Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (155 page)

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).

54.
Baik II, pp. 28, 29. This book was published in the 1960s but the characterization of Kim and his destiny is not unlike what could be heard in the ’50s.

55.
Ibid., p. 138.

Dae-Sook Suh observes, “The fundamental reason for the North Korean endeavor to build up the image of Kim Il-song as the father of the Korean revolution is, primarily, his non-Korean revolutionary past. He fought under a Communist army and became a Communist, but it was with the Chinese, and possibly the Russians, not with the Korean Communists. In the Korean Communist movement and among Korean Communist leaders, Kim Il-song is an alien who advanced through the ranks of the Chinese Communist revolutionaries in .Manchuria and was educated and trained by the Chinese Communists as one of their own, not as a delegate or a representative of Korean Communists among the Chinese. Kim’s revolutionary past is a remarkable one, considering that he was only thirty-three in 1945—even if it was in the Chinese army. He was a Korean, a Communist, and he fought against the Japanese, scoring some important victories in .Manchuria against them. It is his effort to build the image of a towering mountain from a molehill past that brings the perplexities, denunciations and doubts of his Communist revolutionary past” (Suh,
Korean Communist Movement
[see chap. 2, n. 56], p. 293).

56.
Kim Il-sung Square opened in 1954 (Baik II, p. 457). Kim Chaek, who had died during the Korean War, was one of the few leaders besides Kim Il-sung whose names were carried on institutionally. Kim Chaek had a steel works and the city in which it was situated named after him, as well as the leading technical college, in Pyongyang.

57.
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
(see chap. 4, note 45), pp. 154–193. (Some extended quotations are from an earlier, manuscript version of that chapter.) Evaluating the outcome of this open challenge to Kim Il-sung s power, Lankov says (p. 193) that it “determined the direction of North Korean development over the following decades. Before 1956 the country had been a typical ‘people’s democracy’ in many respects not unlike the regimes of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, but after 1956 it began to transform itself into a much more idiosyncratic Communist state: thoroughly controlled, extremely militarized, devoted to a fanatical personality cult and a particular type of ideology, and far removed from ‘orthodox’ Marxism-Leninism. The very term for this ideology,
‘chuch’e [juche],
was coined on the eve of the 1956 crisis, in December 1955.”

58.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 18 and November 20, 1990.

59.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, preface.

Bruce Cumings
(Origins
II [see chap. 3, n. 43], p. 292) criticizes use of the terms “Stalinist” and “oriental despot” to describe Kim Il-sung when “there is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the classic, wholesale purge’ that characterized Stalinism, and that has been particularly noteworthy in the land reform campaigns in China and North Vietnam and the purges of the Cultural Revolution.”