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International Journal of Korean History(Vol.2, Dec.2001)
Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
J. Michael Allen*
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The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.
—Thucydides1
The fifth-century-BCE Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War
may have been the first person to write down such an explicit formulation
of what became known much later as social Darwinism. In this article I
will discuss a single Korean thinker, Sin Ch’aeho (1880~1936), for whom
social Darwinism was one of several ideas whose implications for Korea
he explored during a very fruitful period of intellectual activity in the
early 1920s. The fact that social Darwinism was part of a mixture of ideas,
and not a solitary or unitary ideology informing Sin’s work, is important
for understanding not only Sin Ch’aeho, but also the larger intellectual
milieu of early twentieth-century Korea (including Korean exiles, of
which Sin was one). While Sin’s nationalism has long been recognized—
indeed, it is the primary reason he is still studied and honored in Korea as
well as in the West—there is a third element in the mix, in addition to his
nationalism and social Darwinism, that must be considered. This is Sin’s
attraction to anarchism, especially of the variety advocated by Peter Kropotkin. Attention to Sin’s anarchism is especially important in any attempt to put Korean social Darwinism in the context of larger East Asian
political and intellectual conversations. My argument here will be that
anarchism helped Sin resolve some of the difficulties that his interest in
* Professor, Dept. of History, Brigham Young University-Hawaii
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
social Darwinism posed for an occupied Korea. As conceptually appealing as social Darwinism was for Sin the historian, it helped to justify Japan’s imperial ambitions. Sin found in anarchism the anti-imperial critical
stance that social Darwinism did not provide.
Sin Ch’aeho was influenced by Chinese, Japanese, and European
thinkers, as well as by his mentors, colleagues, and predecessors in Korea.
As he became interested in the ideas of Kropotkin and other anarchists, he
had to try to fuse these ideas with the interest in social Darwinian theories
about national progress that he had displayed in some of his historical
writings. For Kropotkin, anarchism was never far from an overarching
interest in social transformation. It was, in fact, part of the program for
such a transformation. One can therefore understand why many Koreans
would find the Russian appealing. At the same time, many Korean thinkers were attracted to the social Darwinist idea that the struggle for survival in a hostile world had demonstrated the superiority of societies that
were more progressive than the losers in this struggle. Sin, for example,
cited historical and contemporary cases—both Korean and non-Korean—
to show the domination that weaker societies faced. The danger for the
losers in such a struggle, however, was not only domination, but the possibility of perishing altogether.
The dire consequences of weakness naturally led to an urge to
strengthen Korea in order to compete in this new world. Nevertheless,
Koreans found it difficult to fully embrace a worldview based on conflict
and competition because of the logical consequence of such a view: validation of Japan’s domination of Korea. It is only by recognizing this ambivalence that we can understand the way in which Koreans filtered anarchism, and particularly the works of Kropotkin. While acknowledging the
desirability of human progress as an end, Kropotkin questioned competition as the best means for achieving it, arguing instead that “mutual aid”
could serve the same purpose more humanely. This was a welcome and
intellectually weighty counterbalance to the difficulties inherent in the
acceptance of social Darwinism in Korea. In the case of Sin Ch’aeho,
Kropotkin’s moral strain also resonated with Sin’s own sense of moral
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outrage. Furthermore, anarchism provided a channel for Korean nationalism, since it provided conceptual support for the idea that an assumed
natural solidarity could find expression as active social cooperation.
It should be kept in mind that Sin Ch’aeho does not represent all expatriate Koreans of the 1920s, nor can he be taken as representative of all
Korean social Darwinists. And although in this article I will describe only
some aspects of the appeal of social Darwinism to one Korean, Sin is a
good example of an intellectual and activist who found in social Darwinism an appealing analytical category to supplement his studies of Korean
history and his activism against Japanese rule. In particular, because Sin
Ch’aeho was apparently able to move to and from social Darwinism and
anarchism to some degree, using him as a point of departure for a discussion of these ideas helps illuminate what social Darwinism and anarchism
said to Koreans—what promises they held out, what questions they answered—in the 1920s.
Sin Ch’aeho is frequently hailed as one of the path-breaking founders
of modern Korean historiography. He is also honored for his unflinching
opposition to Japanese rule in Korea. As often as not, he is accorded a
place of pride among a group of historians lumped together under the
undifferentiated category of “nationalist historians” in the early twentieth
century (a category which itself should not be taken uncritically, as it
tends to be used in a way that encompasses people whose thinking included a wide variety of assumptions, approaches, critical stances, and
objectives). The nationalist lens through which Sin has typically been
viewed has often resulted in inadequate attention to other ideas of his later
years. One of the objectives of this article is to suggest ways of widening
the rather narrow view that has dominated discussions of Sin Ch’aeho,
especially in the West.2
Born in 1880 in South Chuncgheong Province, Sin received a classical
education, graduated from the academy known as the Seonggyun-gwan,
and went on to an early career in journalism. Many of his earliest essays
sound little different from those of others of his generation who held out
hope that an educated, enlightened populace would pull Korea out of the
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cultural and political doldrums in which the country seemed to be mired.
At this point, Sin’s thinking appears to have been based on the idea of
“self-strengthening” (jagang). Through education and the refinement of
character, Sin maintained that people could rise up and break through the
darkness of ignorance. He was willing to learn about “new civilizations”
(including the West) in order to acquire the knowledge necessary for Korea to retain and enhane independence. He exhorted his countrymen to do
the same, so that they would not have cause for shame before foreigners.
Liberty and self-reliance, he argued, were the keys to a glorious future.3
Sin wrote his earliest historical essays before Japanese annexation in
1910, but at a time when Japanese domination over Korean affairs was
more of a reality than a threat. In April of 1910, only a few months before
the formal annexation of Korea to Japan was completed, Sin left Korea
for China, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He was far from
alone; such well-known activist intellectuals as An Changho and Yi Gap
left around the same time. Sin became active in various Korean political
groups in China, and intensified his historical studies.
Sin was a prolific writer, and the nature of his historical writing
changed over time. His earliest writings (prior to annexation) are a combination of anti-Japanese rhetoric, castigation of Koreans whom he
viewed as assisting directly or indirectly in the subjugation of their country, and the adulation of heroes from Korea’s past. His early Carlylean
view of history as the actions of great men, however, did not suit him well
after he left Korea. It was not just a matter of Korea coming under the
direct rule of Japan. Sin explored a variety of political and social theories
while in China. His later works are therefore marked both by a recognition that Japan’s hold on Korea was firm (at least for now), and by a
much higher degree of theoretical complexity. The most important of
these works, Joseon sanggosa [History of Ancient Korea], is an ambitious,
complex, and fascinating examination of Korean history seen partly
through the lens of contemporary concerns.4
By the early 1920s, Sin had shifted his attention from heroic history to
a new focus on “the people” (minjung) as the driving force of historical
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development. In the anarchist “Declaration of Korean Revolution” of
1923, Sin was certainly among the first—if not the very first—to use the
term in this way. Though the nation remained at the forefront, Sin’s identification of the minjung as the ones who would carry out the revolution
that would both free Korea from Japanese rule and create a new society
was not simply a strategy that Sin inserted into his inflammatory manifesto to arouse support. It was, in fact, a reflection of a broader change in
Sin’s thinking during this period. The shift in attention toward the masses
appears to have coincided with Sin’s interest in history as the record of
struggles between nations. The most famous lines of his Joseon sanggosa,
from the introduction written in 1924,5 contain an explicit formulation of
this theory. It is worth quoting here at length.
What is history? It is the record of the state of mental activity in
which the struggle between “I” and “non-I” in human society develops through time and expands through space. World history,
then, is a record of such a state regarding mankind in the world,
and Korean history is a record of this state of the Korean race
[minjok].
What do we refer to as “I” and “non-I”? Simply put, we call that
thing which is situated in the subjective position “I”, and all others
we call “non-I.” For example, Koreans call Korea I and call England, America, France, Russia, and others non-I, but people of
England, America, France, Russia and other countries each call
their country I and call Korea non-I. The proletariat refers to itself
as I and to landlords, capitalists, and others as non-I, but the landlords, capitalists, and others each refer to their own group as I and
to the proletariat as non-I. In addition, in learning, in technology,
in occupations, and in the intellectual world—and in every other
area—if there is an I there will be a non-I as its opposite; and just
as there is an I and non-I within the I position, so there is an I and
a non-I within the non-I position. Therefore, the more frequent the
contact between I and non-I, the more heated will be the struggle
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
of the I against the non-I, and so there is no respite in the activity
of human society, and there will never be a day when the forward
advance of human history will be completed. It is for this reason
that history is the record of the struggle between I and non-I.6
This view of history as a “struggle” between “I” and “non-I” is a far
cry from history as the biographies and actions of great men, the preference which marked much of the historical writing of Sin’s earlier years. It
is difficult to know exactly when and where Sin got the ideas contained in
such statements as the one included above and implied in his discussion
of the “masses.” There is clearly some degree of Marxian influence in
Sin’s writing at this point. The theory of “I” and “non-I” might be seen as
contradictions in a dialectical theory of opposites. I and non-I, self and
other, the subjective and the objective, are in opposition to each other, but
they are also dependent on one another. Each partakes of the other’s essence, since even at the two poles of I and non-I, self and other, there is
no pure I or non-I. Hegel believed that through a process of one idea encountering its opposite, a third, more encompassing, and also truer idea
emerges, resulting in progress toward ultimate truth. As Michael Stanford
puts it: “The German word for this is ‘aufheben’, which has the dual
sense of ‘to annul or abolish’ (negative) and ‘to supersede or transcend’
(positive). Both Hegel and Marx used this word in a technical sense because of its combination of two meanings. For both Hegel and Marx, progress arises from contradictions.”7
In Sin Ch’aeho’s formulation, however, the complete theory is not
there, though it may be there in part. There is no indication that the process is moving progressively toward an ultimate stage of development, or
that each succeeding stage builds on the previous one, reconciling what
was negated. Sin’s idea is, rather, a logical construct built upon the subjective individual viewing everything outside itself as its opposite, or
“not-itself.” It is also a way of accounting for the fact that there are winners and losers in history.
Sin’s introduction to Joseon sanggosa is indicative of a shift in his his-
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torical outlook and his conception of Korea’s place in the world. This is
adumbrated in the two long paragraphs quoted above, but is even more
apparent in the rest of the essay, particularly its first two sections. Sin’s
analysis is sophisticated and impressive, and shows how much his view of
the scope and focus of history had changed since his early writings about
history, which served as an aid to patriotism. For one thing, Sin was willing to compare Koreans and their history with other countries, with Koreans not always coming out on the favorable side of the comparison. This
was based on his view that for any person or nation to make a difference
in history, that entity “must posses two attributes: (1) the attribute of continuity [sangsokseong], referring to the continuity of its life with regard to
time; and (2) the attribute of universality [bopyeonseong], referring to the
spread of its influence through space.”8 This had concrete applications in
comparative history:
The extent to which an event is the stuff of history can be determined by looking at the strength of these two attributes. For example, Kim Seongmun was a Joseon-period scholar who proposed
three hundred years ago that the world was round, but his work
does not have the same historical value as that of Giordano Bruno
[1548~1600], who said the same thing. This is because Bruno’s
work led to tangible achievements, resulting in explorations by
European states and the discovery of the new continent of America. Kim’s work, by contrast, yielded no such fruits. Jeong Yeorip
[? ~ 1589] was a great man of the East [dongyang] who tried to
break down the traditional theory of the bonds between lord and
subject,9 but he is not a historical figure of the stature of Rousseau,
who wrote the Social Contract. This is so because, while one cannot say that the groups Jeong influenced did nothing, their
achievements cannot compare with the far-reaching effects of the
French Revolution, which came after Rousseau.10
Furthermore, Sin now described history as uniquely the domain of human social activity: “There is I/non-I struggle apart from society as well,
but the bounds of the I in struggle are so limited that it lacks the attributes
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
of continuity and universality. So even among humankind, it is only social activity that becomes history.”11 That is, the isolated activity of an
individual is no longer what makes history. This is a marked change from
Sin’s earlier hero-centered accounts, but one that is in keeping with the
attention to the masses evidenced in his anarchist writings and other essays of this period. In fact, later in Joseon sanggosa Sin argued that the
more established the society, the more difficult individual action became.12
The “I/not-I” construction that figures prominently in Sin’s statement
about the nature of history and the position of Korean history in a global
historical context can be understood in the light of Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762~1814), even if any influence on Sin came only through Hegel, acknowledged to have been heavily influenced by Fichte. It is true that,
unlike Sin Ch’aeho, Fichte was an abstract philosopher, and his concept
of “I” was his proposed solution to problems arising from his reading of
Kant. Nevertheless, his ideas help establish the philosophical ground for
Sin’s I/non-I duality. In working out what he referred to as his Wissenschaftslehre (“theory of scientific knowledge”), Fichte posited a selfactuating I that necessarily required a not-I in order to be complete. “In
order to think clearly about the I, I require something to be the Not-I.”13
The I and the not-I are “posited in opposition to each other.”14 For Fichte,
this was part of a complex philosophical system ultimately accounting for
all being, action, and knowledge. Fichte was therefore preoccupied with
the differences between subjectivity and objectivity. In its theoretical
concern, according to Fichte’s English translator, Fichte’s system “deals
with the ‘theoretical attitude,’ an attitude that presupposes the classical
division between the knowing subject (the theoretical I, or ‘intellect’) and
the object known (the not-I, or ‘the world’).”15
There is no indication that Sin read Fichte directly (it seems unlikely,
as Fichte is not likely to have been translated into any language Sin could
read). Sin certainly did not have use for all of Fichte’s system and its implications. For one thing, Fichte proposed that while the I comes into being for itself, that which is not-I arises simultaneously for the I.16 This
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does not quite apply to Sin’s schema of the world of states, but there are
nevertheless resonance of parts of Fichte’s conceptualization. Note what
Sin had to say about priority and interdependence in the appearance of the
I and the non-I:
If we speak first of substance in a priori terms, the non-I appears
after the I, but if we speak of a posteriori acquired form, then the I
appears after the non-I. In other words, after the Korean nation
[minjok]—the I—appeared, the non-I in opposition to the Korean
nation—the Miao and the Chinese—existed. This is part of the a
priori formulation.
If, however, the Other, the non-I (Miao, China, and so on) had not
existed, in all likelihood the process of forming the I . . . would
not have appeared. This is according to the a posteriori formulation.17
Keeping in mind Fichte’s conceptualization, when Sin wrote that “after
the Korean nation—the I—appeared, the non-I in opposition to the Korean nation . . . existed,” he seemed to be saying not that the existence of
the Korean minjok preceded these other groups in any strictly chronological sense, but that as part of a dialectical construct, these Others have
cognitive meaning only in their relation to Korea, the I. It is in that sense
that they come after the appearance of the Korean nation. Each is conceptually dependent on the other, with priority determined solely according
to the stance from which the analysis is made.
Far from arguing that the Korean minjok preceded other national
groups, Sin asserted that three millennia ago, Koreans, Manchurians,
Mongolians, and Turks were all of the same race (by blood—hyeoljok).
As they spread and occupied different lands, however, different civilizational patterns developed, leading to clear distinctions among peoples
formerly of the same group.18 Reiterating the theme (emphasized in his
early Doksa sillon) of the history of Korea being the history of a race, Sin
wrote that this differentiation of a formerly unitary race was the beginning
of minjokseong (nationhood, or national characteristics).19 In other words,
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
despite differences between periods of history (which Sin acknowledged
were important), there was an essential racial unity to the history of the
nation that could be traced back thousands of years.
The interdependent struggle between I and non-I on the conceptual
level set the stage for discussion of more concrete kinds of struggle. The
idea that struggle was pervasive was a given:
[T]here is struggle between I and non-I not only among humans,
but among other creatures as well. But because the self-awareness
of that I is very weak, or absent entirely, it has no continuity or
universality; in the end, it is only humankind that creates history.
There is I/non-I struggle apart from society as well, but the bounds
of the I in the struggle are so limited that it lacks the attributes of
continuity and universality.20
In any struggle, there will be winners as well as losers. The theory
which Sin was explicating not only made this reasonable, it made it necessary.
One who subjugates the non-I and recognizes the I becomes the
victor in the struggle and continues life into future history. But the
one who recognizes the non-I and denies the I will be the loser in
the struggle and will leave nothing behind. This is an unchanging
principle in history, past and present. Even though it is human nature to want to be a winner rather than a loser, why is it that, contrary to one’s expectations, one in fact becomes a loser rather than
a winner?
In other words, the fact that an entity (a nation, for example) exists as
an “I” does not in itself guarantee that its independent existence will continue. If “survival of the fittest” was a governing principle in the world of
nations, Sin argued that what made a people fit to survive was a combination of spirit (jeongsin) and environmental accommodation. “Lacking
either of them”, he wrote, “means reverting to defeat.”
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Not even the Jews or the Turks were able to avoid the calamity of
perishing, and their successors were weak. The reason the South
American republics and Egypt were not able to save themselves
from the misfortune of decay in the latter days, even through a revival of learning, was because their predecessors were weak.21
Sin moved here from Fichte’s style of abstract theorizing about I and
non-I to the more concrete world of the rise and fall of nations, and the
weakness of those which do not survive. He now sounded more like a
social Darwinist than a Fichtean, but he attempted to employ both strains
of thinking to introduce what he hoped would be a historical inquiry that
would answer fundamental questions about the rise and progress of Korean civilization. As he then laid it out in his introduction, he intended to
do this by examining the lifestyle, religion, foreign relations, politics,
wars, economy, and numerous other aspects of the life of the inhabitants
of the Korean peninsula.22 When he actually got down to the business of
writing the history that this essay was meant to introduce, Sin did not fulfill the promise of his ambitious introduction. What is interesting about
this overture, however, is the view it affords us of what kinds of ideas Sin
had been thinking about, and how those affected his overall view both of
history and of political activity.
If social Darwinian theorist Herbert Spencer was a strong influence on
Sin Ch’aeho, as Sin Yongha and others have maintained, that influence
remained strong. 23 Indeed, it might be argued that Sin’s early “selfstrengthening” is itself a form of social Darwinism, or at least shares with
social Darwinism the recognition that weakness must be recognized and
remedied in order to survive. In a hostile world, full of states in fierce
competition, Koreans had to change not only the way they viewed themselves, their country, and its history, but the way they viewed the world as
well. The ideas of social evolution and struggle were attractive to some
Korean intellectuals in the early years of the twentieth century, and such
ideas shaped their views of what course Korea must take to make its way
in the modern world: a course of positive action and struggle. 24 There
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
does indeed seem to be much of Spencerian social Darwinism in the idea
of inevitable struggle among nations, as contained in Sin’s statement on
the nature of history. But it seems safe to say that a new idea of the world
did not come out of a heightened historical consciousness; rather, the opposite is the case. Sin already had an awakened historical consciousness
prior to his reading in social and historical theory. Now, he could combine the two in describing both the course of history and the dilemma
facing Korea in his own time.
As early as 1908, the idea of the importance of struggle was adumbrated, though not thoroughly elaborated, in Sin’s Doksa sillon, in which
he described a world in which “the superior [nations] survive, and the
inferior collapse” (ujon yeolmang).25 Sin also recognized that autonomy
and strength did not mean isolation. Korea, he declared in the same year,
must “struggle with the world if we are to gain independence in the
world.”26 In 1908 he made this statement to emphasize the vital importance of heroes (they were the ones to carry on the struggle)—quite a different point from the one he was making in the 1920s—but struggle remained a vehicle for the promotion of the nation even after heroes were
replaced as the primary historical actors. The role of struggle is much
more explicitly enunciated in his introduction to Joseon sanggosa. This
piece also recognizes the positive influence that the outside world may
have on Korea, so Sin’s I/non-I formulation is not a clear-cut distinction
between everything Korean and everything foreign. In a 1925 Tonga ilbo
article, however, in which he praised the glories of Kropotkin’s writing,
he was careful to warn against slavish acceptance of foreign ideas—not
because they were foreign, but because uncritical acceptance would leave
Korea without its own character:
The Korean people search for truth beyond questions of immediate advantage and disadvantage. Therefore, if Buddhism enters
Korea, we become a Buddhist Korea, rather than creating a Korean Buddhism. If Confucianism enters Korea, we become a Confucian Korea, rather than creating a Korean Confucianism. What-
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ever the principle, when it enters Korea we become a Korea of
that principle, rather than making that principle Korean. As a result, there is a Korea of principle and morality, but there is no Korean principle and morality.27
Because Sin’s concern was with the Korean nation as seen in competition with other nations, he did not offer any class-based critique of either
historical or contemporary Korea. At the same time, the view of history as
struggle also weakened Sin’s analysis when it came to criticizing Japanese imperialism. If history was the story of struggle, what better validation of this could there be than the example of Japan’s recent behavior?
The Japanese empire was Sin’s political foe, but it was a foe that was explained—perhaps even required—by his view of the behavior of nations.
In other words, once Sin accepted the idea of social evolution as it applied
to peoples and nations, Japanese imperialism had to be interpreted by the
theory of struggle for existence (unless it could somehow be placed in a
special category, which Sin did not provide). Both Japan and Korea, it
turned out, were acting out roles that were defined by universal laws of
history. This is not to say that the situation could not be remedied, but
struggle, victory, and defeat remained operative as fundamental historical
principles. As a result, Sin could not criticize imperialism in theory. Yet
he seems to have felt strongly in moral terms that imperialism—and especially Japanese imperialism—was wrong. Because of these theoretical
problems, however, in his condemnation of Japanese imperialism (and his
discussion of imperialism generally), Sin failed to go beyond geopolitical
aspects of the problem to consider the economics behind much imperial
expansion; there was no theoretical critique. Here neither his readings in
political and sociological theory nor his experiences outside of Korea
helped him. As a result, much of Sin’s writing on this problem is characterized by criticism without a critique: consideration of theoretical issues
had to take second place, and sometimes found no place at all.
Sin Ch’aeho’s writings of the 1920s reveal contradictions and ambiguities. Though Sin typically wrote with great confidence (bordering some-
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times on bravado), I believe that part of the key to Sin’s contradictions
paradoxically stems from a certain amount of critical ambivalence. The
difficulty in finding a critical perspective with which he could be completely comfortable may help to explain why Sin was attracted to anarchism during his time in China. Sin accepted the idea of social progress
among nations in theory, but, as a Korean, still desired the elimination of
Japanese rule. On the latter point, nothing could be more clear than his
“Declaration of Korean Revolution”, written in 1923 for the expatriate
group Uiyeoldan. The Declaration was a hot-tempered diatribe, calling for
violence in the name of Korean independence.
More than the bomb-throwing tone of such documents, however, it was
the writings of Kropotkin that captured Sin’s imagination. The hope that
Kropotkin held out was the possibility of a radical transformation brought
about by social revolution. This was Kropotkin’s prophetic call. It is possible, however, that what attracted Sin to Kropotkin was not simply the
idea of social revolution, but the Russian’s alternative to the primacy of
struggle as the determinant of the fate of nations. His influential book
Mutual Aid was largely a refutation of the social Darwinist theory of inevitable struggle among nations. As Michael Confino pointed out, “starting from Darwin (whom he considered misinterpreted by his epigones),
Kropotkin attacked the thesis of T. H. Huxley and others who held that
‘the struggle for existence’ between and within the species is the supreme
law of life and evolution for both the human and the animal realm.”28
Kropotkin had devoted a great deal of thought to the idea of “mutual aid,”
credit for which he gave to zoologist Karl Kessler. This idea was as much
a law as was struggle and competition. Kropotkin wrote:
Kessler’s idea was, that besides the law of Mutual Struggle there is
in nature the law of Mutual Aid, which, for the success of the
struggle for life, and especially for the progressive evolution of the
species, is far more important than the law of mutual contest.29
The ambiguities and contradictions that characterize Sin’s later writings reveal themes and approaches held in tension as he attempted both to
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write a new Korean history and to act in the present for a new Korean
future. Any attempt to completely harmonize all these ambiguities runs
the risk of either oversimplifying, or of ignoring or underestimating some
of the threads that make up the fabric of Sin’s thinking and writing. While
I will not attempt such a forced harmonization, I will nevertheless suggest
how these divergent strands come together at least at certain points, and
how they help us understand both the continuities and the discontinuities
in the work of this endlessly fascinating writer.
The relationship between cooperation and struggle in Sin’s thinking is
complex and unclear, but we might look to Liang Qichao (1873~1929) for
an example of how struggle might play in a particular nation’s history.
Liang, the Chinese journalist, reformer, and popularizer of Western ideas,
undoubtedly influenced Sin at several points. He was popular among Korean intellectuals, and Sin published a translation of a major work of Liang’s in 1908.
Sin Ch’aeho worked struggle and competition in as fundamental parts
of his description of the basic nature of all history in the introduction to
Joseon sanggosa, as described above. Liang’s own familiar-sounding
characterization of the nature of history was much more straightforward,
if also less impassioned and less philosophically complex:
What is history? History records the activities of human society,
compares achievements and identifies causality in order to provide
a reference for contemporary people. Chinese history is that which
records the activities of Chinese ancestors and provides a mirror
for the contemporary Chinese people.30
The lectures from which these lines came were delivered in 1926~1927,
too late for them to have directly influenced Sin’s writing. Nevertheless,
their similarity to Sin’s opening lines at least suggests that these two students of history drew from the same well. In “On the New Citizen” [Xinmin shuo], published in 1902 and quite possibly read by Sin, Liang explicitly incorporated ideas of struggle into his view of the unfolding of
history. In Joseph Levenson’s words:
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
In the Hsin-min shuo, Liang stated categorically that, in compliance with the general law of struggle for existence and of natural
selection, men must come into conflict with men and nations with
nations. Because struggle exists at all levels, the struggle of nations, the largest natural focal point for loyalty, dwarfs all more
petty struggles, and patriotism is the great necessity. Private interest must be sacrificed for public. This battle is the mother of civilization, the prerequisite for progress.31
The world as Liang saw it was a world of struggle, and the nation was
the fundamental unit in that struggle. The strength that came from identification of members of a nation (identified by race, language, customs,
and so on) with one another naturally led to an outward expansion of the
nation, which Liang referred to as “national imperialism” (minzu diguozhuyi). This struggle would determine the fate of nations, and any nation
not prepared for it would become a victim of stronger nations.32
One need not make claims of direct, conscious descent to note that
combining Liang’s statement about the nature of history and the Darwinian national sociology evident in “On the New Citizen” would produce
something very much like Sin Ch’aeho’s statement on history and struggle at the beginning of Joseon sanggosa.33 But whatever influence Liang
and Spencer (or perhaps even Spencer through Liang) may have had on
Sin, there are hints of other influences as well in the same statement, as
has been discussed.
It has already been mentioned that the anarchist Kropotkin offered an
alternative to struggle as the overarching explanation of human history,
and that this may have been part of what attracted Sin to the Russian
thinker. How can we understand Sin’s attraction to both Spencer and
Kropotkin, despite the two Europeans’ divergent social theories? Perhaps
by the time of Sin Ch’aeho’s turn to anarchism he had given up the idea
of political constructs altogether and was looking for anyone to help Korea. He had certainly become disillusioned with the possibility of achieving his objectives through organized political parties or governments. His
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17
brief association with the Shanghai Provisional Government had been a
disappointing experience. The members of that group were politicians;
Sin was an idealist.34 He never did become a thorough anarchist in the
Kropotkin mold, however. His emphasis on struggle—and on the nation—remained strong. John Crump has argued that what distinguishes
Korean anarchism from its Chinese and Japanese counterparts is the fact
that from the beginning it has had a heavy overlay of nationalism. Not
only has Korean anarchism not resisted nationalism, Crump maintained, it
has positively embraced national liberation, which was the cause that
gave it its primary impetus in the first place.35 This helps us understand
Sin Ch’aeho’s anarchism, but again, it is not anarchism as nationalism
that is instructive. It is the combination of the two, the symbiotic commingling of a desire for national liberation and a desire for social reorganization, together with historical explanations that redefine both the
meaning of Korean history and the actors in its drama, that provide the
fascination in studying Sin Ch’aeho.
In part because of his emphasis on the nation and on struggle, as has
been argued, Sin ultimately developed neither a class analysis nor a theoretical critique of imperialism. Yet at the same time, it is clear that Sin did
not view Japan’s rule of Korea in neutral terms. He strongly opposed it,
but his strongest reaction to it was moral. In other words, an analysis of
global history might explain the domination of weaker states by stronger
states, but from the perspective of a Korean, Japanese rule was still intolerable.
There was a moral component to Sin’s thinking from the very beginning. Even prior to 1910, he wrote essays exhorting his “Confucian brethren” to wake up to the reality of Korea’s situation and accept the responsibility of leadership to help rescue the nation. Throughout his historical
works he castigated the Goryeo scholar-official Kim Busik and the sadae
(“serve the great”) mentality that he saw as toadyism toward China, but
here again his criticism was partly moral: it was simply wrong for Kim to
relegate indigenous Korean beliefs to a position inferior to ideas and practices imported from China. He villanized Japan as a “bandit,” and Kore-
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ans who cooperated with Japanese rule as “slaves.”36 By the 1920s, however, he reserved most of his direct anti-Japanese attacks for his nonhistorical writings, and it was these writings that were increasingly characterized by anarchism.
This did not save Sin from contradictions, particularly to the extent that
his anarchism became the outlet for his anti-Japanese nationalism. Anarchism is opposed to any kind of state structure because these are seen as
inevitably coercive. Theoretical anarchists held an ideal view of voluntary
communities and associations. Anarchism, in other words, is an anti-state
ideology.37 For Sin, however, anarchism seems to have been interesting
primarily (at least initially) because it gave him a stance from which to
criticize Japanese imperialism in Korea. While he was attacking what the
Japanese state was doing, he did it largely in the name of the preservation
or resurrection of Korea, which would presumably include some kind of
Korean state. It was clear what Korea was to be liberated from, but not
what it was to be liberated to. Furthermore, there are plenty of characters—including heroic ones—in Korean history who would hardly fit the
anarchist ideal of championing non-statist social organization. All of this
leads to the question: When you become an anarchist, what do you do
about the specifics of Korean history? In Sin’s case the answer seems to
have been that you deal with them separately from your anarchist convictions. Social Darwinism could be of considerable conceptual assistance
here, despite its limitations for Korean nationalists.
This is not the only contradiction that comes from Sin’s retention of
moral outrage during his theoretical wanderings. Social Darwinism, for
example, is not a moral idea. It is based on Realpolitik and the fact of the
existence of stronger and weaker nations competing in the world. Sin,
however, clearly favored the state of Goguryeo, which was ultimately a
loser in the competition among the Three Kingdoms. By social Darwinist
theory, there should be nothing wrong with this because judgments are
scientific and amoral. Yet Sin condemned Silla for defeating Goguryeo,
though Silla had made what amounted to a calculated political decision.
It is likely that in addition to what Kropotkin had to say about historical
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19
development and the nature of village communities in early society, Sin
was drawn to the Russian by the fact that he too had a moral outlook that
set him apart from many of his European anarchist compatriots—certainly
as compared with someone like Bakunin, who was also widely read
among Asian anarchists. This moral grounding (and the sense of moral
outrage it supported) very likely made Kropotkin appealing to Sin as
much for his tone as for the content of his anarchism, which in turn
shaped Sin’s own anarchism. A strong moral tone is unmistakable in
Sin’s pre-1910 writings as well, but it comes from more traditional
sources, including Sin’s classical education and his involvement in the
movement to improve and strengthen Korean society through reform and
“enlightenment”.
In addition to these more direct influences, reference to Fichte helps us
understand the philosophical ground of Sin’s conception of the relationship between states. In his introduction to Joseon sanggosa Sin sounds
very much like a man deeply influenced by Liang Qichao as well as by
Herbert Spencer and Hegel, including Hegel’s “philosophical history,”
emphasizing stages of history characterized by achievement and failure in
a chronicle that was not evaluatively neutral. Again, some of these suggestions of influence are speculative, and are not meant to be a precise
genealogy of Sin’s ideas. They do, however, suggest one possible reason
why Sin’s introductory comments seem so wide-ranging, particularly
compared to the more conventional scope of the treatment in the book
itself: Sin was trying out new ideas as he ruminated on the fundamental
processes and meaning of history. But the reason he was interested in
such things was still for the sake of arriving at a better understanding of
the history of Korea. That is the history he wanted to write. If competition
was now a larger part of the story, and the masses rather than heroes were
put in the foreground, it was because they would better represent the history that was important to tell.
Finally, after examining Sin’s expatriate anarchism and his evolving
historical philosophy, it is important to keep in mind that Sin did not turn
to anarchism after he finished producing historical works. His first tract
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
that was at least partially inspired by anarchism, Joseon heongmyeong
seoneon, was written in 1923, before he finished work on Joseon sanggosa, and certainly before he wrote the introduction to that work in 1924.
It is therefore not accurate to claim that Sin turned “from” being a historian and nationalist “to” being an anarchist. These strains were playing in
his mind at the same time. I believe it is closer to the mark to argue that
anarchism provided an outlet for a different agenda than history did. By
the time Sin wrote his “What is history?” introduction discussed above,
his historical outlook had become sufficiently infused with a social Darwinian emphasis on struggle that he had undercut his own ability to criticize imperialism on a theoretical basis. Nevertheless, history and politics
remained closely intertwined in Sin’s writings throughout his most productive periods.38
Beyond matters of social transformation, resistance to imperialism, and
the restoration of a Korean history worthy of the name lies the recurring
question of who acts in history, an essentially political question. In his
writings of the 1920s, Sin implicitly asked this question, but only incompletely answered it. He used both minjok and minjung as his focal points,
but there is a problem here in the interstices between minjok (nation in a
racial sense, and the root of the term usually translated into English as
“nationalism”), and minjung (“the people” in a political sense) which Sin
did not clarify in his writings. The minjok is not the same as the minjung;
that much is clear. The nation, in ethnic or cultural or linguistic terms, is
not the same as the oppressed masses. In other words, not everyone in the
minjok fits into the minjung. Sin explicitly ruled out certain collaborators,
but more detailed analysis might have required him to expand the range
of those not considered part of the minjung. Perhaps Sin did not leave
enough anarchist writings to allow us to call him a pure anarchist in the
classical tradition. But he did leave enough to let us know that his anarchism is not simply a mutant nationalism. The existence of Japan in Korea gave a focus to his early nationalism and his later anarchism. By
adopting a view of history as struggle, and in his anarchist writings redefining the suppressed minjung as the actors in history, Sin attempted to
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21
center Korean history within a theory that satisfied his longing for both
independence and social transformation. Taken together, as they must be,
Sin’s historical and anarchist writings of the 1920s reconstructed Korea’s
past “in order to authorise the future.”39 If the minjok told the story of the
past, it was the minjung that held the key to the future.
The claim of the March First “Declaration” that Korea’s independence
and freedom were “supported by five thousand years of history” was precisely the kind of claim that could find ideological support in the writings
of Sin Ch’aeho, both before the annexation and into the 1930s and beyond. 40 Contemporary Koreans, in both halves of the peninsula, have
been selective in honoring Sin. Forgotten (at least in the south) is his
Manchurian irredentism; forgotten or explained away is his anarchism;
forgotten are the more idiosyncratic aspects of his writings in order to
preserve him as a modern historiographical pioneer. Sin was appropriated
by both pre- and post-Liberation nationalists and made into exclusively a
nationalist historian, effectively denying his intellectual complexity. Sin
Ch’aeho the anarchist was of less use, and possibly embarrassing. He was
therefore made a shadow. But without giving a body to that shadow we
cannot hope to understand the ambivalence that characterized Korean
social Darwinism in the 1920s.
Notes :
1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1954), V, 89, p. 402.
2 I am completing a book manuscript on Sin’s work that will deal at greater
length with all of the issues raised in this article, none of which can be given
full treatment here.
3 Sin Ch’aeho, “Giho heunghakhoe neun hayuro gahiyeonneun ga” [Why was
the Giho Society for the Advancement of Learning started?], in Danjae Sin
Ch’aeho jeonjip [The complete works of Sin Ch’aeho; hereafter referred to as
SCH], revised edition (Seoul: Danjae Sin Ch’aeho seonsaeng ginyeom sa-
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Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea
eophoe, 1977), 3, pp. 97~98. This essay was originally published in Issue 1
(August 1908) of the Giho heunghakhoe wolbo [Monthly newsletter of the
Giho Society for the Advancement of Learning].
4 Joseon sanggosa can be found in SCH 1, pp. 31~354.
5 Though Joseon sanggosa was not published in its entirety until later, Sin indicated that he wrote the introduction in 1924. This is found in the introduction
itself, in which Sin stated that it was written sixteen years after the publication
of his Doksa sillon, which appeared in 1908. See SCH 1, p. 47.
6 SCH 1, p. 31.
7 Michael Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 271.
8 SCH 1, pp. 31~32.
9 By implication, this would undermine the entire traditional system of ethics and
morality.
10 SCH 1, p. 32.
11 SCH 1, p. 32.
12 SCH 1, p. 71.
13 J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy(Wissenschaftslehre)
Nova Methodo, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 124.
14 Ibid., p. 69.
15 J. G. Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel
Breazeale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 239.
16 See, for example, J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and
Other Writings, 1797~1800, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), pp. 40~42.
17 SCH 1, p. 33.
18 SCH 1, pp. 33~34.
19 SCH 1, p. 70.
20 SCH 1, p. 32.
21 SCH 1, pp. 32~33.
22 SCH 1, pp. 33~35.
23 Sin Yongha, Sin Ch’aeho ui sahoe sasang yoen-gu (Seoul: Han-gilsa, 1984), p.
178.
24 Michael E. Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920~1925
J. Michael Allen
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
23
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 31~33.
SCH 1, p. 472.
SCH 4, p. 113.
SCH 3, p. 26.
Michael Confino, “Varieties of Anarchism,” The Russian Review 48 (1989), p.
408.
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, rev. ed. (London: William Heinemann, 1908), X (emphasis in original).
Liang Qichao, Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa (Taipei: Taiwan zhonghua shuju,
1936), 1. Liang went on to provide more detail on historical questions and approaches, both in general and as they related specifically to China.
Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 116.
Philip C. Huang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1972), pp. 58~59. Huang pointed out (pp.
148~149) that this social Darwinian emphasis on struggle, as strong as it was
in Liang’s writing of this period, was gone from his later works.
Sin also used “new citizen” language in some of his writings. There is not
room in this article to discuss at length the relationships between gungmin,
sinmin, minjung, and other conceptions and categorizations of the people involved in historical and contemporary action. These conceptions must further
be linked to Sin’s interest in self-strengthening, social Darwinism, and anarchism—either as ways of problematizing history or as ways of solving the
problems of history.
It is worth noting that Kropotkin himself also displayed this aversion to formal
political participation, and is known more as a theoretician than as an activist.
See Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976),
pp. 253~254.
John Crump, “Anarchism and Nationalism in East Asia,” Anarchist Studies 4
(1966), pp. 45~64.
SCH 3, pp. 35~46, 55~57.
For an example of a study of twentieth-century South Korea that is heavily
indebted to anarchism, and that promotes the virtue of voluntary, ecologicallysensitive communities while decrying the modern state as coercive and destructive of traditional communal culture, see Seung-Joon Ahn, From State to
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Community: Rethinking South Korean Modernization, ed. Hasok Chang and
Eric Jacobson (Littleton, Colo.: Aigis Publications, 1994).
38 The Popular Memory Group argued for the unavoidability of the politicalhistorical tandem in terms that seem applicable here:
“All political programmes involve some construction of the past as well as the
future, and these processes go on every day, often outrunning, especially in
terms of period, the preoccupations of historians. Political domination involves historical definition. History—in particular popular memory—is at
stake in the constant struggle for hegemony. The relation between history and
politics, like the relation between past and present, is, therefore, an internal
one: it is about the politics of history and the historical dimension of politics.”
Quoted in Nancy Abelmann, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South
Korean Social Movement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), p. 9.
39 The words are J. G. A. Pocock’s. See his “Time, Institutions and Action: An
Essay on Traditions and Their Understandings,” in Politics and Experience:
Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott on the Occasion of His Retirement, ed. Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 229.
40 The full text of the famous “Declaration of Independence” of 1 March 1919
can be found in Yi Gwangnin and Sin Yongha, eds., Saryo ro bon han-guk
munhwa sa: geundae pyeon (Seoul: Iljisa, 1984), pp. 281~283.