Problems of the Number of Children in Chinese-Russian Families in the First Half of the 20th Century

The paper is devoted to the problem of the number of children in Chinese-Russian families living in Russia in the first half of the 20th century. This issue is considered based on office documents identified in the collections of various Russian archives, as well as ≪Books of memory of victims of political repression in Eastern Transbaikalia≫. The study revealed that, at the beginning of the 20th century, most Chinese-Russian families had no children or only one child; the number of mixed families began to grow in the first half of the 1920s. The paucity of children was due to the short period of existence of most such families. In general, while Chinese-Russian families with two children predominated in Russia, there were many families with one child. After political repression, families with many children became rarer. Ultimately, most Chinese migrants before the 1940s did not start families in Russia; an additional factor that hindered the formation of an established Chinese diaspora was the weak connection of children from mixed marriages with Chinese culture.