The Sinitic Nexus: Becoming Asian in the Chinese-language Literature of Manchuria under Japanese Rule

This dissertation analyzes modern Chinese-language literature produced in Manchuria under Japanese rule during the 1930s and 1940s. The protagonists in this literature identify not only with Manchuria, China, and Japan but also with East Asia. In my readings, a sense of belonging to China or East Asia, but more often to the latter, is one of the main sources for the cultural identities of these protagonists. In this study, I conceptualize the identities represented in the Chinese-language literature of Manchuria as a complex combination of entangled identities that I call the “Sinitic nexus.” I argue that the “Asian” element of this nexus of identities is constructed by Asianism, or the pan-national discourse of “Asia.” While thus far, the significance of “Asian” identities in the Chinese-language literature of Manchuria has been overlooked both in scholarship on this literature and in the intellectual history of Asianism, I focus on it to reveal the complexity of this literature from a fresh perspective that goes beyond naturalized categories such as nation and the dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized, and also to show how Asianist thought was creatively reproduced in literature through narratives of “Asia.”

In this study, I examine the work of three Chinese-language writers who were active in the semicolonial setting of Manchukuo (1932–45), a satellite state of the Japanese empire, and argue that their short stories and novels represent diverse configurations of the Sinitic nexus. Xiao Song’s protagonists seek to deny their “Chinese” identity in favor of an “Asian” identity. Some of Gu Ding’s protagonists have no national identity at all and identify only with “East Asia.” Jue Qing, by contrast, portrays protagonists whose “Chinese” identity is reinforced through their essentialized understanding of “Asia.” I argue that the narratives of “Asia” in the Chinese-language literature of Manchukuo resonated with the official ideology of the satellite state in various ways. By analyzing the identification process in this literature and setting the stories in question in their sociohistorical context in its full complexity, I offer new interpretations of these works as political acts that in some cases legitimized the state but in others subverted the official ideology. In this dissertation, I engage in dialogue primarily with studies on colonial modernity in East Asian literature. By emphasizing the sophisticated and ambiguous role of Asianism in the Chinese-language literature of Manchukuo, I explore colonial modernity in East Asian literature from a new perspective. My discoveries also seek to contribute to a reassessment of writers who produced complex and intriguing works that have been marginalized in scholarship for political reasons.