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This paper aims to expand the understanding of the Manseon Ilbo as both a journalistic institution and a media outlet, examining its characteristics as a collaborationist Korean-language daily through content analysis. Published in Hsinking, the capital of Manchukuo, the newspaper traces its origins to the Manmong Ilbo, launched concurrently with the establishment of the Manchukuo Public Relations Association, the agency responsible for government press control. The Manseon Ilbo was issued as a daily newspaper consisting of four pages each for its morning and evening editions until May 1940. Beginning in June of that year, under the stated rationale of reducing transportation expenses and achieving managerial rationalization, the paper was reorganized into a unified daily edition comprising eight pages in total. This format remained in place until December 1941. Following the enforced suspension of the Dong-A Ilbo and the Chosun Ilbo on the Korean Peninsula in August 1940, the Manseon Ilbo further strengthened its position as a Korean-language newspaper. During the wartime period, the Manseon Ilbo faithfully carried out its missions of ‘serving the nation through reporting’ and ‘reporting in accordance with state policies’, increasingly manifesting an overtly pro-Japanese and collaborationist character. In particular, the newspaper’s coverage of key Manchukuo state policies, such as the National Army Law and development policies, exemplified the typical traits of wartime media. Its pages—not only editorials but also newly established regular columns, news reports, and reader contributions—were thoroughly saturated with the government’s official line.

This paper explores the literary work and critical vision of poet Lee Soohyung as published in the Manseon Ilbo, the daily newspaper of the Manchurian Publicity Association. While the Manseon Ilbo served as an instrument of colonial propaganda, it also functioned as a literary platform for Korean writers seeking to develop a distinctly Manchurian Korean literature. At the paper, Lee headed the Poem Realism fellowship and published poems that depicted Manchurian urban life as a site of military domination and commodified desire. Through surrealist imagery, he transformed figures like the city, the prostitute, and St. Mary into symbols that revealed both the violence of colonial modernity and the tenuous hope of Koreans in exile. Lee’s essays on surrealism emphasized the use of vivid imagery accompanied with rhythmic vitality as means of reconciling aesthetic modernism with moral responsibility. However, his later “local” poems in Chokwang reoriented his poetics toward the realm of memory and compassion, exposing elements of resistance through recollection rather than avant-garde experimentation. Taken together, these writings reveal the artistic contradictions of a poet seeking literary autonomy within a colonial system—an ambition that ultimately became constrained by the Manseon Ilbo platform and the politics of the time. Building on this tension, this research examines how Lee’s dual position as both participant and critic of colonial production complicates scholarly understandings of Korean literary modernism in Manchurian Korean literature.

During his years in Manchuria, Lee Deok-seong (1915–1948) used literary criticism to great effect in negotiating the contradictions of colonial modernity.Across nearly fifty essays, he wrestled with the opposing pulls of tradition and innovation, nationalism and imperialism, and sought ways to secure cultural autonomy and articulate a distinctly Korean literary identity. Even amid the cultural clashes and displacements of the Pacific War, Lee’s insistence on literature’s ethical and historical responsibilities helped delineate the contours of wartime Korean literary criticism in Manchuria.Drawing on Lee’s surviving works this study traces both the evolution and the limits of his intellectual position and provides a nuanced view of how his criticism reflected the shifting boundaries of Korean literary thought under empire. His efforts to blend Western theoretical frameworks with Korean national discourse in ways that reveal an emerging independent logic—one that developed in tandem with the ideological transformations of that time.