Rui Hua

The dissertation examines the politics of Sino-Russo-Japanese collaboration and the nature of the Manchurian borderland intellectual space before and during the early years of Manchukuo (1932-1945). It explores how Sinophone intellectuals mobilized legacies of the Qing empire and the transnational Manchurian borderland to resist global imperialism, both Japanese and Western, in a transient window of political uncertainty in southern Manchuria shortly before and after the Mukden incident. From the local self-governance movements to the drafting of the Manchukuo constitution, these intellectuals experimented with various anti-imperialist projects to challenge received notions of nation and modernity from their margins. Although doomed by militarism, these defiant utopias still find resonance today.

This fellowship consists of two projects. The first, a book manuscript, offers a transnational history of peasants’ international law in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria. Legal histories of modern East Asia often foreground juridical spaces in the coastal metropolises. Using new sources in multiple languages from seventeen different archives, this manuscript tells a different story about the bottom-up emergence of transnational legal modernity in the non-state spaces of the agrarian frontier. Through detective work in hundreds of cases about property and debt straddling many borders, the manuscript shows how a unique form of legal pluralism allowed Manchurian borderlanders to influence the international rivalry in Northeast Asia. The second project examines how nonagrarian ecologies and their inhabitants—human or otherwise—participated in the making of the Northeast Asian legal order in the twentieth century. It combines legal history and the earth sciences to explore the possibility of storytelling at both human and planetary timescales.