Making Borders in Modern East Asia

The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919

Nianshen Song

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781107173958
• eBook ISBN: 9781316805558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• A note on romanization
• Measures
• List of abbreviations of some sources
• Introduction: A Lost Stele and a Multivocal River
• 1 Crossing the Boundary: The 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