Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945 by Alyssa M. Park (review)

After the Second Opium War, Russia moved to the South to annex Ussuri in 1860, an area formerly part of China's territory. The annexation led the Tumen Valley, which Ussuri faces, to become a converging point where three territorial borders met—that of China, Chosŏn, and Russia. Soon after the 1904 Russo-Japanese War and Japan's annexation of Chosŏn completed in 1910, Japan's encroachment into the region caused more confusion about and trouble with the border control and recognition of insiders and outsiders, subjects and aliens among the four countries. During the years (1860–1945), the Tumen Valley emerged as a contentious borderland where multiple jurisdictions and complex state controls were intensively competing.

Alyssa Park's Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945 is a great scholarly accomplishment that tells us about the multifaceted border making processes and subject identifying politics in the Tumen Valley, by looking into the role of Korean migrants in reshaping each country's sovereignty practices—Park calls it "sovereignty experiments." This particular borderland, as a formerly "prohibited zone" by the Qing government, had remained strategically empty allowing peace and stability across the region for years. However, as the modern nation states rose and multiple jurisdictions needed clarification over the membership and citizenship with neighboring countries, previously uncontrolled border crossing activities came to be governed under new agreements and numerous treaties that aimed to manage the people as a legible being for the tax levy, military duty, labor market, and land uses. Sovereignty Experiments opens our eyes to the multiple experiments of sovereignty in a form of state authority through legal practices, statesmanship, and diplomacy. But it also highlights the experiments on migrant bodies and cultural practices imposed by the hosting states (China and Russia) as well as the homeland (Chosŏn). Alyssa Park successfully unpacks the complex border crossing history in accordance with the rapid geopolitical shifts and racial ethnic dynamics applied to "Sovereignty experiments" as following.

First, the sovereignty experiment was exercised through population control on the border. Between China and Chosŏn, the two rivers—Tumen and Yalu—were considered ambiguous but geo-political borders in the area. Even though the early Chosŏn built forts to mark and protect the border, Koreans secretively crossed the border for timber, mining, and especially ginseng collection. Yet, the growing negotiations and treaties among the surrounding countries—exemplified by the 1689 Sino-Russian treaty, Russia's 1860 annexation of Ussuri, the 1881 Qing-Chosŏn agreement on the Korean settlement in China, Chosŏn's sending of missionaries to Russia in 1882, and the 1888 Chosun-Russia treaty—enabled each country to control and manage the migrants under their own sovereign rules. That is, on the one hand, the treaties attempted to fix the ambiguous control over border crossing bodies. On the other, they continuously left border control ambiguous for practical reasons. For example, Korean migrants were unwelcomed to Russia in the early phase of migration—perceived as uncivil, lazy, dirty, and uneducated aliens (Chapter 4). Yet, they were welcomed since Koreans were good at reclaiming the lands with diligence. Therefore, simple deportation was not an option either. In particular, while Russia considered Asians the "uncivilized alien"—crude and impenitent with questionable loyalty (p. 203), the Russian government issued a bilet (visa) to the increasing migrants from China and Chosŏn as a temporary resident. In the process of naturalization, however, the Russian government collected fees from Koreans for sanitization measures and public health (p. 139) and banned Koreans from getting employed and getting land leased in 1907 (p. 141). Park's observations on sovereignty experiments is extended from the authority's legal practices to the body politics and cultural practices exerted on the migrants in the name of Russification to civilize Koreans with the concept of hygiene, morality, and love of the nation (p. 221).

The embracing and excluding of migrants culminated in the way that Qing China was controlling Korean migrants whose membership was confusing between China, Chosŏn, and Japan. In China, Koreans, as a useful source of land reclamation and cultivation, were asked to...