Transnational Chinese Capital in 1930s Korea and the Wanbaoshan Incident

• In Event: Colonial Transnationalism between Korea and China in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper casts a new light on the 1931 Wanbaoshan Incident where nearly two hundred overseas Chinese in Korea were killed and surviving Chinese merchants suffered huge losses in assets following the clash between Korean and Chinese farmers in Manchuria. Whereas previous studies claimed that the outbreak of that incident was due to the Japanese empire’s discord-provoking scheme, I argue that the existing ethnic conflict caused by the Chinese economic power over the Korean market was the primary reason behind that tragic incident. In addition to Chinese-language archives, this study draws on memoirs and testimonies of the Government-General officials and classified documents of the Government-General that previous studies overlooked.

My analysis highlights three points; first, no existing documents proves the close contact between the Japanese Consulate in Manchuria and the Government-General in Korea, an absence that refutes the systematic imperialist scheme behind the incident. Second, this paper shows the overseas Chinese power in distribution and manufacturing industries as well as vegetable production in colonial Korea. Third, in the labor market, capitalists in Korea favored Chinese laborers due to their low cost, which caused the increased number of conflict between Chinese and Korean laborers. The Korean journalism, furthermore, took the exclusionist stance against Chinese economic power in Korea and closely attended to the Sino-Korean conflict in Manchuria, instigating jingoistic nationalism. Rebutting the “colonized-as-victim” model, this paper reveals how the colonized Koreans resisted capitalist transnationalism of overseas Chinese, a tension that ultimately escalated to the 1931 Wanbaoshan Incident.

Author

• Junghee Yi, Incheon National University