What it Meant to be Chinese or Korean in Manchukuo
The following post is Part IV in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss why the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” are sometimes difficult to define when it comes to the Manchukuo period.
Defining the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” is of fundamental importance to my thesis. I primarily use these two words to emphasize the language in which any given text was written. But I also use “Korean” and “Chinese” as signifiers for communities that employed these languages to differentiate themselves from other collectives. In the context of 1930s Manchuria, language became a critical tool for Chinese and Korean writers to distinguish themselves from each other, the Japanese colonizers, and even from central China and the Korean peninsula. The latter point indicates the inherent difficulty of using the terms “Chinese” and “Korean” as modifiers for people or language in Manchuria because each word has ethnic and national implications in the region of East Asia.
What it meant to be “Chinese” or “Korean” in 1930s Manchuria diverged from the categories of ethnic and/or national identity that were simultaneously being shaped in the Korean peninsula and China proper. To define each term must not only take into account the transnational independence movements in East Asia but also the specific circumstances under the Manchukuo regime. With regards to the independence movements, scholars note the rise to popular use of the words minzu, minjok, and minzoku (in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, respectively) meaning “nation” or “ethnie.”[1] Lydia Liu cites minzu as a Sino-Japanese loanword, meaning that it came into modern Chinese and Korean through Japanese kanji inspired by European languages.[2]
The etymology of the terms minzu, minjok, and minzoku demonstrates that the Japanese empire had served to spread ideas associated with modernity, especially political and cultural nationalism. While intellectuals in China and Korea considered themselves to be purveyors of cultural and scientific knowledge, much of their modern learning had come from Europe via Japan as opposed to having developed organically within a larger East Asian civilizational sphere. Japan’s cultural influence was compromised, however, as the Japanese empire reached the height of its power in the 1940s. The more force Japan used to spread its empire and the ideology of Pan-Asianism, the more determined many Chinese and Korean nationalists were to extricate their countries from Japanese rule.
Andre Schmid, a historian of Korea, notes: “The appearance and spread of minjok offered writers a powerful conceptual tool to reconsider the nation in multiple ways. The same term served intellectuals in all three countries of East Asia, giving to nationalist writing in East Asia a shared vocabulary and, through this common usage, reinforcing the naturalizing claims of the term to universality.”[3] Consequently, a direct relationship developed between intellectual practices and the burgeoning ideas around nationhood at the turn of the century. The terms minzu, minjok, and minzoku answered the purpose of very different political undertakings in spite of their linguistic and ideological similitude.[4] Politically, “China” and “Korea” in the 1930s had not consolidated as the entities they became decades later. The Republic of China under the Kuomintang faced threats to its integrity from foreign and domestic entities, including the increasingly influential Chinese Communist Party. Being colonized, Korea did not have a polity except for the partially recognized Korean Provisional Government in exile based in Shanghai, but it was by no means the only potential leader of an independent Korea. Japanese state-makers, on the other hand, appropriated the concept of ethnic self-determination in their creation of Manchukuo as a multi-ethnic state. These discrepancies between historically defined ethnic communities and the political realities of ethnic nationalism necessarily conditioned the Chinese and Korean experiences in Manchukuo.
In explaining why Korean nationalism came to center on ethnic identity from the late nineteenth century, Gi-Wook Shin specifies two interrelated processes: “the rise and dominance of ‘nation’ as a major source of collective or categorical identity over nonnational or transnational forms (class, for example), and the rise and establishment of a racialized and ethnicized notion of nation.”[5] Shin highlights this subtle division to remind us that there was no guarantee that, as a form of collective identity, the nation would prevail over other rival forms.[6] He further argues that historians need to study the historical processes “in which the nation rose, was contested, overrode other contending forms of collective or categorical identities, and came to be conflated with ethnicity and race.”[7] This thesis represents collective identities that contended with the Manchukuo state and various notions of the ethnic nation as the predominant forms of community. Chinese and Koreans in Manchuria negotiated multiple forms of collective identity, such as 1) that imposed by Manchukuo nation-builders; 2) the hoped-for outcomes of the minzu and minjok independence movements; 3) the sense of community that stemmed from each group’s respective relationship to Manchuria. The nations that later became the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the Republic of Korea (ROK) overrode the conceptions of identity presented in this thesis, which means that the evidence here may offer insights into the relationships across East Asia before the rise of current nation-states.
Scholars of Manchuria have privileged the nation as the default collective formation based on the minzu and minjok over other conceptualizations. Intellectuals throughout East Asia invoked the minzu and minjok for the purpose of turning it into an objective reality, as described above. Such an interpretation, however, overlooks the function of the intellectual in the particular social environment of Manchukuo. Japanese state-makers based the establishment of Manchukuo on the postulate that a nation-state was the best form of collective identity under circumstances where outright colonization was not possible. The Manchukuo regime therefore impinged upon the nationalist objectives of non-Japanese intellectuals. Under these circumstances, Chinese and Korean thinkers were faced with opportunities to form other kinds of communities.
[1] The three words are represented by the same Chinese characters: 民族.
[2] See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 292 and Andre Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 173-175.
[3] Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 174.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3.
[6] Ibid., 7.
[7] Ibid., 7-8.