Time: 16:00-18:00, March 26 (Tue.), 2024
Venue: Main Confrence Room (3F), Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (IASA), The University of Tokyo
Title: Sino-Korean Relations after Empire: Landed Property, Agricultural Labor, and Legal Rights of Koreans in Civil War-era Manchuria (1945–1948)
Speaker: Claudius Kim (Visiting Fellow of IASA, The University of Tokyo)
Claudius (Kyung Yeob) Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Modern Korean and Chinese History at Stanford Univeristy, specializing in the transnational history of revolution and diaspora, as well as military and diplomatic histories in modern East Asia. Drawing on multilingual archives from China, Korea, Japan, and the U.S., his dissertation argues that the Chinese and North Korean Revolution was a transnational revolution that shared geo-spatial, demographic, and politico-military foundations over the course of the WWII, Chinese Civil War, and the Korean War, where Korean migrants constituted a common thread that weaved together critical moments in China and Korea’s history. His publications include “Rice Scarcity in World War II Macao: The Local Experience Revisited” (Urban History, 2019) and the forthcoming article, “Sino-Korean Relations in the Era of the Cold War, Civil War, and Decolonization in Postwar Manchuria (1945-48)” in the Journal of Cold War Studies.
Discussant: Jamesdaniel Harris (Visiting Fellow of IASA, The University of Tokyo)
Jamesdaniel Harris received his BA in Economics, and in Political Science, summa cum laude, from Cornell University. After working several years in New York City’s financial industry, Jamesdaniel Harris returned to academia, receiving his MSc and Doctorate in Economic History from the London School of Economics. Dr. Harris taught Entrepreneurship at Peking University’s summer school, Introductory Economics at Yancheng University, and conducted seminars in Behavioural Economics and Behavioural Finance at Hokkaido University. His current research topics include a data-bassd explication of the financial history of Shanghai’s early debt and equity markets, analysis of private property rights institutions in late-imperial and Republican era China, game theoretic approaches to analysing costly effort provision under committee award structures, and a critique of the methodological approach of the empirical Law & Finance literature.
Language: English
Moderator: Khohchahar E. Chuluu (The University of Tokyo)
Abstract: The talk is based on my forthcoming article in the Journal of Cold War Studies, which is a chapter taken from my Ph.D. dissertation, “Revolution on the Move: Migrant Revolutionaries and Revolutionary Migrants in Trans-war China and Korea.” In this article, I argue that the Kuomintang (KMT) government of China allied with Korean rightwing nationalists to co-opt Manchurian Koreans in resolving three major postwar challenges. Retracting its punitive stance towards Koreans as former enemies in August 1945, the KMT branded them as “citizens of an allied nation” who deserved protection and support. Analyzing Sino-Korean relations in 1945–48, this article reveals how Manchurian Koreans factored into KMT’s Cold War, civil war, and decolonization strategies. As the Cold War loomed and the civil war broke out, the KMT offered preferential economic aid to Koreans, seeking to earn the trust of the future South Korean leaders and encourage Korean rice farmers, the KMT army’s major source of local food supply, to continue agricultural production. As a less punitive decolonization drive, rather than confiscating Koreans’ landed property outright, the KMT also leased rent-free farmlands to them, thus ensuring its allied citizens a means of livelihood. In conclusion, my research demonstrates how Sino-Korean relations constituted a previously overlooked but critical dimension of China’s experience in navigating the Cold War, civil war, and decolonization.
Contact: Khohchahar E. Chuluu（echuluu[a]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp）