Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919

Andre Schmid

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780231506304
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

Korea Between Empires chronicles the development of a Korean national consciousness. It focuses on two critical periods in Korean history and asks how key concepts and symbols were created and integrated into political programs to create an original Korean understanding of national identity, the nation-state, and nationalism. Looking at the often-ignored questions of representation, narrative, and rhetoric in the construction of public sentiment, Andre Schmid traces the genealogies of cultural assumptions and linguistic turns evident in Korea's major newspapers during the social and political upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Newspapers were the primary location for the re-imagining of the nation, enabling readers to move away from the conceptual framework inherited from a Confucian and dynastic past toward a nationalist vision that was deeply rooted in global ideologies of capitalist modernity. As producers and disseminators of knowledge about the nation, newspapers mediated perceptions of Korea's precarious place amid Chinese and Japanese colonial ambitions and were vitally important to the rise of a nationalist movement in Korea.

1 The Universalizing Winds of Civilization

Who will breathe in the winds of this new civilization that are night and day crossing over to this side of the Pacific Ocean, accompanying the ships and telegraphs? Who will light a torch in the deep and long night?

—Sŏbuk hakhoe wŏlbo, February 1909

Nationalism thrives on crisis. And in the closing years of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century, perhaps the only area of agreement across the full spectrum of Korean society—from conservative Confucians residing in the countryside, to leading reform officials in the capital, to resident foreign observers—was that the peninsula was in quite a predicament. Editors did not shy away from colorful metaphors to portray the crisis. A single article could describe the nation as a “flimsy ship crossing a raging river,” “an old house threatening to collapse,” and “a sick body.”¹ The people were referred to as “fish in a boiling cauldron,” “sparrows on a burning column,”² and “crows in a basket,”³ while the imperialist powers were likened to tigers and wolves surrounding the nation,⁴ a group of thieves encircling a house,⁵ and a typhoon advancing from all four directions.⁶ It was as if Korea were being “shot on four sides by arrows.”⁷ Others avoided such dramatic language, suggesting only that the national situation was so dire that “it was unspeakable.”⁸

In such a precarious situation, the people should be “preparing the house for a huge storm”—and a growing number tried to do just that.⁹ These were nationalist writers and publicists who tried to escape the crisis by producing and disseminating particular types of knowledge about the nation in support of a reform agenda. In the newspapers, journals, and textbooks that they created, these writers for the first time made the nation the unrivaled subject of public discourse, linking all matters however seemingly trivial or however seemingly grand—from the style of haircuts to constitutions, from popular rights to the use of umbrellas—to the nation’s health and wealth in a global order. The diversity of information about the nation was largely united by an underlying commitment to the ideologies of capitalist modernity as captured in the period’s most popular phrase, “civilization and enlightenment” (munmyŏng kaehwa). Touted as universal, munmyŏng kaehwa spurred a reform package that sought to strengthen and enrich the nation by disciplining the population into certain modes of behavior and bringing both individuals and the nation in line with international standards. In this way, munmyŏng kaehwa offered a new spatial and temporal unit that linked all three levels: the behavior of individuals shaped the fate of the nation that performed within the historical laws that, in turn, were seen as having produced the contemporary global ecumene. Nationalism in these years resorted to a form of globalization as a way of salvaging the nation, a project informed by the temporal and spatial vision of munmyŏng kaehwa.

With their segmented format and long runs, newspapers were ideally suited to investigate and disseminate the many new ways of articulating national visions in this changing ideological environment. In an era when no other media could rival the power of newspapers and journals, the writers who controlled them dominated public discourse about the nation and world, enabling them to offer visions of Korea that positioned themselves as enlightened leaders while shunting aside alternatives that might contest the assumptions of their nationalist reform project.

Internal Disorder, External Calamities

Events both on and surrounding the Korean peninsula in the last few years of the nineteenth century neatly fit the classical Confucian definition of crisis as captured in the phrase naeu oehwan, “internal disorder, external calamities.” At this time, few writers committed to new notions of progress were keen to employ such a mode of analysis with its connotations of cyclical dynastic decline. Nevertheless, most contemporary analysts, as well as historians today, agreed with the basic premise of naeu oehwan: that the crisis of the waning years of the Chosŏn dynasty resulted from the confluence of internal and external trends. Externally, the conspicuous arrival of the West’s new technologies, capital, and knowledge had helped spur a reconfiguration of state-society relations while internally, less conspicuous but equally significant long-term socioeconomic trends had undermined the state’s ability to rule. Parochial matters that in an earlier age had been the concern of only village heads and magistrates were now interlinked with globalizing processes, and what had been seen as local matters came to be interpreted anew in world historical terms. No other period in the previous few centuries had witnessed such profound shifts in the ideological makeup of Korean society.

The sense of crisis took a specific form in 1894 when a peasant uprising almost overthrew the 502-year-old dynasty. Led by Chŏn Pongjun, the peasants in a southwestern county rose up against their corrupt local magistrate, who, after coercing them into building a water reservoir, had the temerity to charge them for using that water. By the end of May, slightly more than one month after the outbreak of hostilities, the peasant armies captured the capital of Chŏlla Province. Historians have tended to contextualize the events of these days as long-term trends marking the decline of the Chosŏn dynastic order. The magistrate who initiated the uprising with his demands, Cho Pyŏnggap, has come to personify the corruption that made state institutions in the last century of the dynasty unable to adapt to a changing socioeconomic order, thereby exacerbating the pressures on the rural economy through their personal exactions from the peasantry. The ability of the uprising’s leaders to mobilize peasants rapidly in areas far removed from the site of the original crisis are seen as a reaction to the widespread difficulties in the countryside resulting from long-term changes in the agricultural economy and intensifying commercialization.¹⁰ These shifts brought with them various types of dislocation between status and economic power while arguably impoverishing large numbers of participants who had been unable to take advantage of the changes.¹¹

Other historians have paid close attention to the affiliation of many of the peasant leaders with a new religion that since the 1860s had expanded throughout the country. Called Tonghak, or Eastern learning, this syncretic religion provided some of the organizational infrastructure for the peasants, and as some scholars have contended, its advocacy of social equality and calls for social change posed an indigenous ideological challenge to the state’s Confucian orthodoxy.¹² Despite these differences over the precise origins and nature of the peasant uprising, historians generally agree that the successes of the peasant army and the ineffectiveness of the state were rooted in a growing imbalance in the institutions and ideology that had served the dynasty for more than half a millennium.

Never was this clearer than in June 1894 when government troops failed in their attempts to retake the capital of Chŏlla Province from the peasant armies. With their troops routed by the “Green Bean General,” as the leader of the peasants had come to be affectionately known, the court telegraphed Beijing for assistance in suppressing what had developed into a virtual civil war that threatened the very existence of the dynasty. When Qing officials responded affirmatively, Japan, which had been carefully monitoring the events, seized the opportunity to send its own troops to the peninsula, setting up the conditions for the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. What had begun as a dispute over a reservoir in a remote county escalated into a war that fundamentally changed the geopolitical landscape of the region.

From the earliest years of the Meiji period, Korea had been an important foreign policy issue for Japanese leaders. Since the “Conquest of Korea” debates (Seikanron) of 1872–73, the question of how best to protect and maintain an ever shifting array of Japanese political, security, and economic interests dominated discussions of Korea.¹³ Outside the government, various groups pursued their own, often highly imaginative efforts while the government sought to do so by mastering the conventions of international law, even though brute force was always a ready option.¹⁴ In a demonstration of how quickly Japan had learned the style of gunboat diplomacy, which only a short time before had been used against it, a ship was sent off the shores of Korea to provoke an incident. The following year, beating the Western powers at their own game, Japan signed the Treaty of Kanghwa with the Korean government, opening the peninsula to an ever widening array of international commercial activities. One of the treaty’s objectives had been to weaken Korea’s ties with China, but in fact, because of various political shifts within Korea, combined with a newly aggressive Chinese stance on the peninsula, the treaty did not translate into an attenuation of Sino-Korean ties. State and private support for reformers inside the country dominated Japanese efforts to shift the political balance for the next two decades, but by the early 1890s, despite a burgeoning trade, Japan had been unable either to persuade or to force a reconfiguration of Korea’s relations with the Qing.¹⁵

When in 1894 the Chosŏn government requested assistance from Qing officials to suppress the Tonghak peasant armies, Japan used the opportunity to end Chinese influence on the peninsula. That the government and peasant armies had agreed to cease hostilities before the Japanese troops arrived was a minor inconvenience. Japan rejected proposals to withdraw. In July 1894, Japanese troops captured the Korean palace and sequestered the king, actions that triggered the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. In control of the government, the Japanese established a reform-oriented cabinet that launched a sweeping reform movement, known as the Kabo reforms. In the countryside, however, news of Japan’s actions led the Tonghak armies to reorganize, this time directing their attacks against the foreign invaders. Hopelessly outarmed, they were defeated by Japanese troops, and Chŏn Pongjun, together with other key leaders, were captured. By the next spring, Japan’s success in the Korean countryside was followed by an even more resounding victory when its army and navy completely routed the Qing forces. In the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the document signed to conclude the war, the first clause forced China to recognize the objective pursued by Japan for many years, an end to tributary ties with Korea.

Within a week of each other, Chŏn Pongjun was executed and the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed.¹⁶ While these two events may have been satisfying to many Japanese, they did little to assuage the sense of crisis that prevailed in Korea. The independence acquired from the Treaty of Shimonoseki, while certainly welcomed by many Koreans who had long been working to end the tributary relationship, was seen as a hollow sovereignty. Granted rather than earned, it was sovereignty in name only, according to one style of critique. Independence proffered by outside forces, it suggested, could never lead to a completely sovereign nation.¹⁷ Internally, although the defeat of the Tonghak peasant forces dispelled the immediate military threat to the dynasty, sporadic local uprisings, sometimes involving Tonghak members, continued for many more years. Indeed, the central government’s reform program, with its top-down and heavy-handed approach, often aggravated the situation in the countryside. These years were also the high tide of concession diplomacy in East Asia. Whether it was Americans seeking railway construction or gold mining rights, Russians demanding forest concessions, or Japanese obtaining fishing rights, the Korean government was regularly pressured and cajoled into handing over concessions to foreign commercial interests.

The history of the next fifteen years until annexation is often recounted along three narrative lines, all tracing various dimensions of the crisis. The most prominent narrative, focusing on the royal house, offers a high-level political history in which the king and his family serve as a metaphor for the nation. A legacy of lingering court-centered Confucian historiographical practice, this narrative line renders the drama surrounding King Kojong into a style of national history that follows the steady decline from nominal independence to colonialism. It was not a happy slide. In one of the most telling moments in the history of the royal house, on October 8, 1895, a group of Japanese ruffians organized by Miura Gōrō, the newly appointed Japanese consul to Korea, broke into the royal palace. The queen was targeted for removal, having been vilified in the Japanese media as a conservative obstacle to reform and the expansion of Japanese interests. She was slain that night by Japanese swords. In a vain attempt to hide evidence of the deed, her body was burned at the back of the palace, an action that earned international opprobrium for the newly “civilized” Japan, but not enough for Miura to be convicted by the Japanese courts.¹⁸ Fearing for his own safety, King Kojong shortly afterward hid in his consort’s palanquin leaving his residence for the Russian legation, where he remained ensconced for a contentious eleven months. Upon his return to the palace, he and his officials launched a series of reforms—a restoration (chunghŭng), in the classical parlance in which the changes were framed—that tried both to salvage the throne’s tarnished reputation and to strengthen the court’s hold over the state bureaucracy and society.¹⁹

Despite these efforts at reform, the state was unable to resist Japan’s sustained encroachments. During the Russo-Japanese War, the court declared the peninsula to be neutral, but Jap...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Monumental Story
• 1. The Universalizing Winds of Civilization
• 2. Decentering the Middle Kingdom and Realigning the East
• 3. Engaging a Civilizing Japan
• 4. Spirit, History, and Legitimacy
• 5. Narrating the Ethnic Nation
• 6. Peninsular Boundaries
• 7. Beyond the Peninsula
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Studies of the East Asian Institute