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Attracted by Tanxu’s work in Yingkou and other Manchurian cities, government leaders in Harbin invited Tanxu there to construct a Buddhist temple. The motivations were, as elsewhere, both religious and political, aiming to bring Buddhism to a city that lacked a major temple, but also to use the architecture and location of the temple to promote Chinese nationalism in a city that had until recently been a Russian semi-colony, and retained a Russian identity in much of its population and infrastructure. Tanxu continued his work in Harbin, while also travelling throughout the region and even Japan as part of the East Asian Buddhist Conference, until 1932, when Japanese armies invaded Harbin and established the state of Manchukuo as a Japanese protectorate. Although insistent that he was not a guerrilla in the Japanese resistance, Tanxu’s patron, General Zhu Qinglan, attracted the attention of Japanese spies and police, and Tanxu soon fled to Xi’an.

Unable to return to Russia because of his White army service, Arnautoff spent 1921-1925 in northeastern China. He lived hand-to-mouth while studying at the Lotus Art School in Harbin, then took a job with the cavalry of Zhang Zoulin, the local warlord, in Mukden. He met and married Lydia Blonsky, daughter of another White army refugee.

The city is humanity’s most enduring symbol of power. States and empires rise and fall, armies conquer and collapse, ideologies come and go, but the world’s great cities endure. If there is a force that can vanquish a city, it is natural, not artificial. Ancient cities that anchored early states in Southwest, South, and East Asia fell victim to climate change as deserts encroached on their hinterlands. Modern cities on low ground at the water’s edge would not survive the sea-level rise that could accompany sustained global warming. But no political upheaval or economic breakdown would end the life of a major city—not even destruction by atomic bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt because the advantages and opportunities offered by their sites and situations were unaltered by the catastrophes that struck them. Silk route terminal Chang’an morphed into Xian and Tenochtitlan became Mexico City because their locational benefits, sites, and regional networks outlasted their violent transitions. Not for nothing is Rome known as the Eternal City. With the maturation of the modern state came the notion of the “capital” city, focus of its administrative system and emblematic of its power. Cities had always dominated their hinterlands, but now their power radiated far afield. From Athens to Amsterdam and from Madrid to Moscow, these national capitals became imperial headquarters that launched colonial campaigns near and far. London was synonymous with this early wave of globalization, but Paris also lay at the heart of a global network of power and influence. In these capitals, cityscapes substantiated national achievements through elaborate palaces, columned government buildings, decorative triumphal arches, spacious parade routes, and commemorative statuary. Museums bulging with treasure attested further to the primacy of the culture, leading one observer, long ago but memorably, to designate such centers as “primate” cities (Jefferson, 1939). The trappings of this primacy reappeared in the architecture of colonial headquarters from Dakar to Delhi and from Luanda to Lima, incongruous Greco- Roman-Victorian-Iberian imprints on administrative offices, railroad stations, post offices, even prisons half a world away from Europe. More than ever before, the city in the global periphery was the locus of authority and transculturation.

The globalizing professionals and technical personnel that make up the professional fraction of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) in architecture are a very mixed group, ranging from those who work with (or for) those who own and control the major architectural firms to those engaged in facilitating construction (Kennedy 2005; Ren 2011), the education of architects, designers in general, professional architectural entrepreneurs, historians, and critics. In chapter 2 the role of architects and their firms in the social production of iconicity was discussed (summarized in table 2.2). In this respect the professional fraction and the corporate fraction of the TCC clearly overlap. However, there are many other professionals in and around architecture and urban design whose relationship to the professional fraction of the TCC is more problematic, and they are the prime focus of this chapter. Of all the four fractions of the TCC, the professional fraction is the one in which we find most opposition to the globalizing agenda of contemporary capitalism and, in some cases, outright condemnation of consumerism and its effects on architecture and the city. There are frequent debates between globalizing professionals who enthusiastically support and practice the agenda of capitalist globalization and others who pursue their own, sometimes alternative agendas. These include engineers and consultants working with inexpensive and sustainable local materials and building methods, and teachers, historians, and critics who give them theoretical and practical support. There is no shortage of critical commentary on capitalism and consumer society from those on the politically progressive wings of contemporary developments in architecture and urban design, more or less leftist scholars. Proponents of Critical Regionalism in its several incarnations (Frampton 1985; Canizaro 2007; Lefaivre and Tzonis 2012) and those under the umbrella of vernacular architecture (Harris and Berke 1997) also provide some in­sights about what alternative globalizations in architecture and urban design could look like. Even some notable architects, considered members of the cultural establishment, have expressed radical ideas when in reflective mood (e.g., Rogers 1991).

This chapter explores the differences between Russia's civilian and military colonization projects in Manchuria. It discusses the planning and establishment of Manchuria's railways and new cities and demonstrates that Imperial Russia's economic colonization in Harbin was more successful than its military claim over Port Arthur. Harbin became Russia's semi-colonial outpost with a flourishing urban space and a sizable Russian population. In contrast, Russia's fortress of Port Arthur did not flourish and eventually became a source of conflict with Japan. Even Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905, and its withdrawal from Northeast China, did not stop Russian and Soviet participation in urban growth and industrial development in northern Manchuria, which continued even after the Revolution of 1917.

This essay examines cinematic representations of the Russian diaspora within Manchukuo and the Japanese empire, through an analysis of the relation of sound, singing, and music to movement and affect in the film My Nightingale (1943), directed by Shimazu Yasujiro. This story of Russian exiles is set within architectural spaces that have intimate connections with sound and music and that, because they are marked as culturally different, take on racialized meanings. With the focus on sonic, sensory, and vocal elements as “cinematic affect,” the film’s images are rendered as pure potential and indeterminacy—particularly in scenes where there are disjunctions between those images and the sources of sound, speech acts, and subtitles. Such disjunctions create resonances that go beyond the ideological and pedagogical apparatus of film production to establish a new unbounded hermeneutic space without a definite and stable center.