Madang: Journal of Contextual Theology (Madang J Contextual Theol)
Book review

[Book Review] Minjung: A Birth of Korean Studies

Chair Professor, Graduate School of Theology, Hanshin University, Seoul, Korea

Correspondence to Hiheon Kim, E-mail: kimhiheon@empal.com

Volume 43, 71-76, June 2025.
Madang: Journal of Contextual Theology 2025;43:71-76. https://doi.org/10.58302/Madang.2025.43.6
Received on June 10, 2025, Revised on June 14, 2025, Accepted on June 14, 2025, Published on June 30, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

This book review examines the seminal two-volume work by Kang In-cheol, which offers a meticulous and comprehensive account of the conceptual history of minjung. The first volume, Minjung: The Resistant Subject, critically engages with the theoretical underpinnings and discursive formations of minjung, while the second, Minjung: In Times and History, provides an exhaustive historical analysis of its development. Collectively, these volumes adopt a macro-perspective to elucidate the socio-historical contexts that have shaped the conceptual transformation of minjung. Kang’s research traces the emergence of minjung—a longstanding East Asian term denoting the ‘dominated class’—as it evolved into an emblematic concept within Korea’s progressive social movements and intellectual tradition. Through detailed analysis, Kang demonstrates how the minjung concept, particularly during the 1920s and 1970s, underwent a significant semantic shift, moving beyond its connotations of ‘subordination’ and ‘numerical majority’ to encompass meanings of ‘resistance’ and ‘subjectivity’. This transformation not only reflects broader socio-political changes but also constitutes a distinctive linguistic revolution within Korean intellectual discourse. Moreover, his research systematically analyzes the evolution of the minjung concept since the 1970s, categorizing its theoretical characteristics into three distinct generations. This approach underscores its significant role in the emergence of Korean studies. This review seeks to enhance understanding of minjung by synthesizing the core arguments and insights of both volumes.

Minjung: Theory & History (2 volumes) By In-Cheol Kang Published by Sungkyunkwan University Press, Seoul, 2023 ISBN: 979-11-5550-596-0 & 979-11-5550-597-7

In East Asia, there are numerous signifiers that refer to the ‘majority ruled class’. Among them, the concept of minjung (民衆, people) acquired new significations—such as ‘resistance’ and ‘subjectivity’—and has established itself as a term representing a transformative political agent. By the late twentieth century, it became a concept emblematic of both social movements and intellectual history in Korea. Kang In-cheol meticulously researched the history of this concept, resulting in a comprehensive two-volume work spanning over 1,200 pages. The first volume, entitled Minjung: The Resistant Subject, addresses the theory of minjung discourses, while the second volume, Minjung: In Times and History, deals with its comprehensive history. These two books provide a macro perspective on the socio-historical contexts that have shaped the conceptual transformation of minjung.

From a historical perspective, the concept of minjung acquires substantive meaning through two distinct periods. The first period is the 1920s which was shaped by the antiJapanese independence struggle beginning with the March 1st Movement of 1919 as well as the concurrent socialist movements. The second period is the 1970s when the democracy movement gained momentum in opposition to the military dictatorship. Through this historical process, the concept of minjung has functioned as a “condensation of a Korean linguistic revolution” (Kang, I:17), encompassing key concepts of European modernity such as progress, history, democracy, freedom, nation, and revolution. Especially, since the 1970s, the concept of minjung developed in opposition to and competition with various rival concepts, including in-min (people), simin (citizen), minjok (nation), dajung (multitude), and subaltern. Research on this process is characterized by what may be termed the “birth of Korean studies,” insofar as it manifests a conceptual distinctiveness and uniqueness that sets it apart from foreign progressive discourses. In the following, this process will be examined by summarizing the content of the two volumes.

The term minjung has long been used not only in Korea but also in China and Japan to refer to the subjugated or ruled classes. As a term denoting the ‘majority of the people’, minjung has, for approximately two thousand years in East Asia, mainly carried the connotations of ‘subordination’ and ‘majority’. However, a significant transformation in its meaning occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. In China, during a period of social upheaval from the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the signifier minjung was invoked and used as a term with resistant implications. For example, the young Mao Zedong, in an article published in July 1919, paid attention to the “power of minzhong (Chinese pronunciation of minjung)” and emphasized that the “unity of minzhong” was the “key to the success of the revolutionary movement.” In Japan, minjung was used as a translated term with a dual status. On one hand, it functioned as a translation of ‘democracy’ and was employed in the realm of politics. On the other hand, as a translation of ‘people’, it was used in the domain of the arts (Kang, II:26-38).

In Korea, the concept of minjung had remained subordinate in the competition to other notions such as kungmin (nation), inmin (people), and minjok (nation/ethnicity) until the late nineteenth century. The transformation in the meaning of minjung occurred through two principal historical turning points. First, the collapse of the Joseon dynasty led to the removal of conceptual constraints, as republican imagination expanded, thereby creating conditions for a transformation in meaning. Second, the March 1st Movement of 1919 marked the emergence of minjung as the “uncompromising and persistent subject of the national movement,” in contrast to the fragmented concept of minjok (nation) in the anti-colonial struggle (Kang, II:98).

This conceptual revolution gained momentum in the 1920s. In 1922, Tu-Bo (Struggle Report), a journal associated with the Corea Communist Party, identified minjung as the “subject of violent struggle.” The following year, in 1923, the independence activist Shin Chae-ho described minjung as “beings born into the world through revolution” in Declaration of the Korean Revolution. Correspondingly, organizations dedicated to the minjung movement began to form, reflecting the concept’s growing practical significance. This trend was further underscored by a systematic definition of minjung that appeared in a February 6, 1924 editorial of the Dong-A Ilbo. Titled “The Undiscovered Minjung: Minjung as the Source of Power,” the article conceptualized the historical development of modern Korea as a progression from the “discovery of society” to the “discovery of nation” to the “discovery of minjung” (Kang, II:81).

However, in the mid-1930s, most of the socialist camp adopted the term inmin (people), and minjung was gradually reabsorbed into the old dominant ideology, entering a period of conceptual retreat and dormancy until the 1960s. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935 emphasized the struggle to unite “people’s forces against the offensive of fascism,” leading communist groups, which constituted the majority of the independence movement’s left wing, to emphasize inmin (Kang, II:113–117). Moreover, during the last Japanese colonial period, minjung was represented as an object of colonialism, causing the concept to lose the vitality it had in the 1920s. With the onset of the division system of the Korean peninsula along with the independence in 1945, inmin was adopted by the left, while minjung was relegated to a subordinate and passive status, a trend that persisted till the 1960s.

However, as the 1970s approached, minjung gradually acquired a new character. This transformation was driven by growing critical consciousness in response to the oppressive military regime that came to power through a coup and the rapid social reorganization caused by industrialization in the 1960s. Critical intellectuals began to depict a ‘resistant minjung, breaking the “prison of concepts” and initiating what has been called a “minjung renaissance” (Kang, II:166). The reopening of the “era of minjung,” as in the 1920s, resulted from a complex set of factors: the self-immolation of labor activist Jeon Tae-il in November 1970 and the following growth of social movements, the rise of campus cultural movements and the spread of student activism, the gradually heightened postcolonial consciousness since the April 19 Revolution of 1960, and the emergence of intellectual groups—critical professors, students, and journalists who were kicked out of their places and persecuted by the military regime—able to research and publish minjung discourses outside institutional constraints. Unlike the 1920s, when ‘movement’ discourse was dominant, the minjung concept of the 1970s also took on an ‘academic’ discourse with minjung ‘theology’ at the forefront.

The first generation of minjung theory in the 1970s developed and spread through four main channels: 1) the dissemination of minjung discourse in literature, folklore, aesthetics, theater, dance, and art through cultural movement groups; 2) the spread to education, sociology, Western history, Buddhism, and Confucianism, led by Christian minjung theology; 3) the independent adoption of minjung discourse in literature, Korean history, and economics; and 4) the incorporation of minjung theory in religious sociology, journalism, philosophy, political science, law, and public administration. From 1970 to the early 1980s, minjung theory developed “as if by prior agreement” in various fields, giving rise to minjung studies, a distinctly Korean academic discipline (Kang, II:212).

In this first generation, the use of the concept of minjung remained unsettled and its meanings were mixed. The moment when minjung settled into a single signification of the oppressed majority as “the resistant political subject” was paradoxically precipitated by the oppression of the ruling class, with as the decisive turning point as the tragedy of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising in 1980. Subsequently, minjung theory became radicalized and popularized, reaching its peak with the full emergence of a radical ideological system combined with Marxism. The “demystification” of worldviews achieved through reflection on and inheritance of the Gwangju Uprising shattered the Cold War myths of anti-communism and pro-Americanism, ushering in an era of “revolutionary romanticism.” Unlike the 1970s when the humanities led the discourse, minjung theory in this second generation was dominated by the social sciences, emphasizing scientific rigor, practicality, and partisanship. Numerous debates occurred, but these mainly unfolded as “the expansion of revolutionary and Marxist hegemony.”

However, from the mid-1990s, a seismic shift occurred as the revolutionary minjung concept in the second generation rapidly declined. Amid changes in domestic and international contexts, minjung began to compete with other concepts such as simin (citizen) and dajung (multitude), and the previous revolutionary minjung concept was either discarded or replaced. This change was driven by two main factors. First, the ‘1987 system’, established in the wake of the June 1987 uprising at the height of revolutionary minjung activism, compromised with neoliberalism and market power, marginalizing minjung in the process. Second, the collapse of socialism beginning in 1989 caused a crisis of “theoretical and psychological defenselessness” in the Korean progressive movement, which was overwhelmed by “apocalyptic depression and anxiety” (Kang, II:403). As a result, the existing minjung movement was either absorbed into mainstream politics or transformed into civic activism, while radical Marxist movements collapsed rapidly.

Thus, the revolutionary second-generation minjung theory overall contracted, even prompting discussions of the “death of minjung (discourse).” However, strictly speaking, this was less the end of minjung theory than a period of searching for alternatives. The third generation of minjung theory gradually emerged, drawing on post-Marxism and postmodernism as theoretical resources, and became fully visible in response to new social crises. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Korean society rapidly reorganized under neoliberalism, maximizing the dominance of capital and markets and transforming into a “risk society” in which minjung were forced to remain unilateral sacrifices. The social landscape changed so much that the class-based minjung of the 1980s became invisible. The labor class became internally fragmented, interests were segmented, and the number of precarious non-regular workers increased, leading to phenomena such as the “class betrayal” of regular workers in large corporations. These changes renewed interest in minjung theory (Kang, II:419).

Kang In-cheol divides the choices made by the minjung research community in the mid1990s into four broad categories. First, many researchers abandoned minjung studies and discarded the minjung concept. Second, some proposed alternative concepts such as simin (citizen), dajung (multitude), subaltern, and identity groups while advocating a shift from minjung research. Third, small others persisted in second-generation minjung theory, continuing the Marxist tradition. Finally, a fourth group redefined the minjung concept or reinterpreted the legacy of the first-generation minjung theory, breaking with the second generation. In this process, minjung theology was exceptional, as it had a “golden age” of distinguished predecessors to return, unlike other fields that had to search uncertainly amid the ruins of Marxist minjung theory (Kang, II:435).

Since the mid-1990s, third-generation minjung theories have taken diverse forms. First, due to the multiplicity of identity among minjung, goals and demands have become varied, and solidarity assumes plural forms. Here, minjung emerges as having plural subjectivity with both particularity and commonality. Second, the dichotomy of ‘domination and resistance’ is transcended, with emphasis on the duality and hybridity of both. Thus, essentialism that idealizes minjung or overlooks the fluidity and variability of the minjung signifier is avoided. Third, interest in everyday resistance increases, encouraging a combination of revolutionary and quotidian resistance. Fourth, minjung is seen as a postcolonial and postmodern subject that relativizes the modern subject. Fifth, minjung appears as a transnational subject that crosses the boundaries of nation and ethnicity, decoupling the minjung-minjok(nation) relationship, while in peace discourses focused on overcoming the national division, minjung and minjok are recoupled. Sixth, discussions of minjung culture and collective ‘affect’, criticized as “romantic and idealistic” in the second-generation theory, are revitalized. Seventh, sensitivity to internal heterogeneity, diversity, discrimination, and oppression within minjung grows, with attention to the oppression and discrimination of minorities becoming important in the reconstruction of the minjung concept. Finally, solidarity is understood in multidimensional ways, with horizontal solidarity, solidarity of vulnerability/precarity, international solidarity, and solidarity of memory all being explored (Kang, II:458–467). Korean minjung theory today continues to bear witness to our times in diverse forms.

In sum, according to Kang In-cheol, the defining feature of the Korean minjung concept is its “dynamism within a conceptual network.” The minjung concept vies for hegemony with other concepts of similar meaning (daejung, simin, dajung, etc.) and forming an ‘oppositional’ relationship, while at other times coexisting and intermingling with certain concepts (subaltern, homo sacer) in a ‘compatible’ relationship. With the inmin (people) concept, it alternates between compatibility and opposition; with the minjok (nation) concept, it takes a reciprocal fusion. Despite this multiple dynamism, minjung has not lost its own ‘uniqueness’, and it is distinguished from other terms. The characteristics unique to the minjung concept are its indigeneity, resistance, non-sovereignty, parallelism of old and new conceptual meanings, and non-mainstream status (Kang, I:404–406). These features will serve as the foundation and possibility for future minjung research.

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