Settler Colonialism, Closure of Borders, and Forced Migrations in Northeast Asia (1930-1949)

This article connects the three imperial settler colonization projects overlapping in Manchuria and the Russian Far East in the first half of the 20th century (Chinese, Russian/Soviet, Japanese); they led to several forced migrations that shook the region between the Stalinist «revolution from above» and the creation of the People’s Republic of China: the deportation of Slavic peasants to the Russian Far East; the deportation and expulsion of Soviet Koreans and Chinese; and the expulsion of Japanese settlers from Manchuria and Sakhalin/Karafuto. These population movements violently reorganized a vast trans-imperial society that had previously stretched across porous international borders.