Following the disastrous failure at reunification North Korea underwent an impressive recovery. It then experienced one of the world’s most rapid rates of industrialization, transforming itself from a predominately rural to an urban-industrial nation while completing the socialization of the entire economy. In view of the achievement of these years, there could be little doubt in the minds of the leaders of the regime or in those of many foreign observers that the country was becoming one the most industrialized, modern and developed states in Asia. Accompanying this economic progress was the political consolidation of Kim Il Sung and his guerilla partisans, as they eliminated real or potential rivals. All this was achieved as DPRK gained further political autonomy and avoided being a satellite of either Beijing or Moscow.
Reconstruction and Total Socialism
Reconstruction 1953–1956
Few nations in modern history were more devastated than North Korea at the end of the Korean War, and few recovered so quickly. In the summer of 1953 North Korea was in ruins. American bombing had destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. Many smaller plants had been repaired yet industrial production was at only 36 percent of its 1949 level.1 In May 1953, during the last months of the conflict further bombing targeted the country’s main irrigation dams disrupting agricultural production and contributing to severe food shortages. The country was poor, hungry and in desperate need of aid. Hwang Jang Yop (Hwang Chang-yŏp), later the regime’s chief ideologist, returning from studying in Moscow described the shock at how bad conditions were. In Pyongyang few houses were standing. People were living in dugouts in the hillside, beggars filled the streets along with thieves desperate for food. Even as a new faculty member at the elite Kim Il Sung University food rations were limited; he recalls living on turnip soup. The wife of one his colleagues gave birth in the morning and was standing in line waiting for food rations in the afternoon.2 The enormously high war casualties meant there was a shortage of younger men. Foreign observers were struck by this shortage of men and the fact that women were doing much of the work in construction and other fields.3
Yet North Korea, despite this, made a strong recovery. In just three years cities were rebuilt and factories were operating. By 1957 industrial production in most sectors had returned to their modest 1949 levels and the country was about to embark on a spurt of rapid economic growth.
North Koreans would later claim almost full credit for the recovery but foreign aid was crucial to the effort. There was a dire need for assistance and the regime wasted no time in asking for it. Within days of the armistice Kim Il Sung supplied the Soviets with a list of aid requirements. A month later, in September 1953, he led a delegation to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin’s successors and negotiate assistance. In November he journeyed to Beijing. Meanwhile, other North Korean officials traveled in the countries of Eastern Europe from June to November seeking aid. The Soviets and the Chinese agreed to new loans, and the Chinese canceled all previous debts.4 Soviet and Eastern bloc countries sent thousands of advisors, mostly engineers and technicians, to assist. China also helped, not only with loans but also by using its Chinese People’s Volunteers still stationed in the country to help with construction and thereby somewhat easing the labor shortage. With the help of this aid from its communist allies the regime launched a three-year economic plan for the period 1954–1956.
Pyongyang’s allies helped rebuild some of the prewar infrastructure such as the chemical fertilizer complex from the colonial period at Hŭngnam.5 Soviet aid projects were instrumental in the construction of the Sup’ing hydroelectric power plant (the largest in Asia), a large steel mill at Sŏngjin (the city was renamed Kim Ch’aek) in the northeast and in the rebuilding of the port of Namp’o. Each of the Soviet Union’s allies contributed. The Czechs provided buses, Albania asphalt, Mongolia provided 10,000 horses and the East Germans sent a term of 350 engineers and technicians to supervise the rebuilding of the industrial city of Hamhŭng.6 Eastern Europeans were especially active in rebuilding old and constructing new factories. Several hundred Soviet-Korean technicians and experts came and provided valuable expertise. Thousands of North Koreans went to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for training programs. It is difficult to measure this foreign assistance since aid was calculated in ways that did not reflect market prices. Some of it came in the form of materials which were sold at extremely low prices and loans with generous repayment terms. The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites financed 77 percent of imports from 1954 to 56. By one reckoning, aid accounted for 33 percent of state revenues in 1954.7 Furthermore, the Soviets supplied military equipment and important resources such as oil as subsidized prices. But this assistance needs to be placed in perspective. While the Soviets and their Eastern European allies supplied technical help and material on a large scale, Soviet aid to North Korea was smaller proportionately than the assistance the USA provided to South Korea. Washington financed half the government budget of the ROK in the 1950s. It also was over a shorter period of time—South Korea remained heavily reliant on the USA until the mid-1960s, but by 1960 Soviet aid accounted for only 2.6 percent of the DPRK’s revenues.8 This massive aid injection was confined to just the first several years after the war.
Another contributing factor to the country’s rapid recovery was the effective use of mass mobilization campaigns involving the entire population for reconstruction projects. Calling it “war by another means” Kim Il Sung organized reconstruction efforts as if they were military campaigns complete with “speed-battles” and “144-day campaigns” to reach targets. Immediately after the war, mass mobilization succeeded in clearing the destruction, rebuilding houses, schools, factories and other facilities. The population was called upon to make heroic sacrifices for the national effort; and this they did, working extremely long hours while living barely above the subsistence level. Nearly everyone, including students, were enlisted to work on building projects. Sŏng Hye-rang, recalled that during her four years as a student at Kim Il Sung University she spent only one year and eight months studying, with the rest of the time devoted to laboring on construction sites.9
A major effort in the reconstruction was to rebuild Pyongyang into a showcase city. Since the city had been so systematically bombed by the USA in 1951 there were few structures still standing; thus Kim was able to recreate an entirely new city. He personally supervised the rebuilding as chairman of the Pyongyang City Rehabilitation Committee. It became a city designed for display with great squares—the People’s Army Square, Mao Zedong Square and the largest, the Kim Il Sung Square. It had impressive public buildings such as the National Theatre and Kim Il Sung University, and a Stalin Street lined with modern apartments.10 Less visible were the more modest residential apartments along muddy streets. But while housing was terribly crowded by Western standards, with several families sharing a single bathroom, at least it provided adequate shelter.11
Collectivizing Agriculture and Total Socialism
The most important sector of the economy in private hands was agriculture. While some communist countries allowed for small-scale markets for private produce, Kim, following the Soviet command economy model, opted for total collectivization. Kim Il Sung had several reasons for pursing collectivization or “cooperativization” (hyŏpdonghwa) as he called it—North Korea never actually used the term collectivization. It seemed the most effective way to modernize agriculture without compromising the country’s need to develop heavy industry. With his focus on was industrialization, Kim sought to extract the agricultural surpluses from the peasantry to supply the anticipated large urban workforce, much as Stalin had done in Russia. Geography and the labor shortage may have contributed to this decision. Food supplies were a problem in this mountainous region with its short growing season. Nor did the DPRK’s allies have the large food surpluses to offer as aid, as the USA was able to give the ROK. Food shortages appeared early. Both in 1954 and in the early 1970s the state had forcibly requisitioned crops.12 Agricultural problems were compounded by the Korean War, which resulted in a shortage of manpower and of draft animals. Kim and his planners saw the solution to these problems in consolidating small plots of land into large farms that could be worked by tractors and other mechanized equipment.
The original plan was for the collectivization of agriculture to be carried out as a gradual three-stage process, beginning the mutual aid teams called p’umassi-ban that would help each other in carrying out the work. This collective method drew from traditional practices of village cooperation in which farmers would share the use of oxen or help each other. In the second stage, members of a hamlet would go beyond mutual aid to pooling and sharing tools as well as labor. Finally, the third stage was carried out whereby farmers were simply allotted a share of the crop and supplied other goods in accordance with their work. At the Third Party Congress in April 1956 Kim Il Sung reiterated that the policy was to proceed slowly, and gradually move toward a more “voluntary” approach to collectivization. But later that year this policy changed and it was decided to accelerate the process. The decision may have been in emulation of Mao who in September 1955 decided to speed up collectivization. And indeed the pace of collectivization was similar. By the end of 1956, 80.9 percent of households joined a cooperative at a similar speed to that of China where the figure was 83 percent. By end of 1957, 95.6 percent of all farm families were part of agricultural collectives (according to a 1981 official census).13
In the summer of 1958 the state announced that collectivization had been completed. It had all proceeded swiftly and rather smoothly. There was none of the resistance and upheavals that characterized the Soviet Union’s collectivization two decades earlier. Why this was so is not entirely clear but collectivization may have been aided by the disruptions of the Korean War which saw many farmers displaced.14 Few changes impacted so many people. Several million farmers who had become small private landowners now became laborers for the state. One can imagine how the complete collectivization of agriculture must have been an unwelcome and unexpected outcome for the millions of peasants who had so enthusiastically embraced land reform only a few years earlier. In 1946 the peasants had attained ownership of the land they worked; a decade later they had lost this same right.
In 1957 cabinet decrees 96 and 102 prohibited the buying and selling of grain.15 Basic commodities were collected and redistributed by the state, with no private markets. The few remaining private enterprises were taken over by the state. Eventually, as the system evolved, there was virtually no local or regional autonomy; all decision making came down to the basic allocation of food and clothing to each household through the public distribution system directed from the center. As was the case in the Soviet Union from 1928, Kim focused on developing heavy industry that would increase the industrial base of the economy and could support a strong military rather than a focus on consumer goods. All private ownership was prohibited and private markets were all but eliminated. By the late 1950s North Korea had gone beyond most Soviet bloc states in creating an entirely state-directed socialist economy.
The Political Consolidation of Kim Il Sung and His Manchurian Guerilla Comrades
During the first few years after the Korean War Kim Il Sung established his personal autocracy and eliminated from power all but his Manchurian guerilla comrades. He had begun the process of removing non-partisans from power during the Korean War as he rebuilt the party. During the war, while often powerless to decide military policies, he was free to conduct party business. Kim blamed Mu Chŏng, the experienced and respected military commander from the Yanan group, for the military disasters of the early war and had him dismissed from his posts. The prominent Soviet-Korean Hŏ Ka-i was, as we have seen in the previous chapter, also purged. While consolidating his hold on the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) he also appeared to strengthen his power over the Korean People’s Army (KPA). In December 1952 he appointed himself marshal of the army, outranking all his military officers.16 But it was only after the conflict ended that the major purges began.
First, Kim Il Sung eliminated the domestic communist leadership—those communists who had remained in Korea working underground during the colonial period. This first major purge took place on August 3, 1953, only a week after the armistice when the DPRK conducted its first Stalinist show trial. Twelve domestic communists were indicted and convicted during the three-day affair. The most prominent was Yi Sŭng-yŏn (1905–1953).17 Yi had been active in the Korean Communist Party almost since its inception, when he had joined at the age of 20. Arrested many times he worked under Pak Hŏn-yŏng and enjoyed a prominent career in the Korean Communist Party, including serving as editor of the party newspaper Haebang ilbo after liberation.18 The charges against him and others were absurd. They were accused of spying for the USA, of deliberately working with it to destroy the Communist Party in the South and of trying to overthrow the DPRK government. The defendants confessed to all charges and were executed. They also admitted to attempting to replace Kim Il Sung with Pak Hŏn-yŏng. Pak, perhaps owing to his prominence, was arrested but only expelled from the party. His one-day trial took place in December 1955. He was sentenced to death after he admitted to all charges, including being the chief spy for the USA and having worked for the Americans since 1939.19
With all the prominent domestic communists eliminated, Kim Il Sung turned to the removal of members of the Soviet and Yanan groups. His decision to eliminate Soviet and Yanan Koreans was not only intended to consolidate power and remove potential rivals but also part of his effort to establish the DPRK’s autonomy and protect himself from the de-Stalinization policies of the Soviet Union after 1953. The North Korean revolution he led was, at heart, a nationalist, anti-imperialist movement, one that sought to regain the country’s full sovereignty. Soviet help was crucial in the beginning but Kim had no desire for North Korea to be a Soviet tributary state. Certainly, as Armstrong and others have argued, the North Korean revolution had strong indigenous routes, with the leadership in Pyongyang being important actors in shaping events. Yet Moscow and its deputies in North Korea held ultimate authority during the years immediately after liberation from Japan. Even after independence in 1948 North Korean leaders, dependent on Soviet aid and military support, consulted with Moscow before making important decisions. This changed with Chinese intervention in the Korean War. From November 1950 to July 1953 it was the Chinese, not the North Koreans or Moscow, that had operational control over the war. When Beijing took over direction for the war from the North Korean leadership this also weakened Moscow’s political control. After the conflict the DPRK remained heavily dependent on Soviet aid but the period of tutelage was over. Kim Il Sung sought to ensure that the Soviets did not try to re-establish control over his country and make it a satellite of Moscow.
At the same time the de-Stalinization efforts taking place in the Soviet Union were as much a threat to Kim Il Sung as they were to other “little Stalins” in Eastern Europe. Kim, who had patterned his leadership after Stalin, could only be alarmed by the changes. So the purges of the late 1950s were an assertion of the autonomy North Korea had gained from the Soviet Union during the Korean War, a resurgence of Korean nationalism, a resistance to the contagion of de-Stalinization and consolidated Kim Il Sung’s personal power by removing those who were not closely associated with him, especially those with links to the outside powers—the Soviet Union or China.
In early 1955 Kim removed the Yanan faction member Pak Il-u. Pak had served as a liaison between the Chinese People’s Volunteers and the KWP during the Korean War and was known as “Mao’s man” because of his close ties with the Chinese leader.20 On December 28 that year, at a meeting of KWP Central Committee Members, Kim criticized Pak Ch’ang-ok the most prominent of the Soviet Koreans for excessively copying the Soviet Union. Calling for more Korean themes in art and literature Kim introduced the term juche (or chuch’e, often translated as “self-reliance”). This was the first public mention of the term that would later evolve into the official state ideology. The following month Pak Ch’ang-ok was removed from his position as Chair of the State Planning Committee. Then came new policies in Moscow. During February 1956, in a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev launched his attack on Stalin, denouncing his many crimes and cult of personality. Since Kim Il Sung’s own cult of personality was modeled on Stalin’s and since Stalin himself was still revered in the DPRK this was threatening. Furthermore, the new Soviet leadership’s call for greater emphasis on consumer goods and light industry also ran counter to Kim’s own plans to focus on heavy industry.
Initially Kim seemed to deflect the potential challenges to his own power by the new Soviet currents. When the Third Party Congress of the KWP met in April 1956, he used the new criticism of personality cults as a means for justifying his purge of domestic communists. He criticized the personality cult that had been built around the now disgraced and recently executed Pak Hŏn-yŏng.21 Yet trouble for Kim came while he was overseas from June 1 to July 19 on an extended trip to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While absent, members of the Soviet-Korean and Yanan groups, possibly with Soviet encouragement, plotted for change. Later official accounts made accusations that Pak Ch’ang-ok sought to become party chair with Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik of the Yanan faction serving as premier, but the truth of what took place is not clear. Returning from his trip Kim Il Sung seems to have become aware of the pending challenge to his leadership and appeared ready to face his critics at a Central Committee meeting held in August. Although the details of what went on are rather uncertain, Pak Ch’ang-ok, Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik and apparently others criticized Kim’s policies, including placing too much emphasis on heavy industry and the recent appointment of his guerilla comrade Ch’oe Yong-gŏn to a top leadership post.22 Kim maintained control at the meeting and if—and this is not certain—the real aim of his opponents was to remove him from the top party post it failed. Pak and Ch’oe were arrested and six other high-ranking officials fled to Manchuria. Some members of the party issued a declaration critical of Kim Il Sung but were quickly arrested.23 In general, the opposition to Kim seemed unorganized and largely ineffective.
Alarmed at the prospect of a Stalinist-type purge, Anastas Mikoyan, a Soviet Politburo member; and Peng Dehuai, the Chinese military commander during the Korean War, arrived in North Korea in September and jointly called on Kim for restraint. Under pressure Kim halted his attempted purge. This intervention by Moscow and Beijing appears, from later documents, to have been a bitter experience for Kim Il Sung, highlighting the very situation that he was so determined to avoid—his country’s subservience to outside foreign powers. Its effect seemed to have made him even more determined to achieve as much freedom of action for himself and autonomy for his country as possible. In fact, it may be one of the truly defining events of his regime, reinforcing all his fears. For his opponents the Soviet and Chinese appeals bought them only a few months. After the crisis cooled Kim launched a full-scale purge in 1957.
The Great Purge
A major purge began in 1957. This time it was not confined to a few top leaders but was part of a thorough investigation of all citizens—the sorting of people according to degrees of loyalty to the regime. Kim Il Sung was determined to rid himself of opponents, a determination that was most likely reinforced by the Soviet intervention in political upheavals and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956.24 The prelude to the purges was a party investigation into the background of members which began toward the end of 1956. Initially the North Koreans explained to their allies that this was being carried out to replace deteriorated party membership cards, to rehabilitate former rank-and-file party members, and to educate them.25 The following year saw the removal of almost all Soviet-Koreans and then Yanan group members. In 1957 Kim Tu-bong was replaced as president of the Supreme People’s Assembly and titular head of state by Ch’oe Yong-gŏn. Many, if not most, of the Soviet-Koreans, including Pak Ch’ang-ok, fled to the Soviet Union and some of the Yanan faction members, including Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, went to China. The scope of the purge widened in the summer of 1957, perhaps influenced by the anti-rightist campaign that Mao had launched against his critics in June of that year.26
But even before this, the Standing Committee issued on May 30, 1957 a directive “On Transforming the Struggle against Counterrevolutionary Elements into an All-Party, All-People’s Movement” which called for a thorough investigation of all party members.27 The backgrounds of all were scrutinized and everyone was placed into three general categories (kyech’ŭng): those deemed “loyal” or the core (haeksim), those classified as “wavering”(t’ongyo) and those considered “hostile” (choktae). The loyal or core class members were known as tomatoes—red through and through; the “wavering” members as apples (red on the outside only); and the “hostile” members were called grapes. This consolidated and refined one of the most distinctive features of North Korean society: its rigid social structure. Each category became what amounted to a hereditary caste whose status was passed on from parents to children. Later this system was further elaborated with the creation of subcategories. In the late 1950s this new class system served as a means of conducting a thorough purge of party members. Accompanying this purge the North Korean Cabinet issued Decree No. 149, which prohibited people belonging to “hostile forces” from living near the border, the seacoast, within 50 km of Pyongyang or Kaesong (Kaesŏng), or within 20 km of any other big city. As a result, according to Lankov, some 70,000 people are believed to have been relocated to remote areas in the mountainous regions of the north.28 In the summer of 1957 the state introduced another measure: the oho tamdangje (five households-in-charge system) of neighborhood collective security. This revived an old East Asian custom by which families were lumped together into neighborhood units and held accountable for the actions of their unit members. Under this system citizens were encouraged to spy and report on each other.
More than 100,000 citizens fell victim to arrests during 1957–1959, some 2,500 were executed, some publicly. This was a number equal to all those previously punished since 1945 and proportionately on a scale not far short of the Soviet Union’s Great Purges of 1937–1938.29 Show trials took place for those accused of being South Korean agents, of being saboteurs and of cooperating with the South Korean and American forces during their occupation of the North in the fall of 1950.30 Meanwhile, the themes and subjects of art, literature and textbooks became more Korean. In 1956 the state ordered an end to all performances of Soviet plays in Korean theaters.31 As this Koreanization continued streets named after foreign allies were renamed, pictures of Soviet leaders disappeared and references to the Soviet role in the liberation of the country were removed from the history books.
When the Fourth Congress of the KWP met in 1961, Kim Il Sung’s control over the party and its domination by his fellow ex-guerillas were near complete. At the party congress in 1956 there was a higher percentage of ex-guerillas in the Central Committee than in the past, five of the eleven members of the Standing Committee (Politburo) were former guerillas versus only two out of seven in 1948.32 But they were still a minority sharing posts with Yanan and Soviet comrades. In 1961, by contrast, ex-guerillas completely dominated the upper echelon of the party. Of the eleven members of the Standing Committee, the highest body of the party, all were partisans with the exception of Nam Il, a Soviet-Korean, and Kim Ch’ang-man from the Yanan faction. Nam Il was an early and loyal supporter of Kim Il Sung. Kim Ch’ang-man was an interesting case. Throughout the 1950s he enthusiastically championed the party leader. Outdoing others in proving his loyalty he had first denounced the domestic communists as traitors and collaborators with the enemy and then attacked the leaders of the Yanan faction, including Pak Ch’ang-ok and Kim Tu-bong, accusing them of being American spies. But self-serving demonstrations of total loyalty did not save him from being dropped from the leadership only a few years later.33 Of the 85 members of the Central Committee only 28 returned. All but one of his partisans (who had died) retained their posts; almost all non-partisans were demoted or purged. There were now 37 ex-guerillas, only two Soviet-Korean and three Yanan members and only one member of South Korea’s domestic faction, historian Paek Nam-un. Almost all the rest were clients of guerillas.34 A few with no partisan background owed their positions to family ties to the partisans, including Kim Yŏng-ju, Kim Il Sung’s younger brother.35 Kim Il Sung’s partisans were in full control of the party.
Kim Il Sung’s removal from power of all but his fellow Manchurian guerillas had a profound impact on North Korea’s development. The entire society became molded by the guerilla culture. Party propaganda constantly extolled the deeds of the Manchurian fighters. The Poch’ŏnbo Museum was opened to commemorate Kim’s great military achievement, and in 1957 its 20th anniversary was publicly celebrated.36 In 1958 the Research Center for the History of the KWP began a program of elaborating on the myths of Kim and his guerilla comrades. In 1959 it published the first part of the four-volume Memoirs of the Anti-Japanese Guerillas.37 This would soon be a must-read for all citizens.38 The Manchurian guerillas not only featured as the heroes in exaggerated stories, memoirs, fiction, films and songs but became the only legitimate bearers of the Korean communist and national liberation tradition. In their study of the North Korean political culture, Hoenik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung remarked that the anti-colonial armed resistance of Kim Il Sung’s partisans in Manchuria became “the single most important, most sacred, all-encompassing saga of the nation’s modern history.”39 But the feats of the partisans were more than just a source to legitimize the regime and form a basis for national pride; they became the model to be emulated in almost every endeavor. This was accompanied by a general decline in the intellectual level of society, resulting from the purge of many of the best educated people. According to Hwang Jang Yop, the North Korean scholars who survived the purges were less academically trained and compensated by demonstrating greater loyalty.40 This intellectual decline was reinforced further by the country’s increasing isolationism, as contact with even its East European allies, already restricted, became more so and North Koreans married to foreigners were required to divorce them.41
Kim’s purges eliminated most of the more educated and broadly experienced members of the leadership. With power firmly in the hands of the Manchurian partisans and their clients, fewer and fewer positions of responsibility were held by people with any exposure to the outside world other than the Manchurian mountain villages near the Korean border. The leadership had become largely restricted to an extremely narrow segment of the communist and nationalist movements. And they were the least educated. The party itself was a mass party with over a million members, the largest in proportion to the size of its population of any communist country. It also differed from most other communist regimes in that almost all party members had been recruited since 1945. They were for the most part poorly educated, had no foreign experience and knew of no other leader than Kim Il Sung. Fewer than a quarter of the party cell secretaries had a secondary education and many had no formal education at all.42 Perhaps in no other modern society was power so effectively monopolized by people with so little education and so little exposure to the larger world.
North Korea’s Great Leap Forward
North Korea’s great purges coincided with its economic great leap forward, an initiative to quickly transform the country into an industrial nation. In 1957, with the economy restored to its prewar level and agricultural collectivization being accelerated to near completion, North Korea spelled out in its Five-Year Plan (1957–1961) as part of its great push for industrial transformation. It would be the only five-year plan until 2016. The focus shifted from recovery to an emphasis on rapid industrialization. The term “Great Leap Forward” was not actually used by North Korea but the policy did resemble Mao Zedong’s own drive to transform a poor, agrarian society into an industrial state by setting wildly ambitious targets and employing mass mobilization to make up for a shortage in technology. This was not coincidental, as Kim Il Sung was indeed influenced by Mao. When Mao inaugurated the Great Leap Forward in China in the spring of 1958, Kim began accelerating his own targets, announcing later that year that the Five-Year Plan would in fact be completed in just three and a half years.43 Mao boasted that China would soon surpass Britain in steel production; in 1959 Kim proclaimed that in ten years North Korea would surpass Japan in per capita industrial output.44
The symbol of North Korea’s great leap was the Ch’ŏllima movement, so called after a mythical Korean horse capable of galloping a thousand li (several hundred miles) a day. The Ch’ŏllima movement had its reputed origins in December 1956 just before the Five-Year Plan was rolled out and when Kim Il Sung visited the Kangsŏn steel mill to personally direct the work. The plant had a capacity for 60,000 tons but was producing only 40,000. Needing more steel Kim Il Sung ordered that the plant increase its production by at least 10,000 tons. When the plant managers said this was impossible Kim went to the plant and took matters into his own hands. Discussing problems of production with the workers he spurred them on to exceed the production quotas assigned to them and to come up with their own solutions for overcoming production problems and developing more efficient methods. As a result, production at the mill not only met the target but exceeded it, with an output of 90,000 tons of steel; this increased even more the following year to 120,000 tons.45
The steel mill success became a legendary event, cited for decades by party propaganda organs and learned by all North Koreans as a story of inspiration and emulation. “The creative power of our working class and our people is really inexhaustible,” Kim declared; and he tested this proposition in endless campaigns.46 Using the Kangsŏn steel works as a model Kim Il Sung inaugurated the Ch’ŏllima movement at a party plenum in September 1958. In a radio broadcast that month he urged North Koreans to “rush forward like a flying horse” and fulfill the Five-Year Plan in three and a half years.47 Fired up with enthusiasm, a plant worker, Chin ŭng-wŏn, was reported to have created the first Ch’ŏllima Work Team, a group of workers tasked with exceeding their quotas. The media presented reports of workers accomplishing extraordinary feats of production by working extra hours and putting in near superhuman efforts. Construction projects were completed ahead of schedule and factories exceeded their targets through these efforts.48 Propaganda organs carried out endless exhortations to increase production, seeking to grind out more output from the people. There was a “Movement to See the Early Morning Stars” to make workers and farmers get up and go to work very early, and a “Movement Not to Have Soup” which originated in textile factories to minimize the time lost on bathroom breaks.49 In 1959 students were sent to construction sites under the slogan “One Stretch After One Thousand Shovels.”50
Kim’s big push for rapid economic modernization resembled Mao’s Great Leap Forward in two other ways: the development of local-based industries and the consolidation of collectives into larger units. At a June 1958 KWP meeting a new plan was announced to develop each of the 209 counties into largely self-sufficient units for the production of consumer goods.51 Kim Il Sung, like Mao, sought to make each local government unit self-sufficient in basic necessities—with their own facilities for clothing, footwear, food processing and so on. This was partly to enable central government to devote its resources and attention to heavy industry. Kim, again like Mao, also decided to consolidate the newly created agricultural cooperatives into larger units. In November 1958 the state announced that the nation’s 13,309 cooperatives, which averaged 79 households, were to be merged into 3,880 large units or around 300 households each. The state’s aim was to create economies of scale that would improve grain production.52 Meanwhile, official reports claimed enormous success, with grain production increasing from 320,000 metric tons in 1957 to 483,000 tons in 1961.53
The attraction of the Chinese model for the North Korean leadership was irresistibly strong. China in the late 1950s was arguing that its Great Leap Forward was a special road for China and other Asian societies to follow and one that relied on a voluntarist approach and mass mobilization to compensate for the shortage of capital and technical expertise. As Kim distanced himself from Moscow he may have found in Beijing a more compatible model for development. He and many others in the party leadership spoke Chinese and felt culturally closer to their giant neighbor. However, Kim was not simply emulating Mao Zedong. Both policies were driven by incessant needs. Even before 1958 Kim had displayed a concern for local self-sufficiency, perhaps deriving his experiences from the guerilla base areas in Manchuria. The lessons from the Korean War were also still fresh in Korean memory and there was a concern to ensure local self-sufficiency in the event of another invasion. And the consolidation of farms was an attempt to increase efficiency and free labor for industrial needs. Kim did not imitate all aspects of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The collective farms were consolidated but not on the scale of China’s. There were no communal kitchens or backyard steel furnaces; nor were they ever called communes but remained “cooperatives.”54 As one Eastern European reported in 1960, the “Korean comrades have never tried to copy the Chinese experiences.” The idea of introducing Chinese-style communes “was firmly rejected.”55 Overall the effort was nothing as extreme as the disastrous policies of Mao which led to mass famine.
Kim Il Sung, also differed from Mao by showing greater flexibility. It did not take long before the problems in pursuing these wildly ambitious targets became apparent. By the end of 1959 he decided to slow down his efforts. Kim admitted that the fast pace of economic development was creating many “defects,” including shortages in manpower and industrial raw materials, housing and food.56 The year 1960 was declared a “buffer year,” a period of adjustments. He moderated some of his more extreme demands for production increases and admitted to some shortcomings. Still, when he began a new Seven-Year Plan (1961–1967) its ambitious targets reflected all the optimism of the early years, and considering the success of the Three-Year and Five-Year Plans this was not entirely unreasonable.
While he began to modify some of his economic policies somewhat in 1959 and 1960 Kim never abandoned his dedication to the idea of working with and learning from the people. He continued in his efforts to seek to overcome bureaucratic inertia, to avoid party officials being cut off from the masses and to tap the creative energies of the people. To achieve this he developed two new economic policies: Ch’ŏngsan-ri method (Ch’ŏngsan-ri munbŏp), to spur production on the farm, and the Taean work system, to increase production at the factory. The Ch’ŏngsan-ri method began when Kim Il Sung visited a collective farm not far from Pyongyang in February 1960. As at the Kangsŏn steel mill he closely supervised the work, giving instructions on major tasks such as when to plant and on minor details including when to schedule soccer games so that they did not interfere with work. He initially spent 14 days at Ch’ŏngsan-ri and subsequently between February and October 1960 he made another 38 trips to the farm. It was reported that “He was so kind and unceremonious that the people could tell him their minds without any cautions.” He was thus able to listen and learn from the people.57 Kim’s intention was to set an example for all party cadres to follow. Like Mao he worried that the new officialdom had become divorced from the people. Based on his “on-the-spot guidance system” (hyŏnji chido) he had high-ranking officials of the KWP visit and work with the farmers. This too had Maoist echoes, resembling the similar xiafang (downward to the village) efforts in China in 1956.58 Farmers were encouraged to present their grievances and their suggestions for improving production, and to be active participants in the management of the enterprise. Bonuses, financial incentives as well as awards and titles were also used as incentives to get farmers to increase output. The Ch’ŏngsan-ri method became the standard model involving party officials in direct intervention, participation and interaction with farmers for the next 50 years.
The following year Kim Il Sung launched the Taean work system (Taeanŭi saŏpch’ekye). Again it commenced with Kim Il Sung carrying out on-the-spot guidance to workers at the Taean electric machine plant in December 1961. This brought the management of factories under the control of KWP committees consisting of managers, engineers, plant workers and party officials. The idea was to establish direct worker participation in the management of plants while preventing arbitrary control of decision making by local managers and bureaucrats. While the initiative was designed to draw upon the wisdom and creativity of the workers by having them actively involved in decision making, the reality was usually quite different. Production sites were dominated by the factory’s party chair and other cadres rather than by trained managers or engineers, while the lines of responsibility for decision making became unclear.59 Again the influence of Mao can be detected with his mass-line method of sending party cadres to learn from the people. It paralleled the Ch’ŏngsan-ri method in that it encouraged interaction between party officials and workers. In their efforts to seek greater worker input both methods can be seen as attempts to provide a more rational system of economic production and avoid the arbitrary directives issued during the Five-Year Plan which had often proved inefficient. But they did little to change the fundamental features of North Korea’s economy—its relentless demands on the workers and farmers with little in the way of material incentives.
North Korea’s great leap forward may not have been as extreme or as immediately disastrous as China’s, but unlike Mao’s failed experiment it was never abandoned. All of its elements—the Ch’ŏngsan-ri method, the Taean industrial system, the Ch’ŏllima movements—and various campaigns to exceed economic targets remained permanent features of the DPRK. Kim Il Sung and his successors continued their on-the-spot guidance, party officials were personally involved in production and renewed calls for local self-sufficiency in the production of basic consumer goods were issued periodically. Mass mobilization for militarized campaigns became an unchanging part of the lives of ordinary citizens. The exhortations, political indoctrination, endless campaigns and “speed battles” remained the prime means of boosting production. To a large extent these were features that appeared in the late 1940s. They were further elaborated on and given institutional permanence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All are perfectly understandable efforts to achieve the goals of modernization using the Soviet and Chinese models, while drawing from the memories of imperial Japan’s forced industrialization during the Second World War, and on the experiences of Kim Il Sung and his partisans. Initially they achieved impressive results. The tragedy for the country and its revolution was the failure to abandon them when they were no longer effective.
The great leap in industrialization was accompanied by an enormous expansion in education. In 1956 four years of primary school was made compulsory. By 1959, with almost all children receiving this basic education, compulsory schooling was extended to seven years. This was again extended after 1967 to nine years. By the 1970s at least ten years of formal schooling was becoming the norm for young people. The regime vigorously pursued adult literacy with two-year workers’ schools kŭlloja hakkyo and adult education middle schools kŭlloja chunghakkyo. In 1967 workers’ schools which taught basic literacy were so little needed that they were abolished, only the after-hours middle schools continued to function.60 North Korea placed a great emphasis of developing practical work schools. As of March 1959 all students in middle school and above were required to work eight to ten weeks in factories, mines or on other projects.61
From the standpoint of the early 1960s North Korea’s economic development can only be regarded as a success. Industrial production increased more than three-fold from 1956 to 1960, admittedly starting from a very low base.62 The limitations of its methods of modernization, that is forcing people to constantly toil on focused economic and infrastructural targets, were not yet apparent.
Militarization and Foreign Policy Shifts
The Fourth Party Congress
When the Fourth Congress of the KWP assembled in September 1961 Kim Il Sung had much to be satisfied with. He had secured his personal power. The country had recovered from the devastation of the Korean War and for all its problems had made enormous strides toward building an industrial society. North Korea was now completely socialized, all agriculture was carried out in state-owned cooperatives, and all business and industry from the smallest retail shop upwards was now state-owned. Industrial production was well above prewar and war levels. The country was becoming more industrialized than it had been under Japanese rule. In 1957 the first tractor rolled out of a DPRK plant to much fanfare. There is a famous story about this event. Supposedly the reversed-engineered tractor would only go in reverse.63 Whether or not that is true, what is clear is that the domestic production of tractors, soon to be followed by trucks, cars and military vehicles, was a symbolically significant achievement. Living standards were spartan and chronic shortages in food and housing were a problem; still, even in these areas there was much improvement. Universal primary education had been achieved and secondary and higher education greatly expanded. Most adults were now literate owing to successful campaigns to teach the Korean alphabet. A major point of business at the congress was inaugurating the new Seven-Year Plan. It was ambitious with a target of 12.8 percent annual growth rate. Industrial production was to increase 3.2 times and agricultural production, which was lagging behind the country’s other economic sectors, was to increase 2.4 times.64 Two developments, however, were soon to hamper the efforts to realize these goals. First was North Korea’s decision to place greater emphasis on military build-up. The second was the country’s involvement in the Sino-Soviet dispute.
Equal Emphasis and Militarization
The DPRK remained in a state of war with the South. Yet in the first decade after the Korean War priority for scarce resources went to economic development. This changed in late 1962. The sea change came about at the Fifth Plenum of the Fourth Congress of the KWP which met in December 1962. At this meeting, under the slogan “with a hammer and sickle in one hand and arms in the other,” it adopted the “equal emphasis” (pyŏngjin) policy of placing the same emphasis on economic development as on military build-up. The new effort in enhancing the nation’s military preparedness consisted of four parts, or four lines (sa nosŏn): arming the entire population, intensifying training for its armed forces, turning the entire country into an impregnable fortress and providing modern equipment for its armed forces. The policy was put into effect immediately, although it was only officially implemented by name at the Second Party Conference in 1966.65 To coordinate this military build-up a Military Committee (kunsa wiwŏnhoe) was reconstituted at the December 1962 meeting. This was a body that had been established by the Supreme People’s Assembly shortly after the start of the Korean War and abolished at its end. Its revival now suggested the extent to which the nation would be on a permanent war footing. The Committee’s membership was not publicized but Party by-laws issued in 1970 stated it operated under the direction of the Central Committee and functioned as a military policy making body that directed both the armed forces and the defense industries.66
Not all of this was new. With the slogan chŏnmin mujanghwa, “arming the whole people,” in 1959, after the withdrawal of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, the regime created a civilian militia, the Worker-Peasant Red Guards (Nonong chŏkwidae). This was now expanded until all able-bodied men between 18 and 45 and single women between 18 and 35 were required to join. Members of a hamlet formed a squad, a village a battalion and they were organized into regiments at the county level and corps at the provincial level. Men and women were required to attend training sessions after work and farmers during the quieter season.67 Intensifying training for the military included further political indoctrination to ensure high morale and a sense of purpose. This too had already begun earlier when Kim ordered more ideological training programs for troops in January 1961 but was now intensified.68 The size of the army was a problem—only 400,000 were under arms compared to 600,000 in South Korea. Ideological training would, the leadership hoped, partly compensate for this. At the same time the size of the military forces was continually increased until they matched and eventually greatly exceeded that of the South despite having only half the population. This was achieved by lengthening the period of military service. In the 1970s and 1980s the ROK had a three-year conscription while the DPRK’s averaged at over eight years. Young men who did not enter higher education began military service after completing secondary school around the age of 16. Later some of the men served until the age of 28. Thus North Korea had the most onerous military service in the world.
The country was made “an impregnable fortress.” As Kim Il Sung stated in 1963:
We have to fortify our entire country. By doing so, we can defeat those who have atomic weapons even though we do not possess them ourselves. … We have to dig underground tunnels. We have to fortify not only the front line, but also the second and third defense area as well as strengthen anti-aircraft and coast-line defenses. We have to build many factories under the ground … when we fortify the whole country, not even the strongest enemy, not even the Americans will be able to invade us.69
Accordingly shelters were constructed throughout the country, including the Pyongyang subway, which was designed as much as a deep underground shelter as a means of transportation. As during the Korean War underground factory and military installations were constructed around the country. The elaborate tunnels that hide so much of the country’s military activity became permanent characteristics of North Korea to the dismay of later US intelligence analysts heavily reliant on satellite photos. Of no less importance was the fourth policy of developing modern weapons. The production of military hardware, especially from the 1970s, became a central focus of industrialization targets.
Although there was “an equal emphasis” on military and economic development, in practice the Seven-Year Plan’s targets were scaled back. There was a sharp increase in the amount of resources devoted to the military, beginning a policy that was never really reversed. Of course, North Korea had always maintained a large military; it was technically in a state of war and remained, in theory at least, ready to resume the conflict. After 1962, however, there was a vast increase in military and military-related industrial development. According to the researcher Joseph Chung, defense spending was 8 percent of the state budget in 1954 and fell to 3.7 percent in 1959; after 1962 it rose to 18 percent, peaking at 30 percent between 1967 and 1972. By the late 1970s it had fallen somewhat but would remain among the highest, if not the highest, of any country.70
It is not entirely clear what brought about this change in policy. Kim Il Sung himself later cited the US increased military involvement in Vietnam after the Tonkin Resolution as a factor, but this took place in 1964 nearly two years after the equal emphasis policy was adopted. He may have been concerned about the new threat of the newly formed South Korean government of General Park Chung Hee which came to power in May 1961. What seems to have precipitated the shift to military development was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Kim Il Sung could hardly have been pleased when the Soviet Union agreed under US pressure to withdraw missiles from Cuba. It called into question just how reliable Moscow would be in a crisis when US forces were stationed on his border, and seemed to confirm Kim’s worst suspicions about Khrushchev. That the Soviets largely ignored their small ally in their negotiations with the USA could hardly be comforting. The Soviet Union’s abandoning of its ally Cuba and conceding to the USA only appeared to demonstrate that the DPRK would have to rely on its own military prowess.
Troubled Relations with Its Patrons
The equal emphasis hampered the country’s breakneck pace of economic development. Another obstacle to rapid economic growth was the DPRK’s involvement in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The DPRK initially remained neutral amid the growing Sino-Soviet tensions. For all the difficulties associated with Khrushchev’s reforms, Pyongyang was careful to maintain proper relations with both Moscow and Beijing even as the two powers began to be at odds. From 1956 to 1961 Kim Il Sung made five visits to the Soviet Union, attending three congresses of the Communist Party of the USSR. He visited China in 1958 and 1959.71 And he visited both countries in July 1961 shortly before the Fourth Congress of the KWP, concluding negotiations with a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with each of the two powers, with the separate treaties between North Korea and China and North Korea and the Soviet Union respectively signed just one day apart. But North Korea’s sympathies were clearly with China. Kim Il sung remained uncomfortable with the direction Khrushchev was taking: de-Stalinization and the idea of peaceful coexistence with the USA and its allies. The first threatened to undermine Kim’s own legitimacy and the second was highly unacceptable so long as American forces were stationed along his border and the task of national unification was still uncompleted. Kim Il Sung attended the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in the fall of 1961 where he heard Khrushchev renew his attack on Stalin and criticize the independent stance of Albania and its Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. Khrushchev’s attacks on Albania were indirectly aimed at the small country’s ally, the PRC, but they must have sounded alarming to Kim whose personality cult, economic policies and independent stance in the communist movement were quite similar. Pyongyang, ignoring Moscow’s criticisms of the small European state, reaffirmed its ties with Albania signing, in March 1962, an agreement on cultural cooperation.72
The Soviet Union and North Korea continued to conduct economic exchanges and send congratulatory messages to each other on appropriate occasions but there was no high-ranking visits between the two states, and no increases in Soviet aid. This contrasted with increased exchanges at all levels with China. During the October 1962 border war between India and China, North Korea wholeheartedly backed China in contrast to the neutral stance taken by Moscow. Meanwhile, Kim Il Sung resisted efforts to join with Mongolia and become a member of Comecon, the economic partnership between Moscow and its Eastern European allies. North Korea sought economic aid but opposed Khrushchev’s idea of an integrated socialist economy with a division of labor among individual countries. Still, Kim maintained an open stance of friendship toward Moscow.
Yet this changed in late 1962 as relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated and North Korea began to lean toward China. The North Korean press became openly critical of Soviet policies and began taking an openly pro-Beijing line. In response the Soviet Union greatly reduced economic and technical aid. North Korea sided with China when it refused to sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of July 1963.73 The first sharp attack on the Soviet Union came in an article by three historians at Kim Il Sung University in September 1963, which criticized a Soviet world history published in 1955. They accused the Soviet historical interpretation of having “many distortions, falsifications and fabrications which came from the prejudice and ignorance of the authors with regard to the history of Korea.”74 The Soviets, they charged, were basing their history on Japanese imperialist accounts. The article continued by claiming the Soviet publication had shortchanged Korean history by placing the first Korean state in the second century bce when a state existed centuries earlier, by maligning the nationalist and progressive credentials of the late nineteenth-century political leader Kim Ok-kyun and other bourgeois reformers, and by minimizing the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on the March First Uprising.75 The following month the Rodong sinmun responded to Khrushchev’s attempt to call a world conference of communist parties to expel China with the editorial “Let Us Defend the Socialist Camp.” It criticized the idea of excluding China and went on to scold the Soviet Union for trying to interfere with the internal affairs of the DPRK as well as other countries. The Soviet Union was attacked for not supporting Pyongyang’s emphasis on heavy industry and a self-supporting economy. It went on to criticize Moscow for “trying to force the anti-personality cult” campaign on other socialist countries, and called Soviet policy “imperialism.”76 Thus the editorial made explicit the fears and concerns Kim Il Sung had about the Soviet Union.
Moscow responded to these attacks with the suspension of both aid and purchases of minerals. This was a sharp blow to the North Korean economy. The equal emphasis policy diverted resources away from economic development and now the pace of industrial growth was slowed by the loss of Soviet aid. China may have stepped in somewhat with increased aid and trade, although this is unclear, but if so, it was insufficient to compensate for the economic sanctions.
Relations never came to a complete break. Kim Il Sung himself restrained from publicly criticizing Moscow; in fact, he rarely made any public statements on foreign affairs at all during this period. Moscow too was careful not to personally attack Kim Il Sung, responding to further attacks with silence. The fall of Khrushchev in October 1964 provided the opportunity to mend fences. Soviet Premier Alexis Kosygin paid a visit in 1965, relations improved and aid and economic exchanges were renewed. Like it or not, North Korea was dependent on Soviet aid and technical assistance if it was too carry out its industrialization and military build-up. On this Kim was pragmatic and realistic. He may have also been put at ease by Moscow’s support for the Vietnamese as US involvement in the conflict grew. The dispute with the Soviet Union proved to be a severe economic blow to the state as economic and military aid was reduced or suspended for several years. Until the end of the Soviet Union, relations between the two powers became strained at times but after 1965 Pyongyang was careful not to alienate its primary economic patron too much. Moscow, for its part, found it useful to maintain influence in the strategically located DPRK.
Improvements with relations with the Soviet Union, so vital to the economic well-being of North Korea, were accompanied by worsening relations with China. North Korean leaders were always more comfortable with the Chinese, their fellow Asians with whom they share many cultural links. Mao’s mass line, his emphasis on voluntarist efforts in overcoming a backward state and China’s championship of national liberation wars also resonated with the North Koreans. Additionally the Korean War had forged some strong bonds between the two nations including their militaries. But when in 1966 Mao plunged his country into the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution tensions between the two nations appeared. The extremist antics of his youthful Red Guards and their backers in the party made the leadership in Pyongyang uncomfortable. Although as mentioned in the next chapter, North Koreans had their own version of the Cultural Revolution they were less than sympathetic to Mao’s. According to the Cuban ambassador to Pyongyang, officials made jokes about Mao being senile. Kim, according to the East German reports, told Brezhnev in a secret meeting in December 1966 that it was “massive idiocy.”77 And the Cultural Revolution soon turned on him. In 1967 a poster signed by veterans of the Korean War accused Kim Il Sung of being “revisionist and a disciple of Khrushchev.” Other reports issued by Red Guard publications accused Kim of living like a millionaire and of showing concern for traditional filial piety by making his mother and father revolutionary saints.78 At one point a train arrived in North Korea from China with the dead bodies of murdered China-based Koreans with a warning to the leadership that they should expect the same fate.79
More serious was a border dispute. The Sino-Korean border was demarked in 1712 with a few modifications made in the early twentieth century by the Japanese. In dispute was Paektu Mountain, the highest point in Korea, a place regarded in Korean tradition as sacred and the home of the legendary founder of the nation Tan’gun. This paralleled simultaneous border disputes China was having with the Soviet Union. But this dispute appeared to have been resolved in 1970 as the Cultural Revolution began winding down. Premier Zhou Enlai’s visit that year marked a return to normal relations. At the Second Party Conference in 1966 Kim Il Sung ended a long silence on Sino-Soviet dispute by stating that the country maintained an independent position in the international communist movement. The country took no further sides in the dispute among the two major communist powers but would for the most part skillfully maintain correct relations with both, using this as a means for receiving aid while achieving political autonomy.
Fostering the Three Revolutionary Forces
North Korea’s foreign policy often seemed unpredictable and even irrational to outsiders but it adhered closely to one goal: the unification of Korea. The North Korean revolution with its aim of creating a strong, progressive, independent Korean nation could only be completed when that happened. From the leadership’s point of view the Korean War was only a temporary setback toward the goal of reunification, not a defeat. It is likely that Kim Il Sung never doubted the inevitability of liberating the South, at least not until the last years of his nearly half-century in power. And this goal of unification followed a clearly articulated three-fold strategy based on promoting the “three revolutionary forces” given its official formulation in a speech Kim Il Sung delivered at a party meeting on February 27, 1964– “Let Us Strengthen in Every Way Revolutionary Forces for the Realization of the Great Task of Fatherland Unification.”80 There were three revolutionary forces, he explained, those at home, those in the South and international, and all had to be strengthened to complete the liberation of Korea. Thus there were three parts to the process of reunification. First, in the North not only must the nation be strong but the people must realize their full revolutionary potential. In other words, North Korea had to be made economically, militarily and ideologically strong. Second, the revolutionary forces in the South were hindered by the people’s ignorance of their own degree of suppression by their “puppet” government and their subjection by the American imperialists. This had to be corrected so that, unlike 1950, the people would rise up against their government in support of the DPRK. Third, strengthening the “international revolutionary forces” necessitated promoting ties with Third World nations as well as socialist ones and exploiting the weaknesses and divisions among the imperialists. The main aim here was to force the USA to withdraw its forces from the South.
Kim Il Sung had made clear from the mid-1950s that the unification project would be a long-term one. In a meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1958 he explained that if “we can successfully finish our [long-term] construction plan” then “it is possible to unite Korea, peacefully.”81 Not only did the North need to build up its industrial and military forces but the process of fostering the revolutionary forces would take time. Yet they were essential to the task. All this suggested that rather than invade and expect the people to rise up, the idea was to wait for the people of the South to rise up first and then join forces with them—what can be called the “South Korean Revolution first and then unification policy.”
To promote the South Korean revolution Pyongyang established the Department of External Intelligence Inquires (Taeoe chŏngbo chosabu) often known as the “35th office” in April 1963. It trained agents to work in the South. This worked with two other institutions: the South Korean Liaison Bureau (Taenam yŏllakpu) and the Department of Culture (Munhwabu). The Liaison Bureau was a channel linking the KWP with the communists below the DMZ. It originally was staffed by communists from the South. When the domestic communists were purged in the early 1950s, they were replaced by partisans who had little experience or knowledge of the South.82 The Department of Culture was founded in 1956 as a propaganda organ aimed at South Koreans and Koreans living in Japan.83 In 1964 North Korean agents were able to contact a few sympathetic southerners and create the Revolutionary Party for Reunification (T’ongil hyŏngmyŏng tang). This underground communist organization was headed by Kim Chong-t’ae, a high-school teacher and store owner. It remained small, ineffective and was discovered by the South Korean intelligence officials in 1968. Kim Chong-t’ae was executed and 158 others arrested.84 Although the Revolutionary Party for Reunification ceased to exist, North Korea insisted otherwise and sponsored radio broadcasts and other propaganda in its name. Pyongyang also used the two non-communist parties, the Democratic Party and Ch’ŏngudang, which, of course, existed only as instruments of the regime, to issue appeals to their South Korean compatriots.85
Meanwhile, the DPRK pursued an opportunistic policy taking advantage of any seemingly favorable developments in the South or in the international situation. In 1960, for example, there was the political turmoil in the ROK. A student-led uprising in April of that year overthrew the authoritarian Syngman Rhee regime. This was followed by the creation of a parliamentary democracy, an experiment plagued by pent-up demands by labor, teachers, students and intellectuals that led to sometimes violently suppressed demonstrations. In August of that year Kim Il Sung, probing sentiment in the South, proposed a Confederal Republic of Koryo as an intermediate step toward unification. The name was chosen because of its neutrality. The other two common names for Korea already had associations, with Han’guk used by the South and Chosŏn by the North. Nothing came of the idea but Kim would revive it 20 years later. In the spring of 1961 Pyongyang proposed meetings with radical student groups who responded positively but this effort was cut short by the military coup of May 16, 1961. Kim sent Hwang Sŏng-t’aek, an official who had fled to the North in 1946, to meet one of the coup leaders, Kim Jong-p’il, but the new military government of Park Chung Hee which took a hard anti-communist line executed Hwang.86
Discouraged by the hard nationalist, anti-communist stance of the Park regime, the North Korean regime began to draw up possible plans for armed conflict on the peninsula. Initially these were based on a Vietnam-style guerilla campaign but were modified in 1964 as a more defensive “Flying Dragon” plan which would use both PRC and KPA forces. Another plan in 1965, the “Charging Bull,” was based on a more aggressive response to liberate the peninsula.87 In 1967 North Korea began to take a more provocative stance toward South Korea. North Korea had from time to time caused “incidents.” And there were frequent seizures of southern fishing boats. Along the DMZ there were constant little crises ranging from failures to adhere to some agreed-upon protocol, such as having soldiers along the border wear the proper insignia, to exchanges of gunfire. In 1967 there was an eleven-fold increase in such incidents, keeping the American and South Korean forces in a constant state of tension. By the end of the year gunfire erupted almost daily across the border.88 These included artillery shelling for the first time since the armistice. North Korea appeared to have decided to place pressure on South Korea to undermine the government and promote a revolution.
In 1968 North Korea carried out a series of highly aggressive measures. To carry them out the North began training a special Unit 124 in July of 1967. One was aimed at assassinating South Korean President Park Chung Hee. On January 18, 1968, this unit infiltrated into the South and three days later 31 commandos launched a night time attack on the presidential palace getting within 500 meters before being stopped by security forces. Twenty-nine were killed, one was captured and one escaped and fled to North Korea. Between October 30 and November 2, eight infiltration teams each with about fifteen commandos from the same 124th Army Unit landed on the east coast between Samchŏk and Uljin.89 Villagers were rounded up and forced to hear speeches about the socialist paradise to the North. Most of the guerillas were quickly reported and killed or captured but only after 63 southerners were dead.90 On the sea, 115 southern fishing boats were seized by the North that year.91 South Korea responded by stepping up patrols of the coast line, tightening security and offering generous rewards for all reports. These efforts were successful enough to make the infiltrations increasingly difficult.
One of North Korea’s most risky moves was the seizure of an American intelligence ship the USS Pueblo off the east coast near the port of Wonsan which took place the two days commandos stormed the presidential palace in Seoul. If the attacks on the South Korea may have had a purpose of trying to destabilize the country it is not clear what purpose the capture of the Pueblo served. It was perhaps a fortuitous event. North Korea claimed the ship was in its territorial waters which the USA denied. The 82-member crew was held captive for 11 months before being released in December. The Americans initially responding with a show of force sending the aircraft carrier the Enterprise into the waters off the east coast. However, rather than leading to military retaliation as Kim Il Sung might have feared, the USA negotiated for the release of the crew issuing an apology and the crew signed a confession. Americans were amused by the confession written by the crew. It contained many puns mocking the DPRK which the North Korean apparently didn’t understand. However, the Pueblo Incident provided a useful lesson for the North. The failure of the USA to militarily respond to the seizure of its ship indicated to Pyongyang just how much the USA sought to avoid armed confrontation. This was reinforced the following year in April 1969 when North Korea shot down a US EC-121 spy plane, again with no serious retaliation from the Americans. Later North Korea would engage in aggressive acts and then seek to negotiate with the Americans, frequently winning both concessions and demonstrating its military prowess to its people.
As in the case of the Korean War North Koreans had an unrealistic idea of the support they had among their countrymen in the southern part of the peninsula. The activities of 1968 seemed senselessly reckless even to Pyongyang’s closest allies. The Romanians, for example, described the Blue House attack as an “incredibly daring and narrow-minded” act that would only exacerbate tension.92 As in the Korean War, Kim Il Sung turned on his generals for these failures and conducted a purge, most likely in early 1969. At least ten partisan generals were removed from top posts and replaced by more technocratic-minded officials, most ex-guerilla fighters who had been serving in civilian posts. By 1970 the North Korean leadership made a modest retreat from its extreme militaristic stance.
Just why they chose to be more aggressive at this time is not known for certain. One factor may have been America’s military build-up in Vietnam and South Korea’s military participation in the conflict, both troubling for the North Koreans. In July 1968 a new slogan appeared, “Cutting off the Limbs of US Imperialism Everywhere.” It went, “Vietnam is breaking one leg of the American bandit, we are breaking the other one.”93 Especially worrisome was the treaty of normalization the Park government signed with Japan in 1965. This opened the way for Japanese trade and foreign investment but it also raised fears of the former colonial power reasserting its economic hegemony over the country. The normalization treaty between South Korea and Japan in 1965 was accompanied by huge and sometimes violent protest demonstrations by students and political opposition groups who saw it as a betrayal of national sovereignty. These demonstrations may have given Pyongyang the impression that there was enough hostility toward the government to form the basis for a general revolt. It is not clear how captive the leadership was to its own propaganda but there seems to have been a genuine belief that most South Koreans viewed their government as the illegitimate heir of Japanese imperialism, a clique of former Japanese collaborators and now active collaborators of American imperialism; and that it was a regime with little popular support. According to this line of thinking, the situation was potentially favorable, therefore, for the revolutionary forces in the South. Internal politics may have been a factor. Following the purge of the Kapsan faction (see Chapter 4) Defense Minister Kim Ch’ang-bong and another military man, Hŏ Pong-hak, who may have sought to brandish their credentials through more aggressive measures, were in charge of South Korean operations.94 Both were removed from their positions in 1969. Certainly the military provocations served to create a sense of a nation threatened by outsiders. Residents of Pyongyang were required to wear backpacks in case they had to evacuate and dig emergency shelters. Troops moved through the main streets, a sight likely to impress the urgency and preparedness on the populace.95
Whatever the motivations behind them, the raids were a failure. Whether or not they were the work of a small group of military men or the product of internal politics, they reflected the fact that Kim Il Sung and those around him appeared to have interpreted opposition to government policies as sympathy or potential sympathy to the DPRK. In fact, the situation was much less ripe for a communist revolution in the South than it had been. In the early 1950s land reforms had been carried out in the South. The countryside was now the home of often conservative, small, independent farmers. The North’s invasion of the South had hardened anti-communist attitudes among many southerners, and in the 1960s the country was beginning to make real economic progress. While anti-Americanism was common enough among South Koreans, there was also a great reservoir of goodwill toward the USA as well as a growing number of people enamored with American culture. Furthermore, the stridently anti-communist regime of Park Chung Hee had developed extensive and effective intelligence services that made serious infiltration of the South and the organization of any large-scale communist organization extremely difficult. North Korea was also handicapped since it had purged most of the South Korean communists with knowledge and contacts, and placed the Liaison Office in the hands of partisans with little experience in the South.
Dialogue with the South and Confrontation
North Korea continued with its provocative acts, albeit not on the scale of 1968. On December 11, 1969, North Korean agents hijacked a YS-11 civilian airplane with 51 passengers, and on June 22, 1970, they detonated a bomb at South Korea’s national cemetery in an attempted assassination of Park.96 On January 23, 1971, they tried to hijack a Korean Airlines plane; and in April 1971, at a party meeting, Kim Il Sung gave a more militant than usual speech about the need for struggle against American imperialists, Japanese militarists, and their agents in the South.97 Then the international situation began to change dramatically. The most startling event was the breakthrough in relations between the USA and China. First there was the announcement in 1971 that the two countries had been secretly holding diplomatic meetings and of the planned visit of President Nixon to Beijing. In February 1972 Nixon met with Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders, starting a process toward normalization of relations. News of a thaw must have been disturbing to Kim Il Sung, suggesting Beijing might follow Moscow’s earlier mellowing of its stance toward the USA. He reacted to this news of the coming visit by declaring “Nixon’s visit to China will not be a march of a victor but a trip of the defeated, it fully reflects the destiny of U.S. imperialism which is like a sun sinking in the western sky.”98 Yet he must have known it called into question China’s future support for his regime.
However, this geopolitical change, for all its disturbing implications, also suggested the possibility of an American withdrawal from South Korea, which prompted North Korea to open talks with the South. As early as April 1971 Foreign Minister Hŏ Tam presented an Eight-Point Plan for Addressing the Problem of Unification through Peaceful Negotiations.99 In August 1971 the South Korean Red Cross proposed to its northern counterpart the exchange of information about and the possible reuniting of families separated by the DMZ. Several million South Koreans had family members or relatives in the North. Hundreds of thousands of siblings were separated from each other, parents from their children, even spouses. There was absolutely no communication, no postal service let alone telephone links between the two countries so they were entirely ignorant of the fate of their loved ones in the North. The issue of divided families was an emotional one in the South and a good starting point for any movement toward rapprochement between the two sides. The North responded favorably to the proposal, and on August 20 the two sides met for only four minutes but this was followed by secret visits by Yi Hu-rak, the chief of South Korea’s Central Intelligence Agency to North Korea, and by Vice Premier Pak Sŏng-ch’ŏl to Seoul. After these secret talks North and South Korea issued a joint communiqué on July 4, 1972, stating three fundamental principles on unification. First, that unification must be carried out independently, without outside interference. Second, it must be achieved peacefully. Third, it must be implemented as a show of great national unity based on the homogeneity of the people first, with the differences in thinking, ideologies and systems worked out later.100
A North–South Coordinating Committee was formed that held three meetings: one in Seoul from November to December 1972, a second in Pyongyang in March 1973 and a third in Seoul three months later in June. But little progress was made at the meetings. South Korean officials wanted to proceed with gradual confidence-building measures. Family reunifications would be a good first step, and from there gradually work on bigger, more complex issues. The North proposed they discuss major issues across the board. DPRK representatives also insisted that South Korea’s National Security laws, which gave the government broad powers to arrest communists or communist sympathizers, had to be repealed before any family reunions or other humanitarian issue could be pursued. They also insisted on the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea being a precondition for any further negotiations. South Korea insisted that the DPRK end its propaganda campaign for the Revolutionary Party for Reunification. In the face of these demands the talks deadlocked. After seven meetings between August 1972 to July 1973 the Red Cross talks came to an end.101 The North–South Coordinating Committee ceased to meet after mid-1973. Mid-level meetings continued at Panmunjom from December 1973 to March 1975; with little promise of any breakthroughs these too fizzled out. The talks failed because Kim Il Sung lost interest when he realized that a withdrawal of US troops was not imminent and, in fact, would not be on the table for serious consideration. He also turned down a proposal by President Park in 1973 for dual admission to the United Nations. This would have meant a de facto mutual recognition of each other’s regime. In the mid-1970s he returned to the rhetoric of military confrontation with the South. North Korean officials told Hungarian diplomats in 1976 that “Korea cannot be unified in a peaceful way.”102
The 1972–1973 negotiations began a pattern that would be repeated for the next four decades. North Korea would initiate or respond to offers for talks. There would be some diplomatic or even cultural and economic exchanges. Optimism would rise over the prospect of a thaw in relations. Pyongyang would then set conditions that were difficult or unrealistic or that it knew the South would find unacceptable. Seoul would offer small confidence-building measures that would eventually be rejected with the DPRK insisting that major issues be discussed.103 Talks would break down and Pyongyang would ratchet up the tension with its rival again.
A principal aim of the DPRK’s foreign policy was the withdrawal of US troops in the ROK, whose presence it saw as perhaps the greatest obstacle to reunification on its terms. When the talks with Seoul proved unsuccessful the DPRK tried another tactic to get the USA to withdraw its forces from Korea: direct negotiations with Washington. It first called for direct talks in March 1973.104 When the Nixon administration ignored this the Supreme People’s Assembly in March 1974 issued an open letter to the US Congress calling for direct peace treaty negotiations.105 The USA, however, remained adamantly opposed to bilateral talks.
For the rest of the 1970s North Korea resumed its policy of hostile acts against the South. On February 4, 1972, they kidnapped five fishing boats and wrecked one. Another fishing boat was captured on August 30, 1976.106 Among the most menacing activities was its construction of tunnels under the DMZ. The DPRK constructed tunnels under the border capable of providing passage for substantial numbers of troops. The first was discovered in November 1974. It was 3.5 km long, ran 1.2 km under ROK territory, contained a narrow-gauge railroad and was capable of transporting a regiment an hour. Three more were found in 1975, 1978 and 1990. The second was even wider, capable of being driven through in small vehicles and transporting a division in an hour.107 A particularly dramatic event, most likely orchestrated by Pyongyang, occurred on August 15, 1974, celebrated as liberation (from Japan) day in South Korea. An agent of a North Korean front organization in Japan made an attempt on President Park’s life as he was making a televised speech. The assassin missed Park but fatally wounded his wife. Another act of aggression took place in August 1976 when North Korean soldiers attacked and killed two American officers who were trimming a tree in the area. The USA responded with a show of force but as with earlier incidents there was no military retaliation.
These provocative actions seemed irrational and reckless, creating in the minds of many outsiders an image of a dangerously unpredictable and relentlessly hostile regime. They were not intended to immediately foment a pro-North rebellion, since even Kim Il Sung must have understood by this point how limited his support was in the South; but they did have a rationale. First, they acted to probe the ROK’s defenses. More importantly they were attempts to destabilize the South. Kim Il Sung held the firm conviction that he represented the will and the progressive forces of the Korean revolution and of Korean nationalism. Eventually the people of the South would rise up, eventually the Americans would withdraw and eventually the situation would be ripe for reunification. The terrorist attacks were intended to speed this process along. And continuing tensions with the South served a domestic purpose: sustaining a state of military alertness was useful for maintaining a high degree of control over the population, as well as making the country better prepared for war when it resumed.
Courting the Third World
A third part of North Korea’s strategy for reunification was creating an international environment that would isolate South Korea, pressure the USA to withdraw its troops and win the support of progressive nations to its cause. For this purpose, Kim Il Sung began cultivating close relations with the Third World. “If the small countries jointly dismember him, the American bandit will be torn apart,” a North Korean propaganda slogan proclaimed.108 This also served to help the DPRK emerge from the shadow of its two patrons, the Soviet Union and China, and announce its presence as an independent state. Moving far beyond the days when he needed Stalin’s approval to establish diplomatic relations with a short list of friendly socialist states, Kim Il Sung aimed at playing an active role in international affairs. In this he resembled leaders of South Korea who also sought to overcome their country’s reputation as a dependent American client state. Additionally being a major world leader may have added to Kim’s prestige at home as well as appealing to his vanity. This became even truer in the 1970s when Kim Il Sung began portraying the DPRK to his people as a shining example of progressive socialism admired around the world. Above all it was another front in his rivalry with the South. He wanted to demonstrate that the DPRK was the true representative of the Korean people and to isolate South Korea. As a result a competition began between the two Koreas as each sought to receive more diplomatic recognitions than the other.
North Korea initially had some success in gaining Third World support for its demand for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Korea. At the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference in Lima in August 1975 it became a full member. A committee of the General Assembly in 1975 passed a pro-North Korean resolution on the Korean Question that year which called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the peninsula. At another NAM conference in Colombo the member states endorsed Kim’s stance on Korean unification. By the early 1980s the DPRK had established relations with 110 countries around the world. It had more missions abroad than its rival South Korea and its voice was heard louder in Third World forums. A constant stream of leaders from Africa and other Third World countries visited Pyongyang, where no matter how small their influence or of how little actual strategic or economic importance they might have had, they were sure to receive an enthusiastic welcome from the thousands of North Koreans who dutifully turned out on the streets to greet them. These visits also served a domestic purpose of highlighting the global recognition of the great leader and his achievements. In an outreach effort, North Korean performance troupes and exhibitions were sent around the world. These were given much publicity at home, also contributing to the official line that the DPRK, its culture, its socialist path and especially its leader were globally admired.
These often expensive efforts produced little in the way of practical benefits, and the goodwill and influence they developed were often undermined by the clumsy and ill-informed behavior of North Koreans. Much of this problem was based on the ignorance of North Koreans of the outside world as well as the general lack of experienced diplomats. NAM representatives soon tired of having North Korea use its meetings as forums for pushing its agendas. The crude use of bribery and bluster to try to get their way offended many governments. Many were becoming wary of the growing cult of Kim Il Sung, and some were also concerned over the country’s acts of terrorism against its southern neighbor. North Korean prestige was also undermined by its abuse of diplomatic protocol. Its representatives abroad came into trouble for carrying out smuggling, drug dealing and other illegal activities. In the 1970s, for example, North Korean diplomats were expelled from several Scandinavian countries for drug smuggling. Nor did Pyongyang generate much of a popular following outside its borders. North Korea sponsored 200 pro-Pyongyang organizations in 50 countries, but these never generated much local support and remained dependent on DPRK funds.109 In the long run, this stage of the three revolutionary forces strategy proved as unsuccessful as the other two: Kim Il Sung’s effort to build up the DPRK as an economically powerful nation and unchallenged superior Korea, and to promote the revolutionary forces in the South.
References
Lankov, Andrei. North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2007.
Lim, Jae-Cheon Lim. Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea. London: Routledge, 2015.
Armstrong, Charles, K. “‘Fraternal Socialism’: The International Reconstruction of North Korea, 1953–62,” Cold War History 5, no. 2 (May 2005): 161–187.Crossref
Lerner, Mitchell. “Mostly Propaganda in Nature” Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology and the Second Korean War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.
Lim, Jae-Cheon. “Institutional Change in North Korean Economic Development Since 1984: The Competition Between Hegemonic and Non-hegemonic Rules and Norms,” Pacific Affairs 82, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 9–27.Crossref
Footnotes
1
Chin O Chung, Pyongyang Between Peking and Moscow: North Korea’s Involvement in the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1958–1975. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1978, p. 23.
3
Bazacs Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 43.
5
Stephen Kotlin and Charles K. Armstrong, “A Socialist Regional Order in Northeast Asia After World War II,” in Charles K. Armstrong, K. Gilbert Rozman, Samuel S. Kim, and Stephen Kotlin (eds). Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006, pp. 110–125.
6
Charles, K. Armstrong, “‘Fraternal Socialism’: The International Reconstruction of North Korea, 1953–62.” Cold War History 5, no. 2 (May 2005): 161–187; Szalontai, 47.
7
Ginsburgs, George. “Soviet Development Grants and Aid to North Korea, 1945–1950,” Asia Pacific Community 18 (Fall 1982): 42–63.
12
Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 25.
13
Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, 2005, p. 179.
14
Chong-sik Lee, “Land Reform, Collectivization and the Peasant in North Korea,” in Robert A. Scalapino (ed.). Korea Today. New York: Praeger, 1963, pp. 65–81.
15
Yim, Sang-chŏl, Pukhan nongŏp [North Korean Agriculture]. Seoul: Tosŏ Ch’ulp’an Sŏil, 2000, p. 35.
18
Nam, Koon Woo, “The Purge of the Southern Communists in North Korea: A Retrospective View,” Asian Forum 5, no. 1 (1973): 43–54; Suh, p. 360.
24
Balazs Szalontai, “You have No Political Line of Your Own’: Kim Il Sung and the Soviets, 1953–1964,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin no. 14–15 (Winter 2003/Spring 2004): 87–137.
25
Conversation with Comrade Samsonov First Secretary of the Soviet Embassy, Polish Embassy, December 24, 1956, North Korean International Documentation Project.
39
Heonik Kwon and Byung-ho Chung. North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, p. 16.
44
Robert Scalapino, “Korea the Politics of Change,” Asian Survey, 3, no. 1 (January 1963): 31–40, 63.
45
“Kangson, Home of the Chollima,” Korea Today 241 (September 1976): 25–32; Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle,” Monthly Review 16, no. 9 (January 1965): 541–549.
49
Ilpyong J. Kim, Historical Dictionary of North Korea. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2003, p. 24.
50
Bon-Hak Koo. “Political Economy of Self-Reliance: Juche and Economic Development,” in North Korea, 1961–1990. Seoul: Research Center for Peace and Unification of Korea, 1992, p. 85.
53
Sŏ Tong-man, Puk chosŏn yŏn’gu [Studies on North Korea]. Paju: Republic of Korea, Han’guk wŏnsik, 2010, pp. 167–168.
55
Report, Embassy of Hungary to Hungarian Foreign Ministry, July 2, 1960, North Korean International Documentation Project.
59
Kim, Sung-chull. “Fluctuating Institutions of Enterprise Management in North Korea: Prospects for Local Enterprise Reform,” Harvard Asia Quarterly: 10–33 (no volume number or date).
60
Mun Woong Lee, Rural North Korea Under Communism: A Study of Sociological Change. Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1976, p. 100.
65
Han Monikka (2003) ‘1960 nyŏntae Pukhan-ŭi kyŏngche kukpang pyŏngchin nosŏn-ŭi ch'aet’aek-kwa taenam chŏngch’aek [North Korea’s choice of the simultaneous economic-military strengthening strategy and its policy toward South Korea]’, Yŏksa-wa hyŏnsil [History and Reality], 50, pp. 133–164.
68
Sung-joo Han, “North Korea’s Security Policy and Military Strategy,” in Robert A. Scalapino and Jun-Yop Kim (eds). North Korea Today. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983, pp. 144–163, 155.
70
Joseph S. Chung, “Economic Planning in North Korea,” in Robert A. Scalapino and Jun-Yop Kim (eds). North Korea Today. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983, pp. 164–188, 180.
77
Bernd Schaefer, North Korean “Adventurism” and China’s Long Shadow, 1966–1972. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, pp. 5, 9.
79
Sheila Miyoshi Jaeger, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea. New York: Norton, 2013, p. 376.
80
Byung Chul Koh, The Foreign Policy Systems of North and South Korea. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 123–124.
85
Andrei N. Lankov, “The Demise of Non-Communist Parties in North Korea (1945–1960),” Journal of Cold War Studies 3, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 103–125.
88
Mitchell Lerner, “Mostly Propaganda in Nature:” Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology and the Second Korean War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.
89
Michishita Narushige, “Calculated Adventurism: North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns,” Korea Journal of Defense Analysis 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 188–197.
90
Lerner 2011, pp. 22–25; Suh, p. 232; Lankov, Andrew. The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 30.
91
Soon Sung Cho, “North and South Korea: Stepped-Up Aggression and the Search for New Security,” Asian Survey, 9, no. 1 (January 1969): 29–32.
92
Romanian Embassy to Bucharest, January 26, 1968, North Korean International Documentation Project.
93
Bernd Schaefer, North Korean “Adventurism” and China’s Long Shadow, 1966–1972. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, October 2004, pp. 12–13. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Working_Paper_442.pdf, Accessed January 16, 2016.
95
Mitchell Lerner, “Mostly Propaganda in Nature”: Kim Il Sung, the Juche Ideology, and the Second Korean War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center, 2010, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mostly-propaganda-nature-kim-il-sung-the-juche-ideology-and-the-second-korean-war, Accessed July 26, 2016.
96
Michishita, Narushige, “Calculated Adventurism: North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns,” Korea Journal of Defense Analysis 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 188–197.
98
Robert R. Simmons, “North Korea: The Year of the Thaw,” Asian Survey 12, no. 1 (January 1972): 245–231.
99
Kim Hae-wŏn, Pukhan ŭi Nambukkhan chŏngch’I hyŏpsang yŏn’gu [Research on North Korea’s Political Negotiations with South Korea]. Seoul: Sŏnin Publications, 2012, p. 71.
102
Memorandum Hungarian Embassy February 16, 1976, North Korean International Documentation Project.
104
Chong-sik Lee, “The Evolution of North-South Korean Relations,” in Robert A. Scalapino and Hongkoo Lee (eds). North Korea in a Regional and Global Context. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 115–132.
106
Yongho Kim, North Korean Foreign Policy: Security Dilemma and Succession. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books, 2011, p. 102.