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"Making Borders in Modern East Asia Until the late nineteenth century, the Chinese-Korean Tumen River border was one of the oldest, and perhaps most stable, state boundaries in the world. Spurred by severe food scarcity following a succession of natural disasters, from the 1860s countless Korean refugees crossed the Tumen river border into Qing-China's Manchuria, triggering a decades-long territorial dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. This major new study of a multilateral and multiethnic frontier highlights the competing state- and nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese war, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War. The power-plays over land and people simultaneously promoted China's frontier-building endeavours, motivated Korea's nationalist imagination, and stimulated Japan's colonialist enterprise, setting East Asia on an intricate trajectory from the late-imperial to a situation that, Song argues, we call modern"--
List of contents
List of figures and tables; Abbreviation of some sources, measures; Acknowledgements; A note on romanization; Introduction: a lost stele and a multivocal river; 1. Crossing the boundary: socioecology of the Tumen River region; 2. Dynastic geography: demarcation as rhetoric; 3. Making 'Kando': the mobility of a cross-border society; 4. Taming the frontier: statecraft and international law; 5. Boundary redefined: a multilayered competition; 6. People redefined: identity politics in Yanbian; Conclusion: our land, our people; Epilogue: Tumen River, the film; Selected bibliography; Index.
About the author
Nianshen Song is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Summary
In the late nineteenth century, Korean refugees crossed the Tumen river border into Manchuria, triggering a territorial dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. This major new study of this multiethnic frontier highlights competing nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese, the Russo-Japanese, and the First World Wars.
