The Empire’s Crop in Socialist Soil: Rice, Ethnicity, and State Extraction in the Yanbian Sino-Korean Borderland, 1868–1961

This paper examines how wet-rice farming by ethnic Korean migrants reshaped the political economy, ecology, and governance of ethnicity in Manchuria across the twentieth century. It challenges a common assumption in modern Chinese and East Asian history: that regime change necessarily produced sharp ruptures in economic practice. Instead, it argues that successive regimes—the Qing, the Japanese empire, and the Chinese socialist state—shared a strikingly similar expectation of Korean settlers in the Manchurian borderland: their value as wet-rice cultivators. Despite their divergent political objectives—Qing border defense against Russian expansion, Japan’s construction of an imperial bridgehead in Manchuria, and the People’s Republic of China’s project of socialist state-building—these regimes converged on a common extractive relationship to Korean agricultural labor. What changed most decisively was not this logic itself, but the ecological conditions that made rice cultivation possible.

For the first time, Manchuria was transformed into a rice-producing region. The rice varieties that enabled this transformation were developed by Japanese agronomists for colonial extraction in Korea, a territory colder than the Japanese metropole. These varieties were later carried into Manchuria by Korean colonial subjects fleeing famine, dispossession, and imperial violence. While local Chinese populations had long regarded Manchuria as unsuitable for wet-rice cultivation using indigenous seeds, Korean migrants successfully cultivated rice where none had previously thrived. Even after Japan became China’s political enemy, Japanese agrarian science persisted across the border, reshaping Manchuria’s ecology. The result was a historical irony: socialist China’s “revolutionary crop” rested on imperial agronomy.

Drawing on the concept of the “cropscape,” this paper treats rice not merely as an agricultural commodity but as a historical force linking ecology, labor, and state power. Tracing rice across imperial, colonial, and socialist regimes reveals how agrarian economies, ethnic classification, and state formation became deeply entangled in Manchuria’s modern history.