Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea

By Jaeeun Kim

Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their "internal others," such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as "external members" such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China, focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula.

Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state. Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors' agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. Kim demonstrates that being a "homeland" state or a member of the "transborder nation" is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9780804799614

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This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-BAA-2102).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kim, Jaeeun, author.

Title: Contested embrace : transborder membership politics in twentieth-century Korea / Jaeeun Kim.

Other titles: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015047452 | ISBN 9780804797627 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Transnationalism—Political aspects—Korea—History—20th century. | Korean diaspora—Political aspects—History—20th century. | Korea—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | Japan—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | China—Emigration and immigration—History—20th century. | Koreans—Japan—History—20th century. | Koreans—China—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC JV8757 .K5454 2016 | DDC 323.6089/957009045—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047452

ISBN 9780804799614 (electronic)

Typeset by Thompson Type in 11/14 Garamond

Contested Embrace

TRANSBORDER MEMBERSHIP POLITICS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY KOREA

Jaeeun Kim

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

Andrew G. Walder, General Editor

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University sponsors interdisciplinary research on the politics, economies, and societies of contemporary Asia. This monograph series features academic and policy-oriented research by Stanford faculty and other scholars associated with the Center.

To Hun-Seok Kim

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Transborder Ties

1. Engaging Colonial Subjects on the Move: Colonial State, Migration, and Diasporic Nationhood

2. Who Owns the Nation? Cold War Competition over Zainichi Koreans in Japan

3. Beyond Bamboo Curtain and Hermit Kingdom: Korean Chinese between Two Socialist Fatherlands

4. Reluctant Embrace and Struggles for Inclusion: Korean Chinese Return Migration to Post–Cold War South Korea

Conclusion: Ethnic Nationalism, Globalization, and the Future of Transborder Membership Politics

Appendix: Archival and Ethnographic Data

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Maps

I.1. Northeast Asia in the late 1930s: Expansion of the Japanese Empire

I.2. Northeast Asia from the early 1950s to the present: Decolonization and the Cold War

Figures

2.1. Mindan’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971

2.2. Ch’ongnyŏn’s placard hung in Ikaino (the Korean neighborhood in Osaka) in 1971

2.3. Doorplate for Mindan members

2.4. Per capita GDP trends of South and North Korea between 1950 and 2008

Table

Table B.1. Abbreviations of the materials cited extensively in Chapter Three

Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the making; it was born through multiple border crossings and a series of changes in my institutional affiliation. I have had the great fortune to benefit from the guidance, support, and generosity of numerous individuals and institutions along the way. Writing acknowledgments to a book like this may always feel like an awful understatement.

My deepest gratitude goes to my mentor Rogers Brubaker, whose brilliance, integrity, dedication, and warmth left the most enduring imprint on my intellectual growth. Apart from enriching the book with his insightful critiques at the early stage of its development, Rogers should take credit for reining in the perfectionism (in a positive light) or insecurity (in a negative light) of his (now) junior colleague in the most gracious way and enabling the book to see the light of day, opening itself to constructive criticism. Numerous mentors and colleagues provided brilliant insights, sharp criticisms, and warm encouragements. I would like to thank Gail Kligman, Andreas Wimmer, Akhil Gupta, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Fatma Müge Göçek, and the anonymous reviewers of Stanford University Press for reading the entire manuscript at different stages of its development and sharing their critical insights with me, especially Gail multiple times. For helpful comments on the earlier versions of individual chapters, I thank the late Nancy Abelmann, Barbara Anderson, Joshua Bloom, Miguel Centeno, Nicole Constable, David Cook-Martín, Mitchell Duneier, David Fitzgerald, Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Douglas Gildow, Julian Go, Young-Hae Han, Yossi Harpaz, Wesley Hiers, Angela Jamison, Robert Jansen, John Lie, Rajashree Mazumder, Dmitry Mironenko, Leslie Moch, Zeynep Ozgen, Hyung-Il Pai, Saeyoung Park, Rocio Rosales, Donggen Rui, John Skrentny, Jae-Jung Suh, Kristin Surak, Iddo Tavory, Jun Yoo, Roger Waldinger, and Sharon Yoon. The participants in many seminars, workshops, conference sessions, and invited talks helped me crystalize the key ideas of the book and sharpen my arguments. Although I cannot possibly name all of them, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the participants in the following venues: 2006 Comparative Social Analysis seminar at UCLA, 2006 Society for Comparative Research Retreat at Yale, 2009 SSRC Korean Studies Workshop in Monterey, 2010 SSRC IDRF Recipients Workshop in Austin, 2011 Comparative Perspective: The Politics of Public Space in Korea Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, 2012 Contemporary China Colloquium at Princeton, and 2013 SSRC Korean Studies Junior Faculty Workshop in Monterey. The earlier version of part of Chapter One appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (2014): 34–66, published by Cambridge University Press. The earlier version of part of Chapter Four appeared in Law & Social Inquiry 36 (2011): 760–786, published by the American Bar Foundation and Wiley Blackwell. The book certainly benefited from the anonymous reviewers of both journals.

The extraordinary intellectual community in UCLA Sociology profoundly shaped how I think and write, the influence of which I realized only after leaving it and the pedigree of which I proudly embrace. In particular, the horizontal and vertical ties and camaraderie created through the Comparative Social Analysis seminar (the so-called 237) embedded me in the department both intellectually and socially, which was immensely helpful during the solitary writing process. Although the cross-continental move every summer for four years in a row was undeniably tough, I would not change any of these given the exceptional privilege that they gave me. I was able to interact with brilliant mentors and colleagues at Princeton, Stanford, George Mason, and the University of Michigan, whose friendship also made the bumpy and solitary transition to a faculty member much smoother than otherwise. Apart from those already mentioned above, I would like to thank Robert Wuthnow, Kate Choi, Gi-Wook Shin, Ajay Verghese, Tony R. Samara, Rashmi Sadana, Satsuki Takahashi, Alexandra Murphy, Ramaswami Mahalingam, and Youngju Ryu. A special shout-out to Robert Jansen one more time, thanking him for his over ten years of friendship, which has sustained me from UCLA to the University of Michigan.

The research for this book was undertaken with generous support from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies. Summer language fellowships from the Center for Chinese Studies and the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA enabled me to improve my language skills before undertaking research in China and Japan. The writing of the book would have been significantly delayed without the financial support and the luxury of time given by the writing fellowships from UCLA, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton and the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. The Academy of Korean Studies has kindly underwritten the editorial expenses for romanization, cartography, and indexing for the entire book. I am sincerely grateful to Andrew Walder, Geoffrey Burn, James Holt, Jenny Erin Gavacs, Margaret Pinette, and other production staff at Stanford University Press for welcoming the manuscript and ushering the final manuscript through to production. I also thank Nojin Kwak, Adrienne Janney, and Jan Sunyoung Wisniewski at the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan for making the book a better read by securing financial support and editorial assistance. Jesse Lichtenstein deserves a separate mention for his tremendous contribution to tightening the writing of the book. The late Jihyon Cho generously gave me the permission to use his incredible photos in Chapter Two a few months before he passed away. I want to pay due respect to his life’s work through this book.

This book would have been impossible without the openness, kindness, and generosity of numerous individuals who shared their stories with me at my fieldsites. I only regret that I cannot name most of them, as they appear in this book under pseudonyms. I would still like to give special thanks to those who facilitated my archival and ethnographic research in South Korea, Japan, and northeast China. For my research in South Korea, Yong-p’il Kim and the staff members at the former Tongp’o T’aun Center (now Chungguk Tongp’o Hŭimang Yŏndae) deserve the first mention. They let me hang out at the center seven days a week and always answered my silliest questions with enlightening insights. I also thank Kyu-gŭn Ch’a and Ĕn-ok Yi for enabling me to access the perspectives of street-level bureaucrats. In Japan, An Pae, Yŏng Kim, Chae-hwa Park, Ch’ŏl-su Kang, Mi-saeng Yun, and Kwang-hyŏn O introduced me to important organizations, invited me to various social gatherings, and shared their own experiences over the delicacies of Tokyo and Osaka. Sang-gi Kim, my beloved grandfather-in-law in Osaka, addressed my endless inquiries with remarkable honesty and introduced me to friends and neighbors who would have been inaccessible through organizational channels. For my research in northeast China, my deepest gratitude goes to Donggen Rui (Tong-gŭn Ye) and Guanglin Jin (Kwang-rim Kim). Although they were not even in China during my fieldwork, their family members, friends, and colleagues came through as the most invaluable resources for my research. I will also never forget the hospitality of my multiple host families, Chŏng-sŏn Kim, Si-rim Kim, Su-sŏn Ch’oe, Chae-jun Kim, and Sun-ja Song. I would like to express my special gratitude to two individuals who were irreplaceable during my research in northeast China but have passed away since I returned from the field. The late Kyŏng-rim Kim kindly accompanied me to numerous interviews with people who would not have opened up to an unknown South Korean researcher from the United States. Those who are familiar with the work of the departed Ranshan Liu (Yŏn-san Ryu) will see how much I am indebted to his bootstrap ethnology and collection of oral histories. One of the greatest joys of carrying out international fieldwork is to have an opportunity to learn from, and form an enduring relationship with, the international group of scholars. In addition to those already mentioned above, I am grateful to Chulwoo Lee, Hye-Kyŏng Yi, Dong-Hoon Seol in South Korea, Hyang-suk Kwŏn, Ryŏng-gyŏng Ri, Ae-sun Yang, and U-jong Chŏng in Japan; and to Tae-ŏn Yang, Chunri Sun (Ch’un-il Son), Zhongguo Jin (Chong-guk Kim), and Sen Jin (Sam Kim) in China. These scholars have graciously shared their expert knowledge, introduced me to a broad range of secondary literature, and facilitated my recruitment of study participants. I am looking forward to their feedback on this book and to continuing cross-border scholarly exchanges with them.

It is a genuine privilege to thank my immediate and extended family for their unflagging support and warm encouragement. My parents Hwa-kon Kim and Mi-hye Kang taught me the importance of sincerity, persistence, resilience, and humor—the virtues required of those who embark on a long intellectual journey. My accomplishments and setbacks across the Pacific have been their pride and concern over the past decade. I also thank my only sister Jaelim for inspiring me with her professionalism and, above all, being a steadfast companion from the day she was born. I also thank my mother-in-law Se-yang Kim for providing a warm respite from the madness of academia. In the end, I owe my most heartfelt debt to my husband Hun-Seok Kim, to whom this book is dedicated. Nobody has put up with more or provided more moral support than him during the ups and downs of this long journey. Without his incredible generosity, warmth, humor, and compassion, I would never have made it here.

INTRODUCTION

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Transborder Ties

When I visited Chin-t’ae’s house in Japan in 2009, two framed photos hung on the living room wall.¹ One was a group photo taken with the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung during Chin-t’ae’s 1988 visit to North Korea. Chin-t’ae pointed himself out—a slender, serious-looking man in a dark suit, among twenty-two similarly dressed fatherland visitors posing for a picture with the Great Leader. The other was a 2006 photo of Chin-t’ae and his wife, taken in their hometown in South Korea. In it, they faced the camera dressed in splendid traditional Korean wedding garments, which gleamed in stark contrast to the gray hair, wrinkled faces, and stooped backs of the two beaming octogenarians.

Chin-t’ae was born in 1923 in Cheju, an island at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. He followed his father to Osaka at the age of fourteen and worked in various manufacturing jobs until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. Although his family members joined the massive repatriation flow back to the Korean peninsula, Chin-t’ae postponed his return, in part because he had heard about the political turmoil sweeping across newly liberated Korea. At that time, he had no inkling that it would be almost seventy years before he could return to his hometown. Chin-t’ae became a supporter of a pro–North Korea organization in Japan, and the South Korean government banned his return, though he managed to send remittances and letters to his family secretly through friends and neighbors.

MAP I.1. Northeast Asia in the late 1930s: Expansion of the Japanese Empire.

When the South Korean consular office finally issued temporary travel permits to Chin-t’ae and his wife in 2006, they visited their parents’ graves in their hometown for the first time in more than seven decades. They also held a long overdue wedding ceremony, commemorated by the photo in the living room, with the blessings of their reunited families.² After returning to Japan, the couple finally changed the nationality category in their foreigner’s registries from North to South Korea³ and subsequently applied for South Korean passports. These enabled them to complete the belated registration of their marriage and their children’s and grandchildren’s births in the South Korean family registries (the basic civil registration system in South Korea, implemented initially by the Japanese colonial state).⁴ While showing me their new passports and family registration documents, Chin-t’ae glanced toward the bedroom, where his ailing wife lay in bed, and said with a quiet smile, Now that we have these papers that document our marriage, my wife is not going to die a spinster. He added that, although it was unlikely that his wife would have another chance to visit South Korea with her newly issued South Korean passport, the change in registration would still mean a lot to their sons and daughters: Having South Korean passports and family registration documents will make it much easier for them to travel overseas and handle family property left in South Korea.

MAP I.2. Northeast Asia from the early 1950s to the present: Decolonization and the Cold War.

Kil-yong had a different story to tell about a photo of the late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung when I met him in northeast China in 2009. A fourth-generation Korean migrant, he was born in 1942 in Dunhua, Manchuria (the disputed borderland in northeast China), which had been under Japan’s control since 1932. His family did not join the massive wave of repatriation after the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Instead, his father became actively involved in the Chinese civil war as a communist and later became a high-ranking official in the newly minted People’s Republic of China. The government dispatched his father on the official Chinese goodwill mission to North Korea in 1948 to celebrate the establishment of its socialist ally. His father returned from this trip with a photo of himself being greeted by Kim Il-sung, with no way of knowing how that photograph would affect his family in the years to come.

In 1961, Kil-yong, a college dropout, managed to land a job as a teacher at a technical high school in Yanji (the capital city of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, home to the majority of ethnic Koreans in China), and this brought him the privileged city-dweller status.⁵ Several months later, however, a government directive ordered the closure of his school. This left him unemployed, jeopardized his hard-won city-dweller status, and darkened his future prospects overall. The deepening radicalization of the Communist Party leadership also concerned him; a mocking remark he made about the agricultural collectivization project had been publicly criticized during the Anti-Rightist Movement a few years prior. Encouraged by the rumor that North Korea provided coethnic returnees with jobs, higher education, and citizenship, Kil-yong crossed the China–North Korea border one night in January 1962. He and several friends knocked down the Chinese border guards, ran across the bridge between Tumen (China) and Namyang (North Korea), and were welcomed by North Korean border guards at the end of the bridge with a salute: Welcome to the socialist fatherland! Although many other Korean Chinese repatriates were assigned to factories or mines near the border area, Kil-yong secured a teaching job in a developed port city, Wonsan. He suspected that the photo of his father and Kim Il-sung he showed North Korean officials during the intake interview was helpful.

The photo, however, became a liability after Kil-yong returned to China a few years later at his parents’ tearful request. As the Cultural Revolution threw China into turmoil, the Red Guards accused Kil-yong’s father of having secretly served the revisionist agenda of North Korea, and the photo was presented as critical evidence. Kil-yong’s unauthorized venture to North Korea was painted as part of his father’s espionage activities. Because both his father and Kil-yong were labeled antirevolutionaries, his family not only lost their city-dweller status but were discriminated against in every aspect of their lives: they were not rationed white rice; their home was not supplied electricity; even their pig, branded an antirevolutionary pig, was denied its share of rationed feed! Kil-yong’s younger brothers and sisters were not allowed to join the Communist Youth League—not even if they openly denounced and disowned their father and elder brother. It was ten years before Kil-yong could teach at a school again.

Yŏng-il was born in Heilongjiang in northeast China in 1947, the second son of his first-generation immigrant parents. Unlike Kil-yong’s family, whose settlement in Manchuria dates back to the late nineteenth century, it was as late as 1938 that Yŏng-il’s father left his poverty-stricken hometown at the southwestern end of the Korean peninsula to find work in Japan-occupied Manchuria. He returned to his hometown briefly to marry Yŏng-il’s mother and took her back to Manchuria right after the wedding. When the couple sent a letter to their families in Korea in the spring of 1945, delivering the news of the birth of their first son, they had no idea that the collapse of the Japanese Empire, the occupation of Manchuria by the Soviet army, and the ensuing civil wars in China and Korea would effectively prohibit their return before their deaths in the mid-1980s.

Although Yŏng-il was not highly educated, he managed to join the army and then the Communist Party in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. This helped his career as a rural cadre. But when he first visited South Korea in 1989 in his early forties, Yŏng-il found that peddling Chinese medicines or working at construction sites in South Korea could bring him at least ten times the income he was earning as a low-level government official in China. His South Korean relatives were initially terrified by the unexpected visit of their long-forgotten relative from the evil communist country. But they eventually agreed to list him in the family genealogy book and wrote several letters of invitation so that he and his wife could obtain entry visas to South Korea to earn money. The restrictive immigration policies in the early 1990s, however, made it virtually impossible for coethnic migrants from China like Yŏng-il to enter South Korea via legal channels. His elder brother, whose 1944 birth registration remained in the village archive, was able to obtain South Korean citizenship. But Yŏng-il and his younger siblings, whose births remained unregistered in the colonial-era family registries, were not.

It was only through the invitation of his divorced daughter, who had remarried a South Korean man, albeit only on paper for the sake of citizenship, that Yŏng-il and his wife were able to return to South Korea in 1997. Knowing that other opportunities to return would be scarce, the couple overstayed the designated visa term and worked as unauthorized migrants in South Korea for nine years until policy changes finally enabled them to obtain South Korean citizenship in 2006. After recounting his migration history, Yŏng-il proudly showed me his recently obtained South Korean passport and family registration document without my prompting, as Chin-t’ae in Osaka did. Yŏng-il’s son obtained South Korean citizenship as well, I also learned, although he was not interested in settling permanently in South Korea. In fact, by the time I met Yŏng-il, his son was working at a Korean restaurant in Japan without papers to make as much money as possible so that he could start his own business after returning to China. Yŏng-il explained that his son’s newly obtained South Korean citizenship facilitated his migration venture: Without the South Korean passport, he couldn’t possibly have been exempted from the visa screening process at the Japanese consular office.

The stories of Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yŏng-il reveal some of the common experiences of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants and their descendants in Japan and northeast China. These experiences include a series of border crossings spanning multiple generations, forcible separation from—and neglect or persecution by—their state of origin, and a shifting sense of loyalty and belonging to the multiple states that have claimed these people or to which they’ve laid claim. Each story also describes painstaking efforts of Korean migrants and their descendants to maintain, rebuild, appropriate, or create cross-border family ties amid changing geopolitical and ethnopolitical circumstances. Other common features in their stories are the complex dealings with various official and unofficial documentation practices while attempting (for a range of reasons) to reclaim membership in their putative homeland. Contested Embrace is a comparative, historical, and ethnographic study of these complex relationships—as illustrated in the earlier stories—between the states in the Korean peninsula, colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants to Japan and northeast China and their descendants, and the states in which they have resided over the course of the long twentieth century.

The incongruities among territory, citizenry, and nation have long preoccupied scholars in the fields of international migration, nationalism, and citizenship. The primary focus has been the challenges that various types of internal others, such as immigrants or ethnic minorities, pose to the presumed isomorphism among state, society, and culture—the regulatory ideal of the modern nation-state system. Yet over the last decade or so, scholars have shown growing interest in the membership politics engendered by a different configuration of these incongruities, focusing on the relationship between the state and its external members. The most attention has been paid to the rise of what is often called emigrant citizenship, expatriate citizenship, or transnational/transborder citizenship,⁶ which commonly refers to the increasingly strong ties between sending/emigrant states in the South and labor migrant populations and their descendants in the North. As the influence of emigrant populations on the national economy and domestic politics has grown (via remittances, skill transfer, long-distance political participation, or the ethnic lobby targeting the host state), an increasing number of states have sought to maintain and nurture the affiliation and loyalty of emigrant populations and their descendants (to name a few: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Turkey, and the Philippines), in some cases simply by allowing or promoting dual nationality.⁷ Researchers have also studied a different type of transborder membership in postcommunist Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia, where newly nationalizing states have institutionalized membership statuses for their transborder ethnonational kin, who had been separated from their mother countries by changes in borders and polities rather than by emigration. For example, the privileged treatment of coethnics in immigration and citizenship policies—which had long been enjoyed by ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe before the policy change in reunited Germany in the early 1990s—is increasingly common throughout Europe, ranging from Hungary’s treatment of ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries to Russia’s treatment of Russian-speaking minorities in CIS countries.⁸ The relationship between states and those who were forcibly displaced and dispersed as a result of political turmoil, ethnoreligious conflicts, or outright civil wars has also gained renewed attention, expanding the hitherto limited usage of the term diaspora to a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups. The complexly evolving economic, political, cultural, and ideological relationships between diasporas and their fledgling homeland states have been studied in Armenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Haiti, among other cases.⁹

I suggest we consider this diverse range of phenomena as different manifestations of transborder membership politics. Transborder membership politics involves political claims, institutionalized practices, and discursive representations oriented to or generated by those who have durably resided outside the territory of the state, yet are perceived as belonging to that state or to the nation associated with that state. I use transborder instead of the more conventional term transnational. The claim that people located outside the territorial jurisdiction of the state nonetheless belong to the same nation—outside the state but inside the people (Shain and Barth 2003, 469)—is central to, even constitutive of, this politics.¹⁰ The proliferation of transborder forms of membership and belonging in this sense does not adumbrate the transcendence of nationalism or the nation-state system, as claimed by some early observers;¹¹ rather, transborder membership politics in some cases is driven by transborder or long-distance nationalism.¹² I also use the term membership rather than citizenship. The former is more useful in encompassing the variegated terms on which the state incorporates transborder populations; granting legal citizenship is only one of these multiple modes of incorporation.¹³ Finally, not only the movement of people over borders, but also the movement of borders over people can engender transborder configurations.¹⁴ Highlighting the historicity of what are now considered international borders is an important aspect of the book’s analytic approach.

Contested Embrace analyzes transborder membership politics in and around the Korean peninsula in the colonial, Cold War, and post–Cold War periods. Japan’s occupation of Korea at the turn of the twentieth century set in motion a massive out-migration of the colonial population to the Japanese archipelago (the metropole of the Japanese Empire) and Manchuria (the disputed border region between the Japanese Empire and China).¹⁵ By the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, ethnic Koreans in these two regions (over 2 million in each) comprised approximately 15 percent of the entire Korean population.¹⁶ Postwar repatriation left 0.6 million of these migrants in Japan and 1.2 million in (now communist) China.

The literature on ethnic Koreans in Japan and China has tended to place them squarely within the territorial boundary of postwar Japan or the People’s Republic of China, the seemingly contrasting narratives characterizing the two groups notwithstanding. Studies of ethnic relations in Japan, for instance, have shown how Japan’s transformation from a multiethnic empire to a self-stylized homogeneous nation-state entailed the transformation of its Korean residents from colonial subjects to a hidden ethnic minority that was legally disenfranchised, socially excluded, and culturally assimilated and thus rendered invisible.¹⁷ The few existing accounts of Korean Chinese history, by contrast, have uniformly highlighted the progressive integration of this model minority into the People’s Republic of China in a teleological and triumphalist fashion.¹⁸ Inquiries about the genealogy of Korean ethnic nationalism¹⁹ or colonial and postcolonial state building,²⁰ for their part, have limited their analytic focus largely to the Korean peninsula. The massive outward migration that coincided with the rise of Korean nationalism and the uneven incorporation of these transborder Koreans into the colonial and postcolonial state-building processes have been largely missing or mentioned only in passing in these studies.

Contested Embrace breaks with the methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) underlying these studies, that is, the prevalent tendency in social sciences to take the current nation-state as a seldom-questioned unit of analysis. I situate ethnic Koreans in Japan and China not simply at the margin of their respective state of settlement but also at the transborder margin of their states of origin, that is, the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula.²¹ Despite a widespread, deeply entrenched and quasi-primordial belief in Korean ethnic nationhood, the embrace of these transborder coethnic populations by the colonial and the two postcolonial states, North and South Korea, has been selective, shifting, and recurrently contested. Contested Embrace explores under what circumstances and by what means the colonial and postcolonial states have sought to claim (or failed to claim) certain transborder populations as their own, and how transborder Koreans have themselves shaped the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties as they have sought long-distance membership on their own terms. Building on the emerging constructivist/modernist approach to East Asian nations and nationalisms²² and the culturalist/cognitive turn in recent theorizing on the modern state, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethnonational kin populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state.

Who Constitutes the Transborder Nation? Classification, Identification, and Boundary Crossing in the Context of Macrohistorical Transformations

While building on the growing scholarly interest in transborder forms of membership and belonging, Contested Embrace seeks to overcome limitations in the existing literature on transborder membership politics in three respects. The Korean situation provides a particularly rich and distinctive case for the advancement of these theoretical agendas.

First, the existing literature on transborder membership politics has largely focused on the question of who gets what—in other words, disputes over what economic, political, and social rights, obligations, and influences transborder members should have vis-à-vis their putative homeland states. In contrast, the question of who is what—that is, disagreements over who should be defined as transborder members and how these members should be identified—has remained understudied from a theoretical and comparative perspective. By situating the hitherto neglected questions of classification, identification, and boundary crossing at the center of the analysis, I demonstrate that being a homeland state or a member of the transborder nation is not an ethnodemographic fact but rather a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

The peculiar trajectories of state building in the Korean peninsula—involving an extended period of colonial rule and the emergence of two mutually delegitimizing postcolonial states, North and South Korea—offer an opportunity to highlight this fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation building. As the stories of Chin-t’ae and Kil-yong suggest, at different times throughout the twentieth century ethnic Koreans in Japan and China (and their respective states of settlement) took an ambivalent, or even hostile, stance toward the transborder claims to their affiliation and loyalty made by their putative homeland states. By the same token, as indicated in Chin-t’ae and Yŏng-il’s experiences, the homeland states often warily guarded their territorial and membership boundaries against the claims to membership and belonging made by their ethnonational kin in Japan and China. This selective, shifting, and contested embrace of coethnic populations by the putative homeland state appears even more striking given the widely recognized ethnically centered understanding of Korean nationhood.²³ The Korean case thus cautions us against attributing unwarranted explanatory power to ethnic nationalism without specifying its genesis, infrastructure, and varying manifestations in different sociopolitical domains and in different macrohistorical contexts.²⁴

Second, Contested Embrace pays particular attention to the two-pronged nature of disputes over who is what, which involve struggles over both group definition and individual identification. Whereas the former struggles concern the creation and the transformation of a transborder membership category, the latter struggles concern an individual’s claim to membership in that category, however its boundary is drawn in the first place. And although the former struggles over group definition usually develop in the legal, political, and public spheres, the latter struggles over individual identification unfold through the reiterative encounters between front-line state agents (that is, the foot soldiers of the modern taxonomic state, to borrow the term from Ann Stoler [2002]) and transborder populations in various bureaucratic settings, largely hidden from the public view. The literature on transborder membership politics has seldom distinguished these two dimensions and has paid little attention to struggles over individual identification in bureaucratic settings. The distinction, however, is important for two reasons.

First, the distinction enables scholars to examine not only how states define the boundaries of certain categories but also whether states have the infrastructural capacity to correctly and forcefully assign individuals to these categories.²⁵ For instance, whether a person’s national membership is determined by the jus soli or the jus sanguinis principle—the often-cited criterion for determining ethnic or civic understanding of nationhood—means very little if there is no adequate bureaucratic infrastructure that can verify to whom the person is born and where. Second, the distinction between struggles over group definition and those over individual identification enables scholars to conceptualize the agency of transborder populations in a more comprehensive and dynamic way. Transborder populations can challenge the dominant categorical schemes imposed by the state, not only by proposing alternative views about how they should be classified as a group but also by deliberately misrepresenting their individual identities and thereby inducing misclassification or misidentification from the state’s perspective (for instance, by forging a birth certificate). Incorporating the micropolitics of identification in bureaucratic settings into our analysis therefore produces a much more agentic portrayal of transborder membership politics.

The Korean case helps us duly recognize the importance of these struggles over individual identification in transborder membership politics. In the Korean case, the development of the legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures of state membership did not precede, but rather coincided with, an unprecedented level of out-migration among the colonial population. This belated modern state building left the state with an uneven, fragmentary, and sporadic grasp of both its sedentary and mobile populations, affecting its infrastructural capacity to impose its classification schemes on the ground. The competitive and hostile interstate relations that characterized northeast Asia in the better part of the twentieth century—the competitions between Japan and China during the colonial period and between North and South Korea during the Cold War—further undermined each state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1991): the capacity to authoritatively define who was what and to naturalize these definitions with immense performative power. The resultant uncertainty and politicization of the identity of Koreans in Japan and China made their incorporation into the national body politic of their ancestral homeland more precarious, but it also allowed them more room for negotiation and maneuvering as they managed their individual paper identities vis-à-vis the states involved. These circumstances bring into sharp relief the importance of the micropolitics of identification in bureaucratic settings, which is often obscured in other cases of transborder membership politics.

Finally, I argue that we take into serious account long-term macroregional processes that play a crucial role in the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. These macroregional processes not only engender ethnic mixing and unmixing on a large scale (Brubaker 1998) but also transform the nature of borders and polities, destabilizing the membership status of certain mobile populations, altering the realpolitik considerations of relevant state elites, and thereby setting in motion contentious transborder membership politics. Moreover, interstate competition, mutual emulation, and norm diffusion on the international level contribute to the formation and the transformation of official classification schemes and identification regimes, which come to serve as a conceptual grid and a practical tool in the state’s transborder nation-building effort. In other words, the uneven and tumultuous development of the regional interstate system constitutes and reconstitutes the very analytic units that are later taken for granted—the state of origin, the state of settlement, and the transborder population. The existing literature on transborder membership politics, having focused largely on relatively recent developments, has often neglected the significance of these long-term macrohistorical processes and regional interstate dynamics, while prioritizing the factors pertinent to the current phase of global capitalism and exaggerating the novelty of state effort to reach out to their transborder populations.

This book seeks to overcome the resulting analytic myopia as well as the presentist and economistic tendencies in the broad field of transnationalism studies. The stories of Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yŏng-il highlight how deeply transborder membership politics in Korea have been embedded in the dramatic and distinctive macrohistorical transformations of twentieth-century northeast Asia. These transformations include the dissolution of the Sino-centric regional order and its belated incorporation into the Western interstate system; the rise and demise of the Japanese Empire, especially the massive cross-border migration it engendered, the geopolitical boundaries it reconfigured, and the peculiar institutional legacies it bestowed; the formative influence of the Cold War on decolonization and nation-state building in the region; and finally, the attenuation of Cold War tensions and the dramatic increase in cross-border migration within and beyond the region. The Korean case vividly illustrates how these macroregional processes contributed to the formation and the transformation of a distinctive institutional field of transborder nation building, comprising a set of organizations (including both state and nonstate agencies), bureaucratic techniques (for example, census taking, documentation of identities, and border policing), and idioms of identification (terminologies employed in various state categorization practices). This changing institutional field determined the bureaucratic and imagined scope of the transborder nation at a particular historical conjuncture. By tracing the shifting and diverging contours of transborder membership politics in northeast Asia over the course of the long twentieth century, I attempt to bring the literature on transborder membership politics into productive conversation with the studies of colonialism, postcolonial state building, Cold War, and globalization, while mitigating the existing scholarship’s oversampling of European and American cases.

The State’s Symbolic Power and the Bureaucratic Underpinning of Transborder Membership Politics

The ethnographic vignettes presented at the beginning of the book highlight how Chin-t’ae, Kil-yong, and Yŏng-il had to deal with various official and unofficial documentation practices (family registries, foreigner’s registration, passports, family genealogy documents, and invitation letters) to claim long-distance membership and belonging in their ancestral homeland. The literature on transborder membership politics has largely focused on the economic, political, and cultural means of transborder nation building (for example, fund-raising, diaspora bonds, diaspora taxation, political campaigns, legal status provision, cultural festivals, and the like). The bureaucratic scaffolding underlying transborder nation building,