Reimagining the nation in Manchuria: The representation of peasant collectivity in Chinese and Korean discourses on the Wanbaoshan Incident (1931).

摘要

This dissertation explores how Chinese and Korean journalistic and literary discourses on the Wanbaoshan Incident construct nationhood through their representation of the peasant collectivity involved in the incident. The Wanbaoshan Incident, which transpired a few months before the 1931 Manchurian Incident, was a conflict between Chinese and Korean peasants in Manchuria over the construction of an irrigation route. In this dissertation, I examine the Chinese and Korean media coverage on the incident soon after it took place, and three literary works based on the incident that were written in the 1930s and 1940s.;The journalistic and literary discourses on the Wanbaoshan Incident present diverse ways to imagine Chinese and Korean nationhood at different historical moments. While journalistic discourses signify the Wanbaoshan Incident from various positions in existing nationalist discourses, fictional narratives create new and alternative ways to configure Chinese or Korean nationhood at a time when existing ones were no longer valid in the international political context of East Asia. The Chinese novel Wanbaoshan portrays Chinese peasants as the proletarian class in the world, which represents a Marxist view of the Chinese nation diverging from existing Chinese nationalism. The Korean short story "Peasant" creates a way to envision the absent Korean nation from Manchuria during the late colonial period, when there hardly existed a positive vision of the Korean nation. The Korean novella Rice Plants constructs a new collective identity for Korean immigrants settling in Manchuria that is neither Korean nationalist nor necessarily pro-Japanese.;The nature of the collective identity being constructed in each narrative is primarily determined by how the peasants are portrayed. Journalistic discourses mostly emphasize the innocent victimhood of the peasants, whereas in fictional narratives, the struggling peasants emerge as the collective protagonists of history, creating images of empowered nationhood. Moreover, in the fictional narratives, peasants' unmediated experiences in Manchuria become the source of such empowerment. Among the peasants' own experiences, most important is the confrontation between the Chinese and Korean peasants, antagonism for each other being their first response. The fictional narratives draw power from this antagonism and then construct new images of nationhood by overcoming or sublimating it while retaining the power it provides.;These various and often alternative imaginations of Chinese and Korean nationhood are the products of the unusual historical juncture in East Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, when, due to Japan's imperialist expansion, Chinese and Korean states were in serious crises, and the political configuration of Manchuria was undergoing many great changes. Thus, what this study ultimately explores are the diverse courses of modernity as it unfolded in modern East Asia.