"There was little, if any, feeling of loyalty toward the abstract concept of Korea as a nation-state, or toward fellow inhabitants of the peninsula as "Koreans". Far more meaningful at the time, in addition to a sense of loyalty to the king, were the attachments of Koreans to their village of region, and above all to their clan, lineage, and immediate and extended family. The Korean elite in particular would have found the idea of nationalism not only strange but also uncivilized. Since at least the seventh century the ruling classes in Korea had thought of themselves in cultural terms less as Koreans than as members of a larger cosmopolitan civilization centered on China... To live outside the realm of Chinese culture was, for the Korean elite, to live as a barbarian."
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Sources
Carter J. Eckert (1991), as quoted in Cultural Modernity in Korea (1999), by Michael Edson Robinson and Gi-Wook Shin, p. 338.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/South_Korea
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