How South Koreans Interpreted Modern China: &ITSouth Korean Studies of Modern Chinese History during the Cold War Era&IT

Abstract

The purposes of this paper are to analyze how three South Korean scholars-Kim Jun-yop, Min Tu-ki, and Rhee Yeung-hui-interpreted modern China during the Cold War era and thereby show that the development of South Korean studies on modern Chinese history was linked to the global Cold War. It was only after the Korean War that South Koreans began to study modern Chinese history in earnest. Despite anticommunist pressure on academic interests in the field, South Korean interpretations of modern Chinese history at the time were not uniform. For example, Min viewed it as the history of the establishment of a modern state, while Rhee saw it as the history of the revolutionary movement to overcome Western modernity. What is also interesting is that each type of interpretation matched its proponent's attitudes toward and understanding of modernization. More precisely, each researcher's understanding of modernization was an important and powerful argument for his interpretation and description of modern Chinese history. In this sense, it can be said that South Korean studies of modern Chinese history during the Cold War era were the products of intellectual activities that included selective acceptance, reinterpretation, and criticism of the cultural Cold War symbolized by modernization theory.