Modern Korea and Its Others

Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity

Vladimir Tikhonov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317518617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The period spanning the 1880s to 1945 was a crucially important formative time for Korea, during which understandings of modernity were largely shaped by the images of Korea's neighbours to the east, west and north. China, Japan and Russia represented at some moments modern threats, but also denoted a range of alternative modernity possibilities, and ultimately provided a model for Korea's pre-colonial and colonial modernity.

This book explores the way in which modern Korea perceived its geographic neighbours from the 1890s until 1945. It shows that Korea's modern nationalism was at the same time internationalist in its orientation, as the vision of Korea's ideal place in the world and brighter national future was often linked to the examples (positive and negative), threats (perceived and real) and allies abroad. Exploring the importance of the international knowledge and experience for the formation of the Korean nationalist paradigms, it offers nuance to the existing picture of the international connections and environment of the Korean national movements. It shows that the picture of Japan inside the anti-Japanese independence movement of the colonial period was more complicated than simple hatred of the invaders: modern achievements of Japan were admired even by anti-colonial nationalists as a possible model for Korea. The book also demonstrates the extent to which Chinese and Soviet revolutions influenced the thinking of modern Korean intellectuals across the whole ideological spectrum.

Introducing new sources presented in English for the first time, and including themes such as race and ethnicity, global revolution, and gender, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Korean, East Asian and Russian history, as well as historians of the colonial/modern era more generally.

Part I Russia – an Oriental occident?

1 Russia as a threat and a hope in Korean Intellectual life, 1880s to 1945

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720326-2

Introduction: Korea and Russia encounter each other

As is well known in culture studies, there is hardly anything stronger charged with diverse, often self-contradictory meanings in the social universe than space. Space – if we are to treat it as a socio-cultural reality produced, reproduced, defined and redefined in sync with the general discursive developments in society as a whole (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]) – is neither neutral in a culture-political sense nor ever described simply factually or ‘objectively’. Of course, the descriptions of the spatial Others may well be based on facts – but they invariably overlap with the images derived from the given society’s diverse mental maps, partly inherited from earlier times and partly shaped by contemporaneous political or cultural configurations (Michelet 2006, 1–36). And just as the craft of map-making is essential for the socio-cultural production of national identities, the imaginary geographies of foreign space often play an important, constitutive role in defining the position and status of a given society, as a collective subject of perception, vis-à-vis its diverse significant Others across the border. Could it be possible for the Western Europeans of the Age of Enlightenment, or the following Age of Progress, to posit themselves as the centre of the world’s (supposedly ‘only authentic’) civilization, were it not for the existence of Eastern Europe, conveniently situated between civilization and ‘barbarity’, or a ‘mystic and barbarous Orient’, Europe’s main constitutive Other in the common worldview of the imperialist era (Wolff 1994, 1–49)?

As we have seen, in both pre-colonial (1880s to 1910) and colonial (1910–1945) modern Korea, the educated strata showed a persistent and keen interest in the world beyond Korea’s – or, later the Japanese Empire’s – borders. In the pre-colonial period, much of the interest was expressed in an acute desire to learn about modern civilization and escape victimization in the process of the worldwide imperialistic partitioning of the globe. In addition, the outside world – in particular, the “civilized countries” of Europe and North America – was seen by Korea’s reformers as a bearer of a higher moral standard, which Korea, engulfed by a deep crisis not only in politics but also in its societal morals, was to identify itself with if it was to survive and regenerate itself (Ch’oe 2013, 103–125). In the colonial period, one underlying reason for the interest was an easily understandable hope that some new constellation of international events would reshape the world in a way conducive to ending or assuaging Korea’s colonial predicament. At the same time, colonial-period intellectuals were motivated by their foreign experiences to “arduously strive” (punt’u) towards the modernization goals, through both resisting colonialism and concomitantly working inside the inescapable colonial framework (Sŏ and Kim 2005, 9–17). In a word, together with (geo)political concerns, the spatial Others had a crucially important impact on Korea’s modern identity construction. Their “degree” (chŏngdo) of modern development was constantly checked against the other, hierarchically arranged (“the most advanced” countries as opposed to “more backward” societies) and hotly debated in a variety of aspects; “our” modern achievements were seen as both depending on learning from the frontrunners in civilizations’ race to the top and avoiding the pitfalls into which some of “our” foreign references fell. What was, then, Russia’s place on the mental map of such a world as seen from pre-colonial and then colonized Korea?

Much of the Korean imagery of the West on the whole and Russia in particular was strongly influenced by contemporary Japanese views. For many of Korea’s modernizing intellectuals, who either studied in Japan or learned Japanese at home, the Japanese language was the main medium for familiarizing themselves with the modern world (Chaeil Han’guk yuhaksaeng yŏnhaphoe 1988; Hŏ 2009, 31–44). The modern Japanese images of Russia were deeply ambivalent and often self-contradictory. Developing late, Russia was habitually “orientalized” in popular Western discourses (Neumann 2004) and was often contrasted with Meiji Japan as a relatively backward country compared to the centres of civilization in Western Europe. Simultaneously, despite its backwardness, it was seen as a major military power. Due both to its territorial proximity, supposed special aggressiveness and, from the mid-1890s, overlapping interests in Korea and Manchuria, it was depicted as a major threat to Japan itself. The Japanese views of Russia emphasizing its insatiable aggressiveness peaked in popularity in the days of the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, when such pictures as, for example, a caricaturized image of the Russian emperor as a voracious men-eating devil were to be found among the newspaper cartoons of the time (Mikhailova 2000). However, ‘the other Russia’ of literary writers, critical intellectuals and revolutionaries was a major source of inspiration for Meiji Japanese intellectuals, especially liberals and radicals. Tolstoy (1828–1910) – on whose popularity in Japan and Korea I will dwell in more details in Chapter 2 – and Turgenev (1818–1883) were of foremost importance in shaping Japan’s modern literature after the 1880s. Some 65 books on Russia’s revolutionary populism (narodnichestvo) were published in Japan in 1881–1883 alone and newspapers in the 1880s–1910s were commonly filled with accounts (often very sympathetic) of radical activities in Russia (Konishi 2007; Rimer 1995). The opposition to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) – shared by the Russian socialists on the other side of the frontline – provided an occasion for the formation of a self-conscious militant socialist milieu in Japan (Kublin 1950). Many of the essential features of Japan’s modern views on Russia – for example, an accentuation of Imperial Russia’s socio-political backwardness and international aggressiveness, together with sympathy towards all those risking their lives and freedom in the struggle against such an abusive government – are identifiable, as we will see below, in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Korean interpretations of Russia as well.

While certainly grounded in reality – autocratic Imperial Russia undoubtedly did not measure up to its own chosen Western models of modernization in socio-political and economic respects (on the degree of its economic backwardness, see Stepanov 1993), while behaving in a provocatively expansionist way (common, however, to most Western powers in the heyday of imperialism) – the views on Russia of the kind outlined above should be classified as stereotypes. They conform to the classic definition of stereotype – a preconception, which shapes the image of the world in the minds of people who are unable or/and unwilling to assess its truthfulness themselves (Lippmann 1922, 95–156). As we know from social psychology, “out-group” stereotypes are likely to be based on the three main dimensions of inter-group relations – relative power, relative status and relative goal compatibility (Alexander et al. 1999). High-status and visibly strong Others with supposedly incompatible goals are likely to be seen as potential aggressors (“imperialists”), while equal status and power together with compatible goals usually match a definition of an ally (Alexander et al. 2005). However, with the available information on the Western powers – Russia among them – being still extremely limited, perceptions of the relative power, status and goals of the Western interlocutors were all conditioned by the sources to which the early Korean modernist intellectuals had access. Furthermore, they were conditioned also by their own political sympathies, antipathies and interests: class, religious or personal.

The correspondence – or lack of it – between Koreans’ and Russians’ stereotypes of each other is an intriguing issue. Surely, Korea never figured as importantly on Russian mental maps as Russia used to figure on the Korean ones: the relationship between Russia the peripheral empire (Kagarlitsky 2007) and Korea as a victim of modern (including Russian) imperialism was asymmetrical by definition and from the very beginning. Vis-à-vis their Western European models-cum-competitors, Russia’s imperial intellectuals could easily confess their weakness or backwardness; towards Koreans, however, the “imperial eyes” (Pratt 2007), with their assumption of absolute and essential superiority, were to be directed. A good example is Frigate Pallada (Goncharov 1987 [1858]), nineteenth-century Russia’s celebrated travelogue and arguably the first-ever travel writing by a Russian who actually visited Korea. As Susanna Lim persuasively argues in her article on Frigate Pallada’s 1852–1855 East Asian voyage described by one of the participants, famed novelist Ivan Goncharov (1812–1891) in his travelogue, Koreans – whom Goncharov encountered twice, during brief sojourns on Kŏmundo Island (near Korea’s south-western coast) and Korea’s northeastern coast (April–May 1854) – were seen by the travelling Russian writer as an epitome of noble savages: “tall, healthy, athletic”, loving poetry, but at the same time childish, abjectly poor, “lazy, coarse” and lacking any skills (Goncharov 1987 [1858], 462–476). This description contrasts with the sense of humiliation Goncharov felt encountering the signs of Great Britain’s overwhelming superiority in maritime technology, trade and worldwide colonial expansion. Goncharov was painfully aware that, however “soulless” British capitalists might be (Goncharov 1987 [1858], 48–52), he was travelling in a British world, the world of steamers which contrasted starkly with the antiquated, 20-year-old frigate on which Goncharov himself was sailing (Lim 2009). Still, in the encounter with Koreans, Russia’s superiority was seen as undisputed – Korea being placed on the very margins of the world as known to Goncharov. Koreans were even more alien to Goncharov’s world than the Chinese, whose entrepreneurial skills the Russian traveler took notice of; they possessed no status or power to speak of, they were object rather than subject of history.

What Korean intellectuals regarded as aggressiveness, Russia’s imperial intellectuals tended to see as a way to protect a “weak, helpless, child-like” Korea facing a variety of dangers in a world dominated by the imperialist “grown-ups”: “protection of the natives” being perhaps the most popular trope in the arsenal of the imperialist rhetoric of the time (August 1985). One way to make this argument sound plausible was to point out to Koreans’ own “desire” for Russia’s “benevolent intervention”. Indeed, as Korea became a playground of Chinese and Japanese imperialist ambitions in the beginning of the 1880s (Deuchler 1977; Kim 1980; Duus 1998; Larsen 2008), Korea’s king Kojong (reigned 1863–1907), despite the opposition by some of his own ministers, made some moves to secure Russia’s commitment in Korea in the wake of signing on 7 July 1884 the first-ever treaty between the two countries (see the text of the treaty, in classical Chinese and English, in Chŏng 1965, 12–27). The then deputy foreign minister of Kojong, Paul von Möllendorff (1847–1901; for his biography, see Lee 1988), presumably on oral royal orders, suggested to Russian diplomats several times in December 1884 that, given the Japanese pressure upon Korea in the aftermath of the aborted three-day-long Kapsin coup (4 December 1884: see more in Cook 1982, 247 on these events), the Russian protectorate over Korea, modelled after Russia’s relations with Bulgaria, would be essential for fending off both Japanese and Chinese encroachments and making Korea into an “Asian Belgium” (Shpeyer 1885; cited in Pak 2004, 147).

Möllendorff successively arranged a Seoul visit and royal audience for the then secretary of Russia’s legation in Tokyo, Alexis Shpeyer (1854–1916) on 1–6 January 1885; the Russians, however, were not fully committed and pushed instead – unsuccessfully, so far – for the despatch of their military advisors for training the Korean army, with a view to gradually cultivate their influence in Korea rather than attempt its inclusion in Russia’s sphere of influence, which could seriously provoke Russia’s main colonial competitor, Great Britain (Pak 2004, 148–162). During the next decade (1885–1895), Russia’s policy in Korea aimed mainly at preventing China from fully dominating it and encouraging the Korean government to stand stronger against Japan’s encroachments (Pak 2004, 163–218); however, Japan’s attempt to secure Liaodong Peninsula in the wake of China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War was perceived as threatening Russia’s main interests in Manchuria and led Russians to initiate the Triple Intervention (23 April 1895; see more in Duus 1998, 104–105 on this event), forcing Japan to give away its war booty. After Russia tangibly demonstrated its strength, the sequence of further events, including the Japanese-masterminded murder of the rather pro-Russian Queen Min (7–8 October 1895) and flight of frightened king Kojong to the Russian Legation (11 February 1896), made Russians, albeit for a relatively short time, into major players in the imperial game around Korea with pro-Russian moves by Korea’s royals giving them the opportunity to depict their intervention as a benevolent rescue of sorts. Before the Sino-Japanese War and Triple Intervention, taking Korea over was out of the question. As Nikolai Matyunin (1849–1907), a Russian noble appointed as the border commissar of South-Ussuri Area (pogranichnyi komissar Yuzhno-Ussuriiskogo kraya) in 1873 and one of the key players in the making of Korea policy in 1880–1890s, put it in a classified Chief of Staff’s publication, such an undertaking would require a prior annexation of the whole of Manchuria, the birthplace of China’s ruling Qing Dynasty. This would imply an all-out war against China which was judged to be beyond Russia’s capabilities (Matyunin 1894). After 1895, a defeated China gave away all its claims to Korea and Russia’s expansion to Manchuria soon accelerated. The Li-Lobanov Treaty, allowing Russia to build the China Eastern Railway, was concluded on 3 June 1896 and Russian ambitions towards Korea grew proportionally (Nish 1985, 30–33). An annexation was by no means a foregone conclusion, but it could now be legitimately debated in policy-making circles.

Russia’s imperial travelers – mostly diplomats and military officers – who visited Korea in the mid-1890s, were, with truly imperialist selectivity, mostly describing “natives” as gratefully yearning for a Russian rescue. For example, then lieutenant-colonel (later general) Vladimir (Karl Johan Voldemar) von Alftan (1860–1940), of aristocratic Swedish-Finnish provenance, who made a reconnaissance trip through the northern areas of the Korean peninsula in late 1895–early 1896, describes the Korean officials he met in a manner one usually describes children. The magistrate of Kyŏnghŭng (on the Korean side of the Russo-Korean border) “completely changed the interior of his house” after a brief visit to a nearby Russian village over the border, “proudly showed” to the visitor his new, “European-style” furniture and “radiated when he received compliments” from the Russian guest. He and his underlings “were funny in their attempts to imitate” the manners of the Russian, not even daring to take the cups of tea before their guest did so first. Being “oppressed” by the Japanese, the childish inhabitants of Korea were keen to complain to and request help from their potential Russian saviours: in Kilju, “as soon as we arrived, we were met with great joyfulness and immediately treated to the stories of how many disasters and misfortunes are brought by the Japanese and how they oppress us [Koreans]”. Otherwise, the aristocratic traveler reported Korea to be quite a wretched place: “unbelievable wretchedness” of the country “almost completely devoid of any artisanship or trade” and of the “passive and unenterprising people”, who tend to “limit their desires to the bare minimum” and have only enough skills to produce some low-quality copper-made tableware, horsehair hats or paper. Yet another object for a potential “rescue” in Korea were women, “rather slaves or maids than friends of their husbands”, who thus “have no family life in our understanding of the word” (Alftan 1896; cited also in Tyagai 1958, 220–265). Overall, Alftan really appeared to sincerely believe that Russians were in Korea to save it, both from Japanese and from its own “wretchedness”. Koreans’ status or power were of negligible proportions; as to Koreans’ goals, the only question for Alftan was whether they would render their assistance – again, hardly of any decisive meaning – to Russia or to its anticipated Japanese enemy.

However, quite soon after Kojong’s sojourn at the Russian Legation ended (20 February 1897), the Russians found out that exactly the least “primitive” – that is, most Westernized – among the “natives” (tuzemtsy) were less than enthusiastic about being saved by them. The Independence Club (Tongnip Hyŏphoe, 1896–1899) – Korea’s first-ever public, non-governmental political organization, which initially enjoyed the court’s backing and was led by US-educated reformers, Sŏ Chaep’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Russia – an Oriental occident?
• PART II China – centre-turned-periphery-turned-hope for the future
• PART III Japan – model and conqueror, eternally alien?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index