Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea

by Gi-Wook Shin

The period from 1876 to 1946 in Korea marked a turbulent time when the country opened its market to foreign powers, became subject to Japanese colonialism, and was swept into agricultural commercialization, industrialization, and eventually postcolonial revolutionary movements. Gi-Wook Shin examines how peasants responded to these events, and to their own economic and political circumstances, with protests that shaped the course of postwar revolution in the north and reform in the south. Utilizing interviews, documentary research, and statistical analysis, Shin analyzes variation in peasant activism and its historical, political, and socioeconomic roots, and offers a major revisionist interpretation. The study contributes to an understanding of Korea's rural political economy during the colonial era, Japanese agricultual policy, and the historical legacy of colonialism for post war social and political change in Korea.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Benemint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gi-Wook Shin is a historian-friendly sociologist, and the book is written as a sociological work. That means he spends a lot of pages discussing the previous works -- which is actually useful because the rural economy is a huge topic in the history of colonial Korea, and you get to see the layout of major arguments (up to 1996) here. It also means that you'll get to see some basic regression analyses (yes, numbers). But I find the small-scale statistical analyses like this interesting and informative.

To summarize his point, he finds that peasant protests in the early 1920s were fewer but bigger in scale, those in the 1930s were more frequent but a lot smaller in scale. While these tenancy disputes were class conflicts, the Red Peasant Union active in the North was more about state-society conflicts (!!). During the wartime, peasants only did passive resistance (i.e. weapons of the weak), but they were nation-based conflicts. I am not quite sure how he jumped from passive resistance to national consciousness, because similar everyday resistance was happening in homeland Japan as well. He only offers a speculation regarding the cause of the 1946 uprising in the South -- not conclusive but somewhat related to the tenancy dispute experiences in the 1930s (not the Red Peasant Union in the North as Cumings claims). Middle-level peasants who had something to lose, as opposed to the lowest strata who have nothing to lose in Marx's prediction, were the main agents of actions throughout these periods.

Quite a quick read if you are interested in the topic. If you read a few chapters from Landlords, Peasants and Intellectuals in Modern Korea in advance, you'll see whom Shin was arguing against.

[Juhyundred · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of dry but very thorough overview of existing scholarship on peasant's movements and rural economy in colonial Korea. The author presents a thesis that peasant's movements were not "nationalist peasant movements or communist peasant movements but peasant's peasant movements." As such he focuses on the class interests and conditions of the peasantry, and analyzes the development of their movements over the whole colonial period, with some attention given to late Joseon and the early post-WWII years as well. The writing is a little overburdened and Shin's rebukes of "Marxist" strawmen gets a little tiring.