If frontiers could have life stories of their own and historians could write their biographies, Nianshen Song's Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 and Sören Urbansky's Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border would be part of this genre. Both books examine the history of the formation of national borders in two river basins at the intersection of three states in Northeast Asia, raising questions about the significance of border regions in the making of modern nation-states. They both decenter conventional narratives by bringing out the voices of farmers, herders, intellectuals, activists, and officials living in border areas, with a focus on interactions between different groups. However, the approaches they take in terms of source bases and analytical frameworks are notably different.
Song's book focuses on the Tumen River region located in the southeastern part of modern-day Jilin Province in China,...
