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.