Population for civilization: the aspiration for whiteness in (post)colonial Korea

Abstract While postcolonial and race scholarship has extensively illuminated the cultural and epistemological domination of the West, less attention has been paid to how postcolonial subjects actively negotiated and rearticulated these dominant forms of knowledge. Mid-twentieth-century global family planning initiatives—typically viewed through the lens of Western power and policy diffusion—offer a particularly rich yet underexamined site for addressing this gap. South Korea’s early and proactive adoption of family planning in the 1960s, an unusual move among postcolonial nations, is examined here. Korea’s shift from pronatalism to antinatalism is understood not simply as a developmental or demographic decision, but as a racialized civilizational project—driven by an aspiration to approximate Western ideals of modernity, civility, and rationality. Drawing on archival materials from the 1880s to the 1970s, attention is given to how Korean intellectuals first idealized Western low fertility rates during the colonial period and later rearticulated this logic in the postcolonial era through a rural–urban binary. By examining the entanglement of coloniality, local realities, and racialized civilizational discourse, it is shown that global narratives of reproduction and population gained traction in Korea through (post)colonial negotiation rather than simple diffusion.