In the 1920s, Westerners viewed Harbin, in North Manchuria, as a world turned upside down. Located in a former Chinese Eastern Railway concession with a significant Russian population, the city and the Special District in which it resided were represented as places that had reversed the “natural” racial hierarchy – a place where white was the ruled and not the ruler. Administering the Colonizer explores how a non-Western culture dealt with the Western minority under its administration. It reveals that contrary to observations and ideological and national histories emanating from Moscow and present-day Beijing, republican China created policies in a number of areas that not only promoted its own sovereignty but also protected the Russian minority. A historical examination of how an ethnic, cultural, and racial majority coexisted with a minority of a different culture and race, his book also restores to history the multiple national influences that have shaped northern China and Chinese nationalism.