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North Korea THE RISE OF KOREAN NATIONALISM AND COMMUNISM
The colonial period brought forth an entirely new set of
Korean political leaders, spawned by both the resistance to and
the opportunities of Japanese colonialism. In 1919 mass movements
swept many colonial and semicolonial countries, including Korea.
Drawing on Woodrow Wilson's promises of self-determination, on
March 1, 1919, a group of thirty-three intellectuals petitioned
for independence from Japan and touched off nationwide mass
protests that continued for months. These protests were put down
fiercely by the Japanese, causing many younger Koreans to become
militant opponents of colonial rule. The year was a watershed for
imperialism in Korea: the leaders of the movement, predominantly
Christian and Western in outlook, were moderate intellectuals and
students who sought independence through nonviolent means and
support from progressive elements in the West. Their courageous
witness and the nationwide demonstrations that they provoked
remained a touchstone of Korean nationalism. The movement
succeeded in provoking reforms in Japanese administration, but
its failure to realize independence also stimulated radical forms
of anticolonial resistance. In the 1930s, new groups of armed
resisters, bureaucrats, and--for the first time--military leaders
emerged. Both North Korea and South Korea were profoundly
influenced by the political elites and the political conflicts
generated during colonial rule.
The emergence of nationalist and communist groups dates back
to the 1920s; it was in this period that the left-right splits of
postwar Korea began. The transformation of the yangban
aristocracy also began during the 1920s. Although the higher
scholar-officials were pensioned off and replaced by Japanese,
landlords were allowed to retain their holdings and encouraged to
continue disciplining peasants and extracting rice. The
traditional landholding system was put on a new basis through new
legal measures and a full cadastral survey shortly after Japan
took over, but tenancy continued and was systematically deepened
throughout the colonial period. By 1945 Korea had an agricultural
tenancy system with few parallels in the world. More traditional
landlords were content to sit back and let Japanese officials
increase output; by 1945 such people were widely viewed as
treacherous collaborators with the Japanese, and strong demands
emerged that they share out land to their tenants. During the
l920s, however, another trend began: landlords became
entrepreneurs.
Some Korean militants went into exile in China and the Soviet
Union and founded early communist and nationalist resistance
groups. A Korean Communist Party (KCP) was founded in Seoul in
1925; one of the organizers was Pak Hn-yng, who became the
leader of Korean communism in southern Korea after 1945. Various
nationalist groups also emerged during this period, including the
exiled Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which
included Syngman Rhee and another famous nationalist, Kim Ku,
among its members.
Police repression and internal factionalism made it
impossible for radical groups to exist for any length of time.
Many nationalist and communist leaders were jailed in the early
1930s (they reappeared in 1945). When Japan invaded and then
annexed Manchuria in 193l, however, a strong guerrilla resistance
embracing both Chinese and Koreans emerged
(see
fig. 2). There
were well over 200,000 guerrillas--all loosely connected, and
including bandits and secret societies--fighting the Japanese in
the early 1930s; after murderous but effective counterinsurgency
campaigns, the numbers declined to a few thousand by the
mid-1930s. It was from this milieu that Kim Il Sung (originally
named Kim Sng-ju, born in 1912) emerged. By the mid-1930s, he
had become a significant guerrilla leader whom the Japanese
considered one of the most effective and dangerous of guerrillas.
They formed a special counterinsurgent unit to track Kim down and
put Koreans in it as part of their divide-and-rule tactics.
Both Koreas have spawned myths about the guerrilla
resistance: North Korea claims that Kim single-handedly defeated
the Japanese, and South Korea claims that the present-day ruler
of North Korea is an imposter who stole the name of a revered
patriot. Nonetheless, the resistance is important for
understanding postwar Korea. Resistance to Japan became the main
legitimating doctrine of North Korea: North Koreans trace the
origin of their army, leadership, and ideology back to this
resistance. For the next five decades, the top North Korean
leadership was dominated by a core group that had fought the
Japanese in Manchuria. (Kim Il Sung's tenure in a Russian
reconnaissance brigade also would have had an influence.)
Japan declared war on China in 1937 and on the United States
in 194l. As this war took on global dimensions, Koreans for the
first time had military careers opened to them. Although most
Koreans were conscripted foot soldiers, a small number achieved
officer status and a few attained high rank. The officer corps of
the South Korean army during the Rhee period was dominated by
Koreans with experience in the Japanese army. At least in part,
the Korean War became a matter of Japanese-trained military
officers fighting Japanese-spawned resistance leaders.
Japan's far-flung war effort also caused a labor shortage
throughout the empire. In Korea this situation meant that
bureaucratic positions were more available to Koreans than at any
previous time; thus a substantial cadre of Koreans received
administrative experience in government, local administration,
police and judicial work, economic planning agencies, banks, and
the like. That this occurred in the last decade of colonialism
created a divisive legacy, however, for this period also was the
harshest period of Japanese rule, the time Koreans remember with
the greatest bitterness. Korean culture was quashed, and Koreans
were required to speak Japanese and take Japanese names. The
majority suffered badly at the precise time that a minority was
doing well. This minority was tainted by collaboration, and that
stigma was never lost. Korea from 1937 to 1945 was much like
Vichy France in the early 1940s: bitter experiences and memories
continued to divide people, even within the same family. Because
it was too painful to confront directly, the experience became
buried history and continued to play on the national identity.
In the mid-1930s, Japan's colonial policy entered a phase of
heavy industrialization that embraced all of Northeast Asia.
Unlike most colonial powers, Japan located heavy industry in its
colonies and brought the means of production to the labor and raw
materials. Manchuria and northern Korea got steel mills,
automotive plants, petrochemical complexes, and enormous
hydroelectric facilities. The region was held exclusively by
Japan and tied together with the home market to the point that
national boundaries had became less important than the new
transnational, integrated production. To facilitate this
production, Japan also built railroads, highways, cities, ports,
and other modern transportation and communication facilities. By
1945 Korea proportionally had more kilometers of railroads than
any other Asian country save Japan, leaving only remote parts of
the central east coast and the wild northeastern Sino-Korean
border region untouched by modern means of conveyance. These
changes were externally induced and served Japanese, not Korean
interests. Thus they represented a kind of overdevelopment.
The same exogenous changes fostered underdevelopment in
Korean society as a whole. The Korean upper and managerial
classes did not develop; instead their development was retarded
or swelled suddenly at Japanese behest. Among the majority
peasant class, change was advanced. Koreans became the mobile
human capital used to work the new factories in northern Korea
and Manchuria, mines and other enterprises in Japan, and urban
factories in southern Korea. From 1935 to 1945, Korea began its
industrial revolution with many of the usual characteristics:
uprooting of peasants from the land, the emergence of a working
class, urbanization, and population mobility. In Korea the
process was telescoped, giving rise to comparatively remarkable
population movements. By 1945 about 11 percent of the entire
Korean population was abroad (mostly in Japan and Manchuria), and
20 percent of all Koreans were either abroad or in a province
other than that in which they were born, with most of the
interprovincial movement being southern peasants moving into
northern industry. This was, by and large, a forced or mobilized
movement; by 1942 it often meant drafted, conscripted labor.
Peasants lost land or rights to work land only to end up working
in unfamiliar factory settings, doing the dirty work for a
pittance.
Perhaps the most important characteristic of Korea's colonial
experience was the manner in which it ended: the last decade of a
four-decade imperium was a pressure cooker. The colonial
situation built to a crescendo, abruptly collapsed, and left the
Korean people and two opposing great powers to deal with the
results.
When the colonial system was abruptly terminated in 1945,
millions of Koreans sought to return to their native villages
from these far-flung mobilization details. But they were no
longer the same people: they had grievances against those who had
remained secure at home, they had suffered material and status
losses, they had often come into contact with new ideologies, and
they had all seen a broader world beyond the villages. It was
these circumstances that loosed upon postwar Korea a mass of
changed and disgruntled people who deeply disordered the early
postwar period and the plans of the United States and the Soviet
Union.
Data as of June 1993
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