User:Madalibi/民族

Call this Ethnic nationalism in East Asia?

Minzoku, minzu, minjok. Ethnic nationalism and conceptions of race in Japan, China, and Korea. Redirects from all three pronunciations; neutrality would demand to put the main page at "民族."

Has been translated as "race," "nationality," "nation," "race-nation," "ethnic group," "ethnie," "ethnos."

"notoriously contested word" (Mullaney 2011: 14), "one of the most controversial and pivotal concepts in modern Chinese history" (Mullaney 2011: 21)

There should be a wiki called Ethnicity in China.

QUOTE: "The term minjok is a neologism first invented by Japanese intellectuals in the early Meiji period. As Schmid (1997) has pointed out, the term was used as a powerful conceptual tool by Korea, Japanese, and Chinese scholars to reconceive the nation and rewrite its historical past. In Korea, the term first appeared in the editorials of a number of daly newspapers, but its usage was not widely accepted until the publication of Sin's Toksa sillon. This work provided the fundamental critique of conventional Confucian historriography and "by setting the bounds of the neologism, moved to establish a vision of the nation as a historically defined racial identity" (1997: 31)." (Jager: 152, note 8)

QUOTE: "The term minjok was part of the new lexicon that accompanied the rise of nationalism in East Asia. Pronounced minjok in Korean, minzu in Chinese, and minzoku in Japanese, the two characters of this neologism had strong resonances with ancient terms for ethnic or racial groupings. The first character, min, appeared in the most ancient texts as a term for 'people,' whereas the second character, also present in classical texts, denoted the 'clan,' 'tribe.' or 'family.' Both terms were separately combined with other characters to designate a variety of social groupings, variously translated in English as 'ethnicity' or 'race.' However, it seems that in none of the pre-modern wrtings of Korea, China, or Japan were these two characters regularly linked as a single compound to designate large collectivities. This very combination – two venerable characters traditionally used to denote various / types of social groups – served to blur the term's recent origins, suggesting an etymology that, like the claims being made for the nation, stretched into the distant past. Moreover, with its individual components giving the term a somewhat organic touch through its intimation of a popular (min) and familial (jok) derivation, it proved most useful for intellectuals writing about the nation as a natural entity."(Schmid 2002: 172-73.)

Schmid 1997: "Rediscovering Manchuria: Sin Ch'aeho and the Politics of Territorial History in Korea." Journal of Asian Studies 56.1 (February 1997): 26-47. See also article in Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (eds.), Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

QUOTE: "The coerced integration of East Asia into the world system in the latter half of the nineteenth century incited writers not only in Korea, but also in China and Japan to reformulate inherited conceptions of nation and identity. Often infusing their writings with theories of Social Darwinism and civilization, writers throughout the..." (Schmid 1997: 26)

QUOTE: "Yet Manchuria represented much more than a rediscovered birthplace in Sin's narrative. It also served as a standard for measuring and narrating the history of the minjok. This function of Manchuria discloses Sin's injection of Social Darwinism into his historical writing. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals throughout East Asia engaged with Social Darwinism, employing it both to .... imperialism and devise plans to strengthen the nation (Pusey 1983). In Korea, it was through Japanese translations, the writings of Liang Qichao, and the essays of Yu Kilchun, one of the first Koreans to study abroad, that Social Darwinism gradually filtered through the intellectual community (Yi Kwangnin 1978, 1979; Sin Ilch'ŏl 1981_. The subject of struggle for Sin was neither the state nor the individual but the minjok–the Puyŏ minjok over the course of its history confronting five major rival / races: the Xianbi, Chinese, Malgal, Jurchen, and local tribes (t'ojok) (Sin 1908a, 473-74). The amounted to a political history, replete with heroes and battles, recounting the ups and downs of the minjok in its competition for existence–precisely what Sin proposed as the proper focus of the historian." (Schmid 1997: 34-35)

QUOTE: ".... writings did he broach the issue of the concept's newness. Instead, Sin used the rhetoric of rediscovery, emloying it to conceal the novelty and originality of a concept constructed with the aid of a neologism. The minjok was presented as an objective entity that centuries of historians had failed to recognize. Only through a proper historical perspective, Sin proposed, could the minjok be identified and traced by empirical inquiry" (Schmid 1997: 32)

QUOTE: "The term quickly became current among nationalist writers throughout East Asia. While its precise origins remain obscure – a testament to the term's ability to conceal its newness – the consistent use of minjok, like so many other terms relating to modernity and the nation, first appeared in Japan, although it quickly became popular in China as well. The appearance and usage of the word minjok in Korea have been subjected to relatively little scrutiny, with some historians deeming the novelty of the term to be irrelevant. The term rarely appears in the canonical texts of various streams of the Korean nationalist movement in the ten years before the Protectorate Treaty of 1905. Works as diverse as Yu Kilchun Observations of a Journey to the West (1895), Chu Sigyeong's essay "On National Language" (Kungmunnon, 1897), Min Yeonghwan's testimony before committing suicide in protest against the Protectorate Treaty (1905), them ore than two years of daily editions of the Tongnip sinmun (1896-98), and the prison interrogation records of Cheon Pongjun, leader of the Tonghak peasant armies (1895) all were completed without the use of minjok, even though each of them dealt extensively with national concepts. As in the cases of Japanese and Chinese intellectuals, most Korean intellectuals did not employ the word minjok in the early stages of the nationalist movement because it had not yet found a conspicuous place in their conceptin and definition of the nation." (Schmid 2002: 173)

Origins

Dikotter, Doak, Shin. To discuss:

Notion of 民族: Japanese neologism, widely adopted by East Asian elites
German "Volk"
"Ethnic consciousness," Social Darwinism
民族 as keystone of nationalist discourse in all three countries
China: Zhang Binglin, Liang Qichao
Korea: Shin Chaeho, beginnings of "nationalist historiography"
Japan: important in debates between state and society; kokumin-based nationalism vs. minzoku-based nationalism; Pan-Asianism

Could stop around 1910 (Japanese annexation of Korea) or 1911 (Xinhai Revolution).

Pre-WWII

Japan

About the Yamato race and race-based Pan-Asianism in Japan and its empire. Attempts to reform or improve the Korean race (search minzoku in Hyung-il Pai's Constructing 'Korea' Origins); Tokyo Anthropological Association; anti-statism

China

Zhonghua minzu, Republican historiography, eugenics, Chinese ethnology

Korea

Korean resistance against Japanese rule was based on the belief in the uniqueness and purity of the Korean minjok.

Post-WWII

Korea

Japan

China

Historiography

China

Korea

Japan

Bibliography

China

Leibold, James. (2006). "Competing Narratives of Racial Unity in Republican China." Modern China 32.2: 181-220.