The cheese, the worm, and the law

Grassroots legal cosmopolitanism in the Manchurian borderland, 1906-1927

Bibliographic Data

ID3616844
AuthorsRui Hua (0000-0003-2686-7991, Boston University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume58
Issue4
Pages1201-1221
Publication date2024-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x24000398
OpenAlexW4405770004
LanguageEN
References cited11

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

China · Colonialism · Comparative law · Cosmopolitanism · East Asia · Empire · Grassroots · Legal pluralism · Legal realism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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