North Korea was created by revolutionaries driven by nationalism, anti-imperialism and the search for the right path to modernity. All three were the products of its encounter with the modern world that began in the late nineteenth century. An intense nationalism, accompanied by a fierce desire to be free of foreign control characterized not just Kim Il Sung and the builders of the North Korean state but many modern Korean leaders. An ancient, ethnically homogeneous society with its distinctive culture, Korea found itself caught up in the world of nineteenth-century imperialism for which it was unprepared. China, Russia and Japan fought for control over the peninsula, with Japan emerging victorious. In 1910 it was annexed by Japan which governed it as a colony for 35 years. Under direct foreign rule for the first time in their history Koreans responded with modern nationalist and anti-imperialist movements that sought to regain their independence, and secure it by creating a strong and powerful nation that could take its place among the leading states of the world. This was the aim of the DPRK’s leaders, and differed in these respects little from that of all Korean nationalists including those that ruled the South after 1948.
Early Historical Background
Much of Korea’s long history may seem too remote to be of relevance to the story of North Korea but, in fact, this is not so. As is true of their East Asian neighbors Koreans have been historically minded, and their interpretation of the past is central to their modern identity. North Korea’s ideology and the way it sees itself are intertwined with its understanding of Korean history.
Korea as a unified state dates back to the seventh century. Three kingdoms – Shilla (or Silla) in the southeastern part of the peninsula, Paekche in the southwest and Koguryŏ in the North – had emerged by the fourth century and competed for supremacy until Shilla emerged victorious in 676. Thereafter, except for a brief period in the early tenth century one state governed the peninsula. The northern border fluctuated somewhat, but has not changed significantly since the early 1400s. When the country was partitioned in 1945 it ended 13 centuries of unity. Few states in the twentieth century were as old or had such stable boundaries. It was also homogeneous to an unusual degree. Whatever varied peoples may have lived on the peninsula, they had long become a single ethnic-linguistic group by the nineteenth century. North Korea today is possibly the world’s most ethnically uniform society, and South Korea would be a candidate for the second most. While China had a profound influence on their society, Koreans maintained a distinctive culture with their own dress, styles of houses, folk art and customs, their own unique alphabet developed in the fifteenth century, and their own cultural identity. Until the late nineteenth century there were no significant Korean communities outside Korea so that it was, uncommonly, a land where political, linguistic-ethnic and cultural boundaries were nearly the same. Korean history was also characterized by a high degree of historical continuity. Three dynasties ruled from the 676 to 1910 without radical changes in the basic institutions. In the Shilla period it was ruled by the Kim royal family. In 935 a new dynasty ruled from Kaesong (Kaesŏng) in what is now North Korea renaming the state Koryŏ. After nearly five centuries of rule the Yi dynasty came to power in 1392 with a new name for the state: Chosŏn. The Yi or Chosŏn dynasty, moved the capital to Seoul and remained on the throne until the Japanese annexed Korea in 1910. During 13 centuries of monarchic rule many of the same aristocratic families dominated politics and society century after century. Only the intrusion of foreign imperialism and the Japanese takeover brought a break in history and even then the old aristocratic lineages controlled much of the countryside until the land reforms after 1945.
Korea has been shaped by its relationship with its neighbors. Korea was part of the Chinese tributary system, with the Korean king a vassal of the Chinese emperor. This was sometimes misunderstood by Westerners to mean something short of full independence, but the reality was that Korea was fully autonomous. Its obeisance to its huge neighbor was usually more ceremonial than substantive. Korean nationalists in the early twentieth century felt ashamed at what they regarded as their subservience to China – which in both North and South Korea is referred to as sadaejuūi, literally translated as “serve the great-ism”; in modern times it had the connotation of slavishly serving a great power rather than being proudly independent. Before 1876, however, the educated classes, at least, took pride in being part of the great cosmopolitan world centered in China and in their adherence to “the study of the Way,” as the Confucian tradition was sometimes called. Indeed, the rigid adherence to Neo-Confucianism that characterized Korea from at least the fifteenth century exceeded that of China, Vietnam or Japan but enabled the ruling class to see their society as the truest bastion of righteousness.
From Hermit Kingdom to Colony
North Korean propaganda portrays Korea as a victim of imperialist aggression. In fact, in South Korea too Korean history, despite long periods of peace, is often depicted as one of repeated foreign invasions: the Khitans from inner Asia in the tenth century, the Mongols in the thirteenth, the Japanese in the late sixteenth and the Manchus in the early seventeenth centuries. To avoid trouble Chosŏn state sought to limit its contact with the outside world. The aggressive, globalizing Euro-centered world of the late nineteenth century, however, did not make opting out of the emerging international economic system possible. After the British forcibly pried China open to Western trade in the Opium War of 1839–1842, and after the Americans “opened” Japan in 1854, some Western attention was drawn to the hermit kingdom. The British unsuccessfully attempted to initiate trade. Meanwhile, French missionaries sneaked into the country, and following the execution of several of them France sent a punitive expedition in 1866.1
North Koreans regard the General Sherman incident as the beginning of the modern era of imperialist intervention into their country. This obscure affair, little known to Americans, has been made into a major event, with the official version memorized by all school children. In August 1866 a heavily armed American ship, the General Sherman, with a crew of Americans, Chinese, Malays and British sailed up the Taedong River to Pyongyang seeking to open up trade. A local official explained that the country was closed to trade with foreigners but the ship ignored the request to leave. After tense negotiations led to an exchange of fire between the crew and locals, the Koreans burned the ship, which was caught on a sandbar, and killed its crew. For a while the Americans did not know what had happened to the ship. The government in Seoul informed the Chinese of the incident and through the Chinese the USA eventually learned of its fate. In 1871 the US Minister to China, Frederick Low, led five ships and 1,200 men under Admiral John Rodgers on a punitive expedition. The Americans attacked the island of Kanghwa and some coastal forts. The Koreans fought to the death, inflicting a few casualties on the Americans. Without authorization to proceed further, and frustrated by the Koreans’ refusal to talk, Low and Rodgers withdrew. The government, proud to have driven off the barbarians, both the French in 1866 and the Americans in 1871, erected stone signs that proclaimed “Western barbarian invade or land. If we do not fight we must then appease them. To urge appeasement own to betray the nation.”2
But Korea’s isolation quickly came to an end. In 1876, acting in imitation of the Westerners that had recently forced them to open their ports to trade, the Japanese sent their gunboats to Korea and intimidated the court into opening up the country to commerce and formal diplomatic relations with Tokyo. Within a few years the USA, Britain, France and others had joined the Japanese. Some members of the yangban aristocratic elite as well as other educated non-aristocrats were quick to appreciate the need to carry out modern reforms if the kingdom was to survive. But the Koreans never had the leisure to experiment with adaptations of Western institutions and technologies since China, Russia and Japan aggressively competed for influence and intervened in the internal affairs of their country. These powers were able to take advantage of the internal rivalries within the ruling class which failed to form a united front against foreign aggression. Japan, which was the most committed power in the region and determined to gain control of what they considered to be a strategically important peninsula, first defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War 1894–1895 and then triumphed over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905 to become the master of Korea. In 1905 Korea became a Japanese protectorate with the approval of Britain and the USA; five years later it became a colony. Koreans reacted to these events in varied ways. Some accepted the reality of Japanese dominance and cooperated with their new rulers, others resisted. The latter waged a guerilla war against the Japanese from 1907 to 1911. About 15,000 of these poorly armed, disparate groups called ūibyŏng (righteous armies) lost their lives before the resistance was stamped out. A few Koreans went into exile, fleeing to Shanghai, Hawaii and elsewhere, or crossed the border into Manchuria or Siberia. Most simply went on with their lives and accommodated themselves to the new order.
These years between 1876 and 1910 were important because they marked Korea’s entry into the modern world and exposed Koreans to new ideas about their place in it. By 1910 Koreans studying in Japan, and a few in Europe and America encountered a bewildering array of new ways of thinking about society and government. Ideas of modern science, progress, constitutionalism, state sovereignty, popular sovereignty, human rights, international law and equality entered the discourse of the educated most often through Japanese translations. Of course, there is nothing special about this; Koreans were only participating in the global diffusion and evolution of these new concepts. What was unusual was that, unlike many Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin American and other peoples, Koreans, owing to their effective isolation until fairly recently in world history, were exposed to these ideas more suddenly. There was no small group of “Dutch Learning” scholars as there had been in Japan, or Western-exposed intellectuals such as in early nineteenth-century Bengal or Istanbul. Yet the younger generation of educated Koreans eagerly embraced these new ideas in what amounted to an intellectual revolution.
Korea’s Unusual and Traumatic Colonial Experience
North Korean society, to a considerable extent, is rooted in the colonial experience. The 35-year colonial regime, 1910 to 1945, touched the lives of almost every Korean, often in disturbing and even traumatizing ways. It was during this period that modern nationalist, anti-imperialist movements began and that competing visions of modernity became defined. It would be hard to exaggerate just how profound that experience was in shaping the character of North Korea. Many of its defining features – the militarization of its society, its coercive methods to marshal the population for state goals, its xenophobia, the cult of the ruling family and its intense, fierce nationalism – were shaped by the peculiar features of Japanese rule.
In many ways Korea was a typical colony. The Japanese had modeled much of their colonial administration on that of the major European powers. As in the case of most Western imperialists the Japanese saw themselves as agents of modernization and progress. They created a modern infrastructure with railroads, schools and port facilities; brought about improvements in agriculture; and established certain industries. But economic development was designed to produce raw materials and products needed by the mother country, which directed and controlled its development. Yet Korea’s colonial experience was unusual in that Korea was neither a contiguous appendage to a land empire nor ruled by a distant overseas power. Only 115 miles from Japan’s shores, Korea had a long history of interaction with its colonizer, including the sixteenth-century invasions and attempted conquest. It was a familiar, often menacing neighbor. Japan shared a common East Asian cultural heritage with Korean Confucian values that included an emphasis on rank, hierarchy, authority and respect for education. This it married to Western concepts of science, industry, technology and bureaucratic efficiency.
Japan’s colonial rule of Korea was also unusual in its intensive nature, to the degree it promoted industrialization and to the massive wartime mobilization of the population during World War II. Most colonies were ruled through local indigenous officials or elites. Japan, however, ruled Korea directly. In the late 1930s nearly a quarter of a million Japanese served in Korea as bureaucrats, police and garrison soldiers and as employees of state banks, companies and schools – a contingent ten times that of the French personnel who were sent to administer Vietnam, a country similar in size and population; and equal in number to that of the British in India, which had twenty times the population. The vast bureaucracy and police system penetrated throughout Korean society, including the Japanese village school teacher and the Japanese village policemen who carried out regular home inspections to see to it that health and other regulations were being carried out. After 1931 colonial Korea was also far more industrialized than most colonies. In particular, the northern part of the country, with its abundant mineral resources, hydroelectric potential and proximity to the expanding Japanese empire in China, was rapidly developed. Seeing Korea as an important base for the expansion into China, an elaborate railroad system was built as well as other infrastructure. Thus by 1945 Japan had set much of the foundations for an industrial society in Korea, most of which was concentrated in what became the DPRK.
North Korea was profoundly influenced by Japan’s wartime mobilization and indoctrination of the Korean people. World War II began in Asia with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. From 1938, when Tokyo came to realize that establishing supremacy over China would be a long and difficult undertaking, wartime Japan quickly evolved into a totalitarian society based on the vague, mystical and racial-nationalist ideology of kokutai (national essence) – an ideology in many ways similar to the one that evolved in North Korea. The cult of the emperor had been promoted by the state since 1868 and was central to the creation and intensification of a modern Japanese nationalism. By 1940 political parties were abolished and the entire nation was mobilized in various campaigns to support the war effort. Korea fully participated in this wartime ultra-nationalism and totalitarian mobilization. From 1938 almost all Koreans were organized into various syndicates in support of the emperor and the imperialist expansion into China. Koreans were required to register at Shinto shrines and to participate in ceremonies honoring the emperor. The school day for all children began with the portrait of the emperor being taken out of its sacred case, the imperial instructions being read to students, and, having lined up into a military-style formation, all teachers and students bowing in the direction of the imperial palace in Tokyo.
This wartime mobilization was accompanied by a change in policy to coercive assimilation. In 1940 Koreans were required to adopt Japanese names, Korean-language newspapers were closed and Japanese became the language of instruction in all schools. Few colonial policies left such bitterness. Meanwhile, women, laborers, farmers, students and those belonging to organizations with compulsory membership were mobilized to collect scrap, provide voluntary labor and attend ceremonies such as Rising Asia Day. No Korean could escape the pressure to participate in these activities. These mass mobilization campaigns set a pattern that has continued to be a part of North Korean life to the present day. A massive relocation occurred as people moved from the agricultural south to the newly industrializing north of the country or to Manchuria, Japan or other parts of the expanding empire. Most of this migration was voluntary, but not all, as labor when needed was simply conscripted. The scale of this mass mobilization and movement of labor was huge. By 1945 one-third of the industrial labor force in Japan was Korean.
Thus World War II shook up Korean society, disturbing long-held routines, uprooting millions and giving Koreans their first experience of living in a regimented, centrally controlled society that did not allow for much of a private life. With its mystical, racial-nationalist ideology, its cult of leadership and its mass mobilization of society for collective projects, wartime colonial rule foreshadowed the North Korean regime. Not all of the salient characteristics of North Korea reflect the peculiarities of its colonial experience, and it would be an overstatement to claim that the totalitarian state was made in Japan. But the impact of colonial rule was profound.
Nationalism and Anti-imperialism
No other feature of North Korea is more defining, more central to its ideology or so essential to understanding its aspirations and its relationship with the outside world than its hyper-nationalism and its view of itself as engaged in an anti-imperialist struggle.
Modern Korean nationalism can be traced to the late nineteenth century. Some Korean intellectuals began to absorb the ideas of popular sovereignty, the concept of a sovereign state operating within an international state system, and began seeing their own society as a nation. This new emerging ethnic-linguistic nationalism, symbolized by the promotion among the educated of the use of the Korean alphabet and the recording of national histories, gradually fused with ethnic and local resentments at Japanese rule to create a popular national movement. A turning point in the birth of Korean nationalism was what the Koreans call the “March First Movement” in 1919. This was part of a wave of excitement and anti-colonial activity that spread across the world from Egypt to China, sparked by the end of World War I, the ensuing Versailles Peace Conference and President Wilson’s principle of “national self-determination” set forth in his Fourteen Points. While Wilson’s formulation was intended to apply only to Europeans, like so many non-Western colonial subjects, Koreans seized upon this principle of self-determination to call for their own independent nation. When a small group met in Seoul to read a symbolic “Declaration of Independence,” calling for the end of Japanese rule, demonstrations broke out across the country. It has been estimated that 500,000 to 1 million people participated in the rallies which continued throughout the spring. Hundreds were killed by Japanese police.3
Embarrassed by the international attention this protest movement received and reflecting a more liberal atmosphere in Japan, Tokyo allowed the Koreans to establish Korean-language newspapers and periodicals and permitted some freedoms in discussing political and social topics. The result was a burst of creative energy among artists and intellectuals who laid the foundations for modern literary and artistic expressions, but it also brought about a division among Korean nationalists that would profoundly shape Korean history: between the moderate, Western-looking cultural nationalists and the more radical nationalists who tended to look toward the Soviet Union and communist movements abroad for inspiration.
By the 1920s, many Korean intellectuals looked to the West as a model for civilized behavior, much as the Korean intellectuals in the past had looked to China. Ironically, most of these were educated in Japan, where they read Japanese translations of Western works and in some cases where they studied Western languages, usually English or German. They were highly critical of Korea’s cultural backwardness, which they saw as responsible for the fall of their country to the Japanese. Many advocated for a moderate agenda, working within the limitations of the colonial framework. The focus of these moderate nationalists, whom historian Michael Robinson calls “cultural nationalists,” was on culture, not politics.4 This was partly based on pragmatism, since any call for independence would result in arrest and harsh repression, and therefore be ineffective. But it was also based on a sincere conviction that Korea must develop spiritually and culturally before it could be ready for independence. It was their duty to work on uplifting society first. Cultural nationalists advocated a gradual approach to development, seeing education as key. They propagated their ideas through the newspapers, a host of new magazines and through various youth, women’s, educational and cultural associations.
This moderate, elitist approach to creating a modern nation did not appeal to all Koreans. A number of young intellectuals, many also educated in Japan, came under the influence of socialism, especially in its Marxist interpretation. They looked to the common people as embodying the essence of the nation and to their own role as leaders of the people. They were impatient with the gradualism of the moderate nationalists and rejected the idea of cooperating with the colonial regime. Furthermore, they were suspicious of both the old landowning and the newly emerging Korean entrepreneurial classes, and saw the overthrow of both the colonial regime and the indigenous elite as their aim. These more radical Korean nationalists saw their role less as cultural reformers bringing the masses up to modern standards of civilization than as part of the vanguard of the “people.” Most of them, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, became associated with the fledgling communist movement. As a result, the nationalist movement in the 1920s was divided between moderate “cultural nationalists” and radical, Marxist-leaning groups. The ideological foundations of North and South Korea can in part be traced to this split.
This split between cultural and radical nationalists was reflected in the exile community. All the exile organizations suffered from a great weakness. Unlike many foreign-based anti-imperialist national groups elsewhere there was no logical center, such as London or Paris often served for Africans, Middle Easterners and Southeast Asians. Shanghai remained an important center of anti-Japanese activity and the home for the Korean Provisional Government established in 1919 and initially headed by Yi Sŭng-man, better known to Americans as Syngman Rhee. But only a small fraction of the exiles were based there and the Korean Provisional Government was weak and ineffective. Other exiles were based in Manchuria, Tokyo, Hawaii, mainland USA and elsewhere. Overall, exiled groups played only a marginal role in the nationalist movement before 1945 but became extremely important when Japanese rule ended.
The Communist Movement(s) in Korea
North Korea today has reinterpreted history so that there is a linear progression from the anti-imperialist movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century to the anti-Japanese struggle and the single line of socialism formulated and fostered by Kim Il Sung. In reality, however, the Korean communist movement had multiple origins. It was characterized by several features. First, from its birth it was a geographically fragmented and varied movement lacking a single leader or base of operation. It fact, it is better to use the plural – movements. Second, except for a handful of cadres trained in the Soviet Union and a few intellectuals who seriously studied Marx, most Korean communists did not have a very sophisticated understanding of Marxism-Leninism. And third, the Korean communist movements were above all, nationalist, anti-imperialist movements seeking a means to achieve a Korea free of foreign control.
While few Koreans understood the finer points of Marxism-Leninism they took what they needed: the essence of their country was the Korean people or “masses” (Korean minjung); and the Korean people had been victimized by a parasitic feudal class of yangban aristocrats that kept the country in a backward state and who now collaborated with the Japanese. The struggle for the liberation of both the people and the nation was thus the same struggle; and it was a struggle not only against a foreign occupier but against both the landholding class and its feudal culture and values associated with Confucianism, and against the emerging capitalist class who cooperated with the Japanese. The masses, however, not being educated, needed leadership from dedicated revolutionaries who could organize them for the inevitably victorious struggle against the Japanese and their collaborators. With history on their side, they would establish a new progressive, rich and strong, independent Korea. This was the thinking that inspired those Koreans who became communists including Kim Il Sung and the other future leaders of North Korea.
The first communist organizations appeared in Siberia which was home to several hundred thousand Koreans who had emigrated there after 1860. Yet by and large, this population of Soviet-Koreans were not directly involved in the Korean nationalist movements. They had their own tragic history when, in the late 1930s, Stalin, fearing the loyalty of so many Koreans living near the border of the expanding Japanese empire, relocated the entire population to Central Asia. It is estimated that one-third of all Soviet-Koreans may have perished owing to this clumsy and ruthless resettlement. This was accompanied by purges of Soviet-Koreans in the Bolshevik Party and in the military. As a result, by 1945, the Soviet-Koreans were isolated from Korea, and Moscow lost a potential cadre of Korean-speaking party and military personnel that could have assisted them in their postwar occupation of northern Korea. Instead the Soviets had to find Korean speakers among the scattered surviving Soviet-Koreans to supply them with translators and to aid in the occupation and construction of the socialist regime. These “Soviet-Koreans” would form one of the major groups among the North Korean leadership during the first decade after World War II.
Another group of communists that would prove important in the early history of North Korea was the “domestic communists” who had their origins in the communist movement within Korea. This movement began when Korean students studying in Japan became familiar with Marxism and brought communist ideas back with them. In its early years this domestic communism remained largely confined to small circles of students and intellectuals in Seoul. On April 17, 1925, two leftist organizations – the Tuesday Society and the North Wind Society – comprising mostly young intellectuals merged to form the Korean Communist Party (Chosŏn Kongsandang).5 Later that year the colonial authorities arrested most of the small band of young people. A second Korean Communist Party was organized in 1926 but, as before, its leaders were soon arrested. When a third party was organized in December 1926 most of its members too were arrested in January 1928. Still another, fourth attempt to create a party in February 1928 led to another wave of arrests in August.6 Dismayed by these repeated failures in December 1928 the Communist International (Comintern) issued what became known as the December Theses, analyzing the reasons for the Korean communists’ failures. The Korean Communists were criticized for consisting of only intellectuals and students, for letting factionalism weaken them, for their lack of a firm grasp of Marxist-Leninist principles and for their failure to attract industrial workers and poor peasants.
The constant police surveillance and efficient repression made it difficult to organize a major and successful communist movement within Korea. However, a number of communists remained active, some trained in the Soviet Union and associated with the Comintern. Several of these attempted to organize industrial workers and peasants. One example was the Moscow-trained O Ki-sŏp, who was active in the northeastern province of Hamgyŏng in the 1930s, a center of labor and peasant activism. People like O spread egalitarian ideals, preparing the way for the North Korean communist regime, but they were mostly marginalized or purged shortly after liberation. There were Red Peasant Unions (chosaek nongmin chohap) in the 1930s, mainly in northern Korea, that managed to survive Japanese suppression.7 They formed as a response to the unrest in the countryside where the conditions of most peasants had worsened under Japanese colonial rule. Landownership declined as local landlords took advantage of legal reforms and the commercialization of agriculture to consolidate and expand their holdings at the expense of impoverished farmers who went from owner-cultivators to landless or land-poor tenants. The most active center of the domestic communist movement remained in Seoul where most of the intellectual community was concentrated.
When arrested the Japanese would place enormous pressure on them to renounce communism. Many activists under duress while imprisoned did so, were released and left the movement. Others perished in prisons. But some survived, including Pak Hŏn-yŏng (1900–1955) who served as the leader of the underground Communist Party in Korea during World War II, apparently undetected by the colonial authorities. A founding member of the first Communist Party in 1925, Pak was arrested by the Japanese and then released after faking mental illness. He was later rearrested, served six years and released in 1939. Under the guise of an itinerant bricklayer he traveled around the country in an effort to re-establish a national party.8 But in 1945 he and other domestic Korean communists lacked an effective organization, were to a great extent cut off from contact with Korean communists in exile, and had limited contacts with Moscow and the international communist movement.
A third important group were the “Yanan communists.” With Japanese repression too severe in Korea and the Soviets too suspicious of the loyalty of their Korean community, China became the most important base for the Communist movement. Many Korean activists traveled to China where Shanghai became the center for exiled patriots. Nationalists of all hues – rightists, anarchists, socialists – gathered there, many associated with the Korean Provisional Government, the then-exiled government established in 1919. Many of these Koreans started working with the Chinese Communist Party not long after it was founded in 1921. Among them were Kim Chŏng, better known by his revolutionary name Mu Chŏng, who made the 1934–1935 Long March with Mao and the other Chinese communists to their new base at Yanan. He was joined by Kim Tu-bong who became one of the leaders of these “Yanan Koreans” as they are often called.9 Kim was born in a poor fishing village, taught in middle school and, following his participation in anti-Japanese activities, fled to Shanghai in 1919. He became a distinguished linguist and was one of the many exiled intellectuals. Another “Yanan Korean” was Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, also of humble background, who spent six years in prison for anti-Japanese activities before fleeing to China in 1936. When war broke out between China and Japan in 1937 Koreans joined the anti-Japanese struggle, with some fighting alongside the Guomindang and hundreds of others joining the fight alongside the Chinese Communists. In 1942 Yanan Koreans formed the Korean Independence League headed by Kim Tu-bong and Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik. A military wing, the Korean Voluntary Army, was headed by Mu Chŏng, with Pak Il-u, another prominent leader, as his deputy. It fought in battles against the Japanese in northern China and engaged in anti-Japanese propaganda work. Eventually Koreans working for and fighting alongside the Chinese Communist Party numbered in the thousands.10 Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, Kim Tu-bong, Pak Il-u and many other Yanan communists would play an important role in the early years of the North Korean state.
The group of communists that would dominate and eventually almost completely shape North Korea were the Manchurian guerillas who were active in the mountains near the Korean border. The Manchurian border region with Korea was a frontier-like area and a hotbed of guerilla activities in the 1920s and 1930s. There were 400,000 Korean in Manchuria in 1920 and 900,000 by 1931. About two-thirds of them lived in the Jiandao (Kando) region of Manchuria bordering northeast Korea.11 Most who settled in the region came from the adjacent northern provinces of Korea to escape poverty and seek opportunities in this climatically harsh but less populated region. Some were fleeing Japanese rule for political reasons. Most worked as farmers. When the Japanese took over Manchuria in 1931–1932 the Korean residents found themselves once again within the boundaries of an expanding Japanese empire. In the 1930s many of these Korean settlers fought in guerilla groups against the Japanese, the most famous being Kim Il Sung. It was a rough and sometimes lawless area with widespread banditry, but with its rugged terrain it was ideal for guerillas to operate in.
The Young Kim Il Sung
Perhaps no one has so shaped the society he ruled as Kim Il Sung did. In modern world history a few comparisons come to mind: Ataturk the founder of modern Turkey or perhaps Mao Zedong. But Ataturk could not erase Islam from its hold over the Turkish people and much of Mao’s legacy was rejected or ignored almost immediately after his death. Neither so entirely remolded their society or so successfully arranged for their succession. The story of North Korea is to an unparalleled extent bound up with that of its founder. Who was Kim Il Sung? His official biographies, which in Orwellian fashion are periodically rewritten, are so far removed from historical reality that it is easy to dismiss them. Misinformation, sometimes spread in the past by South Korean intelligence, also complicates our understanding of his early career. Still, by working with Japanese police records and some Soviet documents, and by carefully analyzing published accounts in North Korea, scholars have been able to piece together a fair amount of detail about his early background.
Kim Il Sung was born Kim Sŏng-ju on April 15, 1912, the day the Titanic sank, in the village of Mangyŏngdae outside of Pyongyang. Around 1935 he adopted the name Kim Il Sung which means “sun-star.” He was the eldest of three sons. His father, Kim Hyŏng-jik (1894–1926), was married to Kang Pan-sŏk (1892–1932). As with many Koreans he traced his family back many generations – in his case to twelve generations and to Chŏlla Pukto in the rich rice-growing region of the southwest. From there they emigrated to the north. Kim Il Sung’s background was a favorable one for producing an active nationalist since his family was Christian and exposed to modern ideas, and already active in the nationalist movement. His father attended Sungshil School established by American missionaries in Pyongyang. He did not appear to have worked as a farmer but taught elementary school. Kim Il Sung’s mother, Kang Pan-sŏk, was from a Christian family; her father, Kang Ton-uk, was a Presbyterian elder.12 Kang Pan-sŏk’s family was from the nearby village of Ch’ilgol. Several members of her clan later rose to prominent if not top-tier positions in North Korea where they were known as the Ch’ilgol faction.13
The young Kim grew up just outside Pyongyang, a city that was undergoing rapid modernization. It was a provincial city since everything – political, economic, cultural and intellectual life – was centered in Seoul. It was nonetheless one of the larger and more prosperous and intellectually active cities in Korea. It was a major center for Christianity, and sometimes called the “Jerusalem of the East” owing to the large Protestant community and the large number of Christian mission schools. Official biographies fail to mention Kim Il Sung’s Christian background while highlighting and inflating his nationalist activities.14 But both were linked since Christians were disproportionately represented in nationalist organizations. P’yŏng’an province, where the city was located, was also the center of the indigenous Ch’ŏndogyo religious movement which had many adherents among the peasantry. In 1923 the religious sect formed the Young Friends’ Party (Ch’ŏng’udang) as its political wing which advocated for agricultural reform.15 Its members, like Christians, were also active in nationalist movements.
Later biographers created a long revolutionary pedigree for Kim Il Sung. His great-grandfather, Kim Ŭng-u, moved to Mangyŏngdae and according to the official histories was a leading participant in the fight against the General Sherman. Thus, he was present and a key player in the birth of the modern anti-imperialist movement. Whether or not the role of Kim’s great-grandfather in this incident has any basis in fact, his family does seem to have been politically active. According to official histories his father, Kim Hyŏng-jik, while attending Sungsil Academy, became filled with patriotic outrage when the Americans began using students as slave laborers and led a student strike against them.16 Mostly likely this is a later fabrication to reinforce the family tradition of anti-American imperialism. More credibly he is said to have taken part in the creation of an organization called the Korean National Association. In 1917 he was arrested by the Japanese and released the following year. Kim Il Sung later described visiting his father in prison as a major turning point in his life when he became aware of the evils of Japanese imperialism.17 One of Kim Hyŏng-jik’s two brothers was arrested in South Hamgyŏng after a skirmish with police. He was interned in Seoul where he died while still imprisoned in 1936.18
The young Kim Il Sung did not spend much of his early life in Korea. In fact, he spent almost his entire formative years from seven until he was thirty-three outside of Korea. At the age of seven his family moved to Manchuria, apparently after his father’s release by the Japanese authorities. They joined thousands of other Koreans, mostly from the north who crossed into Manchuria, a frontier area that only opened to massive Chinese settlement after 1860. Despite the harsh winters Manchuria had ample fertile land, but most Koreans settled in the hilly or mountainous areas adjacent to Korea. Some were escaping Japanese rule, others were simply escaping poverty. His father worked in Manchuria as a Chinese herbal medicine doctor. There Kim Il Sung attended Hwasŏng Middle School but then transferred to the Chinese Yuwen Middle School. Again it is interesting to note that most of his secondary education was in a Chinese not a Korean school, and, furthermore, that he was fluent in the language and is even said to have been fond of reading classic Chinese novels in later years.19 It is not certain why he went to a Chinese rather than Korean school, but his Chinese education is left out of official biographies.
As a youth Kim Il Sung returned to Korea only once from 1923 to 1924. Supposedly at his father’s suggestion he walked several hundred miles to learn about the oppression in Korea. More likely, his father sent him there to study in Pyongyang at a school where Kang Ton-uk, his mother’s father, was the vice principal. Later this return to Korea at the age of eleven was celebrated in North Korea as the “One Thousand Ri Journey for Learning” (Paeum ŭi ch’ŏlli kil). The following year he returned to Manchuria in what North Koreans call the “One Thousand Ri Journey for Liberation” (Kwangbok ŭi ch’ŏlli kil).20 At this point, North Koreans are taught, the young Kim “knew the reality of his homeland, marched across the snowy mountains, [and] on [his] way back across the Amok River made a resolve to liberate his county at any cost.”21 Now fully aware of the situation in his homeland, he began his lifelong quest to liberate it from the Japanese and build a great, independent nation.
Kim Il Sung left middle school in 1927 just before completing the eighth grade. His father died the year before but it is not clear why he left before graduating. The school was in Jilin, a major provincial city and a center of political activism. And he was politically active. North Koreans learn that he formed the “Down-With-Imperialism League” in 1926, an organization that prepared the way for the emergence of the communist movement in Korea. It is also when he formulated the ideological foundations of the North Korean revolution – a remarkable achievement for a 14-year-old. The official biographers have him busy educating the peasants and teaching Das Kapital to fourth graders.22 These ludicrous claims aside, Kim Il Sung was, like so many youths in Jilin at that time, involved in political movements at an early age. In May 1929 the 17-year-old Kim Il Sung joined a small short-lived student group organized by members of the South Manchurian Communist Youth Organization. They were quickly arrested and Kim Il Sung spend a few months in jail. Later North Korean sources claimed he organized this group but since he was one of the youngest and least-educated members this was unlikely.23 Sometime in the early 1930s he joined the Chinese communist-led anti-Japanese guerillas, possibly around 1932 about the time his mother died. From then on his life became inseparable from that of the Manchurian guerillas.
The Manchurian Guerillas
In North Korea the experience of Kim Il Sung and his fellow Manchurian guerillas in their conflict with the Japanese has provided the main background for plays, movies, songs, operas, children stories and every other conceivable form of entertainment. It provides examples and metaphors for all forms of economic, political and social activity. People are constantly being taught to learn from the examples of their great leader and his heroic comrades. Perhaps, more importantly, it has shaped the way the country’s leadership interprets and understands the world. Yet, as large as it looms in North Korea and for all its importance in understanding that state’s history, the Manchurian partisan campaign was a rather small-scale one. The Korean guerillas were tiny in number and the area of their activity was largely confined to remote peripheral areas in the mountainous countryside just north of the Korean border. Despite their aim of liberating Korea they rarely penetrated the well-protected border of the colony. Overall, the guerilla attacks on the Japanese imperialists were little more than a nuisance.
Kim Il Sung began his days as a guerilla fighter in an area near the border town of Antu with the National Salvation Army. North Korean official accounts have Kim establishing the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army on April 25, 1932, a date still celebrated. Yet there is no record of such an organization, which appears to be a later fabrication to disguise the fact that he fought under the Chinese Communists. Only in 1992, shortly before his death, did Kim admit he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party.24 In fact, there was no Korean communist guerilla organization in Manchuria. Following Comintern instructions that there should be one communist party for each country, the Korean communists came under the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. Koreans fighters became absorbed into the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NEAJUA), an offshoot of the Northeast People’s Revolutionary Army that had been founded by the Chinese partisan Yang Jingyu in September 1933. It was based primarily in southern Manchuria. The NEAJUA was divided into three “Route Armies” which were subdivided into small units or corps, confusingly also sometimes labeled “armies.” Yang Jingyu served as commander-in-chief of the First Route Army. Its second corps was consisted mainly of Koreans included the Third Division commanded by Kim Il Sung. Other prominent commanders in the NEUAJA included Ch’oe Hyŏn, Ch’oe Yong-gŏn and Kim Ch’aek who all later held prominent positions in the DPRK.25 Although working under the Chinese Communist Party leadership, ethnic Koreans made up the majority of fighters in the border area of Jilin Province, where Kim Il Sung was active.26
The label “armies” was rather grandiose for what were modest-sized units rarely numbering more than several hundred fighters. Although most of the Chinese Communist Party guerilla fighters in eastern Manchuria were ethnic Koreans they served under the Chinese and Chinese was the operational language.27 This led to tensions between the two ethnic groups which were aggravated by Chinese fears, often well founded, that many of the Koreans were agents working for the Japanese. In 1934 the Chinese Communist Party carried out a massive purge arresting and executing hundreds of Korean communists. Kim Il Sung was among those arrested but was released after a short time. The purge and its ethnically directed target provided Kim with an early example of how Koreans and he personally could be victims of comrades from a major communist power.28
With the Japanese firmly in control of major cities and towns, the guerilla movement was largely rural, consisting of small scattered groups supporting themselves by plundering wealthier farmers and “taxing” peasant villages. The Manchurian partisans established some self-governing bases. These were very small but are historically significant because they provided Kim Il Sung and his guerilla comrades with their earliest experiences of governance. About 20,000 people lived under these People’s Revolutionary Governments. Later, historians gave credit to Kim for having organized them but they were actually organized by the Chinese communists.29 The emphasis was on land redistribution. Land was expropriated from landlords and “Japanese puppets” and redistributed to impoverished peasants, including women. Leftover land belonged to the revolutionary government. As historian Charles Armstrong points out the guerillas in Manchuria often resorted to forcing young Koreans into serving in the resistance armies, levied unwelcome taxes on local peasants and raised money by kidnapping wealthy farmers for ransom.30 These were hardly measures to win popular support. In the late 1930s the Japanese, by a variety of methods, were able to destroy these revolutionary bases. And in a final effort they then launched a successful new campaign to wipe out guerilla resistance during 1939 and 1940, killing Yang Jingyu and most of the guerilla leaders. During 1940–1941 the surviving Manchurians guerillas withdrew to the Soviet Union.
Kim Il Sung was one of these surviving guerillas. So wildly exaggerated are his exploits that many Western and South Korean critics have dismissed his anti-Japanese activities altogether. Yet his record is impressive if on a modest scale. He must have been an able young commander, for at the age of 24 he was in charge of a division of the NEAJUA, a unit of perhaps 200–300 men.31 While he was only one of many guerilla leaders, and probably never commanded more men than that, he did secure notoriety with his raid on the Korean town of Poch’ŏnbo (known as Pojŏn prior to 1945) on June 4, 1937. This amounted to no more than killing seven Japanese policemen, destroying the police post and other Japanese buildings, and then occupying the town for several hours. Kim Il Sung gave a speech, handed out some leaflets and left. According to Japanese police reports only about 80 guerillas were involved. Although it was a rather minor affair it was one of the few successful raids across the heavily patrolled border at that time and was reported in the Japanese and Korean press.32 Even before the incident the Japanese-controlled press in Korea had reported on Kim Il Sung’s “banditry” but it was the “battle” of Poch’ŏnbo that received the most publicity and laid the foundations for his later reputation. North Koreans would later celebrate this as a great turning point in the anti-Japanese struggle. According to an official account, “the significance was not in the fact that we killed a few Japanese but in the fact that the Poch’ŏnbo battle threw revolutionary rays of hope inspiring confidence to the Korean people that they were alive and could beat Japanese imperialism if they fought against it.”33 In reality it was far less significant. Still it was alarming enough to the Japanese that they created a special unit to try to hunt Kim down. For 110 days in the winter of 1937–1938 he fled from his pursuers with his little band, an incident later heralded as the “Arduous March” (konan ŭi haenggun).34 Interestingly the Japanese unit hunting Kim included several Koreans who were to hold important positions in the South Korean military during the Korean War including Paek Sŏn-yŏp the army chief of staff.35
Assisting Kim when he was in Manchuria were socialist activists from northern Korea who crossed over to the Kapsan region where Kim’s group was active and formed the Kapsan Operations Committee (Kapsan kongjak wiwŏnhoe) to coordinate anti-Japanese activities. The Kapsan Operations Committee was rather short-lived, destroyed by Japanese counterinsurgency forces in 1938. For a while its veterans, known as the Kapsan group, held many high-ranking posts in North Korea, although they never enjoyed quite the prestige or power of the actual guerilla fighters.36 Kim Il Sung continued to fight on and led an attack on Musan, another border town, in May 1939 that was also well publicized. When Japanese forces carried out their determined and effective campaign in 1939–1940 to rid Manchuria of guerilla activities his was one of the last partisan bands to retreat to Siberia.37 There he sat out World War II. In a report written in Chinese in 1942 Kim Il Sung analyzed the failures of the guerilla movement. They had failed to work with other anti-Japanese groups, had attacked the enemy too soon before building up their forces and their numbers had been too few to be a match for the Japanese.38 It was a realistic appraisal by a young but experienced fighter.
Official biographies have Kim Il Sung heroically directing the anti-Japanese struggle from his mountain retreats in northern Korea. In fact, from 1940 to 1945 he was based outside the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. In the summer of 1942 the Soviets formed a special unit: the 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade of the Soviet 25th Army made up of Chinese and Korean ex-Manchurian guerilla fighters. It was commanded by a prominent Chinese guerilla leader, Zhou Baozhong, and had between 1,000 and 1,700 men including 200 to 300 Soviets attached. About 140 to 180 Koreans served in a battalion under the command of Kim Il Sung, most of whom had previously served with him in the 1930s.39 The brigade was to carry out intelligence and sabotage work and some members did so, but Kim Il Sung himself does not appear to have been involved in any such activities. Instead these years seems to have been uneventful, although it is not entirely clear how he spent his time other than that he became a father. His first wife, Kim Hyo-sun, was captured by the Japanese in 1940. He then married a fellow partisan, Kim Chŏng-suk. The daughter of a farmer, her mother and brother were killed by the Japanese and she joined the guerillas at the age of 16. Kim also lost a brother in the 1930s; Kim Ch’ŏl-ju, one of his two younger brothers, was killed while fighting the Japanese.40 While in Siberia Kim Chŏng-suk gave birth to their son, Kim Jong Il (Kim Chŏng-il).41 North Koreans are taught that Kim Jong Il was born at his father’s secret guerilla headquarters on Paektu Mountain in northern Korea, but this too was a later fabrication. After her death in the late 1940s Kim Chŏng-suk, as the mother of Kim Jong Il, became part of the Kim family pantheon and an object of national veneration.
While only a minor figure in the independence movement whose guerilla exploits were later enormously inflated, Kim Il Sung was not a totally obscure figure. Many Koreans, as a result of newspaper accounts, had heard of him. To say he was famous would be overstating it, but nonetheless, he was far from an unknown figure when he returned to a Soviet-occupied northern Korea in 1945. Eventually almost the entire leadership of North Korea was drawn from these survivors of the Manchurian guerilla campaign. Many of the Koreans in the 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade would emerge with prominent positions in the North Korean party and government. It is a remarkable and extremely important fact about North Korea that a handful of poorly educated, rural-based resistance fighters, living just beyond the borders of their homeland, most of whom had never been to a Korean city, came to entirely dominate their country. Their military exploits, though extremely modest in scale, grew into a legendary, heroic struggle, the basis for the legitimacy of the regime and the inspiration and guide for almost every endeavor it undertook.
When World War II came to a sudden end with the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, the Korean communist movement consisted of several thousand personnel fighting and serving with Mao Zedong in the interior of China, the remnants of the Manchurian-based guerillas now mostly living in the Soviet Far East, some serving in the Red Army, and a barely surviving underground movement within Korea. There were also a number of ex-Communist Party members and communist-leaning leftists in Korea who were in jail or no longer active; in fact, many were ostensibly supporting the Japanese war effort. A few Comintern members were in the Soviet Union. These groups had little contact with each other or in many cases may not have been aware of each other’s existence. There was no coordinated communist movement and no obvious leadership. In this they resembled the other Korean nationalist groups: small isolated exiled groups in China and the USA, and domestic nationalists most of whom had been pressured to serve the Japanese and who also lacked any effective organization or widely recognized leadership. Thus, with the collapse of imperial Japan, Korea was a political vacuum.
Footnotes
1
Most of this section and the following two sections are based on the author’s A Concise History of Korea: From Antiquity to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
2
Ki-baik Lee, A New History of Korea, translated by Edward W. Wagner with Edward J. Shultz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 266.
3
Frank Baldwin, “Participatory Anti-Imperialism: The 1919 Independence Movement,” Journal of Korean Studies 1, no. 1 (1979): 123–162.
4
Michael Robinson, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 1920–25. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988.
5
Chong-sik Lee, The Korean Workers’ Party: A Short History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Hoover Institution Press, 1978, pp. 19–20.
7
Gi-wook Shin, Peasant Protest and Social change in Colonial Korea. Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Press, 2014, pp. 75–91.
8
Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: the North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 127.
10
Koon Woo Nam, The North Korean Communist Leadership, 1945–1965: A Study of Factionalism and Political Consolidation. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1974, p. 45; Shen, Zhihua and Danhui Li, After Leaning to Once Side: China and Its Allies in the Cold War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011, pp. 52–53.
11
Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003, p. 18.
13
Kim Hakjoon, Dynasty: The Hereditary Succession Politics of North Korea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 27.
14
Yong-ho Choe, “Christian Background in the Early Life of Kim Il-song,” Asian Survey 26 (October 1986): 1088.
16
Choe, Yong-ho, “Christian Background in the Early Life of Kim Il-song,” Asian Survey 26, no. 10 (1986): 1082–1091.
18
Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 5.
19
Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, p. 51.
20
Jae-Cheon Lim, Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea. London: Routledge, 2015, p. 57.
26
Hongkoo Han, “Colonial Origins of Juche: The Minsaengdan Incident of the 1930s and the Birth of the North Korea-China Relationship,” in Suh, Jae-Jung editor, Origins of North Korea’s Juche. Latham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012, pp. 33–62.
34
Kim Kwang-un, Pukhan Chŏngch’i yŏn’gu 1 [Studies of North Korean Political History Vol 1.]. Seoul: Seonin, 2003, pp. 106–107.
38
Armstrong, Charles, “Centering the Periphery: Manchurian Exile(s) and the North Korean State,” Korean Studies 19 (1995): 1–16.