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CHAPTER 1 Modern Korean Nationalism Korean nationalism was born in the fifty years that preceded the fall of the Yi dynasty and the advent of Japanese rule after 1910. Initially, nationalism in Korea was a response to an international threat to the traditional political and social order of the Yi dynasty. At one level, the Yi dynasty elite sought to preserve Korean political autonomy and cultural integrity by revitalizing the traditional system. By the 1880s, however, a new progressive elite had emerged opposing this approach. The progressives also wished to preserve Korean political autonomy, but their vision as to what constituted the nation and what means were necessary to accomplish this goal was profoundly different. It was from this beginning that the modern nationalist intellectual elite emerged. By the late nineteenth century, a second strain of Korean nationalism emerged on the level of the common man. The opening of Korea in 1876 brought foreign economic and political penetration. Ultimately , the increased presence of foreign traders, missionaries, and even military troops provided a target for growing peasant discontent. The antiforeign slogans and program of the 1894 Tonghak Rebellion signaled the nascence of mass nationalism in Korea, directed both at the corruption and incompetence of the Yi political system and the growing foreign cancer that threatened Korean society. Modern Korean nationalism was formed by a joining of these two impulses over a period of several decades. Moreover, as the strength of the nationalist impulse on both levels increased, the conception of what was being defended changed. The idea of the nation-state drawn from the Western model came to dominate the statements of nationalist reformers after the 1880s. According to such men, the preservation of Korean independence hinged on fundamentally altering the political and social system, and in this endeavor they were pitted as much against their own conservative Korean brethren as against the threat from the outside. At the level of the masses, antiforeign, patriotic sentiment continued to increase at the end of the Yi dynasty. Ultimately, Japanese colonial rule and the dramatic economic and 14 Modern Korean Nationalism 15 social changes accruing by the first decades of the twentieth century combined to produce a pervasive consciousness of anti-Japanese sentiment ripe for mobilization by nationalist elites. After 1910, Korean nationalism was dedicated to regaining independence . The fall of the Yi dynasty discredited the traditional system and its political elite. The new nationalist intelligentsia that emerged to claim leadership of the independence struggle needed to redefine the nation, provide new symbols to galvanize nationalist consciousness among the masses, and devise a political program with broad support that would solve the problem of Korean independence. From the beginning, nationalist intellectuals were divided as to what should be done, and by the second decade of Japanese rule, the nationalist movement had reached a turning point. Anti-Japanese sentiment was running high, but no single program nor any single group of leaders had emerged that seemed able to channel nationalist energies into a drive to unseat the Japanese. The debate over this dilemma is the subject at hand. However, a general survey of the rise of Korean nationalism is first necessary to provide the general context of the issues that united as well as those that divided the nationalist leadership in the 1920s. The Yi Dynasty and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis By the middle of the nineteenth century the Yi dynasty had marked over four and a half centuries of rule on the Korean peninsula. The dynasty ruled a well-defined territory that encompassed the entire Korean peninsula; three-quarters of this territory had been under continuous Korean control since the Silla unification in the later eighth century. The population of Korea (between eight and ten million in the 1870s) was linguistically and culturally homogeneous as a result of this long experience of political autonomy and centralized rule. The dynasty ruled through a centralized bureaucratic state adapted and refined from Chinese institutions. The Yi monarch's authority was, in theory, absolute; his authority was augmented by Confucian ideology, a state orthodoxy that supported a stratified social structure. In addition, this orthodoxy legitimated an aristocratic elite's monopoly of bureaucratic service and, by extension, its political and economic power.1 The Yi monarchs derived their legitimacy from the simple fact that there had been kings in Korea since the earliest recorded history. The founder of the Yi dynasty had assumed the right to rule through [3.145.166.7] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 11...

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