At the Chinese-North Korean border today, Chinese cranes raise a new customs facility, immigration center, and cross-border bridge at Tumen. Across the river, the North Korean bank remains conspicuously still. Reflected in this present-day asymmetry is a fraught dynamic around infrastructural systems whose roots predate this contemporary push for cross-border exchange. By historicizing the infrastructural life of rail transportation networks in post-liberation North Korea, this talk examines how the struggle to reclaim and operate Japanese-built systems both shaped Sino-North Korean relations and constituted the possibilities for socialist subject formation. While North Korea envisioned inherited rail tracks to power state-building efforts and forge new socialist subjects, this vision collided with a material reality in which Chinese technical expertise established operational hierarchies.
Drawing on North Korean railway discourse and Chinese operational archives, this talk discusses how the North Korean project of creating proper socialist subjects became entangled with Sino-North Korean technical supervision and command during the Chinese Civil War and Korean War. The story reveals a form of infrastructural coloniality, in which inherited technical systems designed under empire continue to reproduce hierarchical relationships and extractive logics after formal colonial rule. These patterns endure, inviting reflection on how infrastructure can carry power relations that persist across borders and political transitions.
About the Author:
Haeyoung Kim is an Assistant Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History at San Francisco State University. Her research and teaching interests broadly include infrastructure and technology in Korea, empires and their aftermaths, and post-colonial East Asia. Her current book project focuses on the relationship between technology and global histories of empire in Korea, examining how technical designs and the built environment shape historical processes, influencing not only the operation and implementation of infrastructures themselves, but also how these expressions of power produce and mediate imperial, colonial, and post-colonial spaces and identities. Kim holds a PhD, MA, and BA from the University of Chicago, and a MPP from Harvard University.
