Roads to Prosperity?

By Jiyoung Cho, 03/16/2018.

Roads to Prosperity?
The Politics of Global Assemblages of Prosperity in the Tumen River Triangle and Its Effects

Infrastructures such as roads, railways, and trains moving across the Tumen River Triangle where North Korean, Chinese, and Russian borders meet in the vicinity of the Tumen River have been the locus of generating transnational significance. It is, on the one hand, because human rights NGOs promote their strategic rhetoric that mobility of things (e.g. daily goods, USBs, or laptops) via this borderland inform ‘advanced’ materials with liberal, capitalist ideas to North Korea. These materials are regarded as creating possibilities for North Korean’s regime change. On the other hand, the South Korean government and proponents of its Eurasian initiatives envisage this Triangular borderland as space of generating co-prosperity and human rights not only for North Koreans but also for neighboring countries because they anticipate that building new bridges and railways linking those three countries and beyond will foster cooperative, peaceful relationships facilitated by the free flow of materials among them.¹

In fact, the development of this triangular borderland was initiated by Tumen River Area Development Project (TRADP) in 1991. It aimed to foster and facilitate economic regional collaborations among the two Koreas, China, Russia, Mongolia, and Japan. Hoping that increasing mobility of energy, finance, infrastructure and technology among these countries could produce peaceful borders, the project was an attempt to build the post-Cold War aspirations for the region, though this hope continued to oscillate between imaginary visions for the peaceful, prosperous future and memories of antagonistic Cold War history (Park 2016). Interestingly, since North Korea ceased to participate in TRADP and GTI (TRADP was sponsored by United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and renamed in 2005 as the Greater Tumen Initiative (GTI)) in 2009 and UNDP stepped out of playing the central role in GTI, the Tumen River Triangle has been more actively developed by diverse actors who are globally connected. Another interesting point is that in their rationale for designing development schemes, multiple temporalities based on conflicting narratives of past, present, and future have been playing a crucial role in creating new social relations in that area.

Such intriguing phenomena lead me to ask following questions: How have spatial reconfigurations in the Tumen River Triangle been intermingled with discourses on co-prosperity? How have the scheme of the spatial formations in this borderland shaped and been shaped by multiple temporalities? And what effects have they produced? To find answers to these questions, this study draws on the concepts of assemblage and time, which opens up the ways to critically examine how borders are created and imagined in association with meanings of prosperity in this region. By doing so, this study expects to engage with literature on state/spatial theory, development, and political ecology. To do so, this research project relies on open-ended, non-linear method of data collection, adopting an interpretive approach based on archival research in South Korea, China and the United States, open-ended interviews, and active fieldwork. With the support of ICI team, from July 9th to August 13th, 2018, I plan to conduct my fieldwork in Jilin and Beijing to explore various theme parks and interview researchers and officials in logistic companies.

1) NK News 2015; NK Econ Watch 2014; Joongang 2014;2015;2016; Hankyore 2013; 2014; 2015; 2016;2017; Korean Herald 2015; Pressian 2014; 2016