Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland: Manchus, Manchoukuo, and Manchuria, 1907–1985 by Shao Dan (review)

Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland is a rich and compelling examination of human and territorial transformation that charts the complex process by which the territory of Manchuria and with it the Manchu people were reterritorialized and ethnonationally reimagined over the course of the twentieth century. At the center of this study is the question of how, as the author phrases it, “Manchus were redefined from conquerors of China to colonized people in Manchoukuo, and finally as the core members of one of the PRC’s minority groups, ‘Manzu’” (p. xxi). Three dynamics were instrumental within this process, Shao contends, encompassing the deterritorialization and provincializiation of Manchuria in the late Qing, the remaking of national and ethnic boundaries during the cataclysmic Sino-Japanese conflicts of the past century, and the power of the postimperial Chinese state to ascribe categories. Chronologically, the study is framed by two events. The first, in 1907, was the commencement of the provincialization of Manchuria, wherein longstanding policies of differential administration were, at least in theory, replaced with those that would bring the northeast under the same systems and protocols of administration as China proper. The second, in 1987, was the formation of the Xinbin Manzu Autonomous County in Liaoning Province, which for Shao exemplifies something of a culmination of, or at least a benchmark for, the historical process addressed in her study.

The questions addressed in Shao’s study have received relatively less scholarly attention than, for example, parallel questions in Xinjiang and Tibet. As Shao argues, the paucity of scholarship is due in large part to the way in which the Manchus themselves have been framed historically, politically, and historiographically. As compared with the charged political question of territoriality in both Tibet and Xinjiang, regions in which historians are inevitably confronted with the question of how to understand the Qing and China as colonial powers, Manchuria and its vicissitudes have been more neatly categorized under the rubric of territory once lost and now regained. When viewed through the nation-statist lens of irredentism, and often unspoken assumptions regarding the seemingly excusable desire for the redemption of lost sovereignty, questions of denaturalizing Chinese political claims regarding the hoary inseparability of Manchuria from eastern political centers have registered far less than scholarship on western borderlands. A second reason for the paucity of scholarship pertains to the longstanding issue of sinicization—specifically, the notion that Manchus have long since been absorbed into the majority Han’s cultural and linguistic ways, and, as such, command far less attention than other members of China’s unified, multiethnic country. Rather than treading this well-worn path, however, Shao is keen to historicize Manchurian territoriality, Manchu identity, and, as she phrases it eloquently, “historical paths not taken and nations not formed” (p. 6).

Shao’s study is divided into three parts, each encompassing two to three chapters. The first part focuses primarily on the Qing; the second on Japanese imperialism, the Republic of China, and the People’s Republic; and the third on the question of historical memory and personal narrative. The twofold burden of chapter 1, which the author tackles admirably, is to demonstrate key differences between the lives of Manchus living in Manchuria and those living in China proper, as well as to capture the ways in which Manchus in China proper regarded Manchuria itself. To this end, Shao outlines multiple ways in which Manchu-Han relations in Manchuria differed from what many have come to assume about Manchu-Han relations in general. In Manchuria, bannermen were less dependent upon court-administered stipends, supplementing their incomes through engagement in agriculture—which in turn brought them into closer economic relations with the local Han population. Unlike the systems of spatial segregation common in China proper, moreover, in which walled garrisons served as concrete, daily reminders to the populace of a wide array of differential policies, such...