Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 440 pp. (Maps, tables, figures.) US$297.00, cloth, ebook. ISBN 9789462987562.
Contemporary conversations about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) often emphasize the country’s relationship with its much larger political neighbour and ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is well known that the PRC supplies the North Korean state with much of its fuel and food, making this bilateral relationship the DPRK’s most consequential. So for outside observers attempting to peer into the inner workings of this exchange, the roughly 1400-kilometer shared border between the two countries along the Yalu and Tumen Rivers forms a natural place to turn.
This is precisely why Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney’s Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands makes a welcome appearance as the first English-language scholarly edited volume on the region. While acknowledging the inherent difficulties in elucidating the “full breadth of interactions, potential, disconnection, and unresolved history” (17) in the Sino-Korean border region, the editors of this volume nonetheless do an impressive job in gathering eighteen wide-ranging essays that speak to the complex social dynamics, historical and contemporary, of this borderland.
Framed by an editorial introduction and afterword (Kevin Gray) that helpfully lay out the ambitions and structure of the book, the rest of the volume is divided into five sections. The first section starts with a chapter that introduces relevant concepts from border studies (Edward Boyle), and another that compares the Sino-North Korean boundary to border spaces elsewhere in Asia (Elisabeth Leake). A third chapter takes the form of an academic travelogue, with the book editors using insights from their field research to introduce the different sub-regions of the border.
The second of five sections approaches questions of methodology for Sino-North Korean border studies. The DPRK is famously reluctant to share information about its inner workings with outsiders, and the PRC is also not renowned for transparency. Then how does one begin to write an informed and balanced study of the interactions between the two places? Chapters in this section highlight such diverse sources as surveys of North Korean defectors (Denney and Green), defector ethnographies (Markus Bell and Rosita Armytage), Chinese customs data (Kent Boydston), and historical archives (Cathcart). Some chapters could devote more analysis to the limitations of their respective source bases (for example, more critical insight could have been given into the representativeness of defector surveys), but each points to the myriad possibilities that these materials offer for studying the region.
The third section of the book takes three chapters to examine “Histories of the Sino-Korean Border Region.” In the volume’s introduction, the editors state that “the historical element provides our text with a novel and important means…of achieving something new” in analyses of the border (17). Some major topics, such as the borderland’s industrialization under Japanese colonial rule or the impact of the Korean War, remain relatively undiscussed. Nonetheless the three chapters do illuminate many fascinating aspects of the region’s past, including early modern conceptions of the border during the Qing and Chosŏn dynasties (Yuanchong Wang), Cultural Revolution-era Korean language policies in the PRC ethnic Korean enclave of Yanbian (Dong Jo Shin), and the emergence of a new Yanbian during the Reform and Opening up Era, as told through the personal recollections of British diplomat authors Warwick Morris and James E. Hoare.
Questions of Sino-North Korean economic exchange come naturally enough for observers of the region, and the fourth section tries to address this interest by focusing on Special Economic Zones (SEZs), regions of capitalist experimentation where the DPRK attempts to concentrate foreign investment. Borderland SEZs examined in this book include Rajin-Sonbong on the Sino-DPRK-Russian border (Théo Clément), the larger “Tumen Triangle,” including Rajin (Andray Abrahamian), and Hwanggumpyeong and Wihwa Islands on the Yalu River border (Cathcart and Green). While the dynamics of each SEZ differ slightly, the authors broadly agree on their limited efficacy in effecting major economic change within the DPRK. Following this discussion, the fourth section concludes with a chapter-length overview of marketization in the DPRK (Ward and Green). Like the other SEZ-focused chapters, the authors’ approach here is more qualitative than quantitative, and readers interested in more numerical data on the Sino-North Korean economic relationship would be advised to look elsewhere.
The final group of chapters largely focuses on another topic that consumes the interest of Western observers of the Sino-North Korean borderland: human rights, especially the fate of North Korean defectors who cross the Yalu and Tumen River borders into Northeast China. The thorny, and oft-times life-or-death, question of what to call these border crossers is one addressed in chapters by Nicholas Hamisevicz and Andrew Yeo as well as Hee Choi. They note that the Chinese insistence on labeling these North Koreans “economic migrants” allows for the PRC government to ignore international refugee conventions and repatriate defectors back to North Korea, where they face certain punishment. Also noted is the threat of sexual violence faced by defectors in Northeast China, a majority of whom are women. The section is rounded out by a chapter on the competing receptions of “celebrity defectors” in the West and South Korea (Sarah Bregman), and a final chapter that moves beyond human rights to consider flexible meanings of “Koreanness” among ethnic Korean Chinese and Russians in the Tumen River borderland (Ed Pulford).
The editors of this volume claim that “in comparison with the historical weight and palpable meaning of the inter-Korean boundary, the [Sino-Korean] border… is of modest significance” (14). After reading through this volume though, I would have to disagree. Certainly the DMZ occupies a prominent place in the outside imagination of a divided Korea. But if the intra-Korean border is a place where peninsular change seems occluded by reams of barbed wire, then the (comparatively) more porous Sino-Korean border is a place where different kinds of futures can be imagined. For that reason, scholars interested in the future of both China and North Korea would do well to consult the insights of this exciting new work.
Joseph A. Seeley
University of Virginia, Charlottesville