푸순(撫順)탄광과 한중소설

Abstract

The largest open coal mine of Asia lies in Fushun, a village located in the east of Shenyang city in Northeast China. Regarding the Fushun coal mine as “the most important place in the future of the Empire,” after the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese government immediately occupied Fushun, depriving the Chinese government of its developmental rights, and set out on a full-scale development of the mine. Indeed, Fushun became the crucial place for Japan’s economic invasion. However, from the standpoint of Chinese and Korean people the exploitation of labor was also the most tragic. Although many Chinese and Korean scholars have been keenly aware of the importance of Fushan mine, only two have written novels based on it—a Korean writer, Han Sulya, and a Chinese writer, Wang Qiuying. In 1926, Han Sulya lived in Fushun with his family for over a year, and acquired a proletarian consciousness. Upon his return, he published the short novel Night of the Dormitory. This novel portrays the toil-filled life of a Korean miner, newly migrated to Manchuria, detailed from the writer’s proletarian point of view. Later in 1940, Wang Qiuying, who was born in Fushun, published a novella, Coal Mine, set in the background of the Fushan coal mine. This novella is based on the realities of life in the Fushun mine, and successfully depicts the fate and hard work that a Chinese miner and his family must endure to survive. This research is a comparative study of the commonalities and differences between these two novels.