Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xviii, 284 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-3836-4.
Sovereignty Experiments is a long-awaited monograph which comes amid rising research interest on this tripartite border area in Northeast Asia, which author Alyssa Park terms the “Tumen Valley.” Park’s book primarily aims to provide a truly transnational history of this borderland by focusing on Koreans who were mobile throughout the three countries in the expanse of the Tumen Valley (Korea, China, and Russia). Easy to say but much harder to execute, writing a transnational history of this area involves not only extensive archival research equipped with multi-linguistic competence but also a balanced yet focused view on the history and people. Park has carried out this daunting task in a rigorous and calm manner. The transnational approach adopted in this aspiring work fills a gap formed by the conventional nation and empire-centred historical approaches in predefined regional studies of Northeast Asia (16). The period which the book investigates spans from 1860, when Russia advanced to East Asia, to the eve of Cold War after World War II. Though considerable parts of the book were devoted to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when “sovereignty experiments” were implemented and attempted by the Korean, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese authorities. As the title of the book indicates, the author provides the reader with firm historical evidence on the process of modern formations of national borders, and traces back this process by showing how current boundaries in this Northeast Asian borderland were the result of historical contingencies at the beginning of modern history. The scholastic implication and political importance of this book manifests in the historicization of a contemporary political order which is not “a naturally pre-existing institution or unilaterally imposed upon” (3). In this light, the book does not merely portray Korean migrants as an ethnic group subject to the hosting governments’ policies, but highlights that these migrants participated in the experiment together with “officials, diplomats, [and] explorers” (17), as their migration itself raised “the problem” (16) of sovereignty—the so-called Korean question—in this Northeast Asian borderland.
The book is largely divided in two parts. While the first part, “Across the Tumen Valley,” focuses on the mobility of Koreans who crossed the Tumen River back and forth across the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, Kando, and the Russian Far East, the second part discusses the settled lives of these mobile Koreans in the Russian Far East. The first chapter discusses the pre-history of this borderland which was characterized as a “prohibited zone” by both Qing and Chosun (Joseon). Until Russia entered this borderland scene, international relations between Qing and Chosun was based on a tributary system whereby both courts recognized “each other’s sovereign authority over territory and implicitly understood the two rivers [Yalu and Tumen] as the natural geographical boundary” (39). Despite some difficulties in drawing clear boundaries between the two countries, prohibited zones have been reserved for its natural resources and highly valued ginseng habitat to which indigenous peoples and Koreans had seasonal access without any need to prove their status. It was in 1860 when Russia gained territory from the Russian Far East up to the Tumen River that this old buffer zone was dismantled through an international relations clash between East Asian tributary logic and treatise-based jurisdiction maintained by Russia and other Western powers in East Asia. Park eloquently illustrates how a non-consensus of jurisdiction on “people and place” in this borderland between the three countries in the late nineteenth century has had a lasting impact on subsequent historical developments. In particular, she discusses how this international problem is posed by “incommensurability” between East Asian and European powers and became more complex and complicated on the ground due to various actors’ engagement with this international situation, “taking the law into their own hands” (54). The following two chapters (chapter 3 and 4) show that the question of sovereignty in this borderland of Northeast Asia was tightly linked with control on Korean migrants—not confined to delimit its territory—as a massive influx of Koreans to Manchuria and the Russian Far East made it almost impossible to align territory and people. This fact was further compounded due to Japanese intervention after the Russo-Japanese War, and the problem with colonization on the Russian side. In the second part of the book, chapters 5 and 6 vividly describe village life among Korean migrants in the Ussuri region and how their “transnational life-world” resulted from the “plural jurisdiction” of Tsarist Russia and its need for an Asian labor force. Most interestingly, the book presents much archival evidence showing “self-rule” in Korean villages in the Russian Far East. Chapter 7 discusses Korean nationalists’ activities and Soviet authorities’ policies towards the Korean population in the region. Park sees a parallel between these two modernist endeavors for the enlightenment of Korean migrants. The epilogue briefly summarizes the situation surrounding Koreans in the Russia Far East after the Russian Civil War (1918–1922) ended. As did Tsarist authorities, the Soviet regime also “experimented with multiple ways to govern the population” (245), but in the end concluded its “sovereignty project” (244) by removing all Koreans, as they “embodied” all conflicting “local, national, and global agendas” (246).
Sovereignty Experiments might set new ground for future scholarly work on the transnational border areas of Northeast Asia and beyond. I highly recommend it for those who seriously study interregional history. Many readers would be surprised by the extensive literature and source materials utilized in this book, which is clear evidence for the difficulty not only in research but also in the border-making of this region.
Hyun-Gwi Park
Kyung Hee University, Seoul