[News Culture] Simsan Kim Chang-sook (1879–1962) is often remembered as “the last Confucian scholar of Joseon.” Yet he spent much of his life challenging the very Confucian establishment from which he came.
What angered Kim was not Confucian thought itself, but the failure of those who claimed to represent it. As Korea lost its sovereignty, he watched an entrenched scholarly elite retreat behind convention while the country slipped into colonial rule. To Kim, learning without responsibility had become empty ritual. A scholar who remained silent in the face of national crisis had abandoned the moral duty of scholarship itself.
His answer was action.
Kim petitioned against Japan’s encroachment on Korean sovereignty, carried an independence appeal signed by Confucian scholars to Shanghai and helped take Korea’s case to the international community. When diplomacy reached its limits, he turned to armed resistance. Arrest and torture left him unable to walk, but prison did not end his defiance.
Liberation brought a new struggle. Kim opposed the division of Korea, challenged Syngman Rhee’s authoritarian government and continued to speak out for democracy even in old age. At the same time, he worked to restore Seonggyungwan and founded Sungkyunkwan University, seeking to rebuild education around the principles of integrity and public responsibility.
Kim’s life was, in many ways, an argument over what it truly meant to be a scholar.
He rejected a Confucian order that had become detached from the world around it, yet held fast to the conviction that moral principle demanded courage, sacrifice and action. From the independence movement to the fight against authoritarianism, he spent his life putting that belief to the test.
A Scholar Who Refused the Old Order
Born in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, in 1879, Kim grew up in a Confucian household with an unusually reform-minded outlook.
His father, Kim Ho-rim, questioned rigid class distinctions and emphasized the dignity of labor regardless of social standing. During the Donghak Peasant Revolution, he even had students from his village school work in the fields — a striking departure from the conventions surrounding Confucian education at the time.
Those early lessons shaped Kim’s understanding of what scholarship should mean. He later studied under prominent Confucian scholars Gwak Jong-seok, known by the pen name Myeonu, and Yi Seung-hui, known as Daegye. His education was firmly rooted in Confucian tradition, but it did not close him off from the changes sweeping through Korea and the wider world.
The 1905 Eulsa Treaty, which effectively deprived Korea of its diplomatic sovereignty, pushed him decisively into political action.
Kim traveled to Seoul and submitted a petition demanding that the treaty be annulled and those responsible for betraying the country punished. The protest led to his imprisonment, but did little to temper his resistance.
In 1907, he joined efforts connected to the National Debt Repayment Movement and helped establish Seongmyeong School in Seongju, seeing modern education as another way to strengthen the country. His outspoken criticism of the pro-Japanese Iljinhoe again brought him into conflict with the authorities.
Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 plunged Kim into despair. A stern rebuke from his mother eventually shook him from his despondency. He spent the following years immersed in classical texts, reconsidering the responsibilities of a scholar in a country that had lost its independence.
The conclusion he reached was uncompromising: scholarship that failed to answer the crisis of its time had little meaning.
The Paris Jangseo Movement and a Rebuke to the Confucian Establishment
The March 1 Independence Movement of 1919 became a defining moment in Kim’s life.
Among the 33 national representatives who signed the Declaration of Independence, not one came from Korea’s Confucian scholarly establishment. Kim was devastated by their absence.
To him, it was more than a missed opportunity. The scholars who had long claimed moral authority over society had failed to step forward at one of the most consequential moments in the nation’s history. Kim openly condemned an ossified Confucian establishment that, in his view, had lost the courage to act.
But he did not stop at criticism.
Kim helped gather the signatures of 137 Confucian scholars from across Korea for a petition demanding national independence. Evading Japanese surveillance, he secretly traveled to Shanghai with the document.
An English translation was delivered to representatives connected with Kim Kyu-sik, who was working to bring Korea’s cause before the Paris Peace Conference. Copies written in classical Chinese were also circulated among Confucian communities across Korea and sent to Chinese newspapers, prominent political figures and foreign diplomatic missions.
The campaign became known as the Paris Jangseo Movement.
It was both an appeal for Korean independence and a declaration that the country’s Confucian intellectuals could no longer remain spectators to history. Kim had turned his criticism of the old scholarly order into political action on an international stage.
He subsequently became active in the Korean Provisional Government, serving in its transportation affairs organization and later as a member of the Provisional Assembly. In China, he sought support from senior figures associated with Sun Yat-sen and worked alongside independence activists and intellectuals including Shin Chae-ho.
When Diplomacy Was No Longer Enough
As years passed without independence, Kim became increasingly skeptical that diplomatic appeals alone could end Japanese colonial rule.
He fiercely opposed Syngman Rhee’s proposal to place Korea under an international mandate and began moving toward a more militant strategy. In 1921, he joined Bohapdan, an armed independence organization.
By the mid-1920s, Kim was working with the family of independence activist Lee Hoe-young on plans to establish a military base in Inner Mongolia. The ambitious project required substantial funding, prompting him to return secretly to Korea to raise money.
The mission placed him under constant danger. Japanese agents were tracking independence networks, forcing Kim to move repeatedly to avoid capture. A serious back injury further complicated his efforts, while fundraising fell far short of what the project required.
Still, he refused to abandon the armed struggle.
In 1926, Kim recruited independence fighter Na Seok-ju and sent him to Seoul to attack the Korean Industrial Bank and the Oriental Development Company, two institutions regarded by independence activists as major instruments of Japan’s economic exploitation of Korea.
The operation marked a decisive transformation in Kim’s resistance.
The scholar who had once challenged power through petitions and international appeals had come to believe that independence would also have to be fought for by force.
Defiance That Survived Prison and Torture
Kim’s resistance eventually led to his capture.
Japanese authorities arrested him while he was receiving medical treatment in Shanghai and forcibly returned him to Korea. Once imprisoned, he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the colonial legal system.
He rejected legal representation and insisted that he was not a criminal standing before a lawful court. He regarded himself as a prisoner of war, captured while fighting an occupying power.
The torture he endured was devastating. Repeated beatings caused severe injuries that ultimately left him unable to use his legs.
His body was broken, but his resistance was not.
Kim continued to compose classical Chinese poetry in prison, expressing the conviction that a man already prepared to give his life for his country had little reason to fear persecution. Even in confinement, writing became another form of resistance.
He was sentenced to 14 years in prison and spent more than seven years behind bars before his deteriorating health led to a suspension of his sentence.
After his release, Kim remained uncompromising. He refused to comply with Japan’s policy pressuring Koreans to abandon their names and adopt Japanese ones, rejecting another attempt by colonial authorities to erase Korean identity.
The Old Scholar Who Would Not Stay Silent
Japan’s surrender in August 1945 brought the liberation Kim had spent decades fighting for. It did not bring the country he had imagined.
The Korean Peninsula quickly became engulfed in ideological conflict, while competing political factions struggled for power. Kim argued that national unity had to come before partisan interests and opposed any settlement that would leave Korea divided.
He stood alongside Kim Ku in efforts to establish a unified Korean government and prevent the permanent separation of North and South.
Those efforts failed.
In the new Republic of Korea, Kim soon found himself confronting political power once again. He became a fierce critic of Syngman Rhee’s government, condemning authoritarianism and corruption and openly calling on the president to step down.
For Kim, independence had never meant simply replacing one ruler with another. A country could not be truly free, he believed, if political power once again demanded silence and obedience from its people.
He ran in the 1951 vice-presidential election and later entered the political arena again during the 1960 presidential election, using public life to continue his defense of democratic principles.
His struggle also extended into education.
Kim worked to restore Seonggyungwan after its institutions had been compromised during Japanese colonial rule. In 1946, he founded Sungkyunkwan University and became its first president, seeking to carry Korea’s Confucian educational tradition into a new era.
It was not an attempt to revive the old order he had spent his life criticizing. Rather, Kim sought to recover what he believed that tradition should have represented all along: integrity, responsibility and service to society.
Age and disability did little to quiet him.
During the 1952 Busan Political Crisis, Kim spent 40 days in prison. In 1958, amid controversy surrounding the National Security Act, he was carried on his grandson’s back to the National Assembly to make his opposition known.
After the military coup of 1961, he refused a request to meet Park Chung Hee.
Kim died in 1962.
His life had spanned the final years of the Joseon era, the collapse of Korean sovereignty, Japanese colonial rule, the independence struggle, liberation, national division and the emergence of authoritarian politics.
Through each upheaval, Kim returned to the same question: What responsibility does a scholar bear when the world around him is unjust?
His answer never changed.
A scholar could not remain a spectator.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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