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Tosan Ahn Ch'ang-Ho: A Profile of a Prophetic Patriot, by Hyung-chan Kim. Los Angeles: Academia Koreana, 1996. 361 pp. $35.00 cloth.
A chief architect of the Korean independence movement, An Ch'angho (1878-- 1938) has long been an elusive figure in modern Korean history. Remaining an enigma, the leading intellectuals, writers, and scholars of Korea and the West actually could not figure him out. In a sense, his genius-and his adoption of a moderate reformist stance to camouflage yet advance his ultimate revolutionary agenda to wage an independence war to reclaim his country-which eluded the Japanese police for decades also eluded them. A mostly self-educated man of principled moral dignity and labyrinthine strategic mind, An led a formidable international network of exile and underground activities, evading Japanese suppression from the 1900s to 1930s. Committed to the patriotic cause of freedom of his people and country, he did not fully reveal his revolutionary aims or intentions even to those who were close to him. With multilayered and multidimensional strategic vision and planning, he eschewed neither violent tactics nor progressive socialist ideologies to champion his life-long goal of national freedom. Most of all, An Ch'angho was a pioneering constitutional democrat with a passion for writing constitutions. During his lifetime, he created a series of self-governing associations and secret societies for he believed that a democratic self-government was the very means and the end of the anticolonial revolution.
Inevitably, the earlier interpretations of An Ch'angho reflected and embodied the painful legacy of colonialism, the Korean War, division, and successive military dictatorships. Caught at the nexus of modern Korean history and historiography, An Ch'angho was misinterpreted or misjudged as a "gradualist-pacifist" by Yi Kwangsu, Chu Yohan, Chong-sik Lee, and Arthur Gardner from the 1940s to the 1970s;1 as a "cultural nationalist" by Michael Robinson in the 1980s;2 and as a "self-reconstruction nationalist" by Kenneth Wells in the 1990s.3 As disciple-biographers, Yi Kwangsu and Chu Yohan presented An as a "gradualist-pacifist" and set the tone for subsequent interpretations. If their works were marked by inconsistencies and paradoxes, Yi and Chu's collaborations further clouded and complicated understanding of An and the Korean nationalist movement.
With twists and turns in the interpretations, the "cultural nationalist" critique by Robinson, for example, provocatively charged that...