루쉰을 통해 다시 본 리영희의 문화대혁명

Abstract

This paper examines Korean journalist and scholar Ri Yŏng-hŭi’s writings on contemporary China in the 1960s and 1970s with a view to reconsider his dubious legacy as a progressive Korean writer writing about communist China. Ri’s positive description of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s was especially influential among college students and intellectuals in Korea. However, witnessing the social changes in China in the 1980s and then the collapse of the socialist world around 1990, Ri stopped writing about the Mao era. It is important to note the meaning of Ri’s retreat at this time because he never denied or withdrew any part of his earlier writings on China. At the core of Ri’s description of the Cultural Revolution lies the idea of “human revolution,” by which he means reforming people’s minds into awakened and selfless ones. In this understanding of the Cultural Revolution, values of awakening, which Ri learns from Lu Xun, and socialist collectivity coexist without conflict. In Ri’s view, even Lu Xun was a selfless mind standing with the people and recognizing ordinary people’s revolution. The reason why Ri suddenly ceased writing about the Mao era without clear explanation was probably that he could neither give up his views on the positive effects of the Cultural Revolution, nor account for its positive and negative effects at the same time. I suggest that this was where Ri was puzzled and was the point which later generation of Koreans studying or writing about Maoist China should go back to and contemplate on.