Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919
Cambridge University Press, 5/3/2018
EAN 9781107173958, ISBN10: 1107173957
Hardcover, 318 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
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 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.