A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  The opposing forces leading to Korea’s civil war originated in the colonial period and were dramatically incited by the reoccupation and division of Korea in the immediate post-liberation period (see Chapter 20). These same forces would render the conflagration unleashed by these crack North Korean troops almost an inevitability by the first half of 1950. Syngman Rhee himself, the South Korean president, clearly agitated for a US-backed move toward forcible reunification, and his soldiers along the increasingly fortified frontier with North Korea came close several times to sparking a full confrontation. The North Korean troops returned the hostility in kind with their own provocations. These skirmishes reflected the bitter divide that had arisen, amidst the pressures of superpower rivalry, out of an array of interests in the first few years after liberation. As in China, while one must not lose sight of the profound divisions among Koreans that constituted the core factors leading to civil war, the geopolitical context framed the outbreak and progress of the conflict.

  Kim Il Sung’s decision to launch the Korean War, in fact, required adherence to the pecking order of the communist bloc. Recent research from de-classified archives and other sources have pointed to the strained efforts of the North Korean leader to gain permission and assurance of support from the heads of the Soviet Union and China. For this, Kim played the two leaders, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, off each other. Stalin first had to consent to Mao’s returning thousands of North Korean troops left over from the Chinese civil war. Kim then found it relatively easy to convince Mao that the North Koreans should proceed with a communist-led military reunification of the fatherland, just as Mao had done. Mao, though wary of American involvement, even offered Kim Chinese military assistance, but Kim Il Sung was convinced that such help would not be necessary, so quickly and decisively would the North Koreans overwhelm their southern counterparts. Plus, American Secretary of State Dean Acheson had flatly stated in early 1950 that South Korea lay outside the US defense perimeter, suggesting strongly that the Americans likely would not get involved. Still, a cautious Stalin, while begrudgingly permitting Kim to seek his desperately sought unification and providing North Korea with

  strategic and material assistance, required that traces of Soviet involvement be eliminated. And with such assurances came the go-ahead for the invasion.

  6–25

  “Six-Two-Five” (Yug-i-o) is the simple, powerful term for the Korean War among Koreans, in the same way that “Nine-Eleven” suffices for Americans in reference to their signal moment in recent history. At dawn on June 25, 1950, the Korean People’s Army launched a full-frontal assault over the thirty-eighth parallel border and, despite the saber-rattling that had been going on for months, this attack came as a major surprise. The South’s lack of preparation showed clearly in the Northern army’s easy rampage to Seoul, which it captured in two days, trailing just behind the massive flight of refugees streaming southward. Koreans throughout their history had experienced these sudden invasions that turned their world upside down, but never from their own national brethren. There was no advantage of local knowledge in fending off the invaders this time.

  Indeed, as the Northern army chased the refugees and the Southern forces southward and quickly captured most of South Korea within a few weeks, it was joined by the leftist guerillas holding out in the mountains, as well as by communist sympathizers hiding within South Korean society. Together they instituted a swift revolutionary change in the occupied territories: land was redistributed, leftist political prisoners were released, and prominent local leaders, intellectuals, and businessmen were arrested, killed, or taken up north. The Southern army, for its part, took little care to discriminate between possible northern collaborators and regular citizens as it committed atrocities on its southward retreat. So began the cycle of recriminations and reprisals that would victimize hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent bystanders and constitute one of the greatest tragedies of the Korean War. The brutal cleansing of suspicious elements and radical restructuring of social relations emulated, in telescoped fashion, the North Korean revolution itself

  from 1945–50 (see Chapter 22), and it set the stage for reciprocity once the tide of the war changed and towns were reoccupied by the opposing side. The people of Seoul, which the North Korean leadership had claimed to have “liberated” in June 1950 and went on to change hands four times in the first half-year of the Korean War, would bear some of the worst retributions in this truly vicious cycle.

  The first major turning point of the war took place while the “Pusan Perimeter,” the roughly forty-mile radius around the southeastern port city, held off the North Korean siege long enough for the United Nations to organize an American-led recapturing of the South. In September of 1950, through the famous “Inchon Landing,” just to the west of Seoul, the American forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, attacked the North Koreans on the backside as UN reinforcements were sent into the south. This in effect squeezed the Northern forces through a pincer movement. The retreat of the Northern army up the peninsula thereafter was almost as swift as its sweep down the peninsula a few months earlier. The combined US-ROK forces recaptured Seoul and within a few weeks had chased the People’s Army out of Pyongyang as well. In its flight northward, the North Koreans made sure to destroy both the property and persons that might assist the Southern forces. These horrific sights failed to deter the American military commanders’ push up the peninsula, all the way to the border area with China, in their determination to take a complete and quick victory, which, by late 1950, seemed well in hand.

  CHINESE INTERVENTION AND THE STALEMATE

  It was not as if the American army failed to foresee the potential intervention by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on behalf of the North Koreans, as reconnaissance flights showed columns of Chinese troops assembling close to the border. Apparently, however, the American commander, General MacArthur, believed the Chinese would never engage American might. (There remains speculation that MacArthur might actually have sought to provoke a wider confrontation as a way of overturning the communist victory in China. If so, he badly miscalculated both the formidable military challenge presented by China as well as the degree of support he would enjoy back in Washington.) When the Chinese did enter the war beginning in early November 1950, the sheer scale and suddenness of the invasion delivered nothing less than a stunning blow, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops chased the joint US–ROK forces back down the peninsula. Only after the joint Chinese–North Korean forces recaptured Pyongyang, then briefly even “re-liberated” Seoul, did the UN forces put a halt to the southward advance and press the front just to the north of Seoul, where it would remain for the next two-and-a-half years.

  The stalemate of the rest of the war from early 1951 to mid-1953 refers to the lack of movement of the battlefront itself, which shifted little until the Armistice of July 1953 and ultimately left the country divided along the same thirty-eighth parallel where the war had started. This was the Korean War of the American film and TV series M*A*S*H. But the notion of a stalemate should not lead us to consider these two-and-a-half years a respite, for the relentless destruction of this period led ultimately to the greatest tragedy of all in the Korean War: the decimation of the population and landscape, with ultimately little to nothing accomplished other than millions of deaths and a bitterness and distrust singed into the memory of all actors. To North Koreans, the stalemate brought constant siege in the form of American bombs, napalm, and other carriers of devastation that left the North, by the summer of 1953, with few major buildings remaining standing. This is also the memory of the war that the North Korean leadership has sustained and incited as a reminder of American brutality, and thereby also as a reinforcement of its own legitimacy. To the Chinese, the Korean War is remembered as the conflict in which Chinese “volunteers” bravely kept American imperialism at bay. Today, the sacrifice of thousands of these Chinese soldiers prompts the grief of Chinese tourists who visit the site of a major batt
le of the war in the border town of Ch’rwn, just south of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. Ch’rwn in fact remains an open-air museum, with artifacts from the Korean War battles displayed in plain view as a reminder of South Koreans’ own sacrifices and need for vigilance (see Image 21).

  Image 21 The shelled-out headquarters of the South Korean Communist Party from the Korean War, left intact in Ch’rwn, South Korea, near the border with North Korea. (Author’s photo.)

  As it had done throughout the course of Korean history, China once again played a key role in determining the character and fate of the Korean nation. The hyper-nationalist historical narrative in North Korea has deleted China’s contributions toward preserving the country during the Korean War, just as Chinese assistance in fending off the Japanese invasion of the sixteenth century has been officially forgotten. But the replay of historical motifs is striking. Chinese intervention in the Korean War arose first and foremost from its own interests, this time to maintain a buffer against American domination of East Asia. As was often the case in the long history of Chinese–Korean relations, Chinese influence framed the place of Korea in the larger East Asian regional order—politically, economically, and culturally. China’s participation in the Korean War also symbolized the peninsula’s distinctively modern entanglements as well. Indeed, Korea remains one of the few places on the globe where the Cold War still has powerful remnants. In fact, while the stage has changed dramatically, the primary geopolitical actors in the early twenty-first century affecting the peninsula are the same as those during the Korean War: the US and China. And given the increasing ties today between China and South Korea as well, Chinese actions likely will affect significantly the ultimate fate of Korea in the near future, just as they did in 1950, and just as they have done throughout much of Korean history.

  22

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  Early North Korea

  CHRONOLOGY

  1945 August First Soviet incursions into northern Korea; liberation from Japanese colonial rule

  1945 September Soviet Central Administration established; Cho Mansik asked to head a coalitional governing body

  1945 October Kim Il Sung introduced by Soviet occupation to cheering crowds in Pyongyang

  1945 November Massacre of Christian nationalists in Siniju

  1946 Spring Initiation of comprehensive land reform in the northern occupation zone

  1946 November Elections for the interim northern legislature

  1947 Establishment of the People’s Army

  1948 September Formal establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

  1950–53 Korean War

  1955 December Kim Il Sung’s speech introducing the concept of Juche to party propagandists

  1956 Failed attempt to oust Kim by Soviet-backed Korean communists

  1957 Beginning of the Ch’llima heavy industrialization campaign

  1962 Purge of novelist Han Srya, the leading propagandist for Kim Il Sung’s personality cult

  1968 North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo

  KIM IL SUNG’S “JUCHE” SPEECH, 1955

  To an audience of propaganda officials of the North Korean Communist Party in late December of 1955, Kim Il Sung delivered a historic speech that introduced the concept of “Juche” (Chuch’e), the ideal of

  self-reliance that would become the country’s ruling ideology. Kim’s emphasis, as it would be for the Juche concept itself, lay in forging a distinctively Korean path to socialism through a focus on national history and customs. The mistakes made thus far in North Korea, he claimed, stemmed from an excessive dependence on external models, particularly those of the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, this speech came amidst a purge of Kim’s political rivals, targeting especially those Soviet-Korean communists who had come to the country as Soviet occupation advisors. Indeed, despite the outward appeals for achieving “peaceful reunification” by presenting a stellar model of Korean socialism in the north, this historic speech and its political context pointed directly to the solidification of Kim’s political power. It encapsulated the core elements in the politics, economy, and culture of the early northern system and launched the dominion of Juche as North Korea’s ideological justification for Kim’s absolute rule.

  North Korea’s comprehensive transformation in the first two decades of its existence, beginning in 1945, laid the groundwork for its more familiar late-twentieth century form. By the early 1960s, Kim Il Sung stood as the undisputed source of political authority, and the country had embarked on a heavy industrialization campaign that would speed the North past its southern counterpart in economic development. Furthermore, the reordering of society into categories that reflected this political and economic collectivization, a process that had begun in the post-liberation period, was by now well in place. Kim’s speech in 1955 outlining the basic principals of Juche, which nourished the idea of self-reliance with a fierce nativism and wariness of the outside world, also demonstrated his regime’s preoccupation with history—history as knowledge, but also as an ideological tool. As it turned out, this obsession with historical orthodoxy constituted a cover as well as a corrective for dependence.

  LIBERATION SPACE NORTH KOREA

  There remains considerable debate about the Soviet impact on northern Korea during the liberation period from 1945 to 1950. The more that previously classified Soviet documents have become accessible, however, the more it appears that Soviet influence was paramount and indeed decisive in determining the political outcome in the northern occupation zone. This should be expected, but such a revelation goes completely against the North Korean historical orthodoxy as well as substantial scholarship that has forwarded a dominant role played by domestic forces in shaping the northern system. The stakes are as high as they are for South Korea (Chapter 20), for this issue gets to the heart of North Korea’s historical legitimacy and purported independence, touted by Juche ideology as the foundation of North Korean existence.

  The Soviet occupation, however, faced almost as much difficulty in bringing about its desired outcome in North Korea as the Americans did in the southern occupation zone. Like the Americans, the Soviets, who entered Korea as combatants a week before the end of the Pacific War on August 15, 1945, were unprepared to administer the country and utterly ignorant of their new territory. The Soviet Central Administration (SCA), the makeshift governing organization of the Red Army in Korea, stumbled onto a complex scene, with a diverse population characterized by ideological differences that overlapped with socioeconomic, religious, and regional ones. The regional characteristics of northern Korea, deeply rooted in history and shaped considerably by the colonial experience, showed that while the northeastern region had conditions conducive to communist growth, the northwestern part of the country—where Pyongyang lay—was a stronghold of Korean nationalism.

  The nationalists in this area tended to be landed, with strong business influences, and Christian. All of these strains were embodied in the most respected and well-known figure in the north, Cho Mansik, a Presbyterian elder who had steadfastly resisted colonial assimilation and mobilization efforts. He was, in this sense, the northern zone’s counterpart to Y Unhyng, the left-moderate who commanded a great following in the south before his assassination in 1947. Cho was not killed until 1950, but the SCA, after turning originally to him in September of 1945 to head a Soviet-friendly coalitional governing body, found him recalcitrant in opposing communism and any hint of national division. He was arrested by 1946, but the Soviet occupation’s difficulties with him reflected the bitter divisions in northern Korea that had developed between Protestant nationalists and Soviet or communist elements. The largest outbreak of violence in this struggle took place in November of 1945 in the border city of Siniju, on the Yalu River, when a Christian protest against the Soviet occupation sparked a massacre of dozens.

  One of the great ironies of North Korea is that Kim Il Sung, this country’s dominant communist figure, came from a t
ypical Protestant household in Pyongyang. The Soviet occupation officials’ fateful decision, in October of 1945, to promote Kim as the prospective Korean leader came only after their failure to win over Cho Mansik, whose anti-communism stemmed from his religiously-inspired nationalism. Unlike Cho, Kim wielded little influence over the populace, despite his being known to some as a famed guerilla leader from the 1930s who had managed to escape the Japanese hunt for him. After four years of living quietly in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945, the period when his son, Kim Jong Il, was born in Siberia, Kim accompanied the Soviet army’s entrance into his home city in late September, 1945. In a large mid-October rally in Pyongyang staged to celebrate the Soviet occupation, Kim was introduced to a cheering crowd as one of several featured Korean leaders, including even Cho Mansik. But through cunning, ruthlessness, charisma, considerable political skill, and a lot of luck, Kim gradually won enough confidence from the Soviet authorities to take, step-by-step, the reigns of the native political system in northern Korea.