, Mykola Bantysh-Kamensky, and Osyp Voitsekhivsky, a physician who during his lifetime was honored by the Chinese with a monument (1829) for his contribution to the struggle against epidemics. After the Revolution of 1917 about 1,000 Chinese lived in Ukraine. In 1926 Huangun-bao (Chinese Workers’ Newspaper) was published in Kyiv. Systematic research on China was developed in the 1920s, mostly by the All-Ukrainian Learned Association of Oriental Studies (1926–30). When the association was abolished, Chinese studies died out in Ukraine; they were revived only after the Communists came to power in China. Beginning in 1949 cultural ties between Ukraine and China were cultivated as part of the Soviet policy on closer economic and cultural relations with China. In 1957 a secondary boarding school offering the Chinese language from the first year was established in Kyiv, with an enrollment of 700 students. In 1958 specialization in the Chinese language was introduced at Lviv University.
In the 1950s over 100 Chinese delegations visited Ukraine. About 400 Chinese students studied at institutions of higher learning in Ukraine, and several thousand Chinese received training at Ukrainian enterprises. During this period the works of Taras Shevchenko (beginning in 1934), Ivan Franko, Vasyl Stefanyk, and other classics, as well as about 50 titles of Soviet writers such as Oleksander Korniichuk, Oles Honchar, Andrii Holovko, Oleksander Dovzhenko, and Yurii Zbanatsky were translated into Chinese. A comparable number of works were translated from Chinese into Ukrainian. Beginning in 1949, many Ukrainian engineers, writers, scholars, and actors visited China. A continuous exchange in theater and musical ensembles, dance groups, and art exhibits was instituted between Soviet Ukraine and China, while institutions of learning and libraries exchanged publications. The Ukrainian-Chinese Friendship Society was established in 1958 in Kyiv as a branch of the all-Union society. In the 1960s cultural relations between Ukraine and China were discontinued.
There were no important economic ties between Ukraine and China in the pre-Soviet period. In 1925 the short-lived Ukrainian-Oriental Trade Chamber was set up, and it conducted trade, which never attained sizable proportions, with China. In 1926–7, for example, Soviet Ukraine’s exports to China totalled only 2.8 million rubles. Ukraine’s economic relations with China expanded rapidly after 1949. In the 1950s at least 35 percent of the Soviet Union’s economic aid to China came from Soviet Ukraine. From 1950 to 1958 Soviet Ukraine contributed on the average 500 million rubles per year in aid to China (7 percent of China’s annual capital investment). China imported automated machine shops, metallurgical equipment, coal-mining machines, electric motors, cars, tractors, farm machinery, pipes, ferrous metals, chemical fertilizer, etc, from Ukraine. In 1958 Ukraine provided the equipment for building about 100 industrial enterprises in China. Ukrainian plants and scientific research institutes designed and constructed industrial plants in China. China paid the USSR for this aid in products, of which Ukraine received raw silk, ferro alloys, tea, canned goods, and textiles.
However, even after the break in relations between China and the USSR in the 1960s, interest in Ukraine did not completely disappear.
In 1972 the Beijing Shangwu publishing house published Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (Guo-ji-zhu-yi-hai-shi-e-luo-si hu), translated by Xin Hua and Lin Han-da. In 1974 the highly respected San-Lian publishing house in Beijing released Petro Shelest’s O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land (Wuo-men-de-su-wei-ai-wu-ke-lan), translated by a collective of the Xian-Wing Cadre School of the Ministry of Culture.
With the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of the universities and research institutes, the study of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet nationalities, including Ukrainians, experienced a considerable revival.
The Institute of Nationality Studies and the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences were the two leading centers among several in China where Ukrainian problems were studied. On the university level the important centers, to mention just a few, were Heilongjiang University in Harbin, Beijing University and the Central School for Nationalities in Beijing, the University of Nanjing, and various centers in Shanghai.
Chinese information about Ukraine remained quite inadequate, however. For example, in a highly authoritative reference work, Ci-Hai (3 vols, Shanghai 1979), edited by Xia Zheng-nong, there were a total of 30 references pertaining to Ukraine. Of these, 16 were geographical in nature; 3 pertained to historical figures (Prince Oleh, Prince Ihor, and Yaroslav the Wise); and the remainder included Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Oleksander Korniichuk, Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Korolenko, Hryhorii Skovoroda, Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovsky (‘bourgeois economist’), Trokhym Lysenko, and H. Kulishenko, a colonel of a Soviet volunteer unit who died fighting the Japanese in China in 1939. Nearly all the information came from Soviet Russian sources.
In 1979 three Ukrainian scholars in the West—Bohdan Bociurkiw, Peter Potichnyj, and Borys Levytsky—visited China as guests of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Subsequently a number of scholarly contacts were established between various Ukrainian-studies centers in the West and Chinese institutions, with the aim of furthering the exchange of knowledge and publications about Ukraine.
Chinese scholars interested in Ukrainian matters during the 1970s and 1980s included Ruan Xihu, author of ‘The Ukrainian Nationality Problem’ in Shi-jie-min-zhu-wen-ti-chu-tan (Brief Survey of World Nationality Problems, Beijing 1981); Guo Simian; Shen Yun at Heilongjiang University; and Chen Yi-yun, an editor of Sociology Today, a journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The journal Shijie Wenxue of the CASS Institute of Foreign Literature occasionally published translations of Ukrainian literature.
After the establishment of Ukrainian independence Sino-Ukrainian relations developed on an amicable basis. China recognized Ukraine as a state in December 1991 and arranged for its ambassador to the Russian Federation to serve as a plenipotentiary to Ukraine until the two countries exchanged ambassadors in March 1992. High-level diplomatic exchanges followed, including state visits by Leonid Kravchuk and (later) Leonid Kuchma to China and Chinese premier Li Peng and president Jiang Zemin to Ukraine. The relative smoothness of these developments was aided in part by mutual strategic interests (particularly in regard to the Russian Federation) and by Ukraine’s agreement not to extend diplomatic recognition to or to establish official relations with Taiwan. The latter issue became the focal point of a diplomatic row in 1996 when Taiwanese vice-president Lien Chan visited Ukraine unofficially (and received an honorary doctorate from Kyiv University). In a joint Chinese-Ukrainian declaration of friendship and cooperation signed during an official visit by President Jiang to Kyiv in July 2001 Ukraine expressly stated that it regards Taiwan as an inalienable part of China.
Direct economic ties also developed. By 1997 bilateral trade between China and Ukraine amounted to almost US $1.3 billion per annum. This amount decreased in the latter part of the decade to approximately US $760 million in 2000, but quickly bounced back to US $1.23 billion in 2002 (with an anticipation that this amount would continue to grow in the future).
Chinese scholarly interest in Ukraine continued in the late Soviet era, albeit in a limited fashion. The Ukrainian language began to be studied at Hunan University in the mid-1980s by He Rungchang and Liu Dong. In 1990 a Ukrainian-Chinese dictionary, compiled by the Institute of Lexicography at Heilongjiang University under the leadership of Zheng Shupu, was published in Beijing. Zheng was subsequently working on a Chinese-Ukrainian dictionary. A language textbook and phrasebook followed in 1995 and 1996 respectively (the latter prepared by Liu).
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union scholarly activity related to Ukraine expanded. Hunan University established the Ukrainian Research Center. In 1993 a Ukrainian Studies Committee headed by Jiang Changbin was established under the auspices of the Beijing Foreign Affairs Research Society. It was officially inaugurated in July 1993 during a visit to the Chinese capital by Ivan Dziuba, then Ukraine’s minister of culture. Two ‘Ukraine-China: Paths of Cooperation’ conferences were organized jointly by Ukrainian and Chinese scholars, the first in Kyiv (1993) and the second in Beijing (1995). Chinese scholars have participated in the conferences of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies (MAU) and have established the Chinese Association for Ukrainian Studies (KAUS) as a MAU member; in recognition of his long-standing interest in and promotion of Ukrainian studies in China, Peter Potichnyj (who has had a role in many of the initiatives taken in China since the early 1980s) was named as honorary president of KAUS. In 2004 Zhao Yunzhong of Shanghai published a survey history of Ukraine (to the end of the Revolution of 1917) in Chinese.
Ukrainians in China. Until the end of the 19th century only those Ukrainians who worked for various imperial Russian institutions on Chinese territory (diplomatic missions, postal service, steamship lines, trade missions, and the Peking Russian Orthodox church mission) lived in China. Many more Ukrainians settled in China when the Chinese Eastern (Manchurian) Railway was built by Russia in 1898 on Manchurian territory that belonged to China. Ukrainian colonies sprang up at stations and towns along the railway, particularly in Harbin, which became the Ukrainian center for all of northern Manchuria. Smaller Ukrainian communities appeared in central and southern Manchuria—in Mukden, Dairen, and Kirin—and in Shanghai, China.
On the eve of the Revolution of 1917 there were over 20,000 Ukrainian families in Manchuria, mostly families of employees of the Chinese Eastern Railway. These Ukrainians maintained close ties with Ukraine and with Ukrainians living in the Far East. Amateur and professional theater groups were organized, usually at railway workers’ clubs (the first professional troupe was Myroslavsky’s). A Ukrainian hromada was organized in Shanghai in 1906, and a Ukrainian club in 1907 in Harbin and elsewhere. There was no Ukrainian press, but the official publication of the Chinese Eastern Railway—Kharbinskii vestnik—contained much information about Ukrainians.
The Revolution of 1917 provided a stimulus to Ukrainian cultural life and led to the founding of various institutions and organizations, which were represented by the Manchurian District Council (Mandzhurska Okruzhna Rada). The council’s chairman was I. Mozolevsky, and its members were Petro Tverdovsky, S. Kukuruza, and M. Yurchenko. The Ukrainians in Manchuria participated in Ukrainian political life in the Far East, particularly in the Far Eastern Ukrainian congresses, and maintained close contact with Kyiv. At the end of 1917 a Ukrainian military unit commanded by P. Tverdovsky was dispatched from Harbin to Ukraine, and in the fall of 1918 Tverdovsky returned to Harbin as the Ukrainian consul. A Ukrainian school, a gymnasium, a Ukrainian Orthodox church parish, and a number of Ukrainian institutions that were housed in the building of the Ukrainian club (the Ukrainian People's Home) were established in Harbin. A weekly newspaper, Zasiv, was published there (34 issues). Refugees from the Far East after the Bolshevik occupation enlarged the Ukrainian population in China.
In 1922–31 the flourishing Ukrainian community in Manchuria suffered a setback as a result of its loss of ties with the Far East and, more important, because of the hostile attitude adopted by the Chinese administration, which was influenced by Russian circles. The Ukrainian People's Home in Harbin was confiscated by the authorities, and the Ukrainian gymnasium and other institutions were abolished. At this time the Prosvita society in Harbin, which to survive operated under the auspices of the local branch of the YMCA, played an important cultural role. The weekly Ukraïns'ke zhyttia was published in Harbin over a Japanese signature to avoid control by the Chinese administration.
Ukrainians met with fairer treatment in Manchoukuo, the buffer state set up by Japan in 1931, although the Japanese military mission meddled in the internal affairs of the Ukrainian community. Ukrainian organized life again became centered on the Ukrainian People's Home in Harbin, which housed a number of organizations, such as the Ukrainian National Hromada, the Union of Ukrainian Emigrants, Prosvita, the Association of Ukrainian Teachers, the Ukrainian Youth Association, and the Zelenyi Klyn Youth Union. In 1935 the Ukrainian National Colony was founded as an umbrella organization for all Ukrainians in Manchuria. When the Japanese dissolved all other Ukrainian organizations in 1937, the Ukrainian National Colony became the center of all Ukrainian life. In 1932–7 the weekly Man'dzhurs'kyi vistnyk was published under the editorship of Ivan Svit. In 1934 Ukrainian radio programs were established in Harbin and in 1942 in Shanghai as well. In the Prometheus club (see Promethean movement) in Harbin Ukrainian representatives collaborated with the émigrés of other nations oppressed by Russia. When the Soviet Army occupied Manchuria in 1945, most of the Ukrainians there were arrested and deported, and all Ukrainian organizations were outlawed.
On the territory of China proper in the 1920s–1940s Ukrainian organizations functioned in Shanghai, where a Ukrainian bureau for all of China was located for a time and the newspapers Shankhais’ka hromada and Ukraïns’kyi holos na Dalekomu skhodi were published; in Tientsin; in Tsingtao, where the newspaper Na Dalekomu Skhodi was published; in Hankow; and in other cities. Virtually all Ukrainians in China emigrated to the West by 1949, before the Communists came to power.
There were likely a number of Ukrainians in the small ‘Russian’ community that formed in Hong Kong in the interwar period (consisting largely of people who had fled from Siberia following the October Revolution of 1917).
Accurate figures for the number of Ukrainians who lived in China are unavailable. It is estimated that in the 1930s there were about 30,000 Ukrainians living in China including Manchuria, half of them in Harbin. More recent estimates suggest that today there are approximately 20,000 people of Ukrainian origin remaining in China, although virtually all of them have integrated and assimilated fully into Chinese society.
Lidiia Holubnycha, Peter Potichnyj, Ivan Svit, Tsui Tsien-hua
[This article was updated in 2004.]