UC San Diego

This dissertation explores the transition of the port city of Dalian as it shifted from a wartime hub of the Japanese empire to a socialist urban center heavily influenced by the Soviet Union. How did a long-term center of Japanese colonial modernity transition so seamlessly into socialist urban space? What elements of the Japanese project were fundamental parts of such a transformation, and how did the socialist regimes of the late 1940s and early 1950s deal with this? In answering these questions, my analysis delves deeply into the most controversial themes in modern Chinese history. I examine the legacies of Japanese colonial expansion and development on the modern Chinese nation-state, the social and cultural experiences of Japanese colonialism, the impact of Soviet occupation and local Sino-Soviet relations, and the nature of regime change, legitimization, and the re-integration of former colonial spaces into the Chinese state. I argue that warfare played a transformative role in the city's history. Placing this narrative at the center of my study, one can see commonalities in the Japanese, Soviet, and Chinese projects for governing Dalian, which involved mobilizing its people and resources for the successive campaigns war. Part of the project of establishing legitimacy here also involved how these various powers staked claims to the city. It is precisely because of its tenuous linkages to Japan, Russian, and China that one sees such a need for clarity. The Nationalist government staked a deep claim to Dalian, demanding its reintegration with China, while the PRC took a nebulous stance, choosing to downplay territorial claims by projecting an image of Dalian as part of the broader socialist world. What emerges is a very different picture of postwar nationalism in which the CCP was compelled to downplay the fact that a foreign nation was continuing to occupy Dalian. I argue that 1945 and 1949 may have been watersheds in Dalian's history, but they did not represent clean breaks from the past. Rather the city's socialist transformation was a continuation of many of the same social, political, and economic goals established under the colonial regime