Yellow Sea Studies: Toward a cross-cultural and transboundary approach

Interest in coastal and marine spaces in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) has soared in recent decades. Maritime history, a relatively young post-WWII (World War II) discipline once defined as “the history of merchant shipping of all kinds,”¹ has significantly expanded to become an “all-encompassing” discipline concerned with “humankind’s relationship with the sea,”² especially following its resurgence in the late 1990s in the context of questioning the effectiveness of area studies for historical analysis.³ Instead of drawing national borders or emphasizing distinct regions, recent works have examined transnational commercial, biological, social, and cultural exchanges and redefined regions in terms of civilizations.⁴ Yet, newly emerging inquiries into the coastal and marine spaces also transcend historical ones. In conjunction with the recent turns in HSS—ontological, material, and animal turns to list a few—the world’s coasts and oceans have been interrogated in terms of their unsettled, always-becoming ontologies,⁵ their materialities shaping human knowledges and experiences,⁶ and more-than-human politics and ethnographies.⁷ Rather than a backdrop to history, the oceans are now reimagined as a paradigm of history,⁸ while also being considered as a cradle of social theories.⁹ No longer “marginal to land” and “peripheral to our academic enquiries,”¹⁰ these watery spaces are emerging as a central subject of intellectual discussions in various disciplines.

This special issue joins this excitement about the coastal and marine spaces by focusing on one geographical region in particular: the Yellow Sea. The Yellow Sea is a gulf shared by China, North Korea, and South Korea. Located on the eastern edge of the continental shelf of the Eurasian plate, it is one of the marginal seas of the Pacific Ocean. This tiny sea occupying no more than 450,000 km² or up to a mere 0.1% of the Earth’s oceanic surface is nevertheless one of the world’s most populous and productive seas, accommodating about 2.7% of the global human population¹¹ and responsible for about 10% of the global seafood production.¹² The thorny issues of development and conservation regarding the rapid loss of marine and avian biodiversity suggest that the Yellow Sea has undergone a series of significant changes at the regional scale.¹³ Despite these changes, however, this space has received little attention as a shared body of water largely due to geopolitical tensions. The border between North and South Korea, known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL), is heavily militarized while the Chinese naval and air forces have expanded their bases along the shores in recent years. While diplomatic reliefs have ebbed and flowed over time, the decades-long unease among the three countries is constantly reminded when non-humans and humans cross the borders in an unruly manner. As a result, the Yellow Sea continues to be imagined as a divided space whose connections among its constituent countries remain surprisingly under-investigated.

Amid such circumstances, this special issue proposes the establishment of Yellow Sea Studies as a collaborative and interdisciplinary field of research in HSS that explores the interactions and entanglements of things, bodies, ideas, knowledges, and practices about the sea and via the sea. By fostering regionwide conversations transcending the conventional scales of the state or the nation, we envision Yellow Sea Studies bringing together existing works and creating synergies to reimagine the Yellow Sea as a maritime region. We are inspired by the notion of a “mediterranean sea” that has been conceptualized by numerous scholars.¹⁴ At a glance, it sounds similar to the “enclosed or semi-enclosed sea” defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as “a gulf, basin or sea surrounded by two or more States and connected to another sea or the ocean by a narrow outlet or consisting entirely or primarily of the territorial seas and exclusive economic zones of two or more coastal States.”¹⁵ Yet, the concept means much more than legal implications. It conceives of the sea as a central mode or channel for commerce, migration, and communication, thereby actively connecting multiple places around its rim and imagining a space of a unity or wholeness while also attending to the differences arising within them.¹⁶ In other words, the concept of the mediterranean sea creates a maritime region. Seeing the world as comprised of maritime regions is radically different from mainstream understandings of world regions primarily defined by continental connectivity.

In Asian studies, the notion of a mediterranean sea has been useful in overcoming modern boundaries imposed by European colonizers. The longue durée historical works on precolonial to postcolonial maritime connections in the Indian Ocean, the Southeast Asian seas, and the South China Sea have revealed hitherto undervalued places and networks, for example, the significance of Melaka¹⁷ as a highly advanced cosmopolitan city where Indian, Persian, Arab, and Jewish merchants used to interact.¹⁸ Likewise, we believe that the Yellow Sea, imagined as a mediterranean sea, can help uncover the forgotten and lost stories and ultimately facilitate an awareness that it is a shared sea demanding shared responsibilities. Sketching in this way, the Yellow Sea Studies we wish to cultivate is distinguished from the works mainly housed in the fields of law, policy, and politics, which focus their debates on the delineation of maritime boundaries and the securitization of human and non-human mobilities, both of which are often tied to national politico-economic interests.¹⁹ Instead, Yellow Sea Studies emphasizes connections, interactions, and entwinements. We believe that such an alternative view can contribute to making a more sustainable and peaceful maritime region.

While Yellow Sea Studies can unfold in multiple directions, this special issue focuses on two approaches: cross-cultural and transboundary. Through a cross-cultural approach, we aim to recover the rich histories of cultural formations, exchanges, and transformations that have taken place in the region. Through a transboundary approach, we aim to explore new movements and tendencies emerging out of the evolving dynamics of more-than-human geographies. This special issue builds on the panel that we organized at the 2022 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Meeting entitled “From the Bohai to the Yellow Seas: A Transboundary and Cross-cultural Story,” chaired by Prasenjit Daura and commented by Ian Miller as discussant. While the three papers assembled here span different time frames and employ different disciplinary approaches, they share a common view of the Yellow Sea as an interconnected entity. In the subsequent sections, we introduce our individual papers and draw the broad contours of cross-cultural and transboundary approaches. We conclude with a brief discussion of the barriers to and the potential for the establishment of Yellow Sea Studies.

People in prehistoric times would have walked—rather than sailed—across the Yellow Sea, much of which was a dry plain until the dawn of the Holocene (Figure 1). The Yellow Sea took on its current shape about 8,800 years ago as sea levels rose since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Today, its average depth is merely about 44 m, while its rivers—Yangtze,²¹ Huang, and Liao to Yalu, Daedong, Han, and Geum to name a few major ones—carry an enormous amount of sediment each year. These topographical and hydrological features contribute to the formation of a vast belt of tidal flats and lend the coastal waters their distinctive yellowish hue: hence the “yellow” sea, although the body of water that we now call the Yellow Sea used to be called by various names, reflecting the relative viewpoints of the political leadership of a given period and territory. The current name was introduced outside the region as late as the 18th century as can be seen in the Nouvel Atlas de la Chine created by French geographer d’Anville²² (Figure 2).

However, it was called and its boundaries were defined in the past, the geological history of the Yellow Sea implies that it is a sea with rich stories, memories, and heritages about the people who have crossed, used, and lived in the space over time. A cross-cultural approach to the Yellow Sea is to recover them on a regional scale. From ancient creation myths to modern patterns of using coastal spaces and resources, many parallels are found among the three countries sharing the Yellow Sea. A cross-cultural approach explores how things, bodies, ideas, knowledges, and practices traveled and cross-fertilized maritime cultures, engendering similarities as well as differences. We are aware of many exciting research, alongside a few policy-driven, studies centering on the conflicts and diplomacy across the region.²³ We envision that a cross-cultural approach will help facilitate conversations among these established works, stimulate our imaginations, and discover more connections than what we are familiar with today.

Ronald Po’s “The Bohai Sea and Mount Penglai: In Search of a Maritime Religiosity in Imperial China” examines Mount Penglai, a mythical island of the immortals that first appeared in Shanhai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), known as one of the earliest geographical literatures in China. If the interpretation of Mount Penglai has been largely limited to its symbolic significance within Daoism, Po sees it as a geographical imaginary. In contrast to the Greek imaginary of the Mediterranean Sea as a restless, chaotic, and therefore unsafe space, Po argues, the Chinese imagined the Bohai Sea²⁴ as a relatively mild and peaceful space because Mount Penglai, where the xian (the immortal saints or sages) reside, tames the water and suppresses anarchy. Po explores how such an imaginary, leading to reiterated stories and repeated journeys in search of the place in reality, traveled not only to the Korean peninsula but also to Japan. A geography of Mount Penglai turns out to connect places far beyond the Yellow Sea.

With the exception of nearly three centuries of restrictions on private maritime trade during the Ming and early Qing periods,²⁵ the Yellow Sea continued to be a vibrant frontier for merchants, envoys, navigators, and explorers. Entering the 18th century, especially, the Yellow Sea began to be incorporated into the globalized world as its actors diversified with the arrival of more imperial powers,²⁶ which means that the cross-cultural exchanges and transformations since this period must be situated within a global context. Xiaofei Gao’s “Seaweed Modernity: Empire, State, and the Sino-Japanese Relations,” in this regard, attends to how the knowledges of the high nutritional value of seaweed newly produced by the Japanese and Western biochemical scientists influenced the Chinese people’s changing perceptions of seaweed in the early 20th century, from a rather unattractive food consumed out of hunger or for medicinal purposes to a “common household seafood.”

Through seaweed, Gao weaves together modernisation and state-building efforts, regional geopolitics, and the biophysical transformations of the Yellow Sea. The experimentation with seaweed for various industrial purposes, such as agar, fiber, and even gas masks, echoes similar stories of wartime scientific and technological advances in the West that significantly altered the view of nature as a commodity of practical or economic value. The stories of the migration of Japanese fishermen to Manchuria, initially supplying fish to the Japanese army and later participating in seaweed production, and the human-assisted migration of Laminaria seedlings from Korea and Japan, a macroalgae species possibly non-native to China, vividly illustrate the complex networking and hybridization processes of knowledges and practices across a maritime region. Gao’s work demonstrates that a cross-cultural approach can be useful for telling larger, complex stories.

If the boundaries of the state or nation maintain some relevance in understanding the cross-fertilization of human cultures in the Yellow Sea, there are many non-humans—from fish, mammal, and shorebirds to invasive species and marine debris—that freely travel across borders. Bound up by biological conditions or ocean currents, their movements are not unlimited. Yet, they move beyond human will or control. This unruliness transcending man-made boundaries requires a new perspective to understand them. A transboundary approach in this regard is to think at the scale of the sea. It is to view the Yellow Sea as an interconnected entity, to follow its transboundary actors, and to examine the effects they create.

The natural sciences have been at the forefront of taking a transboundary approach. Physical oceanographers treat the Yellow Sea as an integrated system defined by gradually changing bathymetry, sea surface temperature, salinity, and other parameters. Such a conceptual model is essential for understanding the ocean currents that enter, circulate, and exit the Yellow Sea, which do not favour one country over another (Figure 3). Conservation scientists have similarly used such concepts as the Yellow Sea Large Marine System (YSLME) and the Yellow Sea Ecoregion (YSE) to stress the biological connectivity of this space. A large marine ecosystem (LME), a concept developed by Kenneth Sherman and his colleagues in the 1980s and the 1990s, is defined as a water body of over 200,000 km² adjacent to a continent.²⁷ Of the 66 LMEs identified globally, what characterizes the Yellow Sea is the highest levels of Chlorophyll-A (thus the highest primary productivity) and the highest cumulative human impacts, including habitat modification, plastic debris, and ocean acidification.²⁸ It is also one of the fastest warming LMEs, with a 0.93°C increase in sea surface temperature from 1957 to 2012.²⁹ Such diagnoses have led to several initiatives in transboundary environmental governance, involving domestic actors as well as international actors such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP). They have contributed to knowledge production at the Yellow Sea scale and have successfully engaged North Korea as an observer or participant in many activities. As noted above, however, these efforts have yielded limited outcomes because of fluctuating geopolitical moods.

A transboundary approach in HSS would help answer different types of intellectual questions and complement existing efforts to govern the Yellow Sea. Beyond tracking transboundary movements per se or offering a problem-solving framework, the strength of HSS lies in revealing the complexities involved in those movements and thereby suggesting more nuanced perspectives and actions. Choi’s “How to stay with the trouble: Spartina invasion and management in the tidal flats of the Yellow Sea” shows a glimpse of how this can be done. Spartina is an invasive coastal plant, known as a notorious “tidal flat killer” in both China and South Korea. While mainstream conservation efforts have singularly focused on killing the plant to protect native tidal ecosystems, Choi interrogates deeper issues surrounding eradication efforts. Without assuming its invasive status, she examines how Spartina became a troubling plant in the situated contexts of the biological invasion paradigm introduced to the region and the recently elevated status of tidal flats as a globally valuable nature. Taking this approach further, she finds that Spartina has contributed to engendering a new awareness of salt marshes as a coastal habitat distinct from tidal flats and has reinforced the need to treat the Yellow Sea as one ecological system. Her work complicates the Spartina problem. Simultaneously, she suggests that solutions can be more carefully crafted.

A transboundary approach, as this example illustrates, is not about producing essentialised knowledges but about paying attention to emergent actors, situations, and politics. As such, it requires new methodologies and theories, while also demonstrating that the sea can serve as a new field site to develop them. Ultimately, by enriching our understanding of the sea as an inseparably connected maritime region, we envision that a transboundary approach can help promote sustainability and peace as it has already proven valuable in engaging North Korea in regional collaborations in the field of environmental governance. Alongside a cross-cultural approach, we believe that a transboundary approach will allow us to better understand and practice connections.

Despite geopolitical tensions, the Yellow Sea remains a maritime region with rich cultures shared among various places and vibrant non-human and human activities that cross borders. To restore and foster this identity, we have proposed the establishment of Yellow Sea Studies. Facilitating conversations and collaborations across different subregions and disciplines, we believe that the Yellow Sea Studies can help create a renewed awareness of the connections, interactions, and entwinements existing within the Yellow Sea.

There are several barriers to advancing the Yellow Sea Studies. First, the differences between the Chinese and Korean languages have hindered access to each other’s intellectual resources. Along with translations, training bilingual scholars and facilitating forums for knowledge exchange would help overcome this barrier. Second, geopolitics still largely determines the opening and closing of the North Korean scholarship. While waiting for a good time to come would be one way to overcome this challenge, we believe that future works using available information about the country can contribute to improving the situation in the long run. Moreover, we imagine that cross-cultural and transboundary studies can be extended to place the Yellow Sea within a larger East Asian maritime network, from the Sea of Japan and the Strait of Melaka to the Pacific Ocean. These efforts would help dismantle the constraints imposed by nation-centric historiographies and illuminate the influential role played by the seas and oceans in shaping the past and present of the broader East Asian region.

There have been surprisingly few conversations across different disciplines under the theme of the Yellow Sea. We hope that Yellow Sea Studies will host interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, an examination of ports, rural settlements, and various networks facilitating the flow of ideas, commodities, non-human entities, and human beings would foster collaborations among urban history, agrarian studies, labour histories, imperial histories, and global environmental movements. While this special issue initiates the exploration of cross-cultural and transboundary approaches, we also envision that the Yellow Sea Studies will incorporate other useful approaches as it blooms. In turn, we believe that scholarship on coastal and marine spaces will benefit greatly from the attention given to the Yellow Sea.

This special issue builds on the panel “From the Bohai to the Yellow Seas: A Transboundary and Cross-cultural Story” that we organized at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. We are grateful to our panel discussants, Prasenjit Duara and Ian Miller, for their valuable advice on establishing Yellow Sea Studies.