Home > Activities
Date(s)： 2025/07/30
Time： 15:00~17:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host： Prof. Lin Chih-hung（Associate research fellow, IMH, AS）
Speaker：Mr. Xu Luming（Ph.D. student of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign）
Organizer： History of Knowledge Research Group
Abstract, In this study, I focus on the agricultural land policy in Manchuria during the early twentieth century to argue that “land” was the central object of competition for the development of “coloniality of nation”. By recognizing private ownership of farmlands and the commercialization of land and grains, the Republican Chinese government was able to expand its economic grip over Manchuria. As “Chinese land”, agricultural lands in Manchuria should be exclusively owned and exploited by the Chinese nation, but not necessarily by the Chinese people. On the contrary, as the direct competitor of China in Manchuria, the Japanese government and social organizations used a variety of strategies within the framework of international law to advance their “national interests” and expand Japan’s imperial reach. I will analyze the history of land policy in Manchuria and propose that there was an “ownership pluralism” concerning issues of land ownership, migration policy, and nationality question throughout the periods of late Qing, Republican China, and Manchukuo era. A shared practice for both China and Japan thereby became fundamental to my analysis: land measurement and ownership management (Ch. qingzhang 清丈; Jp. chiseki seiri地籍整理). Instead of studying the processes of land surveying and land policies from a single national historical perspective, I argue that land policies, migration projects, and nationality questions are inseparable from each other, which made land in Manchuria a delicate political question inextricably interwoven with the production of national ideologies and state building processes.