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.
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.