Dong Jo Shin

This study examines the entangled histories of empire, ethnicity, and ecology through the case of Korean migrant farmers in Manchuria—later recognized as an ethnic minority in the People’s Republic of China. These farmers brought and cultivated cold-tolerant rice varieties originally engineered by Japanese agronomists for colonial Korea, which later thrived in Manchuria across the late Qing, Manchukuo, and early PRC period. Amid political and ecological change, Korean farmers temporarily inverted the conventional majority-minority hierarchy by producing this lucrative crop. Drawing on the concept of “cropscape,” this study illuminates how rice exposes the shared extractive logics of empire, colony, and state, and its role in ethnic formation in twentieth-century China.