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The effects of capitalism and colonialism, together with the expansion of the nation-state system, led to significant changes in the ways in which human spaces across the globe were defined, partitioned, and governed. While territorial modification was nothing new in the context of world history, what was new was the discourse and ideology behind it. Nations created artificial boundaries in order to identify themselves, and traditional understandings of space and place were both renewed and transformed in accordance with the hegemonic regime of international law. This type of change emerged firstly in Europe, and was later extended to European colonies in Africa, America, and Asia. With the imposition of the idea of national sovereignty, new geographic and political rhetoric fundamentally challenged the indigenous knowledge in relation to the possession and governance of land, leading to numerous conflicts and confrontations. A particularly popular example of this new kind of rhetoric was the notion of "no man's land" (or terra nullius in international law terminology). Many colonial powers, such as the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Japan, employed this term to legalize their forcible seizure of native territories.1
This article examines the invention of this notion in an East Asian context. In the late nineteenth century, a territorial dispute over the land north of the Tumen River, the border separating Qing China and Chos[LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH CARON]n Korea, stirred up a severe political conflict between the two neighboring countries. Then, in the early twentieth century, when Japan forcefully turned Korea into its "protectorate" and colony, this contested border area in southeastern Manchuria emerged as a critical diplomatic issue between China and Japan. During the debate over ownership of this space, Shinoda Jisaku (1872-1946), a Japanese colonial bureaucrat and international law expert, argued that this territory had been controlled by neither Qing China nor Korea, and hence constituted a "no man's land." The definition had, and still has, wide influence in academic discussions on the historical nature of the borderland.
Much scholarly work has been published on the Chinese-Korean-Japanese territorial dispute on the northern bank of the Tumen River. Unlike those works, this article is not a comprehensive investigation of the boundary dispute itself, nor...