Organizer: Charles Armstrong, Columbia University
Chair: Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago
Discussant: Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara
This panel explores the mutual interaction of ethnicity, citizenship, and territorial sovereignty in the construction of modern nation-states in East Asia, focusing on the boundaries between Northeast China/Manchuria and Korea from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Over the course of this time period, the "premodern" cultural and political entities of the Qing empire and the kingdom of Choson became redefined in relation to each other and to the global system of sovereign states.
This involved both issues of state policy and the movement and sentiments of local communities. Migrants and border-crossers, as disrupters of established boundaries and active agents of colonial expansion, became a new focus of attention. The permeability and flexibility, the "hardness" and "softness," of nation-state boundaries changed radically over time: boundaries are relatively restricted but problematically defined in the nineteenth century, become opened and redefined by Japanese colonialism between 1905 and 1945, and are reconstructed and solidified after 1948/1949 when new, self-consciously modern and ethnically identified states are established on the territory of former Qing and Choson.
The panel focuses on three crucial moments of boundary-making between "China" and "Korea": the Qing/Choson settlement of the late 19th century; the expansion of Japanese informal colonial control into Manchuria in the 1930s; and the establishment of boundaries between the People’s Republic of China and North Korea, including the creation of an ethnic Korean autonomous zone on the Sino-Korean border.
Where’s the Tumen River? The Limits of National Territory Along the Sino-Korean Border, 1885–1909
Andre Schmid, University of Toronto
One Korean newspaper referred to it as the most pressing concern of the nation, while the New York Herald Tribune predicted that it might result in the next Sino-Japanese war. The issue in question was the Sino-Korean border: just where exactly should it lie? By 1907 when these two newspaper comments were made and tensions over the allocation of lands were reaching a high point, Korean and Chinese officials had already been negotiating for over two decades what in the Korean press was called the "Kando" question. Two years later, pressures were somewhat eased when Japan, in control of Korean foreign policy since 1905, reversed its support for the Korean position and signed a treaty with the Qing recognizing their claims on the area. This paper examines the controversy over these lands just north of the Tumen River in order to show how conceptions of national space and its boundaries were shifting in Korea during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As early as 1712, Choson and Qing dynasty officials had sought to delimit and demarcate this section of the frontier. Although a number of significant ambiguities remained, it was not until the rise of modern nationalism that these ambiguities came to the forefront—a crisis stimulated by new concepts of territorial sovereignty and articulated in the new language of international law. The issues themselves were not new; rather, novel ways of conceiving and negotiating the limits of national space were grafted onto these longstanding questions.
Japanese Colonial Society in Korea and the Advent of Manchukuo: Consolidation or Divergence?
Barbara J. Brooks, City University of New York
For more than a decade before the Manchurian Incident of 1931, Japanese imperialists promoted the concept of an enlarged Japanese colony that would embrace both Korea and Manchuria. Many in the Japanese colonial community in Korea welcomed Japan’s occupation of China’s Northeastern provinces as the consolidation of an extended society of Japanese subjects in both colonial and treaty port outposts. As Manchukuo developed, however, its colonial policies and managing establishments began to sharply contrast with those of Korea. Army leaders in Manchukuo rejected interference from the Korean Government-General and Japan’s colonial bureaucracies. Rather than the strident assimilationist policies of the Korean colonial government, Manchukuo came to promote its own brand of "multiculturalism" based on the concept of a society composed of five "races." While policies in Korea pointed toward its absorption into metropolitan Japan, many of those in Manchukuo aimed at earning the puppet state diplomatic recognition.
For the colonial community, as reflected in the popular press, what were the implications of such differently evolving Japanese colonial states? How were Manchukuo and the emerging plans for its Japanese colonial society received by those senior close cousins, the Japanese in Korea? This paper will examine these questions based on reading the colonial press and other archival materials from 1931–1938. Analysis of such popular responses will illuminate our understanding of the imagined and policy-driven boundaries of the extended colonial community on the Northeast Asian mainland, and raise the question of whether Japanese formal colonialism in Korea and informal empire in Manchukuo embarked on a new and divergent course in the 1930s.
"Blood-Cemented Friendship": Congealing National Boundaries Through Revolution, War, and Reconstruction, 1937–1967
Charles Armstrong, Columbia University
In 1937, just as the second Sino-Japanese War broke out and Japan accelerated its assimilationist policies in its Korean colony, Chinese and Korean communists joined forces in Manchuria to form the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NEAJUA) to resist Japanese colonialism. Among the young officers in the NEAJUA was a Korean expatriate named Kim Il Sung, future North Korean premier. Although the NEAJUA was effectively crushed by 1940, the Sino-Korean alliance in Manchuria laid the groundwork for relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after the two communist states were established in the late 1940s.
Sino-North Korean "friendship" was based on the modern principles of sovereign equality and ethnic distinction. One problem was the presence of some one million ethnic Koreans on "Chinese" territory, in the area known as "Jiandao" in Chinese and "Kando" in Korean. The solution to the "Jiandao problem" was resolved during the midst of the Korean War in 1952, when the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Zone was established as the first ethnic autonomous area in the PRC. Ethnic Chinese were also "repatriated" from North Korea to the PRC well into the 1960s.
In the late 1960s, as China descended into the isolationist chaos of the cultural revolution and North Korea embarked on its ultra-nationalistic politics of juche (self-reliance), for the first and only time this friendship came to a breaking point. Not only were the PRC and DPRK officially at odds, but the boundary issue became a dispute once again, with armed clashes breaking out on the border.