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Century of refugees, imagined Asia

Hyein Kim 1

1동국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examined the mechanism of exclusion/absorption of the nation-state which are inherent in the Asian imagination in the process of establishment of decolonized nation state and the free nation by investigating articles and narratives related to Chinese the refugees produced in Korea before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In South Korea in 1948 appear the Chinese refugees who moved south escaping from the war of China. South Korea who accepted them from the perspective of the international morality, however deported all of the refugees who entered the country illegally or came to consider the refugees left in South Korea as (potential) criminals of spies․smugglers as the People's Republic of China was established in October, 1949. In these situations Lee Gwang Soo's Seoul is problematic, which presented the Chinese refugees with the background of Seoul at the same period of time in January, 1950. Seoul presented the Chinese refugees, and domestically, stressed public order and security setting up them as spies, and externally, tried to found the status of a liberalistic nation Korea emphasizing an affinity between China and Korea. And the project to raise the Korea's national identity to the center of not only Asia but also the world moved forward to stress the eternity of the national identity of Koreans setting up Chinese refugees and spies of Chinese Reds as 'the Chinese Koreans'. As a result, eventually Seoul was read in terms of communist aspects at that time and it was stopped to be published serially. However, on the contrary, this paradoxically indicates that the decolonized nation-state and the free nation were constructed through excluding other nation's refugees and communists from the category of ‘people’=‘nation.’

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.