Minority Report: Ethno-Nationalism and Japanese Imperialism in the Sino-Soviet Borderlands, 1919-1949

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

From the late nineteenth century, emerging nationalisms and the threat of outside aggression problematized the identity and loyalty of minority populations living in China’s northern borderlands. Russian and Soviet involvement in the region elicited a response from Japanese imperialists, who worked to cultivate relationships with non-Han minority communities living in the region. Recent scholarship on minorities in this region, however, focuses on the Chinese Communist successes in incorporating these populations into the national fold. Such an approach overlooks the critical role of the Japanese empire in shaping local policy geared at Muslims and Mongols especially. It also does not take into account many of the important transnational and global connections that Japanese imperialism facilitated between Mongols and Muslims who lived under the shadow of either the formal or informal occupation.

The papers on this panel are all concerned with the different ways in which Japanese militarists, bureaucrats, and pan-Asianists helped to connect minority populations living in the northern borderlands to the outside world during the transwar period. In China, Japanese imperialists and pan-Asianists began asserting themselves through transnational linkages and contacts with Muslims and Mongols by aligning themselves with certain interest groups in return for their often-nominal loyalty. In probing further into Japan’s quest for legitimization in the international community in the years leading up to WWII, this panel explores the dynamics between minorities living in China’s northern borderlands and the Japanese imperial state, examining where expressions of nationalism, transnationalism, internationalism, and imperialism intersected and overlapped.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Kelly Anne Hammond, University of Arkansas

Chair

• David Atwill, Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Jadidists in Beijing: Chinese Muslims’ Educational Reform in the Early Twentieth Century and Japanese Pan-Asianists - Noriko Unno, Harvard Yenching Institute

• In the Quest for Independence: Buryat Pan-Mongolism in 1917-1922 - Tatiana Linkhoeva, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

• Managing Muslims: Japan’s Quest to Legitimize itself in the Islamic World through Connections with Italy and Germany in WWII - Kelly Anne Hammond, University of Arkansas

• The Transnational Transwar: Japanese Imperialism and the Origin of Autonomous Regions in Modern China - Sakura Christmas, Bowdoin College

Discussant

• Sinan Levent, Ankara University