The cheese, the worm, and the law: grassroots legal cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian borderland, 1906–1927
Date
2024
Authors
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Hua R. The cheese, the worm, and the law: Grassroots legal cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian borderland, 1906–1927. Modern Asian Studies. 2024;58(4):1201-1221. doi:10.1017/S0026749X24000398
Abstract
This article tells the story of 36 Chinese peasants and their audacious campaign to defend their private rights on two tiny islands in Manchuria from the Japanese empire and a Chinese warlord regime. A borderland in Northeast Asia, Manchuria was a site of intense inter-imperial rivalry in the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly discovered local Chinese archival documents as well as sources produced by Japanese, Korean, and American actors, I discuss how the peasants leveraged their knowledge of multiple property regimes in the borderland to delay and deflect the demands of two states. This microhistory of a transnational dispute illustrates the workings of a form of convergent legal pluralism in the Northeast Asian borderland. While historians agree that state capacity grew substantially in the East Asian borderlands in the early twentieth century, the case shows how that growth also complicated the nature of the state and created new possibilities of bottom-up socio-legal action. It exemplifies the kind of legal cosmopolitanism grassroots actors practised in a world of justice dominated by not-so-cosmopolitan nation-states.
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.