Jixi

Jixi (simplified Chinese: 鸡西; traditional Chinese: 雞西; pinyin: Jīxī) is a city in southeastern Heilongjiang Province, People's Republic of China. At the 2020 census, 1,502,060 people resided within its administrative area of 22,488.47 square kilometres (8,682.85 sq mi) and 560,118 in its built-up (or metro) area made up of 3 out of 6 urban districts (including Jiguan, Hengshan and Chengzihe). Jixi is on the Muling River about 30 km (19 mi) from the border with Russia's Primorsky Krai and 120 km (75 mi) from Lake Xingkai. The mayor of Jixi is Zhang Changrong (张常荣) since June 2015. The area is one of the important coal mining bases in China. A crater on asteroid 253 Mathilde was named after the city. Jixi was ruled by the Jurchen and Goguryeo people. By the Shang dynasty, dwellers here had begun to communicate with people in the Central Plain. It was in the Han dynasty that primitive agriculture in this region had made great progress. During the Tang dynasty, Jixi was under the control of the Balhae. As the Manchus conquered the territories occupied by the Ming dynasty in 1644, the basin of the Amur River was blocked in order to protect the Manchu people's place of origin. In this period, the population of the Jixi region experienced a sharp decrease. In 1662, the Kangxi Emperor ordered the general of Ninguta to dominate the territory. Since a large number of people engaged in reclaiming wasteland and collecting ginseng, Jixi and the whole Ussuri River basin gradually became the base for medicinal materials. In the second half of the 19th century, as Czarist Russia advanced through Siberia and reached the Sea of Okhotsk, the Qing officials like General Tepuqin (特普欽) made a proposal to open Manchuria for farming in order to oppose the conquest of Russia, and so the Qing government forsook the policy of blockading on the Northeast region of China. A large number of the Han Chinese, especially from the Shandong Peninsula and Zhili, migrated into Manchuria. The Qing government set up Mishan Prefecture in this territory in 1908. Coal resources were discovered constantly in Jixi during this period. In September 1914, a merchant named Yuan Dazhang (袁大章) from Mukden was approved to set up the Mixi Coal Mine Company, which represents the regular production of coal in Jixi. However, construction of Chinese Eastern Railway one of the provisions brought a nucleus of Russian Jews to northern Manchuria. In January 1924, Muling Coal Mine Corporation was operated jointly by the Jewish businessman Solomon L. Skidelsky and the Jilin Province government. The headquarters of the company was located on Ashihe Street, Nangang District, Harbin.[2] The output of Muling Colliery has reached 1.6 million tons in 1931. Since The Japanese invasion of Manchuria began on September 19, 1931, the whole of Manchuria was seized by Japan following the Mukden Incident, and in 1932, a sympathetic government, Manchukuo, was established. The Jixi region then became a colony of the Japanese. On December 15, 1935, Jixi Railway Station's construction was completed by South Manchuria Railway(SMR). On September 1, 1941, the Manchukuo government established Jining County (鶏寧縣). The first mayor of the county was Kubota Yutaka (久保田 豊).[3] The Japanese settlers brutally slaughtered more than 100 thousand miners in the Jixi mining area, leaving several mass graves in Didao.[4] On August 9, 1945, Togashi Ichiro (冨樫 一郎), the conductor of Didao Colliery, ordered the destruction of the coalpits in Hengshan, Didao and Muling as the Soviet Red Army closed in.[5]