Emeritus professor and former president of Dong-A University
Dr. Suk-Jung Han is a professor emeritus and former president of Dong-A University in Korea. He completed his undergraduate studies in the department of Korean literature at Seoul National University and received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago.
With support from the Fulbright Foundation, he was a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. He has also been a researcher at the Kyoto International Center for Japanese Studies (日文硏) and the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore. He was appointed as a professor of sociology at Dong-A University in 1983. He later served as Dean of the College of Social Sciences, Dean of Academic Affairs, and Vice President before being appointed as the 15th President of Dong-A University in 2016.
His published works include Reinterpretation of the Establishment of Manchukuo and Manchuria, Space of East Asian Convergence (co-authored) and The Origin of the 1960s Korean Developmental Regime: Manchurian Modern (2024). He translated Prasenjit Duara’s Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern into Korean as Chukwon gwa sunusong (2008).
Panel 6 | Figural Representations of the Past and the Future
MANCHURIAN MODERN: THE KEY TO THE 1960s KOREAN DEVELOPMENTAL REGIME
ABSTRACT
In spite of the postwar academic ignorance, Manchukuo (1932-1945), the Japanese puppet state in Northeast China refuses to disappear. It was pivotal to the rise of ‘carbon technocracy’, fueling the developmentalist dreams of the Japanese empire and post-liberation China. Also, in its control economy, heavy industry, and city planning, Manchukuo was a laboratory of Japanese modernity.
It became a mode of the recovery of the postwar Japan, which was pursued with the spirit of ‘techno-nationalism’ evolving from the wartime ‘techno-fascism’ of Manchukuo. Finally, Manchukuo provided the model of “East Asian bureaucratic authoritarian industrial regimes”, which demonstrated the odd face of a cutting-edge modernity based on violence.
Its prime example is South Korean developmental regime, which pushed ahead any obstacles like a bulldozer. Numerous dimensions of modern Korean adaptation were inherited from the colonial experience, in particular, that of Manchukuo. Manchukuo was the underlying reference point for the intensive industrialization of South Korea. In military fashion, the South Korean bulldozer regime mobilized its people and resources against its real and imagined rivals, driving them to the labor front to solve the “problem of generations-old poverty.”
Manchukuo is no other than a “place of paradoxes,” in Prasenjit Duara’s terms, where it becomes difficult to disentangle imperialism from modernity. Manchukuo which was so far approached solely through the nationalist prism, actually was a land of opportunity for a number of Koreans. Dormant for two decades after the liberation, their potential influence was manifested at the full-scale Cold War confrontation with North Korea in the 1960s.
The elements that flowed from Manchukuo to South Korea are what I term Manchurian Modern, or what Koreans experienced in and adapted from the militarized periphery. It is an ideological and practical construct of the high modern that drove rapid economic development and political mobilization.
Through the concept of East Asian Modern, Prasenjit Duara explains that globally circulated practices and discourses on modernity were regionally modulated in East Asia through importation and blending at the turn of the 20th century. My Manchurian Modern is a diachronic one, in that the rigid variant of modernity migrated from the northern periphery of the Japanese empire to the postwar Korean nation-state three decades later.
