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Settler colonialism is not distinctly Western or European | Aeon Essays
In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over the next 14 years, the Japanese government lured 270,000 settlers there by offering free land to ordinary Japanese households. Japanese propaganda stressed, importantly, that this colonisation scheme was not inconsistent with Japan’s commitment to racial equality. Japanese farmers would bring new agricultural techniques to Manchuria and ‘improve’ the lives of native Manchus, Mongols and Chinese by way of example.
Japan’s settlement of Manchuria represents a case of settler colonialism, a concept that was initially developed in the humanities to explain the violent history of nation-building in North America and Australasia. Unlike traditional colonies such as India or Nigeria, as Patrick Wolfe explained, settler colonies do not exploit native populations but instead seek to replace them. The key resource in settler colonies is land. Where Indigenous land is more valuable than Indigenous labour – often because Indigenous peoples are mobile and cannot be easily taxed – native peoples are killed, displaced or forcibly assimilated by settlers who want their land for farming. Settlers and their descendants then justify these land grabs through discourses that both naturalise the disappearance of Indigenous peoples (it was disease!) and stress the benefits of the civilisation the settlers brought with them.
Although settler colonialism has become a valuable framework for explaining the history of Western countries like the United States and Australia, the dynamics that it describes are clearly quite general. Japan’s leaders in the 1930s, for instance, similarly salivated at the seemingly empty plains of Manchuria that could be a solution for all the food needs of Japan’s rapidly growing empire. And just like policymakers in the US, Japan had a variety of self-serving justifications for settling this new frontier. Its claim that Japanese farmers would contribute to ‘co-prosperity’ and ‘racial harmony’ in Manchuria and Korea bore little resemblance to the forced assimilation, discrimination and dispossession experienced by subject peoples there. As such, in popular and academic writing today, there is no resistance to naming Japanese colonialism and imperialism in East Asia or to placing Japanese settler colonialism in conversation with Western settler colonial projects.
What is odd, however, is that, while Japan’s colonisation of Manchuria was unfolding in the 1930s, there was much greater reluctance to condemn Japan by Western scholars otherwise committed to the abolition of racism and imperialism. This confusion helps illuminate why other, very similar settler colonial projects currently unfolding in the Global South have received relatively little attention or condemnation today.
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In 1936, the noted US scholar W E B Du Bois visited Manchuria, China and Japan as part of a world tour. Japan’s rise had long been a source of inspiration for Du Bois, who claimed in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line’. Japan’s wartime victory over Russia in 1905 seemed to Du Bois to augur the long-awaited rise of coloured peoples around the world. And Japan was a rhetorical champion of racial equality in the interwar period. It had tried (but failed) to enshrine racial equality as a founding principle of the League of Nations in 1919, and its diplomats proved vocal critics of Jim Crow in the US South.
W E B Du Bois with Japanese professors in Tokyo, 1936. W E B Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Courtesy Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
It is in this context that Du Bois visited Manchuria in 1936. He would subsequently report that what Japan had accomplished in Manchuria was ‘nothing less than marvellous’. Du Bois gaped at Manchuria’s absence of unemployment, sparkling new infrastructure and ‘happy’ people. The absence of an explicit racial hierarchy or segregation between different ethnic groups in Manchuria, with schools divided only by language, seemed to make Japanese rule there qualitatively different from European colonialism. Japan, to Du Bois, was ‘above all a country of coloured people run by coloured people for coloured people.’
Du Bois’s credulous defence of Japan in the interwar period is a major analytical blind spot
The trouble for Du Bois, of course, was that his Chinese friends felt very differently about the whole matter of Japanese rule in Manchuria. Du Boisstruggled to understand the enmity between China and Japan: two ‘coloured’ nations who should ostensibly be political allies. Shortly after leaving Manchuria, he provocatively questioned an audience in Shanghai: ‘Why is it that you hate Japan more than Europe when you have suffered more from England, France and Germany, than from Japan?’ A year later, in the wake of the undeniable atrocities committed by Japan against hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, Du Bois doubled down on his defence of Japan. He wrote that ‘Japan fought China to save China from Europe’ and that, even if it had committed violence in China, Japan was simply following Europe’s playbook. The Japanese had also not invented the practice of ‘killing the unarmed and innocent in order to reach the guilty’, he emphasised, highlighting similar European counterinsurgency practices in South Africa and the Punjab.
A 10th-anniversary poster for the Manchuria Airline Company, c1941. Courtesy the MFA, Boston
Du Bois’s credulous defence of Japan in the interwar period is acknowledged by even his most sympathetic interlocutors as a major analytical blind spot. The point of highlighting these errors is not to undermine Du Bois’s critique of the operation of race in the Western world. Rather, highlighting how Du Bois became a surprisingly vocal defender of Japanese colonialism points out how even otherwise insightful political observers can spectacularly miss the mark with respect to understanding how race and power operate in ‘coloured nations’. Du Bois’s errors, in other words, have much to teach us about why scholars continue to fail to understand settler colonial projects in the Global South today.
In the early 1960s, Indonesia annexed the western half of the island of New Guinea or ‘West Papua’, claiming to liberate the people there from Dutch colonial rule. In response to a series of uprisings from Indigenous Papuans in the 1970s and ’80s, Indonesia resettled 300,000 farmers from its core islands to West Papua in just two decades. Much like Japan in Manchuria, Indonesia lured large numbers of ordinary Indonesians to West Papua by promising them free transport and land there. And much like Japan in Manchuria, Indonesia justified this resettlement or ‘transmigration’ scheme to external observers by stressing two things.
First, transmigrants would bring agricultural development to West Papua and thereby improve the living standards of what officials called ‘primitive’ Papuans. And second, transmigration was not inconsistent with the state’s commitment to ethnic and racial equality. Quite the opposite, in fact. Mixing ethnic groups together would produce social cohesion. As Martono, Indonesia’s minister for transmigration, put it: ‘[T]he transmigration programme highlights social integration so that racial differences and differences between ethnic groups will no longer exist. There is no such thing as one ethnic group colonising another [in Indonesia].’ The disappearance of West Papuans as a distinct group, in other words, would be the natural result of ethnic mixing. These justifications were accepted by Western donors in the World Bank who ultimately funded the transmigration scheme.
