Transnational prejudices -Sino-Korean mutual perception through Japanese lenses-

Abstract

This essay focuses on the mutual perception of Koreans and Chinese during the colonial period through the analysis of writings from Pan Yangyao and Huang Yanpei, two Chinese intellectuals who visited Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, and from Yi Siyǒng, who published in 1934 a rebuttal to Huang Yanpei’s book. Chinese assessment of Koreans draws heavily on the Japanese stereotyped view of Koreans as lazy and untrustworthy. In those authors’ eyes, Korean flaws often seem to serve as a contrast to enhance qualities associated with the Japanese. Here inversion is not so much a dichotomized binary with Korea as the inverted China, but rather with Korea as an inverted Japan. In other words, Korea is presented as a warning of what could happen to China without an arousing of Chinese national consciousness. Consequently, while the Chinese are observing and describing colonial Korea, their narrative is actually more about China. The rebuttal of Huang Yanpei by Yi Siyŏng displays the same pattern of inversion in figurating Chinese alterity. Yi praises Japan’s qualities in order to underscore Chinese shortcomings. China is not so much presented as an inverted Korea than as an inverted Japan.In other words, Sino-Korean mutual perception during the colonial period was not simply the result of direct experience in China for Koreans and in Korea for Chinese; it was also the product of the Japanese views and stereotypes on both China and Korea which were used as a means for Chinese and Koreans to figurate their mutual alterity.