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PART II THE PATTERNS OF GROWTH The growth of the Kyongsong Spinning and Weaving Company represented the pinnacle of Korean capitalist development before 1945. The company's achievements belie the common notion that the sprouts of capitalist growth, first seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were virtually stamped out by Japanese imperialism after 1876, only to reappear again after 1945. That the roots of Korean capitalism can be traced back to the pre-1876 period is, I have suggested, a product of wishful academic thinking, but there is no doubt that from 1876 on Korea saw the emergence of a native entrepreneurial class that eventually turned its attention to industry. Far from stifling such growth, colonialism advanced it: for both the economic and political reasons already noted, the Japanese permitted and abetted the development of a native bourgeois class. To say this is in no way to offer an apology for Japanese imperialism. The purpose is rather to clear away one of the many myths surrounding the colonial period that continue to inform much South Korean scholarship . It is possible - indeed, probable - that the Koreans, left to their own devices, would have produced a capitalist class entirely on their own. But that is not what happened: colonialism was the setting in which Korean capitalism experienced its first real surge of growth. Although this was certainly unfortunate, and is perhaps embarrassing or distasteful for many Koreans to admit, it is nevertheless a fact. Having acknowledged Korean capitalist development during the colonial period and examined the extent of such growth, it is now necessary to explore the nature of the phenomenon. So far I have been using the term capitalism to refer to an industrial or industrializing society characterized by a market economy and private ownership of property. While this definition has been useful in helping to locate and describe the origins and development of a nascent Korean bourgeoisie in general terms, it actually tells very little about the particular 65 66 THE PATTERNS OF GROWTH capitalism that developed in Korea. What were the economic patterns that characterized Korean capitalist growth? More specifically, what was the role of the state in such development? What, moreover, was the nature of the relationship between the new and growing capitalism of the colony and the capitalism of the Japanese metropole? An examination of these questions is essential if we are fully to understand the legacy of colonial capitalism, but such study brings us into direct conflict with another of the enduring myths about the colonial period: the notion that Korea's bourgeois development before 1945 may be characterized as "national capital" (minjok chabon). I have already noted in part 1 that conventional South Korean scholars like Cho Kijun reject the idea of any significant Korean socioeconomic development under Japanese auspices. But what about the native capitalist development-epitomized by the Kyongsong Spinning and Weaving Company-that so obviously did take place? How can such growth be explained without acknowledging colonial influence? In the concept of "national capital," Cho and others have found an ingenious solution to this apparent contradiction. Like many historical terms used in South Korea today, this expression has MarxistLeninist roots. In a strict sense, it refers to the small (petty) native bourgeoisie in a colonial situation who compete with and oppose both the dominant imperial bourgeoisie of the metropole and the big native bourgeoisie (the "comprador" bourgeoisie) aligned with imperialism.1 North Korean scholars have continued to employ and refine the distinction between "national" and "comprador" capital in their writings, and this has given their work on capitalist development in the colonial period- in spite of its tedious encomia to Kim II Sung (Kim IIsong) -a certain analytical clarity and depth that the south has only recently begun to match. Before the 1980s little distinction was made in the south between national and comprador capital; in general all Korean capital was referred to without differentiation simply as national capitaJ.2 And here we arrive at the crux of the myth. Since, according to this hoary view, all Korean capital in the colonial period was national capital, it was also by definition anti-Japanese and existed in opposition both to the colonial power structure and to the capitalist system in Japan itself. Cho Kijun, perhaps South Korea's most venerable authority on Korea's capitalist development, writes as follows in describing the achievements of Kyongbang-his premier example of national capital during the colonial period: [13.58.39.23] Project MUSE (2024...

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