When the Sino-Japanese Yalu River Timber Company launched its rafting reform program in the early twentieth century, Japanese administrators framed Japanese-style rafts as a triumph of civilized forestry management over Chinese backwardness. Yet the outcome was neither straightforward replacement nor simple modernization. The late Qing regulatory framework mandating the exclusive hiring of Chinese laborers provided a structural barrier that delayed Japanese intervention and sustained reliance on local rafting knowledge. Drawing on Japanese diplomatic archives, forestry surveys, and travel accounts, this article argues that the apparent victory of Japanese-style rafts concealed the persistence and transformation of Chinese rafting practices. First, the categories of “Chinese-style” and “Japanese-style” rafts were themselves coined by Japanese sources after the Russo-Japanese War: before Japanese intervention, no such classificatory distinction existed on the Yalu River. Second, the contradiction at the heart of this discourse: the “civilized” technology being promoted was itself rooted in Edo-period craft traditions, Japanese regional handicrafts that shared the same pre-industrial character as the practices they sought to displace, repackaged through colonial discourse as emblems of “civilization.” Third, Chinese-style rafting was never fully displaced: what emerged was a technological order of coexistence and mutual adaptation, in which Chinese techniques, labor structures, and ecological knowledge persisted within and shaped the reformed system, most concretely embodied by the synthesis of Japanese binding techniques with Chinese steering rudders that emerged through daily practice. Together, these findings suggest that colonial science and technology on the Yalu River operated not by replacing local knowledge but by reclassifying, absorbing and obscuring it.