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Manchuria: An Ethnic History. Ethnic Studies of Northeast Asia/Memoires de la Societe Finno-Ougrienne. By JUHA JANHUNEN. Helsinki: The FinoUgrian Society, 1996. xiv, 335 pp.
Juha Janhunen, a Finnish polyglot and comparative linguist at the University of Helsinki, writes the ethnic history of "Manchuria" mainly from synchronic material. For him, Manchuria has its own distinct historical identity and integrity: "Manchuria, as a physical reality, is much more permanent than political states and their constantly changing borders" (p. 11). He somewhat idiosyncratically defines "the Manchurian ethnohistorical region" as having the following components: "Continental" (southern, central, eastern, northern, and western Manchuria), "Peninsular" (Shandong, Liaodong, and Korea), and "Insular" (Cheju Island, the Tsushima Islands, Kyushu, Shikoku, Honshu, Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and even Sahkalin). (The majority of his coverage is, however, on the "continental core" of the region.) Although his book is by no means a political harangue against the PRC, he clearly cares greatly for the people and land of Manchuria and regards the current term for the region, the Northeast (dongbei), as a "terminological trick" and "a transparent attempt to legitimize the political presence of China in Manchuria and to discourage any further attempts at creating a separate Manchurian regional identity" (p. 11). He also observes with discernible exasperation that "the realization that Manchuria is an entity fundamentally different from Mongolia and Central Asia came surprisingly late" (pp. 26-27).
The ethnic history of the peoples who have historically inhabited Manchuria is, janhunen believes, best written starting with "the present-day ethnic corpus, which may be defined as the network of the ethnic groups currently inhabiting the region under study. From this synchronic foothold ethnohistorical research can regressively approach the whole diachronic complex of increasingly ancient and more hypothetical ethnic developments . . . " (p. 17). Of three principal parameters for distinguishing ethnic groups (biology or racial...