Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

From the publisher’s website:

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.

Contents

Introduction | Adam Cathcart, Christopher Green, and Steven Denney

Part I Geography and Borderlands Theory: Framing the Region

1. Illuminating Edges: Borders as Institutions, Process, Space | Edward Boyle
2. On Asian Borders: 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

Part 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: Documenting North Korea’s Mythic Origins in the Border Regions, 1931-1953 | Adam Cathcart

Part III Histories of the Sino-Korean Border Region

8. Revisiting the Forgotten Border Gate: Fenghuang Gate and the Emergence of the Modern Sino-Korean Borderline, 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 Region 1990: A Journey to the Border in a Time of Flux | Warwick Morris and James (Jim) E. Hoare

Part IV Contemporary Borderland Economics

11. Change on the Edges: The Rajin-Sonbong Economic and Trade Zone | Theo Clement
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

Part V Human Rights and Identity in the Borderland and Beyond

15. Land of Promise or Peril? The Sino-North Korea Border Space and Human Rights | Nicholas Hamiseviez and Andrew Yeo
16. Celebrity Defectors: Representations of North Korea in Euro-American and South Korean Intimate Publics | Sarah Bregnzan
17. North Korean Border-Crossers: The Legal Status of North Korean Defectors in China | Hee Choi Translated by Robert Lanier
18. The Limits of Koreanness: Korean Encounters in Russo-Chinese Yanbian | Ed Pulford

Afterword | Kevin Gray