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CHAPTER 1
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Division and Reunification of Korea
THE HISTORICAL AND GEOPOLITICAL CONTEXT
The Cheonan incident, and its possible consequences, can best be understood within the context of an overarching struggle between imperialism and nationalism. This is by no means a simple story, with good guys and bad guys, with forces of progress ranged against native backwardness, enunciating clearly delineated objectives and strategies. It is a complex, contradictory and confusing story, and no simple judgements, whether moral or factual, are possible. The next chapter looks at the broader picture: the changing geopolitical structure of the world since 1945. This chapter focuses on the Korean peninsula and perforce starts rather earlier, with the Japanese subjugation of Korea. Both aspects – the global and the Korean – fit together to form a historical context within which we can attempt to understand the Cheonan incident and the deepening crisis in Northeast Asia.
Japanese Imperialism and Its Defeat
Despite its complexity, the impact of imperialism on East Asia, and the reaction to it, has been the main historical driver of the last century and a half in the region. From the mid nineteenth century, in response to the unequal treaties imposed upon it by Western imperialism (in this instance led by the US), Japan attempted to carve out its own empire, creating something that towards the end went by the euphemism of the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'. Taiwan, seized from the flagging Qing dynasty, was the first conquest, although rather peripheral to imperial strategy. Not so Korea. The former Chosun was taken over in 1905, and formally became part of the empire in 1910. Korea was quite important in its own right: its land area is about 60 per cent of that of Japan, but it is its location that makes it so valuable. The Korean peninsula is a corridor between Japan and the Asian mainland. It has often been compared to a dagger, pointing either at China or Japan, depending on who is talking. It was no accident, therefore, that imperial Japan seized Korea.
Korea led Japan into Manchuria, now China's Dongbei, or Northeast, but then becoming the puppet state of Manchukuo. Next came unsuccessful forays into Mongolia and the Soviet Union, before the invasion of the rest of China in 1937. Japan's expansion inevitably brought it into conflict with Asian nationalism and other imperialisms. This created a complicated web of relationships, often shifting but always ambivalent and negotiated. Subhas Chandra Bose, for instance, saw the Japanese as allies in his fight for Indian independence from the British. Bose's stance was straightforward ('my enemy's enemy is my friend'), and his memory is respected, even revered, in India. Not so Wang Jingwei (Wang Ching-wei), who collaborated with the Japanese for reasons of personal ambition (he and Jiang Jieshi – Chiang Kai-shek – were bitter rivals), but also because, it has been argued, he saw the Japanese as protectors against Western imperialism. Wang has ended up being reviled as a traitor in both China and Taiwan, but had the Japanese prevailed, and had he survived into a postwar, Japanese-dominated China, he might have achieved the status that Park Chung-hee acquired in South Korea.
Japan's competition with other imperialisms, primarily the Americans but also the British, the French, the Dutch and the Soviet Union, led to its defeat and devastation. This defeat set the stage for postwar Asia. Of most relevance in this context was the liberation of Korea, and its division into two parts which after a few years solidified into the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north. This was an unnatural division: the Koreans are more homogenous than most peoples, and Korea had been in a unified state for centuries – much longer than, say, Germany. It is not surprising, therefore, that the economic, social, cultural and political imperatives for reunification remain strong. Reunification has had popular support since the division, though reports do suggest that young people in the South, at least, are less committed than their elders.
Elites in both Koreas have continuously advocated reunification, at least in public, but their attitudes in private are no doubt more nuanced. If one cannot have the whole cake, is it best to content oneself with half? Beyond that, given the blood-soaked history of the Korean peninsula since 1945, and especially during the Korean War 1950–53, defeated elites in a unified Korea might face imprisonment or death. At the very least, defeated elites tend to lose power, wealth and status. The number of East German diplomats, military officers and officials who enjoy uninterrupted careers in post-unification Germany is reportedly small – and that is without a civil war between the two Germanys. The reunification issue hangs over the Korean peninsula as both a promise and a threat. Ultimately it remains a necessity for sustainable economic growth and for political stability; the division is inherently unstable. However, if the reunification comes about through force – and that is a major concern of this book – the consequences will be catastrophic.
Reunification also has international ramifications. For countries at a distance it has little consequence, but for neighbouring countries there are enormous implications. Japan is averse, whatever the composition of the reunified state, because it would be a substantial economic, military and political competitor. This consideration does not weigh so heavily on the United States (which, despite the Pacific Ocean, must be considered a neighbour), China and Russia. None of these would be seriously challenged by an independent Korea, though none would want one that was dominated by one of the others. And that, in reality, means American domination. In fifty years' time it may well be different, and perhaps Korea will revert to a twenty-first-century version of its traditional tributary relationship with China; but for the immediate future, if it is a matter of forced reunification, only a US-dominated Korea seems possible.
Imperialism and Its Subjects: The Negotiated Relationship
Even the greatest of imperial powers are not all-powerful; crucially, they always have to work through local elites. The relationships involved vary greatly but there is always a degree of negotiation between superior and subordinate, between imperial proconsul and client politician or general. One of the lessons that the Americans brought away from their war in Vietnam is that dispensing with their local client, as they did with Ngo Dinh Diem and a few of his successors, can just make things worse. Incumbency can provide considerable leverage, even to the weakest of clients, if there are no obvious alternatives available; and even if there are, the 'transfer cost' of changing clients entails an admission of failure and poor judgement.
Hamid Karzai is an excellent case in point. His domestic support and power base are very weak, and even the American mainstream media acknowledge that he would not last long without US protection. And yet Karzai has considerable leverage, as was illustrated in a story in a Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal that led to the general's downfall. In February 2010 he was preparing for the ill-fated Marja operation. This was meant to display and deploy American military superiority so that a 'government in a box' could be rolled out to administer the pacified Afghans. Before the operation went ahead, McChrystal needed the presidential signature, Afghanistan being in theory a sovereign country just getting a little help from its friends. The general went to the presidential palace, where he was kept waiting, according to the story, for some hours because Karzai was asleep recovering from a cold and could not be disturbed. This anecdote might serve as a metaphor for the uneasy liaison between empire and local elites.
If imperial powers have difficult choices to make in the administration of their possessions, the decisions for the locals are of course usually much starker, and even existential. Within Korea there were a number of responses to the reality of Japanese, and subsequently American, imperialism, but they can be represented by three men: Yi Seungman (also Ri Seungman or Lee Seung-man) known by the anglicised form he preferred as Syngman Rhee; Park Chung-hee; and Kim Il Sung.
Syngman Rhee
Syngman Rhee was an aristocrat who became the first Korean to gain an American PhD. He had been active in opposing Japan, and lived for most of his life in Hawaii with his Austrian wife whom he married in 1933. He was for some years the president of the Korean provisional government in exile, based in Shanghai, though he spent little time there and was impeached in 1925. He returned to Korea from Hawaii in 1945 in General Douglas MacArthur's personal plane, and with American patronage became the first president of the Republic of Korea in 1947. Not having his own power base, and averse to disturbing the social hierarchy, he took advantage of American support in inheriting and utilising the Japanese colonial administration, and in particular the police and army. One reason his army was no match for that of the north was that it was geared for pacification rather than conventional war. After the outbreak of war, which took the North's Korean People's Army (KPA) down to the outskirts of the southern port of Pusan, he was saved by massive US intervention. He fled back to Hawaii in 1960 in a CIA plane, after being ousted in student-led riots.
Time magazine would say of him in 1953, with no hint of irony: 'The great strength of Syngman Rhee is his single-minded devotion to his country and its independence'. The Americans, as we know, have curious ideas as to what constitutes another country's independence; having an American general in charge is no barrier to independent status. However, there was some truth to it. While he was clearly America's man, he was no poodle, and often relations with the United States were strained. He, no less than Kim Il Sung, wanted a unified Korea, and he had no qualms about war. In fact he refused to sign the armistice because he wanted to keep the Americans still fighting. This, incidentally, had a knock-on effect which has surfaced recently to complicate the post-Cheonan situation. China apparently suggested reconvening the Military Armistice Commission to investigate the sinking, and this would have brought together the four parties to that Commission – the US, China, North Korea and South Korea. North Korea objected, saying that the MAC had been in suspension since the US had unilaterally substituted a South Korean general for an American one in 1991.
Back in 1953 the Americans, constituted as the United Nations Command, went ahead and signed an armistice with China and North Korea. Rhee had no choice but to accept a fait accompli, the South Korean army not being in a position to continue the war on its own. Rhee lasted until the end of the decade, before being forced into exile. The man who took over, after a brief democratic hiatus, General Park Chung-hee, was yet another variation on the same dictatorial theme.
Park Chung-hee
Park was from a modest background, and he did what many ambitious men did: he trained as a primary school teacher to get an education, and then threw in his job and joined the army – the Japanese army, or more precisely the Manchukuo branch of it. So anxious was he to get in that he wrote a letter of loyalty to Japan in his own blood. The Japanese went and the Americans came, and Park joined the new South Korean army. After a few adventures along the way, such as being accused of being a Communist, he came to power in a coup in 1961. Until his assassination by his spy chief in 1979, he led a South Korea firmly posted in the American camp. The country's major source of foreign exchange in the 1960s was the sending of soldiers to fight with the Americans in Vietnam.
So, in a sense, he was a servant of two masters. Yet again, Park was in many ways his own man as president of the Republic of Korea. One of the first things he did after coming to power was to set up an aggressive campaign to establish diplomatic relations with a wide range of countries. This was partly in competition with North Korea, which was doing the same thing, but also to create an independent Korean international identity beyond Washington's direct control. The North Koreans were driven by much the same imperatives. His economic policies were very un-American, being firmly state-directed in the style of Meiji Japan or the Soviet Union. His pronouncements on the necessity of developing industry and on self-reliance mirrored what was being said in North Korea. Rapid economic growth gave him, and subsequent leaders, more leverage against American pressure.
His authoritarian, repressive style produced friction with Washington. The Americans, perhaps annoyed at his kidnapping of opposition leader Kim Dae-jung in Tokyo (the idea was to throw him from a helicopter into the sea, but this was foiled by American intervention) forced him to hold elections. The South Koreans were apparently not convinced by this display of democracy, and dutifully re-elected Park to the presidency a couple of times. In 2004 his killer was posthumously awarded a certificate for his contribution to the promotion of democracy. However, there was also a popular work of fiction in the 1990s which cast the Americans as being behind the assassination, suggesting that many thought his relationship with them was fractious. The US also clamped down on Park's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
Kim Il Sung
The third person in this triumvirate, Kim Il Sung, faced many of the same choices as Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee. Like his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, he had to cope with the demands of patrons, in this case the Soviet Union/Russia and China, in somewhat the same way that Park had to deal with the Americans. But it was his first decision – how to address Japanese imperialism – that differentiates Kim Il Sung from Park Chung-hee, and to a lesser extent from Syngman Rhee. That decision, in turn, conditioned the way he was able to deal with his patrons.
Kim Il Sung chose the path of armed resistance to Japan, and while this liberation struggle did not have the success that, for instance, Albania or Yugoslavia had against the Germans it did establish Kim as the pre-eminent anti-Japanese nationalist. Kim returned to Korea when Soviet forces entered northern Korea. While Syngman Rhee had campaigned against Japanese imperialism from Hawaii, and Park Chung-hee had collaborated, Kim built up a reputation as an independence fighter. He was not the only one, of course, but his ascendancy was not pre-ordained, or engineered from Moscow.
Reunifying the Peninsula
Kim Il Sung was adroit at playing off the Soviet Union against China, but was not so successful when it came to dealing with the Americans. Sixty years on, there are still debates and bitter recriminations about the Korean War. We know that both Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee were dedicated to a unified Korea (under their own control, of course) and that both regarded war as an acceptable instrument to obtain that. Nothing surprising, or especially morally reprehensible, in that. After all, the American Civil War was the bloodiest in US history, outranking both world wars in American casualties, and yet the moral opprobrium cast upon those who precipitated it is really quite muted; rightly or wrongly, we tend to judge civil wars differently from wars between nations.
In 1950 the greatest war in history was only five years in the past, and the Chinese Civil War was just coming to a close. War must have seemed a natural solution to achieving national reunification. Syngman Rhee's army was much weaker than Kim Il Sung's, although exactly how knowledgeable each was about the capacity of the other is another matter. There were many incursions from the south into the north prior to the outbreak of war in June 1950, but to what degree these were a deliberate attempt by Syngman Rhee to provoke a war that would bring in the Americans in sufficient force to reunify the country for him is unknown, and unknowable. This was the thesis advanced by the iconoclastic American investigative reporter I. F. Stone in his The Secret History of the Korean War (1952).
Richard J. Bernstein and Richard Bernstein give the mainstream Western interpretation when they write of
the generally accepted view that Kim Il Sung, with the somewhat nervous approval and military support of Joseph Stalin, began the conflict with a massive, premeditated attack across the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, aimed at speedily defeating the ineffectual South Koreans and driving any American troops that came to their aid off the peninsula.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crisis in Korea"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Tim Beal.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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