Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea, by Gi-Wook Shin. Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. xii + 234 pp. (ISBN 0-295-97548-2 cloth).
Reviewed by Sallie Yea
Victoria University of Wellington
[This review first appeared in
Asian Studies Review, 21 (1997): 249-51]
Shin's study on peasant protest during the colonial period in Korea is a major contribution to a recently growing genre of research in English on Korean society (see also Abelmann 1996; Wells 1996). Social forces and civil society have been identified as a neglected third element shaping Korea's path to modernity and hence correcting the emphasis on state and world system as the most prominent factors shaping this path (see Koo 1994). The common thread running through much of this research is an exploration of the significant formative role social forces have played in shaping Korea's historical trajectory and rapid modernisation. Historical and political agency is located in the social actors themselves, particularly in populist minjung forces such as peasants and tenant farmers, blue collar industrial workers, and other marginalised social groups.In the context of this recent scholarship, Shin investigates the role of peasants in shaping modern Korean history. He documents the protests, rebellions and other dissenting practices undertaken by peasants during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). Shin's central argument is that "Korean peasant activism in the first half of the twentieth century has greatly influenced society and politics in the second" (p. 174). In particular he shows how such protests influenced the course of postwar rural class relations and social structures. He argues this historical influence convincingly, citing peasant activism as the basis for social revolution and the sweeping land reforms in North Korea, and the various struggles around land that took place in the immediate circumstances of a liberated South Korea.
A second argument of the study concerns the ways in which peasant activism has been investigated and theorised, both in previous studies on Korea and elsewhere. For Shin, these studies are plagued by the inadequacies of the "colonialism-pauperisation-revolution" thesis. This thesis claims that Japanese colonialism produced structural conditions conducive to revolution: exploitation and pauperisation of the peasantry and subsequent polarisation of the rural class structure into "big, parasitic landlords and poor, landless tenants" (p. 177). The problem with these studies, according to Shin, is that is they view peasant revolution solely as an outcome of colonialism. Shin rejects this view for the Korean case and is sceptical of studies which attempt to explain peasant protest by simply "slotting them in" to existing theoretical approaches.
Shin provides a neat overview and critique of the 'colonialism-pauperisation-revolution' thesis. He then moves on to argue that peasant radicalism and dissent in Korea was various and mutlifaceted during the colonial period, and cannot be reduced to a certain type (a response to the harshness of colonial system) or a particular theoretical construct of peasant rebellion (such as the pauperisation-revolution thesis). He states his intention as examining the ways class, nation, and the state combined to produce such diversity and complexity in rural conflict and protest.
To illustrate the multifaceted nature of peasant protest, the study focuses on four major forms of peasant protest and rebellion: tenacy disputes (1920-39), "the red peasant union movement" (1930-39), "everyday forms of resistance" (1940-45), and the "peasant rebellion of 1946"(p. 6). Each of these four forms of peasant protest occupy a separate chapter in Shin's study. In each case Shin explores the actual socio-economic circumstances of the peasants, concentrating on the varying effects of colonialism and commericalisation on different rural class strata. Contrary to the conventional view, Shin discovers that colonialism and commercialisation did not polarise, but greatly diversified the rural class structure, so that protests and struggles emerged around a variety of claims and issues which were perculiar to certain groups.
While Shin is at pains to demonstrate the variety of peasant protests and movements - in terms of their aims, social agents, sites, and specific grievances - he nonetheless tends to reduce dissent in each case to its barest economic threads. Peasant protest and grievances were (and are) also related to social class, and often provided scathing critiques of social hierarchies in rural Korea. In addition, many of these protests were expressed in rural folk culture, art and ritual performance, such as p'ansori. These cultural elements of peasant protest and dissent also have a contemporary (albeit re-worked) validity (see, for example, Choi 1995). The reconstruction and reworking of these mechanisms of protest within the context of postcolonial modernity in South Korea are, unfortunately, not considered at all in Shin's study. In purporting to address the central role of peasant protests in shaping Korea's modern history, Shin thus overlooks this vital deployment of cultural forms of protest and dissent in contemporary social conflicts. An unfortunate omission from Shin's study is thus the recognition of the cultural dimensions of peasant protest, both in the past and today.
Shin must, nonetheless, be commended for the richness of his historical account and his detailed exploration of the four types of peasant movements in colonial Korea. The study is also impressive in its intricate usage of historical sources. Despite some unfortunate omissions, Shin's book provides an excellent account of peasant protest in colonial Korea, and adds considerably to a growing genre of scholarship which explores the role of social forces in shaping Korea's modern history. This book would be a valuable addition to the collection of any scholar of modern Korean society or history, as well as an appropriate inclusion in any general reading list for students of Korean Studies.
ReferencesAbelmann, Nancy 1996. Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Choi, Chungmoo 1995. 'The Minjung Culture Movement and the Construction of Popular Culture in Korea'. In Wells 1995.
Koo, Hagen 1994. State and Society in Contemporary Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wells, Kenneth (ed.) 1995. South Korea's Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, Manoa.