Challenges of Subalternity on the Northeast Asian Frontier

Abstract

Challenges of Subalternity on the Northeast Asian Frontier Sören Urbansky Jon K. Chang, Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East. 276 pp. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0824856786. $68.00. Victor Zatsepine, Beyond the Amur: Frontier Encounters between China and Russia, 1850–1930. 240 pp. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0774834094. $80.00. Until the fall of the Qing and Romanov dynasties, China and Russia shared the longest land border in the world. In addition to its vastness—cutting through the Siberian taiga, the steppes of Mongolia, and the Central Asian mountain ranges—this border was special in many ways. It not only divided the two largest Eurasian empires, but it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and sedentary people mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia and later the Soviet Union clashed with those of Qing and Republican China and Japan, and where the world’s two largest communist regimes hailed their friendship and staged their enmity. During the past century, tightly patrolled borders gradually replaced the once open and vaguely demarcated interimperial frontier. With this transformation, contacts across borders faded and left no room for people with hybrid identities and vague notions of belonging. Despite its pivotal role in world history, its radical changes over time, and the growth of a general academic interest in frontiers and borderlands, the intersecting periphery of the Chinese and Russian empires in Northeast Asia has not yet received the scholarly attention among historians it deserves. Two new books fill some of the blank spots on the history of this region. Victor Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur traces the history of the distinctive frontier [End Page 867] society of Russians, Chinese, and indigenous people along the vast Amur River and its tributaries at the turn of the century. Jon K. Chang’s Burnt by the Sun explores the fate of the Korean diaspora in the Russian Far East from korenizatsiia to deportation. Chang and Zatsepine both argue in different ways that people and states were responsible for the transformation of this region from an open interimperial periphery into a full-fledged borderland of nation-states in the modern sense—that is, a landscape divided by congruent lines of economic, political, ethnic, and cultural differences. ________ The monographs are two fairly typical examples of a shift in historical writing in which frontiers and borderlands are no longer seen as peripheral. Building on works of geographers and anthropologists as well as the pioneering historical works of Frederick Jackson Turner and Herbert Eugene Bolton, historians have turned their attention to the margins of nation-states and empires from the Americas to Southeast Asia.1 Recent scholarship adopts cross-cultural perspectives, thereby pushing historiography away from center-periphery interpretations of frontiers and borderlands toward developments in the peripheries.2 This trend can also be observed in emerging scholarship on borderlands edging China and Russia.3 Research on the history of their interimperial frontier in Northeast Asia, however, mainly exists in the form of general surveys, [End Page 868] with minimal interest given to the locality and the people.4 Books on the history of diplomatic relations focus on Russian imperial expansion and Qing reactions to it but ignore the people in the peripheries as a factor in their relations.5 To the present day, the majority of regional histories conceive the interimperial frontier and emerging borderland between the Chinese and Russian empires as their outermost peripheries—if the area figures in their analysis at all—but not as a meeting place of their different peoples. Scholarship on Russian regional history of the territories between Lake Baikal and the Pacific has largely been general.6 Though marking a more thoroughly researched field, a similar trend exists in scholarship on the history of China’s Northeast. Some monographs explore the region’s position within the political mapping of the Chinese Empire.7 Others address the [End Page 869] imperial rivalry between Russia, Japan and China,8 with a strong focus on the Manchukuo period.9 Most of the scholarship is informed by a top-down perspective, in which...