Chapter 4

From colony to competing states

As the Second World War came to an end, most Koreans hoped that their nation would be an independent and prosperous state. Instead, during the short span between the closing days of the Second World War in the summer of 1945 and the ceasefire in the Korean War in the summer of 1953 events took a turn that few, if any, had expected.

Korea became both free of Japanese colonial rule and simultaneously partitioned into two occupation zones by the United States and the Soviet Union. For the first time in over a millennium the peninsula was politically divided. Occurring at the very moment of its liberation this came to be regarded among almost all Koreans as one of the great tragedies and discontinuities in their history. Out of these occupation zones the Americans and Soviets supporting different ideological factions among Korean nationalists created two separate states—the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). In just a few years, Korea became two societies with different leaderships, political systems, and geopolitical orientations. When North Korea attempted to reunify the country in 1950, foreign powers again intervened in Korean affairs; the result was a costly conflict that left the peninsula still divided.

Liberation and Division

When the Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945 Koreans throughout the country danced in the streets and celebrated for several days. It was generally assumed that the Allied liberation of their country would mean immediate independence. In the days between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of Allied troops, Koreans across the country formed hundreds of ‘People’s Committees’ (inmin wiwǒnhoe). These were ad hoc groups that mostly dealt with immediate tasks such as securing food supplies and maintaining basic order. Although the name ‘People’s Committees’ suggested to some outsiders, especially to the Americans, that they were communist dominated or inspired, they were in fact mostly spontaneous and represented all sorts of people. On 6 September delegates from these various committees formed the Korean People’s Republic. They elected Syngman Rhee, who was still in exile in America, as its president.

Koreans did not realize that the Allies had no intention of giving Korea its independence until after a long period of ‘tutelage’. Although they had previously given little thought to Korea, at the Cairo Conference in December 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek agreed that Korea would gain its independence ‘in due course’ upon the defeat of Japan. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who like most Americans knew little about Korea, proposed that it be placed under a UN trusteeship for forty years, until Koreans were ready for independence, not appreciating the fact that Koreans had many centuries of experience in being an independent state. Stalin agreed but suggested shortening the period to between twenty and thirty years.

The decision to partition Korea into two occupation zones was made at a hastily called meeting on the night of 10 and 11 August by the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee in Washington. Four days earlier, the Americans had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and two days after that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and began an assault along the northern part of its empire. Fearing that the Soviets were in a position to occupy the entire peninsula, the Americans drew up the proposal to prevent all of it from falling under Soviet control. For reasons that are unclear, Moscow quickly accepted it. The thirty-eighth parallel was chosen, simply because it divided the two zones into equal-sized halves. The decision was made as a temporary measure, by people who were largely ignorant of the country. Unfortunately for the future of Korea, the United States and the Soviet Union, who had agreed to a joint occupation, were quickly heading for a political and ideological rivalry.

The speed with which Koreans had formed local governing committees and the unbridled display of emotion that accompanied liberation indicated just how strongly the people shared a collective sense of national identity and a desire to create an autonomous state. However, the authoritarian nature of the colonial regime had left them with a local leadership who had, willingly or not, compromised with the imperial regime. Nor did they have institutions to create the framework for governance. Christian churches had often become a haven for nationalists, but only 5 per cent of Koreans were members, and many of them too were compromised by collaboration with the colonial regime. There were the communists, but they barely survived as a weak underground organization. Those nationalist leaders with untarnished reputations were in exile and unable to quickly return. As a result, the Allies entered a Korea with a leadership vacuum.

The occupation

Koreans expected to be liberated from occupation. Instead they got new foreign occupiers. If Koreans were not ready for these new occupations, neither were the Soviets nor the Americans. Both arrived without clear plans or even Korean-language interpreters. The Soviets occupied their zone first, entering Pyongyang on 26 August. Upon their arrival they found that the People’s Committees were already carrying on the functions of local government. At first, they worked with them. But many of their members were Christians, including the Pyongyang committee’s Cho Mansik, a Christian advocate of non-violence. Pyongyang, the centre of their Soviet administrative zone, was a stronghold of Christianity. Its members were better educated, made up much of the middle class, and were the natural leaders of the community; but they were also strongly anti-communist. Therefore, the Soviets sought partners among the communists. However, the Korean Communist Party was awkwardly headquartered at Seoul, in the American zone, and most of the leadership lived in the south. The local communists in the north were obscure figures, unknown to Moscow; so the Soviets looked to the exile community.

Several weeks into the occupation the Soviets found their candidate for leader in one of these returning exiles: Kim Il Sung. After fleeing to Siberia in 1940, Kim and many of his fellow Manchurian guerrillas had become part of the 25th Red Army’s 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade. When the war ended they tried without much success to return to Korea. Finally, Kim and sixty of his comrades managed a ride on a ship to the port of Wonsan on the East Sea where they disembarked on 19 September. It was his first time in Korea since the age of 12. Wearing Soviet military uniforms, familiar with the Soviet army, speaking some Russian, and with an unimpeachable reputation as anti-Japanese resistance fighters, this small group of former Manchurian guerrillas appeared to the Soviets to be the suitable Koreans they were looking for. Although not the most senior member, Kim Il Sung was the best known and impressed the Russian officers who interviewed him. The occupation authorities almost immediately began promoting him. His big debut came on 14 October when the Soviets organized a massive welcoming ceremony for the Red Army attended by hundreds of thousands. Kim was given the task of delivering the keynote speech. From then on it became apparent that he was being designated by the Soviets as the leader in their zone of occupation. Many of his partisan companions were placed in key positions.

Early in 1946, the Soviets removed Cho Mansik from his posts and arrested him. Almost all positions in North Korea went to communists. In addition to Kim Il Sung and his guerrilla companions these included hundreds of bilingual Soviet-Koreans from the USSR who provided technical expertise. They were particularly valuable because of their familiarity with Soviet government and party organization. At the same time, thousands of Korean communists returned from China. These so-called ‘Yenan Communists’ included the prominent leader Kim Tubong, who formed a rival communist party, the New People’s Party, which at the insistence of the Soviets merged with the North Korean Branch Bureau, as the Korean Communist Party in the Soviet zone was called. Meanwhile, as the Americans and their allies in the south began to crack down on the communists most of the leaders fled north forming a ‘Domestic Communist’ faction under the leadership of Pak Hǒnyǒng. Therefore, Kim Il Sung had to share the power with many others but still he was the leader the Soviets promoted.

While after just a few months the Soviets assembled a leadership in the north, the Americans struggled during their three-year occupation to establish order and find Koreans they could comfortably work with. The situation they faced was more complex since their zone included Seoul, the centre of political and intellectual life, with its many competing groups jockeying for power. But the Americans compounded their problems by a series of blunders. Unlike the Soviets, the Americans refused to work with or even acknowledge the People’s Committees, falsely believing they were controlled by communists. Nor did they recognize the Korean People’s Republic but rather disbanded it. Instead, the US military commander initially ordered Koreans to continue to obey the Japanese colonial authorities until the new American military government was fully in place. This was meant as only a temporary measure of expediency to ensure order until the Americans could put their own administration in place. Koreans were stunned that they were supposed to obey the oppressors that they had just been liberated from. The Americans quickly realized their mistake and sent the Japanese back to their homeland but they never fully regained the trust of the people they had been sent to govern.

Conservative landowners, businessmen, and former Korean officials in the colonial regime were quick to use the Americans to establish an administration that would protect their interests. A week after the Americans arrived they formed the Korean Democratic Party—a conservative grouping to counter the Korean People’s Republic. The Americans appointed these conservatives to an advisory council, and staffed the administrative posts and the top positions in the police force with them. At the same time the US occupation authorities banned the Communist Party; its members as well as other leftists were arrested or fled to the north. However, US officials had an ambivalent attitude toward conservatives whose hold over the south they were fostering. The Americans shared their anti-communism, but they were uncomfortable about their lack of nationalist credentials, their extreme rightist views, and the thuggery of the newly created police forces, and some understood that a Korean administration dominated by landowners represented an obstacle to the popular desire for land reform.

Like the Soviets, the Americans soon looked to the returning exiles for potential leaders. The most prominent was Syngman Rhee, the well-known and respected nationalist who returned to Seoul from America on a US military plane. His dramatic entry suggested an official US endorsement for his leadership; however, he returned to Korea much as did Kim Il Sung, on his own to a country he had not seen in years. On 20 October, just six days after Kim Il Sung made his public debut at the mass rally, Rhee appeared in public introduced by General Hodge. With his fluent English, his staunch anti-communism, his personal charisma, and the energy of a man much younger than his 70 years, the Americans felt they had found their leader much as the Soviets had singled out Kim. Yet Rhee soon proved to be too independent, having no intention of being, or being viewed as, an American puppet.

Rhee shared the anti-communism of the conservatives, yet unlike them he had an unblemished anti-Japanese reputation. As a result, Rhee and the conservatives formed an alliance; they supported him, and he protected them from those Koreans who wanted revenge against collaborators. Uneasy with this alliance, some US officials looked for more moderate leaders. One candidate was the charismatic moderate leftist Yǒ Unhyǒng, who teamed up with Kim Kyusik, a more conservative-leaning moderate. However, any hope that they could form an alternative leadership group to the conservatives was dashed in July 1947 with Yǒ’s assassination, most likely engineered by his conservative foes. Desperate, the Americans even turned to another exile, Sǒ Chaep’il, the ageing former leader of the Independence Club. But Sǒ, dying of cancer, came to Korea only to take a look at a homeland he hadn’t seen in decades.

The US occupation zone was plagued by labour strikes and student demonstrations. Some of these were instigated by communists, many were simply expressions of frustration and impatience with the way the events were unfolding. Students often protested against placing ‘Japanese collaborators’ in administrative positions in the newly established secondary schools and colleges, workers wanted higher wages, farmers land. The Americans responded by carrying out thousands of arrests. However, strikes and demonstrations continued, lending a somewhat chaotic nature to the occupation period.

By 1947, this anti-communist alliance of Rhee and the conservatives dominated the bureaucracy of the nascent South Korean state and its security organs. The conservative character of the South was reinforced by the thousands of landlords, businessmen, Christians, and others fleeing from the North, most possessing a passionate hatred of communism. In the process they were creating what could be called the South Korean system. It was a political order dominated by anti-communist, pro-business, economically and socially conservative nationalists whose political views were shaped as much by the authoritarian, ultra-nationalist Japanese colonial regime as by American ideas of liberal democracy.

The emergence of two states

The creation of two states was not a premeditated plan by the two superpowers, nor by any group of Koreans. It was the outcome of the suspicions and rivalry between Washington and Moscow and was aided and abetted by the political polarization among Korean nationalists. A half-hearted effort to create a unified Korea was made by the major powers. The Soviet Union, the USA, China, and Britain met in December 1945 to discuss UN trusteeship, now reduced to five years. The details were to be worked out by an American–Soviet Joint Commission which met in the spring of 1946, but this accomplished little. The Joint Commission met again in the summer of 1947; by then, however, the structures of two different states had already emerged.

Initially Moscow does not appear to have planned to create a separate state in the north. However, in early 1946, the Soviet occupiers began to take steps to construct a Soviet-style political and social order in their sector. Through carefully managed elections they created a People’s Committee in February which carried out sweeping reforms. Under the direction of their Soviet supervisors the People’s Committee nationalized all industries, a rather easy step since most had been abandoned by their Japanese owners. It instituted an eight-hour day, five-day work week, and minimum wage. Other laws established equality between men and women and made divorce easy. The emerging northern state carried out mass adult education campaigns and enacted compulsory universal education.

The truly revolutionary measure was the land reform carried out by the People’s Committee in the spring of 1946. In a country where most people were tenant farmers or agricultural labourers nothing could have done more to win support for the new political and social system the Soviets and their communist allies were establishing. All the property of the big landowners was confiscated; most fled south of the parallel. Their land was redistributed to poor farmers. Heavy land taxes and the small size of the farms meant that their material existence only marginally improved, but peasants were now working their own land.

Over the next two years, as these measures enacted by the People’s Committee were fully implemented, the Soviet occupation created a radically new society in the North, one based on equality in which everyone was to address each other as comrade, in which formerly lowly peasants and workers were told they were the new elite of society, and in which the old yangban class that had dominated society for many centuries was gone. But it was also a regimented society that tolerated no dissent. Protest demonstrations, mostly by Christian groups, were brutally repressed. Writers and artists were enlisted as propaganda agents of the state; and much as the Japanese had done in wartime, everyone was organized by profession, or categories such as women or youth, and mobilized for various campaigns directed at state goals. An elaborate security apparatus was developed under the direction of former Soviet police officer Pang Hakse. North Korea soon had all the makings of a Soviet-style totalitarian government except for a prison system; political prisoners were simply sent to the Soviet Union’s Gulag. It was only lacking an army. That was created in early 1948 when some of the security forces were converted into the Korean People’s Army.

Theoretically the emerging North Korean state was a multiparty one. In practice, all power was in the hands of the North Korean Workers’ Party established in 1946. Kim Il Sung only became its head in 1948 but well before that a cult of personality was created around him. His picture appeared in public places alongside Stalin’s, songs were written praising his accomplishments as guerrilla fighter and revolutionary, the first university in the North was named after him. Thus, many features of North Korea were already emerging by the time of its independence in 1948: the cult of personality of the leader, the regimentation of society, and the mass mobilization campaigns to achieve development goals.

In the South, state organs were established at a somewhat slower pace. Under the US military government, a new network of schools was established. The US military trained a national constabulary, which became the basis for a national army, and they established an Interim Legislative Assembly to share in governance. By the end of 1947 the US authorities and the Koreans serving them had created the framework for a sovereign state.

The United States had no desire to prolong its occupation in Korea, a place it had only limited interests in, so it turned to the United Nations to resolve the question of independence. The UN formed a Temporary Committee on Korea which decided to hold elections in the spring of 1948. When the Soviet Union refused to cooperate, the UN Temporary Commission held them anyway in the South. Some southerners, such as Kim Kyusik, desperately sought to prevent separate elections, seeing them as making the division permanent. But neither the Americans nor most of the political leaders in the South saw any realistic possibility of compromise with the authorities in the North. In May 1948, South Koreans lined up for hours to elect the leaders of the National Assembly, the first time they had ever directly participated in their government. The members of the National Assembly elected Rhee as president and on 15 August, the third anniversary of the surrender of Japan, they declared the Republic of Korea (ROK). The North carried out its own more supervised elections and declared the Democratic People’s Republic (DPRK) on 9 September. The two Korean states were born.

Division and The desire for national unity

The division of Korea did not weaken the sense among Koreans that they were one nation. Outside powers had simply delayed this process of achieving a unified sovereign state but almost all Koreans on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel regarded eventual unification as necessary and inevitable. The desire for reunification was reinforced by the ethnic nationalism both Koreas promoted. North Korea was officially socialist and part of the international socialist community. It was a Marxist state where class took precedence over nation, at least in theory. But Kim Il Sung and the DPRK leadership were as much nationalists as they were communists, seeing the Koreans as one people united by blood, ancestry, and sharing a common destiny. In South Korea, the state was officially based on liberalism and considered itself part of the anti-communist ‘free world’ centred in the USA. Yet Syngman Rhee called his ideology ilmin chuǔi or ‘one peopleism’, awkwardly expressing the same concept of a unitary nation bonded by blood ties and history.

In North Korea, the constitution specified that Seoul (which means ‘capital’ in Korean) was the capital of the Korean nation, Pyongyang just a temporary one. North Korean leaders saw the state as a sort of base camp from which to liberate the rest of the country. Almost immediately after the DPRK was established its leadership asked for Moscow’s support in reunifying the country by force. Similarly, in South Korea school textbooks taught children that Koreans were a ‘one-blood’ people, whose unity under a single state was an unquestionable goal and inevitable development. President Rhee spoke of ‘marching north’ and unifying the country by force. In 1949 and 1950, the ROK army carried out numerous incursions into the DPRK, anxious to probe defences and preparing for the day it could liberate the North.

While both North and South Korea were committed to reunification, achieving this peacefully hardly seemed possible, since the leadership of each held incompatible visions of modern society. The DPRK was ruled by revolutionaries who were confident that they were on the right side of history and who regarded the landlord and capitalist class which dominated the South as enemies of the Korean people and obstacles for fulfilling the goal of creating a progressive modern nation-state. In the ROK, the state was dominated by conservative landlords and entrepreneurs who hated and feared the communists.

Therefore, unification by force seemed a realistic option to both Koreas. Of the two states, North Korea was in a much better position to do so. Although it had only half the population of the South its leadership had better nationalist credentials. Furthermore, North Korea had carried out land reform and gained the support of the peasants; South Korea had not. The regime in the DPRK was more effective at consolidating its hold over its people and mobilizing them for state goals. North Korea, in contrast to the South, was beginning to lay the foundations for creating a modern industrial state. Already possessing most of Korea’s industry and electrical power generation in 1945, it was beginning to further expand its industrial base by implementing a two-year economic plan for 1949–50.

Most importantly the DPRK had the military advantage. It was quickly building a powerful Korean People’s Army. With the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, tens of thousands of Koreans who had fought in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army began returning to Korea, providing a large corps of experienced fighters. Moscow was generous in equipping it with artillery, tanks, and other weapons. The South was much weaker militarily. Its army was smaller; and the USA, fearing it would use them to launch an invasion, refused to supply the ROK forces with military planes, tanks, and other offensive weaponry. Therefore, Kim Il Sung and Pak Hǒnyǒng, the South Korean Communist Party leader who had fled to the North, were optimistic about their chances of quickly achieving unification if they invaded the South.

North Korea’s leadership was encouraged by turmoil and unrest in the South. In contrast to the organization and discipline in the DPRK, the ROK was semi-chaotic with the government plunged into quarrels between the executive branch headed by Rhee and the independent-minded members of the National Assembly. There was widespread discontent in the countryside over the failure to carry out land reform, and labour unrest in the cities. Students, many influenced by leftist politics, carried out almost constant protests. A major anti-government uprising took place in the island province of Cheju. In October 1948, just a week after the USA transferred its command to ROK officers, the army was assembled at the port of Yǒsu to sail to the island. But instead of putting down the rebellion, the soldiers themselves revolted. Some waved banners calling for the overthrow of their government. Loyal troops were found who were able to put down the mutiny, but only after heavy fighting. Some of the rebel soldiers retreated into the nearby mountains to form guerrilla bands.

Rhee’s government responded to all this chaos by mass arrests of real or suspected communist sympathizers and by launching a series of anti-insurgency campaigns in the countryside. Geopolitical insecurity contributed to the anti-communist hysteria of the regime. The DPRK’s allies Russia and China were neighbours whereas the Americans were far away, and their support was uncertain. The Rhee administration gradually achieved progress in maintaining public order and in containing and reducing the scale of the guerrilla insurgency. However, discontent from landless peasants, restless workers, and leftist intellectuals who opposed the Rhee regime, regarding it as reactionary and dominated by former Japanese collaborators, was still a threat to its stability.

Under these circumstances the North Korean leaders assumed an invasion of the South would lead to swift victory. Their main task was to persuade Stalin and Mao to back them. Both were initially reluctant, but in early 1950 Stalin changed his mind and gave his blessing and support for a DPRK military invasion; Mao too gave his approval. Kim Il Sung’s patrons may have been encouraged by what appeared to be a waning commitment to the defence of the ROK by the United States. The US Congress had reduced aid, and in January 1950, the American Secretary of State in a speech excluded South Korea from its ‘defensive perimeter’ in Asia. Moscow sent weapons and advisers and helped Pyongyang prepare for the invasion, which was set for late June, just before the start of the monsoon rains.

The Korean War

On 25 June 1950 what the North Koreans call the ‘Great Motherland Liberation War’ began as planned. The unprepared ROK forces crumbled before the Korean People’s Army and in two days the KPA was in Seoul. Panic took hold in the capital, soldiers retreated, thousands of civilians fled in nightmarish scenes of utter chaos. Roads became rivers of families fleeing south ahead of the advancing KPA, men, women, and children, moving mostly on foot carrying whatever they could on their backs (Figure 7). Symbolizing the horror of these hours was the Han Bridge Incident. There was only one bridge across the mighty Han River that formed the southern border of the city. ROK forces, in an attempt to slow the advancing forces, blew it up prematurely while it was packed with escaping civilians, killing hundreds of them.

7. South Korean refugees during the Korean War.

Had Kim Il Sung’s plans worked, in a matter of weeks, if not days, Korea would have been reunified. But the war did not go as Kim and his comrades had expected. The United States, which was caught by surprise, responded as soon as it was able to confirm that a full-scale invasion was under way. On 27 June, President Truman ordered General MacArthur, head of the occupation forces in Japan, to use US air and naval support at his disposal to support the ROK army. The Americans went to the UN to ask for a resolution giving them the authority to intervene. This they received almost immediately. The Soviet Union, which could have vetoed it, was boycotting the UN in protest at the international body’s refusal to allow the representatives of the People’s Republic of China to replace the Nationalist government’s seat at the UN. The USA thus entered the war under the banner of the UN. Eventually some of America’s allies joined the UN effort including troops from Britain, Canada, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia. But although it was in theory an international operation, the USA supplied the bulk of the United Nations forces and was in complete command of operations.

Since it would take the American forces some time to mobilize for action, the KPA could still have succeeded if it had achieved the swift victory it had expected. However, the North Korean leadership had made two other miscalculations. The anticipated great uprising of support for the North Koreans did not materialize. Furthermore, the ROK forces after initially retreating in confusion began to put up more resistance than expected. The result was North Korea’s Korean People’s Army advanced more slowly than planned, providing the UN forces with time to bring in troops. Still by August the North Koreans had taken over all of South Korea except the south-east corner around Busan which became the temporary capital of the ROK. The KPA was unable to advance beyond this defensive perimeter.

In early September, the UN forces under the American military commander General MacArthur landed at Inchon, catching the North Korean army in a classic pincer. Within days the KPA was routed and Seoul was retaken. In early October UN and ROK forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel to destroy the North Korean regime and reunite the country under their terms. A cautious Moscow was ready to abandon Kim Il Sung, but not Mao Zedong, who warned the Americans against advancing to the Chinese border. When these warnings were ignored Beijing launched a counter-attack in late November driving the UN and ROK forces back over the parallel, capturing Seoul. The Americans in March 1951 retook Seoul and pushed the Chinese back to a line roughly along the old border; there the war stalemated. Negotiations began in July 1951 and continued until 27 July 1953 when a ceasefire was agreed upon.

The Korean War, rather than reunifying the country, made the division permanent. It was one of the greatest single catastrophes in modern Korean history. Relentless American bombing that was accelerated in 1952 left the cities of the North in total ruin. More bombs were dropped on the New York State (or England) sized country than on the entire Japanese Empire in the Second World War. The total military and civilian casualties are unknown but as many as one million of the nine million people may have perished. South Korea did not see the same scale of devastation but, nonetheless, Seoul, which had changed hands four times in less than a year, was largely destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians were killed. The UN casualties at perhaps 40,000 were much less but the Chinese lost several times as many soldiers.

In the South the war increased anti-communist sentiment and hatred of the North Korean regime. North Koreans as they liberated South Korean cities and towns set up People’s Committees to govern them. They rounded up suspected ROK officials and class enemies, executing many, and promised to redistribute the land to the farmers. Some students and others came forward to serve the new political order; most South Koreans, however, feared and resented the northern occupation. There were some guerrillas who fought for the North, but they were mostly the remnants of those who had fought in the mountains before June 1950, not new recruits. When few young men volunteered to serve in the armed forces they were drafted against their will. Tens of thousands of these impressed soldiers were forced to retreat with the KPA when it was driven back into North Korea, and most were never heard from by their families again. As a result, the brief North Korean occupation mainly generated hatred for the communists rather than support. South Korea, during its brief occupation of the North, demonstrated a similar capacity to alienate rather than win over the local population. Thousands who had served in the communist regime were arrested, and the ROK authorities threatened to punish anyone who had collaborated with the communists. That of course, included almost everyone. Furthermore, they announced that illegally appropriated land would have to be given back to the rightful landlords.

Both Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee ended the war firmly entrenched in power and their regimes in tighter control over their peoples. Yet despite the enormous military sacrifices of their benefactors both felt betrayed by them. Moscow responded to Kim Il Sung’s desperate calls for help following the Inchon landing by urging him to retreat north of the DPRK border, showing a willingness to abandon his regime. The Chinese saved it but marginalized him during the conflict. Their interest was in maintaining the DPRK as a buffer state between the People’s Republic of China and the USA and its Asian allies, not in helping to reunify the country. Rhee, too, felt that the Americans had failed to push the war to victory, instead settling for the status quo of a divided Korea. He never disguised his resentment at the Americans for accepting the ceasefire, which went into effect without his signature.

The years immediately after the end of the colonial period in many ways resembled those before the Japanese annexation. Koreans struggled to come to terms with a rapidly changing situation but found that to a considerable extent their fate was in the hands of great powers. China, the Soviet Union, and the United States acted much as imperial China, imperial Russia, and imperial Japan had in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intruding in Korean affairs—aligning with, supporting, and aggravating the division among political factions. This time the result of internal conflicts and external interventions led not to the loss of sovereignty but to the creation of two rival states, each to some degree dependent on powerful foreign patrons. The Korean War did not change this situation but rather made it more permanent.