Making Borders in Modern East Asia
Subtitle: Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919
Publisher: University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9781107173958
Subjects: China, boundaries; China, foreign relations, korea; Korea, foreign relations; China, foreign relations, japan; Japan, foreign relations, china
Description: "Making Borders in Modern East Asia 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"--