3 Foundations
Chapter notes
3.1 Origins of Korean cooperativism
3.1.1 Colonial era cooperatives
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.1 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.2 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 Gye,3 cooperative labour associations called Dure,4 mechanisms for voluntarily assisting those in need in the local community called Pumasi5 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.6
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.7 Many solidarity-based cooperatives in finance, farming and education were established independently of the Act of the Japanese Government-General of Korea and promoted nationwide under the guise of informal voluntary organisations outside the colonial government’s formal oversight.8
In the 1920s, 180 production and consumption associations were created that brought together participants from a diversity of social strata, including housewives, female students, workers, farmers, students, intellectuals.9 The numbers of these cooperatives doubled every year from 1926, reaching at least 500 by 1938, and the number of participants (members) was at least 140,000.10 However, since 1932, the number of cooperatives established nationwide gradually decreased as large-scale cooperatives linked to labour unions and farmers’ movements were suppressed by the colonial government [Kim2022-im].
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.11 Following Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 the cooperative movement was further disrupted by the Korean war and the division of the peninsula.
3.1.2 Post-liberation cooperatives
Following Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945 the grassroots cooperative movement was further disrupted by the Korean war and the division of the peninsula while the statist cooperatives took on an increasingly dominant role in the national economy. From the 1950s onwards, following the Korean war, new Korean 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.12
Nevertheless, at the same time, grassroots cooperatives that had emerged as part of the anti-colonial independence movement in the 1920s and 30s began to re-form and started to spread 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.13 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.
There were three features of the movement during this time, which are notable not only for their distinctiveness but also for their subsequent continuity and development within Korea’s modern consumer cooperatives. First, they adopted an inherent inclusiveness of diverse stakeholders in a manner that sought solidarity between social classes for the common cause of mutual economic independence from colonial economic hegemony. Second, they shared ethical foundations in religious and spiritual philosophies (of the east and west) with a common radical emphasis on pragmatic grassroots theologies of liberation of the poor and marginalised over against a conservative defence of hierarchical structures and dogmatism. They drew their philosophical and moral inspiration from a diversity of sources including Catholicism, Protestant Christian socialism, anarchism, Cheondoism1415 each of which, in their own way, aspired to bring about the dawn of a new world of harmony between peoples and between humanity and nature. Finally, women took the initiative to become a major part of the expanding cooperative movement, forming 12 cooperatives that were led by women and an additional 17 cooperatives that included both married and unmarried women. These cooperatives were made up of a variety of women, including rural and urban women, intellectuals, farmers, housewives, and female students..16
At first glance, this fact seems incongruous with the long history of strictly patriarchal Neo-Confucian ideology propagated by the state and ruling classes throughout the Joseon and colonial periods and which continues to reinforce gender inequalities today. However, a closer reading of the history of women in Korea (see for example)17 highlights the “culture of dissent” that emerged among Korean women of all classes to subvert conventional gender roles and resist sexist oppression. The role of Korean women in the cooperative movement is one example among many of their ability to gain greater economic independence, social power, and political influence despite the challenges of living under one of the strictest contemporary expressions of Neo-Confucian patriarchy.18 Notably, from their earliest beginnings, Korea’s grassroots cooperatives provided housewives, as well as female students, farmers, and intellectuals with a unique context for forging new identities and alliances as they began to redefine, on their own terms, the roles imposed on them by patriarchal norms.
In contrast, closely connected to the emerging anti-Park democratisation movement, grassroots cooperatives
3.2 The Wonju Group
3.2.1 A church for the people
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.19
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.20
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.21 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!
3.2.2 The Wonju cooperative movement
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.22
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.23 He described it as a “movement for service to the masses, abandoning arrogance and radical elite consciousness.” and a “downward crawling movement.”24 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.25 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.”26
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.
3.2.3 The flood
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.27 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.28 But it was not to last long.
3.2.4 Fighting for a civilisation of Life
Although the Wonju movement made a significant and lasting contribution to rural development and democratisation29, 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 coercion.30 It required heavy fertiliser and pesticide application to achieve its promised yields31 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.32 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.
3.2.5 The Seoul Spring and the Gwangju Massacre
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.
3.2.6 New directions
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.””33
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)34 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.35 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.”36
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.
3.2.7 A Manifesto
With the first practical implementations of the Life Movement in place, the Wonju Group37 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.
It is worth listing the chapters of the book that was compiled with the Hansalim Gathering research reports to give a sense of the scope of their thinking and the calibre of people involved
3.3 Understanding the Manifesto
3.3.1 The problem of entropy
The Hansalim Manifesto diagnoses the crises of contemporary civilization as symptoms of a flawed worldview, arguing that:
Based on this insight, the Manifesto critiques capitalist and communist visions of civilization as ideologies which are both built on the same mechanistic worldview. This worldview, grounded in Newtonian science, Cartesian dualism and biological reductionism, casts humanity in the role of mere parts in a global socio-technical-economic machine which, although ostensibly designed to free humanity by enslaving the nonhuman world, has instead made humanity slaves to the ‘civilisation’ it has created which now drives the nonhuman world into a chaos of disorder. Industrial civilisation, “governed by the principle of entropy, can only end in destruction.”
Taking the concept of entropy as a jumping off point, the Manifesto draws on the move from reductionism and classical mechanics towards holism and complexity associated with the New Science movement and environmentalism of the 1980s to propose an alternative understanding of the world. While the theory of thermodynamics predicts the inevitable increase in entropy over time – the eventual decay of a material universe into the final equilibrium of heat death – a quite different conclusion can be drawn from the perspective of the creative evolution of a cosmos in which Life (as consciousness rather than mechanical force) is the operative principle. The Manifesto sees the cosmos as an open, complex and adaptive system of autonomous interdependent agents in a constant process of coevolution and dynamic disequilibrium in which divine spirit is inherent within all things:
In an open system imbued with spirit:
The implication, then, is that any human civilisation that aspires to survive and thrive must find a way to live in symbiosis with this cosmic Life instead of trying to force life into an artificial closed system for the sake of an illusion of control. While western environmentalism and the new science movement provided the basis of their critique of industrialised civilization, the Resources for imagining an alternative future were drawn from Korean history, specifically from the history of peasant culture manifested in the rural tradition of and the Korean indigenous religion of .
3.3.2 Redefining democracy
is an ancient tradition of collective organisation among peasant farmers which became popular throughout the Korean peninsula during the Joseon period. Rice cultivation required intense periods of collaborative labour at specific times throughout the season and, as the technique of transplanting became established during the eighteenth century, this requirement only increased. The functioned as farmers’ village cooperatives in which all able bodied village members participated and which coordinated the activities of production while also providing for the needs of widows and the elderly and infirm from the shared assets of the village. To ease the burden on members, the organised music to accompany collective labour (called or ‘farm music’), provided refreshments and alcohol for the rest periods and held celebrations to punctuate the working year. These activities were governed in a democratic way through village assemblies, the election of officials and the assiduous keeping of records and accounts. Importantly, they were run independently from the ruling elites (who had their own separate institutions for cooperation) and fiercely resisted any attempt at interference from above. The Hansalim founders drew upon this long tradition of peasant democracy, reviving the idea of democratically organised, community-based production in agriculture as a fundamental building block of the movement. They also recognised the importance of the culture of democratic cooperation that was preserved by through the combination of labouring and celebrating, within the democratic Practice of the organisation. However, in order to ground this model of democratic living in a framework for personal and social transformation, they needed a coherent worldview.
3.3.3 The Way of Donghak
Donghak (Eastern Learning, now called Cheondogyo) was founded in 1860 by an impoverished scholar called Su-un (Choi Je-u) as a reaction against both Western Imperialism and the corrupt Neo-Confucian caste system that dominated Korean society at the time. Su-un’s central message was that all things bear divine life (Hanullim) within themselves and that the Heavenly Way of union with Hanullim was open to all people through contemplation and righteous conduct. His message of equality and simple spirituality quickly spread and ignited a mass movement for social change among the peasant population. This movement eventually culminated in an armed uprising in 1894 know as the Donghak Peasant Rebellion. It centered around Gwangju and the Jeolla province and lead to a brief period of self-rule in the province via 54 Jipgangso (independent commoner organizations) and a treaty for protection of citizen’s rights and social reform. Although this uprising ultimately failed, crushed by Japanese troops less than a year after it began, it has remained a powerful inspiration for independence and pro-democracy movements in Korea until the present day.
For Jang Il-soon, the teachings of Haewol (Choe Sihyeong), provided a synthesis of the eclectic ideas he had been gathering and developing for many years.
He is quoted as saying:Haewol’s three ‘noble truths’ (三敬说) – honour heaven (경천, 敬天), honour people (경인, 敬人), and honour things (경물, 敬物) – formed the core of Jang Il-soon’s philosophy and provided him with a language through which to synthesise ideas from Christian and Donghak thought. At the first training session for Hansalim activists in 1991, Jang Il-soon explained:
Jang Il-soon’s words reveal his rejection of religious dogma and political ideology in favour of a generous openness which is reminiscent of Bishop Ji Hak-soon’s own approach in Wonju during the 1970s. The issue at stake for Jang Il-soon is not one of belief but of attention, attitude and act. He asks his listeners not only to attend to heaven, but also to oneself, to others and to all things with an attitude of reverence which is expressed in the act of service.
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.
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.
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.↩︎
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.↩︎
E-Wha Lee, Korea’s Pastimes and Customs: A Social History (Paramus, New Jersey: Homa & Sekey Books, 2006).↩︎
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.↩︎
Kim, “The Experience of the Consumer Co-Operative Movement in Korea,” 2017.↩︎
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.↩︎
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.↩︎
Kim, “The Experience of the Consumer Co-Operative Movement in Korea,” 2017.↩︎
An indigenous Korean religion founded by Choi Je-u in 1860 and formerly known as Donghak (동학 / 東學) or “Eastern Learning”.↩︎
Kim, “The Formation and Development of the Korean Cooperative Movement Under Japanese Colonial Rule - Focus on Concepts, Participants, and Solidarity,” 2022.↩︎
Hwasook Nam, Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea (Ithaca; London: ILR Press, Cornell University Press, 2021), Yoo2008–ts, Nam2000–td, Kim1977–oc.↩︎
Jae-Hak Choi, “Agricultural Cooperatives in Korea,” in 2006 FFTC-NACF International Seminar on Agricultural Cooperatives in Asia: Innovations and Opportunities in the 21st Century, Seoul, Korea, 11-15 September 2006, vol. 11 (NACF Research Institute; National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF), Korea,; Food; Fertilizer Technology Center for the Asian; Pacific Region (FFTC/ASPAC), 2006), 15, https://www.fftc.org.tw/htmlarea_file/activities/20110719103351/paper-860033631.pdf.↩︎
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.↩︎
Sam-Woong Kim, Biography of Jang Il-Soon: The Beautiful Life of Muwidang, ed. Muwidang People (Seoul, Korea: Dure, 2019), 133.↩︎
Personal communication from a relative of a Wonju Hansalim founder.↩︎
Currently, 150,000 people, or 44% of Wonju’s population of 360,000, are credit union members.↩︎
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.↩︎
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.↩︎
Quoted in, Kim, 260–61, translation J. Dolley.↩︎
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.↩︎
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.↩︎
Jang Il-soon - lay Catholic leader and educator; Kim Chi-ha - poet and writer; Park Jae-il - agrarian activist and former president of the Catholic Farmers’ League; Choe Hye-sung, ??; Kim Young-won - leader of the Christian Peasant Movement and first president of the Hansalim Producers’ Association; Lee Soon-ro - housewife and first chair of directors of Hansalim Community Consumer Co-op; Kim Min-gi - Song Writer of the famous ‘Morning Dew’; Choe Hee-wan - Prof of Dance at Busan University; Park Chang-soon - broadcaster and producer of education programs on national TV; Kim Young-ju - Chair of Wonju Credit Union Training Centre; Kim Sang-chong - Prof of Microbiology at Seoul National University; Choi Sung-hyun - Natural Farmer at ‘Nature School’; Cho Seung-Sam - from Gwangju; Park Meng-su - first director of the Mosim and Salim Research Institute.↩︎