The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan's Imperial Borderlands (2016)
Christmas, Sakura Marcelle (Author)
Miller, Ian (Advisor)
Harvard University
Miller, Ian
Physical Details: 329 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation traces one of the origins of the autonomous region system in the People’s Republic of China to the Japanese imperial project by focusing on Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Here, Japanese technocrats demarcated the borderlands through categories of ethnicity and livelihood. At the center of this endeavor was the perceived problem of nomadic decline: the loss of the region’s deep history of transhumance to Chinese agricultural expansion and capitalist extraction. As Japanese occupiers and their collaborators witnessed the social costs of state-led modernization, they began to pursue radical solutions in ethnic cleansing and environmental engineering on the steppe. These chapters show how Japanese administrators strove to reconstitute the relationship between land and nomad through theories of Social Darwinism, Marxian materialism, and cooperative evolution—theories they translated into technologies of rule on the periphery. Nomadism, often cast as incompatible to modernity, actually became integral to its conceit for the empire. Maps acted as the primary idiom through which Japanese planners sought to visualize the borderlands. Using Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian sources, the dissertation challenges the nation-based paradigms that have come to dominate the environmental history of East Asia. To view the colonies from afar as an extractive frontier removes us from environmental consequences of imperialism as much as it did for those living on the archipelago at the time. Rather, the social scientific theories and land surveying technologies, as discussed in these chapters, combined to disrupt the lives of hunters, herders, and farmers with environmental consequences that persisted into the postwar. As such, the dissertation brings together the seemingly irreconcilable histories of the Japanese empire and the People’s Republic. The narrative here addresses the problematic practice in the literature on Japanese imperialism of overlooking the Mongolian territories as empty space. It also serves as an alternate understanding to the beginnings of the multiethnic framework of the People’s Republic. Instead of only seeing the beginnings of Communist rule as forged in the fires of war against the Japanese, the dissertation also points to the significance of the occupation in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.
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