Migration and State Making: A Beiyang Settlement Scheme Along the Amur in 1921

Abstract:This article revisits Anglophone scholarship on Manchuria over the last two decades through the lens of official settlement schemes along China's northern frontier. It observes a difference between the way this key part of state making has been handled in histories of the Qing (1644–1912) and histories of the period of the Guomindang and the Japanese occupation (1928–1949) as opposed to histories of the early Republican or Beiyang era (1912–1927), in which state actors are notably absent from the literature. Bringing a 1921 refugee colonization program coordinated between authorities in North China and Manchuria back into the picture, the article broadens the range of agents involved in the strategic and developmental calculations underpinning modern China's state-making process.