A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  By early September the CPKI gave way to the Korean People’s Republic (KPR)—like the CPKI a coalition of ideological and political interests—which served as the central governing institution connecting the hundreds of “people’s committees” that sprang up around the country. The people’s committees lie at the heart of a great historical debate concerning this period, namely, whether the Korean population in the south, aroused by the destabilizing demobilization of wartime society—including the return of those Koreans who had been abroad—sought a leftist social revolution. Despite their name, however, the people’s committees and even the KPR appear to have represented diverse concerns of disparate localities. Indeed the most pressing, common item on their agenda was to secure local order and ensure a rectification of the traumas caused by the wartime dislocations, the first steps in the great challenge of decolonization. To be sure, many of the people’s committees quickly fell under the sway of the promises and prowess of Korean communists emerging from their underground existence, but clearly most of the participants themselves had little inkling of the larger communist program. Indeed the KPR’s original platform called for nothing more radical than standard labor laws and the redistribution of ill-gotten gains. There was hardly a set ideological agenda in this preparatory period of flux.

  The KPR leaders, in fact, chose as their chairman a right-wing nationalist, Syngman Rhee—by far the best-known independence activist—who still was making his way back to Korea from a decades-long exile in the US. With the American government’s help Rhee arrived in Seoul in mid-October, ready to pursue his long-held dream of leading Korea’s first independent government. His homecoming, however, came a few days after that of Kim Il Sung, the former leader of a communist guerrilla band in Manchuria, who accompanied the Soviet army into the northern zone and was introduced by the Soviet authorities to cheering crowds in Pyongyang. In late November, the final major independence activist from abroad, Kim Ku, a right-nationalist who had led the Korean Restoration Army and Provisional Government in China, made his triumphant return. All three figures returning to the peninsula would ultimately exert far greater power than their domestic counterparts.

  That foreign-based Koreans came to dominate the post-liberation political space, a somewhat discomfiting reality in hindsight, had much to do with the fact that the Allied forces, and not Koreans themselves, liberated Korea. And, as the agents of liberation, the two Allied powers determined the ultimate fate of the country, which meant that they were also the immediate agents of national partition. Well before the end of the Pacific War, in fact, the Soviets and Americans had agreed on an allocation of wartime responsibilities that would place the Soviets in a prime position in the northeast Asian mainland, while the Americans would be busy with Japan. When the Americans suddenly realized in August of 1945 that this would likely result in the Soviet Union’s occupation of the entire Korean peninsula, they proposed a split occupation. Surprisingly, the Soviets accepted, even though the Red Army could have easily driven down the entire length of the peninsula, and even though the thirty-eighth parallel dividing line placed Seoul in the American zone.

  Thereafter the two occupations determined what was politically acceptable in their respective occupation zones. The Soviets, as unaware and unprepared for their occupation as the Americans were, had to deal with a strong right-nationalist and Christian tendency in the populace, particularly in the northwest. It recognized the Korean People’s Republic and the people’s committees while ensuring that Kim Il Sung and other Korean communists would gain the upper hand in political struggles (see Chapter 22). Americans in the south, for their part, found their situation even more complicated and harried. Much of this difficulty arose because, as they had desired, the Americans controlled the capital of Seoul, the major stage and prize of political contestation. From the perspective of Korean political actors vying for influence in Seoul, the American occupation would constitute the dominant factor in their struggles against each other. The two occupations, in turn, used this intra-Korean strife to further secure their own favored political outcomes in their respective zones.

  This complex dynamic became apparent almost immediately, with the announcement by the superpowers in late December of 1945 of a five-year trusteeship over Korea, an idea originating from Allied summits during the war. This promptly triggered vociferous opposition from just about everyone in the country. The communists, though, quickly changed their stance to support the trusteeship, and thus began the most conspicuous, though not necessarily the most important, source of division among Korean political interests. Henceforth the right wing solidified itself around opposition to the trusteeship, which became a convenient bogeyman for excluding and suppressing leftist opponents, who

  could be tarred for taking a treasonous stance. The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), with its own set of concerns about the Left, assisted this effort, maintaining its role as primarily an enforcer of anti-communism and cultivator of pro-American political forces. The de-classified military intelligence documents from the very beginning of the southern occupation demonstrate clearly the premises, suspicions, and ignorance that colored American perceptions of Korean actors. And various stripes of right-nationalist Korean interests were keen to goad the occupiers into reckless actions.

  IMPLANTING THE SOUTHERN SYSTEM

  Anti-communist autocracy, then, became the hallmark and bulwark of the American military government, and of South Korean political rule for another forty years. The southern system took hold, however, not only by matching the American occupiers’ inclinations—including, ultimately, the acceptance of a separate southern government if necessary—but also by eliminating rival political forces. The communists and other leftists were dealt with most harshly (see below). Even moderates, however, who pursued a coalitional solution to the great challenge of establishing a unified government amidst rival superpower occupations, faced constant harassment and pressure. Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku, the two right-nationalists with the largest followings, maneuvered incessantly to block any outcome that might incorporate moderates or moderate leftists in a power-sharing arrangement. The most conspicuous victim of this dynamic was Y Unhyng, the widely revered leader who had led the earliest Korean governing order in the summer of 1945. Y was assassinated in July of 1947, just as he appeared as the only viable alternative to the far right. The rightists had recognized this, and they eliminated Y from the scene. As it turned out, with him died any chance for moderates to survive in this volatile political atmosphere.

  The American occupation, too, did its part in ensuring the victory of the immoderate right wing. One of the first major steps taken by the American leadership after marching into Seoul in the fall of 1945 was to declare illegitimate the people’s committees in the south, absurdly suspecting this vast collection of disparate groups as uniformly left-revolutionary. Afterwards, USAMGIK paved the way for the triumph of the Right, not by intervening in the disputes among political leaders as much as by clamping down on any popular or mass activity the occupation deemed too close to communism. Beginning in the spring of 1946 and over the course of the three-year occupation, the American military and rightist constabulary forces incarcerated thousands of leftist activists and killed hundreds of them. This intractable American orientation was sufficient to prohibit leftist politics from vying for any realistic influence in Seoul. As for its dealings with the Soviet occupation through the occasional gatherings of the Joint Commission, which sought to work out a unified governing solution, USAMGIK, like its Soviet counterpart, was never prepared to countenance any Korean government that smacked of the opposing occupation. After yet another failure to come to terms in the spring of 1947, it became clear that the deadlock had only tightened. Thus the Americans sought to shift responsibility to the United Nations while promoting the formation of a provisional governing council in the south. Headed by Syngman Rhee, this council purged leftists and combined various militias and paramilitary groups into
a policing force that would carry out a thorough, often brutal cleansing of political opponents from the scene. As for the UN, it declared its first priority to be the holding of a UN-sponsored election for a new Korean government. Given that the Soviets refused to participate in this effort, in effect the elections would establish a government for only southern Korea.

  The United Nations forged ahead with these plans even after being refused entry into the northern occupation zone in early 1948. And so, over increasingly vocal resistance, on May 10, 1948, elections were held to choose representatives for the National Assembly, the first concrete step toward establishing a separate southern state. By all accounts, the people demonstrated great enthusiasm, as voters waited patiently in long lines for this new privilege of electing their political leaders. Those so chosen gathered in Seoul at the end of May and selected Syngman Rhee as the Assembly’s speaker, then voted promptly to implement a presidential system over a parliamentary one—clearly a reflection of Rhee’s increasing hold on power. On June 20, Rhee was elected by the Assembly as the new president, establishing a pattern for indirect presidential elections frequently used later in South Korea to maintain dictatorial rule. Indeed, despite the outwardly liberal constitution of the new Republic of Korea, what was inaugurated on August 15, 1948—on the third anniversary of liberation—was a South Korean government that would use its dogged claims of jurisdiction over all of Korea to justify repression. (The separate North Korean government, formally established a few weeks later, would be no different.)

  Little wonder, then, that throughout the liberation period in the south, anti-state and anti-imperialist sentiment grew, as people became aware that liberation from Japanese colonialism was not leading to independence or even to national unity. The discontent was exacerbated by rampant inflation, unemployment, and poverty in the first year of the occupation. This in turn fed the swelling labor movement stirred by leftist interests, and in the fall of 1946 a massive general strike that began in the southern industrial city of Taegu buckled the nascent southern system. The resulting crackdown by police and military forces resulted in the deaths of hundreds of strikers, policemen, and officials. The other major group of resistors in the south were the so-called ppalch’isan (“partisan”), communist guerrillas who, while under constant siege, still managed to wage resistance campaigns in the spring of 1948 after the separate southern elections were announced. They also appear to have instigated the eruption of a major uprising on Cheju Island off the southwest coast, as protests against the southern elections turned into a major insurrection by hundreds of combatants. The response by the south’s paramilitary forces, though, was excessive, sweeping, and horrific, as whole villages were wiped out indiscriminately and tens of thousands of innocent bystanders were killed. Later in the fall of 1948, some members of these militia forces themselves rebelled against the southern system in the cities of Ysu and Sunch’n on the south-central coast. The rebels, quickly joined by communist

  guerillas holding out in the surrounding mountains, managed to capture many towns in the region before being chased back to the hills by the military. As with the Cheju Island episode, the government response was brutal, and over half of the captured instigators, numbering in the hundreds, were summarily executed by firing squad. The Ysu-Sunch’n Rebellion would be the originating backdrop for the acclaimed multi-volume novel (and later, film), The T’aebaek Mountains, which depicted people already caught up in the ideological polarization, political violence, and terrible recriminations that would soon mark the Korean War itself.

  A TROUBLING HISTORICAL SHADOW

  Notwithstanding its short duration, so much importance is attached to the liberation period between 1945 and 1950 that it constitutes a fulcrum of modern Korean history. Lodged between the long colonial ordeal and the Korean War that solidified national division, the abbreviated liberation space has chronically tugged at contemporary South Koreans’ sense of self, an uncomfortable reminder of what might have been. What if the Allies had left the country alone following the end of the Second World War? What if the Americans had supported the moderate elements that sought a coalitional solution to the political divisions? What if Y Unhyng had lived? And, what if decolonization had truly been achieved, when it appeared most people considered this the most pressing issue?

  Beyond political autonomy, so the thinking goes, decolonization would have addressed above all the injustices and severe hierarchies of the late colonial period, hence overturning the economic and political privileges associated with Japanese colonialism. The American military government, ever wary of Soviet influence and communist ascendance, cracked down on the people’s committees and left in place the police and high officials of the colonial system as a way of ensuring stability. For similar reasons, the right-nationalists such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku found the American preoccupation with communism a convenient facilitator of their own political aims. The landed and business interests, though sometimes in contentious relations with Rhee, would have been the targets of any purge of late colonial elites, along with the police and high bureaucracy, and hence these groups in the end had to throw in their lot with Rhee. Rhee helped to salvage their privileges in late 1948, when he implemented the National Security Law, the all-purpose tool of the state’s suppression of political opposition down to the present day. In the summer of 1949, a land reform to address the inequities from the colonial period (achieved in northern Korea in early 1946) was finally promulgated, suggesting that the landed elites were in danger of losing their most entrenched advantages. But later, in the fall, Rhee, under the pretext of anti-communist cleansing, forcefully dissolved the year-long criminal court investigating the most notorious pro-Japanese collaborators.

  The historical narratives of responsibility for both national division and the Korean War are thus dramatically complicated by the reality of multiple divisions among Koreans and the unsavory behavior of many influential actors. In the search for what went wrong, the overarching impact of the superpower occupations, of course, cannot be discounted, but ultimately the actions of Koreans themselves must be, and recently have been, the focus of attention. Even if southern Korea in the liberation space was not really on a path toward leftist social revolution, what did happen in the southern zone has cast a troubling historical shadow over South Korean state and society: the uneasy examples of ready complicity with another foreign occupier, the brutal suppression of political opponents and innocent bystanders alike, and the preservation of late-colonial sociopolitical privileges, the vestiges of which remain powerful today.

  21

  . . . . . . . .

  The Korean War

  CHRONOLOGY

  1948–49 Training of North Korean troops in China

  1950 January US Secretary of State Acheson’s declaration of American defense perimeter

  1950 June 25 Outbreak of the Korean War; Northern army pushes Southern army south

  1950 September General MacArthur’s “Inchon Landing”; Allied forces drive back northern army

  1950 November Chinese intervention in the Korean War on behalf of the North

  1953 July 27 Armistice to end the war

  THE CHINESE ENTRANCE INTO THE KOREAN WAR, NOVEMBER 1950

  The Chinese military had intervened in peninsular affairs several times before the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century alone, the Chinese thrice helped put down Korean rebellions—first an insurrection by a group of Korean soldiers in 1882, and then in 1884, when radical enlightenment activists attempted a coup. Finally, in 1894, Chinese troops arrived to assist the Chosn government in quelling the massive Tonghak Uprising, a move that would launch the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War and bring an end to China’s preeminent standing in Korea. In earlier Chinese interventions, the stakes were even higher: the Ming dynasty’s assistance in saving Korea from the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century; and the Tang dynasty’s alliance with Silla to conquer the two other kingdoms on the peninsula in the seventh c
entury, which led to the first

  unified Korean polity. The lone Chinese military intrusion of the twentieth century, that of October of 1950, would also play a crucial role in the founding of a Korean state, but this time, in the context of the emerging Cold War, the beneficiary was not Korea as a whole, but rather a part.

  The flooding of the battlefront by hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers brought about a startling turn in the tide of the Korean War, which by the closing months of 1950 had been approaching a decisive victory by the US-led United Nations forces. The Chinese soldiers, along with their North Korean allies, quickly pushed the front down to the middle of the peninsula, where the Korean War had started a half-year earlier, and where it would be waged for another two-and-a-half years, with tremendous bloodshed, until the Armistice of July 27, 1953. By then, Chinese intervention had been integral not only to the Korean War, but also to the emerging Cold War order that engulfed the Korean peninsula, and indeed the entire East Asian region.

  CIVIL WARS AMIDST THE COLD WAR

  The Korean War that began in 1950 is commonly cited as the first “hot war” of the Cold War, the confrontation between the capitalist and communist blocs that dominated the second half of the twentieth century and still leaves Korea divided today. One could argue, however, that this designation should apply to an even earlier conflict, the Chinese civil war of 1945–9 between the communists, with the backing of the Soviet Union, and the nationalists, who were supported by the US. Having cooperated for the common anti-Japanese cause in the Pacific theater of the Second World War, the rival Chinese parties almost immediately turned their guns on each other after the Japanese defeat in 1945. After four years of fighting, the communists under Mao Zedong drove Chang Kai-shek’s nationalists to Taiwan. The nascent polity of North Korea might have played a small role in the Chinese civil war. Kim Il Sung’s ties to China from his youth and his contemporary bonds with fellow communists led to a contingent of North Korean troops training under, and perhaps fighting for, the Chinese communists. This relationship, which was subsequently highlighted by both sides, might have provided valuable experience in forging a crack North Korean fighting unit.