Yi Jeonggyu
Yi Jeonggyu (Korean: 이정규; Hanja: 李丁奎; 1897 – 1984) known by his pen name Woogwan (Korean: 우관; Hanja: 又觀) was a Korean anarchist. He spent much of his youth in China, where anarchists were relatively freer than in occupied Korea, and collaborated with not only Chinese anarchists but also with ones from various countries such as Japan, Taiwan, and Russia. He was one of the pioneers of Korean anarchist movement in the early 1920s, and one of the most prominent Korean anarchists in China of that period. He started his career as an independence activist and shortely after he  became a supporter of anarchism. Yi Jeonggyu did not recognize anarchism and nationalism as opposing concepts, and pursued his twin goals of reclaiming Korea's independence and estabilishing a new order in Korea based on anarchist ideal. Together with Lee Hoe-yeong (Korean: 이회영; Hanja: 李會榮) he is regarded as one of key figures who established the anarchist ideology of the Korean independence movement. Family. Yi Jeonggyu was the younger brother of Yi Eulgyu (Korean: 이을규, Hanja: 李乙奎), who was one of the key figures in the . Yi Eulgyu led the exile case of King Yi Kang and converted to  anarchism in China as well. Yi Eulgyu was called “Korea’s Kropotkin” due to his extensive knowledge of anarchist theories. Life. His family lived in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do, and Yi Jeonggyu was born in Jangbong-do, Incheon of South Korea. He attended Incheon High School (formerly Incheon Public Commercial School) in 1911 of Korea under Japanese rule. After graduating, he got a job at a bank but resigned in protest against racial discrimination from the Japanese. Then he became involved with the independence movement. While he was a student at Keiō University in Japan, he encountered socialism and became interested  in it. Yi participated in the February 8 Declaration of Independence in 1919 as a member of the Korean International Student Association (Korean: 조선유학생학우회; Hanja: 朝鮮留學生學友會). When in 1919 the March 1st Movement occurred, he returned to Korea and then left for Shanghai in April 1919. There he became involved with Provisional Government of Korea, representing his home Province of Chungcheon. Drawn to news of the Russian Revolution, he tried to enter the Far East University in late 1921, but he decided to stay in Beijing after hearing a rumor about the violent infighting between Korean Communists. There he met  and Chinese anarchists such as Li Shinzeng and Cai Yuanpei. They helped him to continue his studies at Department of Economics in the Beijing University. He stayed in Beijing until 1923 and formed his ideas as an anarchist for independence and anarchist society. He later said about his life in China that “living a life to fight for liberation of the fatherland was the one thing we the youth only could do and felt proud of” during their struggle for Korean independence. During his time at Beijing University in 1921 and 1923, he grew up as an anarchist thinker while  interacting with the Russian poet Vasili Eroshenko. In April 1924, he organized the Federation of Korean Anarchists (Korean: 조선무정부주의자연맹 or 재중국조선무정부주의자연맹; Hanja: 在中國朝鮮無政府主義者聯盟) with Lee Hoi-young, Sin Chaeho, Yi Eulgyu, , , and Baek Jeong-gi. To achieve his goals, he collaboarted not just with Chinese anarchists but also with other groups such as Esperantists. Around 1922 he worked with the Chinese activist Chen Kongshan, to set up Beijing Special School for Esperanto (Beijing shijieyu zhuanmen xuexiao) and then served as a teacher in the Dawn Middle School (Liming zhongxue) attached to it. In September of 1923, Yi Jeonggyu participated in  a project that intended to reolocate about fifty Korean peasant families from Korea to Hunan Province in China, with the goal of building an ideal farming village. The project was a cooperative organization of co-cultivation, co-consumption, and co-ownership. The village was supposed to grow profitable crops such as ginseng, but the project failed due to the unrest in Hunan. While it has historical significance as the first experiment of anarchism in Korea that attempted to build an ideal society in rural areas by raising the income of peasants, it has been criticized for deviating from the basic  principle of anarchism that it solves its own problems on its own, by relying entirely on the Chinese for the material basis of the national liberation movement. Besides cooperating with Chinese anarchists, Yi also interacted in Beijing with many other radicals such a Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren and Fan Benliang (1897–1945). By late 1924, Yi Jeonggyu was hired as an apprentice at a British-owned foundry in Shanghai, but was fired for his involvement with trade unions. In 1927, he helped establish the Shanghai National Labor University (Shanghai guoli laodong daxue), which was an international project of East Asian anarchists , along with Korean, Chinese, and Japanese anarchists in China. In Nanjing around July of 1928 Yi Jeonggyu was elected to serve as one of secretaries of the Eastern Anarchist Federation (EAF, Dongfang wuzhengfu zhuyizhe lianmeng; Korean: 동방무정부주의자연맹; Chinese: 東方無政府主義者聯盟), which was established by anarchists from various East Asian countries, Korea, China, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam (Annam; 安南) to strengthen international ties and build an ideal society that secures the independence of each nation and individual freedom. In the first issue of its journal "The East" (Korean: 동방(Dongbang); Japanese:Tōhō; Chinese:Dongfang) published simoultanesly in those three East Asian  languages on August 20, 1928, he contributed a now-lost article titled “To Inform Eastern Asian Anarchists”. In this piece Yi Jeonggy called for or the revolution in Korea, aided by the cooperation of “Eastern Anarchists”. He was arrested in October 1928 in Shanghai by the Japanese police and brought into Korea where he was sentenced to three years in prison. Yi Jeonggyu organized the Free Society Builders Federation (FSBF, Korean: 자유사회건설자연맹) in Seoul in September 1945. After 1946, he taught at Sungkyunkwan University. He served as President of Cheongju University in 1958 and President of Sungkyunkwan University in 1963  and retired in 1966. He invested all his fortune to establish the National Culture Research Center (Korean: 국민문화연구소), an anarchism research group in 1970. He died in 1984 and did not apply for the status of (Korean: 대한민국 독립유공자; Hanja: 大韓民國 獨立有功者) during his lifetime.