Since the mid-1990s, Vladimir Tikhonov has built up a solid reputation as a scholar of Korean history. His articles on the Korean experience with modernity in the decades preceding and during Japanese colonial rule have appeared in many journals, including this one. In his latest work, Tikhonov takes up a single book-length theme: the role of Social Darwinism in shaping the variety of Korean nationalist thought and activism from the 1880s to the 1910s. He also adds useful ideas on the effects of that discourse in subsequent history including that of divided Korea after World War II. His probe is heavily focused on collective issues and only marginally on individual survival and success.
Like all good intellectual historians, Tikhonov traces the genealogy and variants of Social Darwinism in the West and narrates how the concept arrived in Korea via direct sojourns and studies by some members of the Korean elite in Europe, America, and Japan as well as via translated treatises in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The burgeoning press in Korea also played a major role in the dissemination and discussion of the concept. In the subtitle of the book, Tikhonov puts quotation marks around “Survival.” I would have put those marks around Ideology instead. This is not a mere quibble, for as his work demonstrates in detail, Social Darwinism in Korea was never a single ideology but a conglomeration of understandings and beliefs that emerged over time, and different thinkers and leaders drew not only different but even contrary conclusions from it about ensuring the survival of the Korean nation. Survival as an end was thus the relatively clearer of the two words at least until the Russo-Japanese War and the start of the Japanese Protectorate over Korea, whereas the “survival of the fittest” talk was replete with contradictions from the outset and the contradictions grew further as newer events unfolded.
The Korean monarchy hurtled from one crisis after another until Japan annexed the country in 1910. Then of course the goal of survival also came to be invested with newer meanings. Were, for example, the boundaries of nation, culture, and state inextricably linked with one another, or could the former two be preserved under the Japanese imperial rule or under a Japan-led Pan-Asian solidarity movement? How one answered the question produced everything from resistance and freedom struggles against Japan to varieties of accommodation and collaboration with Tokyo. The answer also spawned all manner of new educational proposals. Tikhonov extensively examines all such topics with erudition and insight. He mines a rich array of both primary and secondary Korean, Chinese, and Japanese sources, and adds illuminating observations from works in English and other European languages. His work is a path-breaking examination of its kind in English, though Yi Kwangnin and others following his footsteps have published numerous writings on the subject in Korean.
Several merits of Tikhonov's book are worth dwelling upon here. One is that he not only presents the thinking of eminent Korean intellectuals such as Yu Kilchun, Sŏ Chaep'il, Yun Ch'iho, Sin Ch'aeho, An Ch'angho, Chang Chiyŏn, Pak Ŭnsik, Yi Kwangsu, Ch'oe Namsŏn and others but also the viewpoints of educated men and women below the elite level who increasingly spoke on national issues in the newspapers and magazines that were springing up all over Korea. And it is remarkable how Social Darwinism's interpretations by the Chinese intellectual giant Liang Qichao provided a pervasive tool of analysis to elite and non-elite authors alike in the first decades of the 20th century.
The second is the way Tikhonov highlights the influence of Social Darwinism on Han Yong'un, a reformist Buddhist monk generally better known for his poetry. How the “survival of the fittest” theme was reinterpreted by Han within his humanistic value system makes for an intriguing and enlightening reading for anyone who may not have studied him before. In addition, that part of Tikhonov's study shows how proudly Asia-rooted the Buddhist progressive thinking was in contrast to the West-oriented “might is right” kind of currents circulating more widely.
The third valuable contribution of Tikhonov is the juxtaposition of those who saw Korea's survival, strength, and prosperity in its wholesale Christianization accompanied by a repudiation of its Neo-Confucian past, and those who saw that their country's salvation lay more in the revival of the ancient martial vigor and masculine culture before Neo-Confucianism presumably emasculated it by its “effeminate” stress on mind over the body, brush over the sword. One school would have created a replica of the Christian West in Korea, raising all kinds of questions about the core meaning of identity; the other was fraught with a strident nativism and an elusive essentialism.
Yet Tikhonov is astute in pointing out that even when renouncing and denouncing Neo-Confucianism, these Social Darwinist thinkers frequently relied upon Confucian moral idioms to bolster their appeal. One might add that this, in fact, was in keeping with what the Chinese Neo-Confucians themselves had done: While rebelling against the unacceptable power of Buddhism, Song Neo-Confucians relied very heavily on ideas derived from that very philosophy to create their own cosmology and worldviews. Such ironies and paradoxes have alwaysdelighted me in history, and Tikhonov's work gives us more to savor.
Today, Social Darwinism as a doctrine is only recalled in historical contexts, but looking around we still find its echoes, sans the phrase, everywhere. International competitions in commerce, trade, culture, military might, ethnic ambitions, and athletic events continue to show its undiminished presence even amidst all the expansive talk of globalization. In that sense, Tikhonov's learned study is not just about old Korea; at a subtler level it provokes thought about the “underdeveloped” visions in which we all remain trapped.
