Contemporary Chinese Studies. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. x, 299 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7748-3290-8.
To paraphrase renowned American sinologist Owen Lattimore, the region of Manchuria has historically been a “cradle of conflict” for various contested sovereignties, including Manchu and Russian imperialism, Japanese fascism, and Soviet and Chinese communism (4). While numerous historical monographs have focused on political development in the region, there is still, however, a dearth of studies that consider the effect of Manchuria’s natural environment therein—a gaping hole in the scholarship that Empire and Environment in the Making of Manchuria seeks to fill. This volume, then, explores the impact of both empire and environment on the region of Manchuria through 10 scholarly essays that span almost 400 years of regional history, illustrating through rich anecdotal and archival evidence that “imperial rivalries and socio-economic upheaval are significantly conditioned by existing ecological parameters” (12).
The essays in Empire and Environment are organized chronologically, starting with Diana Lary’s overview of Manchuria over the longue durée. Like the three Canadian Prairie provinces, harsh climactic extremes and rich natural resources have greatly impacted migration history in Manchuria. However, the latter has observed a great deal more political contestation, most notably in the relentless foreign and civil wars that plagued the region between 1895 and 1949 (47). Manchuria was far from politically or ecologically static before 1895, though, as shown by David Bello and Loretta Kim’s essays on the unique challenges faced and strategies employed by the Qing Dynasty in extracting natural resources “by the optimal employment of native populations” from the Northeast (82). Bello effectively demonstrates the importance of sable pelts to the Qing tributary system in the late seventeenth century in response to the Romanovs’ own competing tributary system, the agency of borderland tribes, and evolving ecological conditions in the Northeast (74). Kim addresses the various causes cited by nomadic populations in the Northeast from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries as explanations for their failure to meet designated tribute quotas, reasoning that the Qing had no choice but to respond flexibly to the “irregularities” of human error, natural causes, and composite causes in order to continue to benefit from the Northeast’s rich natural resources (101).
As the Qing empire’s political authority over the Northeast weakened, both Russia and Japan expanded their economic and political influence in the region. The subsequent four essays in the volume focus on the role of the natural environment in the Russian and Japanese projects to create and maintain an “East Asian modern” in Manchuria through the modernizing agendas of “colonization, settlement, and agricultural development” (114). In his case study on the controversial Anda experimental dairy farm, Blaine Chiasson draws attention to the post-1917 Russian efforts to find a new raison d’être for the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) in the Northeast and how the different meanings invested in the land and its resources by Chinese and Russian farmers ultimately led to conflict (126–127).
Norman Smith, Annika Culver, and Kathyrn Meyer’s essays on Manchukuo highlight both the portrayal of the natural environment in Japanese propaganda and the unsavoury details of colonial occupation that were too often left unmentioned (16–17). Smith examines propaganda efforts to pursue “ideal human winter health” in the harsh Manchurian winters and how a push to shift local lifestyles from hibernation to active engagement with the great outdoors represented the influence of eugenics on policy making (132–133). Culver analyzes the visual cultural representations of Manchuria in the South Manchurian Railway’s Manchurian Graph, arguing that the shift in the portrayal of Manchuria as a “right-wing proletarian utopia” to a bastion of militaristic, productive power represents the fascist Japanese state’s evolving visions of both the land and the role to be played by its Japanese settlers (172). Meyer draws attention to a Japanese architectural survey of a dilapidated courtyard house that gave shelter to Harbin’s floating population, claiming that the 300-page report on the slum, ironically named “Garden of Grand Vision,” exposes the nature of Japanese occupation both in its “paternalistic gaze of the agents of empire” and the conditions to which the most vulnerable victims of war and empire were reduced (181).
The final three essays deal with the historical aftermath of the puppet-state of Manchukuo during the Chinese Civil War and the land reclamation projects of the Mao era, highlighting the complex interactions between man and environment in Manchuria’s agricultural and industrial development. Ronald Suleski argues that the set of interviews comprising the Shimoina project, in which elderly Japanese from Nagano prefecture portray themselves as “victims of the national policy of the Manchuria emigration scheme,” provides an important contrast to the dominant, official narrative in postwar Japan that viewed Manchukuo with patriotic nostalgia (214). Wang Ning contrasts the experiences of Qing and PRC exiles who suffered internal banishment to the harsh Northeast to show that unlike Qing exiles, PRC exiles had a shocking lack of agency as they were “forced into manual labor and stripped of their social status” under a totalitarian regime (242–243). Lastly, Sun Xiaoping focuses on the PRC’s militarized rhetoric of land reclamation in “Beidahuang,” or the “Great Northern Wilderness,” and how this effort to “turn demobilized veterans into re-masculinized heroes” was economically successful but ecologically disastrous (249–250).
Overall, Empire and Environment provides a rich array of scholarship that demonstrates the dynamic relationship between Manchuria’s natural environment and a variety of distinctive cultures and political regimes over time. However, although there are essays that portray Manchuria as a contested region from the perspectives of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union; the Qing Dynasty, Republican China, and the PRC; Manchukuo and post-1945 Japan, the Korean perspective is surprisingly absent. Granted, Suk-jung Han’s compelling argument that “Manchukuo incubated the leadership of both Koreas” is acknowledged (10), but there are no corresponding essays to expand on this. Including an essay on a facet of the Korean experience, such as the northern migration of Korean farmers under the aegis of Japanese colonialism, would have further enriched this well-researched, informative collection of diverse scholarly insights on empire and environment in Manchuria.
Emily Matson
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA