A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  The US, too, readily served as a bogeyman for North Korea’s constant vigilance, based on the populace’s grim memories of the Korean War and occasional skirmishes with the US military in Korea thereafter (Chapter 22). In the mid-1990s, this chronic hostility suddenly reached the level of an emergency, as American detection of North Korean activities to reprocess nuclear fuel at their plant in Yongbyon triggered a crisis. The response of the North Korean regime to international calls for inspections was to withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to intensify the public vilification of American intent. Just as tensions in the summer of 1994 reached the stage of imminent military confrontation, former American President Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang and came away with an agreement, which was eventually signed later in the year as the Agreed Framework. The Agreed Framework’s call for North Korean allowance of inspections in exchange for fuel and food aid, however, failed to stop the nuclear program, mostly due to the regime’s attempts to stall indefinitely while extracting as many concessions as possible. But the Americans shared the blame. Indeed North Korea’s relentless push to develop nuclear weapons was historically fated to prick and preoccupy the US, for the genuine fears of an interventionist American military drove much of its nuclear ambitions. American leaders who engaged in juvenile name-calling of North Korea while remaining painfully ignorant of these larger circumstances only exacerbated the North’s

  fears and therefore strengthened the effects of the regime’s propaganda for internal consumption.

  And finally, South Korea, the so-called American puppet, was steadily condemned as a prime example of the shame of foreign domination, despite the occasional breakthroughs in reconciliation such as the 2000 summit in Pyongyang with South Korea’s president, Kim Dae Jung. What outsiders called North Korea’s isolation, then, was touted internally rather as a manifestation of the country’s fierce independence. Following the famine and economic collapse of the latter half of the 1990s, however, the country had to open up sufficiently to entice foreign capital and know-how, including, as noted above, from South Korea. Even Internet and cell phone traffic was made available to a privileged few. But the wariness of the slippery slope potentially leading to the collapse of the system itself remained, and this delicate balance between too much exposure and too much hardship promised to suffer even greater stresses.

  MONUMENTAL LIFE

  One begins to understand, then, the paramount significance of maintaining the impression of North Korean superiority, and hence also the extraordinary lengths undertaken to enforce this narrative. This furthermore accounts for the eerie monumentality of life in North Korea that developed in the closing decades of the twentieth century: the mind-numbing proliferation of over-the-top propaganda, gigantic memorials and construction projects, and ever-stupendous claims about the country and regime. In a classic case of overcompensation, such grandiosity and myth-making that lay at the core of North Korean existence, in which everything was said to be “perfect,” seemed to intensify the more it diverged from reality. North Korea, and in particular Pyongyang, turned into not only an Orwellian society, but an uncannily precise realization of Orwell’s vision in the novel 1984. All the elements were there, including the viral surveillance, the double-talk and absolute control of information, the relentless vigilance and incapacity to turn off the propaganda, the erasure and fabrication of history, the ritualized hatred of a bogeyman enemy, the submission of the self into the mass, brutal punishment for nonconformity and political crimes, and, of course, Big Brother.

  The cult of personality quickly reached absurd proportions and eventually went beyond the scale of other totalitarian regimes in its attribution of extraordinary powers to both the father and son, but especially the latter, who was not only showered with adulation but credited with superhuman intelligence. There is evidence that Kim Jong Il viewed this narrative, much of which he himself probably crafted, more soberly, and repeated the explanation of other North Korean officials in rare moments of candor: the lessons from Korean history, especially in the modern period, required resolute mobilization for the cause of preserving national independence and dignity, and a heroic leader was necessary to rally and properly channel this energy. Tellingly, however, the personality cult in North Korea, as well as political rule itself, also took on a hereditary nature, an understandably rare occasion for communist regimes subscribing officially to an ideology, socialism, with pretenses to perfect rationality. While some commentators detected an unmistakably Christian tenor in the droning public worship of the father–son tandem, the most common and plausible explanation was to observe simply that the North Korean ruling system revived the Korean kingship. In addition to preserving power within a given family, the North Korean monarchy tapped into a basic longing for stability, national pride, and autonomy (however imaginary), as well as for a symbolic leader whose leadership was expressed in familial overtones.

  But this kind of mythology required constant reinforcement, especially as reality intruded upon it. Hence the erection of enormous monuments celebrating the system, its ideology, and especially its leader. The round-numbered anniversaries of Kim Il Sung’s birthday of April 15, 1912 seem to have triggered the most memorable memorials. In 1972, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, a 20-meter bronze statue of his most majestic pose was unveiled close to the banks of the Taedong River. His seventieth birthday in 1982 brought forth a staggering trio of monuments that still dominate the visitor’s impression of the city: the Arch of Triumph, a little taller and wider than the one in Paris after which it was styled, in celebration of Kim’s struggle against Japanese colonialism; the Tower of the Juche Idea, a paean to the official ruling ideology of self-reliance that has simply been called “Kim Il Sung-ism,” so transparently did it serve to rationalize the Kim monarchy; and the splendid Grand Study House of the People, a public library that still stands as the largest building in the traditional Korean architectural style.

  It was hoped that the Ryugyong Hotel (see Image 25) would be completed in time for the next super-great birthday celebration, Kim Il Sung’s eightieth in April 1992. Groundbreaking for this one-of-a-kind structure, towering over 100 stories, took place in 1987, at the height of the feverish competition over which Korea could outdo the other in presenting itself to the world ahead of the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. In addition to planting a bomb in 1987 that destroyed a South Korean airliner with over a hundred souls on board, the Northern regime prepared its own international sports festival, for which the world’s largest stadium, with a seating capacity of 150,000, was built and actually completed. The Ryugyong Hotel, however, ran into troubles, and construction stopped midway in 1992 due to astronomical costs and, as widely suspected, problems in the building’s structural integrity. Thereafter it remained an unsightly skeleton, a 300-meter hollow pyramid of concrete. Visitors to Pyongyang remarked, though almost never flatteringly, on its unavoidable presence, visible from just about everywhere in the city. Some observers described it as “hideous” or “monstrous,” while one American magazine dubbed it “the world’s worst building.” Others, however, found the superstructure a tremendous curiosity and remarked on its distinctive shape with three extended wings, each grounded by a smaller pyramid at the base. The hotel, then, appeared to mimic the layout of the Egyptian pyramids of Giza, although many have commented that it looked like a giant rocket ship ready to launch. After a fifteen-year dormancy, construction on the hotel was revived in 2008, this time targeting for completion April 2012, the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s birth— or Year Juche 100, according to the North Korean calendar.

  Image 25 Ryugyng Hotel in Pyongyang, 2003. (Courtesy of Tae Gyun Park.)

  In the meantime, the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel turned into the unwitting symbol of North Korea itself: the fantastical and megalomaniacal ambitions, economic bankruptcy, and disabling stagnation, waiting only for collapse itself. And as with North Korea’s historical development and ultimately its survival, the R
yugyong Hotel project became a matter of utter will, dedication, delusion, and mobilization. Like the Ryugyong Hotel, North Korea passed the turn of the new century an empty shell, a testament to misplaced priorities (and funds) for the sake of preserving a fantasy. The problem, of course, was that this historical experiment, while grounded in Korea’s past, harmed millions of people.

  As noted above, it is difficult to gage how the people of North Korea actually led their lives, as so much that foreign visitors observed was carefully staged. But sufficient evidence suggests that, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, the modicum of economic development and political stability produced enough to eat as well as a modern lifestyle, at least for Pyongyang and the cities, not terribly different from that of other communist societies. People pursued their routines of work and family life, followed long-established modes of social interaction, enjoyed leisure and play, engaged in romance, and in keeping with Korean passions, often went picnicking, singing, and dancing. They also partook in popular culture by revisiting traditional tales such as the “Tale of Ch’unhyang” through grand theatrical, musical, and filmic productions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and famine of the 1990s, however, came deprivation and resignation, and an intensified dulling of the senses from the relentless monotony and closure to the external world. Exposure to the outside was the purview of the privileged minority who had the most to lose in any dramatic change: the elites of the army and Communist Party, who grew dependent on the system of permanent exploitation and radical difference between the haves and have-nots. For the rest of the country’s people, existence might have been occasionally satisfactory but likely debilitatingly hollow—intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually. In the face of the overarching primacy of formality in the ruling Juche ideology, correspondence to reality was less significant than the collective will to forge an ideal.

  Above all, then, North Korea became a historical tragedy, and “tragic” ultimately rang more true than the other adjectives that immediately came to mind: weird, unknowable, evil. While those labels were readily applied to the regime, the greater concern could only be the North Korean people, victimized by the disastrous turns taken by their history. An investigation into the manner by which the regime came to hold such destructive sway over the populace must be balanced by an inquiry into how the people came to find themselves in such a position in the first place. Here a consideration of the greater historical context is inescapable. One cannot deny that the obsessive fear of external domination was rooted in the painful memories of the colonial period, the post-liberation occupation, and the devastation of the Korean War. One also cannot deny the allure of a fierce nationalism for North Koreans—indeed, Koreans as a whole—given the lessons of the modern experience. The Soviet occupation determined the Cold War orientation of the North’s political system, but understandably a charismatic strongman touting himself as the savior from foreign intervention found resonance. The effects of the colonial experience, furthermore, were not just oppositional: the colonial state’s militaristic and industrializing mobilization of the populace provided a model and foundation for such a system to arise after liberation. And the reception of traditional forms of monarchical authority, paternalistic leadership, and hereditary social hierarchy also made perfect sense.

  In short, North Korea was an unmistakably direct product of its history, including the history that it had in common with South Korea before 1945. That these two states and societies eventually diverged so drastically as time passed suggests not that North Korean history was somehow an aberration or illegitimate, but rather that the two Koreas served as counter-factual examples to each other: each a logical, if perhaps extreme, outcome of a shared past.

  26

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  South Korean Democratization

  CHRONOLOGY

  1979 October Assassination of Park Chung Hee

  1979 December Coup d’état engineered by General Chun Doo Hwan

  1980 May The Kwangju Uprising

  1987 June Mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Seoul; “June Declaration” of direct presidential elections

  1987 December Election of Roh Tae-woo as President

  1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul

  1992 Election of President Kim Young Sam

  1997 Economic crisis; election of President Kim Dae Jung

  THE JUNE DECLARATION OF 1987

  Tear gas again filled the streets of downtown Seoul and other major cities in June of 1987, just as it had so often in recent South Korean history in response to civil unrest. This time, however, the number, determination, and makeup of the demonstrators portended something on another level altogether. Anger and frustration against the Chun Doo Hwan dictatorship among the students and workers had been a given for many years, but in June they were joined by increasing numbers of white collar workers, representing the burgeoning middle class. These soon swelled the ranks of the protestors to upwards of a million people throughout the country. They called for the immediate revocation of plans to hand over the presidency to Chun’s designated successor, Roh Tae-woo, which had appeared as a clear intent to continue the dictatorship in defiance of the popular will. Chun was inclined to proceed with a harsh crackdown

  on these enormous demonstrations that would have brought chaos and great bloodshed. When he became aware, however, that such a move, coming on the eve of the Seoul Olympics to be held the following year, would garner little support from the bureaucracy, his American allies, or even the military, he acceded to demands for a direct presidential election.

  This “June Declaration” of 1987 began the formal breakthrough to a permanent and stable democratic governing system in South Korea. But to suggest that democratization itself began in 1987 would erroneously diminish the long and painful struggle of South Koreans against the forces of both political and economic domination—a struggle that, as in 1960–1, even attained formal success occasionally. Narratives of the political history of South Korea have, understandably, tended to focus on state actors. But as time has passed a counter-narrative of democratization as the central feature of South Korean political history has emerged, a storyline that views 1987 more as the culmination, not outbreak, of longstanding popular yearning and sacrifice for democracy.

  THE PRELUDE: KWANGJU, MAY 1980

  One could argue, in fact, that the single most important event in South Korean democratization did not happen in 1987, but rather in 1980: the Kwangju Uprising, normally called simply “5–18” in reference to the date, May 18, of its beginning. The incapacity to account for this bloody episode denied the South Korean regime of the 1980s any lasting legitimacy. Likewise, the memory of Kwangju drove the intensifying struggle against dictatorship until it burst forth irrepressibly in June of 1987. It is safe to say that, without Kwangju, the breakthrough to formal democracy would probably have taken much longer, if at all.

  The Kwangju Uprising itself stood as the culmination of resistance efforts in the 1970s against the “Yusin” system that Park Chung Hee instituted in 1972 to stifle all dissent and keep himself permanently in power (Chapter 24). As the end of the decade approached, a tense national atmosphere emerged from the combination of many factors: Park’s inaccessibility and siege mentality, which steadily deepened following the assassination of his wife in 1974; a deteriorating economy hit by the worldwide oil shocks; a heightened crackdown on opposition politicians who had gained a plurality in the December 1978 National Assembly elections; and the escalation of popular protests. On October 26, 1979, in the midst of the largest mass unrest to date exploding in the southern coastal cities of Pusan and Masan, Park was assassinated by, ironically, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the internal security apparatus that had muzzled political dissent throughout his reign. During his trial, this man, Kim Chaegyu, insisted that he had been motivated by a desire for democracy.

  Following their initial shock, the Korean people, too, could justifiably expect, after almost two decades o
f Park’s rule, an opportunity finally to establish a fully democratic order. As with the euphoria following the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960, the national mood entered an expectant stage with the cancellation of Park’s state of emergency, the release of political prisoners, and the election of a new president, Choi Kyu-ha. The man appointed to lead the investigation into Park’s assassination, General Chun Doo Hwan, however, had other ideas. On December 12, 1979, Chun engineered a coup by arresting the country’s top military commander. Henceforth, despite the nominal political authority vested in President Choi, it was Chun’s group of officers who held real power. The awakening to this reality fueled the “Seoul Spring” of 1980, when laborers and students staged large demonstrations calling for an end to Chun’s control, a lifting of martial law, and a concerted effort to establish a functioning democracy. The peak of these demonstrations came on May 15, when a hundred thousand mostly student protestors gathered in the plaza of Seoul Station. They retreated the following day to their classrooms, but another crisis would emerge on May 17 with the extension of martial law to the entire country, the shutdown of campuses, and the arrest of opposition leader Kim Dae Jung. Chun was solidifying his grip on power.