Expanding the Japanese empire to the Manchurian frontier: Immigration and ethnicity in the South Manchuria railway towns

Abstract

Introduction For centuries, the northeast region beyond China’s Great Wall was a vast frontier dominion of the Chinese Empire, a peripheral dependency that had been populated from very early times by the ancestors of the Manchus, so in historical foreign usage, it was commonly referred to as “Manchuria.”1 After having conquered the China of the Mings and establishing the Manchu’s Qing dynasty in 1644, the Manchu officials in Beijing identified Manchuria as their ancestral homeland and adopted a policy of closing it to the world, isolating it from the rest of China. As a consequence, a large part of the region still remained sparsely settled and undeveloped at the end of the nineteenth century, when it captured the imperial imaginations of the surrounding powers due to its economic possibilities and the new relevance of its geographical position. Since then, and for the next half a century, Manchuria became a zone of great migrations and it was a highly contested space for what came to be known as “the cradle of conflict,” “the cockpit of Asia,” or “the tinder box of Asia” (Lattimore 1931; Stewart 1936). There, the two dominant East Asian imperial powers at the time-Russia and Japan-engaged in competition for its control, while a threatened China struggled to maintain its extensive territorial boundaries.