Lee Yeung-hi's quest for Ur-thirdworldness : with China's ideological flight and Lu Xun as method
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

This dissertation explores the intellectual journey of Lee Yeung-hi, arguably the most influential journalist, scholar, and social activist in South Korean history, focusing on his study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and reading of Lu Xun. To that end, I reconstruct his self-formation as a critical intellectual based on a close reading of his journalistic and scholarly writings, analyzing the unconscious desire that prompted the self-formation with reference to the three taxonomies of the world, Alfred Sauvy's three-world model, Takeuchi Yoshimi's East-West frame, and Mao Zedong's Three Worlds Theory, whjch had great influence on Lee. It was not until he delved into two world historical events, the Vietnam War and the first Asian-African Conference, as a foreign correspondent at Chosun Ilbo that he was reborn as a critical intellectual. The Vietnam War disillusioned him with the United States and the values it claimed to advocate. It also made him realize the parallels between Vietnam's and Korea's modern history, both shaped by US policy towards Asia, which in turn awakened him to South Korea's Asianness. Lee's awareness of South Korea's Asianness expanded to that of South Korea's third-worldness while he was writing a series of special retrospectives ten years after the first Asian-African Conference, and one month ahead of its second meeting. Despite the cancellation of the second Asian-African Conference and the dissolution of the Third World, his enthusiasm for the Third World was not dampened. Watching some first- and second-world countries breaking away from their blocs, he rather sensed revolutionary third-worldness transcending inductive characteristics of the Third World in reality, which I name "ur-thirdworldness." The ideological flight of the People's Republic of China from the Soviet Union convinced him most about the recovery of ur-thirdworldness, the sheer potentialities for a nation to overcome both the First and Second Worlds which derives from its belonging neither to the First World nor to the Second Worlds. The Cultural Revolution, which Lee viewed as the domestic eruption of the Sino-Soviet Split, was the clearest example of the PRC's ideological flight from the Second World. Lee's misreading of Takeuchi and Nixon's 1972 visit to China made Lee interpret the Cultural Revolution as part of China's national project to overcome Western civilization which was near completion. With the announcement of Mao Zedong's Three Worlds Theory, which classifies South Korea as the Third World despite its ideological orientation and first-world self-identification, he finally responded to the interpellation towards the Third World and to its mission to push history forward, accepting the term "Third World." However, the PRC's introduction of the market economy in 1978 and the Gwangju Massacre committed by the Chun Doo-hwan regime frustrated Lee's hopes for historical progress by the Third World or the recovery of ur-thirdworldness. During this period of despair, he stopped his research on modern China and began reading Takeuchi and Lu Xun again. Internalizing the worldview of Lu Xun's "miscellaneous writing, " he began to concentrate on the Korean Peninsula as an "indestructible iron house" and study measures for Korea's reunification. It also changed the way he pursued ur-thirdworldness. Whereas he believed that ur-thirdworldness should be recovered through the ideological flight from the two existing worlds until the late 1970's, in his late years he took a more practical approach, suggesting the ideological compromise between capitalism and socialism as the prerequisite for the recovery of ur-thirdworldness