The Role of the Intellectual in Manchukuo Nation-Building

The following post is Part V in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers may find it helpful to begin here. Below I discuss what it meant to be an intellectual in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and why it is important for scholars of Manchukuo to keep definitions of the intellectual at the forefront of their work.

The unfixed nature of the concepts of minzu and minjok signal another crucial term for this study: the intellectual. What it meant to be Chinese or Korean directly related to role of the intellectual in East Asia in the 1930s. After all, intellectuals led the production of self-knowledge for the propagation of the minzu and minjok. Because of the important social role they played, the concept of the intellectual has been an essential element in cultural, political, and societal studies of early twentieth-century East Asia.

Many factors contributed to the emergence of “intellectuals” in China and Korea, and literary production in Manchuria was inextricably linked to these larger trends.[1] Central to the transformation of the role of the educated elite from pre-modern scholar-officials to modern social commentators was the idea of the nation promulgated by the West and mediated through Japan. The national idea, as it has come to be called, not only came to dominate the objectives of intellectuals to renew their respective societies, but also their methods of social enlightenment. With the intrusion of Western countries came a prototypical modern life and new technology. Intellectuals inspired awareness through mass media in the form of printed materials, newspapers, and radio, thereby enabling a sense of national identity, a process underlined in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.[2] Moreover, as Ernest Gellner argues in Nations and Nationalism, the nation leveled differences like class, status, and gender to a certain degree.[3] As self-appointed purveyors of cultural symbols and knowledge about the character of the minzu and minjok, intellectuals in East Asia played a major role in conceptualizing what exactly could be constituted as “Chinese” or “Korean.”

In Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, Andre Schmid argues that Korean intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century negotiated a path between a dying Chinese imperial order and a rising Japanese empire. Schmid makes two points particularly relevant to this study. Firstly, he argues that Korean intellectuals engaged with writing and ideas from the old Sinocentric order and the new Japanese imperial order. Invariably, being an intellectual during the early twentieth century therefore meant employing what Schmid calls “cultural strategies” that involved measuring oneself against neighboring communities.[4] Schmid’s positioning of Korea serves as a reminder that Manchuria was also located between Chinese and Japanese civilizing discourses. The symbiotic relationship of Manchuria with the Korean peninsula further illustrates that the discourses earlier intellectuals had used in “identify[ing] just what denoted their particular nation as Korean” likewise affected how Koreans in Manchuria viewed themselves.[5] Discourses originating in Korea likewise affected Chinese intellectuals in Manchuria.

Secondly, Schmid considers the content of newspaper writing paramount to imagining the nation. “Precisely the formation of particular ways of understanding and ordering the nation determines the direction of nationalist movements, the activities of its members, and the participation of the nation-state in the broader global arena.”[6] Schmid otherwise refers to such media content as self-knowledge and argues that it laid the foundation for nationalist movements during the colonial 1930s and after 1945. The current dissertation draws on Schmid’s vocabulary of content and self-knowledge because it defogs the misty lens of ethno-nationalist sentiment. If early configurations of nationalism in Korea and elsewhere were constructed through intellectual discourse, as Schmid argues, then it follows that writers in Manchuria worked for a similar purpose.

Lydia Liu, a literary scholar of China, recounts a process for Chinese not unlike that of early modern Korean. Rather than newspaper content, Liu analyzes literary works, because literature and writing eventually became the site where intellectuals focused their efforts to articulate the national character (guominxing).[7] Liu points out that the discourse of guominxing, though informed by a Chinese context, revolved around Western notions of nation and nationhood. Like the concept of the “intellectual,” the early modern definitions of guominxing and the word “literature” (wenxue) were impacted by what Liu refers to as translingual practice, whereby “new words, meanings, and discourses arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the target language because of, or in spite of, the latter’s contact—or collision—with the source language.”[8] In other words, Chinese intellectuals employed literature as a legitimate means to make manifest their visions of collective identity, which were dependent on the national idea.

The importance of nation-building discourses, including that of literature as a tool for defining national character, undoubtedly affected Manchuria’s educated elite. However, the writers featured in this thesis, though generally well-educated, cannot be considered elite as such. Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria recognized their positions as outliers both in relation to the Japanese imperial hierarchy and in relation to their counterparts in central China and the Korean peninsula. Moreover, social relations between local Chinese inhabitants and Korean migrants had been strained for decades, so these thinkers were duly aware of their (often negative) (pre)conceptions of each other. The value of the non-Japanese intellectuals who worked in Manchuria lies in their subjectivity as spokespeople for their communities and in the ways they interacted.

In order to understand the interconnected nature of intellectual ideas and the social conditions from which they are born, Timothy Cheek suggests recovering “the questions of the day.”[9] Under the rule of the Japanese, one inevitable question for Chinese and Korean intellectuals in Manchuria was “who are we now that Manchukuo exists?” Even though Chinese and Korean intellectuals were equipped with a similar vocabulary of nations and nationalism, their positions in relation to one another depended on how Manchukuo impacted their work. For this reason, I argue that Manchukuo offered a framework for cross-cultural production, under which Chinese and Korean writers had opportunities to negotiate their social relations with each other.

Schmid’s notion that self-knowledge equates to national knowledge is problematic in the context of Manchukuo. Non-Japanese intellectuals were privy to their own productive value vis-à-vis the national idea, but desired to “establish sovereignty over their own labor.”[10] The question for intellectuals then becomes, for what purpose(s), and to what effect(s), did they wield their productive value?  For the purpose of this thesis, I treat the intellectual in Manchuria as a social actor. The two cases presented in this thesis are contingent on what Cheek refers to as “worlds of intellectual life,” which can include the metropolitan elite, provincial elite, and the nonelite, or “local intellectuals with the skills, interests, and activities clearly representative of the everyday lives of most of China’s thinkers and writers but not widely influential.”[11] Within these levels also exist worlds shaped by social experience: popular culture or “voices from the land,” women’s worlds, and “worlds of affinity” such as ethnic minorities or self-chosen identities.[12] By thus delineating a clear conceptualization of the intellectual in Manchuria, we can begin to understand the kinds of communities Chinese and Korean writers imagined.

Significantly, the concept of “intellectual worlds” leads Cheek to discern between urban and rural publics. He describes these cross-cutting worlds as a “matrix of spatial interaction and social experience” that provides the framework of intellectual life.[13] According to Cheek, local thinkers sought as much to answer the questions of the day as their urban counterparts, and they used their discursive powers to shape new social and spatial realities.[14] The Chinese and Korean writers discussed in Case Study 1 worked in Manchukuo’s cities, an environment structured for the dissemination of the national idea. In what this study treats as a direct correlation, scholarship on Manchukuo’s intellectual history has focused precisely on works produced in urban environments. In contrast, the NAUA songwriters are representatives of the non-elite intellectual world, or in other words, the rural public that Cheek describes.

Chang-Tai Hung, a historian of popular and folk musical culture, acknowledges the discursive power of communist music as “an activating force in shaping the minds and hearts of the people and a determinant of historical reality.”[15] Hung further asserts that military songs from the War of Resistance, as well as their later collections, are “highly selected public documents intended to provide justification for a specific political agenda.”[16] Similarly, the NAUA songs contain important discourse about social life in Manchukuo that were often veiled in urban writing. Regarding Chinese and Korean intellectual interaction, in particular, the NAUA songs reveal that one aspect of their political agenda was precisely to bring the two communities together. Such was not the priority for urban writers, as the intertextual analysis in Case Study 1 will demonstrate. These differences show that Korean and Chinese writers in Manchuria determined their own intellectual value, a value that was not wholly connected to nationalist sentiment.    

[1] Timothy Cheek notes that the concept of “intellectual,” articulated through the modern Chinese word, zhishifenzi, came from the Russian word “intelligentsia.” Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5.

[2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. edn. (New York: Verso, 2006).

[3] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press, 2008), 62.

[4] Ibid., 3-4. See also Tikhonov, Modern Korea and Its Others.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] Schmid, Korea Between Empires, 6.

[7] Liu, Translingual Practice, 50.

[8] Ibid., 6 and 273 for the translingual practice of wenxue.

[9] Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, 16.

[10] Park, Two Dreams in One Bed, 196.

[11] Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History, 10-11.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 92-96.

[14] Ibid., 10-11 and 16.

[15] Chang-Tai Hung, “The Politics of Songs: Myths and Symbols in the Chinese Communist War Music, 1937-1949,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 903.

[16] Ibid., 907.