제국일본의 화공(華工)과 식민당국의 화공정책 ― 식민지 조선과 타이완을 중심으로

Abstract

After the Sino-Japanese War, human migration in East Asia began to dramatically increase. This included Japanese migration to Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China, Korean migration to Manchuria and Japan, and Chinese migration to Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Such mass migration within East Asia triggered the overall transformation of the region in political, economic, and cultural terms. This paper focuses primarily on Chinese migration, which, while constituting a much smaller part of this mass migration than that of Japanese or Koreans, nonetheless continued with little interruption during this time of great political upheaval, which included port opening, wars, and colonization. This was due to the fact that Chinese migration in East Asia was largely economically motivated, unlike Japanese and Korean migration, which was often caused by political factors. The majority of all overseas Chinese, commonly called huaqiao, were laborers, or huagong, and this was the case in East Asia too. In the 1920s in particular, the vast majority of the Chinese living in colonial Korea and Taiwan were laborers, and they were consistently absorbed into the Japanese empire, which was linked to the growth of capitalism in Japan, Japan’s efficient colonial rule, and the migration of Japanese and Korean laborers in East Asia. Consequently, Japanese colonial authorities had no choice but to take a serious view of the problem of Chinese laborers, especially regarding policies pertaining to their employment, public security, and custom. This paper attempts to shed new light on the meanings of port opening, war, and colonialism in East Asia by examining the motivation, nature, and organization of migrant Chinese laborers in colonial Korea and Taiwan as well as the policies Japan drew up to regulate them within their colonial purview.