Shang Yue

Shang Yue (; 1902 – January 6, 1982) Shang lost contact with Kim after he was arrested by the Nationalist Chinese. Shang's daughter later attested that her father had thought of Kim as "diligent, putting good questions both inside and outside the class."

Until 1939, Shang worked as an editor at a number of radical periodicals. His Outline of Chinese History (1954) became a widely used textbook. during which he suffered.

Sprouts of capitalism

The core argument of Shang Yue's idea on the sprouts of capitalism is that proto-capitalism existed under late Ming and early Qing China from the 16th to the 17th century, as evidenced by large quantities of factory products that entered metropolitan markets. He thought that a large number of factories implied the existence of proletarian and bourgeois classes, and of a commodity economy. For him, the existence of a bourgeois class was a prerequisite for the formation of the Chinese nation. He argued that the delayed development of Chinese capitalism was caused by both the Mongol and Manchu conquests of China. Both North and South Korean nationalist historians adopted and advanced the theory of sprouts (MR: ) of capitalism to downplay Japanese influence on the origins of Korean industrialization. They claimed that industrial development had been halted by the annexation of Korea in 1910. Since the 1980s, the South Korean historians have been largely denying the validity of the theory.