Scripting a Multicultural Future: The Chinese and Korean Songs of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army

Abstract

Hundreds of military songs are credited to the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NAUA). The NAUA was a coalition of Chinese and Korean guerrilla armies that operated in Northeast China during the Manchukuo period (1932–45). The NAUA used songs to teach and inculcate new behaviors in line with socialist and communist ideologies. Most importantly, the songs worked on an emotional level, meaning that they conveyed collective sentiments while also directing their appropriate expression in order to foster camaraderie and boost morale. Drawing from concepts formulated by historians of emotions, I argue that the NAUA became what Barbara Rosenwein terms an “emotional community.” As such, the NAUA defied strict nationalist sentiments primarily due to the discursive power and easy dissemination of the military songs. The Chinese and Korean songs, along with their aesthetic features, have not been studied comprehensively. As literary products of a tumultuous era, the NAUA songs deliver historical evidence of the transnational and transcultural ideologies present in resistance groups across the Japanese empire.

Introduction

In 1999, a lawsuit was filed by a former soldier of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (Dongbei kangRi lianjun 东北抗日联军, hereafter NAUA), a coalition of Chinese and Korean guerrilla units that operated largely in Manchuria during the years 1936–49.¹ The plaintiff, Jin Bowen 金伯文 (1918–2005), was the wife of the renowned deceased general of the NAUA's Third Route Army, Li Zhaolin 李兆麟 (1910–46). Jin's lawsuit against her fellow compatriot, Li Min 李敏 (1924–2018), centered on the intellectual property rights of the military tune “The Encampment Song” (Luying zhi ge, 露营之歌). Jin Bowen filed suit because Li Min claimed that her husband, Chen Lei 陈雷 (1917–2006), had written the first verse of the song that most people believed Li Zhaolin to have written (Sheng Xueyou 2000). The dispute is said to have been the first “properly handled intellectual property case that crossed into the new millennium” (Zhao Yan 2000: 29).

The lawsuit was the culmination of a series of events stretching back to the early 1980s, and it was complicated by the fact that Chen Lei and Li Min held high offices in the Heilongjiang provincial government.² When the couple began to “write [Chen Lei's] name all over the city” (Zhao Yan 2010) it was seen as a moral betrayal of NAUA unity (not to mention an affront to the beloved Li Zhaolin) and a challenge to the “spirit and policies of ‘truth-seeking’ that had been restored to the CCP in the three plenary meetings of 1978 following the Cultural Revolution” (Zhao Yan 2000: 27). More than half of the forty former NAUA members still living in the mid-1990s lodged a complaint in defense of Li Zhaolin's family. To these former soldiers, the case was also a matter of whether “NAUA soldiers were a true or false face of history for future generations.” The songs and their composers not only represented pre–Cultural Revolution values but were also a critical marker of the soldiers' social identity as important players in the foundation of the People's Republic of China. That the dispute lasted well into the new century speaks to the ongoing question of how China's national history is to be made.

I begin with the above anecdote because the NAUA and its songs have been buried in the history of transnational anti-Japanese resistance in the early twentieth century. Certainly, NAUA songs are a drop in the bucket of regional songs collected throughout China since the 1920s (Hung 1996; Yang 2018; McConaghy 2021). Yet the anecdote tells us that the NAUA members maintained a level of identification with the army for the rest of their lives. Moreover, they went to great lengths to protect and preserve what they considered to be important evidence of that social identity: the songs.

Allow me to briefly describe the establishment of the NAUA and the importance of music in its life span. The NAUA can be traced to the founding of Manchukuo, the nominally independent state created by the Japanese in Northeast China. In the aftermath of the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931, there arose a number of volunteer militias led mostly by local, ethnically Chinese power brokers and largely composed of bandits, peasants, and communist guerrilla units (Lee 1983; Yamamuro 2006; Shen Zhihua 2015). Meanwhile, in the eastern part of Manchuria, Korean communists steadily grew in number and mounted their own attacks on Japanese authorities (Han 1999). As anti-Japanese resistance throughout Manchuria increased, Chinese communists eventually became its leaders, and they shifted from uniting communist and non-communists to bringing Chinese and Korean forces together. As the story goes, the Chinese and Korean troops in the southern county of Panshi 磐石 led by Yang Jingyu 杨靖宇 (1905–40) spearheaded this change of direction (Lee 1983: 209–20; Coogan 1994). They created the NAUA in 1936 and became the vanguard of the anti-Japanese resistance.

The significance of this unprecedented combination cannot be understated, considering the historical tensions between Chinese and Korean residents of Manchuria. The Japanese colonization of Korea and its subsequent sociohistorical effects on Manchuria vis-à-vis Korean exile and migration have been extensively analyzed elsewhere. Some scholars estimate that there were between 690,000 and one million Koreans settled in Manchuria by 1931; approximately 80 percent resided in the border region of Kando 間島 (Brooks 1998: 29; Park 2005: 44). Brooks (1998), H.-J. Lee (2009), and especially Park (2005) elucidate literary, sociological, and historical perspectives that demonstrate how Japanese insistence on Korean migrants in Manchuria being counted as “Japanese” had detrimental consequences for Chinese and Korean peasant relations. Communism among poor Chinese and Koreans in Manchuria, however, proved to be a unifying ideology and one of the biggest concerns for the Japanese colonial authorities on either side of the border. Indeed, Koreans accounted for nearly 90 percent of all communists in Manchuria by 1928 and, as such, constituted the majority of NAUA troops (C.-S. Lee 1983: 113–14; H. Han 1999: 9–10, 14).³ That said, NAUA leaders were mainly Chinese due to the above-mentioned united front effort as well as to the Comintern's decision to incorporate the Korean Communist Party into the Chinese Communist Party (C.-S. Lee 1983: 113). The stakes of working together were high for each group due to language differences, mutual distrust, and a history of prejudice.

Chinese and Korean cooperation was the key characteristic of the NAUA and many of its most memorable songs. Yet, given the anti-Japanese context in which the songs appeared, the dual cultures present a conundrum. How are we to understand the NAUA in light of the ethno-nationalist ideologies prevalent in China and Korea during the war period? Nationalist sentiments undoubtedly suffuse many of the lyrics. For example, “Chinese and Koreans Unite” (Zhong-Chao minzu lianhe qilai 中朝民族联合起来), purportedly written by Yang Jingyu, states, “Separately enact ethnic self-determination [minzu zijue, 民族自决] for Chinese and Korean contentment, and aid in the early success of a Korean revolution” (Han Y. 1989: 36–37).⁴ These and other lyrics quoted throughout this article show that Chinese and Korean soldiers may have been united in name but not always in actuality. NAUA members not only retained the larger objective of establishing sovereign ethno-nationalist states on the peninsula and in China proper, but each group also had historical ties to Manchuria that made it difficult to come to terms with a potential multiethnic polity in the region. According to Hongkoo Han (1999: 205–6), Chinese communist leaders leveraged that precise idea to enable a united front with Korean communists in the formation of the NAUA.

Gi-Wook Shin (2006: 7–8) reminds us that alternative collective identities were possible apart from nations because competition between transnational discourses like Pan-Asianism, class affinity, and communism—each with its own affective idiom—characterized the war period. According to Shin, there was no guarantee that the nation would prevail over other rival forms of collective identity. Sayaka Chatani's (2018) study of Korean and Taiwanese youth who volunteered for the Japanese army validates Shin's argument. Chatani describes how the young men “became emotionally attached and committed to a set of beliefs and a value system” (10). In other words, they “internalized” the nation/empire-building ideologies espoused by the state. Chatani's framework of internalization aligns with studies that recast the notion of resistance (Duara 2004; Mitter 2000; and Moon 2013, to name a few) as one where so-called resistors drew upon the same transnational and often Pan-Asian ideas as Japanese colonialist policy makers. Chatani's research also corroborates Jeremy Yellen's (2019: 11, 20) argument that the conflict between empire building and nation building was intrinsic to the “contested, negotiated process” of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which made the Japanese empire “both colonial and anticolonial at the same time.” Together these studies show that resistance groups—the NAUA included—acted as counterweights that altered the trajectory of the Japanese empire due to their co-optation (albeit for their own purposes) of the nation-building discourses circulated within it.

I use the term unite to describe the NAUA because the verb in Chinese and Korean, 联合 (C. lianhe, K. yŏnhap), appears frequently in the songs. Perhaps “be allied to” would be a more accurate translation into English of the army's ideals, though admittedly, the active verb is pithier. Additionally, “to unite” entails a closer spatial and social relationship than “to ally,” which will become an important conceptual device in the lyrics discussed below. If the NAUA songs are interwoven with the nation/empire-building ideologies that characterized Manchukuo within the broader empire, then ethnic nationalism was as important an idea as cooperation between ethnic groups. “Unity,” therefore, points to reflective practices and discourses about camaraderie, shared lives, objectives, and hopes, as well as a shared sense of what the future could be as long as they maintained peace among themselves. In this sense, “unity” occasions a theoretically permanent state. We may not be able to say for certain what the NAUA wanted their allyship to look like on the battlefield or after defeating the Japanese; and we cannot say whether they felt they had attained it on any level or whether any particular songs produced such a result. But regardless of how we translate it, the NAUA strove for a semblance of cohesion, despite a tenuous grasp on a multicultural future.

I offer the following analysis of the intellectual discourses, cross-cultural interactions, and emotional values that expose the NAUA as a unique social entity. The “unity” analyzed here, however, does not preclude layers of tension between soldiers, doubts about the sacrifices that war necessitates, or other more complicated experiences; indeed, this study acts as a point of departure for future analysis of the NAUA cultural movement. The following sections present distant and close readings of several Chinese and Korean songs through which I seek to “uncover systems of feelings: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them” (Plamper et al. 2010: 252).⁵ This study frames the NAUA as an emotional community for two reasons: First, as indicated above, to circumvent an altogether unhelpful quest to isolate either Chinese or Korean cultural elements within NAUA history and songs. To do so would be to run the risk of further ossifying the songs into essentially (and essentializing) nationalist history. Second, the land of Manchuria features prominently in the songs. The land itself thus emerges as a stakeholder within the framework of emotional community. Localizing the NAUA songs as products of a place (Manchuria) and time (Manchukuo) allows us to broaden the colonial-resistance dichotomy that has characterized research on literature and texts from the war period.

The Structure and Content of NAUA Songs

If Jin's court case is any indication that music intrinsically defines the NAUA, then certain elements within “The Encampment Song” can perhaps be said to have enabled the community's cohesion. Indeed, “The Encampment Song” contains many images and themes that pertain to other NAUA tunes as well. Consider the disquiet that pervades its first verse. We immediately locate the soldiers taking respite in wild terrain and facing immense pressure to unify the disparate attitudes among the troops:

Dramatic, lyrical imagery aligns with the pathos and sonority of the music to convey an epic war scape starting at the Songhua River during a heavy flood, a common trope that signals reliance on this river, the lifeblood of the region. Later in the song, we find the troops at the waterfalls of Jingpo Lake, treading into the Xing'an Mountains, and “sweeping across the Nenjiang plains with determination.” All of their movements are to “restore the Northeast,” “transform the land,” “charge through the blockade,” and “retake our country” (Li 1991: 20). According to the authors of the Handbook of Cultural Geography, structuring the act of seeing the land “can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways and so give the earth voice” (Anderson et al. 2003: 7). The natural environment described in “The Encampment Song” acts not only as a setting, but the words and the melody themselves become “different means of sensing the land.” Note that this conceptual model will appear in all of the songs discussed below.

Many NAUA songs contain the same aesthetic elements described above with regard to “The Encampment Song.” What is the significance of these similarities? We need an analytical framework to discuss the corpus of songs, especially since there are two languages and cultures represented. In the afterword to Han Yucheng's Selections of NAUA Songs, he provides five main categories for the hundreds of NAUA songs. According to Han, the primary category includes songs that “denounced the disintegration of the country with tears of blood” (368). Other categories refer to songs that (1) sound the bugle call of the resistance, (2) depict magnificent battle scenes, and, notably, (3) foster morale. Han argues that “the songs, being a necessary product of the time, not only inspired and enthused people, they also functioned to unite people's thoughts towards cooperation” (368). Although Han describes the characteristic tone and content of the songs, he does not analyze what literary devices the songs contain or their functions.

Much of the NAUA music is formulaic in structure and content, rather like a script for the circulation of emotions. Piroska Nagy (2008) describes emotional scripts as “motivation systems,” basically a mental routine or a sequence of actions that provokes certain interpretations or behaviors. Nagy states that building a reservoir of action-based scripts can lead to an understanding of the emotions involved. In a similar vein, the predominance of specific song forms in the NAUA increased the army's discursive power. Just as any army needs a plan on the battlefront, the NAUA needed a defense strategy against the ideas imposed on them by Manchukuo state builders. Song formulas are like stockades: the more fortified they are, the more impenetrable they will be to the enemy. Similarly, formulaic songs are not only easier to memorize, perform, and disseminate, they catalyze conformity across multiple bodies, connecting troops over various battlefields spread throughout the Manchuria front.

NAUA songs consist of four verses on average. The following formula can be observed throughout the corpus but seems to apply more to Chinese-language songs in general. The first verse, typically the most descriptive and emotive, sets the scene and engages the listener/singer. Often this verse refers to a crisis. I chose three songs in Li Min's 1991 edition at random for the following examples with the sole criterion being that they have four verses. “In mid-September of the twentieth year of the Republic, the Japanese thieves came to attack” states the first line of “Support the United Army” (Yonghu lianjun ge 用户联军歌, 32). “Amidst heavy artillery, people in all of China had nowhere to turn” begins “Unite to Save the Country” (Tuanjie qi fu guonan 团结起赴国难, 17–18). In spite of the circumstances, however, “War of Resistance Song” (KangRi zhan ge 抗日战歌) proclaims that “a victory for the national revolution is coming” (134). Subsequent stanzas in numerous NAUA songs follow the tone laid down in the first verse.

The lyrics of the second and third verses can often come across as bromidic with political jargon or reiterations of the enemy's evildoing. “Support the United Army” insists that bankrupt workers extricate themselves from a miserable life under a harmful imperial power by resisting the Japanese (32). In “Unite to Save the Country,” people with money should give funds; those with weapons and grain should offer them to the front line (17). Comrades are encouraged in “War of Resistance Song” to “launch a new battle to welcome tomorrow” (134). In stock fashion, “Organize to Charge” (Zuzhi qilai qu chongfeng 组织起来去重逢, 32) denounces Chiang Kai-shek for selling the country (a common trope) and urges its people to gain a costly glory. Idiomatic phrases define and perpetuate the appropriate emotional response to the Japanese occupation. Anyone willing to commit to the resistance should likewise memorize and frequently use such rhetoric, especially when creating their own songs.

The fourth verse paints a picture of victory. “Support the United Army” and “Unite to Save the Country” each urge soldiers to “strive to advance” (17, 32). As long as soldiers cooperate with one another, nature will unite with them: “Wind will scatter the clouds, brightening the day . . . and bringing peace after the Japanese are driven out” (32). Often fourth verses end with raising a red flag, signifying a bright communist future. Joy is only conveyed once the enemy has been defeated, the land returned, and the nation made anew (18, 32, 134). Of course, plenty of songs have fewer or more than four verses, but they generally follow the same script patterns as four-verse melodies.

Many Korean-language songs use three verses to present a problem, a solution, and a result. Though the Japanese enemy features frequently as well, Korean-language songs establish a stronger discourse around the benefits of class struggle and building a new society based on equality. The first verse in “Song for the Breadless” (Ppang ŏmnŭn cha ŭi norae), for example, depicts a poor fellow crying in a shack, while the second verse portrays a rich person living in a grand house. The lyrics make explicit that these two characters share the same bloodline, signifying their Korean ethnicity (Kim 2013: 151). The problems of inequality, poverty, and an outmoded social hierarchy require leveling the class divide in favor of an ethnic national identity. The final verse thus calls for a communist society with freedom and equality.

Three stanza tunes also lend themselves to a chorus repeated after each verse. For instance, the chorus of “Oppose the White Terror” (Panbaeksaekt'ero ka 反白色테로歌) urges everyone to “fight without fear because no more will the proletariat wander” (Kim 2013: 138), meaning that the underprivileged will find hope in the struggle. Three-verse scripts differentiate Korean songs from Chinese tunes in the NAUA corpus, but three- and four-verse structural forms demonstrate many similar characteristics in tone and content, if not style.

Breaking the songs into their structural components reveals the intertextual nature of NAUA scripts, which does not merely mean that songs were often modeled on one another. Scripts can be seen as rituals that “offer socially accepted frameworks of display for emotions and allow frequent experiments with them in a collective form” (Nagy 2008). Scripts link the corporeal experience of emotions to their appropriate discursive expression. In other words, the emotives in the NAUA songs stem from a kind of logic that army members shared among themselves. Scripts are discursive spaces that, as the close readings of the songs below demonstrate, convey cultural attitudes and values central to the formation of an NAUA collective identity.

Before continuing to a close reading of the songs, a brief word about the song compilations used for this study is in order, because they too are historical documents that shape our understanding of the NAUA. Three different compilations titled Selections of NAUA Songs (Dongbei kang-Ri lianjun gequ xuan 东北抗日联军歌曲选) exist, all claiming canonical authority for NAUA music. Li Min, mentioned in connection with the lawsuit above, is credited as the editor of the 1991 and 1995 editions. I have not been able to find the 1995 edition, although it is named in the 2013 Korean songbook Historical Materials of Chinese Koreans: Culture and Arts Edition (Chungguk Chosŏnjok saryo chŏnjip: munhwa yesul p'yŏn), edited by Kim Ch'unsŏn. The Han Yucheng edition (1989) does not contain any publication information. This undocumented edition appears to be legitimate, however, because it contains most of the same songs and has the same foreword as the 1991 edition. Even though the 1991 edition and Han Yucheng's version are not exact copies, I believe it is beneficial to use both to gain a fuller picture of the way these songs have entered the historical record.⁶

As mentioned above, two languages and cultures are represented in the songs. Yet the songbooks do not explicitly demarcate the origins of each song. Many of the same songs are rendered in Chinese in Selections of NAUA Songs and then in Korean in Historical Materials of Chinese Koreans: Culture and Arts Edition, so it is nearly impossible to know in which language any given song first appeared. That said, the compilers provide some background information on exceptionally important songs, many of which are analyzed in the following section. It is this paradox between the endurance of the songs as cultural artifacts paired with their nearly invisible language/cultural markers that prompt me to take a broad, transcultural view of the NAUA. For the purposes of this study, the historicity of any particular song is relevant only insofar as it has been preserved as part and parcel of the NAUA social identity because of how the army positioned itself as defenders of Manchuria.

Discourse, Symbolism, and Physicality

Three elements work in tandem to deliberate on uniting people to fight the Japanese in any given NAUA song. First, songs use rhetorical devices to lay out logical albeit difficult choices. Second, songs contain symbols that establish the correctness or appropriateness of decisions. Third, and most important, songs depict the NAUA soldiers themselves performing the army's objectives, thereby conceiving of new spatial and social relations. It is worth remembering that soldiers sang the songs, effectively combining the three elements of discourse, symbolism, and physicality.

NAUA songs frequently cite a cause for the emotions of anger and injustice (e.g., the Mukden Incident). They likewise offer a range of appropriate emotional responses and possible solutions. Satire in “The Reverse Manchukuo National Anthem” (Tuifan Manzhouguo ge 推翻满洲国歌), for example, works as an effective response to the very real anger incited by a complete Japanese takeover.⁷ In this regard, NAUA scripts illustrate cognitive processes centered on logic and decision-making, repeatedly appearing through what I call the “logic of suffering.” That is, suffering as an emotional and physical condition is often the consequence of a rational decision. If two undesirable choices are presented, then the logical choice becomes temporary pain for the purpose of long-term gain.

When bolstering their courage in the face of dying in battle, soldiers might sing, “We're not afraid to drive out the Japanese dwarves, why would we be afraid of immeasurable misery?” (Han 1989: 14). This kind of rhetorical question urges the soldiers to change their paradigm of thinking from self-preservation to self-sacrifice. Such statements further diffuse the battle's intensity, reiterate the causes of the war, and remind singer-soldiers of their ultimate objective. The logic of suffering empowers the fighters to willingly shape their own experience of opposing Manchukuo.

References to the suffering that invariably began on September 18, 1931, at once explore the range of public emotions that resulted from the event and manage a perpetual state of solemn fury for that day. The month of September in “Peasants' Chant of Twelve Months” (Nongmin tan shi'er yue 农民叹十二月) is likened to barren and cast-away farmland after a bad season (Han 1989: 91). Not only do this song's lyrics portray the perceived effects of the Mukden Incident, but the desolate autumn raises a rhetorical question: “The poor are so hard done by, how can we pass the winter if there's nothing to eat or wear?” For a logical response, we look to “Four Seasons of Guerrilla Warfare” (Siji youji ge 四季游击歌). “In autumn, the guerrilla spirit is especially fine” and is the “best time to strategize, beat the Japanese, and kill their running dogs” (18).

Rhetorical questions like those cited above shed light on soldiers' revulsion to the takeover and the subsequent challenges of putting collective trauma into words. “The Guerrilla Troops Song” (Youjidui ge 游击队歌) states, “Let me ask every Chinese person: who would want to be a slave in a lost country?” (Han Y. 1989: 11). Enslavement far outweighs the threat of death in battle, so the solution is simple: “Take up your weapons and join the guerrilla troops.” Songwriters discursively stratified suffering in order to make the better choice clear for themselves and their audience.

The logic behind the choice to suffer is most poignantly rendered in songs that depict soldiers experiencing hardship due to Manchuria's extreme winters. “The Encampment Song,” for instance, derives its pathos from its association with the primordial seasons, especially wintertime. Winter scenes are common tropes in literature written about Manchuria, and the NAUA songs are no exception. “Icy skies, snowy ground, north winds howl, night rain again brings a cold day” (Han 1989: 7). Wintry tableaus appear in Korean songs, too. “Who is the white-clad man walking away in the wind and snow-covered Manchuria plains?” (“Unite, Proletarian Masses,” Tan'gyŏrhara musandaejung; Kim 2013: 122). The Manchurian winter correlates to a well-reasoned resilience. Another Korean song, “Boiling Blood Rises Again” (Kkŭllŭn p'i nŭn tŏ kkŭrŏ), contrasts its titular image of “hot blood” with “a blizzard [that] rages in the Northeast” (Kim 2013: 114). The burning injustice felt by the soldiers in the song deflects an otherwise cold death: “Let us wander this place clasping bitter hearts,” the singers commiserate. As anger warms the sojourners' hearts, it keeps them from succumbing to the perilous northern winter. The lyrics thus create an important discourse around the symbolic and emotional value of the landscape by portraying the winter season as a function of the loss caused by the Japanese occupation.

The relationship with the land is the most comprehensive, widespread idea throughout the songs for Chinese and Korean NAUA members. Manchuria provides the setting for the ideological as well the physical battle. NAUA songs transform the territory and terrain of Manchuria into a discursive script as a way to battle against Manchukuo and the Japanese. When the NAUA song lyrics envision the soldiers “seiz[ing] back our rivers and mountains” (duohui wo heshan 夺回我河山, Han 1989: 19), they do not simply mean the natural environment because heshan had long been a metaphor for the country and government. The NAUA exhibited a desire to reclaim and reconceptualize what the land meant to them, namely their autonomy.

Sharing Place, Sharing Space

Chinese and Korean soldiers realized their relationship upon the landscape of Manchuria both in the songs and in real life. As a result, emotive language in the lyrics evoked a narrative of NAUA authority as legitimate users of Manchuria's natural environment. Furthermore, Chinese and Korean unity became a significant site for opposing the Japanese through the deployment of imagined interpersonal relationships (e.g., allies, friends, family, and communities). The actions and mentalities that generated positive feelings between people, as represented in the songs, codified affective behaviors that may have shaped the NAUA into a cohesive community. NAUA songs enabled Chinese and Korean narratives of affinity, an idea meant to strengthen the communist united front.

“China, Korea Have Come Together” (Chungguk, Chosŏn ittaeyŏtta) is a sophisticated synthesis of Manchuria landmarks, Korean musical form, and communist symbols.⁸ Employing a traditional Korean polymetric musical structure, the melody mostly follows three-quarter time but switches to four-four time at the bridge, each musical phrase coming to completion after twelve beats. These rhythmic qualities are also seen in the NAUA's two arirang versions examined below. Together with lyrics that describe Manchuria landmarks, the musical structure of “China, Korea Have Come Together” constructs and enhances a narrative of Chinese-Korean unity:

The image of the Tumen River (图们江, K. Tuman kang) flowing east and the Amnok River (K. Amnok kang, C. Yalujiang 鸭绿江) heading west from Changbai Mountain corresponds to a geographical reality and, in fact, the rivers have long been considered the natural border between Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. These landmarks symbolize Chinese and Korean solidarity against the Japanese, epitomized when, in the chorus, they are encouraged to “rise up . . . fight onward to overthrow our enemy” (190).

Although the song uses the Korean name Amnok for the river, the Sino-Korean word Changbaek (C. Changbai 长白) is used for the mountain instead of the more common Korean term Paektu (白頭). Language thus metaphorically sutures terrain that physically partitions the peninsula from the continent, and the two countries resolve to “manage paradise together” (190). “China, Korea Have Come Together” consolidates the cultural value that both groups attach to the land by evoking symbolic feelings of peace through the topography of Changbai Mountain and its rivers.

The final line of “East Asian Slaves Unite” (DongYa de nulimen lianhe qilai 東亞的奴隸們聯合起來) presents another intriguing use of language that discursively unites Chinese and Korean people. Singers of the Chinese version would exclaim: 達阿普繞冬木得啦 (da'a pu rao dong mu de la), a transliterated phrase that, in Korean, reads: ta ap’ŭro tongmudŭra (Li 1991: 86).⁹ Notably, the Chinese phrase has no literal meaning (notwithstanding its equivalence to the Korean phrase); instead, a footnote accompanying the line in the Chinese songbooks defines it for Chinese readers: “都前進吧,同志們” (Li 1991: 86). Translated into English, the line means “Everyone advance, comrades!” This instance of transliteration suggests that “East Asian Slaves Unite” was first composed in Korean. In transmitting the ideological discourse to their Chinese comrades, the songwriter(s) embedded the ideal of Chinese and Korean unity into the words themselves.

Language, culture, and geography, as the above examples attest, often intersect in the NAUA songs. Korean musical form additionally distinguishes some songs from the majority of the NAUA corpus. The most apparent examples are “Songhwa River Arirang” (Songhwa kang arirang) and its sister tune, “Paektu Mountain Arirang” (Paektusan arirang).¹⁰ An arirang is a type of Korean folk song, and it refers to a mountain pass, symbolizing the experience of misfortune. Arirang can be likened to ballads with their wistful, repetitious refrains, although lyrics can also be ironic, as is the case in “Songhwa River Arirang.” Though the songwriters of the two arirang presented here are unknown, a traditional Korean melody combined with Manchurian topography make these songs meaningful inclusions in the NAUA canon.¹¹

“Paektu Mountain Arirang” portrays the journey of Korean migrants into Manchuria. “Weeping, we crossed the Amnok River,” they declare (Kim 2013: 143). Understandably, the narrators exhibit complicated emotions about Manchuria. They have left everything they love behind, most especially their parents, symbols of continuity and rootedness in the ubiquitous traditional discourse of filial piety. Furthermore, the “whole of Korea and its beautiful land is tossed away,” a denouncement of Japanese colonialism on the peninsula. They feel “fated to wander north Manchuria miserably.” At what point does Koreans' longing for home turn toward a desire to begin anew in Manchuria?

The final verse offers an answer and hope. “As the red flag waves on Paektu Mountain, we wait for the revolutionary army to liberate us.” Notably, Changbai Mountain becomes devoid of its symbolism as a boundary in this song. No longer does it divide two places and peoples. Instead, the red flag on its highest peak (Paektu) enshrouds it as a beacon of freedom, courage, and community. Changbai Mountain transforms into a literal threshold, leading from the Korean homeland into Manchuria and a newfound identity rooted in cohesion with Chinese neighbors.

“Songhwa River Arirang,” too, depicts the struggles that Korean migrants faced in Manchuria. “There are a lot of fish in the Songhwa; there are no grains, so we eat only fish” the lyrics exclaim (Kim 2013: 156–57). A plenitude of fish may seem fortuitous, but historians have shown that Koreans generally cultivated rice in Manchuria.¹² To decry a lack of grain was to say that their livelihood was at risk, so despite being positioned next to a source of great sustenance, their survival remained in constant jeopardy The final line underscores such circumstances: “The floods of Songhwa come every year; the farmers are on the move again” (157). The Songhua River acts as a symbol that relocates Korean people away from the border rivers (e.g., the Amnok or Tumen) and into Manchuria proper. After all, the river cuts through the heart of Manchuria.

For Chinese communists, working with Koreans meant confronting Korean ideas about the landmarks to which the two groups shared access. However, the symbolic meaning of these landmarks for each group differed. Because these geographical landmarks were metonymical for Manchurian territory in the eyes of local Chinese people, “losing” them to the Korean experience was no small matter. Sharing the landscape by way of songs, therefore, may have placated some of the tension between the two groups.

Embodying the Landscape

Despite the fact that the NAUA consisted of Chinese and Korean people, we must not forget that the army consisted of individual bodies. The body is crucial to the impact of ideas. We have only to consider that war is not war without bodies to carry out the fight. While the NAUA songs may differ from memoirs in the sense that they do not divulge how individual soldiers thought about their own bodies, expressions of physicality in the songs explicate the absolute value of the soldier's body in relation to the dissemination and shaping of the political objectives of the NAUA.

The song lyrics contain countless references to the body. Many lyrics refer to body parts (e.g., hands, hearts, feet, shoulders, chests, and backsides, to name a few) as well as bodily fluids, such as blood, sweat, and tears. Different types of people appear throughout the songs: old, young, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, men, women, children, sons, daughters, lovers, rich, and poor. Just as the songs themselves are physical expressions when people sing aloud, many lyrics employ figurative narrators to speak, chant, sing, and inquire. In short, the NAUA songwriters consistently evoked the body in various manipulations. By singing such lyrics, members of the NAUA not only resisted the Japanese in spirit but, more importantly, they can be said to have configured their very beings to withstand and counter Manchukuo in thought and deed.

The most important function of the body within the NAUA song lyrics is its ability to fight, to the extent that the most frequently used word in Korean songs is the verb ssauda (“to fight”). Iterations of ssauda and its Chinese counterparts, douzheng (斗争, “conflict; battle”) or fendou (奋斗, “to fight; struggle”), amount to a rich trove of NAUA emotives because they generally appear as commands. Stoic determination is expected in “Cries from Jail” (Okchunghamsŏng, 獄中喊聲), for example, when soldiers are commanded to “fight until the last victory” (Kim 2013: 167). Recurrent appeals in “Song of Freedom” (Chayu ŭi norae) and “Courageously Advance” (Yong jin ge 勇進歌) to “go fight bravely” and “courageously advance” indicate a hope that the soldiers will live up to such lofty emotions (Kim 2013: 178; Li 1991: 309). “War Flag Song” (Chŏn'gi ka 戰旗歌) and “The Reverse Manchukuo National Anthem” inspire a sense of urgency as troops are told to “fight unyieldingly for the people's happiness” and “hurry, hurry to build a people's government” (Kim 2013: 181; Li 1991: 342). As these Chinese and Korean lyrics attest, the army's objectives must be performed by willing and able bodies who not only follow commands but also use their (song)voices to bespeak their comrades' cooperation in the ensuing battles.

Although verbs like ssauda and fendou entail physicality (because they both mean “to fight”), they can likewise be used in the context of class struggle, women's rights, or social revolution. As the “Sovereignty of Parliament Song” (Ŭihoe chukwŏn ka 議會主權歌) states, they must “fight for global revolution of the proletariat” (Kim 2013: 171). The “Women Fighters Song” (Nyŏja t'usa ka 女子鬪士歌) urges both men and women to “get out and fight for a new equal society” (118–19). The command in the “May First Song” (Oilchŏl ŭi norae) to fight “as the curling red flag flies before us” takes on a positive emotional value and reveals important social discourses (166). Apart from the possibility of physical death, fighting also implies the potential for a new life. Rather than simply anti-Japanese or anti-imperialist rhetoric, ssauda and fendou are multifaceted emotives used by the NAUA to explore new social relations.

The songs transfer the pain and shame of losing the Manchurian homeland to the landscape itself and configure the soldiers as its saviors and guardians. NAUA songwriters communicated their collective trauma in visceral form, namely by deploying color and the personification of significant landmarks to convey the message that soldiers' affinity with the land is of the utmost importance. The “Changbai Mountain Song” (Changbaishan ge 长白山歌), to use but one example, depicts an invader from the east who uses unbridled brutality (Han Y. 1989: 38–39). Under these circumstances, “white mountains (baishan 白山) turn red with blood (xie ranhong 血染红)” and “black waters (heishui 黑水) are as long as they are resentful” (38). The colors in these lines—red, black, and white—contain multiple layers of meaning. Blood personifies the mountains, as if they themselves are alive and able to bleed. The red color contrasts with the white peaks, unmistakably those of Changbai Mountain. Thus, the phrase “white mountains turn red with blood” signifies the transformation of its tallest summit, the “white-headed” (C. baitou 白头, K. paektu) peak, into a revolutionary symbol.

“Black” waters refer to the Heilong River (literally “black dragon river”) and its biggest tributary, the Songhua River. (It is not unusual for “black waters” to indicate both rivers.) The lyrics imagine Manchuria as a living entity enduring the pain of occupation. Despite its suffering, “white bones replaced by black steel strangle the dwarf thieves” (“Chant of 9.18,” Shuochang jiuyiba 说唱九一八; Liu Huijuan 2015: 27). Signified by the colors white and black, the metonymy of the Changbai Mountains and the Songhua River acquire human form and affective behaviors. The already “black” waters darken with hate. The dead bones return to life by shifting form and enacting revenge. Personification and the use of red, black, and white figuratively restore Manchuria's vitality.

As intellectual products, the NAUA songs discursively rescued Manchuria from Manchukuo. The soldiers in “Protect White Mountains and Black Waters” (Baowei baishan heishui 保卫白山黑水), for instance, prepare for combat by first positioning themselves “at the foot of Changbai Mountain and on the banks of black water” (Han 1989: 173–74). After preparing physically, they fortify themselves mentally, “to take revenge, vow to enlist, and confront the national crisis.” The title, as with many NAUA songs, demands that the soldiers fight for Manchuria. These extensive commands render the soldiers larger than life and give them the wherewithal to fight for the land instead of their own bodies.

Commands to do something cannot be separated from the emotion involved in the doing. Such is often the case with NAUA song lyrics. If landmarks come to life through bodily imagery, color, and personification, it is largely due to the imperatives contained in the titles of those songs. The verb yao (要, “must; need”) in the title of “Must Fight” (Yao douzheng 要鬥爭) indicates as much. Resolve permeates the lyrics even as the song's imagery reveals scenes of terrible hardship:

The lyrics activate all of the senses, making its performance a personal and memorable experience. Rather than divulging the facts of the fight (e.g., who shot at whom, what defenses were used, who was injured), the songwriter(s) instead recreate the intensity, confusion, and energy of the front line. Listeners/singers come to understand how the fight felt physically and emotionally through the use of images and metaphor that convey sensual encounters with nature. By combining bodily imagery with the landscape, the song not only suggests the momentousness of the war, but the lyrics also impose a discourse of affinity between the soldiers and the land. Warriors are not simply depicted as fighting upon the land; they are the land, which undergoes a serious upheaval.

“Must Fight” aligns the human body to the land through the metaphorical mixing of the colors pink (fenhong 粉紅) and dark green (molü 墨綠), themselves variants of “red” and “black” more typically found in NAUA songs. Where dark green symbolizes the life force of the land, an alternative understanding of fenhong may be the blood (hong) of many (fen) bodies. Famine drains the sustaining forces of the earth's surface and its people as the green and pink colors mix. Once a pristine wilderness, the “jade palace” (qionglou yuyu 瓊樓玉宇) is reduced to white bones (baigu 白骨), again a personification of nature. Compounded upon the image of the larger-than-life mountains quaking with turmoil is the blood and sweat of the soldier's body—miraculous disturbances in themselves. These lines, together with the tumultuous seas, convey something wondrous and awful: the body and land becoming one.

Nowhere is the congruence between land and body made more explicit than in “Four Seasons of Guerrilla Warfare.” Similar to “Must Fight,” the bodies of the soldiers are rooted in the Manchuria landscape through powerful metaphors. As its title suggests, the song script paints a picture of NAUA life all year around, like its sister tune “The Encampment Song.” The song comprises eight verses: two each for spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Spring, which marks new beginnings in nature, opens “Four Seasons” with an optimistic and confident tone:

During the season of reawakening, the land metaphorically births the soldiers into sprouts whose vitality is the “foundation of anti-Japanese revolution.” The young sprouts' vigor contrasts with the “slippery muddy roads” and “river melt” that make the movements of the enemy arduous. Depicting the NAUA soldiers as plant shoots figuratively roots the army in the soil of Manchuria, which cannot but be hazardous for foreign invaders to navigate.

Although the NAUA faces great hardship as the song progresses, their motherland acts as the fountain of their survival. “Unattached to life and unafraid of death, we summon up courage to go kill the enemy” (Han 1989: 17). Using nature as cover, the guerrilla troops “can hide among the tree leaves and thick grass growing everywhere” in the summer. Despite the midsummer heat, they “aren't afraid of starving or hardship, so how could there be fear of bug bites?” As long as the revolution succeeds, “Who could be irked?”

Autumn brings colder weather. The NAUA frequently used this season that symbolized death as an opportunity to recall and invoke a reversal of the effects of the Mukden Incident, as previously discussed. Traditionally the harvest season, autumn also represents the desire of the army to reap victory from the discord sown by the Japanese. The lyrics again conflate the army and nature, but, contrary to the sensory overload in “Must Fight,” interacting with the Manchurian surroundings gives the soldiers lucidity and a powerful accomplice in their fight against the Japanese. Like the changeable autumn weather, the army undertakes surprise attacks, “coming and going like shadows” (Han 1989: 18). Despite their unpredictability, the familial bond between the land and the NAUA remains constant:

Manchuria appears as a “broken nest,” a metaphor aptly suited to the image of geese flying south, signifying those who fled Manchuria after the Mukden Incident. The NAUA fighters, though themselves “damaged eggs,” remain loyal to the land in spite of the “desolate wind” of war. Unlike those people who fled, the NAUA was baptized in the harsh conditions of the motherland. Then a semantic shift in the final two verses suggests a different kind of intimacy with the land than that of the symbolic nurturer/offspring relationship that dominates the previous stanzas. Verses one through six all begin by naming the specific season, but verses seven and eight simply begin with “Warring in the snow . . .” (xuedili youji 雪地里游击). By the year's end it seems that the soldiers have grown into their roles as peers and allies of nature:

The army's notion that Manchuria will bestow upon it the right to rule the land is contingent on the soldiers' ability to withstand her conditions. If winter is the quintessential trope that characterizes Manchuria, then the final verses of “Four Seasons” practically indulge in the perpetual ice scape. Although the winter months bring physical challenges, such as the “cracking” of soldiers' extremities and the “bone-piercing winds,” they fearlessly garb themselves in its power. “Warring in the snow is our strong suit” states the eighth and final verse. Soldiers “don snowshoes” and “lean on walking sticks” in order to make their way across “towering ridges.” The NAUA identity as the progeny of Manchuria signifies an inherent ability to endure the region's most merciless season, which comes to fruition in the final line. Soldiers “chase out the Japanese landlord robbers,” epically resulting in a “success bestowed by heaven and earth.”

“Four Seasons of Guerrilla Warfare” epitomizes the symbolism of the body in the discursive fight to reclaim Manchuria from the Japanese. The displaced body became the symbolic site of Manchuria's involuntary transformation into Manchukuo, an event that elicited a collective visceral response. Changbai Mountain and the Songhua River serve as metonymy for Manchuria and are personified to portray the NAUA members as vital elements—the blood and bones—of the landscape. Descriptions of the seasons and climate further root the NAUA in Manchuria. Equipped with local knowledge, they acquire a powerful ability to protect their motherland. Through these rhetorical devices, the NAUA conceives of a space where the multicultural masses enact a new collective and political selfhood.

Conclusion

The analyses of songs in the above sections bring to light the cultural impact of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. Commanders and soldiers in the army wrote songs that envisaged a new kind of social unity based on communist ideology and anti-imperialist values. Because the army consisted of Chinese and Korean members, the corpus of NAUA songs features both languages. The NAUA songs represent a compelling case of transcultural production in Manchuria during a time when relations between Chinese and Korean people in the region were especially fraught within the Japanese colonial structure. The present discussion has placed Chinese and Korean songs together to show the NAUA as an emotional community, shaped by shared ideologies, rhetoric, and symbolism, if not always language or nationalist sentiment. Key to this framework was a symbiotic relationship with the land wherein both Chinese and Korean soldiers would protect Manchuria, and Manchuria would remain their birthright and deliverer.

I began this article by introducing a lawsuit concerning the authorship of “The Encampment Song” that threatened the fraternity of the NAUA. The case put on display the social bond between the litigants. The plaintiff and defendant, Jin Bowen and Li Min, were ethnically Korean women who married Han Chinese men, Li Zhaolin and Chen Lei, respectively. The litigants thus represent the multicultural makeup of the army.¹⁴ The intercultural marriages of the couples involved likewise reveal a familial aspect that has been overlooked in academic research on the NAUA. Despite these connections and the evidence that writers used both Chinese and Korean (some tunes even have dual versions), no bilingual compilation of NAUA songs exists. Here it may be worth reiterating that ethnic Korean (Chaoxianzu; Chosŏnjok) entities in China published the major song compilations, as well as the 2005 Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army Register. The absence of national remembrances of NAUA songs by either North or South Korea tells us that these cultural products largely serve the ethnic Korean population in China. Music became a link in the chain of NAUA social relationships, yet music also reveals the group's historical vulnerabilities vis-à-vis the PRC and the two Koreas.

NAUA music stands in perpetual conversation with the Japanese empire in which it was created and the post-1949 PRC in which it has been remembered. The epistemologies of these two fields, however, frame research on the army in distinct ways. On the one hand, research about the NAUA's formation, individual members, and cultural products lends itself to consolidating the role that the NAUA played in securing communist leadership in Northeast China after 1945. On the other hand, the present study situates the NAUA and the songs that defined its members within a transnational conceptualization of resistance, the internalization of ideas, and the power of emotions in bringing people together.

Former NAUA members, regardless of ethnicity, viewed themselves as significant actors in China's multiethnic national history. The “Encampment Song” lawsuit was taken to court because former soldiers and the family of Li Zhaolin believed that Chen Lei and Li Min had made false claims about the authorship of a much-beloved song. The stakes were twofold. First, litigation was a way to redress Li Zhaolin's reputation, representative of the fallen soldiers of his generation, in the time of retribution following the Cultural Revolution. Second, the government positions held by Chen Lei and Li Min, turned the matter into one of war heroes versus corrupt officials. If the couple's (mis)appropriation of the songs tells us anything, it is that the songs contained attitudes about camaraderie and patriotism held dear by writers that had to be reasserted after 1978.

If the discourses that enabled the rise of nation-states in the early twentieth century evolved over time, then the inverse may be true of the NAUA: its emotional community fossilized. In their day, however, the NAUA songs were revolutionary—not merely because they were written and sung by communist forces that advocated socioeconomic restructuring. A radical theme of cross-cultural unity runs through them. The songs substantiate the idea that social identity is a combination of place, cross-cultural interaction, political discourse, and an individual's sense of purpose. Seeing the NAUA as an emotional community shifts focus away from nationalist sentiment and onto the discursive power of the song lyrics in forming a collective social identity.

Notes

References