Abstract
Korea had been a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. Instead of becoming independent and unified, it was divided in the aftermath of World War II. The chapter describes how the American Cold War strategy of anti-communism penetrated the internal politics of South Korea, and distorted, or even prevented, like in other countries the process of decolonization, keeping the colonial apparatus in place. The historical task of reshaping the post-colonial order in East Asia was overshadowed for the US by requirements of its new hegemony and the need to rebuild the region’s capitalist economies. The systematic elimination of former independence activists, including right-wing nationalists in South Korea, by extreme anti-communists who had worked for the Japanese foretold the dominance of anti-communism in politics. The ideology of anti-communism brought South Koreans permanent surveillance, political terror, and mass killing like during colonial subjugation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Kim, “How the National Division and the Korean War Affected South Korean Politics”.
- 2.
Osterhammel, Colonialism.
- 3.
Escobar argues that colonialism, postcolonialism, and imperialism are constitutive of modernity. He thinks that coloniality incorporates colonialism and imperialism but goes beyond them, which is why he believes that coloniality did not end with colonialism (i.e., the formal independence of former colonies) but was rearticulated in the three worlds of postwar imagination (Escobar, “Beyond the Third World”). Hajimu calls this phenomenon “decolonization as recolonization” (Hajimu, Race for Empire, Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II, 258).
- 4.
Haynes, “The Cold War Debate Continues”.
- 5.
Raskin, “Democracy versus the National Security State”; Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land.
- 6.
The US’s post-war strategy may be viewed as empire-building or a sort of imperialism (Johnson, Blowback; Steinmetz, “Return to Empire”). The American international strategy was also the result of the world’s economic situation and domestic politics.
- 7.
Jansen and Osterhammel, Decolonization.
- 8.
Lange and Dawson 2009, “Dividing and Ruling the World?”.
- 9.
Armstrong, “Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945–1950”.
- 10.
“A highly articulated, disciplined, penetrating colonial bureaucracy substituted both for the traditional regimes and for indigenous groups and classes… The period from 1935 to 1945 was when Korea’s industrial revolution began” (Cumings, “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy”, 11–14). Lee Young-hoon argued that Korea’s modernity was imposed by Japan and its economic development was made possible by Japan’s colonial modernization (Lee Young-hoon, Korean Economic History).
- 11.
Nakano Dosio and Japanese-Korean (Zainichi Korean) scholars argue that colonialism continued in East Asia, citing US occupation policy, Okinawa, and Japanese-Koreans (Nakano et al., Continuing Colonialism).
- 12.
Lauterback, “Hodge’s Korea”, 353.
- 13.
The Declaration was the outcome of the Cairo Conference on November 27, 1943. Its participants were President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China.
- 14.
The Declaration, which was “a statement calling for the surrender of Japan in World War II,” was adopted in Potsdam on July 26, 1945.
- 15.
Roosevelt had thought that it was necessary to educate Koreans about enlightened self-government on the model of the US’s trusteeship of the Philippines (Cho, Korea in World Politics: 1940–1950, 277). When Japan surrendered, the US proposed a trusteeship for Korea, considering it a way to block Soviet expansion there. But the Soviet Union approved the proposal.
- 16.
Little, “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa”.
- 17.
China played an important role in the Conference, which adopted a 10-point plan for promoting world peace and cooperation, including “recognition of the equality of all races and all nations” and “abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country”.
- 18.
Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, 136.
- 19.
American military leaders did not understand the history of Japan’s colonization of Korea and Koreans’ experience of it as an intense national humiliation. They thought that the status of Koreans under Japanese rule had been like that of the Christian minority in Japan (Fujitani, Race for Empire).
- 20.
Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 100. Because the only Koreans with bureaucratic experience had worked for the Japanese (Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex, 160), it seemed inevitable for USAMGIK to reinstate them.
- 21.
Lauterback, “Hodge’s Korea”, 353.
- 22.
After liberation in 1945, communists underground and overseas immediately gathered in Seoul to reorganize the Korean Communist Party, which was originally established in 1925. Korean independent activists regarded the communist movement in Korea as part of the national independence movement, as it was in other formerly colonized countries. Other factions of leftists also organized several leftist parties. The Korean Communist Party organized branches nationwide and inserted cells into peasant associations and labor unions. With the hardening of national division, the Korean Communist Party changed its name to the Worker’s Party of South Korea in 1946.
- 23.
The US’s State Department’s planners began to worry about Soviet control of Korea in late 1943. They even planned for a full military occupation of Korea (Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, 113).
- 24.
Little, “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa”, 533.
- 25.
Under Japanese colonialism, Koreans were forced into submission by a system of police control. Imperial Japan’s Tenno (emperor) System was militaristic authoritarian rule with a highly centralized bureaucracy. Japan established a military-police state to govern colonial Korea with no political autonomy or native representation. All of Korea’s Governors-General were army generals who received orders directly from the emperor.
- 26.
Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, 351–381. The Autumn Harvest Uprising, which began in October 1946, was a set of widespread public protests against the American occupation and its use of Japanese collaborators as policemen. It started in Taegue and spread across the country and included rural seizures of power, workers’ strikes, and, finally, guerrilla warfare.
- 27.
Hoffman, “The Development of Modern Police Agencies in the Republic of Korea and Japan: A Paradox”.
- 28.
Almost all of the top-police positions were filled by Japanese imperial police (Kang, “Operation and Character of Korean Police, 1945–1953”, 47).
- 29.
As a late-developing country in the 19th century, Japan achieved the high level of political and administrative centralization. “In many ways, Japan emerged from World War I as a police state” (Ireland, The New Korea).
- 30.
Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, 203.
- 31.
Millett, “Captain James H. Hausman and the Formation of the Korean Army, 1945”.
- 32.
Kim, The Unending Korean War, 192–203.
- 33.
Noe, “The Formation and Character of ROK Army (1945–1950)”.
- 34.
Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 88.
- 35.
Schonberger, “U.S Policy in Post-War Japan”.
- 36.
War criminals in the trials at Tokyo and Nuremberg were not treated the same because the US’s project of reordering the world was subordinated to the logic of victors’ justice. But, compared to Japan, the German trial was relatively successful in punishing war criminals, many of whom were punished by the Nuremberg Tribunal and ostracized in both German states. In Japan, many war criminals were publicly honored at the Yasukuni Shrine (Buruma, The Wages of Guilt) and held higher offices in post-war governments.
- 37.
Schonberger, “U.S Policy in Post-War Japan”.
- 38.
The CIA secretly funded the Liberal Democratic Party and its candidates in the 1950s and 1960s as part of gathering intelligence on Japan and making the country a bulwark against communism in Asia (The New York Times, Oct 9, 1994).
- 39.
Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 89.
- 40.
A closer look at the Malagasy Uprising also reveals the real character of US policy after 1945 by confirming some unpleasant truths about its attitudes toward decolonization and the divergence of its rhetoric of self-determination from reality (Little, “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa”).
- 41.
Dower, “The San Francisco System: Past, Present, Future in U.S.–Japan–China Relations”.
- 42.
Kim, “The San Francisco Peace Treaty and Korea”.
- 43.
Kwon, The Other Cold War.
- 44.
Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex, 143.
- 45.
The Jeju uprising was an attempted insurrection in the South Korean province of Jeju Island that began as opposition to the South Korean, instead of peninsula-wide, general election scheduled for May 10, 1948. The anti-communist campaign of repression that followed lasted from April 3, 1948, to May 1949. Leftist guerrillas attacked local police and right-wing paramilitary youth units stationed on Jeju Island. Both sides committed atrocities, but South Korean governmental actions were especially brutal. It was estimated that between 14,000 and 30,000 islanders, or up to 10 percent of the island’s population, died in the rebellion. See Jeju 4.3 Committee, Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, 2003.
- 46.
The rebellion took place in Yeosu, Suncheon (Yeo-sun), and surrounding towns in the province of South Jeolla. Communist soldiers instigated the riots, and rising hostility to Syngman Rhee’s regime made left-leaning soldiers side with the rioters. They protested Rhee’s order to put down the Jeju uprising, which had occurred just months earlier in April (Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 217–224).
- 47.
Park, A Study of the National Security Law 1, 227. After the National Security Law was passed on December 1, 1948, it was revised several times and is still in force today. The communist-led Jeju incident and Yeo-sun Rebellion furnished the government’s justification for the law, but opposing assemblymen cautioned that it would suppress freedom of thought, as under Japan.
- 48.
Lasswell, “The Garrison State”.
- 49.
Dower, Embracing Defeat; Shin, “Historical Disputes and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia”.
- 50.
In a civil war, a scorched-earth policy includes mass killings and massacres. In contemporary total wars and civil wars, the “‘enemy’ is taken to include society as a whole within a given territory or space” (Shaw, War and Genocide, 25).
- 51.
The US military government formed a Korean defense force, and 18 lieutenants from the US Army's 40th Infantry Division were tasked with organizing eight Korea Constabulary Regiments, which were to act as a police force. When the ROK was established on 15 August 1948, the Constabulary was absorbed into the Republic of Korea Army.
- 52.
After 1945, the Soviet-sponsored socialist government of North Korea ruthlessly purged large landowners, Christians, and anti-communist and pro-Japanese Koreans. Thus, many escaped to South Korea (Lauterback, “Hodge’s Korea”, 356) and formed the core of the anti-communist movement there. They called themselves ‘North West Youth’ because they had lived in the north and west of the Korean peninsula.
- 53.
In the similar purge in post-war Greece, members of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and former members of the World War II-era leftist resistance organization the National Liberation Front (EAM) were persecuted prior to the outbreak of the Greek Civil War.
- 54.
The appeal of communism and Marxism among South Korean anti-government activists nearly disappeared after 1989, but the government cited the existence of small groups of North Korean sympathizers to justify extending the work of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and other intelligence organizations.
- 55.
Kim, “Forgotten war, forgotten massacres-the Korean War (1950–1953) as licensed mass killings”; “The War against the “Enemy Within”. The exact number of civilians killed by South Korean authorities in the anti-communist campaign during the Korean War (1950–1953) cannot been calculated. More than two million civilians were killed across the Korean peninsula during the Korean War. I assume that more than 300,000 unnamed civilians were killed by South Korean authorities, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea (TRCK), on which I served as a standing commissioner (2005-2009), investigated the Korean War’s massacres but failed to calculate the total numbers of civilian victims. See, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea, Report on the Activities of the Past Three Years.
- 56.
Chung, “Refracted Modernity and the Issue of Pro-Japanese Collaborators in Korea”.
- 57.
Kim, “How the National Division and the Korean War Affected South Korean Politics”.
- 58.
Chung, “Refracted Modernity and the Issue of Pro-Japanese Collaborators in Korea”.
- 59.
Unlike in Germany, which was a highly industrialized country experienced with liberal democracy (under the Weimar constitution of 1919), in Korea the ideological conflict between liberalism and communism in the formative period of the Cold War was always intermingled with the issue of decolonization.
- 60.
Deyo, ed. The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism.
- 61.
Park Chung-hee employed nationalist rhetoric to arouse the devotion of ordinary Koreans. But he severely repressed the national reunification movements that followed democratization movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
- 62.
For Third World revolutionaries, anti-foreign sentiments have always been more important in domestic politics than in foreign policy (Westad, “Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third World”, 457).
- 63.
Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War 1981; Hajimu, Cold War Crucible.
- 64.
The situation in Korea after the surrender of Japan was quite similar to that in Greece after the German army withdrew in 1944 in that both faced American neo-colonial rule. In Greece, the US advised the government to suppress trade unions and execute leftists, many of whom had fought in the resistance against German occupation (Eve, “Anticommunism and American Intervention in Greece”).
- 65.
According to Wallerstein, the Cold War was “cold” in Europe, but it was quite “hot” in Asia. “It is probably not very useful to speak of the Cold War in Asia” (Wallerstein, “What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretive Essay”, 19).
- 66.
In this sense, the world did not experience and does not remember the global Cold War in the same way (Kwon, The Other Cold War). For example, Taiwan had the longest period of martial law in modern history. The government declared martial law in 1948, in the aftermath of the 228 Incident of 1947, and despite the democratic Constitution of the Republic of China. Perceiving a continuing need to suppress communism, it did not lift martial law until 1987.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kim, DC. (2020). How Anti-Communism Disrupted Decolonization: South Korea’s State-Building Under US Patronage. In: Gerlach, C., Six, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-Communist Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54963-3_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54962-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54963-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)