만주사변전 在滿韓人의 수전개발에 대한 중국 동북지방 당국의 시책

Abstract

Since the early days of the Ch'ing dynasty the Chinese people have moved to the Northern area of China, and after reaching the Manchurian area they started to plant cerials like beans, millet, corns, which were suited for dry land cultivation. But the Korean people who later immigrated into this area started to utilize the damp(swamp) areas, turned them into rice fields and widely initiated rice agriculture. This marked the beginning of irrigated agriculture inside the Manchurian area, and the Korean people's rice field agriculture successfully joined the traditional dry field agriculture of this area. The establishment of this new agricultural measure helped boosting the entire economy of Manchuria, as it guaranteed considerable agricultural development throughout the area. Rice field products were more profitable than any other dry field products. So it was natural that the authorities of Manchuria and the landlords actively preferred and encouraged rice cultivation. But the period of development of Manchurian rice agriculture overlaps some series of events including the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and the full-scale war which involved the Japanese invasion of China. In the course of these events, Japan incessantly tried to take advantage of the Korean people in the area as the agent of her infiltration. As the results the measures taken by the authorities were mixed, and sometimes codtradicting each other. They took such measures to support the Korean people in their efforts of establishing and expanding the rice cultivation as (i)helping establish rice cultivating companies, (ii) intensified control of irrigation system, (iii) encouraging reclamation by distributing unreclaimed lands(including swamps) at substantially lower prices. At the same time, they tried to enforce such restrictive measures as (i) prohibition of land ownership by Korea immigrants, (ii) aggravating tenant conditions. These measure put Korean immigrants in a even more difficult position regarding rice agricultural environment, and led to an actual drop of productivity and square measure of rice cultivation areas in the 1920s'. But the cultivation in general, managed to survive and continue its development. The temptation of high profitability of rice crop was so strong that the authorities were just unwilling to ascertain if their decrees were being observed tightly.