The Imagination Of Shanghai From Foreigners’ Perspectives

This thesis aims to research and study Shanghai as Korean writers who lived in Shanghai around1920s-1930s have imagined. The Korean interim government site is still preserved in Xintiandi area in Shanghai at present. This has been the starting point of this thesis as the Korean interim government site is a symbolic icon which represents the relationship between Korea and China.After the failure of Korean independence movement on1st of March,1919, a lot of Korean intellectuals sought asylum in Shanghai. Among those intellectuals, Korean writers expressed in their writing works what they saw, heard and felt in Shanghai and their works were issued in magazines such as’Gaebyuk’,’Samcheolli’,’Sindonga’and’Joguang’. This thesis tries to study their imagination about Shanghai by researching the writers’’Writings about Shanghai’.This thesis is outlined as follows. Chapter1will explain the relationship between Korea and Shanghai from the historical and social perspectives and analyze the specificity of Shanghai. Chapter2will study the Shanghai experience through travel essays of Korean writers who lived in Shanghai. Chapter3will investigate the lives of Shanghai lower-class, the state of minds of Korean people who lived in Shanghai around1920s-1930s and their attitude towards life through’Writings of city people in novels’Through various works above, this author found out that Shanghai has already become the biggest prosperous international city in Asia around1920s-1930s. However, semi-colonial Shanghai also showed its decadence and dark sides. In the case of Korean writers, since they had already experienced the colonization of their mother country by Japan, they tended to focus on the Shanghai’s decadence and dark sides. Due to open ports and concessions, Shanghai was able to achieve significant development in economy and culture but it was the price they had to pay for the colonization by the Western. Accordingly, they considered Shanghai’s modernization as a kind of malformed prosperity. This view on Shanghai by Korean writers with specific ethnic characteristics differs from dominant view that only looks at the modern Shanghai under glittering neon signs. In1930s when Japan expanded their influence in Shanghai, many Koreans lost their will for revolution and, at the same time, they started to sink into the pleasures of mega city and to persecute the lower-class and true revolutionists. Shanghai, a hopeful place for revolution, became a place of discouragement and despair. Hence, Korean writers criticized colonialism and capitalism behind the prosperous modernization of Shanghai in the’mirror’. They judged that Shanghai was on its way to a corrupted modernization and development.