Making Borders in Modern East Asia

Until the late nineteenth century the Chinese-Korean Tumen River border was one of the oldest and perhaps most stable state boundaries in the world. Spurred by severe food scarcity following a succession of natural disasters from the 1860s countless Korean refugees crossed the Tumen River border into Qing-China''s Manchuria triggering a decades-long territorial dispute between China Korea and Japan. This major new study of a multilateral and multiethnic frontier highlights the competing state- and nation-building projects in the fraught period that witnessed the Sino-Japanese War the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War. The power-plays over land and people simultaneously promoted China''s frontier-building endeavours motivated Korea''s nationalist imagination and stimulated Japan''s colonialist enterprise setting East Asia on an intricate trajectory from the late-imperial to a situation that Song argues we call modern.