North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Ed Pulford: Discovering the city where North Korea, China and Russia collide

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Ed Pulford joins the podcast to discuss his new book “Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea,” which examines the unique border area between the three countries from various angles. He shares insights from his time in the Chinese town of Hunchun on the border with Russia and North […]

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most closely watched regions in the world. Don't wait, spaces are filling fast. Hello podcast listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack O's Wedsuit, and this interview was recorded on Wednesday, the 17th of July, 2024. And I'm joined by a stream yard from his home in England by Dr. Ed Pulford, who is an anthropologist and senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Manchester. He has a new book, Past Progress, Time and Politics at the Borders of

China, Russia and Korea, which we will discuss today. Welcome on the show, Ed. Thanks very much, Jaco. It's great to appear. Now, your book, as I said in the introduction, it's called Past Progress, Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia and Korea. Briefly, what's it about? Well, I guess it's about how people from different countries across borders, between countries, perceive their relationships with people on the other side of those borders in terms of time, in terms of whether the people and the place that they look at across the border, for example, the Tumen River border between China and North Korea, whether they perceive those people to be in the same sort

of time space, if you like, are those people behind us? Are they ahead of us? And I guess this is a very widely held view. It's very common when people travel to different countries, I think, for the perception to be that this place is more modern or more advanced or less modern or something than what might have been expected. But I guess in socialist countries such as North Korea, China, or the Soviet Union, there's a particular kind of intensity to how time has been part of identifying the state. And so everyday people, in my view and based on the fieldwork that I conducted at this triple border, perceive the people

from across the border in very stark ways to be from different periods of time. And that's all the more stark, I think, in the wake of the collapse of some of these socialist projects. I hope that's not too obscure a summary. But basically, that's the theme. And I guess the core question I'm trying to answer in many ways is why it is that people

are so taken, are so captured by this idea of progress, of forward movement. Why it is that we understand our place in the world. And again, it's not just people on the North Korea China border or anywhere else, but why it is that so many people in the world understand themselves to be somewhere in a forward-moving temporal frame. Yeah, okay. On the most practical level, is there actually a time difference, a difference in time zones between the parts of Russia, China, and North Korea that meet? Yes, although there's more complexity than one might expect to how people cross these borders and what time they end up adhering to. So the gap between that northeastern part of China and the adjacent part of Russia varies depending on daylight savings and so on between two and

three hours. So again, that's a big difference when crossing a single short distance across the border, a huge leap there two or three hours. Between Korea and China, there's a one hour difference, I guess, these days or you know, that's sort of the standard thing. But North Korea has, I think is probably well known to many listeners played a little bit with its time zone, including actually, as it would happen during the period when I was conducting my research about seven or eight years ago, when there was a sort

of half hour shift in 2015 to apparently, according to reporting, move away from being on the same time zone as Japan, right, then got cancelled as far as I'm aware. However, one of the cases that I highlight in this book is Chinese tourists visiting North Korea. They don't bother with any kind of adherence to North Korean time, whatever difference or otherwise there might be between China and North Korea. They just continue to operate on Chinese time the whole time they're there. So I guess whether or not there does exist a time is sort of immaterial to some people who are crossing the borders.

Right. And so we're talking for most of the time of your field work about this Chinese city called Hunchun, which is on that sort of three-way border crossing between China, Russia and North Korea. Just give us a sense of what the borders between those three countries are like in that city of Hunchun. Is it simply just like in Europe when you go from the Netherlands to Belgium and you just cross a line and nobody pays any attention to it? Or are there border guards at all three nations?

How does that work? Yeah, well these are very sort of firmly inscribed, firmly defended and reinforced borders and have been for quite a long time. The North Korea-China border, I guess, has maybe in the longer term over many decades been a little bit more open than the one between China and Russia. But I think we've seen quite clearly in the last few years that more and more sort of reinforcement from both sides actually resulting from a combination of concern over people leaving on the North Green side and concern over people arriving on the Chinese side. That's that's led to a

certain amount of reinforcements. The Tumen River at this point outside Hunshun as you mentioned, it's very shallow, slow flowing, low key kind of border river. It's not you know, the river actually forms the border at that point. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. since the early 18th century. That's, that's been the case, the Yalu on the west side and the Tumen on the right hand side, right, both of them originating on Pekdusan, on Changbai Shan, and that basically delineating the

border more or less consistently since 17, the 1710s. On the Russia side of things, that's a newer border. Mid-19th century was when Russia sort of annexed that part of land and brought its own territory all the way down to that triangular point, Hunshun, which I should say is in this Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture in northeast China. Hunshun is the town at which points basically all three borders meet. And yet from the mid-19th century, the Russians basically concluded a treaty with the Qing dynasty, the Chinese government at the time. And that border, even after the sort of initial, I guess, conclusion of that treaty, there was quite a lot of movement to and fro for quite a significant period

of time. But especially after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922, once the Bolsheviks got there and sort of set up the Soviet state in this part of Russia, the border became more and more firmly reinforced and defended. There's no obvious geographical marker right there. There's a kind of reach. There's no river.

There's rivers on much of the rest of the Chinese border, actually, with Russia, further to the rest of the Chinese border actually with Russia further to the north, the river Ussuri and the river Amur, but here it's a kind of line drawn along a ridge that brings Russia all the way down to the point where it also borders Korea. Again, that point of crossing with that small Tumen River bridge that I guess became a little iconic during the pandemic when some Russian diplomats were leaving North Korea on a kind of hand-pumped cart with all their bags. That's the point where Russia and North Korea join there. So you have quite distinct sort of the look of it is varied, but it's quite a wild area as well. I mean, the town of Funchun is not very big,

not a huge number of people live right up to the border, but there are villages on all three sides that are pretty close to the borders. And is there a sort of a tourist magnet, a point where the three countries meet, where, you know, like in some places in some countries and in some US states, you'll find like there's a rock or a marker where people can stand around and hold hands and one of them's in each country. Is that that kind of a thing there as well? Yeah absolutely. I mean you don't have things like you know the world's biggest boot made out of cheese or whatever novelty things appear on the side of highways in the US to attract people but maybe you don't need that because actually the tourist sites that you've alluded to there is a little way to south east of the town of Hunchun itself.

If you drive down about half an hour, 40 minutes or so from the actual town, you get to a place called Fangchuan, Pangchang I guess is the name in Korean. And it has a platform, a kind of tower that you can climb and overlook all three countries and see into that neighboring parts of Russia, across the Tumen, into the neighboring parts of Korea. And I guess the big draw in many ways for tourists there too is that you can see the Sea of Japan as it's called in China or East Sea,

I guess for Koreans. Although I should say that actually Chinese Koreans call it Ilbonair. They're not so bothered it seems by the nationalist claim to it not being the Sea of Japan that you get on the peninsula. But the sea over to the east is mostly visible if it's a clear day, but that's not accessible to China because Russia and North Korea come down and kind of cut China's access to the Sea of Japan there. So it's a nice view and it's become an increasingly popular tourist destination on itineraries that will take you maybe to Pekdusan,

and then to some other major sites in the area. And then down to this little triple border point. It's worth a visit, I would recommend it. you maybe to Pakdusan, you know, and then to some other major sites in the area and then, yeah, down to this little triple border point. It's worth a visit, I would recommend it. Okay, but it sounds like that triple border point, it's all on the Chinese side, so I'm guessing that you can't just sort of easily hop across the borders and say, now I'm in Russia, now I'm in North Korea, now I'm back in China again. Is that correct? That's absolutely right, Jacko. Yeah, it's a very kind of interesting situation that in microcosm, in a very local setting, I guess, brings into focus the attitude that each country,

each state has to its national borders. Because on the Chinese side, it's, you know, it's pretty free and easy, you know, there's kind of raucous groups of tourists having a great time getting right down there. And you can really go right up to the line and the border. You can see all kinds of artifacts of border drawing projects over the last couple of centuries. There's border stones with the Russian side and also a kind of small museum about a battle that happened there, the Janggofeng or Hassan battle that occurred there between the Japanese Imperial Army and the Soviet Army during the 30s. There's all manner of attractions that really pushed you

right up to the line where the new country starts. On the Russian side, it's a heavily militarized and basically zone of exclusion there. You can't freely enter that neighboring part of Russia unless you have a special permit. You have to be either a resident there or somebody with special permission to go to the town of Hassan, which is the adjacent town in Russia, because it's a sensitive area. Obviously, it's the border with North Korea, with China, at the point at which North Korean

work teams and so on cross into Russia. So there's no hint of any tourism really other than if you're able to organize a special trip to go and look at, I don't know, some lakes with some nice, I don't know, birds and stuff in it. There's also no real infrastructure there for tourists in the unlike in China. And then of course, on the North Korean side, I guess you're looking across that on song county in Hong Kong, Hong Kong book door. Well, I mean, we I guess we're looking across that Omsong county in Hamgyong, Hamgyong, Bukdo.

Well, I mean, I guess we're familiar with the tourist scene, perhaps listeners to this podcast and people involved in its manufacture are familiar with how tourism to North Korea works for local sort of tourists. I guess there was probably a small industry, I would imagine, in some trips up there because there are a few local sites that aren't so far from that point. Things like Wangjiazhan Monument, which is a little bit to the west of there, where you can see this great big statue of Kim Il-sung

and his partisan fighters and so on. And there's a museum also not so far, I guess Huadong is not so far, the museum to Kim Jong-il's, sorry, Kim Il-sung's mother and so on. So there's, you know, there's kinds of bits and bobs on the North Korean side and that are taken in sometimes by tours undertaken by foreigners as well. But yeah, I think it's a very, very different kind of, you know, environment on each side that really reflects whether or not those countries are confident in some respects about their borders or, you know, whether they

feel like they want random people, whether domestic citizens or foreigners or anyone else sort of wandering right up to the edge. Well, coming back to China, that's where you did your field work and that was around what 2013 to 2015, right? Roughly, yeah. I mean, I've repeated visited since then a number of times. But yeah, the kind of primary chunk of the research that went into this book is, yeah, obviously

receding as many other things do into the into the times past. But yeah, roughly around then. Yeah. So I've heard and I've read from various sources that the ability of foreigners to approach the border, that particular border that you're talking about in Northeast China, but also other places along the China and North Korea border, that that's not quite what it used to be, perhaps, particularly during the pandemic, but even afterwards, there are some border areas that foreigners are not allowed to go to. And you have to, you know, I have a Korean friend who went there who sort of pretended he was a local ethnic Korean

Chinese person, but of course that as soon as he was asked to show an ID, that all fell apart. So I think things might not be as as they were when you were there. I think that's that's true. I mean, I think the trend in that direction actually was already starting. It's interesting the case, the question as to whether the pandemic was kind of major watershed in its own right. And I think in many areas when it comes to, yeah, wandering around China's, China's borders and crossing them and so on, it did change things quite

significantly, but actually, I think even before that, there was already some increasingly sort of careful regimentation, organization of how people were allowed to move around this space, even back in the mid 2010s, you know, even going along the border, for example, between Hunshun and Tumen. So sort of to the west, you know, you're basically there is a road all the way along the bank of the River Tumen there, which buses go along and so on. There was increasing kind of monitoring of who was getting on those buses and so on,

even back in the 2010s. And also when it came to that Fengquan tourist site, there was also a sort of increasing regularization of tour groups and so on. I mean, in the earlier days, I guess the early 2010s and so on, and certainly any longer ago than that, you could really just go down there yourself, you could get a taxi or some private transport right up to the tower where you can go over and look at different countries. But actually, already before the pandemic, they were starting to

try to collect people, put them in a car park that was back from the actual tourist site itself and put them then on tour buses that meant that they were on a more fixed itinerary and with these designated spots. Part of that, I think, was reacting to the numbers that were increasingly going there. But yes, I do accept and well, I've seen and heard and spoken to people that I still am in touch with in that area who have seen that there is more concern over these things. And that itself is not unprecedented. I mean, it wouldn't be totally accurate to say that all of China's borders all the way around there are totally up for grabs in terms of going up to the very edge, far to the north of there.

For example, there's a border point with Russia, where there's an island that was in dispute until the 2000s, which has settled the, you know, the dispute has been settled and everyone agrees now which part of the island is Russia and which is China in the middle of the river. But actually non-Chinese citizens are not allowed onto the Chinese bit of that island. So it's not totally out of character or unprecedented to have a North Korea specific thing, although obviously North Korea presents certain particular challenges when it comes to how that border has been over many decades back into the 90s and before that too.

Okay, so focusing on this large town or small city of Hunshun with about 230,000 people. It's in China, but you've got ethnic Koreans there, you've got some Russians across the border. What was it like doing field work and which languages did you learn and speak while you were there? Yeah, well, I had a background already in both in Chinese and in Russian, and that was sort of where I came to it sort of from. But in preparation for the actual research in Hunshun, I did a year of Korean language at Yanbian University in Yanji, the sort of capital is putting it a bit strongly,

but the main center of the Yanbian Korean prefecture in that part of China. So I joined a class of, you know, 30 or so local Chinese students and did intensive year basically their first year undergrad degree in Korean. So I was working on that while I was while I was there. And I lived there with a local in Hunan once I started my fieldwork there properly. And yeah, I mean, it was a really incredibly interesting period of time as I think you would probably imagine. I mean, the kind of combination of languages and cultures and so on there, I mean, it jumps right out at you from walking around

the town of Hunan itself because it's in Yanbian, all of the signs are in Korean already, as well as in Chinese, because obviously it's China. But in order to sort of cater to Russian people in the town, there's also a significant number of Russian signs. And basically, almost every shop has all three languages, which, you know, it just even in a very non-academic or serious way, it just looks great, because it three different scripts and it's all sort of all buttered up together. So, and actually that, you know, in many respects reflects a kind of pattern of interaction that's going on there. There really is a significant presence of all three groups. There are local ethnic Koreans, i.e. Chinese citizen Chosunjok,

who are, you know, a significant proportion of the town, I mean, less and less. I guess this is the story across the Yenbian over the last 30 plus years in terms of migration to South Korea. There was actually a new story at the very beginning of 2022, I think, which indicated that there are now more Chosunjok in South Korea than there are in Yenbian, which is a major sort of turning point. I guess some of those numbers are a bit hard to pin down because people

are quite mobile and moving to and fro a lot. But anyway, there's still fluidity, people are coming back and forth. Exactly. Yeah. So whether someone is actually fully in a place is another question. But the population there is also significant and Chinese, also lots of Russians. And, you know, navigating between Han Chinese, also lots of Russians, and navigating between those different groups of people I found really interesting. What's the status of the Russians there? Do they have Chinese citizenship? No, they're all visitors. They've all come across the border temporarily. There are some people who are there longer term studying or working and you know, there are Russian interests there that mean that, you know, it's not,

it's not sort of completely temporary. But I guess it's more common for Russians to be there as temporary visitors for shopping or medical treatment or a whole bunch of other things, which they do on a kind of regular basis. So they're not sort of permanent residents or people who are all there all the time, but they often are very familiar with Hunshun and know it well because they come from just across the border in many cases, not very far away geographically. And they come in and spend a few days or a few weeks depending on what they're doing on a regular basis. So they get, you know, they build up a lot of familiarity with the place and with the town. So there's a kind of gradation there I guess of like temporary and

permanent people or people who are residents, local people are already from a variety of different ethnic groups and then the outsiders that are there also includes, you know, some Koreans from both Koreas and a real kind of patchwork. Well, now, as you know, we here at NK News, we focus almost exclusively on North Korea. So why is doing fieldwork in Hunchun useful for people who are interested in studying and understanding the DPRK or North Korea better? Well, I think this is a time, in some ways, a time sensitive question or one that has shifted over a period of time. I mean, certainly for quite a few decades or a couple of decades, especially from the 90s and 90s into 2000s, Yonhapn was a place you could come as an outside researcher or someone interested in North Korea and really encounter, get a much storied rare glimpse of North Korean life, whether appearing across the

border or speaking to local experts in institutions in the MBN who had a kind of depth of engagement with North Korea that was really unmatched, including even in South Korea at that point, because actually people were able to freely move to and fro or freely-ish. There was a lot of contact right up until the 90s and just going to North Korea was a very common thing. So I guess you could get a kind of understanding of society and of how things work there in that period that was deeper really than many other places you might go for that. And in the absence of the ability to do immersive kind of field work or research or surveys or anything like that within

North Korea. But I think the other thing that the NBN is sort of a fascinating case for is as a sort of meeting point, it sometimes gets referred to as this sort of a fascinating case for is as a sort of meeting point. It sometimes gets referred to as this sort of third career, but it's also somewhere that combines North and South in quite interesting ways. The course I studied on in the MBN University, for example, was called Chosunmal, the major, the degree is referred to in that way. But the course texts that we had referred to Korean as hangul as hangul you so there was this kind of odd mix and that book that textbook was authored,

for example, by or produced by a publishing company actually way up north in Heilongjiang, where there's another community of chosen joke, not in the not the nbn ones, but a different group of Chinese Koreans. So actually, the text in that book combined this local Korean satori, there's a local Korean speech, kind of, you know, elements of that that were still, I guess, more formal and certain kinds of expressions that might sound a bit awkward or weird in South Korea, but with lots of, you know, South Korean influence. And that's something that has, you know, only intensified, I guess, you know, Genpeng in some ways is the first place that gets the Korean wave because it's outside Korea, but it's open to all kinds of Korean cultural influence. And it's completely Korean speaking

or in many cases, Korean speaking. So there is a kind of amazing combination there of South and North. So I guess in that sense, it helps you to sort of tease out what might be what might be similar or different about those sorts of influences. But I think mainly that the thing that I mentioned there at the beginning where you've got a large population of Koreans there who, you know, have a much more sort of nuanced and complex view of North Korea as their immediate neighbors, and people that they had a lot to do with until comparatively recently. That's a pretty unique situation vis-a-vis North Korea-related research. Now, I've read that through the decades, there have been times when, relatively speaking,

North Korea was an easier place to live in. So some people from China crossed over the border to live in North Korea. And then since at least the 1990s, it's been the other way with North Koreans leaving to spend time in China. Did you talk about these phenomena with your informants in Yanbian? Yes, absolutely. I mean, actually, I think I probably learned about that situation from people I spoke to there in a way that I hadn't previously appreciated. But, you know, the kind of position of those of Chosun Chok within China has shifted considerably over time with political shifts that have gone on in

China. And that has coloured their attitude towards North Korea as a sort of alternative or as a sort of other place that they might feel historically connected to. I mean, in terms of the actual origins of that community, many know, many of them do have some sort of family history not so far away just in what was Hamgyongdo before it got divided into North and South. Although there's also a significant proportion of Yanbian Koreans who come from Gyeongsando and places like further South actually in what is now the South. But I guess in terms of, you know, how much attachments or otherwise they felt to either place, well, in the early days of the PRC, the 50s, North Korea, the Chosunjo was

celebrated as kind of key socialist fighters against Japanese imperialism, people who helped to bring communist power to the Northeast. So they had a high status and were really allowed to govern their own affairs quite happily in Yanbian from the 50s onwards. And really a unique situation among minorities in China. From the 60s, however, or mid 60s and the cultural revolution, there was a strong xenophobic kind of anti minority,

anti borderlands feeling across China. And North Koreans at that point were very, sorry, Chinese Koreans at that point were very sorry, Chinese Koreans at that point were sort of stigmatized and attacked in a way that was common to lots of borderlanders. At that point in time, North Korea had developed quite rapidly, you know, after the Korean War, this Japanese industrial legacy and various other benefits that I guess were there, quite organized Soviet style economy. And so compared to China's chaotic cultural revolution, North Korea at that point seems maybe an attractive alternative to those to those Chinese Koreans who in many or

not many cases, it would be it would be an exaggeration to say it was it was huge numbers, but significant numbers and people who are relatives or, you know, people who the people I spoke to knew, and were related to did move over the border there. However, as you mentioned, tides turn again and as things get worse in North Korea, China, as it sort of takes off economically from the 80s and 90s, starts to seem a more appealing option, especially in the wake of economic collapse and the kind of command economy kind of coming up short once the Soviet

Union is no more in the early 90s. And so yeah, of course, we're familiar, I think, or many people will be with the North Korean famine into the early 2000s. And that occasioned a huge number of people again, moving back in the other direction, too. So there's been an enormous amount of sort of to and fro. And I guess, you know, in terms to bring it right up to the present, I mean, what's most interesting to me and that relates to the previous answer or the question about what we can be learned about North Korea there, it's that actually this push pull and some of the division, some of the increasing and reinforcements of borders and so on over the last 10 or

20 years has meant that oddly enough, these Chinese Koreans and people living in this area now look at North Korea in a way that's oddly similar to how a lot of the rest of the world views it as a kind of odd, far away place, even though you can literally see it from the center of town in Hunshun. You can see hills that are just over there, but they're in North Korea. But despite that proximity, despite decades or centuries of ethnic mixing and commonality language-wise and so on, actually people increasingly look at it as this sort of mysterious, odd place.

And that is a real reflection, I think, of a kind of estrangement that has been produced by, again, some of these historical forces between the two countries. And there's also a much smaller group of ethnic Han Chinese who have lived in North Korea called the the Hwagyo who presumably have the ability to cross borders as well. I think they numbered now somewhere between five to 10,000. Were you able to meet any of them during your time in Northeast China? No, I haven't come across them there. I think I did bump into some in the lift at one point in a hotel in Pyongyang or came across people with that background because they do seem to live an

interesting middle in between life in that context. But no, I didn't come across Huagyaw in Northeast China. I would imagine that their most natural points of call in China itself are probably a bit more mainstream because they're engaged in China related stuff. I guess there's no reason for them in particular to go to Yanbian because there isn't that kind of ethnic connection because they're Han Chinese. Well, I would imagine that the North Koreans that are in Yanbian are, I guess, just a larger number of the kind of groups that you see elsewhere in China, business people, dance and song troupes and people involved in those kinds of business, quite significant numbers, people studying, of course, at Yanbian University and so on.

But that's, you know, those people are often in other parts of China too, just more in Yanbian. So you were actually able to come into contact, unmediated contact with North Korean citizens in Yanbian? Yeah, to an extent. There was a hotel that I used to visit quite often, got made friends with someone who worked there who was a Russian, Veking, Han Chinese person who was, I think that their parents ran the hotel. And, you know, I was a sort of honorary Russian for a lot of the time there. Well, I mean, these days, you know, maybe it would be a mixed blessing. But in any case, it was, you know, it was a sort of I was just sort of assumed to be Russian much of the time. And so some of the friends I made among kind of local Chinese people were often kind of through some sort of Russia related connection. And this friend of mine there, that

hotel had a resident Korean dance troupe who played there and who they'd sort of hang out in the in the bar and you know, the restaurant in the hotel and so yeah, got some you know, some level of chatting to them. Again, my sort of whatever anthropological or research-based instincts, you slightly try to moderate your desperate desire to delve into the ins and outs of someone's deep subjectivity when they're in a situation that,

of course, is probably not gonna be, it's not so easy for them to interact with some random English person or indeed some random Russian person if that's what I was assumed to be. So yeah, I would don't want to over egg my, you know, incredible insights into into life for those people. But I did, you know, I got to know it got to know people well enough. And that definitely fed into my, my research and how I understood the relationships that relationships across those borders. Now from their founding and through their history, both the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the People's Republic of China, while both being notionally or at least nominally socialist countries,

they've trod different paths, different versions of how to achieve socialism, that socialist utopia that they're both dreaming of. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think that is that sort of returns us actually to this kind of core interest I have in this book in how projects which have in common this allegiance to socialism, as you've said, and therefore to a kind of shared trajectory towards this utopian idea somewhere in the future, also diverge and also basically are constructed and carried out within kind of national containers, like within the borders of those states.

This, I guess, in my understanding and in my sort of, some of what I write in the book is partly a function of there being projects that have an inheritance back to this Stalinist idea of socialism in one country, the idea that socialism after Lenin and Stalin actually was no longer this borderless utopian idea that mean everyone or working people across the world would unite regardless of ethnic or national affiliation and so on. There was this sort of pragmatic, I guess, project and in the Stalin case ended up being a very,

you know, of course, brutal and harsh authoritarian project to construct a socialist system within the borders of a country. And I guess, you know, Chinese and Korean incarnations of that are, you know, in some respects have a sort of formal resemblance to that in the sense that they are one country socialism for China and for North Korea. Now, slightly different, I guess, from the Soviet Union, or at least in a different way, each project is also very concerned with national liberation and post-colonial or post-imperial, you know, projects of getting out of that kind of domination by

either Japan and, of course, earlier, and at the same time, European Western colonists. So I guess that's something that in broad terms is shared. But the distinction, for example, between how to construct this socialist project in a massive post-imper imperial space like China, where you have dozens of different ethnic groups, languages, all kinds of different ways of doing things, you know, what Marx or Marxist thinking would think of as different modes of production, different peoples considered according to this progressive view of history, who are

thought of being on different stages of some sort of historical trajectory towards a socialist or communist utopia versus the North Korean case, which certainly a huge amount of effort has been put into constructing that as a single, as a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, broadly, state. Those are quite distinct kinds of projects. And I think the Choson job, because they sort of strad, this case, they are in some ways attached to and implicated in the North Korean socialist project, which is this powerfully mono ethnic, largely focused on Japanese colonialism project, and the Chinese one, which is by by virtue of China's sort of status as a multi ethnic exnic ex-empire, they're part of this other thing

which is a much more kind of plural and complicated thing. I think they act as a great sort of bellwether or case study for trying to see what it means, including what it means to be Korean and socialist over time in quite different national contexts. So that's a sort of angle that I'm interested in here. And there's a Soviet Russian angle to that too, although, perhaps less immediately,

Jermaine, the NK News podcast. Indeed. So when the ethnic Koreans in Hunchun look over the river at North Korea and they're thinking about progress and socialism and backwardness. What are their thoughts? How do they describe North Korea to you? What they're seeing? Yeah, it's an interesting mix of things, I think, because it won't come as a surprise to anyone who's familiar with China today,

that younger people in this region are not sort of died in the world ardent socialists per se, you know, they I think they they don't necessarily take seriously a lot of the official Chinese government messaging and the idea that this is somehow a socialist project in some kind of, you know, very doctrinaire archetypal way from past decades. Although there is still a utility in joining the Chinese Communist Party and being part of those structures, isn't there? There absolutely is, yeah, and in some senses that speaks to the kind of national character

of the Chinese socialist project, I think, that actually the incredible structural complexity of this sort of still somewhat Stalinist 1950s model of socialist statism overlaid on a Chinese already complex hierarchical society. That's still all the iconography or the language around that. And Xi Jinping has been someone who's doubled down on socialism, communism, Marx, Engels, blah, blah, blah, and he talks about it all the time. But in terms of what, quote unquote, real, or what socialism actually is, is aiming for. Maybe that's a bit less a concern of many people. But I think the relationship with North Korea is still seen as a sort of one mediated through this shared socialist past and different fates since that project sort of started to change in the 90s.

And so certainly older older people, including the granny and the family that I lived with in Hunshun, still think of actually people of that generation still do largely think of China as a sort of socialist place in contradistinction to Western capitalist places and kind of look on North Korea positively as a sort of still as a what's called in Chinese a shong di guo jia like a brother socialist brother country. And so there is a kind of still, you know, still alive that kind of nostalgia, but they also look at it as a place that has, you know, that is backwards, that has sort of failed to change its socialist model. And that that's in some ways reflects on people's sort

of, you know, the Koreans there, that they're kind of innate character somehow, they just haven't seemed to get it together. The other, I mean, just as a slight aside, the other really interesting thing that I heard quite often in how people describe North Korea was using a term, fungjian, which means feudal, like they will often sort of categorize North Korea as a feudal country, which is odd. I mean, it's not maybe not totally wrong, given the sort of power structures and so on that are so obvious in North Korea, but fengjian, more feudal than China, is also a kind of curious mix. And so this sort of language, you know, it's really embedded in people's cross border perceptions. And again, this comes back to the sort of overarching theme of what I'm interested in, how people look at those relationships in terms of the language, the iconography, the kind of frames of analysis that people have. You know, these aren't academics,

they're just regular people, but they still sort of have this socialist inflected way of perceiving things, not to make them seem like some kind of totally other impossible to understand group of people, but it plays a role in people's lives, unsurprisingly. Yes. Now, since the personal is political, how does the proximity of the people of Yanbian and particularly in Hunchun to the DPRK influence how they think about the DPRK and its international relations in an everyday way? Yeah, well, that element too is, I think, quite interesting. I mean, again, I think there's an element of generational distinction here among among the MBN Koreans in how they would sort of look on North Korea's

global orientation. Although, you know, I think in in the kind of much more recent frame of the last the last few years and increasing tensions with with China and the United States or a kind of broader understanding that there might be greater sense of stress and division between China and other countries. I think there's a kind of admiration, not to put it too strongly, but people are sort of impressed at North Korea's incredible stubbornness, if you like, in that sense. I mean, there's definitely people who are like, look at that, that those guys are really doing something serious, you know, we might not agree with it, but you've got to you've got to hand it to them. They are, in a way really doubling down on their whole project to resist anything of that of that nature. But I think, yeah, the kind of still now, the idea that people, you know, can cross borders. And of course, as we mentioned earlier, going to South Korea and elsewhere in the world has been a very important part of Joseon-jok lives now for 30 years or more. And so that idea that openness, kind of mobility and the kind of connectedness to other places is a significant

feature of how people understand themselves and understand their society. So again, to look at North Korea through that lens, that people feel great sympathy with Koreans there, in some ways people that they might feel nostalgic about from a sort of co-ethnic or kind of sense of shared history perspective, but the idea that those people are a bit trapped, I think is also a factor in how they how they look at North Korea. So it's a kind of a mix there of, you know, some sort of reluctance, admiration, and then a kind of sympathy, along with along with

a bunch of other things, including, as I mentioned earlier, a sort of confusion as to why don't those guys just reform their economy like we did and sort themselves out? It sounds like that also goes some way to explaining the enduring popularity of North Korean restaurants in China. Yeah, I think there's a booming industry and a lot of this sort of nostalgic stuff. I mean, those North Korean restaurants and the kind of performances that you can enjoy there, you know, as you as you eat your, your rinmian or whatever, the coding of that and the kind of aesthetics of it's a very familiar, they feel adjacent to a lot of the Cultural Revolution era, songs

and dances and so on that, you know, again, older generations within China sort of still appreciate and feel a nostalgia for whether it's actually because of socialism or any kind of actual connection to the political projects, or whether it's, you know, just a sort of more generic nostalgia for simpler times, or whether it's a personal nostalgia for people's youths, people are nostalgic for their youth, whether it was living, I don't know, as a witness in the UK, whether people who prefer to think of their youth as being in some sort of simpler, easier UK to live in, or whether they were

living in Maoist China, it almost doesn't matter. I think people are quite naturally inclined to be nostalgic. So those restaurants, I think cater to a variety of both sorts of ideologically flavored things and just general and now for a younger generation, as I said, who look on North Korea is increasingly mysterious and weird and sort of exotic in an odd way. You know, there's something a bit sort of, you know, edgy about about going to this place and like, what are they doing? It's just so nuts. So I think they've got to market there for a variety of different reasons. When were you last in Hunshun or in Yanbian? I haven't been since the pandemic, actually, sadly. I've only been to China once since the pandemic at all. So 2019, I guess, was the last time. I imagine you might still have ongoing

contact with people who live there today, even though you haven't been there yourself? Yeah, I'm still in touch periodically with people from different backgrounds and different, I guess, in different walks of life there. And in a sense, the border effects of the pandemic were very, very harshly felt by people there who previously were relying on tourist business, for example, that obviously completely dried up or were involved in cross-border trade. All the Russians that lived there basically had to go.

And Chinese people involved in border trade with Russia or to a sort of slightly lesser extent, but also things like seafood to North Korea and other sorts of things. They really struggled and had to find other things to do, kind of batten down the hatches and grit their teeth through that period. So I think from what I've learned, things are kind of starting cautiously to resume their former tempo, at least vis-a-vis the Russian side of things. But as I think you've already discussed, and you've brought it up a number of times on the pod, I think, when will people be allowed to come and go? And of course, Russia, China are likely to be the first places that, and already are a bit bit places that people can go to from to into North Korea from Apparently the full spigot on letting Chinese tourists

back into North Korea hasn't been turned on yet. Yeah, I think that's an interesting one. I guess partly that may be a function of managing scale. I think there were never that many Russians. There was always a flow and going out to Wonsan to go to the beach or, you know, even around Chongqing or these various places. There's, you know, there's kind of, I guess, a sort of trial element to that. But I think, you know, it's not to kind of try to take cases

of tourism to analyze much more complicated, intricate diplomatic things, but sort of classic vein of playing China and Russia or China and the Soviet Union off against each other a little bit. I suppose now, as we've witnessed over the last few weeks, Russia is somewhere that North Korea is quite happy to be buddying up with at the moment. And, you know, why not give it a go? I mean, this stuff, you know, has played out and been evidence around the border as well for decades, you know, right back to the 70s and the 80s when Kim Il-sung was sort of navigating his way between the two communist superpowers. So maybe it's not so unexpected to find that it reflects itself in tourism as well today. Yeah, it is. It's fascinating to watch. the world and it reflects itself in yeah in tourism as well

today. Yeah, it is. It's fascinating to watch and I can totally understand the the interest for you and why you picked that area to do your uh your field research uh that brings us to the end of our interview today. I'd like to

recommend to listeners if they're interested in knowing more to check out your book past progress time and politics at the borders of of China, Russia, and Korea. Are you on Twitter? No, not in any kind of overt or active way. I sometimes look at it and I usually regret it. I understand. I've more or less gone inactive on it myself. But we will include a link to your page at the University of Manchester in the show notes

so people can find you. So thanks once again for coming on the show, Ed Pooleford. Thanks very much, Jaco. I really enjoy speaking to you. Keeping up with South Korea's fast-paced developments just got easier. Welcome to the Korea Pro podcast, your weekly briefing on the stories that matter. Hosts Jongmin Kim and John Lee dissect topics from diplomacy to technology, ensuring you're always informed. Our episodes are a must for professionals in and out of Seoul.

Subscribe on your preferred platform and elevate your understanding of Korean affairs. Pro Podcast, where clarity meets depth. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.