The End of White Privilege in Beijing

In Paul French book Midnight in Peking about the Pamela Werner murder case from 1937, we hear a lot about the so-called white Russians. They are described as a kind of second-class foreigner, that were often seen in Beijing working as pimps and prostitutes. but who were these people that had emerged in the city seemingly out of nowhere? And why would they have such a marked impact on how Chinese society perceived westerners?

Poster created by refugees of the white movement. The flag they honored has today become Russias national flag.

The white Russians were called white not because of the color of their skin but because of their support for the white movement of Russia against the Bolsheviks. It was however the fact that they were fair skinned that made their very existence controversial, when after the victory of the Bolsheviks at Vladivostok in 1922 thousands of desperate Russian refugees started to flee into China, and for the first-time droves of destitute white people were seen in China.

A Russian store in 1930s Shanghai

The western community of Beijing had lived a life of privilege for years, protected by international law and extraterritoriality, but the white Russians were different, because when China recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, the last flicker of hope for the Russian imperialists disappeared and they did not no longer have a state to protect them.

By some estimates 200,000 white russian refugees arrived in China in the 1920s

Most of the refugees went to Harbin, Xinjiang, or Shanghai, where big Russian communities already existed. The famous American actor Charlie Chaplin who visited Shanghai in 1931 remembers how he “came across a number of titled aristocrats who had escaped the Russian revolution. They were destitute and without a country, their status was of the lowest grade, the men ran rickshaws and the women worked in 10-cent dance halls.”

Shura the Hermaphrodite pimp are among other white Russian characters described in Paul Frenchs book "The Badlands"

Beijing in comparison only received a few hundred Russian refugees, but these desperate white people would change the whole idea of a white man in the city. Struggling to make a living the white Russians would take almost any occupation they could find. Reporting back to his government about the refugee crisis in 1923 a Norwegian diplomat described how: “We should not forget, that we are in China ,.., where a white man has never done manual labor. This fact is one of the reasons that a white man has enjoyed such prestige, but now the relation is changing, the Chinese does not perceive the white man as a super human being anymore”.

It should be mentioned that many of the white Russians were able to find jobs and contribute to society in a positive way, but the internal hierarchy in the foreign community was plain for everybody to see. Describing the White Russians standing in Hong Kong, Stuart Heaver quotes Karl Atroshenko in his marvelous long read from South China Morning post.

“Hong Kong in those days (1950s) was based on race and strict hierarchy. We knew three girls at school who all qualified as secretaries; the British girl earned twice as much as the Russian girl and the Russian girl earned twice as much as the Chinese girl. It was the way it was.”

There is no reason to doubt that it was substantially different in the foreign community of 1930s Beijing.

The Bolsjevik army defeated the Russian empire and the Soviet Union was recognized as the legitimate government in 1924

Most white Russian refugees left China in 1949 when the Communist government took over, but not all, we know that because when we started to research the Pamela Werner murder case we found old residents in the hutongs of the former Beijing Badlands where bars and brothels used to be located in the republican period, who still remembers white Russians living in their neighborhoods when they were children in the 1950s.