Originally published at: 东方的叛徒——韩江 – 曙光
Traitor of the East — Han Jiang
Editorial Board of League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Proletariat
Editorial Board of League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Proletariat
On October 10, 2024, the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced to be awarded to South Korea’s so-called “feminist” writer Han Jiang. According to the Nobel Prize official website, Han Jiang was awarded for “confronting historical trauma and invisible rules, revealing the fragility of human life in every work.” In these seemingly abstract words, the usual standards for Nobel awards are hidden — it “is a honor reserved for Western writers and Eastern traitors” [1]. Han Jiang, as the bourgeois writer Sartre, who refused to accept the Nobel Prize, said, is a genuine “Eastern traitor.”
Han Jiang’s award-winning work, The Vegetarian, is a thoroughly surrenderist literature, filled with death literature imbued with Korean comprador bourgeois ideology. The general plot of The Vegetarian involves a housewife from a petty bourgeois family, Yinghui, who marries a company section chief, enduring long-term domestic violence from her father and husband, and choosing to resist patriarchal oppression through so-called vegetarianism, subsequent fasting, and shameless nudity. According to the author Han Jiang herself, this is the so-called “women who vow never to join the human group.” After opposing Confucian demands for women to adhere to the three obediences and four virtues, she pays a heavy price — domestic violence from her father and husband, rape by her husband and brother-in-law. In the end, she is sent to a mental hospital as a madwoman by her sister, suffering torture and abuse. But what is Yinghui’s response to oppression? Han Jiang tries to tell people that Yinghui is resisting, not only “vowing never to join the human group,” but also fighting against oppressors at every turn, eating vegetarian, fasting, self-harming to “resist” oppression, refusing to cook meat dishes for her husband, refusing to obey her husband’s and father’s commands, willingly accepting her brother-in-law’s rape to retaliate against her husband’s oppression, and coldly ignoring her hypocritical sister who also suffers oppression but becomes an accomplice of patriarchy. Han Jiang deliberately named the work The Vegetarian, setting “meat-eating as a symbol of human violence,” and vegetarianism as “a way of causing no harm to anything,” a form of indirect resistance. However, all these so-called “resistances” express the same idea — “non-violent non-cooperation.” In Han Jiang’s world, escaping oppression is so easy — as long as one plays tricks with subjective idealism, feeling oneself as a “free” “tree” in the mind, then any oppression becomes illusory.
But oppression is ultimately an objective existence, which Han Jiang cannot openly deny. So she can only resort to passive pessimism, a dead-end philosophy of death. First, Yinghui, after suffering heavy oppression, says, “Why can’t I die,” then her supposedly exhausted sister-in-law Ren Hui, in her tiring life as a housewife, screams, “Maybe this is all a dream,” beginning to empathize with Yinghui. Here, Han Jiang fully exploits subjective idealism to the extreme — besides “I,” the outside world is a false “dream,” existing only dependent on “my” perception. Lenin pointed out that, “any ‘naive realism’ of normal people who have not been in a mental hospital or studied idealist philosophy admits that objects, environment, and the world exist independently of our sensations, our consciousness, our self, and anyone else.” [2]. Han Jiang strives to promote extreme reactionary solipsism, attempting to deceive women’s resistance against patriarchy with absurd death philosophy, which fully reflects her declining bourgeois worldview.
Moreover, the reactionary nature of The Vegetarian is also reflected in its attitude towards violence. Attitude towards violence has always been a litmus test for revolutionaries and reactionaries. Since the advent of class society, there has been no super-class violence; there are only two kinds of violence in the world — revolutionary class violence and counter-revolutionary class violence. Marxism believes that one should not oppose all violence indiscriminately; when the ruling class first uses violence, only by rising up in resistance and employing revolutionary violence to crush counter-revolutionary violence, eliminate oppressors, can true peace and liberation be achieved for the oppressed. This revolutionary violence is righteous, and is praised by all lovers of freedom, always “the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” [3]. The same applies to gender issues. When faced with violence from father and husband, women must resist with violence, or they cannot deter oppressors (even though Marxism does not endorse personal revenge, self-defense against domestic violence is still more protective than passive suffering, and divorce is a subsequent measure to protect oneself). But even here, Han Jiang, who claims to advocate “non-violence,” reveals her naked ferocity — she vehemently hates spontaneous female resistance, exaggerates violence as terrible, and describes Yinghui’s violent dreams as causing her mental distress, exhaustion, and suffering, as if violence is the source of all evil. In fact, Yinghui’s dreams are nothing but the violence of resisting the dog that bites her (which is absurd and ridiculous — playing out the Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek to the extreme), the violence of resisting her oppressive father and husband. Such violent fantasies are not without reason; they stem from various gender oppressions around Yinghui, which are “the traits of petty bourgeoisie ‘mad’ small capitalists” [4]. They precisely reveal that among petty bourgeoisie, besides the slavish obedience, there lurks an extreme and fanatic resistance to capitalism, lacking guidance but full of revolutionary zeal. For spontaneous resistance of petty bourgeoisie, including oppressed women, truly supporting and guiding women and the proletariat is the correct stance — not pouring cold water like bourgeoisie, cursing “shrews,” “rascal movements,” and similar. But Han Jiang’s attitude exposes her betrayal of women’s liberation and her true surrenderist nature. She viciously attacks the righteous violent resistance of the oppressed, vilifying it as “mad,” and condemning violent resistance as “creepy, dirty, terrifying, and cruel”! What does this mean? It is telling women that facing violence, the only thing to do is not resist, but obey the oppressor, becoming a slave. Yinghui states that she likes her breasts and is even willing to shamelessly expose them “because they have no killing power. Hands, feet, teeth, and even a glance can become deadly weapons,” believing that as long as she does not use violence and faces oppression with a non-violent passive attitude, she can escape oppression. However, the patriarchal oppressors immediately “do not forgive her for this, but use counter-revolutionary violence to bloody suppress her.” [5]. Yinghui’s series of absurd non-resistance policies lead to greater violence from her husband and father, rape by her brother-in-law, abuse in mental hospitals, and so on. Isn’t this the consequence of believing in solipsism and ignoring all oppression? How can it be said that just eating vegetarian, being nude, fasting, and self-harm will make oppression disappear? Doesn’t this fully demonstrate the reactionary essence of the so-called “feminism” that advocates that oppression ceases only when eyes are closed, and seeks submission and death as “liberation”? The bourgeois so-called “feminists” are nothing but accomplices of capitalist patriarchy, traitors among women, who invert black and white from the side, turning surrender into resistance and decay into liberation, brainwashing women into a hypnotic spell that makes them willingly become slaves.
Gender capitulationism on gender issues inevitably leads to class capitulationism on class issues. The reason why imperialism awards the Nobel to Han Jiang is not only because her The Vegetarian spreads reactionary ideas that cause oppressed women to surrender, but also because behind it is a philosophy of surrender that makes the Korean people and oppressed peoples worldwide give up resistance, just like Yinghui, abandoning violence and surrendering to oppressors. Han Jiang’s deliberate writing of various so-called “feminist” literature, including The Vegetarian, is mainly covertly slandering, attacking people’s resistance by attacking women’s resistance. When Han Jiang was young, the Gwangju Uprising occurred in South Korea, shocking both domestic and international audiences. The Gwangju Uprising was a righteous struggle of the Korean people bravely resisting the fascist regime of Chun Doo-hwan. It was because of this resistance that Chun’s regime faced unprecedented political crisis, and his fascist rule eventually collapsed, replaced by a bourgeois democratic government that, though still reactionary in content, was more favorable to the people in form. However, how does Han Jiang view this great historical event? The answer is in her next novel after The Vegetarian, The Young Man Has Come. In the book, she does not praise the heroic struggle of the Korean people, nor the sympathy of the Korean and global people for the citizens of Gwangju and the denunciation of Chun Doo-hwan’s fascist regime. Instead, she sings the song of anti-revolutionary pacifism, replays the old tune from The Vegetarian, and portrays the Gwangju incident as only “bad” violence, only “bad” death, utterly useless, a terrible tragedy of “not to take up arms,” promoting a passive and pessimistic outlook, urging the Korean people to lay down their weapons, surrender to the reactionary regime, and become good slaves. Han Jiang herself once claimed: “(The Gwangju incident) presents me with two unsolvable mysteries: one about human violence, and one about human dignity.” What are the essence of these two “mysteries”? Nothing more than the Korean people’s spontaneous mutual aid, such as “lining up at the hospital door” “waiting to donate blood for the wounded,” and the revolutionary spirit of unity and struggle against reactionaries, which terrified the indecisive, spineless servant, causing her to fear resistance, bow her head, beg for mercy, and seek refuge through surrender. This is the betrayal of the Korean people — the surrenderist! This is the “Traitor of the East”!
Han Jiang’s recognition by imperialism is no coincidence. Her novels are welcomed in South Korea by oppressed women and some deceived Korean people, which is also rooted in profound social background. South Korea is a society with severe class oppression, with frequent strikes of workers resisting capitalists, and a society permeated with Confucian patriarchal ideas, where discrimination, violence, and insults against women by men are equally serious. Facing the surging revolutionary tide, South Korea’s comprador regime and imperialist agents are terrified and try to extinguish this fire, rushing to produce a series of extremely reactionary and pessimistic literary works, one-sidedly emphasizing the horror of oppression, portraying the oppressed as helpless victims of fate, so that the oppressed will lay down their weapons and let capitalism endure forever. Therefore, works like To Live, Furnace, Burning, Parasite, and The Vegetarian are all typical of South Korea’s current “realist” literature.
Although the reactionary novel The Vegetarian winning the Nobel Prize is a bad thing, to some extent, it can also be seen as a good thing, because it “is good because of surrender. Using it as a negative example, so that people know the surrenderist.” [6]. The bourgeoisie worldwide’s praise for it just makes this novel and its ideas go further into the opposite direction, revealing the true nature of surrenderism. The true way out is not in non-violence or in death, but in struggle. Chairman Mao taught us that, “the philosophy of the Communist Party is the philosophy of struggle” [7]. Women need liberation, slaves need to turn over, and only through struggle can we win true liberation. Neither Song Jiang nor Han Jiang can stop the mighty march of revolutionary people. The trend of the world is revolution, communism, and this is something no surrenderist can resist. “Let the ruling classes tremble before the communist revolution. The proletariat has only lost its chains in revolution. And what they can gain is the whole world.” [8]
- Jean-Paul Sartre: “Declaration of Refusal of the Nobel Prize,” October 22, 1964. ↑
- Lenin: “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism,” Vol. 14 of Lenin Collected Works, People’s Publishing House, 1957. ↑
- Marx: “Capital,” Volume 1, People’s Publishing House, 1975. ↑
- Lenin: “Left-Wing” Childishness in the Communist Movement, Vol. 31 of Lenin Collected Works, People’s Publishing House, 1958. ↑
- Mao Zedong: “Statement Supporting the Struggle of Black Americans.” ↑
- Quotations from Mao Zedong, reprinted from People’s Daily, September 5, 1975. ↑
- Quotations from Mao Zedong, reprinted from People’s Daily, March 23, 1974. ↑
- Marx and Engels: “The Communist Manifesto,” in Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume 1, People’s Publishing House, 1972. ↑
