| In modern times, with the eastward spread of western culture and the awakening of national sovereignty consciousness, Korea set off a great establishment of cultural idenfication toward China. Back in the traditional era, Korea borrowed Chinese characters from China as its notation system and imported numerous Chinese classics and books, so this establishment of cultural idenfication was featured of controversies between Korean and Chinese and critics of new learning and ancient learning. Controversies between Korean and Chinese centered on whether to keep using Chinese as before or to use Korean instead. Critics of new learning and ancient learning were the reflections of western new learning and the ancient learning systems which were centering on Neo-Confucianism and were deeply influenced by Chinese culture. In the midst of this establishment of cultural idenfication, to a large extent, China was labeled as "the other". But as the tradition was so influential and groups belonging to different Korean social ladders differed a lot, Korea could not easily get rid of learning from China at the same time. So in the Opening Port Era, Korea still imported numerous books from China and studied China accordingly, keeping an eye on the changing China. Modern China at that time, also experiencing huge changes, still gave some Korean intellectuals expectation and hope. In this paper, I represented this complicated history process and suggested that we should re-evaluate the influences of China to the Korean modernization process. From the complications and entanglements in this establishment of cultural idenfication, we could see the difficulties in trying to part from the cultural mingling between China and Korea. So the forceful establishment of cultural idenfication in the context of cultural mingling could easily bring to the cultural conflictions between China and Korea. |
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