Paper Title: Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914-1945
Panel Titles: Surveying the Nation: Re-discovering the ‘People’ in China’s Republican Era (1912-1949) for AHA (CHUS) 2025
Transregional Colonial and Commercial Interactions of Northeast Asia in Manchuria: From the 15th Century to the 20th Century for AAS 2025
Paper Abstract: This study focuses on the migration projects of China and Japan in Manchuria from the 1910s to the 1940s to claim sovereignty over this land. It employs the term “competing colonialities” to characterize this particular piece of migration history, for both the Republican Chinese governments, intellectuals, and Japanese colonial authorities have used the phrase “colonize” (Ch. zhibian; Jp. takushoku) to define their respective migration projects. These two parallel colonial enterprises clashed in 1931, when the Manchurian Incident broke out, and the state of Manchukuo was established the next year. Although the Republic of China lost its control over Manchuria until 1945, the ROC government transformed its coloniality into a rhetoric of “national humiliation” (guochi). At the same time, the Japanese promoted the independence of the state of Manchukuo from China, transforming Japanese coloniality into the ideology of “Harmony of the Five Races” (gozoku kyōwa). This study argues that underneath the myths of nation and empire, migrants were the central pillars to the macro-level processes of their border-making, while migrants in Manchuria themselves have also taken advantage of Chinese and Japanese colonialities at the micro-level to create myths of their own. I attempt to reexamine the role of the Chinese state in migration history of Manchuria from the lens of “internal colonization”, in comparison with the role individual Japanese migrants/migration organizations have played in the state-led settler-colonization of Manchuria.