Borders, Mobile Koreans, and the Making of Modern Northeast Asia

In 1999, Kim Chi-ŭn, a North Korean doctor, crossed the frozen Tumen River into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Suffering from cold and hunger, she sought help in a nearby farming village, inhabited by many ethnic Koreans. Along with Kim, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans left the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for China during the difficult years of the 1990s and early 2000s. Some stayed temporarily while others sought to leave their homeland forever. The influx of North Koreans raised all sorts of questions in both China and beyond: Should the PRC government simply repatriate them immediately? Should it acknowledge their economic- or even political-refugee status and allow them to stay in China? Who got to decide these matters? The PRC alone? The DPRK? The international community?

Two recent books, Niansheng Song’s Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 and Alyssa Park’s Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945, remind us that these issues are nothing new. Together, these works provide explanations for not only why there was a Korean population in China ready to welcome Dr. Kim in 1999 but also why and how the Tumen River came to be understood as the border between the DPRK and China (and Russia). Perhaps even more significantly, these books also illustrate the process by which ideas of borders themselves and the right or obligation of states to claim responsibility and jurisdiction for their citizens came into being. Rather than emerging inexorably from the spread to Asia of Western notions of sovereignty, nationhood, and citizenship—a process that is often understood to have been dominated by government and capital elites—the formation of the Tumen River border and the determination of what to do with the people who crossed it arose out of a multi-valent series of interactions in the borderlands themselves. Taken together, these works help transform our understanding not only of a geographically limited region of Northeast Asia but of the advent of modernity itself.

Song’s and Park’s works overlap considerably. Both examine Korean movement across the Tumen in roughly the same region in more or less the same time period. However, there are some significant differences. Song tends to focus more on territory and the evolution of legal, cartographic, and historical theories that undergird concepts of land and sovereignty, as well as the repeated contestation of each of these categories by the various powers involved. Park tends to focus more on people, in particular “mobile Koreans,” and the ways in which different states sought to define, regulate, and exercise jurisdiction over them. Song’s source base is impressively wide-ranging; he consults Chinese, Korean, and Japanese primary and secondary sources. Park brings a treasure trove of Russian-language sources to view; the result is, particularly in the second half of her book, a rich description not only of the Korean population in Russia’s Maritime Province, particularly in Vladivostok and in the Poset district immediately adjacent to the Tumen, but also of the Chinese and Russian migrants in the region. Park charts a fairly straightforward progression from a system predicated on historical relations in which jurisdictions overlapped to a system in which international law—particularly the idea of extraterritoriality—played an increasing role and finally to the naturalization of state authority in which states categorized all people within their borders as citizens, subjects, or foreigners. In many ways, Song’s narrative mirrors this progression, but he emphasizes how contingent and overlapping these processes were.

Reading the two books in tandem results, then, in a complementary whole that is in many respects...