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North Korea KOREA IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY WORLD ORDER
The early nineteenth century witnessed a period of sharp
decline in which most of these new developments were
extinguished. Harsh persecution of Roman Catholics began in 1801,
and agricultural production declined, forcing many peasants to
pursue slash-and-burn agriculture in the mountains. Popular
uprisings began in 1811 and continued sporadically throughout the
rest of the century, culminating in the
Tonghak (Eastern Learning) Movement
(see Glossary)
of the 1860s, which spawned a
major peasant rebellion in the 1890s.
Korean leaders were aware that China's position had been
transformed by the arrival of powerful Western gunboats and
traders, but they reacted to the Opium War (1839-42) between
China and Britain by shutting Korea's doors even tighter. In 1853
United States Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his "black
ships" entered Edo Bay, beginning the process of opening Japan to
foreign trade. Korea, however, continued its isolationist policy.
Japan's drastic reform of its institutions--the Meiji Restoration
of 1868--and subsequent industrialization was attributed by
Korean literati to Japan's alleged inferior grasp of Confucian
doctrine. Through its successful rebuff of French and American
attempts to "open" Korea, the regime was encouraged to think it
could hold out indefinitely against external pressure. (The
U.S.S. General Sherman steamed up the Taedong River in
1866 almost to P'yongyang, whereupon the natives burned the ship
and killed all its crew; Kim Il Sung claimed that his
great-grandfather was involved in this incident.)
Reforms from 1864 to 1873 under a powerful leader named the
Taewn'gun, or Grand Prince (Yi Ha-ung, 1821-98), offered further
evidence of Korean resilience; Yi Ha-ung was able to reform the
bureaucracy, bring in new talent, extract new taxes from both the
yangban and commoners, and keep the imperialists at bay.
Korea's descent into the maelstrom of imperial rivalry was quick
after this, however, as Japan succeeded in imposing a
Western-style unequal treaty in February 1876, giving its
nationals extraterritorial rights and opening three Korean ports
to Japanese commerce. China sought to reassert its traditional
position in Korea by playing the imperial powers off against each
other, with the result that Korea entered into unequal treaties
with the United States, Britain, Russia, Italy, and other
countries. These events split the Korean court into pro-Chinese,
pro-Japanese, pro-United States, and pro-Russian factions, each
of which influenced policy until the final annexation of Korea by
Japan in 1910. Meanwhile, various Korean reform movements sought
to get underway, influenced by either Japanese or American
progressives.
A small group of politically frustrated Korean aristocrats in
the early 1880s came under the influence of the Japanese educator
and student of Western knowledge, Fukuzawa Yukichi. This group of
Koreans saw themselves as the vanguard of Korea's
"enlightenment," a term that referred to their nation's release
from its traditional subordination to China and its intellectual
views and political institutions. The group, led by Kim Ok-kyun,
included Kim Hong-jip, Yun Ch'i-ho, and Yu Kil-chun. Yun became
an influential modernizer in the twentieth century, and Yu became
the first Korean to study in the United States--at the Governor
Drummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts. Kim Ok-kyun, impressed
by the Meiji Restoration, sought to stage a coup d'état in 1884
with a handful of progressives, including Philip Jaisohn (S
Chae-p'il, 1866-1948), and about 200 Japanese legation soldiers.
Resident Chinese troops quickly suppressed it, however, and Kim
fled to Japan. Philip Jaisohn, a Korean who had studied in the
United States, was the first Korean to become a United States
citizen. He had returned to Korea in 1896 to publish one of its
first newspapers.
For a decade thereafter, China reasserted a rare direct
influence when Yuan Shikai momentarily made China first among the
foreign powers resident in Korea. He represented the scholar-
general and governor of Tianjin, Li Hongzhang, as Director-
General Resident in Korea of Diplomatic and Commercial Relations
in Seoul in 1885. A reformer in China, Yuan had no use for Korean
reformers and instead blocked the slightest sign of Korean
nationalism.
Japan put a definitive end to Chinese influence during the
Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, seizing on the reinvigorated
Tonghak Movement, which spawned a large rebellion in 1894.
Uniting peasants against Western pressure, growing Japanese
economic penetration and their own corrupt and ineffectual
government, the rebellion spread from the southwest into the
center of the peninsula, thus threatening Seoul. The hapless
court invited China to send troops to put the rebellion down,
whereupon Japan had the pretext it needed to send troops to
Korea. After defeating Chinese forces, Japan declared Korea
independent, thus breaking its long tributary relationship with
China. Thereafter, Japan pushed through epochal reforms that
ended the old civil service examination system, abolished
traditional class distinctions, ended slavery, and established
modern fiscal and judicial mechanisms.
Korean reformers influenced by the West, such as Philip
Jaisohn, launched an Independence Club (Tongnip Hyphoe) in 1896
to promote Westernization. They used the vernacular
han'gl in their newspaper, the Tongnip
simmun (The Independent), publishing alternate pages in
English. The club included many Koreans who had studied Western
learning in Protestant missionary schools, and for a while it
influenced not only young reformers but also elements of the
Korean court; one of the reformers was Yi Sng-man, otherwise
known as Syngman Rhee (1875-1965), who later served as the first
president of South Korea. The club was repressed, and it
collapsed after two years.
The Korean people gradually became more hostile towards
Japan. In 1897 King Kojong (r. 1864-1907), fleeing Japanese
plots, ended up in the Russian legation; he conducted the
nation's business from there for a year and shortly thereafter
declared Korea to be the "Great Han [Korean] Empire," from which
comes the name Taehan Min'guk, or Republic of Korea. It
was a futile last gasp for the Chosn; the only question was
which imperial power would colonize Korea.
By 1900 the Korean Peninsula was the focus of an intense
rivalry between the powers then seeking to carve out spheres of
influence in East Asia. Russia was expanding into Manchuria and
Korea, and briefly enjoyed ascendancy on the peninsula when King
Kojong sought its help in 1897. In alliance with France and
Germany, Russia had forced Japan to return the Liaodong
Peninsula, which it had acquired from China as a result of its
victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). Japan promptly
leased the region from China and continued to develop it; shortly
thereafter, in 1900, Japanese forces intervened with the other
imperial powers to put down the Boxer Uprising, a xenophobic
conflict in China against Christians and foreigners. Russia
continued to develop the railroad system in Manchuria and to
exploit forests and gold mines in the northern part of Korea. The
United States, fearing complete exclusion from the region--
especially from China--had declared its open door policy in 1900,
but lacked the means to assert its will. During this period,
however, Americans also were given concessions for rail and
trolley lines, waterworks, Seoul's new telephone network, and
mines. Japan briefly pulled back from the peninsula, but its 1902
alliance with Britain emboldened Japan to reassert itself there.
Russia and Japan initially sought to divide their interests
in Korea, suggesting at one point that the thirty-eighth parallel
be the dividing line between their spheres of influence. The
rivalry devolved into the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) when Japan
launched a successful surprise attack on the Russian fleet at
Port Arthur (Dalian; or Japanese, Dairen). Japan electrified all
of Asia by becoming the first nonwhite country to subdue one of
the "great powers."
Under the peace treaty brokered by Theodore Roosevelt in a
conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and signed in 1905,
Russia recognized Japan's paramount rights in Korea. Japan would
not question the rights of the United States in its colony, the
Philippines, and the United States would not challenge Japan's
new protectorate, established in 1905 to control Korea's foreign
policy. Japan installed a resident-general and, two years later,
deposed King Kojong. Significant Korean resistance followed this
deposition, spreading through several provinces as local
yangban organized militias for guerrilla warfare against
Japan. In 1909, An Chung-gn, a Korean assassin, shot It
Hirobumi, the former Japanese resident-general who had concluded
the protectorate agreement; two expatriate Koreans in San
Francisco also gunned down Durham Stevens, a foreign affairs
adviser to the Japanese who had lauded their efforts in Korea. It
was too little and too late. In 1910 Japan turned Korea into its
colony, thus extinguishing Korea's hard-fought independence,
which had first emerged with Silla and Kogury resistance to
Chinese pressures.
Under Japanese imperial pressure that began in earnest with
Korea's opening in l876, the Chosn Dynasty faltered and then
collapsed in a few decades. The dynasty had had an extraordinary
five-century longevity, but although the traditional system could
adapt to the changes necessary to forestall or accommodate
domestic or internal conflict and change, it could not withstand
the onslaught of technically advanced imperial powers with strong
armies. The old agrarian bureaucracy had managed the interplay of
different and competing interests by having a system of checks
and balances that tended over time to equilibrate the interests
of different parties. The king and the bureaucracy kept watch
over each other, the royal clans watched both, scholars
criticized or remonstrated from the moral position of Confucian
doctrine, secret inspectors and censors went around the country
to watch for rebellion and assure accurate reporting, landed
aristocrats sent sons into the bureaucracy to protect family
interests, and local potentates influenced the county magistrates
sent down from the central administration. The Chosn Dynasty was
not a system that modern Koreans would wish to restore, but it
was a sophisticated political system, adaptable enough and
persistent enough to have given unified rule to Korea for half a
millennium.
Data as of June 1993
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