My Love from the Mountain: Contingent bordering processes at Mount Changbai/Baekdu

Abstract

Critical examinations of the enduring geographical myth of natural borders challenge the technical approach toward borders that tempts us to think about and act in the world in exclusively territorial and geometric terms. Drawing insights from and seeking to contribute to existing literature on the reification, naturalisation, and fetishisation of borders, this two‐part paper presents a unique case study of contingent bordering processes at Mount Changbai/Baekdu in the China–Korea Borderland. The first part investigates the making and remaking of the China–Korea border from the late 17th century to the 20th century, to reveal how the narratives of Mount Changbai/Baekdu as a “holy mountain” and a “natural border” were conceived and imposed to legitimise the Manchu‐Qing Chinese and Chosŏn‐Korean regimes respectively, and how these narratives were challenged and superseded in subsequent social and political circumstances. The second part investigates the complex ways these narratives have been appropriated by examining contemporary bordering processes as revealed in the commodification of mineral water, with a particular focus on the development of two brands of bottled water, one South Korean and one Chinese, both extracted from the Chinese side of Mount Changbai/Baekdu. This paper highlights the distinctiveness of non‐Western border concepts and practices, and the importance of making reference to them when discussing border and territorial issues in specifically Asian contexts with diverse traditions of territorial governance. It also points out the pressing need to investigate the contemporary socio‐economic implications of the complex intertwining of history, memory, and identity in borderlands. This is particularly the case given the surge of domestic and foreign corporate investment flowing into Asia’s borderland regions, transforming 20th‐century economic backwaters into 21st‐century hotbeds of resource exploitation and commodity production, even while the “ghosts of borderland’s past” continue to bedevil relations between cultures that have no contemporary physical borders.