Populist Collaborators

The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910

Yumi Moon

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801467943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

An empire invites local collaborators in the making and sustenance of its colonies. Between 1896 and 1910, Japan's project to colonize Korea was deeply intertwined with the movements of reform-minded Koreans to solve the crisis of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910). Among those reformers, it was the Ilchinhoe (Advance in Unity Society)—a unique group of reformers from various social origins—that most ardently embraced Japan's discourse of "civilizing Korea" and saw Japan's colonization as an opportunity to advance its own "populist agendas." The Ilchinhoe members called themselves "representatives of the people" and mobilized vibrant popular movements that claimed to protect the people's freedom, property, and lives. Neither modernist nor traditionalist, they were willing to sacrifice the sovereignty of the Korean monarchy if that would ensure the rights and equality of the people.Both the Japanese colonizers and the Korean elites disliked the Ilchinhoe for its aggressive activism, which sought to control local tax administration and reverse the existing power relations between the people and government officials. Ultimately, the Ilchinhoe members faced visceral moral condemnation from their fellow Koreans when their language and actions resulted in nothing but assist the emergence of the Japanese colonial empire in Korea. In Populist Collaborators, Yumi Moon examines the vexed position of these Korean reformers in the final years of the Choson dynasty, and highlights the global significance of their case for revisiting the politics of local collaboration in the history of a colonial empire.

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THE KOREAN REFORMERS
AND THE LATE CHOSŎN STATE

The Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) was long and stable. Major popular rebellions did not occur before its final century. The dynasty suddenly encountered a series of popular rebellions, the coup of elite officials, a palace mutiny, and successive foreign invasions in the nineteenth century. These challenges did not oust the old political frame of the Chosŏn dynasty, until the 1894 Tonghak Rebellion deeply unsettled the regime. King Kojong was tolerant and mild. He moderated reforms between conservative literati and elite reformers. His mediation may have postponed the dynasty’s collapse, but it delayed the fundamental resolution of accumulated problems and social resentments.

The resilience of the late Chosŏn state, if not its strength in the modern sense, framed the historical course of the Korean reformist movements. The monarchy’s fundamental renovation required alternative ideological and institutional networks that could enfeeble and erode the interconnected arrays of values and interests that the Confucian state had grounded, for half a millennium, among its ruling elite and people. The late Chosŏn state, despite all its problems, constrained quite well the opportunities for reformers to grow and mobilize such alternatives. New political spaces were opened when Tonghak rebels critically impaired the dynasty’s political and social establishment. The Independence Club expanded such spaces by mobilizing ordinary people in politics and by publicizing new political ideas and practices to reform the monarchy.

Kojong accommodated the reform proposals of various groups, but during the period of the Great Korean Empire (1897–1910) he mainly channeled government policies in the direction of reinforcing the power of the monarch. This imperial era may have been Kojong’s final opportunity to refashion himself as a constitutional monarch and to transform the discontented populace into subjects with civic rights. Instead, he persecuted the Independence Club and clamped down on the Tonghak remnants who were disrupting the social and geographical periphery of the royal realm. Kojong manifested a traditional kingship of the dynasty as he availed himself of the competition among various political groups and made the groups check and balance each other in his court. His power was too limited to claim absolute status but too strong for any one group of officials to override it.

The late Chosŏn state was not limited to court politics but equipped with dense institutions and networks through which its officials reached deep into local society to enforce the state’s directives. The king’s authority integrated these networks into a single political domain and granted legitimacy to the official and semi-official agents of the state. In exchange, provincial administrators responsively settled local conflicts and mitigated popular discontent. When Korean reformers and rebels in the mid-nineteenth century aimed at reforming the dynasty, they tried to keep the king on their side and renovate the system from the top down or to create a popular scheme from the bottom up to replace the dynasty’s old institutional frame. The Enlightenment School (kaehwap’a) leaders took the first road, and the Tonghak rebels experimented in the second direction. This chapter revisits the characteristics of the late Chosŏn state and examines in what directions its challengers tried to reform the state in the late nineteenth century. It then delineates the organizational experiments that elite reformers and Tonghak rebels introduced in order to constrain the state’s power. Such experiments were later appropriated by the Ilchinhoe’s movements and political campaigns.

State-Society Relations in the Late
Chosŏn Dynasty

James Palais defined the Chosŏn state as a “centralized bureaucratic administration” that was ineffective in penetrating local society. He also described the political system of Chosŏn as a rivalry between monarch and aristocrats through which the ruling elites sustained a power equilibrium among themselves. Despite the weak administration, Palais argues, this system of equilibrium undergirded the unique longevity of the Chosŏn dynasty, which endured twice as long as traditional dynasties in other countries. Compared with a modern state, the capability of the Chosŏn state to govern society was limited. Yet the Chosŏn state had its own means for working with that society and played a crucial role in solving social problems.1

The Chosŏn state had attained a certain degree of centralization from its inception by enacting measures for controlling local officials in its national codes2 and had made administrative revisions toward centralization throughout the dynasty. In the eighteenth century, the Chosŏn state visibly enhanced its local control, in what Korean historians have called the concentration of power (chipkwŏnhwa) in Chosŏn society.3 The ruling elites of the dynasty, the yangban literati, were not a military class. They were ideologically sophisticated and institutionally equipped for directing the local population and the government administration. But in coping with violent resistance to the aristocratic order, they could not mobilize private armies, relying instead on the “means of violence” that the state exclusively controlled. This made it easier for the state to maintain its supremacy over society. Yet until the mid-Chosŏn period, the central administration heavily depended on the power of local yangban aristocrats for governance.4 This reliance on local aristocrats changed in character in the eighteenth century, when the state further augmented the roles of provincial governors and local magistrates and tightened the direct administrative ties between counties (myŏn) and subcounties (li).5 The central government also restrained yangban enforcement of private punishment, reinforced its own jurisdiction over penal administration, and published a new compilation of national law codes.6

What exactly propelled this reorganization is unknown. Given that centralization accelerated during the reigns of the powerful kings Sukchong (1661–1720), Yŏngjo (1694–1776), and Chŏngjo (1752–1800), monarchical initiatives may be one explanation. An alternative possibility is intra-aristocratic dynamics. Ko Sŏk-kyu, a Korean social historian, discloses the power struggles between central and local aristocrats in tandem with the extension of the central state. He argues that the ruling aristocrats, the Patriarch faction, helped magistrates infringe upon the autonomy of the opposing faction, the local aristocrats in the Kyŏngsang area, stirring up local strife against the Kyŏngsang aristocrats over their cultural authority, the membership of the local yangban association, and taxation.7

Whatever its causes, centralization curtailed the virtual autonomy of the local yangban, which had been consolidated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.8 The local effects of this centralization have been differently interpreted in the social history of the late Chosŏn. Kim In-gŏl and Ko Sŏk-kyu have emphasized the crumbling autonomy of local aristocrats and the growing challenges to their status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They explain such changes as follows, analyzing local yangban associations (hyangan or hyanghoe) as the micro-social sites of local strife. The local yangban associations were self-regulating institutions for preserving local elite lineages and their interests. These associations played important roles in local security and welfare as they supervised personnel in public and military administration bureaus, elected officials to those bureaus, and distributed taxes and military service.9

During the eighteenth century, these local yangban associations diminished their importance in local administration.10 This power shift to magistrates facilitated the emergence of new local elites or the distance of local yangban aristocrats toward officials of local advisory bureaus (hyangjik). In some southern areas, the local aristocrats avoided the subordinate roles of hyangjik assisting magistrates in taxat...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Korean Reformers and the Late Chosŏn State
• 2. People and Foreigners: The Northwestern Provinces, 1896–1904
• 3. Sensational Campaigns: The Russo-Japanese War and the Ilchinhoe’s Rise, 1904–1905
• 4. Freedom and the New Look: The Culture and Rhetoric of the Ilchinhoe Movement
• 5. The Populist Contest: The Ilchinhoe’s Tax Resistance, 1904–1907
• 6. Subverting Local Society: Ilchinhoe Legal Disputes, 1904–1907
• 7. The Authoritarian Resolution: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese, 1904–1910
• Conclusion