专业外语|新书：《Making Borders in Modern East Asia 》

Making Borders in Modern East Asia
The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919

• Author: Nianshen Song, University of Maryland, Baltimore

• Publication planned for: July 2018

• availability: Not yet published - available from July 2018

• format: Hardback

• isbn: 9781107173958

About the Authors：

Nianshen Song, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Nianshen Song is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Description：

Until the late nineteenth century, the Chinese-Korean Tumen River border was one of the oldest, and perhaps most stable, state boundaries in the world. Spurred by severe food scarcity following a succession of natural disasters, from the 1860s, countless Korean refugees crossed the Tumen River border into Qing-China's Manchuria, triggering a decades-long territorial dispute between China, Korea, and Japan. This major new study of a multilateral and multiethnic frontier highlights the competing state- and nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First World War. The power-plays over land and people simultaneously promoted China's frontier-building endeavours, motivated Korea's nationalist imagination, and stimulated Japan's colonialist enterprise, setting East Asia on an intricate trajectory from the late-imperial to a situation that, Song argues, we call modern.

• Examines the making of modern China, Korea, and Japan through trans-regional, local, and competitive perspectives

• Rethinks the meaning territorial, ethnic, racial, and national boundaries

• Provides a historical perspective on international relations in twentieth-century East Asia

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables
Abbreviation of some sources, measures
Acknowledgements
A note on romanization
Introduction: a lost stele and a multivocal river
1. Crossing the boundary: socioecology of the Tumen River region
2. Dynastic geography: demarcation as rhetoric
3. Making 'Kando': the mobility of a cross-border society
4. Taming the frontier: statecraft and international law
5. Boundary redefined: a multilayered competition
6. People redefined: identity politics in Yanbian
Conclusion: our land, our people
Epilogue: Tumen River, the film
Selected bibliography
Index.

Reviews & endorsements

Advance praise: 'The author deftly presents a convoluted tale of frontier settlement on the Sino-Korean border, where Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Japanese states and activists contended for influence. This skillful multilingual study told from multiple perspectives is a model for new imperial histories of Asia.' Peter C. Perdue, Yale University, Connecticut

Advance praise: 'A precise and often beautifully written analysis. Through deep engagement with multiple archives Nianshen Song reveals how competing political and economic forces vied for control over the Tumen River's place in modern East Asia. The study, moreover, urges the need for connection - not division - in the areas of China, Russia, and North Korea that surround this river's course.' Alexis Dudden, University of Connecticut

Advance praise: 'This is a truly groundbreaking book in both theoretical and empirical senses. Extensive multi-archival and multilingual research provides original, provocative, yet still accessible perspectives on such complicated issues as border-making, nation-building, and identity-searching in modern East Asia in general and the 'local space' of the Chinese-Korean frontiers in particular. A historical study of the very best.' Chen Jian, New York University. Shanghai and Cornell University

Advance praise: 'How did a remote frontier in North East Asia become a source of friction and hostility between China, Korea, and Japan for the first half of the twentieth century? In this fascinating local history, Nianshen Song shows how China and Korea - two adjacent, centralized states with a centuries long history of frontier relations - re-negotiated the modern meanings of place and citizenship under the shadow of an imperialist Japan, eager to use the ambiguities of territorial meanings for its own purposes. Using a multi-lingual, multi-national archive, Song recounts the topsy-turvy changes marking China's conversion from a multi-ethnic empire to a nation-state in which Koreans become newly defined as national minorities. This is transnational history that captures both the excitement and tragedies of early twentieth-century East Asian history while offering a rigorous analysis of the shifting spatial conceptions of nation-states. In Song's adept hands, a small corner of Manchuria reveals itself as at the core of the intellectual, political, economic, and social struggles of East Asia's global modernity.' Andre Schmid, University of Toronto