Killer Fables: Yun Ch’iho, Bourgeois Enlightenment, and the Free Laborer

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on Yun Ch’iho’s Diary, and outlining some of the ideological and transnational aspects of a Protestant, bourgeois consciousness that emerged in Korea at the turn of the last century, this article presents a critical reassessment of liberalism, Protestant Christianity, and the type of free laborer that bourgeois Protestants like Yun Ch’iho wanted to create. As a pious liberal, Yun Ch’iho led efforts to establish civic and religious organizations that sought to construct a free conscience that would form and maintain public opinion. This was a militant agenda in the sense that, like the evangelical teachers he met in Shanghai and at Emory College, Yun wanted to build public pressure to dismantle the Confucian political order. As a Protestant entrepreneur of free men, Yun sought to “kill the Korean.” This militant, liberal agenda aimed to discipline and embody new desires, especially among youth, to produce the free laborer, and to render the extraction of profit as a form of exchange.