Peng Hai
Peng Hai is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies three emergent fields: the modern history of the Chinese ethnic borderlands, Islam in China, and the cultural critique of ethnic domination in post-colonial states.
University of Pittsburgh
Session
Between the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the expiration of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in 1945, the Russo-Japanese rivalry was contained by a fragile strategic balance that paradoxically fostered an unprecedented wave of inter-imperial exchange. Koreans, Mongols, Tatars, Kazakhs, and Buryats, among others, moved across imperial frontiers, seeking in the rival empire both a refuge and a vehicle for their own aspirations toward nationhood and modernity. Machinations through proxies, containment of direct warfare, agitation of minoritarian identities, and borderlands animated by military reconnaissance, insurgency, and arms trafficking prefigured the geopolitical and ideological structures that would later define the Cold War. Yet existing scholarship has rarely recognized this Pax Japano-Russica as a crucial precursor, and indeed, a direct progenitor, of the Cold War complex. This panel examines how Pax Japano-Russica shaped the geopolitical and ideological alignments of modern Northeast Asia, both in its own time and in its afterlife during the Cold War. Collectively, the papers propose a new prism for Cold War studies: one that situates Pax Japano-Russica as the formative crucible from which the region’s Cold War order emerged. By foregrounding the continuities between these two historical moments, the panel highlights how non-dominant actors animated inter-bloc mobility and how subordinate identities became the very substance through which hegemonic block formations were consolidated.