Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea

Yun-shik Chang, Steven Hugh Lee, Yun-shik Chang, Steven Hugh Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415380652
• eBook ISBN: 9781134179374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited collection traces the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Korea's dramatic transformation since the late nineteenth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the chapters examine the internal and external forces which facilitated the transition towards industrial capitalism in Korea, the consequences and impact of social change, and the ways in which Korean tradition continues to inform and influence contemporary South Korean society.

Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea employs a thematic structure to discuss the interrelated elements of Korea's modernization within agriculture, business and the economy, the state, ideology and culture, and gender and the family. The essays in this volume encompass the Choson dynasty, the colonial period, and postcolonial Korea. Collectively, they provide us with an original and innovative approach to the study of modern Korea, and show how knowledge of the country's past is critical to understanding contemporary Korean society.

With contributions from a number of prominent international scholars within sociology, economics, history, and political science, Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea incorporates a global framework of historical narrative, ideology and culture, and statistical and economic analysis to further our understanding of Korea's evolution towards modernity.

Part I

The agrarian transformation

1 Neither “sprouts” nor “offspring”

The agrarian roots of Korean capitalism¹

Gi-Wook Shin

Recent works on colonial industrialization have renewed the debate over the relationship between colonialism and development in Korea (An et al. 1989; Eckert 1991; Hori 1995; McNamara 1990; Park 1999). Their research challenges Korean nationalist scholarship that has depicted Japanese colonial rule as either destroying the “sprouts” of what was supposedly an incipient Korean capitalism or distorting Korea’s path to capitalist development. They argue instead that not only was there colonial industrialization, but also substantial participation in it by Korean landlords and capitalists. Their view, while commended by some as enhancing current understanding of colonial and postcolonial development in Korea (Kohli 1994), has also encountered fierce criticism, especially from Korean scholars who interpret it as regressing to the “colonialist view (singminjuŭi sagwan)” of Japanese rule in Korea (see Chŏng 1997; Haggard et al. 1997; Sin 1997).

This chapter attempts to contribute to the debate by re-examining the historical process of Korea’s transition from an agrarian to industrial nation since the late nineteenth century. Its central argument is that both nationalist and “colonial origins” explanations are inadequate for understanding Korea’s transformation from an agrarian economy during the late dynastic era to its initial industrialization during the Japanese colonial period, and South Korea’s more advanced levels of postcolonial development. As an alternative, I offer an explanation based on a theory of agrarian conflict that posits agrarian class structure, relations, struggles, and conflict resolution as key to economic change. Such attention to agrarian variables affords a more comprehensive historical explanation of the origins and processes of Korean capitalism. I begin, however, with a discussion of the debate between advocates of “sprouts” (maeng’a ron) or incipient capitalism theory and those who emphasize the colonial origins of Korean capitalism.²

The Korean debate: “sprouts” or “offspring of Empire”?

The sprouts school, represented by Korean nationalist historians, argues that increased commercialization and development of wage labor relations indicate capitalism had already emerged in eighteenth-century Korea, long before the arrival of Japanese imperialism. According to Kim Yongsŏp’s (1960, 1970) influential analyses of land and tax registers (yangan), commercial capitalism, led by “managerial farmers (kyŏngyŏnghyŏng punong),” comparable to British yeomen, appeared in eighteenth-century Korea as a result of internal urban market growth and such technological innovations as double-cropping and transplanting. Unlike “feudal landlords” who increased income through high rent and usury and yields by expanding holdings (cultivated by slaves and tenants), managerial farmers adopted improved techniques to increase productivity and profit. Imperialist incursion, however, later skewed such development, reducing Korea to a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” country and preventing the sprouts of its native capitalism from becoming full-grown capitalism. North Korean historians, who in the 1960s debated the origins of Korean capitalism, also agreed that capitalism infiltrated agriculture in the nineteenth century (see Ch’oe 1981; Doe 1991).

More recently, a number of scholars, notably in the United States and Japan, trace Korean capitalist origins only as far back as the colonial period (An et al. 1989; Eckert 1991; Hori 1995; Kohli 1994; McNamara 1990). They argue that rather than trampling the sprouts of capitalism, colonialism fostered industrial development, to the extent that by 1945 Korea was “an integral part of an imperial economic nexus that stretched from Japan across Korea to the Asian continent” (Eckert 1991: 67). For both political and economic reasons, Japanese colonial rule not only promoted industrialization, but also permitted and even encouraged the rise of a Korean capitalist class that came to play a crucial role in postcolonial industrialization. In Eckert’s (1991: 255) view,

Colonialism bequeathed to the postwar period not only a social basis for future development but also an historically based model of successful capitalist growth … the pivotal economic function of the state, the concentration of private economic power in the hands of a small number of large business groups … the emphasis on exports, and the threat or actuality of war as a stimulus of economic growth.

In short, integral to Korean capitalist development is its colonial legacy, both material and human-cultural.

While both the sprouts and colonial origins views represent major historical approaches to Korean backwardness and development, their explanatory power is weakened by a number of serious flaws. First, the sprouts school exaggerates the capitalist development potential in the emergence of managerial farmers and wage laborers. Commercialization of agriculture does not suffice for capitalism: commercialization may be stimulated by motives other than capitalist ones and certain agrarian class structures may prevent managerial farmers from becoming agricultural capitalists. As shown below, many managerial farmers, drawn to attractive returns on land and usury, became landlords rather than agricultural capitalists. The sprouts school is blind to such internal barriers, blaming colonialism for almost every aspect of Korea’s underdevelopment. Although colonialism may have indeed skewed Korea’s economic trajectory, the precolonial failure to develop capitalism was largely due to a regressive agrarian class structure. The sprouts school also falters in explaining the survival, despite supposed colonial suppression, of the “national capital (minjok chabon)” that undergirded postwar capitalist success (Cho 1982).

In contrast, the colonial origins view elucidates how colonialism fostered a particular model of economic growth, featuring the interplay of the state, foreign capital and technology. Its focus on colonial state industrial policy and its interaction with exogenous factors captures well the overall process of colonial industrialization, but is limited when it comes to understanding endogenous forces of industrialization and Korean participation in it. Explaining such participation is important because 40 percent of all firms were Korean, and the Korean share of total capital formation under colonial rule was about 13 percent. When one includes firms owned jointly by Koreans and Japanese (about 30 percent of all companies), Korean participation in colonial industrialization was even more substantial. More importantly, after the Japanese left in 1945, these experienced Koreans played key roles in postcolonial industrialization. Although some Korean capitalists, as the colonial origins proponents have shown, were progressives eager to take advantage of state industrial incentives, it remains to be seen whether they were representative of the whole class of Korean landlord-turned-capitalists. As Haggard et al. (1997) point out, the argument may suffer from “selection bias,” since it is based on a very few cases selected from among the most successful Korean capitalists.

This suspicion stems primarily from the fact that many Korean landlords, who constituted the rural elite, maintained a Confucian valuation of agriculture over commerce or industry, a cultural heritage that would discourage their participation in colonial industrialization. In addition, Korean agriculture prospered throughout much of the 1930s, producing a higher overall profit margin than non-agricultural investment. Although some sectors of the latter may have been more profitable, non-agricultural investment was still risky in the 1930s, since much of it was lost in firms that went bankrupt within a few years. In fact, the majority of landlord investments, as detailed below, were made in small Korean firms, especially those owned by family members, relatives, and friends, as a method of “portfolio diversification” rather than capitalist enterprise (see Chang 1989; Hŏ 1989). These factors suggest that state industrial policy or economic incentives did not completely dictate landlord capital conversion; other non-economic social factors were also at work.

Finally, the colonial origins argument says little about how the supposed bequeathing of the colonial legacy to postcolonial development actually occurred throughout the turbulent years of the decolonization process, marked by U.S. occupation, division of the nation, popular revolts and rebellions, and war. The issue of historical continuity is important, since a group of scholars have argued that the legacy of colonial industrialization was “erased by intervening historical events,” and thus could not contribute much to subsequent industrialization (Haggard et al. 1997: 3). As Kohli admits, “demonstrating parallels between historical and contemporary situations … is clearly not enough to sustain an argument for historical continuity” (1994: 1285). We need an explanation that better specifies concrete mechanisms of historical continuity and discontinuity in Korean development.

This chapter explains Korea’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial nation since the late nineteenth century, using an agrarian conflict theory I have elaborated elsewhere (see Shin 1998). The theory, based on Marxist scholarship on the origins of Western and Japanese capitalism by such writers as Barrington Moore, Jr., Robert Brenner, and E.H. Norman, focuses on agrarian class structure, relations, struggles, and conflict resolution as underlying both economic backwardness and development. Its central claim is that the breakdown of regressive agrarian class structure is pivotal to the rise of capitalist production relations, and that this is achieved through class struggles and consequent conflict resolution that weaken the power of the landed class. In particular, attention to these agrarian variables helps identify structural conditions for economic backwardness, the historical process by which previously regressive class structure and relations can become compatible with capitalist development, and how such change in agrarian class structure and relations can facilitate capitalist transformation. Accordingly, this chapter examines: (1) how agrarian class structure and relations in late nineteenth-century Korea hindered the rise of agricultural capitalism despite increased commercialization; (2) how colonial-era agrarian class struggles and consequent conflict resolution broke up this structure and its relations, facilitating capital movement from land to industry, key to colonial industrialization; and (3) how continued agrarian conflict bred postcolonial land reform that deposed the regressive landed class and further impelled the crucial conversion of capital to industry.

Agrarian structure and the limits of modernity in pre-colonial Korea

In pre-colonial Korea, an agrarian class structure characterized by a powerful landed aristocracy, weak peasantry, and limited royal power promoted regressive methods of surplus extraction, impeding the rise of capitalist production relations. Despite a centralized agrarian bureaucracy, the monarchy had neither the organizational capacity to penetrate society nor effective autonomy from the dominant class. This was because the sources of power, wealth, and prestige were not controlled exclusively by the Crown; they were also based on inheritance of status and landownership. The landed yangban aristocracy monopolized landholdings, and its close association with the central bureaucracy effectively checked the power of the throne. Checks and balances between the throne and the aristocracy bequeathed a long period of political stability to the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), but prevented the government from making meaningful reforms in times of domestic crisis and foreign challenge. As Palais indicates, the “fusion of aristocratic status with private landownership … was almost as resistant to the fiscal encroachments of the central government as a bona fide feudal nobility” (1975: 58).

A powerful landed aristocracy entailed high land concentration and rural inequality. Studies show that not uncommonly about 10 percent to 20 percent of landholders owned one-half to two-thirds of the registered land and 60 percent to 70 percent of the rural population rented all or part of their land from landlords (Kim 1960; Shin 1973). Rental rates were high (around 50 percent of harvested crops) and lease renewal was often at the mercy of landlords, who also indebted their poor tenants through usury. Further, the landed class preserved a regressive land tax structure through connections with the central bureaucracy and kept their lands off tax registers by bribing local officials, at the expense of both the central government and the peasantry. Such inequity and corruption in the levying and collection of taxes often provoked peasant rebellions, such as the 1862 and 1894 peasant uprisings, but these did not seriously alter the dominance of the landed aristocracy. As Palais points out, the yangban aristocracy per se was not targeted because peasants did not think of the agrarian class structure and relations as the cause of their poverty. They instead acted against “corrupt officials who practiced extortion and bribery and registered and graded land falsely and inaccurately” (1975: 66). Even late nineteenth-century state reform (e.g., that led by the Taewŏn’gun or the Kabo reforms of 1894–1896) was not able to diminish landlord power. In short, a regressive agrarian class structure along with limited state power blocked significant reform or economic change, including the rise of rural capitalist relations.

In late nineteenth-century Korea, as in early modern Europe, two major forces emerged that had the potential for challenging traditional agrarian social order; that is, population change and the spread of market relations. It is well known that demographic change can greatly influence the course of the economy (see Postan 1972). In nineteenth-century Korea, population growth caused a steady decline in the land/man ratio that strained the agrarian system. Although the exact figures for cultivated land and population during the Chosŏn dynasty are undetermined, the trend seems clear: one study estimates that the land/man ratio decreased gradually from 0.25 kyŏl (1 kyŏl = 5 acres) per capita in 1666 to 0.19 kyŏl in 1807 (Shin 1973), and another reports a more rapid decline from 0.11 kyŏl in 1592 to 0.05 kyŏl in the early nineteenth century (Pak 1987). The decline in per capita landholding, however, did not break up the existing class structure. On the contrary, it led to increased land concentration and inequality; one estimate shows that the land concentration gini coefficient grew from 0.36 in 1830 to 0.54 in 1898–1899 (Kim 1994: 302). Simply put, demographic change caused increased competition for land among peasants, further weakening their position vis-à-vis the landed class.

Moreover, the abundance of cheap labor dissuaded labor-saving capital investment by the landed class, a situation reinforced by the lack of any substantial development of non-agricultural sectors that could have provided new outlets for surplus labor. Cultivation was of a small amount of owned land, leased land, or both, and since most poor peasants could not meet subsistence needs, they often hired out their labor for supplemental income (Hŏ 1965; Kim 1992). Conversely, neither did wage labor alone suffice to support a family. A typical poor peasant in late nineteenth-century Korea owned little or no land, leased a small amount from others, and labored for wages. Many were compelled to hire out in crucial seasons, at the cost of inadequate or untimely work on their own small farms (Ch’oi 1985). Taking advantage of this labor surplus and their powerful position in society, Korean landlords further consolidated feudal class relations, burdening their tenants with high rent and rates of tenancy transfer.

Anoth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Korea’s twentieth century transformation
• Part I: The agrarian transformation
• Part II: Business and industrial transformations
• Part III: Transformations in the state
• Part IV: Transforming culture and ideology
• Part V: Social transformations: labor, women, and the family
• Conclusion: South Korea: in pursuit of modernity
• Index