The Death of Migrants: Lessons from the Anti-Chinese Riots of 1931 in Korea
This piece is an installment in PLATFORM’s ongoing series on migration.
In early July of 1931, a wave of anti-Chinese riots swept over the Korean peninsula under Japanese colonial rule. The brutal attacks on Chinese migrants and their houses began in the Korean port city of Incheon, but within days, the riots had become a nationwide phenomenon, reaching Seoul, Pyongyang, Wonsan, and other cities and causing hundreds of deaths and injuries. I am writing a book that begins with these deaths of migrants in the colonial city of Incheon, taking as a point of departure the ransacked, emptied houses, whose inhabitants were found either dead or missing (Figure 1). It was not my primary concern to identify who committed the crimes. The police had already apprehended the assailants—Korean residents, the majority of whom happened to be the urban poor inhabiting the most unfortunate section of the city, attacked Chinese migrants immediately after the alleged deaths of Korean migrant farmers by Chinese landowners in Manchuria. Rather, I embarked on an investigative journey to figure out what motivated the street violence targeting the Chinese houses in the colony, what allowed for a colonized people to commit deadly violence against migrants. This spatially oriented investigation inevitably required a “methodological redress,” a rethinking of what might constitute evidence. Even seemingly ordinary and insignificant objects might hold meaning. In the process of investigation, more crucially, architecture came to life as more than a passive setting for the violent acts, but rather as both victim of and witness to the violence.
Figure 1. The ransacked Chinese shophouse in Incheon during the anti-Chinese riots in 1931 (Source: The National Institute of Korean History).
The wreckage revealed the day after the tumultuous night, such as broken panes of window, cans of gasoline scattered here and there, silk barricades put up in the streets—these material objects seemed to want to speak something out. Study of this evidence brought antagonists to the front of the stage as protagonists, residents who might have resorted to brutal attacks on the architecture of migrants as a means of expressing themselves. Their actions, in effect, made the violence of colonialism legible. Just as it became unclear where the lines should be drawn between perpetrators and victims, the roles of migrant and native also become mutable: in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Chinese migrants were often portrayed as disreputable intruders in conflict with the colonized Koreans, but the same imperial logic made Korean migrants in Japanese-occupied Manchuria the target of physical violence by Chinese residents. As I argue, this imperial logic of separation between natives and migrants incited the colonized Koreans into becoming perpetrators in the sweltering summer of July 1931, turning victims of its own system into killers.
My investigation developed in ways unanticipated, taking detours, yielding new discoveries. The most unexpected finding was made in the case of police photographs. Even though the Japanese police documented with photographs the damage inflicted on the Chinese shophouses during the riots, they were largely taken from the street. The architectural inside of Chinatown thus remained obscure for decades. What Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation” encapsulates what occurred in the course of my archival thinking thereafter, beginning with a happenstance introduction to the interior of Chinatown. One day, a third-generation overseas Chinese scholar named Chou informed me about the existence of police documents on Ildonghoe, a secret anti-Japanese organization formed by Chinese migrants in Incheon in 1941, a decade after the anti-Chinese riots. After the arrest of the members in 1943, the police began photographing locations and objects related to their activities, which serendipitously produced a photographic archive of architectural interiors of Incheon’s Chinatown, which have now disappeared.[1]
Figure 2. Hand-drawn floor plans of the Chinese shophouses created during the police investigation of Ildonghoe in Incheon’s Chinatown in 1943 (Source: The National Institute of Korean History).
Figure 3. Reconstruction of two Chinese shophouses as a gathering place for anticolonial activists within Incheon’s Chinatown (Drawn by author).
Investigating the photographs, I wanted to decipher the messages Chou might have hoped to deliver. Not only did the police take photographs of the now-vanished shophouses, but they also left behind hand-drawn floor plans of the houses with detailed measurements of each room (Figure 2). This information enabled me to reconstruct three-dimensional models of the shophouses and visualize their interior spaces—as focal points for anti-colonial resistance (Figure 3). Soon thereafter, I came across an interview article where Chou had discussed rumors from elderly residents in his Chinese neighborhood: in colonial Korea, Chinese residents would lend their shoes to Korean independence activists to help them avoid police scrutiny—Chinese shoes at the door would make the Japanese police assume that it was a Chinese house. To Chou, rumors are more than groundless gossip. Instead, Chou combed through archive after archive to find evidence that would corroborate the rumors passed on from generation to generation in his Chinese community. This narrative of cross-racial alliances—one that would challenge the colonial accounts of separation and animosity—appeared to be what Chou was determined to uncover through his archival work, opening up possibilities of recovering intimacies formed between the peoples under colonial rule.
“The imperial logic of separation between natives and migrants incited the colonized Koreans into becoming perpetrators in the sweltering summer of July 1931, turning victims of its own system into killers.”
Figure 4. This police photograph shows a passageway (hidden from the street) between the two neighboring shophouses that served as an intimate route of communication for Ildonghoe’s anticolonial activities. (Source: The National Institute of Korean History).
In December 2024, the streets of Seoul were flooded with groups of people protesting the declaration of martial law and the subsequent attempt at a coup by then-president Yoon Suk Yeol. On the other side of the street were far-right picketers, ardent supporters of Yoon who sought to defend him from impeachment. Not surprisingly, it was anti-Chinese rhetoric that united the far-right group. In their commitment to excuse Yoon from accountability for inciting civil war, the far-right supporters pointed to the Chinese Communist Party as the hidden mastermind behind the political rally against Yoon. Furthermore, Yoon’s supporters resorted to the language of hatred to summon the specter of Chinese migrants, or hwagyo (overseas Chinese), blaming them for the nation’s own problems. Anyone identified as potentially Chinese was witch-hunted, with their names, addresses, and faces exposed to the public. These violent acts often targeted the built environment of Chinese residents, including elementary schools and streets of Chinatowns. Sadly enough, images of these incidents gave me an uncannily familiar feeling that we had witnessed such acts before, in Incheon.
Hate speech has been prevalent for some time in Korea, targeting women, LGBTQ, persons with disabilities, and foreign migrant workers. However, the current onslaught of anti-Chinese rhetoric has gained more traction over the past years, fueled by the global rise of right-wing populist politics. Since the failed attempt at a self-pronounced coup, Yoon’s far-right supporters have been spewing out hate speech against such figures of “Chinese migrants” every day, obsessed with a mission to find hwagyo among journalists, entertainers, politicians, and even ordinary citizens. The legacies of colonial racialization and separation continued to exist to the extent that the category of Chinese migrants became a potent symbol licensing colonial oppression in Korea, enabling the public to launch verbal and physical attacks on those who were labeled Chinese and thereby rendering it impossible to establish histories of co-existence. The fear that one can get attacked at any moment on the street by virtue of exhibiting Chineseness—real or imagined—has become a brutal reality. To be noted, this is not necessarily confined to a particular historical moment, but something that is always latent and prone to resurface.
The anti-Chinese riots of 1931 were not an isolated event—rather, they were an expression of a more fundamental form of violence that transcends its temporal and geographic scope, continuing to haunt those of us living in the present. As I write this essay, the world is experiencing an escalating level of precarity and hostile nativism surrounding global migration. In this time of resurgent anti-migrant racism, the anti-Chinese riots of 1931 are far from being a thing of the past. We are living in a postcolonial present that legitimizes the transcendent hatred of the moment, a kind of demon that resurges to possess generation after generation by virtue of its detachment from a history of violence against migrants. Without granting those who suffered legitimate space in historical remembrance, the death of migrants will continue to haunt us.
Citation
Sujin Eom, “The Death of Migrants: Lessons from the Anti-Chinese Riots of 1931 in Korea,” PLATFORM, September 8, 2025.
Notes
[1] These findings have been published in a recent article. Sujin Eom, “Fugitive Archives: Architecture, Police Photography, and Decolonial Futures.” Critical Asian Studies 56, no. 4 (2024): 576–601.
