Archive | 2019
Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945
Abstract
The pivotal importance of migration control in the formation of modern statehood has been well documented. The North Atlantic bias in the literature, however, has been persistent. Alyssa M. Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments offers a much-needed correction in this regard, bringing Northeast Asia, maritime Russia, and intracontinental movement in the region to bear on this multidisciplinary comparative scholarship. Based on transnational and multilingual research, it demonstrates how the mobility of Koreans in borderlands in Northeast Asia catalyzed the emergence of modern sovereignty by forcing Chosŏn Korea, Qing China, and czarist Russia to grapple with the relationship between state, territory, and people in new ways. Readers familiar with the parallel development in Europe and North America1 will encounter similar dynamics: the diffusion of technologies of modern migration governance (e.g., border guards, custom checkpoints, passports, and visas) through competitive coordination between states involved (chapters 3 and 4); the critical role that prevalent racial anxieties about “uncivilized” Asians played in the development of these technologies (chapters 4 and 6); and the increasing preoccupation with “illegal” migration, leading to extreme measures when compounded by geopolitical concerns (chapters 4, 6, and epilogue). Readers will also learn about the distinctive characteristics of the “sovereignty experiments” in the region: the presence of long-standing centralized bureaucratic states, embedded in the centuries-old tributary relationship, which posed a unique challenge to czarist Russia in its eastern borderlands (chapters 1 and 2); the incommensurability between the Confucian body politics and the Western interstate system, which produced memorable diplomatic encounters between Chosŏn Korea and czarist Russia (chapter 2); the conflict between two nationalizing empires, Russia and Japan, that competitively claimed mobile Koreans as their own while remaining paranoid about their allegiance (chapters 3, 4, and epilogue); and the frontier character of the region that enabled migrants, entrepreneurs, bandits, exiles, and paramilitary groups to partake in these “sovereignty experiments” as actively as state officials and diplomats (throughout the book). By making the Tumen Valley—a region spanning the contiguous areas of the Maritime Province in Russia, Jilin Province in China, and Hamgyŏng Province in northern Korea—a unit of analysis, Park overcomes the prevalent nationalist historiography on transborder Koreans. Whether it takes the form of prioritizing the narrative of “a politically active group of émigrés” and “portray[ing] Koreans in China or Russia . . . as tethered to an ethnic Korean homeland” or highlighting the progressive integration of the Korean “model minority” into their adopted countries in a teleological and triumphalist fashion, such nation-centric stories unwarrantedly assume “the existence of discrete and stable Korean, Chinese, and Russian identities” (p. 14). Park instead traces the