2  Rooted in a history of struggle

Note

In (messy) progress

For the Hansalim founders, democracy was not simply a suitable management structure but a fundamental way of life that had been tested and proved through decades of struggle against successive dictatorships. The role of cooperatives in the struggle for democracy in Korea went back to the pro-democracy movement of the 1960s and 70s (in which many of the Hansalim founders were involved1) and inherited a long tradition of anti-state resistance from the pre-war independence movement (see Figure 2.1). But even before the western models of cooperatives and credit unions were transmitted to Korea there existed a long and sophisticated tradition of cooperative self-governed institutions in rural Korea.

In this chapter we take a long detour through history to understand the deep foundations of the Korean practice of democratic self-government as a peasant tradition that inspired the resistance against colonial rule and domestic dictatorship and found its clearest modern expression in the Hansalim Life Movement. This part of the story introduces not only a fascinating world of rural peasant culture but also a long evolution in the roles and rights of women, the end of slavery, religious transformation and even some philosophy. Brace yourselves.

2.1 Cultural-Historical Background

If you look closely at the timeline in Figure 2.1 you will notice that, before the annexation of Korea by Japan, it was known as ‘Joseon.’ The entire peninsula of Korea from the boarder with Manchuria in the north to the Island of Jeju in the South Sea was governed by the Yi Dynasty for more than 500 years from 1392 until a brief period of independent modernisation began in 1897 only to be cut short when Japan began its take-over in 1904.2 The Yi Dynasty and its literary elites were heavily influenced by Confucian ideology and statecraft and the Joseon era was shaped by the dominance of a uniquely Korean form of neo-Confucianism.

The influence of Confucianism in Korea is a legacy of centuries of intellectual and cultural commerce with China as Korea’s nearest neighbour by land. However, in the context of the history of Korean civilization (between 3000 and 5000 years depending on who you ask) Confucian thought plays only one part among many.

The transition from the Goryeo period (918-1392) to the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) brought with it a turn away from Buddhism as the state religion towards neo-Confucianism. Reacting to the internal conflicts and upheaval of the late Goryeo period, the newly established Joseon state sought to create a more stable Kingdom. On the one hand, with a purposeful focus on Confucian ethics, the state enacted tax reforms to stabilise government finances while eliminating unfair tax burdens and refocusing the economy on agriculture and away from commerce and other economic activities3 regarded as improper (because they were profit-making). On the other hand, new measures were used to protect class privilege by adopting the neo-Confucian model of family and social structure as state ideology; perpetuating chattel slavery, reinforcing dependence of the majority of commoners on feudal systems and closing down social mobility.

Figure 2.1: Timeline of Korean history and evolution of the cooperative movement

The Joseon class system

For 500 years consecutive monarchs, aided by a ruling gentry of Confucian Scholarly Officials, the yangban, used gradual changes in policy, law and customs to transform the peninsula into a caste-based and rigidly patriarchal society structured around the Confucian values of filial piety, loyalty (to superiors) and propriety - knowing ones place and following the rules. Although already in place in simplified form for centuries earlier, by the late Joseon period the hereditary class system had become highly complex (see Table 2.1), restrictive and increasingly unstable. Joseon society was categorised into the citizen classes (yangin) and the lowborn classes (cheonmin). The former were subject to taxation (with the exception of the yangban) and were given different levels of rights, obligations and legal protections according to their respective status. The latter, though they were exempt from paying tax, were more or less excluded from normal society except when their work was useful to a member of the citizen classes.

Outside the royal family, the most privileged classes were the yangban (or ‘two orders’) of officials: the civilian scholar-officials and the military officials. They were the hereditary landed aristocrats of Korean society and took up roles as high-level government officials. They lived in substantial houses with estates along with their extended families, servants and slaves. Their relative status within the yangban class was determined by a combination of family lineage, patronage, scholarly tradition (or faction) and the national civil service exam.

Next in status to the yangban were the secondary status classes. Most of these were either the mid-level officials which included the (jungin) – who had expertise in languages, medicine, law, astronomy, accounting, drafting, calligraphy and painting – and the government clerks responsible for administration (hyangni). These classes were also hereditary and lived in the centre of towns and cities.4

Next came the descendants of the concubines of yangban and mid-level officials. They were the illegitimate sons of aristocrats and officials who were excluded from the rights and privileges enjoyed by legitimate heirs. Instead they inherited their mother’s lower status and, although they had relatively more access to wealth and education than their commoner peers, they were systematically discriminated against in law and custom.

Almost at the bottom of the hierarchy of citizens came the commoners (sangmin or yangmin). They were the peasant farmers (property-owning and tenant), craftsmen and merchants. Together they formed the majority of the population and bore the heaviest tax burden in addition to being subject to corvee labour and military conscription. Finally, at the very bottom, were the commoners who worked in lowborn positions, mainly low-ranking service jobs for the state that were deemed to be undignified or unclean. Although they legally shared the same status as regular commoners they were treated more like the lowborn.

Now we come to the ‘lowborn’. The cheonmin were those without legal status as citizens, whose work was seen as demeaning or corrupting but whose services were necessary for the commoners or desired by the royal family, the yangban and the other official classes. The most respectable of the lowborn were the propertyless professionals who included shamans, healers, gisaeng (female entertainers or courtesans) and servants. Below them were the baekjeong or ‘ignorant men’ who were the butchers, wicker weavers, itinerant performers, executioners and tanners or leather workers. Not only were the baekjeong discriminated against in law and through other customs to do with speech and clothing but they also had to live in separate communities, segregated from the rest of society. Finally, there were the unfree (nobi) – the concubines, public slaves (state-owned) and private slaves – who were chattel property. Even their status as slave was hereditary and thus their children automatically became the property of their yangban masters. Thus, discrimination against lower status groups by those of higher status ran throughout the whole hierarchy of Joseon society as driven by the intension of ensuring the political and financial stability of the government and the ruling classes.

Table 2.1: Hierarchy of social classes in the late Joseon period.
Category Class Description Tax status
Citizens
(yangin)		 Yangban (the two orders):
1. Civil branch - scholar-officials.
2. Military branch - military officials (relegated to mid-level officials by late Joseon).		 Hereditary ruling classes who lived as large extended families in houses with estates, servants and slaves. Exempt from paying tax.
2. Mid-level officials - jungin (technical officials) and hyangni (clerks). Hereditary administrative classes who lived in central districts of towns and cities. Low tax burden.
3. Descendants of the concubines of yangban and mid-level officials. Illegitimate sons of aristocratic and sub-aristocratic families, discriminated against in law and custom.
4. Commoners (sangmin / yangmin) - peasant farmers, craftsmen, merchants. Majority of the working population including property owning peasant and tenant farmers. Heaviest tax burden, subject to corvee labour and military conscription.
5. Commoners working in lowborn positions - low-ranking service jobs for the state. Legally classed as citizens but treated more like lowborn.
Lowborn
(cheonmin)		 6. Shamans (government and private), trained healers (government), servants, professional mourners, gisaeng (female entertainers including prostitutes). Social outcasts discriminated against in law and custom but with professional roles. Exempt until changes in law changed status of baekjeong to commoner (citizen). Registered private shamans taxed through special government office.
7. Ignorant men (baekjeong): butchers, wicker weavers, itinerant performers, executioners, tanners. Lowest status classes responsible for the jobs considered beneath the dignity of ordinary people and required to live in separate communities.
8. Nobi (unfree): concubines, government-owned gisaeng (courtesans), government-owned slaves, privately-owned slaves. Chattel property.

You might notice that one particular group of people is missing from this list in Table 2.1. With the exception of courtesans and concubines, there is no mention mothers, daughters and wives (legitimate ones) of the men of each class. That is because the status of women in Joseon requires its own discussion in the context of this wider class structure. And this story is much more complex and interesting than contemporary stereotypes of Korean society might lead you to believe. It begins, of course, with religion.

The social position of women

Prior to the Joseon Dynasty, during the Goryeo period the state religion was Buddhism and before that, Shamanism. The Silla kingdom (57 BC - 935 AD) and the early Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392) were matrilineal5 with most women retaining inheritance rights on an equal basis with men and independent of marriage (except among aristocratic families).6 Although women remained under the jurisdiction of men and their roles and behaviour were strictly defined, they nevertheless enjoyed some degree of agency and economic independence and protection of their property rights. It was also customary for newly married men to live with, and work for, their wife’s family for their first years of marriage as a form of dowry. In contrast, the convention introduced in Joseon times was for the wife to leave her family to live with her husbands family where she often became not much more than the servant of her mother-in-law.

Not only were many women in a better position in the domestic sphere in the Goryeo period, they also enjoyed more opportunities outside the home to participate in public life. In contrast to Confucianism, Buddhist doctrine allowed women to gain education by joining temples and also provided for a respectable way for women opt out of conventional family life by choosing a single life and living alone or becoming a nun. Buddhism also allowed for women to remarry without sanction and even have multiple husbands.7

However, it was not only class structure that was hardened during the Joseon period, but the role and status of women also suffered a massive decline. One key part of the state’s project of social reform was the radical transformation of cultural and legal structures to create a patriarchal society which enforced a strict division in gender roles in addition to class status with the family hierarchy as the central social structure. They legislated a shift to a patrilineal structure and strict primogeniture in which inheritance passed exclusively to the husband and then the eldest son.8 In addition to the economic subordination of women, the state propagated the neo-Confucian ideology of namhak yeomaeng (learned men, ignorant women) and promoted the ideal of the “wise mother, good wife” whose virtue was expressed through samjong chido (“three obediences”) – obedience to her father before marriage, her husband after marriage and her son after the death of her husband. Essentially women became the property of men; subject to complete control by their fathers and husbands, permitted only to aspire to becoming a wife and a mother.9 While severely eroding the rights and opportunities of women, the Joseon reforms also provoked a creative and evolving “culture of dissent” among Korean women of all classes who began to find ways to subvert patriarchal norms and retain certain forms of influence despite the limitations imposed on them.10

Although strictly limited, there were ways for individual women to gain influence and exercise some choice over their future outside of marriage, for example by becoming a shaman, gisaeng (entertainer) or healer.11 In addition, the rules and conventions of Confucian behaviour became progressively more relaxed the lower the social class. Thus, while the wives of Yangban (gentry) and royalty where hardly permitted to leave the inner rooms of their homes, slave women and commoners wives were able to leave the house to run errands, work in the fields or go to market. But this greater flexibility came at a heavy price since the livelihoods of commoners and slaves were often bitterly hard and dependent in large part on the favour of the yangban. Female slaves could not marry without their masters permission and would often be forced into marriage with other slaves by their masters to produce more slaves. They might be taken as concubines or used informally for sexual services by their masters and other members of the household. Gisaeng were especially vulnerable to sexual exploitation by men who considered them as “flowers on the roadside for anyone to pick.”12 Nevertheless, they gained formal education in the Chinese classics, music and literature and many took advantage of this education to write popular literature for the masses which often contained biting social commentary and satire and helped to produce a shared awareness of the suffering of the lower classes among the wider population. Finally, as a shaman, a women could become quite wealthy and influential since the demand for their services at all kinds of ceremonies, for divination and healing was high at all levels of society, from the commoners and to the royal household. However, as a lowborn status role it came with its own forms of discrimination and stigma.

In addition to the multiple ways in which Korean women found to subvert the social structures designed to subordinate them, there was of course huge variation in how strictly norms were enforced among the commoners and lowborn themselves away from the prying eyes of the yangban. Despite the aspiration of the ruling classes to impose their interpretation of confucian culture on the commoners, the influence of buddhist and shamanistic beliefs and practices were more deeply rooted among rural communities and impossible to displace. Perhaps tradition played a vital role in resisting a degradation of communal life from an innovative new value system. The most striking example of this resistance among the rural population is the spread of peasant cooperatives called ‘dure’ throughout the later Joseon.

Before we get into the development of dure, I feel I should reassure you that there are good reasons for the above detour about social structure in Joseon times. By now you might be wondering “What does this have to do with Hansalim and the practice of democracy?” Well, an insight into this cultural background is necessary to properly understand the evolution of self-governing and cooperative practices in Korean society which preceded the introduction of modern western models. In the case of Hansalim, much of the ethical and some of the procedural aspects of their governance practices originate in a rediscovery and reinterpretation of this history of cooperation from ancient times to the late Joseon period. The formation of these cooperative organisations makes sense only in the context of the cultural history. Now that is in place in your mind, we can look at the emergence of cooperative practices in pre-colonial Korea which culminate in the popularisation of dure.

2.2 Cooperation in pre-colonial Korea

More or less formal arrangements for organising mutual aid and cooperation within communities have been common in many societies around the world for hundreds if not thousands of years.13 Since the Unified Silla dynasty (668-935 CE) Korea was governed by a sophisticated centralised state with a professional civil service, a comprehensive system of law, taxation and land-tenure, a vast library of books of historical records and Buddhist writings, a ruling aristocracy and a state religion (Buddhism).

Following the collapse of Silla, the Goryeo dynasty was founded in 935 and the Confucian state model began to be adopted in earnest. It was based on the Tang system with the addition of powers delegated to officials to censor royal decisions (a kind of auditing role which) which set a precedents for maintaining a check on monarchical power that continued throughout the Joseon dynasty in various forms.

By the early Joseon the central government consisted of the monarch and a bureaucracy of central ministries and provincial governments with magistrates and local administrative divisions. The bureaucracy not only implemented the monarch’s policies but its leading representatives (from the civil and military official classes) also provided advice and criticism and had the power to rectify state policy and official appointments in opposition to the monarch.

One of the key mechanisms for guaranteeing the survival of this distribution of power was the rule that historians be present to record verbatim what was said in every meeting between the monarch, his officials and advisors from among the bureaucracy. This was part of the wider process of meticulous record keeping for the sake of transmitting a continuous historical record of daily events and decisions to future generations. Referred to as the Joseon Wangjo Shillok (Annals of the Joseon Dynasty), this chronologically arrange 2,077 volume history covers the first 472 years of the dynasty from 1392-1863 and records daily accounts of events, decisions and observations relating to all areas of Joseon life and society.14

This Confucianism-inspired method of regulating monarchic power created the conditions for a continuous competition for political influence between the monarch, the central bureaucracy and the regions and a constant eb and flow of alliance building ensued over the subsequent centuries as social and economic changes tipped the scales of power in favour of different constituencies at different times. This was the context in which cooperative organisation evolved, first among the ruling classes and later among the commoners.

Self-governing institutions among the aristocracy

In the early Joseon period, yangban in the provinces exercised their authority through local self-governing associations called yuhyangso, the membership of which was restricted to the most prominent yangban in the area who were listed in the local register.15 They chose a jwasu (head of the organisation), several byeolgam (officers) and a hyangni (regional official) through an election by majority vote of the organisation’s members. These organisations provided the yangban with a means of dominating the lower classes in their villages and districts while obstructing the central government’s influence. They became intensely political organisations and as a consequence were alternately promoted and abolished depending on which faction held more influence in the capitol.

By the mid Joseon period a new institution for governing the countryside had replaced the yuhyangso: the community compact (hyangyak). It was an idea developed by the Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) and based on the concept by Lu Dajun (1031-1082). The hyangyak was a voluntary association with the purpose of providing mutual assistance and edification in moral living for all members of society. It specified the virtues required in communal life, described meeting procedures, social etiquette and appropriate family and communal rituals.16

The hyangyak were created for large and small units of government from counties to villages and all residents in that region from a citizen class (yangban, mid-level officials and commoners) were required to join or face banishment.17 These organisations handled nearly all local affairs from arranging mutual aid, ensuring tax obligations to the state were met, punishing and rewarding behaviour and enforcing social norms. They were managed on the basis of written regulations and registers of people eligible to vote and take up official positions (i.e. a select group of yangban). As you might expect, these organisations served the interests of the yangban and often degenerated into means of organising illegal exploitation of the commoners.18

By the late Joseon period, the yangban had begun to form dongyak – which operated with even stricter separation between the yangban and commoners – and donggye – which were mutual aid societies that functioned like a combination of a credit-union and insurance fund to cover large expenses such as rebuilding bridges or paying for weddings. Although they were supposed to benefit the entire community, collected dues from all members and were run by consensus, commoners were excluded from decision making and gradually left to form their own organisations called chongye as a sort of rebellion against the the dongyak and dongye of the yangban.19

Cooperative organisation among the commoners

Gye had existed in various forms since long before the Joseon dynasty but it wasn’t until they were institutionalised as donggye by the yangban that they became a common feature of rural life in Korea. Following the eighteenth century, as commoners left the dongyak and donggye in increasing numbers to form their own mutual aid societies the yangban started to lose control of the villages. Improvements in agricultural technology and the growth of a monetary economy stimulated the rapid formation of gye (mutual aid societies) of all kinds, among all sections of society across the country.

The most common type, chongye (village gye) included all residents in a village without class discrimination including commoners and lowborn and was run by the members themselves. In practice they excluded the yangban who would not lower themselves to join since they could not expect to be given leadership positions. They collected membership dues and meticulously recorded their accounts and changes in personnel which included executive officers, mid-level managers and entry-level officers. The chongye typically made decisions on all aspects of village affairs and distribution of their resources by consensus through “no-holds-barred discussions.”20 somewhat like a hybrid of village assemblies and credit unions.

All types of gye, except the lest formal types formed by women or children, operated an office and wrote formal regulations to set out their purpose, bylaws, income and expenses.21 Gye became a wildly popular form of self-organising and mutual aid and in addition to the most popular chongye the were a multitude of gye organised by people for all kinds of purposes including22:

  • Nonggye: for raising agricultural funds and purchase equipment for farming.
  • Sanggye: for young men supporting elderly parents.
  • Geumsonggye: for protecting pine trees and preventing illegal use of the forests and mountains, such as slashing and burning.
  • Seodanggye: for raising money to run village schools.
  • Upigye: for livestock farmers.
  • Donggyeonggye: for people of the same age (especially yangban) to cultivate friendship and fun.
  • Saljugye: for slaves to unite and rebel against their masters.
  • Chimmokgye: friendship gye.
  • Informal gye formed by women or children for collective purchasing.

During the 300 years when gye were popular, the peak was the eighteenth century. But even as late as the early colonial period (1920s), when a formal census of gye was undertaken, 30,000 gye were recorded with a combined membership of around 80,000 (see Figure 2.1).

For women during the late Joseon and into the colonial period, gye offered a means for increasing economic independence despite the restrictive social hierarchy. This is because one legitimate area of relative autonomy for women was in the home, given the expectation that, in their role as housewife and mother, they control the household economy and oversee the education of their children. The latter provided an indirect route to involvement in affairs outside the home through their strong influence over their children, especially first born sons. The former, made it possible for women to accumulate some degree of economic power but careful management of the household finances. Through setting up their own gye women were able to gather their economic resources together for their own purposes independent from men and these later became a prototype for women’s associations and cooperatives in the colonial period.

In addition to participation in women’s gye, commoner and lowborn women found a greater role in the public life of the community through their participation in the activities of the chongye (village gye). One of the most important functions of the chongye in village life was to make decisions regarding collective farm labour which was organised through the dure system. Like gye, the dure was an ancient institution and it is not clear exactly when they originated but, by the Joseon period, their main function was as farmers’ coops which embodied the belief that “Farming is the foundation of the World.”23 As the rice transplanting technique became established during the eighteenth century, dure spread rapidly throughout the country until almost every village had at least one.

Most able-bodied commoners and lowborn (both men and women) in a village belonged to their village dure. Families of widows, the sick, and the elderly without adult males were exempt from participation, but they still received the benefits of collective labour without discrimination.24 Each dure had an office, a set of rules and regulations, a leader and a multiple people assigned specific roles including keeping the accounts, preparing meals, watching over livestock and overseeing those working in the fields each of whom was selected in annual elections.

The first of two general assemblies each each year was held before the farming season began as part of the homi modeum ritual when each members’ weeding hoe (homi) was hung together in the village hall and shamanic rituals were performed. After the rituals the members gathered over a meal to elect officers for the new year and plan the year’s work. At this meeting they also set wages, initiated new members and decided on repairs or purchasing of farming tools and musical instruments.

The work of the dure was not carried out continuously year round but specifically organised for the busy periods of the farming year when collective labour relieved the burden on individual households. These included rice planting, irrigation, weed pulling, harvesting, threshing and weaving hemp cloth. Much of this work was carried out to the accompaniment of a folk band or music performed by the dure members themselves. The work was broken up by episodes of feasting, music, games and dancing all covered by the expenses of the dure or by whichever member whose land was worked that day and had the means to provide it.

The end of the farming season was marked by a second general assembly and a finale of festivities known as homi geori (or homi ssisi in Jeolla province). The festival included mass group games such as a giant tug-of-war, musical entertainment, a mountain-god worshipping ritual, theatre and folktales, drinking and dancing. During the assembly the dure members settled the accounts and decided on the distribution of mutual aid.

The dure form of democratic practice was not simply a convenient management structure through which to organise collective work. It was far more than that, as a cultural institution encompassing the whole of communal life including not only economic solidarity and care of the vulnerable but also leisure and sporting activities, coming of age rites, training of the younger generation, and not least the artistic expression of collective identity through music, ritual and even visual arts. The picture of democratic practice that this conjures up is exceedingly rich and appealing as a way of transforming what could otherwise be a tedious and burdensome way of life into a more meaningful and satisfying rhythm of labour and relaxation, secured by the collective promise of mutual aid and cooperation.

This celebratory activity gradually evolved beyond the dure into an independent form of folk culture among the rural population which became immensely popular and is now commonly referred to as nong’ak.

The role of music and the arts

Nong’ak originally referred to agricultural festivals among the northwestern tribes of the Korean peninsula in the 3rd-century-CE at which singing and dancing were performed in shamanic rituals accompanied by simple instruments. Such rituals and the musical style associated with them are the indigenous roots of Korean traditional folk music that is still performed today. It includes a variety of sub-genres and regional peculiarities but the basic set of instruments are percussive (drums and gongs) with flutes and double-reed instruments often also playing a role alongside vocalisations and sometimes singing and a two-stringed fiddle. Very different from court music enjoyed by the aristocracy, nong’ak is highly complex rhythmically and also polyphonous and syncopated, giving it the feel of a wild combination of jazz and breakbeat.

A nongak performance typically included increases in tempo, volume and intensity until it provokes everyone to communal dancing until a prolonged sense of ecstatic togetherness is achieved at which point it crescendos to a sudden climactic flourish.

In Korea’s highly patriarchal society, structured by the most conservative form of Confucianism which restricted women to the role of housewives , Korean women in the 1920s were economically dependent on men, had little access to education and had very few opportunities outside of marriage, motherhood and housework. Despite these obstacles, many housewives and single women saved what little money and resource they had to set up their own consumer associations to support their economic needs and gain some level of independence.

The concept of housewife was used in Colonial period by colonial government and nationalist to restrict women’s roles to household and protect male power. Korean women took this concept and subverted it, transforming it into something different… (see book).

It is another step in a long history of Korean women of all classes finding ways to resist and subvert patriarchal Confucian norms and restrictions and to gain greater economic independence and social power.

2.3 Fighting for independence

The annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 was the culmination of a long history of invasions and exploitation of the peninsula. It solidified Japan’s control over Korea and began a long period of oppression during which many of the freedoms of Korean citizens were restricted and the colonial government embarked on a project to destroy Korean cultural, linguistic, and national identity and to completely assimilate Korea through a wholesale re-education of the population through economic domination and their own colonial school system.25 As part of this project, the colonial government also developed a national infrastructure of state-run agricultural and financial cooperatives to manage rural and industrial development and facilitate top-down control and decision making.26 The Korean resistance against the colonial government sought to apply alternative models of cooperativism inspired by grassroots movements from Europe and Japan as well as Korean traditional models of autonomous mutual self-help that had been already present in Korea since the precolonial era. These included reciprocal resource sharing associations called Gye27, cooperative labour associations called Dure28, mechanisms for voluntarily assisting those in need in the local community called Pumasi29 and the tradition of Kimjang, the communal making and sharing of Kimchi.

Thus, under Japanese colonial rule, cooperatives in Korea evolved along two parallel pathways – statist and grassroots – and while statist cooperatives appeared to contradict the very principles of cooperativism – being extensions of the state bureaucracy and neither independent nor democratic – grassroots cooperatives developed in connection with Korean nationalist and socialist movements dedicated to Korean independence.30

After the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, most cooperatives were forcibly converted into rural promotion movements or dissolved due to the mobilisation for war and their leaders were arrested.31 Following Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 the cooperative movement was further disrupted by the Korean war and the division of the peninsula.

2.4 Fighting for democracy

From the 1950s onwards, following the Korean war, grassroots cooperatives that had emerged as part of the anti-colonial independence movement in the 1920s and 30s began to re-form. At the same time the state adopted the colonial era apparatus of cooperatives created by the Japanese to control the rural and industrial economy. Park Chung-hee united the agricultural and financial cooperatives created by the colonial government to form the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF or Nonghyup) which now boasts of being one of the worlds’ largest agricultural cooperatives. Although it is called a cooperative, it functioned as a para-state organisation and was used as a bureaucratic tool of state control to drive through the green revolution in agriculture and to manipulate political support for the Park regime among the rural population.32

In contrast, closely connected to the emerging anti-Park democratisation movement, grassroots cooperatives started to spread again and to promote cooperative ideas throughout the country, establishing schools, consumer cooperatives, credit unions, and medical cooperatives to respond to the desperate need for affordable medical treatment for survivors of the war.33 The organic farming movement also began to spread through the influence of the Poolmoo school (now known as Poolmoowon) which established the first consumer cooperative in 1959 in South Chungcheong Province and, starting in 1975, developed the largest organic farming region in Korea. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the pro-democracy Catholic Farmers Movement, Catholic Priests’ Association for Justice (CPAJ) and other Christian groups, credit unions and consumer cooperatives along with democratic movements among factory workers, peasant farmers, and students continued to increase in influence and spread throughout the country.

Among the leaders of this movement was the Catholic Bishop Ji Hak-soon, who became the first bishop of Wonju in 1965. He had left North Korea before the war to train as priest in Rome and, while there, he was deeply impacted by the spirit of the Vatican Two Council which urged the church to become more outward focused on the needs of local communities and to support ecumenical unity; to become a church run by and for the people, and for the poor and marginalised in particular.34

It was in Wonju, that Ji Hak-soon met Jang Il-soon who was to become one of his closest friends. Jang Il-soon was a native of Wonju and dropped out of Seoul National University (SNU) after the war to found Daeseong School in Wonju to provide a free education to local children. After a failed attempt to run for political office, he spent three years in prison between 1961 and 63, originally facing a death sentence, accused of being a communist. After his sentence was commuted and he was released the state put him under surveillance and prohibited him from public lecturing or writing. With no other options, he became a farmer and an artist, painting calligraphy which he gave away to everyone and anyone. Within the context of the church, Ji Hak-soon gave him the opportunity to teach again and, in 1967, he began training lay Catholic members to prepare for a transformation of the church into a self-reliant lay-centred organisation that supported a wider rural development movement of credit unions and cooperatives.35

With a population of just 100,000, Wonju diocese was an impoverished region of coal-mining and farming communities. The church was dependent upon foreign aid for its survival and the town itself was a cultural backwater with very few resources. As soon as Ji Hak-soon took office he and Jang Il-soon set up Wonju’s first credit union in 1966 and founded Jinkwang Middle School in 1967. Jang Il-soon began to organise training courses for cooperative and credit union members and established the Cooperative Education Institute in Jinkwang school to develop the cooperative movement beyond the Catholic Church.36 The school’s students and teachers also created the first school cooperative in Korea, Jinkwang Cooperative, to purchase books and equipment and run the canteen.

One of the teachers at the school was Park Jae-il. In 1969, after his after his release from prison for his involvement in the June 3rd Movement (protests against the military regime’s policy toward Japan) he moved to Wonju to join the Social Development Committee and the Catholic Farmers’ Association, led by Bishop Ji Hak-soon. He became a teacher at Jinkwang School and attended one of Jang Il-soon’s lectures after school one day. He was so captivated by the vision for reviving cooperation among the common people that he quit teaching to join the cooperative movement full time, taking up a key role in the Cooperative Education Institute. From that moment he became a lifelong student of Jang Il-soon and worked alongside him and Bishop Ji Hak-soon in the cooperative and rural development movement in Wonju. He would later become the president of the Catholic Farmers Association and then Hansalim’s first chair of directors.

In addition to promoting education Ji Hak-soon also built cultural spaces, hospitals and welfare facilities for the disabled. Among these projects, the most significant was the cultural centre which he built in front of Wonju Cathedral. Sponsored by religious organisations from Europe and the United States and dedicated on July 12th 1968, the Wonju Catholic Center was the first civic cultural centre of the Korean Catholic Church. The three story building – run by the diocese and staffed by young lay church members – included offices, meeting rooms, an exhibition hall, projection room, first-floor cafeteria, basement room and dormitories. It quickly became a popular meeting place for young people and a hive of creative activity, hosting performances by local musicians and exhibitions by local artists. The main hall was used to stage plays by Wonju’s Sanya Theatre Company directed by Jang Il-soon’s younger brother Jang Sang-soon and the basement room was the venue for DJs to play pop and classical music from a record collection which apparently exceeded even that of the local radio station!

Around the Bishop, Jang Il-soon, Park Jae-il and their friends, an informal network of pro-democracy and cooperative movement activists began to gather. The Wonju Group, as they were known, began to expand the cooperative movement beyond Wonju into Gangwon province and to forge links across religious and ideological divides. Both Jang Il-soon and Ji Hak-soon made a point of reaching out beyond the boundaries of the Catholic church to other religious groups, not only to other Christian dominations but also to Buddhists. Priests, pastors and monks would visit each others congregations to preach and meet regularly at restaurants to share meals and talk together. The Catholic Church in Wonju became a church not only for believers but for all people striving to build a better and more democratic society. Following the example of Jesus, they sought to serve those in need without distinction and to freely support all who worked for the good of the whole community.37

Jang Il-soon saw the cooperative movement as a training ground for democracy for the whole community and a means of empowering people to become responsible citizens.38 He described it as a “movement for service to the masses, abandoning arrogance and radical elite consciousness.” and a “downward crawling movement.”39 In his lectures, Jang Il-soon reminded people of their own traditional culture of rural cooperation in Korea through Dure (farmers coops), Gye (village credit unions) and Pumasi (informal labour exchange). He referenced the 19th century history of cooperation among the British working class (the Rochdale Pioneers) and the credit union movements in France and Germany as examples of people finding ways to break free from corporate exploitation and live together on their own terms through mutual aid and self-reliance.40 He drew inspiration not only from Jesus’s teachings but also from Buddhist scriptures, Daoist and Confucian philosophy, Korean traditional spirituality and Ghandi’s example of non-violent resistance to enlarge people’s awareness of themselves and the world.

As a symbol of this broad and inclusive vision, the Wonju Catholic Centre became a hub for students and other pro-democracy activists and writers who gathered from Wonju and beyond to talk and drink late into the evenings in the cosy basement room. One of those young people was a poet named Kim Young-il who wrote under the pen name “Ji-ha” (芝河). Originally from Mokpo, Kim Ji-ha had moved as a child to Wonju with his parents. At Seoul National University he became active within the pro-democracy movement in Seoul and, when he returned to Wonju, he brought with him a cast of activists and artists who quickly joined forces with the growing cultural movement (minjung movement) in Wonju. Together they created yard plays (a form of traditional peasant theatre called madang-geuk, 마당극), mask-dances and plays for theatre. These plays raised the profile of Wonju among the wider national minjung movement and before long, Wonju was being called “the holy land of democratisation.”41

Ji Hak-soon (1921-1993) - Bishop of Wonju, founder of Wonju Credit Union and Cooperative Movements

Ji Hak-soon (1921-1993) - Bishop of Wonju, founder of Wonju Credit Union and Cooperative Movements

Jang Il-soon (1928-1994) - teacher, farmer, artist, Hansalim founder

Jang Il-soon (1928-1994) - teacher, farmer, artist, Hansalim founder

Park Jae-il (1938-2010) - farmer, activist, Hansalim founder

Park Jae-il (1938-2010) - farmer, activist, Hansalim founder

Kim Ji-ha (1941-2022) - Poet, activist, Hansalim founder

Kim Ji-ha (1941-2022) - Poet, activist, Hansalim founder

Together, with the Wonju Group, Jang Il-soon and Ji Hak-soon reorganised the church in the Wonju diocese into a network of self-governing self-supporting parishes and set up a program of education and training aimed at empowering the poor and marginalised to form self-sufficient self-governing communities across Gangwon province. Their vision was for a cooperative movement that was economically and politically independent from the authoritarian state and which promoted rural and urban development led by communities themselves.

However, just as things were starting to take off catastrophe hit. In 1972 the large-scale flooding of the Namhan River basin caused widespread devastation in Gangwon and surrounding provinces. In Wonju Diocese the floods damaged 50,000 buildings and displaced more than 140,000 people.42 Bishop Ji Hak-soon went to Germany to ask for funds from the catholic charities Miserere and Caritas to support rebuilding. With the money they provided (2.91 million marks or around $360,000) he set up a Disaster Countermeasures Project Committee to coordinate a long-term recovery project. However, instead of simply providing unconditional aid, as was normally done under such circumstances, the committee targeted their resources at supporting communities to become self-sufficient. Food and money were given as wages for productive work rebuilding communities, restoring farmland and developing new income sources for farmers such as setting up village craft workshops.

Young people from the Wonju Diocesan Youth Association who had been involved with the cooperative movement in Wonju were recruited to act as counsellors. This title of ‘counsellor’ was chosen intentionally to avoid the impression that they were responsible for leading or directing the disaster response. Instead, their role was to visit the affected villages, learn about their needs and provide advice and training to enable villagers to take leadership of the reconstruction and development process themselves. The requirements for receiving support for projects were that they were productive so as to provide a steady income, communal rather than individual and managed cooperatively by the villagers. The ultimate goal was to rebuild solidarity within and between village communities who had suffered years of exploitation under colonial and now military rule that had led to widespread mistrust among the rural population.

This was a particularly special time for Jang Il-soon. He began to see what he had been dreaming of for so many years take shape in reality in his own community. Hundreds of villages across three provinces participated, creating credit unions and cooperatives, restoring the culture of shared agricultural labour and managing their affairs democratically through village assemblies. Others saw what was happening too and the pattern of rural development through cooperation that began in Wonju spread across the country.43 But it was not to last long.

2.5 Fighting for a civilisation of Life

Although the Wonju movement made a significant and lasting contribution to rural development and democratisation44, it was carried out in resistance against the increasingly authoritarian Yusin regime under Park Chung-hee. Top-down state-led projects of agricultural industrialisation, rural improvement and political indoctrination through Nonghyup and the Saemaul Movement (New Village Movement) contributed to the ongoing suppression of the Wonju group’s activities. In a bid to achieve self-sufficiency in rice, the state adopted a new high yielding rice variety, Tongil rice, which was rapidly extended to farmers through a combination of incentives and coercion45. It required heavy fertiliser and pesticide application to achieve its promised yields46 which were supplied exclusively through Nonghyup. These pesticides were highly toxic and little training was provided to farmers about how to minimise risk of exposure. Despite the undeniable improvement in rural incomes stimulated by the state-led green revolution, as the use of chemical pesticides rapidly increased through the 1970s many farmers became sick from pesticide poisoning, ecosystems became increasingly polluted and food safety concerns grew among consumers. Jang Il-soon and others in the Wonju Group began to recognise the dangers of too narrow a focus on productivity and profit sharing. Somehow, cooperation needed to be extended beyond humans to include the natural world in a symbiotic relationship.

Then, in 1974, in what seemed like retaliation against the Wonju Group, Bishop Ji Hak-soon and Kim Ji-ha were arrested, along with 253 others. Ji Hak-soon was court martialled under new emergency measures brought in by Park in reaction to growing unrest and pro-democracy protests among university students nationwide. His sentence was 15 years in prison on the charge of funding an anti-state group and masterminding a plot to overthrow the government.47 Kim Ji-ha was sentenced to death, commuted to life and released after 10 months only to be arrested again and his death sentences renewed. He spent 7 years in prison until he received a stay of execution.

Under pressure from the newly mobilised Catholic resistance and widespread anti-government protests, Park released Ji Hak-soon in 1975. But the government’s suppression of democratic movements intensified with new emergency measures and sweeping powers to control anyone who opposed him. During this difficult time, unable to engage directly in pro-democracy activism or the cooperative movement Jang Il-soon painted calligraphy, drew illustrations and wrote poetry, holding exhibitions to raise funds in support of others and communicate his resistance through art. In the years up to 1979 unrest and mass protests continued to spread until the shocking assassination of General Park by his own head of Central Intelligence, Kim Jae-gyu.

The democracy movement, that had been suppressed by Park, sprang back to life, as people rekindled hope for a transition to genuine democracy. But the new government fell in a matter of weeks as the chief of defence General Chun Doo-hwan led a military insurrection on December 12th 1979 and soon declared martial law.

The immediate reaction by citizens has become known as the “Seoul Spring”. Waves of mass protests spread across the country as students and workers took to the streets to oppose the military’s takeover and call for democracy. The military’s brutal response involved mass arrests, beatings, torture and killing of protesters. Things quickly came to a head in the city of Gwangju in south Jeolla province, a hotbed of pro-democracy activism.

While mass protests in the city had been held peacefully with police cooperation during the previous days, in preparation for General Chun’s final takeover of the government, paratroops and tanks had been sent to Gwangju to suppress the protests, beginning by arresting most of the leaders of Gwangju’s democracy movement. On May 18th, when students attempted to enter the city’s Chonnam National University campus they were brutally beaten by the waiting paratroopers and turned away from the university gates. This provoked spontaneous protests among students which spread across the city throughout the day, calling for an end to martial law and the removal of Chun Doo-hwan. This time, they were met by violence from the riot police and confrontations escalated throughout the day as students fought back and the numbers of protesters steadily grew. When the paratroopers began to chase down and to strip and beat the demonstrators and bystanders alike, the student protest became a popular revolt.

The next day it wasn’t just hundreds of students on the streets but around four thousand citizens - high school students, shop owners, labourers, housewives, priests and teachers - came out to support the students and confront the police and paratroopers in front of Province Hall. When the police fired tear gas and the paratroopers charged the demonstrators, they responded by breaking up paving stones to throw and collected metal pipes and other implements to use as makeshift weapons. Molotov cocktails, drums of oil and nearby vehicles were used to attack and drive back the troops. Taxi drivers took on the role of ambulances to take the injured protesters to hospitals. Buses, trucks and phone booths became barricades.

The clashes between citizens and military became more violent and the paratroopers used their batons, rifle buts and bayonets to attack the crowds and hunted people down as they fled down alleys and into nearby buildings. Whoever they captured they stripped, beat and tortured, leaving many dead or with life changing injuries and taking many more students back to their camp as prisoners. Even some of the riot police who tried to help the wounded, unaccustomed to the extreme violence perpetrated by the military forces, were themselves attacked by the paratroopers.

Over the next few days more than 200,000 demonstrators fought against the police and paratroopers across the city. Convoys of over 100 taxis and some buses and trucks joined the demonstrators on the streets and some began to use vehicles as battering rams and fire bombs to attack the paratroopers blockades. The streets were covered in burning cars, debris and the bodies of dead and injured protesters lying in pools of blood. Citizen Militia began to capture vehicles, explosives, rifles and ammunition to strengthen their stand against government forces who had begun to use live ammunition on the crowds leading to several fatalities and provoking growing rage among the citizens. Then the paratroopers deployed machine guns, automatic rifles and snipers to attack the citizens and military helicopters also opened fire on the crowds. Despite their resort to lethal force, the paratroopers were overwhelmed by the scale of the uprising, and withdrew to the outskirts of the city where they prepared for a large-scale offensive with reinforcements from the army’s 20th Division.

The demonstrators took control of Province Hall and other parts of the city center and organised a Citizen Settlement Committee to negotiate with the government forces. Having withdrawn from the city centre, soldiers blockaded Gwangju and were ordered to use lethal force against any resistance. Finally, after five days of blockade, in the middle of the night on the 27th May 1980 three special forces teams and a division of more than 3,000 soldiers moved on the city centre to recapture Province Hall and Gwangju Park in a battle that ended with 27 citizens and 2 soldiers dead and 295 citizens detained.

Over the course of the uprising, 20,000 trained soldiers were deployed to the city of 800,000. The total number of casualties is not known, as the government acted quickly to cover up the incident and manipulate the data reported. Conservative estimates are that over 200 of Gwangju’s residents were killed by government forces and many more hundreds injured while the so-called ‘ring leaders’ were imprisoned and tortured. Despite the immediate government cover up, news of the massacre at Gwangju spread among democracy activists and students and helped to undermine the legitimacy of the Chun regime, becoming a rallying cry for the pro-democracy movement.

The events in Gwangju were followed by rumours that the government was preparing to target other cities like Wonju which were also centres of pro-democracy activism. Deeply shocked and grieved by the news of Gwangju, and fearing for the people of his own city, Jang Il-soon went into hiding and urged everyone to keep quiet. His lack of action angered many in the democratisation movement and marked the beginning of a shift in his attitude towards forms of political resistance.

A few months after the Gwangju uprising and subsequent massacre, Kim Ji-ha was released from prison in December 1980. A lot had happened since his initial arrest and he had also had time to reflect himself on the experience of the Wonju Group. When he was reunited with Jang Il-soon they discovered they had both come to the same change of direction in their thinking.

Jang Il-soon described it in this way:

“The Hansalim movement was something I had been thinking about for decades, and another was the consumer cooperative movement in the 70s (260), and as I continued the anti-dictatorship movement, I realized that I had to break out of the old Marxist paradigm, because it was not going to solve the problem, and it was going to continue the vicious circle. When I saw that they were spraying pesticides and fertilizers and trying to industrialize the city, I thought that the entire riverbed would be devastated. I told Mr. Park Jae-il, who was trying to start a rural movement in Wonju after the June 3 incident,”We should go in the direction of saving the farmland and food for the community.””48

Since the mid-1970s, Jang Il-soon had been developing his philosophy and way of life around the teachings of Haewol (Choi Si-hyung), a virtually forgotten leader of an indigenous Korean religion called Donghak (sometimes written Tonghak and now known as Cheondogyo or the Heavenly Way). It was the ethical and cosmic vision of Donghak, and especially the practical spirituality of Haewol which became the foundation of the Hansalim movement as it emerged in Wonju through the 1980s.

Donghak was founded in 1860 by Su-un (Choi Je-u)49 at a time when Korean society was in turmoil under pressure from foreign interference, rapid economic change, a corrupt bureaucracy and a monarchy in the process of collapse.50 Su-un taught that all things bear Hanullim (divine life) within themselves and that ‘sagehood’ or unity with Hanullim was open to all regardless of education, class, gender or age simply through sincerely seeking and stilling ones own heart to listen. His message of equality, simple spirituality and reverence for the sacredness of all things, spread like wildfire among the peasantry and disillusioned middle classes alike. Fearing a revolution, the authorities quickly arrested him and executed him in 1864.

Su-un’s successor, Haewol expressed the Donghak teaching that ‘people are heaven’ in three practical rules: honour heaven (敬天), honour people (敬人), and honour all things (敬物). These three phrases express the idea of serving people as heaven and valuing the life of all natural things equally. Jang Il-soon revived Haewol’s teachings and sought, through Hansalim and the Life Movement, to implement them in the form a new kind of cooperative movement that unified humanity with one another and the cosmos in a symbiotic and spiritual relationship. He is quoted as saying:

“Hae-wol, the second teacher of Donghak, said that if you know a bowl of rice, you know everything in the world, and Byeong-hee, Ui-am Son, also said that a bowl of rice is”born of a hundred people” (百夫所生), that is, it is made by the sweat of many peasants. He said that, but isn’t it true that it’s not just people who make it by sweating, but the heavens, the earth, and the whole world become an ensemble and move together as one, so that bowl of rice becomes a cosmic encounter? “If you go a step further, there is a saying in Haewol’s words,”Ichunsikcheon,” (以天食天) which means that heaven eats heaven. In Donghak, it is called innaecheon (people are heaven, 人乃天), and not only people are heaven, but every grain is heaven, every stone is heaven, every worm is heaven.”51

This new direction was sharply at odds with the rest of the democratisation movement at the time which was becoming more explicitly revolutionary and militant in response to Chun Doo-hwan’s intensification of violent suppression. By 1985, it was clear that the memory of the Gwangju uprising and the Chun government’s massacre of civilians was firmly fixed in the national psyche and each year following, the anniversary of the uprising was marked by increasing numbers of participants who commemorated the victim’s sacrifice for democracy. Students began to resort to to self-immolation and public suicide as new forms of protest. Jang Il-soon was horrified by this self-destructive violence in protest against the regime and called instead for non-violent, passive resistance instead of violent struggle.

The new emphasis on the natural world as sacred and a spirituality that looked suspiciously more like shamanism or Buddhism than Catholicism must have been hard to accept for many of the devout Catholic members of the movement. It might seem odd then, that a movement led by Catholics and grounded in the Catholic church should come to embrace an apparently non-Christian philosophy. But on closer inspection, Donghak actually seems quite well placed to fit alongside Catholic social teaching by re-emphasising the sacredness of the nonhuman world. Jang Il-soon’s reinterpretation of Donghak ideas within his own life as a Catholic and his ability to bring them into synergy with Jesus’ teaching through his lectures must have gone a long way open the hearts of others. Finally, through a difficult year-long process of intensive discussion the Wonju Group came to an agreement on transitioning the cooperative movement in Wonju into a Life Movement rooted in Donghak philosophy.

The new direction was expressed in the Wonju Report in 1982 which was written on behalf of the group by Kim Ji-ha. The report criticised capitalist and socialist industrial models of civilisation as equally destructive and incapable of producing a fair and sustainable society and called for an alternative movement for the transformation of society centred on the concept of Life. Publication of the Wonju Report was followed by the organisation of training courses and lectures and a study tour in 1984 to cooperatives in Japan. In 1985 the Wonju Consumer Cooperative was created, with Park Jae-il as chairperson, to organise store-free direct trade with organic farming communities. The store in Seoul, Hansalim Nongsan, followed in 1986 and in 1987 the Hansalim Community Consumers’ Cooperative and the Hansalim Producers’ Association were founded. This led to the formation in 1988 of the Hansalim Community Consumers Alliance in Seoul with 70 members and the Hansalim Producers’ Council in Wonju with 70 farmers.

As the movement was gaining traction, the Wonju Group formed the Preparatory Group for the Hansalim Study Gathering which held five meetings to discuss and diagnose the problems in Korean society and consider how the Hansalim Movement should respond. These were followed by eleven study sessions and four discussion meetings to review contemporary social movements around the world, study various economic, philosophical and social theories, and survey Korea’s own cultural history of cooperation in search of the future direction for Hansalim. This process culminated in the publication of the Hansalim Manifesto in 1989 which set out the philosophical foundation of the movement and outlined the direction of its practical implementation.

One of the striking things about the Manifesto, aside from its fascinating philosophical and spiritual discussions, is its lack of prescriptions on methods and models of organisation. In fact, the cooperative model itself is never mentioned and appears only in the background as the most appropriate means available at the time for organising economic cooperation as part of the wider Life Movement. This lack of definition of organisational strategy set the scene for a continual evolution of forms and structures within Hansalim as circumstances changed, new approaches were tried out and succeeded or failed, and as learning and experience accumulated. As a consequence the subsequent development of Hansalim as a movement and organisation is extremely complex and diverse but the core principles of democratic autonomy and ecological responsibility run all the way through it as the hard-won fruits of decades of committed struggle and sacrifice.

  1. Sam-Woong Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon: The Beautiful Life of Muwidang, ed. Muwidang People (Seoul, Korea: Dure, 2019).↩︎

  2. Kyung Moon Hwang, A History of Korea, 3rd Edition (London, England: Red Globe Press, 2021).↩︎

  3. Hwang, 60.↩︎

  4. Hwang, A History of Korea, 81–82.↩︎

  5. Katrina Maynes, “Korean Perceptions of Chastity, Gender Roles, and Libido; from Kisaengs to the Twenty First Century,” Grand Valley Journal of History 1, no. 1-2 (2012): 1–19, https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvjh.↩︎

  6. Myoung-Ho Ro and No Myŏngho, “The Makeup of Koryŏ Aristocratic Families: Bilateral Kindred,” Korean Studies 41 (2017): 173–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44508444.↩︎

  7. Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education Labor, and Health (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 19.↩︎

  8. Byeong-Seon Yoon, Won-Kyu Song, and Hae-Jin Lee, “The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in South Korea,” Monthly Review; New York 65, no. 1 (May 2013): 56–62, https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-065-01-2013-05\_5.↩︎

  9. Maynes, “Korean Perceptions of Chastity, Gender Roles, and Libido; from Kisaengs to the Twenty First Century”.↩︎

  10. Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea, 11.↩︎

  11. Yŏng-Jŏng Kim, Women of Korea : A History from Ancient Times to 1945 : An Abridged and Translated Edition of Han’guk Yòsòng-Sa Which Was Written Under the Direction of the Committee for the Compilation of the History of Korean Women, 2nd ed (Seoul: Ewha Womans University Press, 1977).↩︎

  12. Kim, 141.↩︎

  13. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, KAIROS (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021).↩︎

  14. KOCIS, A Handbook of Korea, Tenth Edition (Seoul, Korea: The Korean Overseas Culture; Information Service, 1998).↩︎

  15. Nae-Hyun Kwon, “11. Rural Society and Zhu Xi’s Community Compact,” in Everyday Life in Joseon-Era Korea: Economy and Society, ed. The Organization of Korean Historians (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 148, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261150.↩︎

  16. Kwon, 147.↩︎

  17. Kwon, 151.↩︎

  18. Kwon, 151.↩︎

  19. E-Wha Lee, Korea’s Pastimes and Customs: A Social History (Paramus, New Jersey: Homa & Sekey Books, 2006), 178.↩︎

  20. Lee, 187.↩︎

  21. Lee, 188.↩︎

  22. Lee, 190.↩︎

  23. Hae Jun Lee, “12. Why Did Peasants Create the Dure,” in Everyday Life in Joseon-Era Korea: Economy and Society, ed. The Organization of Korean Historians (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 160, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261150.↩︎

  24. Yong-Ha Shin, “Social History of the Dure Community and Nongak,” Civilizational Transition and the Life Movement as a New Alternative Movement (Hansalim Moim, 1989).↩︎

  25. E Patricia Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, ed. Ramon H Myers and Mark R Peattie (Princeton University Press, 1984), 275–311, https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=HWbcDwAAQBAJ.↩︎

  26. Hyung-Mi Kim, “The Experience of the Consumer Co-Operative Movement in Korea: Its Break Off and Rebirth, 1919–2010,” in A Global History of Consumer Co-Operation Since 1850, ed. Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger, and Greg Patmore (Brill, 2017), 353–78, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004336551\_020.↩︎

  27. Kim.↩︎

  28. Lee, Korea’s Pastimes and Customs.↩︎

  29. S Lee, “Role of Social and Solidarity Economy in Localizing the Sustainable Development Goals,” Int. J. Sustainable Dev. World Ecol. 27, no. 1 (January 2020): 65–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2019.1670274.↩︎

  30. Kim, “The Experience of the Consumer Co-Operative Movement in Korea,” 2017.↩︎

  31. Yi-Kyung Kim, “The Formation and Development of the Korean Cooperative Movement Under Japanese Colonial Rule - Focus on Concepts, Participants, and Solidarity” (PhD thesis, SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY (성균관대학교 일반대학원), 2022), http://www.riss.kr/search/detail/DetailView.do?p_mat_type=be54d9b8bc7cdb09&control_no=dc834242f8ef0680ffe0bdc3ef48d419.↩︎

  32. Larry L Burmeister, “Agricultural Cooperative Development and Change: A Window on South Korea’s Agrarian Transformation,” in Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea, ed. Yun-Shik Chang and Steven Hugh Lee, Routledge Advances in Korean Studies (Routledge, 2006), 78–100, https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/24070/1006062.pdf?sequence=1#page=78.↩︎

  33. Kim, “The Experience of the Consumer Co-Operative Movement in Korea,” 2017.↩︎

  34. So-Nam Kim, “Cooperative and Life Movements in Wonju,” in 100 Years of the Korean Co-Operative Movement Vol. 1, ed. Seong-Bu Kim et al. (Seoul, Korea: Autumn Morning, 2019), 253–85.↩︎

  35. Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon, 2019, 133.↩︎

  36. Kim, “Cooperative and Life Movements in Wonju”.↩︎

  37. Personal communication from a relative of a Wonju Hansalim founder.↩︎

  38. Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon, 2019, 152.↩︎

  39. Kim, 135.↩︎

  40. Kim, 136.↩︎

  41. Kim, 165.↩︎

  42. Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon, 2019.↩︎

  43. Kim.↩︎

  44. Currently, 150,000 people, or 44% of Wonju’s population of 360,000, are credit union members.↩︎

  45. Larry L Burmeister, “The South Korean Green Revolution: Induced or Directed Innovation?” Econ. Dev. Cult. Change 35, no. 4 (July 1987): 767–90, https://doi.org/10.1086/451621.↩︎

  46. Yooinn Hong, “Regionally Divergent Roles of the South Korean State in Adopting Improved Crop Varieties and Commercializing Agriculture (1960–1980): A Case Study of Areas in Jeju and Jeollanamdo,” Agric. Human Values 38, no. 4 (December 2021): 1161–79, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10232-y.↩︎

  47. Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon, 2019.↩︎

  48. Quoted in, Kim, 260–61, translation J. Dolley.↩︎

  49. Carl F Young, Eastern Learning and the Heavenly Way: The Tonghak and Chondogyo Movements and the Twilight of Korean Independence (University of Hawai’i Press., 2014), http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt13x1k6b.2.↩︎

  50. Haeyoung Seong, “The basis for coexistence found from within: The mystic universality and ethicality of Donghak (東學, Eastern learning),” Religions 11, no. 5 (May 2020): 265, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11050265.↩︎

  51. Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon, 2019, 197–98.↩︎