Killer Fables: Yun Ch’iho, Bourgeois Enlightenment, and the Free Laborer Henry Em Drawing on Yun Ch’iho’ s Diary, and outlining some of the ideological and transna- tional aspects of a Protestant, bourgeois consciousness that emerged in Korea at the turn of the last century, this article presents a critical reassessment of liberalism, Protestant Christianity, and the type of free laborer that bourgeois Protestants like Yun Ch’iho wanted to create. As a pious liberal, Yun Ch’iho led efforts to establish civic and religious organizations that sought to construct a free conscience that would form and maintain public opinion. This was a militant agenda in the sense that, like the evangelical teachers he met in Shanghai and at Emory College, Yun wanted to build public pressure to dismantle the Confucian political order. As a Prot- estant entrepreneur of free men, Yun sought to “kill the Korean.” This militant, lib- eral agenda aimed to discipline and embody new desires, especially among youth, to produce the free laborer, and to render the extraction of profit as a form of exchange. Keywords: bourgeois, capitalism, liberalism, Protestant Christianity, Yun Ch’iho [Trust] in no Korean, be his words as fair as fair can be. By the way, when a Korean is learned or able, 能, or clever 有才, shun him or kill him. —Yun Ch’iho, Diary Henry Em is associate professor at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He re- ceived his BA and PhD in history from the University of Chicago. From 1995 through 2012, he taught at UCLA, University of Michigan, and NYU. He was Fulbright Senior Scholar to Korea (1998–99) and visiting professor at Centre de Recherches sur la Corée, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2000). His publications include “The Unending Korean War,” a special issue of positions: asia critique, coedited with Christine Hong (23, no. 4 [2015]), and The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (2013). Journal of Korean Studies 25, no. 1 (March 2020) DOI 10.1215/07311613-7932285 © 2020 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York