The Distinction Between Manchuria and Manchukuo

The following post is Part III in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Beginning with this post, I outline the principle positions that I take and the key terms of my thesis, which I used for a set of thematic discussions. The first of these themes is why distinguishing between Manchuria and Manchukuo is significant.

Just as the etymologies and histories embedded in the word “Manchuria” are multicultural, the region itself has always been a meeting ground of nomadic and farming peoples whose cultures co-mingled.[1] Long before the founding of the Qing dynasty, the Koguryŏ Kingdom (37 BCE-668 CE), peopled with ancestors of modern Koreans, controlled a large area of northeast Manchuria before the Silla Kingdom (57 BCE-936 CE) subsumed it.[2] Both of these ancient states are considered predecessors to the Chosŏn Kingdom (1392-1910), the Korean peninsula’s longest-running dynastic state.

In the southwest, however, the Manchu emperors of the Qing limited Han Chinese emigration beyond the Shanhai Pass (shanhai guan) of the Great Wall and the Willow Palisade (liutiaobian), the informal markers between central China and Manchuria.[3] According to Mark Elliot, Han settlement was outlawed completely by 1740 for two reasons: to preserve the ancestral homeland and Manchu customs, and implicated within that edict, was the desire to maintain economic advantages for Manchu bannermen.[4] It was not until the Russian empire began expanding southward from Siberia in the 1850s that the Qing decided to allow Han people to begin settling in Manchuria as a countermeasure. From this regional history, we can see that an academic study situated in the context of Manchuria cannot be anything but transnational and cross-cultural in scope.

In the early twentieth century, cross-cultural interactions in Manchuria reached a critical stage. During the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), a newly modernized Japan began to infiltrate the Korean peninsula and southern Manchuria systematically.[5] Japan eventually annexed Korea as an imperial colony in 1910, while in Manchuria, the Japanese built railroads, factories, ports, and maintained a powerful police and consulate network. By the late 1920s, a combination of political and economic factors, including Japan’s rising militarism, the worldwide financial depression, and diminishing relations with the local warlords Zhang Zuolin (1875-1928) and his son Zhang Xueliang (1901-2001), led to a Japanese takeover of Manchuria. Members of the Kwantung Army, defying the instructions of the Japanese government, staged a bombing at a train station on September 18, 1931 in what came to be known as the Mukden Incident. This event became the excuse for the Kwantung Army to establish a military state called Manchukuo (J: Manshūkoku).[6]

Those responsible for the Mukden Incident, namely the Kwantung Army staff members Ishiwara Kanji (1889-1949) and Itagaki Seishirō (1885-1948), had long pursued Japan’s annexation of Manchuria and Mongolia for the dual purposes of creating a buffer between the Korean colony and the Soviet Union and to provide Japan with the natural resources that the archipelago lacked.[7] In the wake of Zhang Xueliang’s decision in 1928 to ally with Chiang Kai-shek, the Kwantung Army worried that Japan’s interests in the region were compromised. The Mukden Incident was, therefore, used as a pretense to seize Manchuria and blame the bombing on “violent Chinese soldiers.”[8] According to Yamamuro Shin’ichi, however, creating a nominally independent Manchukuo, at least in Ishiwara’s view, was “tantamount to fighting back ten thousand tears…awaiting an opportunity to effectuate the long-cherished plan of seizing the region.”[9] After many months of negotiation between the military in Manchuria and the government in Japan, Manchukuo was declared an independent state on March 1, 1932, and its state organs were established in the days and weeks after. Manchukuo lasted almost fourteen years until August 1945, and its territory encompassed northeast China.

Once Manchukuo was established, the Japanese state-makers conceived of it as a political entity that would function as a modern nation. According to Louise Young, hundreds of members of the Japanese intelligentsia, including professionals and technocrats, relocated to Manchukuo to participate in building its infrastructure. She notes that the government in Japan eventually viewed industrial development as a way to boost Japan’s economy in the midst of a financial crisis, leading to a restructuring of the economy in Manchuria: “The military luster imparted by the early triumphs of the Kwantung Army was now enhanced by the investments that made Manchukuo a jewel of unrivaled value.”[10] City planners and architects redesigned the capital city, Xinjing (literally “new capital,” now Changchun), and the other major urban centers, Fengtian and Harbin.[11] The South Manchuria Railway continued to build new lines and funded many large-scale research projects, including ethnographies and economic reports on individual provinces and counties.[12] State-makers instituted legal codes, an educational system, and a national flag and anthem (the latter of which is discussed in Chapter 4).[13] 

With the establishment of Manchukuo came a top-down set of principles accompanied by propaganda slogans meant to display the categorical independence of the state and distinguish it from China and Japan. Prasenjit Duara stresses that “the distinctive ways of demarcating and representing the spheres of modernity and tradition, state and society, nation and self in Manchukuo not only reflected processes in the two societies [Japan and China], but drew from cultural resources circulating between them.”[14] One way for the Japanese authorities to differentiate Manchukuo from its neighbors was to successfully implement what officials felt other East Asian states had not. For instance, Manchukuo state-builders invoked the Confucian ideal of the “Kingly Way” (C: Wangdao; J: Kodo), a concept Duara describes as “the way of the ethical monarch,” which was first advocated in modern times by Dr. Sun Yat-sen.[15] In a similar manner, Japanese officials utilized the Kingly Way to link Manchukuo to the Japanese imperial family.[16] Differentiation from its neighbors was apparently an ambiguous undertaking.

Along with the Kingly Way, Manchukuo officials began to appropriate a “Five-Race Harmony (gozoku kyōwa)” slogan and ideology because of the multiracial demographics of Manchuria. This slogan had been inspired by Sun Yat-sen, though used to different effect. Under the ideology of racial harmony, state functionaries promoted the social integration of five ethnic groups: Japanese, Han Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and either Korean or (less frequently) Russian.[17] Manchukuo’s propaganda chief, Mutō Tomio (1904-1998), wrote in a special issue of the magazine Manchuria: “The people cooperate, the races bind themselves together and all make efforts to bring about an ideally moral society—an ideal compound-race-state. This is the fundamental spirit of this new State.”[18] In practice, however, the five categories produced an affect of difference that solidified a racial hierarchy with the Japanese at the top.[19] Still, “five-race harmony” and the Kingly Way served to justify the Manchukuo nation-building project.

Despite referring to the same geographic location, Manchuria and Manchukuo represent distinct conceptions of space. Studies about cultural products from the region often approach texts and materials from the angle of perception. Manchuria as wilderness, frontier, or homeland (depending on the viewer) are common analytical frameworks.[20] Perception is only one aspect of the production of space and can only reveal so much about the relationship various people had with the land. The reason for this limitation is that perceived space is of little use without recognizing how discourses that shape space impinge upon lived experience. Essentially, the more aware members of a society are of its spatial production, the more power they have to manipulate it.

Henri Lefebvre, the widely influential Marxist philosopher and author of The Production of Space, argues that the confluence of labor and capital necessarily forge interactions between people, which of course, must be located somewhere.[21] In other words, the production of space necessitates that social relations become localized in a place under specific conditions. All space, therefore, consists of three inseparable aspects: the conceived, the perceived, and the lived.[22] Lefebvre’s conceived space refers to the “discursively constructed space of professionals and technocrats…it is always a conceived and abstract space since it subsumes ideology and knowledge within its practice.”[23] Conceived space is the crucial factor in distinguishing between Manchukuo and Manchuria, especially considering the talent and expertise brought from Japan to build Manchukuo as the epitome of Asian modernity.

Conceived space is impersonal, “an ideal type of homogenized global capitalist space.”[24] Under the Manchukuo regime, urban spaces were built with the immediate goal of inculcating “universal” modernity, which inevitably involved the development of infrastructure for the planned Manchukuo nation. Spatial relations for intellectuals dwelling in Manchukuo’s cities differed from that experienced by intellectuals in makeshift guerrilla camps in the countryside. Intellectuals who worked in Xinjing, or other metropolitan centers, had access to financial networks and social frameworks that allowed them to publish and print newspapers, journals, and books. These platforms, moreover, had long been considered legitimate places for articulating nationhood. As such, this thesis argues that the creation of Manchukuo compelled the intellectuals discussed in Case Study 1 to articulate collective selves using the language of nation-building.  

The Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, however, existed in opposition to the conceived space of Manchukuo, which is to say that its members aimed to establish a community in the most concrete terms. The songwriters of the NAUA disseminated their ideas through handwritten materials, by makeshift presses, and by word of mouth. Unless the songs are read in a Lefebvrian sense—as moments in the production of space that are embedded in place through lived and perceived experience—then it is difficult to see the songs as products of intellectual ideas. Lyrics signal important knowledge about the Korean-Chinese relationship as it occurred in Manchuria. Thus, the NAUA must be seen as a group of people that embodied an idea and a collective vision of Manchuria as a place. As such, the soldiers brought their real-life experiences to bear on the conceived space of Manchukuo.

It is worth noting that, while I do not use the words Manchukuo and Manchuria interchangeably, the Chinese and Korean intellectuals featured in this study tended to use the more ambiguous term, Manzhou (K: Manju; J: Manshū), which could indicate either Manchuria or Manchukuo, as described above. Translating this term into English thus proves difficult, because choosing one word over the other may give the appearance of the writer proclaiming (or not) their allegiance to the Japanese. Nonetheless, the use of Manzhou in the texts challenges many long-held preconceptions of non-Japanese intellectual history as wholly based in ethno-nationalist sentiments. This thesis aims to retain the ambiguous usage of Manzhou and recontextualize it as an effect of spatial production in the context of Manchukuo. Andrew Merrifield explains that “space as a material product is a present space: a moment absorbed in a complex dynamic process which embraces a multitude of intersections.”[25] For the purpose of the arguments in this thesis, Korean and Chinese intellectuals were “present” to the moment. They were “absorbed” in a multitude of intersections, some with each other in person, as the following chapters demonstrate. Manzhou was the moment, the space, and a material product because it was produced intentionally as text by those intellectuals.  

[1] Kim, Ginseng and Borderland, 4-5.

[2] Mark E. Byington, ed., The History and Archaeology of the Koguryŏ Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2016).

[3] Today Manchuria is better known as northeast China, or Dongbei in Chinese (literally, northeast). In Chinese writings, however, one could likewise see the region referred to as the “three eastern provinces” (dong san sheng) or the place “outside the pass” (guanwai). All of these names have their historical precedence in the distinctiveness of the region in relation to central China.

[4] Elliott, “The Limits of Tartary,” 617-619.

[5] Motegi Toshio, “Modes of Narrating the History of Sino-Japanese Relations: The Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Toward a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, eds. Daqing Yang et al., trans. Matthew Fraleigh, 1st edn., vol. 340 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012), 20-22; Ian Nish, “Stretching Out to the Yalu: A Contested Frontier, 1900-1903,” in Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, eds. John W. Steinberg et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 45–64; Kyu Hyun Kim, “The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895): Japanese National Integration and Construction of the Korean ‘Other,’” International Journal of Korean History 17, no. 1 (2012): 1–27; Min-kyo Seo, “Korea and Japan During the Russo-Japanese War-With a Special Focus on the Japanese Occupation Forces in Korea,” International Journal of Korean History 7 (2005): 85–108.

[6] 滿洲國, which could be translated as “the nation of Manchu country.” In a fascinating anedote about the role that the telegraph played in the Manchurian Incident, Daqing Yang notes that Major General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu was sent to Manchuria on 15 September to convey Tokyo’s objections to a Manchuria invasion. A secret telegram was sent from Tokyo by a Kwantung sympathizer, however, that informed the army about Tatekawa’s impending visit. His three-day train journey gave Ishiwara and Itagaki the necessary time to plan the train attack. See Sadako N. Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy, 1931-1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 58-59 and note 25, cited in Daqing Yang, “The Technology of Japanese Imperialism: Telecommunications and Empire-Building, 1895-1945” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996), 117.

[7] Shin’ichi Yamamuro, Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 18-29.

[8] Ibid., 40.

[9] Ibid., 42.

[10] Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 24.

[11] See David Tucker, “City Planning Without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo,” in Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, ed. Mariko Tamanoi (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005) and Kari Shepherdson-Scott, “Race behind the Walls: Contact and Containment in Japanese Images of Urban Manchuria,” in The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire, eds. Chirstopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 180–206.

[12] Takeo Itō, Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo, trans. Joshua A. Fogel (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1988).

[13] See Li Narangoa, “Educating Mongols and Making ‘Citizens’ of Manchukuo,” Inner Asia 3, no. 2 (2001): 101–126 and Thomas David DuBois, “Inauthentic Sovereignty: Law and Legal Institutions in Manchukuo,” The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (2010): 749–770.

[14] Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 16. Duara demonstrates how transregional civilizational discourses shaped people’s perceptions of Manchuria and Manchukuo. Zhang Quan fundamentally disagrees with Duara’s assessment of Manchukuo as a budding nation-state. See Zhang Quan 张泉, “Zhongguo lunxianqu wenyi yanjiu de fangfa wenti: yi Du Zanqi de ‘Manzhouguo’ xiangxiang wei zhongxin 中国沦陷区文艺研究的方法问题——以杜赞奇的‘满洲国’想象为中心 (Methodological Problems in Research on Arts and Literature of Occupied Areas of China: Prasenjit Duara’s Imagined ‘Manchukuo’),” Exploration and Free Views, no. 01 (2017): 123–30.

[15] Ibid., 74. Also see, Roger H. Brown, “Visions of a Virtuous Manifest Destiny: Yasuoka Masahiro and Japan’s Kingly Way,” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, eds. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (New York: Routledge, 2007), 133-150.

[16] Ibid., 77.

[17] Bong, “Destabilizing ‘Racial Harmony,’” 31-74.

[18] Mutô Tomio, “The Spirit of Hsieh-Ho: A New Philosophy,” in Concordia & Culture in Manchoukuo (Hsinking: Manchuria Daily News Press, 1938), 4.

[19] Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn, The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016), 1-18. Also Bong, “Destabilizing ‘Racial Harmony.’”

[20] See Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity, 184-256.

[21] “London is commerce, the global market, generalized traffic together with its consequences,” writes Henri Lefebvre, Marxist Thought and the City, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 8. (emphasis added)

[22] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 38-46.

[23] Andrew Merrifield, “Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, no. 4 (1993): 523.

[24] Ibid., 525.

[25] Ibid., 523.

Chinese and Korean Intellectual Exchange: The Significance

The following post is Part II in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers might find it helpful to begin here. Below I explain the significance of my study within the context of other research about Chinese and Korean literature in Manchukuo.

The contribution of my thesis lies in its analysis of the direct forms of intertextual exchange that occurred between Chinese and Korean writers. In contrast, scholarship to date has generally focused on the way these groups have represented one another in fiction. Indeed, many Korean short stories and novels written in Manchuria in the early twentieth century portrayed Chinese characters and vice versa. Authors negotiated their social positions via the other because they experienced an environment where social relations were not equal, a point examined in depth throughout the thesis chapters. Fictional works by Chinese and Korean authors demonstrate that writers were concerned with many shared issues and often presented different perspectives on the same problems.

Authors of fictional representations from Manchuria typically depict Koreans as displaced, their social identity compromised by their existence on the border between Korea and China. Many such works exist, for example, the short story “Meiyou zuguo de haizi” (“Children without a Homeland,” 1936) by Shu Qun (1913-1989) about a homeless Korean boy who becomes friends with Russian and Chinese peers. Another oft-studied example is the novel Ijung kukjok (Dual Nationality, 1946) by Kim Mansŏn (1915-?), which follows the life of a Korean man who takes on multiple nationalities over his lifetime in Manchuria.[1] Of course, depictions of stateless Koreans had their basis in reality.

Mass migration of Korean farmers and political refugees into Kando (C: Jiandao), the area in eastern Manchuria that borders the peninsula, began around the time of the March 1, 1919 Korean independence movement, although Koreans had lived in the area for centuries.[2] Once across the border, peasant migrants often leased land belonging to Han, Manchu, or other owners. However, because Koreans could be considered Japanese colonial subjects, and the Japanese retained extraterritorial rights in Manchuria, land that passed between Chinese owners and Korean tenants was seen as a weak point for Chinese national sovereignty.[3] Accordingly, writers from both groups represented in fiction the poor relations that developed between Korean and Chinese inhabitants of Manchuria.

Representations of the Chinese Other by Korean authors, and vice versa, often convey ambivalence, antagonism, inequality, judgment, discrimination, and even violence towards each other.[4] The Wanbaoshan Incident on July 1, 1931, for example, captured the attention of Korean writers An Sugil (1911-1977) and Yi Tae-jun (1904-1970) as well as Chinese writers Li Huiying (1911-1991) and his editor Ding Ling (1904-1986).[5] The incident occurred when approximately 400 Chinese farmers rioted against the construction of an irrigation canal that Korean peasants were building, because it cut across land owned by these Chinese families. During the riot, the Japanese consular police came, eventually firing warning shots. No one was killed, and the Chinese farmers dispersed while the Koreans continued to build the canal with the Japanese police overseeing its reconstruction.[6] An Sugil, Yi Tae-jun, and Li Huiying depicted the Wanbaoshan Incident for different purposes, according to Lee Hyun-jeong, each of these authors creating a distinct vision of “Chinese and Korean nationhood based on the collective action of the peasants.”[7] Karen Thornber argues that similarities in fictional representations can be seen as passive intertextuality, or “coincidentally composing creative texts with numerous intersections,” such as drawing from the same event (Wanbaoshan) or social practices (tenant farming).[8]

The representative texts discussed in my dissertation are different from representations of the Chinese or Korean Other because they are based in reality, not fiction. Passive or indirect intertextuality, as Thornber describes, is often based on coincidence. More direct forms of intertextuality include critiquing, adapting, translating, and otherwise intentionally interacting with someone else’s work. There is no specific extant evidence that the Chinese fictional pieces described above were read by Koreans or vice versa. In fact, there is only one known case from 1930s Manchuria where a fictional work by a Korean author that depicted Chinese characters in the region was commented on by a local Chinese intellectual. Kim Tong-in’s (1900-1951) short story Rust-Colored Hills is set in Manchuria and a Chinese writer, Chen Yin, reviews it as part of an extended newspaper article.[9] Case Study 1 of this thesis discusses Chen Yin’s review and places it into historical context with other instances of Chinese and Korean interaction. While there are fewer instances of active interactions compared to fictional representations, the texts discussed in this thesis represent more direct access to the writers’ views about the pressing concerns of the time. 

While Chinese and Korean intertextual exchanges may have been few, Manchukuo witnessed many interactions between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals. Studies about the literature from this period have tended to focus on the Japanese-Chinese relationship and its development within the semi-colonial environment. Annika Culver argues that Japanese officials in Manchukuo were also intellectuals and often produced literary works that doubled as propaganda.[10] Similarly, Louise Young shows how Japanese cultural producers changed the perceptions of Manchuria in Japan over the course of the early twentieth century.[11] One of the most important methods for propagating Japan’s designs in Manchuria, Ying Xiong argues, was translating works by Chinese writers into Japanese.[12] Japanese authorities in Manchukuo viewed Chinese intellectual production as essential to their propaganda, an issue discussed further in Chapter 2. Junko Agnew shows how Chinese participation in public debates concerning the future of Manchukuo’s cultural heritage differed in significant ways from that of their Japanese counterparts.[13]

Readers may come away from the above studies well-informed about the movement of ideas, colonial governance, and the effects of imperialism on society and individuals in Manchuria. The communities and individuals evaluated, however, are predominantly Chinese and Japanese. Moreover, they are based in Manchukuo’s cities. By focusing on different forms of Korean and Chinese intellectual relationship, this thesis adds an important dimension to past scholarship. Existing studies have taken for granted the similarities in ideological, material, and institutional experiences among intellectuals from various cultural backgrounds who were active during the Manchukuo period. That is, the absolute value of the intellectual has remained unquestioned. By identifying a writer’s productive value, I demonstrate how some forms of intellectual work are privileged over others and what purposes that serves.   

My thesis thus makes a contribution to the intellectual history of East Asia by re-evaluating the value of intellectuals vis-à-vis their role in creating discourses of nation-building. The extant studies of intellectual activity in Manchuria (Chinese, Korean, or otherwise) limit their scope to texts that appeared in newspapers, literary journals, and magazines with an indelible link to Manchukuo nation-building ideals. Case Study 1 looks at Chinese and Korean intertextual exchange within the same publication spaces in order to stress how intellectuals viewed themselves in relation to Manchuria. Case Study 2 presents an alternative conceptualization of intellectual production a few steps removed from the formation of a nation. That is, the NAUA operated in direct opposition to the national idea as expressed by Manchukuo state-builders. Along with analyzing the army songs in relation to the Manchukuo nation-building project, I also present the tunes as an alternative literary and intellectual space in Manchukuo. 

Finally, as I discuss, Chinese and Korean intellectuals shared an affinity towards Manchuria that played upon their minds when in direct contact with each other’s work. The particular context of Manchuria defined the social relations that formed within its space and characterized how literary works set in the region were perceived. As self-appointed cultural spokespeople, Korean and Chinese intellectuals attempted to represent their place of residence faithfully, which included ambivalent and unequal social relations. However, intercultural contact raised questions about authenticity and the possibility of cooperation. This thesis relates the multifaceted history of Chinese and Korean intellectuals who interacted as a function of, and in order to understand, their relationships to Manchuria as a place.

[1] For a discussion of Shu Qun’s and Kim Mansŏn’s stories, see InYoung Bong, “Destabilizing ‘Racial Harmony’: Hybridity, Nationality, and Spatiality in the Law and Cultural Production of Manchukuo” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2010). See also Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

[2] Kando is the Korean name for the region largely equivalent to the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture on the border of China and North Korea today. See Seonmin Kim, Ginseng and Borderland (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Woosung Bae, “Literature on Manchuria during the Qing Period and Korea’s Perception of Manchurian Geography during the Late Joseon Period,” Journal of Northeast Asian History 5, no. 2 (2008); and Chong Eun Ahn, “From Chaoxian ren to Chaoxian zu: Korean Identity under Japanese Empire and Chinese Nation-State” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2013).

[3] For the most comprehensive coverage of the triangular relationship between Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese in Manchuria before and after 1931, see Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed.

[4] The Korean author, Ch’oe Sŏhae (1901-1932), wrote particularly violent stories depicting Korean migrants as victims of their Chinese landlords. See Vladimir Tikhonov, Modern Korea and Its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (London: Routledge, 2015). Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906-1943) also lived and set most of her stories in Manchuria She often depicted unequal and destructive relations between Chinese men and Korean women. See Yi Sanggyŏng, ed., Kang Kyŏng-ae chŏnjip 강경애 전집 (Collected Works of Kang Kyŏng-ae) (Seoul: Somyŏng Ch’ulp’an, 2002), 877-879 and Samuel Perry, “Translator’s Introduction,” in From Wonso Pond, by Kang Kyŏng-ae, trans. Samuel Perry (New York City: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2009), vii–xx.

[5] Ding Ling was a famous leftist writer who wrote The Diary of Miss Sophie (Shafei nyushi riji) in 1927, joined the CCP in 1932, and journeyed to Yan’an in 1936. See Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

[6] The dispute occurred two months before the Mukden Incident in September 1931, so it has been considered a harbinger of the establishment of Manchukuo. In reality, the Wanbaoshan Incident was relatively minor, but it became an international conflict because of exaggerated reports in the Seoul press saying that Chinese landlords had killed the Korean peasants. Anti-Chinese riots ensued with over a hundred Chinese people killed in the first incident that occurred in Inchŏn on July 3, 1931 alone. For a comprehensive treatment of the incident, see Hyun-Jeong Lee, “Reimagining the Nation in Manchuria: The Representation of Peasant Collectivity in Chinese and Korean Discourses on the Wanbaoshan Incident (1931)” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2009).

[7] Lee, “Reimagining the Nation in Manchuria,” 29.

[8] Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 216.

[9] Kim Tong-in was one of the most influential of Korea’s early modern writers. Known for realism and naturalism, his most famous work is the short story “Potato” (Gamja) published in 1935. For a recent translation of Kim’s works with accompanying author introduction, see Kim Tongin, Sweet Potato: Collected Short Stories by Kim Tongin, trans. Grace Jung (Croydon: Honford Star, 2017).

[10] Annika A. Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013).

[11] Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[12] Ying Xiong, Representing Empire: Japanese Colonial Literature in Taiwan and Manchuria (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

[13] For an example of these public debates, see “Manchukuo Culture and the Culture of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” (満州文化と共栄文化 Manshū bunka to kyōwei bunka) in Manshū kōron 満州公論 (Manchukuo Review), March, 1945, 22. Cited in Junko Agnew, “Rewriting Manchukuo: The Question of Japanese Literary Colonialism and Chinese Collaboration” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2009), 11.

Chinese and Korean Intellectual Exchange in Manchukuo: Introduction

The following post is Part I in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. I have decided to share the introduction in full not only because it encapsulates my work from the past four years, but it also contains a lot of references to information that I hope to blog about in the future.* Below I explain what my thesis is about and the contribution it makes to Asian studies.

*Some edits have been made to the original wording of the introduction to better suit the style of a blog post.

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In the geographical area in northeast Asia, surrounded by the Korean peninsula, Siberia, the Mongolian steppe, and central China (see map above), is the place known historically as Manchuria. The root of this particular place name in English comes from the transliteration of “Manchu,” the name for the people who called the region their ancestral home and who founded the Qing dynasty (1644–1912).[1] Contained in the word “Manchuria” is a complex history of translation where an ethnonym in classical Chinese became a toponym in European languages, Japanese, and even in modern Chinese.[2] Manchuria had another name superimposed onto its geographic terrain during the early twentieth century: Manchukuo, the name of the state created by the Japanese empire that lasted for fourteen years from 1931 to 1945.

The subject of my dissertation is Chinese and Korean intellectual interaction in Manchuria between 1935 and 1942, the middle years of the Manchukuo period. I examine interactions between Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria, focusing specifically on instances when they came into contact with each other’s writings. Reading one another’s works often facilitated their communication, but there were also situations where writers came to know one another personally by political affiliation or through mutual acquaintances. Contact between Korean and Chinese intellectuals, whether in person or by way of published works, played a significant role in their writing. My thesis investigates the attempts of writers from these two groups to work together, to negotiate their differences in thinking, and to shape new, combined communities. Korean and Chinese intellectual interactions shaped their respective communities and their self-knowledge. These interactions demonstrate new understandings of the Chinese and Korean intellectual relationships in Manchuria as well as of the connections each group had to Manchuria and Manchukuo.

The thesis chapters feature two in-depth studies about the intermingling and transformation of Korean and Chinese knowledge about themselves and each other, as represented in writing. The chapters comprising Case Study 1 examine translations and critiques of writing by Korean authors in Chinese-language literary journals and newspapers in Manchukuo. The chapters of Case Study 2 analyze the writing, singing, and disseminating of military songs by Chinese and Korean members of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA). These case studies are juxtaposed to demonstrate that Chinese and Korean intertextual exchange produced multiple forms of self-knowledge, which, in turn, constituted the foundations of intellectual communities active among local Chinese and Koreans in Manchuria.

The above intellectual exchanges occurred in the now long defunct Manchukuo. Rather than focus on the entire fourteen years that the Manchukuo regime lasted, I concentrate on its middle years between 1935 and 1942. This seven-year period remains a significant moment in the intellectual history of Manchuria because cultural production flourished despite, or perhaps as a direct result of, total Japanese occupation. During these years, the anti-Japanese guerrillas established the NAUA, and in their optimism, wrote hundreds of songs to strengthen morale and unify Chinese and Korean troops. Simultaneously, Korean and Chinese writers working for newspapers and other cultural associations faced relatively relaxed censorship rules, which allowed them to be very productive, especially when compared to the later years of Manchukuo. These different aspects of Manchuria’s intellectual history are shown here side by side for the first time.

Although the representative works of the two cases appeared in the same period between 1935 and 1942, their authors worked under different circumstances and had divergent objectives. For the sake of clarity, and to underscore a critical aspect of my overall argument, I call the writers associated with the Manchukuo state “urban” producers, while I refer to the songwriters of the NAUA as “rural” producers. Distinguishing between urban and rural production highlights two important matters. The first is that the NAUA did, in actuality, operate in the countryside, setting up mountain camps and moving between them. Writers associated with publications endorsed by Manchukuo functionaries, on the other hand, mainly lived in the larger cities of Xinjing (Changchun), Fengtian (Shenyang), and Harbin. Chinese and Korean intertextual exchange occurred in these different spaces, each with its own characteristics, associated experiences, and localized perceptions.

Secondly, the distinction between urban and rural spaces crystallizes the diverging objectives of the writers. The Manchukuo state, in order to stabilize its rule over diverse communities, provided a framework for cross-cultural interaction based on nation-building ideals of racial harmony. The Japanese authorities retained the most control over how writers invoked these ideals in Manchukuo’s urban centers through censorship rules that Korean and Chinese intellectuals had to navigate carefully. Moreover, Japanese intellectuals stressed the importance of translation for conveying a harmonious nation-state. Chapters Two and Three thus investigate the role that translations by non-Japanese intellectuals played within the larger context of creating the Manchukuo national community. I argue that Korean and Chinese intellectual interaction arose from mutual ambivalence combined with a strong desire to have a voice in the creation of a national culture.

In contrast to the writers presented in Case Study 1 who were under the direct influence of Japanese surveillance, the cultural output of the NAUA depended in part on army camps being located in rural areas difficult for the Japanese army to reach. NAUA songwriters were preoccupied with keeping up morale, teaching communist values, uniting Chinese and Korean troops, and most importantly, surviving. Therefore, the NAUA songs offer an alternative conceptualization of intertextual exchange because they were not published in journals and did not entirely conform to modern literary genres, such as the short story. The NAUA songs are instead a combination of folk tunes, modern military marches, and vernacular poetry. Unlike the works of intellectuals in the cities, NAUA songs cannot usually be attributed to one author, as they were often produced collectively. As such, the songs can be interpreted as intellectual discourse, albeit in a different vein than that produced by Korean and Chinese writers who participated in the Manchukuo publishing scene.

The interactions between Chinese and Korean writers, whether in urban or rural areas, are significant findings in Manchuria studies because they give us a deeper sense of what it meant to be an intellectual in Manchuria during the Manchukuo period. I view intellectuals as thinkers who wanted to represent their communities’ affinity to their place of residence. Korean and Chinese intellectuals therefore dealt with their differing views on the same subject: Manchuria. In that sense, this thesis is not a comparison between how Chinese and Koreans wrote about their respective ethnic nationalist movements. Rather, this study identifies how intellectual communities forged a relationship to Manchuria as a place. Cross-cultural interaction exposes the negotiations and compromises that intellectuals had to make with each other in order to represent Manchuria.  

[1] For a history of the Qing, see Zheng Tianting 郑天挺, ed., Qing shi 清史 (Qing History) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1989); Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997); Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2001); and Dai Yi, A Concise History of the Qing Dynasty, trans. Lan Fangfang, Liu Bingxin, and Liu Hui, English edn., 4 vols. (Singapore: Silkwood Press, 2011).

[2] Mark C. Elliott, “The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies,” The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 3 (2000): 624-632.