Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  89. Hong Soon-il, “Refugee Village,” Korea Times, April 20, 1994.

  90. “Despite the war-time destructiveness and psychological strains there ’were few signs of social malaise in North Korea at the end of the war. There appeared to be little murder, theft and personal violence, although there ’were growing signs of sexual license, especially among the young. Thus, while there were points of popular dissatisfaction, basic [Korean Workers’ Party] control over the people of North Korea was not in jeopardy. The Communist version of how the war began was still widely believed” (Paige and Lee, “Post-War Politics,” p. 19).

  91. “The war-time experience was accompanied by the development of certain unfavourable attitudes toward the KWP and the Soviet Union as ’well as by the growth of certain favorable attitudes toward Communist China. The principal discontent with the KWP was that it had not been vigorous enough in its relief and reconstruction work. It was popularly regarded in this respect as the ‘do-nothing’ party. The Soviet Union suffered in popular esteem because it had not given greater assistance to the North Korean war effort. The North Koreans were aware that South Korea was free from Communist air attack and therefore hoped for direct retaliation by Soviet airpower against American attacks upon the North. The knowledge that Russian fighter pilots were flying defensively over North Korean territory and that the Russians ’were providing military and relief supplies did not satisfy the demand for deeper Soviet military commitment, including the participation of Soviet infantry divisions. By contrast, the North Koreans ’were favorably impressed by Chinese military assistance. Mao Tse-tung’s injunction to the Chinese soldiers in Korea to love the Korean Democratic People’s Republic, the Korean Workers’ Party, and the Korean people as your own government, party, and people—and treasure every mountain, every stream, every tree, and every blade of grass the same,’ was widely respected and appreciated. This did not mean, however, that Korean-Chinese relations were without points of friction. There was some evidence of professional jealousy, for example, among North Korean army officers who had to take orders from Chinese commanders” (Paige and Lee, “Post-War Politics,” pp. 18–19).

  92. Baik II, pp. 400, 405. To portray North Korea as the victor, Baik uses American military leaders’ public expressions of regret over their side’s failures. See pp. 404–405.

  93. Kiwon Chung, “North Korean People’s Army” p. 112.

  94. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 255.

  6. With the Leader Who Unfolded Paradise.

  1. Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), pp. 428–430, provides the meeting-hall anecdote. Baik says (pp. 421–422) that Kim “considered that golden opportunities offered by the armistice should be fully used to promote the socialist revolution and socialist construction at full speed, in order to provide a firm guarantee for consolidating peace and completing the historic cause of the unification of the nation.”

  2. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea (see chap. 2, n. 28), p. 425.

  3. Hankuk Ilbo, November 16, 1990, in Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948 (see chap. 2, n. 18).

  4. Hankuk Ilbo, November 18, 1990.

  5. Baik II, p. 369.

  6. Hankuk Ilbo, November 18, 1990.

  7. See Baik II, pp. 308, 388.

  8. Suh, Kim Il Sung (see chap. 2, n. 25) , pp. 105–108, 127–136.

  9. “The trials provided the supreme rationalization for defeat,” as Scalapino and Lee say. The North’s tribulations could be portrayed as “due not to the mistakes of the Kim group, but because traitors from within had given overt assistance to the enemy” (Communism in Korea, p. 451).

  10. Chay Pyung-gil, Following the Conclusion of the Serialization ‘Yu Song-ch’ol’s Testimony,’ ” Hankuk Ilbo, December 1, 1990, translated in Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948.

  Bruce Cumings (Origins II [see chap. 3, n. 43], p. 830, n. 26) discusses the importance of this group:

  “To my knowledge only one source in all the published and unpublished literature on North Korea grasps the central importance of Kim’s peculiar style of leadership, and that is the formerly classified study done in the early 1960s by Evelyn McCune for the U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (‘Leadership in North Korea: Groupings and .Motivations,’ 1963). She correctly terms the relationship between Kim and his close allies ‘a semi-chivalrous, irrevocable and unconditional bond … under iron discipline.’ It is a ‘deeply personal’ system, ‘fundamentally hostile to complex bureaucracy’ Kim and his allies ’were generalists, jacks-of-all-trades who could run the government or command the army, show a peasant how to use new seeds or cuddle children in a school; Kim would dispatch them as loyal observers of officials and experts or specialists outside the inner core, that is, in the realm of impersonal bureaucracy. McCune thought correctly that the powerful glue holding the Kim group together made it much more formidable than typical Korean political factions, based on weaker patron-client relations and given to splintering in power struggles and personal competition; thus it was able to assert dominance over rival groups rather easily. She also understood the concentric circle metaphor, providing a chart of the leadership radiating outward from Kim.”

  11. Kim Il-sung, Selected Works, vol. 1 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1976), cited in Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty (see chap. 2, n. 59), pp. 221–222. Kim’s philosophy of life was, “Don’t trust strangers,” Lim observes. Thus, Kim not only purged his opposition “but precluded the entire potential of any possible formation of new opposition. For instance, once he pinpointed an object of elimination, he hunted its fellow travelers and collaborators and purged all of them. He further eradicated their relatives, business contacts, and even acquaintances. When an army general was purged so were his relatives, relatives on his wife’s side, his leaders, staff, adjutants, drivers, and all relatives of these people, persons from the same home town and schoolmates, and so forth. The extent of the victimization spread like a creeping potato vine.”

  12. Baik II, pp. 378–380.

  13. Ibid., p. 456.

  14. Yoon T. Kuark, “North Korea’s Industrial Development During the Post-War Period,” in Robert A. Scalapino, ed., North Korea Today (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), p. 54.

  15. “[B]etween 1946 and 1965 the share of industry and agriculture as components of national income was almost exactly reversed: from 16.8 percent and 63.5 percent to 64.2 percent and 18.3 percent” (Aidan Foster-Carter, “North Korea. Development and Self Reliance: A Critical Appraisal,” in Gavan McCormack and John Gittings, eds., Crisis in Korea [London, Spokesman Books, 1977], p. 81).

  16. Joseph Sang-hoon Chung, The North Korean Economy: Structure and Development (Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), p. 145.

  17. Kuark, “Industrial Development,” p. 61.

  18. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone (see chap. 4, n. 1), p. 182.

  Suh (Kim Il Sung, p. 140) mentions a Soviet loan of 1 billion rubles in 1953, along with an extension of repayment time for previous Soviet loans. The same year the Chinese provided a loan of 8 trillion yuan. “The Chinese ’were more generous than the Soviet Union and canceled all North Korean debts to China, including materials supplied by the Chinese during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953.”

  19. “North Korea has been generally free from the kind of factionalism, frequent revolutions, corruption, ineptitude, inflation, unemployment, and so on that demoralized and undermined many an emerging economy” (Chung, The North Korean Economy, p. 158). Chung says Kim’s tight dictatorial control brought a stability that probably contributed to economic development even as it dampened private incentives.

  20. Baik II, p. 448.

  21. Although in 1945 Kim was reported to have asked to be called by the plain title dongmoo (comrade), Paige and Lee report that in the 1950s “[a]t least one high official has been fired from his post” for referring to Kim as dongmoo instead of t’ongji, the honorific version (“Post-War Politics” [see chap. 5, n. 58], p. 28).

  22
. “In the nine years since the fighting stopped, North Korea has become something of a showcase, with plenty of window-dressing and propaganda for Communism in Asia” (Kuark, “Industrial Development,” p. 51).

  23. Kim Il-sung, “On Communist Education,” November 28, 1958, quoted in Kim Chang-soon, “North Korea Today” Vantage Point (March 1979): p. 12.

  24. Baik II, p. 423.

  Proponents of North–South Korean coexistence, Kim Il-sung said on November 3, 1954, “seem to think that the responsibility for the revolution in South Korea rests entirely upon the South Korean people and that we, the people in North Korea, are not responsible for liberating the South. This is nothing but an attempt to justify the division of the country and perpetuate it. Such a tendency must be thoroughly done away with.” See “On Our Party’s Policy for the Further Development of Agriculture,” in Kim Il Sung, Selected Works, cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, vol. 1, p. 545.

  25. Baik II, p. 438.

  26. Kim Il-sung, “Sasang saopeso kyojojuuiwa hyongsikchuuirul t’oejihago chuch’erul hwangnip hal te taehayo” (“On Exterminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Independence in Ideological Work”), in Kim Il-song Sonjip (Km Il-sung Selected Works) IV (Pyongyang: Korean Workers’ Party Press, 1960), p. 343, translated in Glenn D. Paige and Dong Jun Lee, “The Post-War Politics of Communist Korea,” in Scalapino, North Korea Today (see chap. 3, n. 11), pp. 26–27. Paige and Lee note, “Such thinking as this may [underlie] apparent Korean sympathy for the Chinese emphasis on widespread wars of ‘national liberation.

  27. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pp. 461–462; 543–548. As for the policy in the immediate post-liberation period, the authors report (pp. 300–301) that within a year after liberation, American and South Korean officials had begun to hear from informers about a “communist master plan” for South Korea. Under this plan, it was alleged, communists in the South would spin off front groups that would publicly take issue with the communists and assume a pose of neutrality. The Southern communists, pretending to be weakened by such maneuvers, would then offer to compromise, joining the rightists and “neutrals” in a united-front government. Believing that the communists’ share of power was small, the Americans would accept this united-front government and withdraw their troops from the South. Then disguised communists planted in the security forces would take advantage of made-to-order controversies and disorders to come forth, restore order and seize power.

  28. Korea Times, May 12 1995, and my June 1995 conversation with Park Jin, presidential spokesman.

  29. See Baik II, p. 510, and Kiwon Chung, “The North Korean People’s Army and the Party,” in Scalapino, North Korea Today, pp. 118–119.

  Note that in the five-year plan promulgated in 1956, “[s]pecial steps ’were taken to deal with new war preparations and subversive plots being intensified by U.S. imperialism and its stooges, for which [Kim Il-sung] stressed the need to enhance the roles of home, police and judicial organs, and bring to light and destroy every kind of enemy subversive scheme as quickly as possible” (Baik II, p. 491).

  30. “Personally I think if we could get a neutralized Korea that I would buy it. I do worry though as to whether we would be able to help a neutralized Korea sufficiently so the ROKs [South Koreans] wouldn’t go Communist in a fairly short time” (Frank C Nash, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, quoted in a declassified, formerly top-secret “Memorandum of the Substance of Discussion at a Department of State–Joint Chiefs of Staff .Meeting,” June 16, 1953, in Foreign Relations of the United States 1952–1954, vol. XV: Korea, pt. 2 [Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1984], p. 1187).

  31. Ibid., pp. 1193–1194.

  32. NSC 154/1, ibid., pp. 1341–1344.

  33. NSC 157/1, “U.S. Objective with Respect to Korea Following an Armistice,” ibid., pp. 1344–1346.

  34. Paige and Lee, “Post-War Politics,” p. 27.

  35. Kim, With the Century (see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 3, p. 429.

  36. “Victorious History of Chongryun,” People’s Korea, 20 May 1995. In Japanese the group is called “Chosen Soren.”

  37. “[B]etween 1959 and 1974,” says Foster-Carter, “92,000 Koreans left Japan to settle permanently in the DPRK …. Of these, 75,000 or over 80 per cent went in the short period 1959–1962.” (“Development and Self Reliance,” p. 104). He cites a Chongryon source quoted in Sekai, no. 3 (1975), p. 190, for the overall figures. For the 1959–1962 figures he cites G. A. De Vos and W. O. Wetherall, Japan’s Minorities, rev. ed. (London: Minority Rights Group Report no. 3, September 1974). Foster-Carter also cites De Vos and Wetherall (p. 15) for this observation: “North Korea most effectively courted … Japan’s Koreans in ethnic education and national identification, in contrast with the South Korean Government, which provided practically no assistance and seemed at times, in alliance with the Japanese Ministry of Education, even opposed to such concerns.” And he cites Jonathan Unger (“Foreign Minorities in Japan,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 3, no. 3, p. 307) for these further indications of the comparative appeal of North Korea over South Korea during this period: “In 1960, 445,000 of Japan’s Koreans designated North Korea as their mother-country, while only 163,000 opted for South Korea—despite the fact that almost all of Japan’s Koreans originated from Korea’s South.”

  38. Interviewed June 1994 in Seoul, Chong was among several Japanese-Koreans who defected from North Korea to South Korea. Available evidence strongly suggests that a very high percentage of repatriates from Japan had found their experiences in North Korea to be highly unsatisfactory.

  39. This detail comes from an interview (Seoul, June 1994) with another defector, Kim Myong-chol, who was born in the North the year Chong emigrated from Japan.

  40. Baik II, p. 547.

  41. See Baik II, pp. 497–516. Also see Chong-sik Lee, “Land Reform, Collectivisation and the Peasants in North Korea,” in Scalapino, ed., North Korea Today, pp. 65–81. In another article in the same volume, “North Korea’s Agricultural Development During the Post-War Period,” Yoon T. Kuark observes (p. 91) that the Chollima movement was less radical than China’s Great Leap, and that Pyongyang quickly drew back from some of the more extreme measures it did impose—although the radical land collectivization remained in force.

  42. Baik II, p. 515.

  43. Ibid., pp. 505–506.

  44. Kuark, “Agricultural Development,” p. 91, citing North Korean official sources.

  45. Baik II, p. 503.

  46. “Since entering the 1960s, coinciding with the Seven Year Plan, the pace of overall economic progress as measured by national income began to drop sharply. Average annual rate of growth in national income declined to 8.9 percent during 1961–67 [as opposed to an average growth rate of 16.6 percent for the entire 1954–67 period]. The fact that no mention was made of the status of national income (as well as agricultural output) for 1970 in Kim Il-song’s speech to the Fifth Congress suggests that the Seven Year Plan target of raising national income to 2.7 times the 1960 level by 1970 (originally by 1967) was not fulfilled” (Chung, North Korean Economy [see chap. 6, n. 16], p. 155).

  47. I am grateful to Prof. Youngok Seo-Kim for pointing out this information.

  48. Grain dealers had been eliminated in 1954. See Lee, “Land Reform,” p. 78.

  49. Baik II, pp. 555–556. Baik adds (p. 556), “On the contrary, the workers and peasants who could not live well are now satisfied and never complain, because their livelihood has been improved.”

  50. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas (see chap. 1, n. 2), p. 66.

  51. Ambassador Walter P. McConaughy “Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State,” April 11, 1961, Document No. 210 in Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–1963, vol. XXII (Washington, D.C: Department of State, 1996), http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusXXII/201to240.html.

  52. Karl Mener, “Seeing Is Believing,” in Impressions of Korea (Pyongyang:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 23.

  53. Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle,” Monthly Review (January 1965): pp. 545–548, quoted in Chung, North Korean Economy, p. 151. Chung comments, “Calling the North Korean feat a miracle perhaps overstates the case but nevertheless dramatizes her achievements as evidenced by various indicators: rapid growth and the absolute level (total and per capita) of national income and of strategic industrial products (per capita output of 1,184 kilowatt hours of electricity 1,975 kilograms of coal, and 158 kilograms of steel in 1970); a long-term change in the composition of national income in favor of industry; change in the structure within the industrial sector in favor of heavy industry, especially the machinery sector; change in the commodity composition of foreign trade and evidence of significant import substitution as well as impressive growth in exports; shifts in the occupational distribution of population in favor of secondary industry at the expense of the primary; increasing urbanization of population; and so on.”

  Another scholar’s summary: “[E]ven if one makes allowances for Communist propaganda and window-dressing … it appears indisputable to this author that North Korea has made greater economic strides during the post-war period as a whole than has South Korea. In the industrial sector there is good reason to take at face value the Communist claim that ‘in 1959 the North produced ten times as much steel as South Korea and five times more cement.’ … It remains to be seen, however, whether the Communists can surpass Japan’s per capita industrial production in ten years as the ambitious premier, Kim Il-song, prophesied in 1959. … In a nutshell, the recent economic offensive of the Communist North, with the usual dazzle of unconfirmable statistics, may have a grave impact upon the people of South Korea in their current plight. For there is no better bait to poverty-stricken people than economic advance” (Kuark, “Industrial Development,” pp. 63, 64).