The struggle of Korean partisans in the border areas of Manchuria with Korea is one of the heroic pages of the anti-Japanese resistance of the population of North-Eastern China from 1931 to 1941, which to some extent, prevented Japanese militarism from implementing plans to invade the Soviet far East. One of the notable participants in the guerilla was a young Korean partisan, Kim Song Ju, who took the pseudonym Kim Il Sung. Born in Korea, he lived in Manchuria and joined the Communist party of China there. He was forced by the pressure of the Japanese army to retreat to the USSR with the remnants of his unit in January 1941.

The valley of the border river Tumangan on the Chinese side (Manchuria) much earlier than the Chinese began to settle and develop Koreans (from the middle of the nineteenth century). By 1931 it has become a kind of Korean enclave on Chinese territory with an immigrant population of about 800,000 people. This region was named Jiandao.

The Korean Communist insurgents under the auspices of the Communist party of China relied on the poor peasantry, which made up more than 65% of the Korean diaspora, and had strong allies - the CPC and the USSR, which provided assistance to armed patriots through the Comintern. The base of influence of the Korean nationalists was much narrower. The majority of rich Korean peasants became collaborators, cooperating with the Japanese authorities, helping them to conduct punitive expeditions against the insurgents. Many nationalists, realizing the impasse of the situation, joined the coalition under the auspices of the CPC. The remnants of the broken detachments became part of the Communist formations. For example, the remnants of the Korean revolutionary army joined Kim Il Sung's unit.

The war that Japan began against China in 1937 gave a new impetus to the anti-Japanese movement of Korean rebels, for whom it was also a struggle for the liberation of Korea from the colonial yoke.