About the Book
Since the 1990s, the Chinese-North Korean border region has undergone a gradual transformation into a site of intensified cooperation, competition, and intrigue. These changes have prompted a significant volume of critical scholarship and media commentary across multiple languages and disciplines. Drawing on existing studies and new data, Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands brings much of this literature into concert by pulling together a wide range of insight on the region's economics, security, social cohesion, and information flows. Drawing from multilingual sources and transnational scholarship, this volume is enhanced by the extensive fieldwork undertaken by the editors and contributors in their quests to decode the borderland. In doing so, the volume emphasizes the link between theory, methodology, and practice in the field of Area Studies and social science more broadly.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction (Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney)
I Geography and Borderlands Theory: Framing the Region
1 Illuminating Edges: Borders as Institutions, Process, Space (Edward Boyle)
2 On Asian Borderlands: The Value of Comparative Studies (Elisabeth Leake)
3 Regions within the Yalu-Tumen Border Space: From Dandong to the Tumen and Beyond (Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney)
II Towards a Methodology of Sino-Korean Border Studies
4 Unification in Action? The National Identity of North Korean Defector-Migrants: Insights and Implications (Steven Denney and Christopher Green)
5 Ethnography and Borderlands: The Socio-political Dimensions of North Korean Migration (Markus Bell and Rosita Armytage)
6 Measuring North Korea's Economic Relationships: Evidence from the Borderlands (Kent Boydston)
7 Ink and Ashes: Documents, Destruction, and North Korea's Mythic Origins in the Border Region, 1931-1945 (Adam Cathcart)
III Histories of the Sino-Korean Border Region
8 Revisiting the Forgotten Frontier: Fenghuang Gate, Qing-Chos?n Contacts, and the Rise of Modern Chinese State, 1636-1876 (Yuanchong Wang)
9 'Utopian Speak': Language Assimilation in China's Yanbian Korean Borderland, 1958-1976 (Dong Jo Shin)
10 The Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in 1990: A Journey to the Border in a Time of Flux (Warwick Morris and James Hoare)
IV Contemporary Borderland Politics and Economics
11 Change on the Edges: The Rajin-Sonbong Economic and Trade Zone (Théo Clément)
12 Tumen Triangle Tribulations: The Unfulfilled Promise of Chinese, Russian, and North Korean Cooperation (Andray Abrahamian)
13 Purges and Peripheries: Jang Song-taek, Pyongyang's SEZ Strategy, and Relations with China (Adam Cathcart and Christopher Green)
14 From Periphery to Centre: A History of North Korean Marketization (Peter Ward and Christopher Green)
V Human Rights and Identity
15 Land of Promise or Peril? The Sino-North Korea Border Space and Human Rights (Nicholas Hamisevicz and Andrew Yeo)
16 Celebrity Defectors: Representations of North Korea in Euro-American and South Korean Intimate Publics (Sarah Bregman)
17 North Korean Border-Crossers : The Legal Status of North Korean Migrants in China (Hee Choi [translated by Robert Lauler])
18 The Limits of Koreanness: Korean Encounters in Russo-Chinese Yanbian (Ed Pulford)
VI Afterword (Kevin Gray)
VII Index
About the Author :
Adam Cathcart is a lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Leeds and the editor of the European Journal of Korean Studies. Christopher Green is a lecturer in Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Steven Denney is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.
Review :
"The book constitutes an excellent example of interdisciplinary study applied to a fluid landscape such as the Sino-North Korean border region. Emphasising the need to conduct parallel field research, it also opens a discussion about which methods could be more reliable in a framework of uncertainty on state data...The rigorous analytical approach that characterises the essays intends to invite a much more critical commitment to the study of borderlands in the world and their globalised entanglements."
- Michaela Bonato (University of Padova, Italy), IIAS Newsletter (September 2022)
"Decoding is a collection of essays that explores North Korea through people, politics, and trade existing on or outside its borders—mainly in the borderland with China... Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands successfully moves beyond staid frameworks and enriches our view of North Korea from the outside in."
- Alyssa Park (University of Iowa), Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Autumn 2022)
"What these chapters have in common is intellectual authority; they are founded in profound, demonstrable knowledge of their subject matter, careful scholarship and analytical precision."
- Hazel Smith (SOAS), The China Quarterly, Vol. 250 (June 2022)
"Political relations between China and North Korea frequently make headlines, [but] we hear less about the economic side of the partnership, and still less about the impact on the lives of people living in the Sino-North Korean border region. The new book Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands seeks to rectify that by looking at how the relationship plays out on the micro-level, on either side of the China-North Korea border."
- Shannon Tiezzi (Editor-in-Chief, The Diplomat), April 2021
"The editors and contributors should be applauded for tackling an unusually daunting project, given data limitations and the dearth of secondary scholarship to incorporate. They strive to inform readers from diverse angles, adding to awareness of what makes this area fascinating. [...] This is a tough border to crack, and we should be thankful that this intrepid band of researchers had the daring to piece together loose ends into a single book."
- Gilbert Rozman, The China Journal, No. 87 (2022)
"Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney’s Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands makes a welcome appearance as the first English-language scholarly edited volume on the region. [...] Scholars interested in the future of both China and North Korea would do well to consult the insights of this exciting new work."
- Joseph A. Seeley, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Pacific Affairs: Volume 94, No. 3 – September 2021
"This book is a rare achievement and warrants reading. Taken together, this is an interesting and also enjoyable book to read for both undergraduate, as a broad introduction, as well as a graduate level courses, that introduces students on how to approach the murky James Bond-like puzzle of North Korea as an academic subject for research."
- Seong-Hyon Lee, China Review International, 2022
