Sin Ŏnjun and Transnational Basis of Korean Nationalism

• In Event: Colonial Transnationalism between Korea and China in the 1930s

Abstract

Throughout the Japanese colonial period, Korea’s reading public paid close attention to Chinese revolutions against Japanese and Western empires. Korean nationalists viewed China’s anticolonial struggle as an indispensible means of liberating Korea from Japan, a stance that reveals a transnational basis of Korean nationalism in the colonial era. One of such nationalists was Sin Ŏnjun (1904-1938), Tong’a Daily’s Shanghai-based correspondent, who took a critical role in conveying momentous events in contemporary China to colonized Koreans. Drawing on Sin’s example, this paper shows how Sino-Korean transnationalism constituted Korean nationalism in the 1930s.

This paper focuses on two moments where Sin Ŏnjun accentuated the sociopolitical proximity between Korea and China. First, Sin’s writing stresses the shared experience of oppression that both the semicolonized and the colonized had to resist; for example, Sin provided meticulous details on the degree of penetration of China by Western and Japanese capitalists, as well as KMT’s effort to abrogate the unequal treaties. Second, Sin attended to radical social movements active in both countries. While disapproving of Chinese Communists’ “terrorist methods,” Sin’s articles center on social issues and activism that are more directly related to the Chinese masses, echoing Korea’s problems of rural tenancy and workers’ impoverishment. In so doing, I argue, Sin Ŏnjun inadvertently contributed to making the transnational sense of “the oppressed under the empire,” whereas explicitly calling for devotion to national salvation toward his readers. My analysis shows that evoking the transnational sense of colonial suffering and struggling effectively worked for promoting nationalism in 1930s Korea.

Author

• Vladimir Tikhonov, University of Oslo