Taming Contested Memories: Interpretation and Commemoration of Ethnic Korean History in Modern China

During the Japanese colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, more than a million Koreans immigrated to Manchuria, and played diverse roles both before and after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Many Koreans served as pioneers of Japanese colonization and participated in the repression of the local Chinese, resulting in hatred between Chinese and Koreans. Meanwhile, others Koreans, both communists and non-communists, fought against the Japanese with the Chinese, and were later enshrined as national heroes by North and South Korea. The Korean immigrants who decided to remain in China after 1945 later became one of the 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in communist China. Based on materials from China and the two Koreas including government documents, newspapers, state-sponsored scholarly works, local chronicles, propagandist materials, and field observation in relevant historical relics, this paper examines the ways Beijing interpreted and commemorated the historical events concerning ethnic Koreans, and analyzes Beijing’s underlying intentions. I argues that Beijing continually tried to tame the contested memories surrounding ethnic Koreans in order to promote its official narrative of national unity. In the early 1950s, Beijing’s need to rally domestic support for its decision to join the Korean War led to its policy of minimizing the memory of pro-Japanese Korean collaborators. Starting from the late 1950s, Beijing sought to strengthen the sense of belonging to China among ethnic minorities, and therefore officially claimed the anti-Japanese Korean communist guerillas as China’s ethnic Koreans defending China, conflicting with North Korea’s narrative enshrining those fighters as its martyrs for liberation. Beginning in the 1980s, South Korean civil society organizations began to retrieve historical relics of anti-Japanese movements by non-communist Koreans in Manchuria which Beijing had long neglected, pushing local Chinese governments to quickly hold their own commemorations and claim those South Korean national heroes as Chinese citizens.