291 Unchanging Rivers, Changing Borders: Revisiting Modern Northeast Asian History from the Perspective of 'Boundary Delimitation'
Connect the three points of Dandong, Ji'an, and Hunchun, and before your eyes lie the Yalu River, the Tumen River, and a Sino-North Korean border that now appears perfectly clear. But if we turn back the clock to the reigns of the Kangxi and Guangxu emperors, while the rivers remained largely unchanged, the way people understood 'borders' was completely different. Borders have never been merely lines on a map. They also dictate where people come from, where they go, and who has the right to call a piece of land 'ours.' In this episode of Eye on East Asia, Sha Qingqing and Tsinghua University Professor Song Nianshen start from the new book Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919, tracing how the Tumen River basin became a modern border amidst the power struggles between the Qing Dynasty, Korea, Japan, and Russia. What were the differences between the boundary surveys during the Kangxi era and the boundary delimitation at the end of the 19th century? Did international law bring equality, or was it a set of rules for empires to allocate qualifications? How did the Jiandao (Kando) issue, the South Manchuria Railway Company’s investigations, and colonial knowledge redefine land and population? The discussion ultimately lands on the dual identity of the Korean ethnic group in Yanbian, and what history should do when facing contemporary anxieties.
Original Chinese title & description
291 不变的江河，变化的边境：从“划界”视角回看东北亚近代史
把丹东、集安和珲春三个点连起来，眼前是鸭绿江、图们江，以及一条如今看上去再清楚不过的中朝边界。可把时间拨回康熙、光绪，河流大体未改，人们理解“边界”的方式却已经完全不同。边境从来不只是地图上的一条线。它还管人从哪里来、到哪里去，以及谁有资格把一片土地叫作“我们的”。 本期《东亚观察局》，沙青青与清华大学教授宋念申从新书《劃界：在圖們江製造現代東亞（1881–1919）》谈起，追索图们江流域如何在清朝、朝鲜、日本与俄罗斯的角力中变成现代边境。康熙年间的勘界与19世纪末的划界有什么差别？国际法带来的究竟是平等，还是一套由帝国分配资格的规则？间岛、满铁调查和殖民知识又怎样重新定义土地与人口？话题最后落到延边朝鲜族的双重认同，以及历史学面对现实焦虑时，究竟该做什么。
Participation credit “聊天的人”：沙青青（公众号：13号埋立地、小红书：Sha-13号埋立地）。
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