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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Imperial Pathways of Knowledge

Through translations beginning in the late nineteenth century, China adopted a number of neologisms coined in Japan, including 科學 kexue, the term for science. In the post-Meiji period, Japanese students studied in US and Europe and brought back to the colonization of the northern island of Hokkaidō the latest agronomic theories. The Japanese agronomist Nitobe Inazo (1862-1933) helped to create a new vocabulary of colonization and empire and coined the term 殖民 shokumin, planting people, for these new efforts to extend the Japanese empire (Dudden 2005, 133-38). The botanical reference drew not only from Nitobe’s educational background but also exposed the undercurrents of the global circulation of concepts about race, territory, and modern statehood.

The expansion of the Japanese Empire created a conduit for ideas about colonization to spread. In Xing An, Chinese officers refused to use the Japanese neologism 殖民 for their efforts. Yet, their plans looked remarkably similar to Japanese state building efforts in Manchuria. To learn more about how nationalists turned to China's own imperial history for precedence, go to the page on the history of tunken.

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The History of Tunken
By the 1930s, the Japanese colonial empire had expanded from Hokkaidō to Taiwan, Korea, and Northeast China. Japan’s continental ambitions entered a new phase with Manchuria, where the colonial administration established collective farms at the same time that the Japanese home government promoted the region as an industrial and modern Eden (Young 1998). Through translations beginning in the late nineteenth century, China adopted a number of neologisms coined in Japan. However, Chinese writers rarely ever referred to Han colonization efforts as zhimin 殖民. Instead, Chinese writers almost exclusively used an update amalgam of the classical Chinese terms for military settlement and land reclamation, tunken 屯墾. Borrowing from the far older terms tuntian and kaiken, tunken did not come into use until the 18th century, and then only sparingly, appearing all of two times in the 18th century Qing compilation of the Ming histories. The term tunken started to appear again in the Qing documents from the late nineteenth century, used in the context of the Northeast, but came widely into vogue only from the 1920s. The etymology of the term strongly suggests that tunken was popularized as a response to China’s perceived besiegement from imperialist powers.
For more on the officers, like Zou Zuohua, who headed the tunken effort in Xing An, continue on to the discussion of the colonizers.

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