Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit

Grace Ji-Sun Kim

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137346681
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Globalism, colonialism, and consumerism have caused unjust suffering (han), for the earth's exploited peoples and the exploited lands. To reverse this tragedy, we need to work for a safer, sustainable planet and renew our inspiration from God as the transforming Spirit who gives, sustains and empowers life to all.

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Empire, Colonialism, and Globalization

Abstract: The history of colonialism, industrialism, and the rise of technology in the West has helped generate the rise of globalism and consumerism that dominates the modern world. A better view that the world asks for is to celebrate differences, expect them, and nurture them. Just as the world benefits from hybrid wheat, it benefits from a rainbow of cultures that inevitably adds the kind of value on which you cannot place a price tag. The danger of suppressing hybridization is all too familiar, as the experience of apartheid and its aftermath in South Africa demonstrates. When we accept diversity, we may be less inclined to see the other as a commodity and more inclined to see people for who they are.

Kim, Grace Ji-Sun. Colonialism, Han, and the Transformative Spirit. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137344878.

Empire

Today’s world is often characterized by imperialism, colonialism, and consumerism. Imperialism is the policy of establishing or maintaining some level of control over one or more lesser states.¹ Imperialism establishes a relationship, by political (England’s mandate over the Falkland Islands) or economic (America as a market for South America) means, in which one state controls some part of the political sovereignty of another. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic dependence, and by cultural dependence.

Empires have existed throughout our recorded history. Their primary intent is to enrich the imperial society at the expense of poorer, less developed societies—often utilizing anyone who will sell their independence at the price of security, blue jeans, and Lite beer. Empires have taken land from people and forced people to take over the land by destroying forests or replacing local crops with crops for export. Imperial colonization has led to death or enslavement of countless native peoples. It is difficult to challenge imperial control as the empire controls the source of power used to subjugate the powerless. In ancient times, there was simply no one else around to help, except when the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates rivers both nurtured competing empires (and then help came with unwelcome strings attached). In the Mercantile Age, England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland divided up the world, with colonies widely separated by seas and forests. In modern times, global economic cooperation defines areas of interest and cooperation, protecting and enhancing the interests of those who invest money. Powerful government and corporate interests also employ alternative sources of power such as mercenaries and arms dealers that remain beyond the reach of national laws and legal boundaries.

An ancient example of cultural imperialism in this sense is the overlaying of Greek culture on Egypt, followed by a similar overlay of Roman, Arabic, Ottoman, and British cultures. A modern example is the overlay of Soviet Russian political systems on the Baltic States, East Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The most perennial imperial culture may be that of China, which lords over Tibet today, as it did during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1378 CE) and the Quin dynasty (1644–1911 CE). The Roman Empire is a complex case, with provinces controlled by the Emperor, provinces controlled by the Senate, and “client states” with independent governments pledging fealty to Rome; it provides an instructive demonstration of different imperial relations, but its control crumbled as the empire caved to inside and outside forces.

Imperialism is the policy of establishing, maintaining, and enlarging an empire.² Today, empires take new forms. The land divisions are not as clearly segregated as in the earlier ones. Empire today is more fluid. There is none of the feudal relations of master to vassal, no serfs, and no oaths of fealty. There are no rigid boundaries or land demarcations in which empires exist—or at least many fewer ones. Today, empires wield commerce dependence, worldwide, of one region or country over another (as with North Vietnam over South Vietnam), and the patron country controls the terms of the dependency. Some imperial artifacts hide the fact that two cultures have been artificially bound within one country, as with the Muslims and the Hindus before the partition of India, to create Pakistan.

Imperialism is an ideology³ “of expansion that takes diverse forms and methods at different times, seeking to impose its languages, its trade, its religions, its democracy, its images, its economic systems, and its political rule on foreign nations and lands.”⁴ Two examples are the complex relations between the Tibet Autonomous Region and Mongolia to China today. “The victims of imperialism become the colonized, that is, those whose lands, minds, cultures, economies, and political institutions have been taken possession of and rearranged according to the interests and values of the imperializing powers”⁵ who value commodities over people.⁶ It is about control—controlling land, their resources, and their people so that those in power will benefit and gain more for themselves.⁷

By its practice and goals, capitalist imperialism is a relationship of subordination and domination of one national polity by another, which actively suppresses diversity and promotes the dominant culture. Here, the only important thing is the value obtained through the exchange of commodities such as clothing styles, films, television, and electronics. It involves the colonizer and the colonized, the ruler and the ruled, the center and the periphery. The value for the overlords lies in commodities and not people. This value is enriched by creating an appetite for the imperial power’s goods. It is also enriched by fostering an improved standard of living in the colonized lands, in order that they may buy more goods and sell more of their commodities to the merchant power.

The advantage to the colonized lands disappears when the goods of the imperial power, such as drugs, airplanes, and computers are beyond the ability of the colonized natives to afford, or when the marginal value of sales diminishes below an acceptable rate of return, or, as in the case of China,⁸ when the former client state now makes its own drugs, cars, and airplanes. Divisions widen between the colonizer and the colonized, the exploiter and the exploited, the capital and the cheap means of production, the First World and those the First World can exploit. These divisions enlarge the gap between the haves and the have-nots who are suffering because the disappearance of unexploited lands puts more pressure on those who have already been exploited. There are no new resources, so old resources are pressured to yield more commodities. Thus, the rise of consumption and consumerism, and the closure of the frontier, are causing the earth to suffer as well.

One direct effect of the rise of mass consumerism—which, because of its colonial roots, views other people and land as commodities—is the enormous rise of modern slavery. According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, up to 27 million people are essentially modern-day slaves.⁹ Many of these slaves are little children who, because of cultural devaluing and terrible, indebted poverty, are sold into any of a variety of human trafficking situations, including sex trade and manufacturing slave trade. As the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, noted in a 2012 General Assembly meeting on violence against women and human trafficking,

Where traffickers are using threats and weapons, we must respond with laws and prosecutions. At the same time, we have to take a broad view of the factors that feed trafficking. Only the worst, most abject poverty could force a family to sell their child for a few dollars. We have to help all those who live in such desperate conditions. They need more than simple promises—they need social protections. Success demands that we bring more poor people, especially women, into discussions on how to help them.¹⁰

These are relationships which make up our world, relationships that are closely related to, although not identified with, particular physical places of the earth.¹¹ As these relationships continue to define the haves and the have-nots, we need to reexamine the consequences of these relationships and rethink how the distribution of wealth and resources can be re-imagined in our world where there is so much inequality. The redistribution of resources can lead to a better quality of life for the poor as well as the rich.

Colonialism

Imperialism and colonialism have left devastating effects on our world, both on the poor and on nature, since the premise is to exploit land and the indigenous population and move on when non-renewable resources (ores, exotic woods, exotic animals) have been exhausted, leaving the natives untrained, sicker and poorer than they were before. Imperialism has nurtured the colonizers’ grandiosity as they exploit others, accumulating worldly goods for the sole purpose of self-gain. This is devastating to human beings and our ecology. It has caused strain on the earth and on vast communities of people who are suffering from exploitation. Economic colonialism has two faces. The first is the desire for markets, as when England needed buyers for its textiles and machinery. The second is consumerism, the desire for cheap goods, such as Chinese tea, Indonesian spices, Malayan rubber, and cheap cell phones.

Colonialism, which is often a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of imperial culture settlers in distant territories.¹² Colonialism can be defined as the control of other people’s land and goods.¹³ Colonialism is subversive as its object is to define native people in ways that facilitate exploitation.¹⁴ As the exploitation continues, the colonizers benefit from it as an inexpensive route to land and luxury, while the exploited land and native peoples suffer under a repression that continues to this day (as when the Spanish and Portuguese colonized Central and South America, or as when the British colonized North America at the expense of the land and native peoples).

Colonization tends to exploit people and land for the purpose of accumulating wealth for the colonizers. Not all colonizers (such as the early English colonizers of America or the convicts who colonized Australia) are wealthy; however their objective is the accumulation of economic value. Colonialism depends on exploitation of the ecological diversity of traditional agriculture to produce commodities that are sold back to the home country on credit provided by the first world. One of the tragic resulting ironies of making the accumulation of economic value our main (if not sole) objective is that many American consumers believe that we are providing people in poor countries with jobs—jobs wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Empire, Colonialism, and Globalization
• 2  Consumerism and Overconsumption
• 3  Nature and Han
• 4  Transformative Power of the Spirit
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index