Korea’s Forgotten Revolution
It's time we look back to when the dream of a unified, progressive Korea was more than just a hope, but a reality.
South Korean political prisoners awaiting execution in Daejeon, 1950. Via the U.S. Army
CW: violence, torture, rape
On the night of August 14th, Washington D.C. was alive.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had just been struck with atomic bombs, the first of their kind, vaporing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians where they stood. Soviet soldiers had just flooded into Manchuria and Korea, overrunning the last fledgling holdings of Japan’s rump colonial empire. Meanwhile, two American army colonels were hard at work alone, poring over a National Geographic map of the Korean Peninsula. One, Charles H. Bonesteel III, would later oversee the American military presence in Korea during the late 1960s. The other, Dean Rusk, would become Secretary of State. Their task was to determine the borders of the postwar American and Soviet military occupation of Korea.
The map had no provincial boundaries. Neither Bonesteel nor Rusk, by the latter’s admission, were even very knowledgeable on Korea. But the two decided that Seoul, the Korean capital, should naturally fit in the American occupation zone. Unable to find any geographic features that would justify that decision, however, the two instead decided to split Korea at the 38th parallel.
That night, Korea would be divided into two zones of military occupation: the United States would occupy the southern half of the country, while the Soviet Union would occupy the north. A couple of scribbles on a National Geographic map would divide countrymen and families for decades, perhaps even centuries, and lay the groundwork for a war that would kill millions. But Korea itself, in spite of its arbitrary division and foreign military occupation, would soon become the site of a progressive grassroots revolution that would sweep the whole peninsula. From reformers to revolutionaries, Korean activists sought to establish a unified democratic government, empower rural peasants and the urban working-class, and undo centuries of social regression against the rights of women and the marginalized.
By the early 1900s, Korea was an independent country in all but name only. It had rebuffed numerous Western attempts to open up the country to foreign markets and religion, only to succumb to Japanese imperial domination of its economy and government. Japanese tycoons reneged on prior contracts with Korea, buying up lucrative mines and strangling Korea’s nascent domestic industry. Japanese agents killed the empress of Korea and placed the emperor under house arrest. Korean sovereignty was a bad joke. But even as de facto ownership of the country passed on to Japan, Korea’s peasants faced the same problem as it had for centuries: the landlord class. Though the traditional yangban elites had been legislated out of existence in 1894, they maintained their ownership of rural farmland and their hold over tenant farmers under Japanese imperialism by collaborating with their new overlords. Indeed, peasant movements for land reform, like the Donghak Peasant Revolution of 1894-95, were brutally quashed at least in part by Japanese forces. Education was also suppressed, with 86.2% of Koreans not having attended any school according to a 1944 census. The literacy rate in 1945 stood at a paltry 22%. This was no coincidence. The economics of Japanese imperialism required a systematic dismantling of the educated, professional Korean class in order to keep the country poor and exploitable. Education for girls and women was even worse, a product of deeply rooted patriarchal beliefs dating back to at least Confucius. And, of course, Korea had no independence to speak of, unable to legislate or demand the right to its own future without facing down the barrel of a Japanese rifle.
Liberation from Japan was the first catalyst for political change in Korea. The Soviet declaration of war on Japan, along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pushed Japan to unconditional surrender by September 1945. Almost immediately, Korea was divided into Soviet and American zones of occupation by American military officers using a National Geographic map. One could easily end the story here. Korea was divided, both sides formed sympathetic governments in their halves of the country, and then war broke out in 1950. But that leaves out an invaluable wealth of history that unfolded in the intervening years, as well as the contributions of millions of ordinary, working-class Koreans who fought for change. In spite of the military occupations imposed on Korea, Korean political leaders sprung to action to form a provisional government, intended as the foundation for a unified Korea: the People’s Republic of Korea. Despite its Marxist-sounding name, the People’s Republic was an amalgam of different ideologies. Korean communists, returning home from their exiles in Siberia and Manchuria, dominated the north, while right-wing nationalists consolidated power in the south. Everywhere across Korea, from local towns (myǒn) and villages (ǔp) to cities and provinces, over 2,600 elected local governments known as People’s Committees (PCs, or inmin wiwŏnhoe) emerged to assert popular power and encourage democratic participation in local governance. A form of revolutionary justice emerged, writes historian Suzy Kim in her quintessential work Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950:
People’s committees took over local governance in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Japanese colonial government, punishing “national traitors” and criminals in people’s courts, distributing grain, and maintaining local security. Peasants, who made up the vast majority of the population, dominated the PCs. It was reported that peasants, refusing the orders of district officials, obeyed only the people’s committees, and that peasants controlled most police stations.
With the PCs also came an overwhelming push for social progress, especially in gender roles and literacy. New laws, again mostly in the North, ensured key legal protections and rights for women, foremost among them the Gender Equality Law of 1946 and the Law to Eradicate Remnants of Feudal Practices of 1947, the latter of which outlawed child marriage and forced marriage. Women themselves took leading roles in organizing and demanding equal rights. The North Korean Democratic Women’s League published the monthly Chosŏn yŏsŏng (“Korean Woman”) to, among other matters, discuss women’s issues in North Korea. Female activists often implored men to assume a larger role in housework, while also celebrating the sacrifices that wives and mothers made for their families: “everyone mobilized for national foundation should learn a great deal and take as a model such pure motherly sacrifice that is unconditional without earthly ambition or desire,” read one contemporary Chosŏn yŏsŏng article. But in spite of the significant gains made by women in the public sphere, many women felt burdened by their new responsibilities as revolutionary heroines. Even worse, there was little opportunity for women to exist in the public sphere without being mothers, sharply limiting the choices available for them.
Along with gender equality, literacy became another goal of Korean People’s Committees, with the establishment of illiteracy eradication teams (munmaeng t’oech’iban). As with the Bolshevik, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, all of which were accompanied by mass literacy campaigns, the Korean social revolution sought to undo the damage done by Japan’s systematic suppression of education. By March 1948, 92% of hitherto illiterate peasants in North Korea had become literate, encouraging large numbers of peasants to pursue their own studies of literature, politics, history, and the sciences. This opened the door for thousands to pursue higher formal education, with standardized education systems being established. What’s more, primary school enrollment skyrocketed as well, with an increase of 204% since the end of Japanese rule. Education was fundamentally a postcolonial project; Japanese colonial rule had focused on eliminating as many traces of Korean culture from the school system as possible. In the words of contemporaneous Korean propaganda, illiteracy and ignorance were the “[enemies] of civilization.”
PCs also played an instrumental role in redistributing land, a key demand of the Korean peasant class for decades, and a goal that had been violently crushed by Japan. Under the leadership of rural committees, 99% of rented land in North Korea was confiscated by the PCs, all without government compensation for a landlord class that was hated for its collaboration with the Japanese. Of course, this wasn’t a flawless process. Some radical peasant groups targeted wealthy peasants who hadn’t been landlords, while many landlords kept their land due to poor enforcement. But for millions of peasants, land reform was a worthy recompense for decades of exploitation under landlords and their Japanese allies: across North Korea, peasants received on average 3.26 acres of arable land, which was even associated with greater agricultural production to alleviate food shortages. It can’t be overstated just how crucial land reform, as well as the economic and social empowerment that came with it, was for the peasants of the north.
Of course, that begs the question: what about South Korea?
Despite the fact that most PCs in South Korea were far from communist—the nationalists that controlled them tended to be right-wing—they were swiftly declared illegal by the American military occupation that would govern South Korea. General John R. Hodge, the occupation’s military governor, said it best, as quoted by eminent historian Bruce Cumings:
[O]ne of our missions was to break down this Communist government [the People’s Republic of Korea.]
Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK)
This isn’t to say that there were no attempts at radical social change in South Korea; indeed, progressive leaders and activists fought to protect the democratic system of governance they had built, along with their policies of land reform and labor rights, unheard of during the Japanese occupation. But this wasn’t all. American military governance had crippled the country with disastrous management of the economy and public services, with critical inflation levels, an outbreak of cholera, a rice famine, and an imploding consumer goods sector that had been reliant on the capital goods and resources of North Korea. Perhaps worst of all, the Americans maintained the hated colonial police, adapting it as an expediency to maintain order and suppress labor unions, all while installing a puppet regime headed by former independence activist and American ally Syngman Rhee. Something had to give.
A general strike was called in September 1946. It started with 7,000, then 36,000 Busan railway workers who were able to bring rail traffic across South Korea to a crawl. Within days, the strike had grown to almost 300,000 industrial workers, clogging the streets. 2,000 Korean policemen and American military forces violently suppressed the strike, but revolution was already burned into the national ethos. That fall, peasants throughout the southern provinces rose up in armed revolt, centered around the city of Daegu. Police stations nationwide were burned to the ground, and the police was only able to put down the rebellion by enlisting the help of far-right paramilitary organizations, like the Korean National Youth Association (Jokchong), Northwest Youth League, and the Baeguisa (“white shirts society”) terrorist group. Hundreds were killed, and thousands more were arrested and tortured. Even so, no reforms were forthcoming. Famine, disease, organized crime—all remained facts of life for South Korean citizens. Police brutality remained as common as ever, especially on the island of Jeju.
Perhaps euphemistically, what happened next on Jeju is commonly referred to as the Jeju April 3rd Incident (제주 4·3 사건) in Korean. But no euphemism or coy linguistic trick could capture what happened on that forlorn island. A general strike was called on the island as early as 1947, in response to continued police brutality and President Rhee’s controversial decision to hold national elections. On April 3rd, tensions exploded into an open uprising. Guerrillas emerged from the mountains, attacking paramilitaries and the police alike, but taking the time to specifically target Japanese collaborators in the police. The police, American soldiers, and fascist paramilitaries responded with a campaign of indiscriminate violence. Civilians were kidnapped, gang-raped, tortured, and slaughtered by the thousands. Villages were razed to the ground to deny the rebels aid, mostly serving to terrorize the civilian population. Ko Chang-seon remembers the violence:
From November 1948, an army battalion was stationed at Oedo Elementary School. The troops convened the villagers able to work and collect firewood for cooking. In fact, it was all a trap set up to kill young men. My father said he would go and that we should stay home. But, my eldest brother left home, as he said he would during breakfast that morning. An estimated 50 villagers responded to the call from the battalion. In the afternoon, only the elderly returned and the young ones went missing (without any news, as if they were dead). After my elder brothers were arrested, the soldiers visited my village and killed people day after day.
Ko Chang-seon, a survivor of the Jeju massacres
Via the Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation
Kim Sul-seong tightly wraps her head in a towel every day, and tries to wring out the pain of being beaten by South Korean soldiers:
Usually, she [Kim] didn’t speak a word about 4·3. But at times, she became infuriated and said she had a headache or that she didn’t want to live for much longer. During 4·3, some soldiers took her to a Buddhist temple on the coast of Taeheung and tortured her all throughout the day, asking about the whereabouts of the missing village members and of her relatives. But she didn’t tell them anything. The soldiers hit her head with the butt of a rifle, which left her suffering from headaches throughout her life. She used to say that thinking of 4·3 gives her a headache, and that it is too painful to endure without wrapping her head in a towel.
Park Seon-hee, Kim’s granddaughter-in-law
Via the Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation
Lee Sam-mun was mistakenly registered as having died with his father. He was eight years old when the massacres happened.
My mother, grandmother, second eldest brother, and I left to find another place to shelter. This time, we settled in a tented village created by the police. Before long, the police attempted to identify the lefties hiding in the village. My mother mistakenly reported herself and was shot to death. The police had ordered everyone with a family member living in the mountains to step forward, and my mother raised her hand, thinking the police had ordered those who had suffered a death in the family to the people in the mountains to self-report. I remember I sobbed the whole week after watching my mother summarily executed. On a day with heavy rain, my grandmother and I buried my dead mother and the remains of my father, eldest brother, and elder sister that relatives had discovered in the mountain. But now, I have no idea where we buried them exactly. Would their graves still be there?
Lee Sam-mun
Lee touches his memorial tablet mistakenly reporting his own death in the Jeju 4·3 Peace Park. Via the Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation
By the end of the year-long uprising, 30,000 lay dead, a tenth of Jeju’s entire population, almost all of them civilians and rebels. Red Island cried tears of blood. The Korean revolution was over.
As much as the Korean revolution is a story of revolution and social change, it is equally one of reaction and state violence; it is a story of the dead. By the time North Korean tanks rolled into Seoul in June 1950, tens if not hundreds of thousands in South Korea lay dead at the hands of their own government. But the progressive inheritance of the Korean revolution persisted, even as regimes on both sides of the border grew more repressive. When South Korea did democratize after decades of military rule, it was thanks to a mass movement of labor, women, and pro-democracy advocates: the same groups that were subdued by dictatorship, state-backed terror, and American arms. As South Korea backslides into reactionary politics once again, and North Korea continues to repress its citizens’ most basic rights, it’s time we look back to when the dream of a unified, progressive Korea was more than just a hope, but a reality.