Shin Chaeho
The polemicist Shin Chaeho (1880–1936) found both Confucian historiography and Japanese colonial scholarship unsatisfactory on political, rather than academic, grounds, and proposed instead the Korean "race" ("minjok") as an alternative subject of analysis. Shin believed that Koreans of his time had a "slavish mentality" as a result of centuries of historical, political, and cultural dependence on China, and he prescribed as a cure an identification with the Korean nation and the state, so that this community could be goaded to collective political activism.