Jo So-ang
Author of the Doctrine of Three Equalities, the basis of the 1941 Founding Principles
Born Jo Yong-eun, with So-ang as his pen name, he came from Paju in Gyeonggi. He studied at the Seonggyungwan, and in 1904 went to Japan as one of the Korean Empire's royal scholarship students, studying law at Meiji University and joining student protests against Japanese aggression.
Exiled to Shanghai in 1913, he worked in the Dongjesa with Sin Gyu-sik and Park Eun-sik and joined the 1917 Declaration of Great Unity. In 1919 he drafted the Korean Declaration of Independence issued by activists in Manchuria and the Russian Maritime Province, and helped draft the Provisional Charter when the Provisional Government was founded. In 1930 he founded the Korea Independence Party with Kim Gu and others and gave it its ideology, the theory of three equalities: equality in politics, economy and education, leading to equality among individuals, nations and states. It became the basis of the Founding Principles the Provisional Government proclaimed in 1941. He joined the Korean National Revolutionary Party in 1935 but soon left to re-establish the Korea Independence Party, and as the government's long-serving foreign minister he pressed Korea's case abroad.
He returned home in November 1945 and joined Kim Gu in the 1948 North–South negotiations. In 1950 he was elected to the second National Assembly from Seongbuk in Seoul with the most votes of any candidate in the country, but was abducted to the North during the Korean War and died there in 1958. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation (Republic of Korea Medal) in 1989.