A History of Korea (81 page)

A TROUBLING HISTORICAL SHADOW

Notwithstanding its short duration, so much importance is attached to the liberation period between 1945 and 1950 that it constitutes a fulcrum of modern Korean history. Lodged between the long colonial ordeal and the Korean War that solidified national division, the abbreviated liberation space has chronically tugged at contemporary South Koreans’ sense of self, an uncomfortable reminder of what might have been. What if the Allies had left the country alone following the end of the Second World War? What if the Americans had supported the moderate elements that sought a coalitional solution to the political divisions? What if Y
Unhy
ng had lived? And, what if decolonization had truly been achieved, when it appeared most people considered this the most pressing issue?

Beyond political autonomy, so the thinking goes, decolonization would have addressed above all the injustices and severe hierarchies of the late colonial period, hence overturning the economic and political privileges associated with Japanese colonialism. The American military government, ever wary of Soviet influence and communist ascendance, cracked down on the people’s committees and left in place the police and high officials of the colonial system as a way of ensuring stability. For similar reasons, the right-nationalists such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku found the American preoccupation with communism a convenient facilitator
of their own political aims. The landed and business interests, though sometimes in contentious relations with Rhee, would have been the targets of any purge of late colonial elites, along with the police and high bureaucracy, and hence these groups in the end had to throw in their lot with Rhee. Rhee helped to salvage their privileges in late 1948, when he implemented the National Security Law, the all-purpose tool of the state’s suppression of political opposition down to the present day. In the summer of 1949, a land reform to address the inequities from the colonial period (achieved in northern Korea in early 1946) was finally promulgated, suggesting that the landed elites were in danger of losing their most entrenched advantages. But later, in the fall, Rhee, under the pretext of anti-communist cleansing, forcefully dissolved the year-long criminal court investigating the most notorious pro-Japanese collaborators.

The historical narratives of responsibility for both national division and the Korean War are thus dramatically complicated by the reality of multiple divisions among Koreans and the unsavory behavior of many influential actors. In the search for what went wrong, the overarching impact of the superpower occupations, of course, cannot be discounted, but ultimately the actions of Koreans themselves must be, and recently have been, the focus of attention. Even if southern Korea in the liberation space was not really on a path toward leftist social revolution, what did happen in the southern zone has cast a troubling historical shadow over South Korean state and society: the uneasy examples of ready complicity with another foreign occupier, the brutal suppression of political opponents and innocent bystanders alike, and the preservation of late-colonial sociopolitical privileges, the vestiges of which remain powerful today.

21

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The Korean War

CHRONOLOGY

THE CHINESE ENTRANCE INTO THE KOREAN WAR, NOVEMBER 1950

The Chinese military had intervened in peninsular affairs several times before the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century alone, the Chinese thrice helped put down Korean rebellions—first an insurrection by a group of Korean soldiers in 1882, and then in 1884, when radical enlightenment activists attempted a coup. Finally, in 1894, Chinese troops arrived to assist the Chos
n government in quelling the massive Tonghak Uprising, a move that would launch the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War and bring an end to China’s preeminent standing in Korea. In earlier Chinese interventions, the stakes were even higher: the Ming dynasty’s assistance in saving Korea from the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century; and the Tang dynasty’s alliance with Silla to conquer the two other kingdoms on the peninsula in the seventh century, which led to the first
unified Korean polity. The lone Chinese military intrusion of the twentieth century, that of October of 1950, would also play a crucial role in the founding of a Korean state, but this time, in the context of the emerging Cold War, the beneficiary was not Korea as a whole, but rather a part.

The flooding of the battlefront by hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers brought about a startling turn in the tide of the Korean War, which by the closing months of 1950 had been approaching a decisive victory by the US-led United Nations forces. The Chinese soldiers, along with their North Korean allies, quickly pushed the front down to the middle of the peninsula, where the Korean War had started a half-year earlier, and where it would be waged for another two-and-a-half years, with tremendous bloodshed, until the Armistice of July 27, 1953. By then, Chinese intervention had been integral not only to the Korean War, but also to the emerging Cold War order that engulfed the Korean peninsula, and indeed the entire East Asian region.

CIVIL WARS AMIDST THE COLD WAR

The Korean War that began in 1950 is commonly cited as the first “hot war” of the Cold War, the confrontation between the capitalist and communist blocs that dominated the second half of the twentieth century and still leaves Korea divided today. One could argue, however, that this designation should apply to an even earlier conflict, the Chinese civil war of 1945–9 between the communists, with the backing of the Soviet Union, and the nationalists, who were supported by the US. Having cooperated for the common anti-Japanese cause in the Pacific theater of the Second World War, the rival Chinese parties almost immediately turned their guns on each other after the Japanese defeat in 1945. After four years of fighting, the communists under Mao Zedong drove Chang Kai-shek’s nationalists to Taiwan. The nascent polity of North Korea might have played a small role in the Chinese civil war. Kim Il Sung’s ties to China from his youth and his contemporary bonds with fellow communists led to a contingent of North Korean troops training under, and perhaps fighting for, the Chinese communists. This relationship, which was subsequently highlighted by both sides, might have provided valuable experience in forging a crack North Korean fighting unit.

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.