railroad constructed in Manchuria (northeastern China) by Russia in the late 19th century. The privileges for the line were obtained from China in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) as part of a secret alliance (1896) between Russia and China. Two years later Russia extracted from China a further agreement to allow an extension of the railroad to Port Arthur (Lüshun) and Dairen (Dalian) on the Yellow Sea, but this South Manchurian Railway was transferred to Japan after the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05).

Planned as an extension of the Russian Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Chinese Eastern Railway was Russia's shortest route to the warm-water port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. In 1924, when the post-Revolutionary Soviet government renounced Russian imperialist territorial claims in China, it nevertheless retained control of the railway. Three years later, the Chinese seized the line, but they were forced to restore it in 1929. In 1935 the Soviet Union sold the railway to the newly formed Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

At the end of World War II, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government negotiated the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Aug. 14, 1945, in which the Soviet Union agreed that it would not support the Communists in the Chinese civil war, receiving, in return, partnership in the Chinese Eastern Railway for a 30-year period. In 1953, however, the Soviet Union returned its share of the railway to the People's Republic of China.