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Manchukuo’s Contested Sovereignty: Legal Activism, Rights Consciousness, and Civil Resistance in a “Puppet State”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Ryan MITCHELL
Ryan MITCHELL*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

Though often viewed as a mere stepping stone in Japan’s gradual early-twentieth-century military and economic encroachment on China, the “puppet state” of Manchukuo was also paradoxically characterized by a high degree of legitimizing legal rhetoric. While its political realities generally failed to reflect these idealized foundations, the latter did provide significant space for legal and other forms of civil society resistance, including by Chinese legal professionals. The germinal resistance movement of these actors demonstrates a complex relationship between the concepts of sovereignty, law, and national affiliation, both in the context of state repression and in the overlapping demands of competing identities. Though various theoretical understandings of resistance help to illuminate this activism, it is perhaps best seen as a radical challenge to the regime’s power to define the norms and exceptions of political and social life.

Keywords

ManchukuoChinese legal historycivil rightsJapanese Empiresocial movementscivil societysovereigntyEast Asiamodernity
Type
Research Article
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , November 2016 , pp. 351 - 376
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press and KoGuan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University 

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Footnotes

*

PhD in Law Candidate, Yale University. JD, Harvard Law School (2012), BA, the New School (2007). Member of the State Bar of California. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the session “Research in Progress on East Asian Law and Society,” organized by the Section on East Asian Law and Society at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in January 2016. The author is grateful to Professors Setsuo Miyazawa, Robert Leflar, Donald Clarke, Eric Feldman, and Rachel Stern. The initial version of this paper was written with the guidance of Professor William Alford, to whom the author is especially grateful for his early encouragement and many insightful comments. Considerable research for this paper was conducted with the aid of a Cravath International Fellowship. Correspondence to Ryan Mitchell, Yale Law School, PO Box 208215, New Haven, CT 06520-8215, USA. E-mail address: ryan.mitchell@yale.edu.

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