Since the 1990s, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, this volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quests to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.
Author(s): Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, Steven Denney
Series: Asian Borderlands
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 440
City: Amsterdam
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney
Part I: Geography and Borderlands Theory: Framing the Region
1. Illuminating Edges
Borders as Institutions, Process, Space
Edward Boyle
2. On Asian Borders
The Value of Comparative Studies
Elisabeth Leake
3. Regions within the Yalu-Tumen Border Space
From Dandong to the Tumen and Beyond
Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney
Part II: Towards a Methodology of Sino-Korean Border Studies
4. Unification in Action?
The National Identity of North Korean Defector-Migrants: Insights and Implications
Steven Denney and Christopher Green
5. Ethnography and Borderlands
The Socio-political Dimensions of North Korean Migration
Markus Bell and Rosita Armytage
6. Measuring North Korea’s Economic Relationships
Evidence from the Borderlands
Kent Boydston
7. Ink and Ashes
Documenting North Korea’s Mythic Origins in the Border Regions, 1931-1953
Adam Cathcart
Part III: Histories of the Sino-Korean Border Region
8. Revisiting the Forgotten Border Gate
Fenghuang Gate and the Emergence of the Modern Sino-Korean Borderline, 1636-1876
Yuanchong Wang
9. ‘Utopian Speak’
Language Assimilation in China’s Yanbian Korean Borderland, 1958-1976
Dong Jo Shin
10. The Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region 1990
A Journey to the Border in a Time of Flux
Warwick Morris and James (Jim) E. Hoare
Part IV: Contemporary Borderland Economics
11. Change on the Edges
The Rajin-Sonbong Economic and Trade Zone
Théo Clément
12. Tumen Triangle Tribulations
The Unfulfilled Promise of Chinese, Russian, and North Korean Cooperation
Andray Abrahamian
13. Purges and Peripheries
Jang Song-taek, Pyongyang’s SEZ Strategy, and Relations with China
Adam Cathcart and Christopher Green
14. From Periphery to Centre
A History of North Korean Marketization
Peter Ward and Christopher Green
Part V: Human Rights and Identity in the Borderland and Beyond
15. Land of Promise or Peril?
The Sino-North Korea Border Space and Human Rights
Nicholas Hamisevicz and Andrew Yeo
16. Celebrity Defectors
Representations of North Korea in Euro-American and South Korean Intimate Publics
Sarah Bregman
17. North Korean Border-Crossers
The Legal Status of North Korean Defectors in China
Hee Choi
18. The Limits of Koreanness
Korean Encounters in Russo-Chinese Yanbian
Ed Pulford
Afterword
Kevin Gray
Index
List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
Figures
Figure 4.1 North Korean defector-migrant resettlement in South Korea by year
Figure 4.2 Ethnocultural score for the combined North-South Korean sample by country of origin (n = 486; DPRK = ‘treatment’)
Figure 5.1 Niigata harbour; repatriation towards North Korea of Koreans living in Japan
Figure 9.1 From bilingual to monolingual: the campus newspaper of Yanbian University, 1953-1980
Figure 10.1 Korean Air hoarding, Beijing Airport Road Spring 1990; no flights as yet, but getting ready
Figure 10.2 Standard housing in the countryside
Figure 10.3 Businessman off to work through the back streets of Yanji; note shop and restaurant signs in Chinese and Korean
Figure 10.4 Dancing on the banks of the Tumen River, Tumen Town
Figure 10.5 The thriving market in Yanji city
Figure 10.6 Overseen by his mother and a stuffed panda, a small boy prepares for military service on the banks of the Tumen River
Figure 18.1 Quad-lingual, quad-script sign on Hunchun China Mobile outlet
Figure 18.2 Storefronts in Hunchun
Figure 18.3 Russian cake shop
Figures 18.4 and 18.5 Russian- and (Joseonjok) Korean-language books entitled ‘Who are we?’ Note both covers’ mobilisation of canonical symbols of reified ‘culture’, notably architecture and cuisine
Maps
Map 8.1 The Willow Palisade on the Complete Map of Shengjing (Shengjing yudi quantu)
Map 8.2 Fenghuang City, the Fence Gate, and the Yalu River on the Complete Map of Shengjing
Tables
Table 4.1 Regression results
Table 14.1 Terms used to refer to markets and how they operated over time (1945-2002)
Table 14.2 North Korea’s major urban markets circa the late 1990s
Table 14.3 The legality of the acquisition and sale of different products and assets in North Korean markets
Table 15.1 Number of North Korean defectors entering South Korea, 2006-2016
Table 17.2 Estimated populations of defectors and their children in China’s three Northeastern Provinces (Dongbei)
