1900년대 초반 신채호 "민족" 개념의 계보와 동아시아적 맥락

The Genealogy and East Asian Context of Sin Ch'aeho's Concept of "Ethnic Nation" in the Firth Decade of the Twentieth Century

Sin Ch'aeho(1880-1936) is renowned as one of the creators of the Korean nationalism in early twentieth century, and one of the pioneering nationalist historiographers. While narrating "nation", Sin tended to use two different terms, "kungmin"(Jap. kokumin) and "minjok"(Jap. minzoku). While the former pointed to the political nation characterized by strong "national consciousness" and "sense of unity", the latter meant "ethnic nation", and was often used interchangeably with the term "race"("injong"). The latter was seen as a necessary prerequisite for the creation of the former, and was habitually described in the "familial" terms - as "country-wide extended family". In the same vein, national history was regarded as "the genealogical book of the great family called nation". In this way, the Confucian loyalty towards one's family, clan and clan ancestors was "re-oriented" towards the nation-state; at the same time, Sin Ch'aeho explicitly appealed to his countrymen to discount the traditional familial and clan ties and put the utmost value upon "nation", "everybody's family", instead. "Familialization" of nation made it possible and even necessary to emphasize the importance of the purported "progenitor of all Koreans", Tan'gun, and describe the whole Korean history as the story of Tan'gun's descendants - "the sacred tribe of Puyŏ". While Sin Ch'aeho acknowledged the existence of "non-Puyŏ" components in the historical ethnic make-up of the Koreans, he downplayed it and described "Puyŏ tribe" as the ethnic "core" of the Korean nation. The emphasis upon "bloodline" and "ethnic descent" in narrativizing the nation were not limited in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century's East Asia to Sin Ch'aeho only: rather, it was a regional trend, and Sin Ch'aeho was an organic part of it. He seems to have been strongly influenced by the "family-state" ideologies of contemporaneous Meiji Japan, and to independently develop the ideas which often paralleled the narratives of the radical nationalists of late Qing China, especially Liu Shifu (1884-1915) and Zhang Binglin (1868-1936), who also tended to view the ethnic Han Chinese as "Yellow Emperor descendants". It looks as if Sin Ch'aeho's "nation as big family" ideology was crucial in making modern nationalism more "natural" for the Korean intellectuals, with their Confucian background.