A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940

Hagen Schulz-Forberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317318064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Contributors to this volume explore the changing concepts of the social and the economic during a period of fundamental change across Asia. They challenge accepted explanations of how Western knowledge spread through Asia and show how versatile Asian intellectuals were in introducing European concepts and in blending them with local traditions.

1 HOW CONCEPTS MET HISTORY IN KOREA’S COMPLEX MODERNIZATION: NEW CONCEPTS OF ECONOMY AND SOCIETY AND THEIR IMPACT

Myoung-Kyu Park

Since its first impact on East Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century, European civilization has been considered a primary reference of modernity and for modernization. Ever since enlightened intellectuals began introducing Western knowledge for the purposes of ‘strengthening the state and enlightening the people’ of Korea, the social influence of modernity-related discourses has been paramount. From the moment Korea opened its doors to the world in 1876, however, the process has always been a contested one, leading to societal disputes over the necessity, priority and methods of importing ‘civilization’. As foreign influence and, in particular, Japanese power increased, the dilemmas of negotiating between voluntary reform and foreign intervention, as well as between traditional identity and global change, further complicated the conflict.¹ During the colonial period, these issues remained unresolved in the tensions between colonizers and nationalists, radicals and gradualists, and urban elites and rural peasants.² After political liberation in 1945 and even leading up to the twenty-first century, disputes — over national division and legitimacy between South and North Korea, over authoritarian developmentalism and over the controversial issue of school history textbooks — are ineluctably rooted in the contentious understanding of complex modernization.³

One way to resolve such conflicts is to locate Korean modern history in a global transformation: one that sees dynamic modernization processes as neither Eurocentric nor ethnocentric. In exploring this new kind of historiography, research on the conceptual changes that arose in the wake of Western expansionism may prove helpful. The period of modernization was not only a time of political crisis, but also a Sattelzeit or transitional period in which modern concepts were invented, introduced, translated and implemented, not only in East Asia but globally. A concept can be an indicator of structural change, can function as an independent social catalyst, and can also be a cultural container in which the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous is embedded.⁴ This chapter seeks to explain Korea’s modernization by focusing on the concepts ‘economy’ and ‘society’ and their semantic influences during the critical period of transformation preceding colonization. Three sets of questions will be raised: First, how were these concepts introduced and implemented in Korea, and what was the driving force in their expansion? Second, what kinds of change occurred in the knowledge paradigm as a result of implementing these new concepts? Was there a significant epistemological break with the conventional way of thinking? Third, what kinds of conflicts erupted as the new concepts were appropriated? Who were the main agents in this process, and what were their chief interests in mobilizing these two concepts? These are necessary questions in the exploration of the relations between conceptual history and social history, between national history and global history, and between semantic shifts and identity-construction in the enlightenment, colonization and modernization process in Korea.

Terms for ‘Economy’ and ‘Society’ during the Korean Enlightenment

Two Korean words — gyeongje (economy) and sahoe (society) — are indispensable in explaining Korea’s modernization within the global transformation. Although the two concepts are lexicologically unrelated, they share a similar discursive power in the process of modern transformation. The word gyeongje was used among Confucian scholars as an abbreviation for gyeongsejemin (governing the world and protecting the people). In 1392, the ruling elites of the Joseon dynasty declared the twenty-two important tasks of the new dynasty, among which gyoyuk (education) and gyeongje were of primary importance.⁵ The fundamental missions of the ruling elites were declared to be education in Confucian morality (through the establishing of Confucian schools) and protection of the people’s livelihood (by support for agriculture). In the late Joseon dynasty, some reform-oriented neo-Confucians expressed an embryonic idea of modern economy in discussing the tasks of gyeongje with a positivistic perspective. For example, Yu Hyeongweon discussed the issues of tax collection, land ownership and agricultural production, market regulation for resource exchanges, and monetary policy from the perspective of gyeongje in his book published in 1770.⁶ Until the nineteenth century, however, the word gyeongje had been used only within the neo-Confucian discourse of state management. The primary purpose of gyeongje was believed to be the political stability of the regime, even though it had to relate to the material lives of ordinary people and the general conditions of material production.

By contrast, the word sahoe was a new locution, hardly ever found in Korean traditional texts. It was a term introduced from the outside as an element of civilization discourse in the late nineteenth century. The separate components of the word sa and hoe, however, had long been used to refer both to the human community and to a gathering. In traditional Korea, the word sa referred to a shrine for worshipping the crop deity and thus was often used as a synonym for the village with which the shrine was associated.⁷ The word hoe was also used for a gathering or for the action of meeting. As early as the Shilla period from the fifth to seventh century, meetings celebrating Buddhist festivals were called yeon-deunghoe, meaning literally the ‘meeting with lotus flower candles’. In the Joseon dynasty, local elites established meetings called hyanghoe to hear and discuss local affairs, and held yeonhoe or sihoe for writing poems and for communicating opinions.⁸ The ordinary people also made their own associations in the name of hoe or gye for mutual help in labour collaboration, relieving casualties and religious activities.⁹ Although the words sa, hoe and gye were familiar in traditional discourse, however, they differed from the new term sahoe.

It was during the first few decades after Korea’s opening of its door to the outside world that Western concepts of economy and society were introduced. Korea could import foreign ideas not only through their own native translations, but also through appropriating and borrowing already translated terminologies from Japan and China because these three countries had long shared a common character, terminology and civilization. Japan had the opportunity and the capacity to take the leading role in selecting vocabularies and texts in the translation of Western works.¹⁰ Interestingly enough, the vocabularies used for translation in Japan were not Japanese vernacular terms, but those words which had been shared within East Asian civilization for a long time. When the words keiji and shakai were selected as translations of economy and society in Japan, both words could be easily appropriated as gyeongje and sahoe in Korea and jingji and shehui in China, even though the three countries’ languages were quite different. In a sense, most translations into Japanese in the late nineteenth century could therefore be understood as translations into the East Asian semantic field, rather than into the Japanese semantic field only.

Since an English-Japanese dictionary edited by an institute of the Bakufu, military government ofJapan in 1862 translated ‘political economy’ as keiji-gaku, the idea of political economy and economic measures of the Western countries was rapidly introduced into Japan.¹¹ It was quite understandable that keiji was selected as the translation of the political economy, because the word had long been familiar as a principle of state governance regarding the material conditions of the community. Those who wanted to focus on the economic liberalism of the voluntary actors in the free market preferred another term like izaigaku to the word gyeongje. Under the Meiji government, however, the words keiji and keijigaku could have stronger power in expressing the government’s positive roles for industrialization. In China, the word jingji (the same as Japanese keiji) was employed in its traditional usage up to the end of the nineteenth century. In 1896 the Japanese translation keiji-gaku was introduced in China, but Yen Fu, an important Chinese intellectual who had translated several Western books into Chinese (including Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Herbert Spencer’s The Study of Sociology), translated ‘economics’ using another word, jixue. Other words — licai, jingshi and shengji — were also used as alternative terms for economic affairs. Liang Qichao mentioned that the Chinese licai was identical in meaning to the Japanese keiji, but nevertheless he used the word jingshi until the year 1902. Gradually, the word jingji came to be considered more appropriate than others to designate the meaning of ‘good politics for state power’.¹²

In Korea, new ideas and concepts were introduced from Japan, China and the United States. Dongnip Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Independence Club, founded in 1896, used native Korean words like him (power), nara (state) and ganan (poverty) in explaining Western discourses. However, borrowing new terms from Japan and China was easier and more efficient for the Korean literati, who had retained their strong confidence in the East Asian civilization. Eo Yunjung, a government official sent to Japan in 1881 to learn about the Meiji reformation, introduced new policies such as the budget system, banking system, governmental bond and tax system with a new academic discipline of economics (translated as gyeongjehak) into Korea.¹³ Hanseongsunbo, a newspaper published by the government, in 1883 delivered several translations including the word gyeongje in the articles for providing information about a foreign country. Although the discipline of economics was new, the words gyeongje and hak (learning) were not difficult for Korean intellectuals to understand and appropriate. The semantic commonality in the conventional terminologies originated from Confucianism, and cultural exchanges among the three countries allowed many translations from Japan to be appropriated by Korea without too much of a time lag. Another word, ijaehak, was used for a while alongside gyeongjehak as a translation of ‘economics’. An article in Hwangseong Sinmun used ijaehak for ‘economics’, and the word gyeongje was mentioned as a part of sociology.¹⁴ But gradually, and increasingly after 1905, the word gyeongje came to displace ijae. It was the same change which had emerged in Japan and China in terms of conceptualizing the modern transformation by the same word gyeongje in Korea, jingshi in China, and keiji in Japan.

The Western concept of society was introduced with the theory of social contract in Japan by the Meiji enlightened intellectuals during the late nineteenth century. After struggling with several words, the word shakai won as a translation of Japanese society. It was introduced into Korea as the word sahoe by the officials who had been sent to Japan to learn modern reform measures in 1895.¹⁵ They established a group and published a bulletin called Dae Joseon dongnip hyeophoebo, in which new ideas and discourses were introduced. In the second issue of the bulletin (published in March 1896), Sin Hae-yeong, the group’s vice-president, wrote an article including the term sahoe. The idea of a ‘social contract’ was also introduced through translation of the work of Fukuzawa Yukichi, who had introduced the idea in Japan. An article in the Hwangseong Sinmun entitled ‘The Spirit of Society’ mentioned that the spiritual capacity to form a collective power and build great associations was necessary in order to preserve the nation and state.¹⁶ Sociology was introduced as sahoehak by Yi Injik in 1905 as a discipline for studying the diverse activities and relations of human associations.¹⁷ In 1906, in another Hwangseong Sinmun article, sociology was explained as a discipline for studying diverse issues regarding ‘evolutions of society, human groups, family, religion, and socialism, social reforms, ethnicities and race’.¹⁸ The role of the media, especially the newly established newspapers, was crucial in appropriating and introducing new ideas and concepts to Korea. Enlightenment intellectuals contributing to the implementation of new words and concepts included Seo Jaepil, an enlightened intellectual who was educated in the United States and later became leader of the Independence Club, and Bak Eunsik and Sin Chaeho, who wrote many articles for the Korean enlightenment movement during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century. The fact that the terms could be borrowed without Korean vernacular translation shows that a civilization based on a shared history in East Asia played a significant role in the translation and appropriation of Western concepts.

Concepts and Social Transformations in Complex Modernization

Rather than an independent semantic unit, a concept is part of a s...