Seattle is full of goodness on this misty, sunny, drizzling, French press in the morning weekend. Eastern mountains blaze with snow and light, Japanese-Americans send out slabs of sushi in Bellevue (Seattle’s Orange-County-with-rain banlieue), pages get scribbled in a windowsills on Fremont‘s young and proletarian streets, Taiwanese dole out sticky rice to a multinational gaggle on University Avenue, and funky Chinese jukebox joints thrum with glories both crude and glorious in Wallingford.
Which is all to say that I’m pleased to write that the journal Korean Studies has accepted and will be publishing my article entitled “Nationalism and Ethnic Identity in the Sino-Korean Border Region of Yanbian, 1945-1950,” in their 2010 issue.
Here’s the abstract:
Nationalism and Ethnic Identity in the Sino-Korean Border Region of Yanbian, 1945-1950
This manuscript chronicles the evolution of ethnic politics in the Yanbian region, focusing on the ethnic Korean Chinese communist leader Cho Dok-hae [朱德海] during the Chinese civil war and the early Korean War. Cho’s advocacy of Chinese nationality for ethnic Koreans is juxtaposed with his cooperation with North Korea, conflict over North Korean refugees, and examinations of the Yanbian region’s role between the PRC and the DPRK. The “Resist America and Aid Korea” movement provides the most dramatic example of how Cho and ethnic Koreans in Yanbian expressed a uniquely tinged Chinese nationalism while continuing to lend support to North Korea. The paper thereby aims to contribute to the regional history of Northeast Asia, add texture to debates on Chinese and Korean nationalism in that region, and reveal new aspects of Chinese Korean agency in the earliest years of CCP control.
Keywords: Chosonjok, Yanbian, nationalism, Sino-North Korean relations, Korean War.
Korean Studies is one of the top journals in its field and publishes about four major articles per year. I won’t reprise my anonymous reviewer’s points here, other than to note my (perhaps transitory?) pleasure that one of them considered the manuscript to be “a work of solid, first-class scholarship.” Will someone please shoot me when I stop getting a little chill when reader’s reports come in?
In any case, I was glad they agreed with my assertion that “What happened in the Sino-Korean borderland from 1945-1950, and the role played by China’s Korean minority in those events, remains largely an untold story” and that I’m the guy who has the right to tell the story for the first time (in English, that is).
In the meantime, hit me with an e-mail at my university address if you are interested in getting an advance copy or helping out with the joyful task of copy-editing the piece before it goes to press.
Finally, anticipating some future postings on word counts — particularly the need for a more comprehensive system of scholarly statistics akin to baseball — the Korean Studies manuscript is 11,899 words in length. Maybe this year I break 100,000 published words? Time to fire up Excel and call the shareholders!
Adam Cathcart 