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The Cold War
The
Cold War first erupted into heated conflict on the Korean peninsula,
and the Cold War lingers on still today in Korea long after it has
passed into history almost everywhere else. ... Soviet Russian troops
had already entered the peninsula from the north on August 9, 1945,
during the final days of World War II. The first U.S. occupation forces
in Korea did not arrive in the south until September 8, a full month
later. The arriving American GIs found, as one report to the State
Department concluded on September 15, “a powder keg ready to explode at
the application of a spark.”
Amid the gathering signs of what
would soon become an open cold war rivalry between the two former World
War II Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, there was a not
unreasonable fear in Washington that the Soviets might press their
early advantage to overrun the entire Korean peninsula. A joint
partition of Korea was therefore hastily arranged, and it was actually
the U.S. Pentagon that somewhat arbitrarily decided on the
thirty-eighth parallel — a mere line on a Pentagon office wall map,
reflecting no particular preexisting cultural or geographical
conditions — as the point of division between the U.S. and Soviet
zones. ... The newly elected Korean National Assembly then selected Syngman Rhee to serve as the first president in July, and on August 15, 1948, the establishment of the Republic of Korea (commonly known as South Korea) was formally proclaimed. Less than a month later, on September 9, a rival Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) was created in the north. Kim Il Sung
... was designated premier (later, president). By early 1949, both the
Soviet Union and the United States had withdrawn their troops from
Korea, and the postwar Allied military occupation of Korea was over. (HEA, 330-1) |
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The Korean War
 [In
late 1949 and early 1950, there] seemed to be signals that the United
States might not actively intervene in a Korean civil war, or be
willing to shed vast quantities of American blood to prevent a forcible
North Korean reunification of the peninsula. In 1950, therefore, Joseph
Stalin finally gave his approval to Kim Il Sung’s ambitious plan of
attack — with the understanding that there would be no active Russian
participation. ... South Korea had a larger population than the north —
approximately two-thirds of Korea’s total — but most of Korea’s
existing heavy industry was located in the north. The northern military
forces were also better equipped ... [and] as many as one hundred
thousand North Korean soldiers had previous combat experience fighting
with the Chinese communist forces during China’s civil war. These
troops were already battle hardened, and their prior service in the
Chinese communist cause also established an ominous burden of debt that
the Chinese communists felt obliged to repay. ...
 In
the early morning hours before dawn on June 25, 1950, North Korean
forces staged a massive offensive south across the line of the
thirty-eighth parallel. ... President Truman fully committed U.S forces
in Korea and also ordered the American Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan
Straits to prevent a possible communist invasion of Taiwan. ... The
defense of South Korea became a UN action. Eventually some fifteen
countries would contribute soldiers to the war effort, although by far
the largest foreign contingent came from the United States. ... By the
third week of the war, over half of South Korea had been captured by
northern armies. With only light handheld weapons to confront the
northern armored vehicles, the first American units that engaged the
enemy also fell back quickly. Eventually, however, UN forces were able
to dig in and hold a defensive perimeter of about fifty square miles
around the southeastern Korean port city of Pusan, which provided an
essential base for resupply and buildup for a counteroffensive. ...
 Next,
in a daring gamble, General MacArthur staged an amphibious landing
farther up the west coast at Inch’on, on September
15. Inch’on is an important port city,
serving the southern capital
Seoul, but it has no nice sandy beaches and features one of the world’s
most extreme tidal ranges. At low tide, an amphibious invasion must
confront miles of mudflats. Inch’on could very easily have become a
deathtrap for the UN soldiers, and MacArthur decided to strike there
against much contrary advice — but he was fortunate, this time.
Inch’on turned
out to be perhaps the single greatest triumph in General
MacArthur’s long and distinguished military career. A mighty invasion
armada consisting of 261 ships put the American X Corps ashore with the
loss of only 536 men. By the end of September, the North Korean forces
had been driven back to the place from which they had started, across
the thirty-eighth parallel. ...
 On
September 30, the first South Korean troops passed north across the
thirty-eighth parallel. On October 2, the Chinese premier (Zhou Enlai)
formally notified the Indian ambassador that China would intervene if
any American troops crossed the parallel. ... Although this Chinese
message was repeated through several channels, it was evidently not
taken seriously. On October 7, the American First Cavalry crossed the
thirty-eighth parallel heading into North Korea. On October 19, the
North Korean capital fell, and by October 26 advanced units of the UN
forces had reached as far as the Yalu River, which marks the border
between Korea and China. A few days earlier, on October 15, at an
historic meeting on Wake Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
General MacArthur personally assured President Truman that there was
“very little” chance of Chinese intervention in the war. Even if the
Chinese did intervene, MacArthur boasted that they would be easily
crushed in what he predicted would be “the greatest slaughter in the
history of mankind.”
10,000 Years of Victory for the Korean People's Army and the Chinese People's Volunteer Army
 The
very next day, on October 16, Chinese so-called “volunteers” began
crossing the Yalu River into North Korea, undetected by UN observers.
Given the vast disparity in military firepower between the United
States and China at that time (this was, furthermore, a People’s
Republic of China that was still scarcely a year old), China’s decision
to enter the war was an enormous gamble. ... Most senior Chinese
leaders were reluctant to go to war against the powerful American armed
forces, especially after Joseph Stalin belatedly informed them that the
Soviet Union would not provide air support. But Mao Zedong calculated
that the U.S. would be unwilling to wage an unlimited total war, and
Mao was also confident in his doctrine of “people’s war,” which relied
on huge Chinese resources of manpower rather than technology. ... On
November 27, the Chinese struck in full force. Within a week, the
center of the UN line had fallen back again some fifty miles. By
January 4, 1951, the South Korean capital at Seoul had fallen to the
enemy for a second time.
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General
MacArthur seems to have felt at this point that the best military
response to Chinese intervention in Korea would be to escalate the war
by taking the offensive to the Chinese homeland. President Truman and
the Joint Chiefs, however, sensibly enough, did not relish the idea of
turning a limited, if nasty, war in Korea into a general World War III.
... When President Truman ordered that all future public statements
concerning Korean War be cleared through the State Department, General
MacArthur proceeded to violate this presidential directive repeatedly.
MacArthur’s complaint was that the restraints being imposed on his war
effort by civilian politicians were preventing him from winning total
victory. In March 1951, MacArthur even wrote a letter endorsing the
idea of “unleashing” Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan
to open a second front against the Chinese communists. When this letter
was read aloud on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, the
U.S. president viewed it as outright insubordination, and on April 11
President Truman officially relieved General MacArthur of his command.
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The
bloodiest phase of the combat in Korea was still yet to come, but by
June 1951 the war had reached an effective stalemate not far from its
original starting point at the thirty-eighth parallel. Cease-fire talks
began, and a truce was declared on July 27, 1953. The war in Korea had
cost the United States some thirty-three thousand lives. China lost
roughly eight hundred thousand, including Chairman Mao’s own son. The
conflict left a staggering three million Koreans killed, wounded, or
missing — one out of every ten. In the north, the war provided Kim Il
Sung with an opportunity to further consolidate his power. In South
Korea, it helped pave the way for three decades of authoritarian
military rule. In China, the war greatly increased the prestige of the
infant People’s Republic, which had taken on the world’s leading
military superpower and not been clearly defeated. To the present day,
two mutually hostile Koreas still confront each other across a heavily
fortified demilitarized zone (DMZ). An official end to the war has yet
to be arranged. (HEA, 331-5)
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North Korea In
the immediate aftermath of the war, with substantial Soviet assistance,
and through energetic mass mobilization of its population, the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea recovered from the extensive
destruction surprisingly quickly. For many years, the North Korean
economy even appeared to be more vigorous than that of the south. But
the North Koreans were reluctant to fully acknowledge the massive
contribution that had been made by China in saving them from defeat
during the war, or the important Soviet role in establishing Kim Il
Sung as leader in the first place, and North Korea began charting a
resolutely independent course. ... [After Kim Il Sung’s] disastrously
failed attempt to conquer the south and reunify Korea, he developed his
own unique philosophy of juche, or “self-reliance,” beginning around 1955. Juche
became the core ideology of North Korea, to a large extent replacing
orthodox Marxism. This ideology was then drummed into the entire
population through morning-to-night loudspeaker broadcasts and
obligatory political study sessions. The growing personality cult of
the Great Leader Kim Il Sung “became a kind of secular religion” in
which Kim Il Sung performed the role of “a living sage-king or god.” (HEA, 335-6)
Guns or Butter?
The Nuclear Threat
North Korea has a military nuclear weapons program and, as of early 2020, is estimated to have an arsenal
of approximately 30 to 40 nuclear weapons and sufficient production of
fissile material for six to seven nuclear weapons per year. North Korea
has also stockpiled a significant quantity of chemical and biological weapons. In 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
(NPT). Since 2006, the country has been conducting a series of six
nuclear tests at increasing levels of expertise, prompting the
imposition of sanctions. (Wikipedia)
 Under
its youthful new Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, since 2011 North Korea has
appeared, if anything, even more volatile. In 2013, Kim purged and
killed his own uncle, who had been the number two leader. In December
2014, the FBI identified North Korea as the culprit behind a
cyberattack targeting the Sony Pictures movie “The Interview” — a
comedy about a fictional assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un — which
included making terroristic threats against movie audiences in the
U.S., and which forced Sony to withdraw the film from theatrical
release. Even the People’s Republic of China, which in 2010 still
refused to condemn North Korea after it (was widely suspected of
having) torpedoed and sunk a South Korean navy frigate, with
considerable loss of life, and shelled a South Korean island causing
civilian as well as military casualties, and which is probably North
Korea’s only significant foreign friend in the world, nonetheless now
enjoys vastly greater cultural and commercial ties with South Korea
than with the north. (HEA, 338)
 South Korea The
Republic of Korea (South Korea) was founded in 1948 as a constitutional
democracy, but true democracy in South Korea did not flourish
immediately, at least not without qualification. Based on a series of
major constitutional revisions, and a couple of military coups, South
Korea has gone through a succession of six different so-called
“Republics” since 1948, the most recent of which began in 1987. Despite
a veneer of democracy, the first president of the First Republic,
Syngman Rhee, had somewhat authoritarian inclinations. On one occasion,
he literally locked up members of the National Assembly until they
voted as he desired. ... Almost immediately after its formation, his
new country had been plunged into a devastating war with the north.
Even after the end of active combat, in the 1950s, South Korea long
remained one of the poorest countries on earth. Even communist North
Korea appeared more economically successful than South Korea until as
late as the mid-1970s. A U.S.-backed program of compulsory land
redistribution did, however, finally destroy the power base of the old
Korean yangban aristocracy.
... Korean society was transformed from a highly polarized hierarchy to
a relatively egalitarian community — a feature that postwar South
Korea also had in common with both postwar Japan and Taiwan. (HEA, 338-9)
Chaebol The Korean word chaebol is written with the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese word zaibatsu,
and the two are somewhat similar phenomena: essentially, holding
companies controlling a range of highly diversified enterprises. ... As of 1991, sales of South Korea’s largest five chaebol
amounted to almost 50 percent of total gross national product (GNP). In
that year, Samsung’s share of Korea’s GNP alone was equal to the
combined total share of the largest twenty American companies in the
U.S. They also became remarkably all encompassing: “The typical Hyundai
worker drives a Hyundai car, lives in a Hyundai apartment, gets his
mortgage from Hyundai credit, receives health care at Hyundai hospital,
sends his kids to school on Hyundai loans or scholarships, and eats his
meals at Hyundai cafeterias.” 
Like the pre-World-War II Japanese zaibatsu and the postwar Japanese keiretsu, the South Korean chaebol had highly diversified interests, but unlike the Japanese keiretsu, the Korean chaebol
were generally not linked to major banks and were therefore ultimately
dependent on outside financing. Because they also normally wished to
retain ownership and management privately in the hands of a single
family, moreover, Korean chaebol
were usually also reluctant to go public on the stock market. ...
Instead of coming from the stock market, therefore, much capital
investment has come in the form of bank loans. Because banking was
substantially controlled by the government, these bank loans, together
with licensing authority, became key instruments of the South Korean
development state. (HEA, 341-2)
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Gangnam Style
Contemporary Pop Culture Starting in the 1990s, a so-called “Korean wave” (hallyu)
of fascination for South Korean television programming, movies, music
(K-Pop), and other pop cultural items, as well as for the material
products of South Korean industry such as cell phones and automobiles,
has swept across much of Asia. Although the astonishing worldwide
Internet success of Psy’s (Park Jae-sang, 1977-) music video “Gangnam
Style” might be dismissed as a one-time novelty song fluke, within Asia
the Korean wave is real and substantial. (HEA, 348)
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