Making Borders in Modern East Asia
The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919

Song examines the transformation of East Asia through Tumen River border disputes in a period of disaster, turbulence, and war.

Nianshen Song (Author)

9781107173958, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 May 2018

318 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.65 kg

'All in all, Song stresses that 'boundaries for both territories and people are relative rather than absolute, flexible rather than rigid'. His meticulous analysis richly elucidates this 'polyphonic' nature of boundary making.' Masato Hasegawa, Saksaha

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.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Asian history [HBJF], Regional & national history [HBJ], History [HB]