Contesting the Residue: Bandits, Collective Hamlets, and Japanese Colonialism in Manchuria

Abstract This article examines the containment of the dispossessed Chinese peasants through the mechanism of the collective hamlet in Japan-occupied Manchuria in the 1930s. To alleviate its internal recession, Japan initiated the agrarian emigration project and sent farmers to Manchukuo, a puppet state of the Japanese Empire. What followed was the expropriation of local Chinese peasants and the grabbing of their land by Japan to facilitate the distribution of land to Japanese immigrants. This resulted in the phenomenon of dispossessed Chinese peasants, which further entailed the colonial control of these people through a specific mechanism, the collective hamlet. The article examines the colonial knowledge surrounding the collective hamlet in relation to the discourse of bandits. It interrogates how the village embodied a new social relation centering on the rights of land use and land ownership. It investigates how the collective hamlet served as a means of normalization, rather than elimination, of the banditry, which appropriated the existence of bandits as an important component of the economy in the areas where dispossession and expropriation took place.