Embattled Korea

The Rivalry for International Support

Ralph N. Clough

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429721861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive book examines the history of Korea's division and the political and economic development of both Koreas, their military confrontation, and their efforts at dialogue. Mr. Clough focuses on the international rivalry between the two, including relations with big power supporters and diplomatic competition inside and outside the UN and the nonaligned movement. The first book to explore in detail the competition between Seoul and Pyongyang outside the diplomatic circuit—from overseas construction projects to international athletic contests—Mr. Clough's study breaks new ground, analyzing South Korea's growing contacts with the USSR and the PRC, as well as North Korea's relationship with Japan and the United States. He views these contacts as probable precursors of diplomatic recognition of both Koreas by all four big powers. Identifying the problems and the choices for the United States in the rapidly changing environment in and around Korea, Mr. Clough makes recommendations for the future direction of U.S. policy.

1
Korea: Victim of the Cold War

On October 14, 1945, the Soviet military command in North Korea introduced the "patriot hero," Kim II Sung, to a mass rally in Pyongyang. Kim, who had entered Korea a few weeks earlier with Soviet forces, spoke to the crowd, praising "the heroic champions of the Soviet army" for liberating Korea from Japanese imperialism.¹ On October 17 General John P. Hodge, commander of U.S. forces occupying Korea south of the 38th parallel, held a press conference to introduce another Korean patriot, Dr. Syngman Rhee. Rhee had arrived the day before on a U.S. military plane from Tokyo. On October 20 he delivered an address at the welcoming ceremony for U.S. forces.² These almost simultaneous ceremonies of foreign sponsors presenting Korean leaders to the Korean people were an omen of Korea's star-crossed destiny after World War II. Liberated from thirty-five years of Japanese colonialism and anticipating a joyous rebirth as an independent unified nation, the Korean people were trapped in a divided condition by the sharpening cold war confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The contrast between the two Korean leaders was great. Kim II Sung, born Kim Song Ju in 1912 to a lower middle-class family near Pyongyang, was only thirty-three years old when he addressed the Pyongyang rally. He had emigrated with his family to Manchuria, where he attended a Chinese middle school. Briefly imprisoned by the Chinese authorities for attempting to organize a Communist youth group, Kim later fled to the hills of eastern Manchuria to join Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese who had occupied Manchuria in 1931. For eight to ten years Kim, with a small group of Korean comrades, was a guerrilla. He advanced through the ranks of the Chinese Communist military organization to the position of division commander. He never commanded more than a few hundred men, however, operating much of the time in parts of Manchuria near the Korean border among a sizable Korean population. Finally, probably about 1941, Japanese counterinsurgency operations forced him to withdraw his unit into Soviet territory in the vicinity of Khabarovsk, where he apparently spent most of his time until 1945. Thus, when Kim returned to Korea with the Soviet army, he was a seasoned guerrilla commander, despite his youth, and brought with him a small group of other Korean guerrilla fighters with whom he had forged strong personal ties. He had been closely associated with the Chinese Communists in Manchuria and had developed relationships with the Soviets during his sojourn in the Soviet Union.³

Syngman Rhee was seventy years old when he returned to Korea. Born to an upper-class family in the southern part of Korea in 1875 during the Yi dynasty, he had studied the Confucian classics as a youth and then attended an American-run Christian missionary school. He became active in the movement to keep Korea free from domination by the Japanese or Russians, who were struggling fiercely to control the Korean royal court. Arrested and tortured in 1897, Rhee spent seven years in jail and emigrated to the United States on his release. He continued his education at George Washington University, Harvard, and Princeton, receiving a Ph.D. in international law from Princeton at the age of thirty-five. For the next thirty-five years he remained in the United States, devoting himself to the Korean independence movement, supported by contributions from the Korean community and sympathetic U.S. citizens. By 1919 he was sufficiently well known to be elected president in absentia of the "Korean provisional government" established by a small group of Korean exiles in Shanghai, only to lose the designation a few years later in one of the squabbles endemic among Korean exile politicians.

Thus, the two men who were to become the most important political figures in the two parts of Korea during the fifteen years following their return in 1945 differed greatly in age, family background, education, experience, outlook and foreign associations. In certain respects, however, they were similar. Neither had close associations with the political leaders inside Korea who emerged, many from jail, after the Japanese surrender. Both were deeply committed to Korean independence and had spent a large part of their lives abroad working to this end. They were tough-minded and possessed enormous self-confidence and political skills. Each had special relationships with the big power in occupation of his part of Korea. They were adept at exploiting those relationships for political advancement, but in the end both proved to be truculent, obdurate Korean patriots, not easily kept in line.

Drawing the Line

When U.S. and Soviet forces entered Korea, their governments had agreed in only the most general terms on the future of that country. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek announced at Cairo in 1943 that Japan would be stripped of all territories "taken by violence and greed" and that "in due course Korea shall become free and independent." Roosevelt, having in mind the U.S. experience in the Philippines, was attracted to the idea of placing the Koreans under trusteeship for a time in order to prepare them for independence. In February 1945 at Yalta he discussed with Joseph Stalin a trusteeship over Korea by the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain that might last as long as twenty to thirty years. Concerning the length of the period, Stalin responded, "the shorter the period the better," but he concurred in the trusteeship idea. No attempt was made at Yalta to discuss details or to reduce the agreement to writing.⁴

The sudden Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945, caught the United States unprepared to deal with the Korean problem. The Soviet Union had declared war on Japan just six days before, and its forces were already advancing into Korea. No agreement had been reached with the Soviets, however, concerning military occupation of the country or arrangements for setting up an international trusteeship over it. In an all-night meeting in the Pentagon on August 10-11, two colonels proposed that the Soviets accept the surrender of Japanese forces north of the 38th parallel and that U.S. forces accept the surrender in the south.⁵ This proposal, which was incorporated into General Order No. 1 directing the surrender of all Japanese forces, was accepted without comment by Stalin. Soviet forces in Korea consequently halted their advance at the 38th parallel.

The Impact of Decolonization

The first mission of Soviet and U.S. forces entering Korea was to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces and repatriate both military and civilian Japanese. Thus, their intrusion not only divided Korea, it also severed the important economic links between Korea and Japan and removed at one stroke the bulk of the managerial and technical elite. Under such handicaps the military commanders' tasks of remolding the economy and superintending the emergence of a new Korean political structure were extraordinarily difficult.

During their thirty-five years in power, the Japanese had radically altered the Yi dynasty's lethargic Confucian bureaucratic state characterized by its self-contained agrarian economy. Their modernizing drive turned Korea into a far more productive area, shaped to meet the needs of the Japanese empire. They governed it through a highly centralized bureaucracy, headquartered in Seoul and staffed at the upper levels by Japanese. The governing apparatus was huge compared to those of other colonial regimes of the period. For example, in 1937 the French governed 17 million people in Indochina through a thin layer of 2,929 administrative personnel, 10,776 regular French troops, and 38,000 indigenous employees. In contrast, Japanese rule over Korea's 21 million people in the same year required 246,000 Japanese in public and professional positions, supported by 63,000 Koreans in subordinate positions.⁶

The swollen bureaucracy reached deeply into Korean society, placing Japanese policemen in every village and giving the central government powers of control, mobilization, and extraction of resources far exceeding any in previous Korean experience. New roads and railroads in remote rural regions opened these areas to outside influence and gave them access to urban markets. Cadastral surveys regularized land ownership, enabling the state to extract larger amounts of taxes and furthering the concentration of land in fewer hands. The population grew rapidly, increasing 25-30 percent during each decade,⁷ sharply reversing the population decline that had prevailed during the nineteenth century. Peasants poured into the towns and cities, and the Japanese recruited large numbers of them to perform unskilled labor in Japan and Manchuria, particularly during World War II.⁸

The Japanese left behind a relatively modern infrastructure: roads, railroads, communications facilities, schools, hospitals, improved agricultural techniques, a body of experienced lower-level bureaucrats and police officers, and a very few Korean entrepreneurs in commerce and small industry. But, for most Koreans, the benefits of Japanese rule were far outweighed by the repressive and discriminatory way in which that rule was exercised. The Japanese owned most of the industry and much of the land in Korea. Illiteracy was high among Koreans, and only 5 percent of them went beyond primary school. In 1936 less than 1 percent of college-age Koreans were in college.⁹ The privileged Japanese residents of Japan's Korean colony looked down on the locals as second-class citizens. Strict police controls squelched manifestations of Korean nationalism; thousands of Koreans were imprisoned. As Japan itself became more militarized during the war against China, the Japanese sought to assimilate the Koreans completely, closing down the Korean press and forbidding the use of the Korean language in schools and business. Koreans were compelled to adopt Japanese names. In the period after the Japanese left, hatred engendered by Japanese colonial rule often produced violent actions against those accused of having collaborated with the Japanese, particularly the Korean police.¹⁰

The economic consequences of the division of Korea were serious and immediate, for the two areas had been heavily interdependent. Most of the best mines were in the North. Eighty-six percent of heavy industry was in the North, whereas 75 percent of light industry, including 88 percent of textile production, was in the South. The South produced two-thirds of Korea's grain, but obtained the needed fertilizer from the North. Eighty-five percent of Korea's electricity and gas was produced in the North, where only one-third of the population lived.¹¹

The U.S. and Soviet military commanders in Korea faced similar problems. They had to create a mechanism for maintaining law and order, devise a framework that would keep the economy running, and begin the political process of producing a Korean government to replace that of the departed Japanese. Lacking instructions as to how the vaguely agreed trusteeship was to work, each was confined to working within his own zone of occupation. Hodge did attempt to carry out a directive received in mid-October, five weeks after he had landed in Korea with his forces, to agree with the Soviets on ways of maintaining normal trade, transportation, and communication between the two zones of Korea, but the Soviet commander rebuffed his approaches on the ground that the two governments had not reached an agreement on these matters. Representations to the Soviet government by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow produced no results.¹² By the time the foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain met at the Moscow Conference in late December 1945, it was more than four months after Soviet forces had entered Korea and three months after the U.S. entry. The two commanders had already gone far toward setting up systems within their zones that reflected the contrasting political and economic concepts of their own countries.

Although the commanders faced similar problems, conditions in the two parts of Korea differed in important respects. The U.S. zone contained not only two-thirds of the population, but also the city of Seoul, the nerve-center of what had been a highly centralized system under the Japanese. Thus, the majority of Korean bureaucrats were in the South, especially those at higher levels; their numbers were further increased by the flight from North Korea of a large number of senior bureaucrats.¹³ No comparable political center existed in North Korea; administrative lines had radiated directly from Seoul to each of Korea's provinces, both north and south of the 38th parallel. The Soviet commander lacked a ready-made center from which to administer his zone. Problems in the South were compounded by Koreans flooding in from Japan, Manchuria, and North Korea, a process already begun in 1945. This influx, which was to rise to nearly two million persons by the end of 1947, could not be absorbed quickly by the South's damaged economy. The North Korean population, on the other hand, declined during these years.¹⁴ Another difference between North and South that would significantly affect the politics of the two zones was the smaller number of tenant farmers in the North and the flight to the South of considerable numbers of landowners, along with senior officials and police.

Soviet Occupation: The Early Months

Throughout Korea in the weeks after the Japanese surrender, Koreans spontaneously organized themselves into local and provincial "people's committees," which in many places took over governmental functions from the Japanese, Thousands of Koreans, imprisoned for anti-Japanese activities, were freed from jail, and many of them became members of these newly formed, self-appointed governing bodies. The exprisoners included many Communists, who had been the chief targets of Japanese suppression. People's Committees did not appear in every locality. They varied greatly in composition, and they did not answer to a central administration, although many declared allegiance to the Korean People's Republic (KPR) that was announced by a group of political leaders in Seoul two days before U.S. forces arrived. Politically, most inclined to the left, advocating a new order in Korea in which peasants and workers would benefit from the disposition of Japanese agricultural and industrial properties. They generally were hostile toward those who had staffed the bureaucracy and the police under the Japanese and toward Korean landlords and businessmen who had collaborated with the Japanese.¹⁵

The Soviets made an early decision to work through these local committees in governing their zone, rather than set up a military government.¹⁶ Where committees did not exist, they created them. Where Korean Communists were inadequately represented, they reorganized the committees to include more. The Soviets were experienced in working through united front organizations, where a minority of disciplined Communists could exercise control behind the scenes. They also had brought with them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Korea: Victim of the Cold War
• 2 Political Change and External Influence, 1953-1979
• 3 Interdependence Versus Autarky
• 4 Military Confrontation and Abortive Dialogue
• 5 Coping with Change in the 1980s: Domestic Trends
• 6 Coping with Change in the 1980s: Confrontation and Dialogue
• 7 South Korea, the United States, and Japan
• 8 North Korea, the Soviet Union, and China
• 9 Diplomatic Competition
• 10 Beyond Diplomacy
• 11 Toward Cross-recognition: The Soviet Union, China, and Japan
• 12 Toward Cross-recognition: U.S. Policy
• Appendix 1: North Korea's Foreign Trade
• Appendix 2: United Nations Special Agency Meetings Held in Seoul
• Appendix 3: North Korean Military Presence in Africa
• Selected Bibliography
• Index