Rosenheim
Donor
Fixed, thank ye kindly. Despite reviewing my posts over and over again, more than a few misspellings always tend to slip me by.
Flowers of Unification, May You Fully Bloom: State and Society in Communist Korea
5. Development of the People's Party
Rosenheim
Donor
Curtis-Lee, Samantha (June 1998). “The Early Korean Party System (1945-1952),” Bulletin Koreana, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 211-230. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, (pp. 213-215 below). [1]
… Claiming a membership of 30,000 people as soon as January 1946 shortly after its founding, rapidly increasing to over 450,000 by 1948, the People’s Party was truly a mass party. Drawing its political strength from both the rural and urban poor, it directly competed with the Workers’ Party (and to a lesser degree the Ch’ŏndogyo Party) for support, with its primary political goals being land reform and the “elimination of feudal values.” [2]
Historians have commonly cast the People’s Party as having operated as a loose collection of moderate social democrats and other center-leftists outside of the communist sphere. In truth, the party should be considered a far more disparate amalgamation of political vagabonds of all ideological stripes and colors. While the core of the party was indeed formed around Lyuh Woon-hyung’s true believers from the south and more recent center-left converts in the north, large sections of the party also included those elements of the far-left unwelcome in the Workers’ Party, such as those favorable to Trotskyism or anarchism. Additionally, a small number of centrists and center-rightists who viewed Lyuh as the true leader of a democratic Korea were significant in the party, including those who were suspicious of the more overtly religious leanings of Cho Man-sik’s Democratic Party and Kim Tae-hyon’s Ch’ŏndogyo Party.
It is also a mistake to consider the party as having merely existed as a moderating force on the Workers’ Party throughout the 1945-1950 period. Though largely regarded by the Soviets as a petty bourgeois party, on a number of issues the People’s Party was either as left-wing as the communists or had adopted even more radical stances. With regards to land reform, for example, the resistance fighter and anarchist-turned-social democrat (and former KPG member) Kim Won-bong advocated for a harsher “2-8” split between the landlords and tenants than the “3-7” split adopted by the United Democratic Front as a whole (and far from the “4-6” system desired by the moderate Cho Man-sik). Despite being a devoted communist Hŏ Chŏng-suk, the daughter of the martyred Hŏ Hŏn, chose to join with her father's partner and advocated for a notably progessive understanding of women’s liberation as part of the People’s Party. Ri Yong, a follower of Lyuh from the south, argued for the immediate reunification of Korea through the use of armed force. Even Ri Pong-su, a Manchurian partisan close to Kim Sŏng-ju, was not seen as out of place as part of the party’s left flank. [3/4/5]
It was precisely the amorphous ideological character of the party, in conjunction with Lyuh’s overwhelming popularity, which allowed it to directly challenge the unspoken supremacy of the Worker’s Party in the 1946 and 1947 People’s Committee elections, becoming the second largest party in northern Korea. Following the indirect election of the Provisional People’s Assembly of Korea held from 17-20 February 1947, the Workers’ Party held 65 seats (27%), the People’s Party 42 (18%), the Democratic Party 31 (13%), the Ch’ŏndogyo Party 23 (10%), and independents 76 (32%). While the Workers’ Party led the political agenda, there was some degree of actual democracy at play. [6]
Perhaps the greatest asset to the People’s Party throughout the first party system was Lyuh Woon-hyung’s ability to maintain the careful balance of interpersonal alliances present in the north. Much has been written about Lyuh’s apparent siding with Cho Man-sik in the aftermath of the 2nd Sam-il Movement of 1948 and its related strikes and protests. However, behind the scenes, Lyuh’s relationships with the leading figures of the Workers’ Party and the SCA were just as significant in resolving that situation to his personal benefit. When the dust settled in the north with the (re-)establishment of the Korean People’s Republic on September 6 1948 (the third anniversary of the 1st KPR’s founding), Lyuh’s position as Vice-Chairman of the PPCK was duly transformed into the office of Vice-President under the premier-presidential system adopted by the new constitution. [7/8]
Lyuh maintained his relationship with the Communist leadership through several points of contact. With Pak Hŏn-yŏng having relocated to the north in June 1947, his previous alliance with Lyuh allowed for a direct conduit of information between the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the People’s Party, especially as both worked towards organizing a general uprising in the south. Moreover, Kim Tu-bong and Lyuh shared a relatively close relationship as Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the PPCK (and later as President and Vice-President of the 2nd KPR), with careful criticism of the communists being accepted within certain bounds. Finally, Kim Sŏng-ju, being the new Premier of the People’s Assembly, had doubled down on the more moderate course of the popular front after the March 1st incident and maintained weekly meetings with Lyuh to ensure a good working relationship. While Lyuh was not universally loved among the left, having a notably poor relationship with O Ki-sŏp and much of the northern domestic faction outside of Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk, he had held to the Moscow line on most matters and was pliant to SCA demands, keeping him in good standing with the party as a whole. [9]
Historians have often debated Lyuh Woon-hyung’s true political character, with his having adopted stances spanning from center-left liberalism to orthodox communism throughout his lifetime. The old Harvard-school placed him as either a communist patsy or direct infiltrator while the revisionist school descended from Erich Lars has granted him significantly more personal agency. In recent years, several political analysts such as Cynthia Wallace have claimed that a number of health issues stemming from the 1945 assassination attempt left Lyuh increasingly vulnerable to manipulation. Regardless, by 1948 Lyuh had emerged as a political chimera in the north and, despite his ailing health, the People’s Party appeared to many as if it were on the cusp of seizing power. [10]
With the benefit of hindsight, the close of this first period can be placed into the context of the collapse of “people’s democracy” as a political strategy in the Soviet-backed states of Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1957. The antagonism between international capitalism and these workers’ states ultimately made these projects unworkable in the long-term, leading to the establishment of either one party states (as in Hungary, Romania) or the political elimination of popular social democratic parties as independent entities (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland). While the historical characteristics of Korea as a political entity were far removed from those of the (later) Warsaw pact, the inherent contradictions of Soviet democracy would make themselves known through the events of late 1950…
[1] In contrast to China and Japan, in OTL there is a distinct lack of English-language academic journals focused on Korean history and politics. For example, with regards to Japan two of the most prominent journals are Monumenta Nipponica, based out of Sophia Univeristy in Tokyo and the Journal of Japanese Studies headquartered from the University of Washington. For China, one can consider the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Journal of Chinese History from Cambridge. Korea, on the other hand lacks any firm support base, with articles outside of the Korean-language largely being printed in general Asia or East Asia journals. While the Journal of Korean Studies existed at University of Washington as well, it lacked the prestige of other area studies journals and was published only intermittently, needing to be revived several times. ITTL, future events cast Korea into a more enduring position within the academic consciousness as compared to the brief blip caused by the Korean War. The Bulletin Koreana is perhaps the most prestigious journal, but there are several others of note.
[2] For comparison's sake, in OTL 1946 the Workers' Party held a membership of 600,000. The Ch’ŏndogyo Party also claimed a membership of 200,000, but this is severely over-inflated with perhaps 30,000 - 60,000 being a more reasonable number as a guess. ITTL, the Workers' Party is only slightly ahead of the People's Party by 1948, with 550,000 claimed members, though institutionally it is still far more powerful than the People's Party due to its strong links with "non-partisan" mass organizations such as the Democratic Youth League and the Women's League. As in OTL, by 1948 almost every person living in northern Korea is linked to at least one mass organization, if not several - this being a mixture of widespread participation in the new "democracy" as well as a system of mass surveillance (and discipline, to borrow from that fuddy-duddy Foucault) by the party locals.
[3] In OTL, Kim Won-bong was the deputy commander of the Korean Liberation Army (part of the KPG) and returned with them to South Korea. He disagreed heavily with the right-wing leading the civilian elements of the military government and eventually moved north to participate in the Soviet-held zone, where he would hold high rank in government. He would be purged by Kim Il-sung in 1958. ITTL, with the suppression of even the moderate left in the south, he headed north slightly earlier and joined up with Lyuh by 1946.
[4] Hŏ Chŏng-suk, also known as Ho Jong-suk, was a remarkable woman and did indeed advocate for women's liberation in OTL North Korea as a member of the Workers' Party. Besides being the daughter of Hŏ Hŏn, she was also the ex-wife of Yan'an faction member Choe Chang-ik and having been in exile in China throughout the 1930s was largely counted among their number, though she remarried several times and had an independent power base within the faction. She argued for free-love, criticized the family, and sought for women's economic indendence from men within the new society of the north. The Workers' Party ultimately advocated for a far more traditional continuation of the family unit and while women's education and political participation were still championed in name by the state, much of the social reforms of the early years were either rolled back or made toothless. Hŏ would briefly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Korea before being purged from power, though she would return to minor roles in government in the 70s and 80s. She lived until 1991.
[5] Ri Pong-su being a member of the Workers' Party in OTL, heavily linked to Kim Il-sung.
[6] The numbers in OTL being 86 for the WP, 30 DP, 30 CP, the rest being held by independents. ITTL the body has slightly more power, meeting more often then the rubber stamp to the Presidium of OTL. Both the change in numbers and character are due to the different political situation in the north.
[7] The 2nd Sam-il Movement will be the focus of the next update.
[8] This is a major change, with OTL North Korea having a nominal head of state position held by Kim Tu-bong and a head of government held by Kim Il-sung. As Soviet-held Korea is attempting to portray itself as being more democratic, it is deliberately aping element of Western democracies to maintain this image. It also has the benefit of raising up Kim Il-sung from his lower position ITTL, with him being presented as the youthful face of the party backed by the Soviets. Additionally, ITTL the KPR is recognized as the "true ideological predecessor" to this new government, with it adopting the same name and stylings. In OTL the KPR was respected in the DPRK but was also seen as a failure due to the broader left being unable to unite and resist the US military.
[9] In OTL Pak Hŏn-yŏng and Lyuh Woon-hyung fell out with one another after 1945, with both competing for control of the left wing in the south. Their relationship would sour considerably, with each attempting to have the other harassed and arrested. Lyuh and Kim Il-sung were largely affable in comparison, with Kim viewing Pak more as a rival for control of the communists than as an ally. Here the relationship between the three is quite different, with the factional infighting largely contained with the Workers' Party as Kim Tu-bong's grip on power grows increasingly weak in the face of the rising People's Party.
[10] Here again we see mention of Erich Lars, who will be the first writer of the "revisionist school" of history regarding communist Korea. Within the historical sense, revisionism is not support for dictatorship but rather a challenging of orthodoxy and interpretation of the historical record. Beginning in the early 1970s, Lars will be one of the first to identify the "home-grown" characteristics of Korean communism, rather than simply labeling the leadership of the state as being Russian-installed puppets. He will face push-back, much of it very reasonable, for the level of independence he ascribes to the regime.
A/N: So far, much of my writing has painted a rather rosy picture of the Soviet-held north. This will change with my next planned chapter from perspective of the work The Great Betrayal, Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. I will also be posting my visual guide to the government soon, as there are just too many damn names for most to keep track of.
Beyond that, I'll have at least 2 chapters on social changes and development, 1 on the situation in the south, and 1 on international affairs (regarding Korea, as butterflies are being kept relatively minimal until the mid 1950s).
… Claiming a membership of 30,000 people as soon as January 1946 shortly after its founding, rapidly increasing to over 450,000 by 1948, the People’s Party was truly a mass party. Drawing its political strength from both the rural and urban poor, it directly competed with the Workers’ Party (and to a lesser degree the Ch’ŏndogyo Party) for support, with its primary political goals being land reform and the “elimination of feudal values.” [2]
Historians have commonly cast the People’s Party as having operated as a loose collection of moderate social democrats and other center-leftists outside of the communist sphere. In truth, the party should be considered a far more disparate amalgamation of political vagabonds of all ideological stripes and colors. While the core of the party was indeed formed around Lyuh Woon-hyung’s true believers from the south and more recent center-left converts in the north, large sections of the party also included those elements of the far-left unwelcome in the Workers’ Party, such as those favorable to Trotskyism or anarchism. Additionally, a small number of centrists and center-rightists who viewed Lyuh as the true leader of a democratic Korea were significant in the party, including those who were suspicious of the more overtly religious leanings of Cho Man-sik’s Democratic Party and Kim Tae-hyon’s Ch’ŏndogyo Party.
It is also a mistake to consider the party as having merely existed as a moderating force on the Workers’ Party throughout the 1945-1950 period. Though largely regarded by the Soviets as a petty bourgeois party, on a number of issues the People’s Party was either as left-wing as the communists or had adopted even more radical stances. With regards to land reform, for example, the resistance fighter and anarchist-turned-social democrat (and former KPG member) Kim Won-bong advocated for a harsher “2-8” split between the landlords and tenants than the “3-7” split adopted by the United Democratic Front as a whole (and far from the “4-6” system desired by the moderate Cho Man-sik). Despite being a devoted communist Hŏ Chŏng-suk, the daughter of the martyred Hŏ Hŏn, chose to join with her father's partner and advocated for a notably progessive understanding of women’s liberation as part of the People’s Party. Ri Yong, a follower of Lyuh from the south, argued for the immediate reunification of Korea through the use of armed force. Even Ri Pong-su, a Manchurian partisan close to Kim Sŏng-ju, was not seen as out of place as part of the party’s left flank. [3/4/5]
It was precisely the amorphous ideological character of the party, in conjunction with Lyuh’s overwhelming popularity, which allowed it to directly challenge the unspoken supremacy of the Worker’s Party in the 1946 and 1947 People’s Committee elections, becoming the second largest party in northern Korea. Following the indirect election of the Provisional People’s Assembly of Korea held from 17-20 February 1947, the Workers’ Party held 65 seats (27%), the People’s Party 42 (18%), the Democratic Party 31 (13%), the Ch’ŏndogyo Party 23 (10%), and independents 76 (32%). While the Workers’ Party led the political agenda, there was some degree of actual democracy at play. [6]
Perhaps the greatest asset to the People’s Party throughout the first party system was Lyuh Woon-hyung’s ability to maintain the careful balance of interpersonal alliances present in the north. Much has been written about Lyuh’s apparent siding with Cho Man-sik in the aftermath of the 2nd Sam-il Movement of 1948 and its related strikes and protests. However, behind the scenes, Lyuh’s relationships with the leading figures of the Workers’ Party and the SCA were just as significant in resolving that situation to his personal benefit. When the dust settled in the north with the (re-)establishment of the Korean People’s Republic on September 6 1948 (the third anniversary of the 1st KPR’s founding), Lyuh’s position as Vice-Chairman of the PPCK was duly transformed into the office of Vice-President under the premier-presidential system adopted by the new constitution. [7/8]
Lyuh maintained his relationship with the Communist leadership through several points of contact. With Pak Hŏn-yŏng having relocated to the north in June 1947, his previous alliance with Lyuh allowed for a direct conduit of information between the Workers’ Party Central Committee and the People’s Party, especially as both worked towards organizing a general uprising in the south. Moreover, Kim Tu-bong and Lyuh shared a relatively close relationship as Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the PPCK (and later as President and Vice-President of the 2nd KPR), with careful criticism of the communists being accepted within certain bounds. Finally, Kim Sŏng-ju, being the new Premier of the People’s Assembly, had doubled down on the more moderate course of the popular front after the March 1st incident and maintained weekly meetings with Lyuh to ensure a good working relationship. While Lyuh was not universally loved among the left, having a notably poor relationship with O Ki-sŏp and much of the northern domestic faction outside of Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk, he had held to the Moscow line on most matters and was pliant to SCA demands, keeping him in good standing with the party as a whole. [9]
Historians have often debated Lyuh Woon-hyung’s true political character, with his having adopted stances spanning from center-left liberalism to orthodox communism throughout his lifetime. The old Harvard-school placed him as either a communist patsy or direct infiltrator while the revisionist school descended from Erich Lars has granted him significantly more personal agency. In recent years, several political analysts such as Cynthia Wallace have claimed that a number of health issues stemming from the 1945 assassination attempt left Lyuh increasingly vulnerable to manipulation. Regardless, by 1948 Lyuh had emerged as a political chimera in the north and, despite his ailing health, the People’s Party appeared to many as if it were on the cusp of seizing power. [10]
With the benefit of hindsight, the close of this first period can be placed into the context of the collapse of “people’s democracy” as a political strategy in the Soviet-backed states of Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1957. The antagonism between international capitalism and these workers’ states ultimately made these projects unworkable in the long-term, leading to the establishment of either one party states (as in Hungary, Romania) or the political elimination of popular social democratic parties as independent entities (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland). While the historical characteristics of Korea as a political entity were far removed from those of the (later) Warsaw pact, the inherent contradictions of Soviet democracy would make themselves known through the events of late 1950…
[1] In contrast to China and Japan, in OTL there is a distinct lack of English-language academic journals focused on Korean history and politics. For example, with regards to Japan two of the most prominent journals are Monumenta Nipponica, based out of Sophia Univeristy in Tokyo and the Journal of Japanese Studies headquartered from the University of Washington. For China, one can consider the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Journal of Chinese History from Cambridge. Korea, on the other hand lacks any firm support base, with articles outside of the Korean-language largely being printed in general Asia or East Asia journals. While the Journal of Korean Studies existed at University of Washington as well, it lacked the prestige of other area studies journals and was published only intermittently, needing to be revived several times. ITTL, future events cast Korea into a more enduring position within the academic consciousness as compared to the brief blip caused by the Korean War. The Bulletin Koreana is perhaps the most prestigious journal, but there are several others of note.
[2] For comparison's sake, in OTL 1946 the Workers' Party held a membership of 600,000. The Ch’ŏndogyo Party also claimed a membership of 200,000, but this is severely over-inflated with perhaps 30,000 - 60,000 being a more reasonable number as a guess. ITTL, the Workers' Party is only slightly ahead of the People's Party by 1948, with 550,000 claimed members, though institutionally it is still far more powerful than the People's Party due to its strong links with "non-partisan" mass organizations such as the Democratic Youth League and the Women's League. As in OTL, by 1948 almost every person living in northern Korea is linked to at least one mass organization, if not several - this being a mixture of widespread participation in the new "democracy" as well as a system of mass surveillance (and discipline, to borrow from that fuddy-duddy Foucault) by the party locals.
[3] In OTL, Kim Won-bong was the deputy commander of the Korean Liberation Army (part of the KPG) and returned with them to South Korea. He disagreed heavily with the right-wing leading the civilian elements of the military government and eventually moved north to participate in the Soviet-held zone, where he would hold high rank in government. He would be purged by Kim Il-sung in 1958. ITTL, with the suppression of even the moderate left in the south, he headed north slightly earlier and joined up with Lyuh by 1946.
[4] Hŏ Chŏng-suk, also known as Ho Jong-suk, was a remarkable woman and did indeed advocate for women's liberation in OTL North Korea as a member of the Workers' Party. Besides being the daughter of Hŏ Hŏn, she was also the ex-wife of Yan'an faction member Choe Chang-ik and having been in exile in China throughout the 1930s was largely counted among their number, though she remarried several times and had an independent power base within the faction. She argued for free-love, criticized the family, and sought for women's economic indendence from men within the new society of the north. The Workers' Party ultimately advocated for a far more traditional continuation of the family unit and while women's education and political participation were still championed in name by the state, much of the social reforms of the early years were either rolled back or made toothless. Hŏ would briefly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Korea before being purged from power, though she would return to minor roles in government in the 70s and 80s. She lived until 1991.
[5] Ri Pong-su being a member of the Workers' Party in OTL, heavily linked to Kim Il-sung.
[6] The numbers in OTL being 86 for the WP, 30 DP, 30 CP, the rest being held by independents. ITTL the body has slightly more power, meeting more often then the rubber stamp to the Presidium of OTL. Both the change in numbers and character are due to the different political situation in the north.
[7] The 2nd Sam-il Movement will be the focus of the next update.
[8] This is a major change, with OTL North Korea having a nominal head of state position held by Kim Tu-bong and a head of government held by Kim Il-sung. As Soviet-held Korea is attempting to portray itself as being more democratic, it is deliberately aping element of Western democracies to maintain this image. It also has the benefit of raising up Kim Il-sung from his lower position ITTL, with him being presented as the youthful face of the party backed by the Soviets. Additionally, ITTL the KPR is recognized as the "true ideological predecessor" to this new government, with it adopting the same name and stylings. In OTL the KPR was respected in the DPRK but was also seen as a failure due to the broader left being unable to unite and resist the US military.
[9] In OTL Pak Hŏn-yŏng and Lyuh Woon-hyung fell out with one another after 1945, with both competing for control of the left wing in the south. Their relationship would sour considerably, with each attempting to have the other harassed and arrested. Lyuh and Kim Il-sung were largely affable in comparison, with Kim viewing Pak more as a rival for control of the communists than as an ally. Here the relationship between the three is quite different, with the factional infighting largely contained with the Workers' Party as Kim Tu-bong's grip on power grows increasingly weak in the face of the rising People's Party.
[10] Here again we see mention of Erich Lars, who will be the first writer of the "revisionist school" of history regarding communist Korea. Within the historical sense, revisionism is not support for dictatorship but rather a challenging of orthodoxy and interpretation of the historical record. Beginning in the early 1970s, Lars will be one of the first to identify the "home-grown" characteristics of Korean communism, rather than simply labeling the leadership of the state as being Russian-installed puppets. He will face push-back, much of it very reasonable, for the level of independence he ascribes to the regime.
A/N: So far, much of my writing has painted a rather rosy picture of the Soviet-held north. This will change with my next planned chapter from perspective of the work The Great Betrayal, Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. I will also be posting my visual guide to the government soon, as there are just too many damn names for most to keep track of.
Beyond that, I'll have at least 2 chapters on social changes and development, 1 on the situation in the south, and 1 on international affairs (regarding Korea, as butterflies are being kept relatively minimal until the mid 1950s).
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Rosenheim
Donor
If we're talking about Ferenc Nagy, Prime Minister of Hungary from Feb 1946 to May 1947, he was forced into exile as in OTL.
If it's Imre Nagy, then he's still a high-ranking member of the Hungarian Working People's Party (at least by 1949).
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Rosenheim
Donor
If I recall, 1947 was a competetive election, similar in many ways to those taking place ITTL Korea, with heavy Communist infiltration. In 1949 OTL, the smaller parties were forced into a national front. Between the two elections, the Social Democrats were forced into a complete fusion with the Communists. So, technically there are other parties at play by 1949.
But note that there is an upward bound of 1957 to that paragraph.
6. The Great Betrayal (Part 1)
Rosenheim
Donor
A/N: This was getting quite long, so I split this chapter in two. I don't normally put an A/N at the front, but I wanted to note ahead of time that the text below's representation of anarchism in Korea is perhaps not as neutral or fact-based as it should be, something that can certainly arise when seeking to revise the historical records about a subject you are passionate about. Happy Holidays, have some totalitarianism.
Pak, Sung-jae (September 2017). “Chapter 4: The Origins of Popular Action and Resistance during Liberation,” The Great Betrayal: Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 91-97. [A]
As outlined in Chapter 2, the Japanese colonial project in Korea operated within a complex system of surveillance and subjugation. The severity and scale of Japanese state terror in its later stages acted so as to condition the populace into total docility, seeking to eliminate avenues of resistance through the control of speech, free association, expression, and thought. The power of this police state in Korea was never total, even in the midst of the worst days of the Asia-Pacific War when the totalitarian mobilization of the body politic through State Shintoism, mass conscription, and forced labor became an all-pervasive norm. However, it is clear that anti-Japanese action operated in reaction to the totalitarian conditions which engendered it. From its explosive emergence onto the scene with the mass protests of the March 1st Movement of 1919 until the arrival of Soviet and US forces strangled any post-war experiment in the cradle, it was ultimately anarchist principles which guided native Korean resistance to Japanese colonialism.
While there were many Korean anarchisms existing in multiplicity with one another, during the period perhaps the predominant understanding of the ideology in Korea was one that was simultaneously nationalist and anarcho-syndicalist in practice. Though national anarchism has since come to be dominated by the activities of small far-right wing paramilitary groups, at the time the demand for Korean liberation from oppressive Japanese rule meshed well with calls for a society built upon theories of limited central government and Kroptkinite mutual aid. The two decades following the first 3-1 Movement saw the emergence of widespread social movements which sought to self-educate, organize, and protect peasants and workers at the local level. At its peak during the early 1930s, Korean anarchism(s) held broad and popular ideological sway, with arms of cooperation stretching into Manchuria, Japan, and China proper. To provide a proper accounting of the ideology, this chapter seeks to address the following questions: How did anarchism come to pervade the Korean masses? What form did anarchist resistance take in everyday life? And how did anarchism inform mass action during and immediately after Liberation? [1]
The Establishment of Anarchist Thought in Korea
While the tired trope of Korea being desperately torn between the influence of China and Japan has been rightfully retired in recent years, it is true that the two primary entry points of anarchism into the Korean political discourse were not located in the peninsula itself. Instead anarchism came to Korea through the unorthodox political education of its emigres in Shanghai, the familiar haunt of Korean political exiles, and Tokyo, the center of an empire that was itself already being torn apart by its contradictions. In Shanghai, Koreans joined with Chinese and Japanese anarchists influenced by the French and Russian schools. This would culminate in alliance as the Quanzhou Movement in 1928, where the three groups relocated to Fujian Province in an attempt to educate Chinese peasants and train them in self defense from bandits and communist groups. In contrast, the anarchist movement in Japan proper was more closely associated with its native communists, though there was a distinct split between the two groups after 1922. In deeply political Tokyo, joint Japanese-Korean archarchist newspapers and reading groups flourished, while in the more industrial Osaka, anarchists were directly involved in labor organization among Korean factory workers. Though perhaps the most famous example of this union was that of the anarchist couple Pak Yol and Fumiko Kaneko, who were arrested in Tokyo during the anti-Korean terror after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 for allegedly plotting against the imperial family, it was the industrial experience which more strongly impacted the anarchist movement in Korea. In conjunction with the nationalist influenced training of the agricultural anarchists based in China, as individuals moved back and forth between the metropole, the colonies, and political safe havens in exile they spread their understanding of anarchism as not just a political ideology but as a methodology for resistance. In this manner, so too did the writings of Osugi Sakae and Pyotr Kropotkin begin to find their purchase in Korea proper. [2]
Photograph of the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese founders of the anarchist Quanzhou Movement in Fujian, c. 1928. Source: Association for Anarchism Studies (Blog)
Between 1920 and 1945, anarchist thought impacted nearly every major political ideology in the peninsula, from the broad-based left-wing rhetoric later utilized by Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk and Lyuh Woon-hyung to even the ultra-nationalism adopted by many rightists in the south. Kim Seong-suk (1898-1953), an independence activist, socialist, and Buddhist monk wrote of the early intellectual ferment of the 1920s: “Anarchism was the most popular among all the -isms. I think all of the leftist ideas were infused in it. For anarchism, I read Kroptikin’s Confession. This was a very good book for [even the understanding of] socialism.” In the face of the Japanese government's absolute monopoly on force, by necessity indigenous resistance was decentralized and largely leaderless, instead relying upon mass action in bringing about lasting social change. The political strategies for resistance were threefold: direct and indirect protest in both industrial and agricultural contexts, mass-emigration to areas outside of direct state surveillance, and, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, armed mobile insurgency. [3]
Political Strategies for Mass Action
To begin with industrial protests, between 1915 and 1928 Korean participation in the Japanese industrial economy rapidly increased both in Korea itself as well as in Japan proper, with an increasing segment of the Korean populace available as a cheap labor force due to declining land ownership (as will be addressed below). Their participation in the workforce was matched by a growing participation in labor activism, with the Yūaikai (Greater Japan Labor Federation) adopting the hereto unprecedented stance of fighting for the equal treatment of Japanese and Korean laborers in 1921. However, in the midst of the Great Depression, Japanese capitalists routinely used Korean workers to divide the labor movement, with firms downsizing targeting Koreans in Japan at far higher rates than their Japanese compatriots. By 1932, the Yūaikai had reversed their stance, being well along the way in its transformation into a right-wing government-directed organization. Following the invasion of China in 1937, Koreans would once again be widely utilized as a cheap labor force to fill the ranks of mobilized soldiers and to increase wartime industrial capacity. Pyongyang became a center of industrial activity close to the front, with Japanese-owned chemical plants, steel mills, and munition factories filling the skyline.
In this context, Korean labor activism varied considerably. During the earlier period, strike activity was conducted alongside Japanese laborers seeking better working conditions, cooperating as relative equals. Following the economic collapse of the late 1920s, however, these labor activities took on a far more radical and nationalist character even under the pall of desperation and coercion. Protests, work stoppages, and sabotage were all notable labor actions conducted by Koreans both in the peninsula and abroad, but these also had severe risks associated with them. Perhaps the most popular avenue of resistance was the simple abandonment of duties. Between 1939 and 1942, for example, a mining company in Hokkaido lost close to a third of its conscripted laborers after they fled its horrible conditions. Similar events would be repeated by Koreans elsewhere, with mass action impeding the war production effort. [4]
With regards to agricultural protests, the late 1910s and 1920s saw a tremendous expansion of agricultural capacity in southern Korea, with the first World War leading to a rice boom in the peninsula due to shortages in Japan. However, this explosive growth saw its benefits limited to the Japanese administrators and the absentee Korean landlords, with rising prices for rice crops seeing only increased taxation for tenant farmers along with a continual demand to limit their own consumption of grains to millet, wheat, and barley imported from abroad. As close to seventy percent of the rural population operated as tenants and semi-tenants, this state of affairs being a continuation of late Chosŏn economic trends in land tenure rather than a direct Japanese imposition, the increasing power of the landlords placed higher and higher pressures upon rural farmers and limited any form of social mobility.
Tenancy protests in the early 1920s operated under the relative moderation of Japanese cultural policies brought about after the 3-1 Movement. These initial protests were largely limited to the heavily commercialized agriculture of the south, with the demands including landlords paying their own rising land taxes rather than merely passing the economic burden down to their tenants, rent reduction, and the allowance of additional self-cultivation. These nascent peasant unions utilized threats of non-cultivation or harvest reduction while refusing to pay rents. Though a few groups made some limited headway, these movements were largely ineffectual and were often suppressed by force, especially after 1926. After the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, efforts to simply improve local economic situations fell by the wayside in the face of widespread starvation and destitution.
During the 1930s the Japanese domination of the peninsula and overall economic collapse saw the regression of land ownership among hundreds of thousands of Korean peasants. Former self-cultivators and semi-tenants were forced into highly unfair tenancy agreements where they proceeded to accumulate massive debt. Thus the conditions on the ground saw the limited agricultural reformers transform into rural revolutionaries. The most enduring form of agricultural protest in the public mind from the period are the so-called Red Peasants Unions (chŏksaek nongmin chohap), in large part because of their later subordination to the dominating narratives of the post-Liberation Korean People’s Republic. In truth these were a diverse array of local actors whose activities spanned over a decade, but a broad set of attributes as to the nature of these projects can be outlined. These organizations were largely based in the less populated north of the peninsula, where the percentage of land owner-cultivators was relatively high. Local peasant unions routinely acted as the nucleus of (limited) self-governance where, unlike the previous reformist disputes, protests directly confronted colonial officials and mobilized large numbers of the peasantry.
Northeastern Korea in particular had long been considered a provincial backwater and was often excluded from the political decision making in Korea even prior to Japanese rule. Before the 1930s, governmental interference in the north, while present, was largely limited to the population centers near Pyongyang. This made the sudden outburst of insubordination in the rural Hamgyŏng provinces appear all the more surprising to the Japanese colonial elite. Beginning in 1931, mass protests among Korean villagers sought not only a fairer accommodation with their landlords, but a revision of tax policy, the end of governmental interference into village affairs, an end to discrimination against Koreans, and a loosening of overall political restrictions. Far from being spontaneous actions, these protests were highly organized with the self-led unions often holding reading circles and night schools for political education. The Japanese response to these demands were often brutal, with thousands arrested and forced into colonial prisons. After the wider invasion of China, political suppression of these groups would become only more intense.
Though direct protest was notable, indirect protest was far more common and lasted throughout the wartime years. With agricultural goods like rice and cotton being demanded by the militarist regime to feed and clothe the ever-growing Japanese machine of war, farmers would often hide crops from tax assessors and secretly shift their production to wheat and barley. Korean villagers spread anti-Japanese rumors, sang folk songs with coded messages of resistance, and routinely hid from the ever-increasing conscriptions to fill the labor shortages in factories and mines in both Korea and abroad. There was also a notable uptick in the amount of Koreans continuing the trend of fleeing to the outskirts of Manchuria and other places beyond the direct reach of the state.
Mass emigration as a political strategy began as early as the annexation of Korea in 1910, with hundreds of thousands of Koreans fleeing to Manchuria, Russia, and elsewhere over the next thirty years. Manchuria in particular saw sustained settlement as the borderland between the two regions was porous and, despite the often harsh conditions, a substantial community of Koreans was present even prior to the 1931 Manchurian Incident. Even after their invasion of the region, Japanese political control over Manchuria was tenuous and waxed and waned with troop movements and their strength of arms. While the activities of the communist partisans in the region have been long celebrated by the KPR, contemporaneous with (and by some accounts preceding) them was the anarchist controlled region that became known as the New Korean People’s Association (Shimin Joseon Ch'ongyŏnhaphoe). [5]
By 1929, there were close to two million Koreans in Manchuria, living in disparate villages throughout the border provinces. Drawn from the anarchist tradition in China, as the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin’s power collapsed, the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAFM) and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF) emerged as several of the leading political entities in the region, alongside anti-Stalinist left-wing forces and a group loyal to the right-wing Korean Provisional Government based in Shanghai. Working in close cooperation with one another, the two anarchist groups founded an autonomous zone of loose control, operating on the basis of mutual aid and personal liberty. Villages and camps were run based on the principles of participatory democracy, with elected officers training their participants in local governance and self defense. Following the Japanese invasion in 1931, however, the People’s Association dissolved. Rather than attempting to hold territory, the KAFM and KACF instead devoted all resources to resisting the advance of the invading army using hit and run tactics, even as they themselves suffered raids and assassination attempts from both the Japanese and Stalinist aligned forces. Despite this acrimonious relationship with the communists, in 1935 the anarchists chose to align themselves with the broader Chinese communist forces in a popular front, continuing to fight against Japan until Liberation.
Rough representation of partisan zone of influence in Manchuria, c. 1930. The green zone corresponds to anti-Stalinist leftist groups, the purple to the anarchists, and the yellow the KPG-aligned rightists. Source: HelloHistory (Blogpost)
When the surrender of Japan came in August 1945, what has been described as a spontaneous uprising rocked all of Korea. Villages and cities began to self-organize, fields were seized from absentee landlords, and laborers took over factories and established workers’ councils. Far from being an awakening to the age of mass politics, as Curtis Debruce once wrote, Koreans utilized the political training and methods of resistance they had been learning diligently for the past thirty five years to seize power from their oppressors. Unfortunately, the masses soon found themselves in the grip of not only two foreign occupiers, but a class of imposed leadership which would quickly target the hard-earned rights and freedoms they had just won...
[A] The above work is built from my reading of two texts: Dongyoun Hwang's Anarchism in Korea, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016 and Gi-Wook Shin's Peasant Protest & Social Change in Colonial Korea, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996. The pro-anarchist slant of the former work is represented in my own text here, as Hwang outlines a hugely popular anarchist movement yet it unable to truly provide evidence for it within his (extremely fascinating) work. Here, the ITTL historian Sung-jae Pak links together any form of non-centralized resistance to ideological anarchism, which is somewhat dubious. However, the information about direct and indirect protest should be taken as accurate and true to OTL developments, with TTL material being largely reserved for Part 2. This is also a history from below, directly rejecting a focus on the "great men" of the era, which is a departure from much of the texts I've presented prior to it.
[1] Despite my warnings above, anarchism was indeed a popular ideology in Korea as it was in much of the world. However, it entered into a period of decline globally during the 1920s faced with the triumph of Communism in seizing power, with it being largely eclipsed as a major ideology. Additionally, the influence of nationalism on anarchism was (and still is) seen as a right-wing deviation by many anarchists, being a major point of contention for colonized peoples seeking their own state.
[2] Pak Yol and Fumiko Kaneko were real individuals, even recently being portrayed in the 2017 film Anarchist From Colony in South Korea. Osugi Sakae was an influential Japanese anarchist, also infamously assassinated by the Japanese military in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
[3] This quotation originates from the OTL work edited by Hakjun Kim, Hyeokmyeong gadeul ui hang-il hoesang: Kim Seongsuk, Jang Geonsang, Jeong Hwaam, Yi Ganghun ui dongnip tujaeng [Revolutionaries' Recollections of Anti-Japanese Struggles: Struggles for Independence by Kim Seongsuk, Jang Geonsnag, Jeong Hwaam, and Yi Ganghun.] Seoul: Mineumsa, 1988. This was originally sourced from my reading of Anarchism in Korea, pg 94.
[4] I actually wrote my MA thesis on the colonization of Hokkaido, with pre-war and war-time mine labor forming a large portion of my text. This event is true to OTL.
[5] Typically this is presented in OTL as the Korean People's Association in Manchuria. The extant of popular control or actual governmentality of this group is difficult to discern and almost impossible to source. I will also note that the local level democracy being praised here can also debatedly be said to have been found in almost all of the partisan groups, including Kim Il-sung's, so the "success" of political anarchism found in these isolated and militant cells should be treated with as much suspicion as the "success" found in the study of the modern day Zapatistas or Rojava. Though broadly sympathetic, the activities of partisan groups present little information for how they will actually govern.
Pak, Sung-jae (September 2017). “Chapter 4: The Origins of Popular Action and Resistance during Liberation,” The Great Betrayal: Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 91-97. [A]
As outlined in Chapter 2, the Japanese colonial project in Korea operated within a complex system of surveillance and subjugation. The severity and scale of Japanese state terror in its later stages acted so as to condition the populace into total docility, seeking to eliminate avenues of resistance through the control of speech, free association, expression, and thought. The power of this police state in Korea was never total, even in the midst of the worst days of the Asia-Pacific War when the totalitarian mobilization of the body politic through State Shintoism, mass conscription, and forced labor became an all-pervasive norm. However, it is clear that anti-Japanese action operated in reaction to the totalitarian conditions which engendered it. From its explosive emergence onto the scene with the mass protests of the March 1st Movement of 1919 until the arrival of Soviet and US forces strangled any post-war experiment in the cradle, it was ultimately anarchist principles which guided native Korean resistance to Japanese colonialism.
While there were many Korean anarchisms existing in multiplicity with one another, during the period perhaps the predominant understanding of the ideology in Korea was one that was simultaneously nationalist and anarcho-syndicalist in practice. Though national anarchism has since come to be dominated by the activities of small far-right wing paramilitary groups, at the time the demand for Korean liberation from oppressive Japanese rule meshed well with calls for a society built upon theories of limited central government and Kroptkinite mutual aid. The two decades following the first 3-1 Movement saw the emergence of widespread social movements which sought to self-educate, organize, and protect peasants and workers at the local level. At its peak during the early 1930s, Korean anarchism(s) held broad and popular ideological sway, with arms of cooperation stretching into Manchuria, Japan, and China proper. To provide a proper accounting of the ideology, this chapter seeks to address the following questions: How did anarchism come to pervade the Korean masses? What form did anarchist resistance take in everyday life? And how did anarchism inform mass action during and immediately after Liberation? [1]
The Establishment of Anarchist Thought in Korea
While the tired trope of Korea being desperately torn between the influence of China and Japan has been rightfully retired in recent years, it is true that the two primary entry points of anarchism into the Korean political discourse were not located in the peninsula itself. Instead anarchism came to Korea through the unorthodox political education of its emigres in Shanghai, the familiar haunt of Korean political exiles, and Tokyo, the center of an empire that was itself already being torn apart by its contradictions. In Shanghai, Koreans joined with Chinese and Japanese anarchists influenced by the French and Russian schools. This would culminate in alliance as the Quanzhou Movement in 1928, where the three groups relocated to Fujian Province in an attempt to educate Chinese peasants and train them in self defense from bandits and communist groups. In contrast, the anarchist movement in Japan proper was more closely associated with its native communists, though there was a distinct split between the two groups after 1922. In deeply political Tokyo, joint Japanese-Korean archarchist newspapers and reading groups flourished, while in the more industrial Osaka, anarchists were directly involved in labor organization among Korean factory workers. Though perhaps the most famous example of this union was that of the anarchist couple Pak Yol and Fumiko Kaneko, who were arrested in Tokyo during the anti-Korean terror after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 for allegedly plotting against the imperial family, it was the industrial experience which more strongly impacted the anarchist movement in Korea. In conjunction with the nationalist influenced training of the agricultural anarchists based in China, as individuals moved back and forth between the metropole, the colonies, and political safe havens in exile they spread their understanding of anarchism as not just a political ideology but as a methodology for resistance. In this manner, so too did the writings of Osugi Sakae and Pyotr Kropotkin begin to find their purchase in Korea proper. [2]
Photograph of the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese founders of the anarchist Quanzhou Movement in Fujian, c. 1928. Source: Association for Anarchism Studies (Blog)
Between 1920 and 1945, anarchist thought impacted nearly every major political ideology in the peninsula, from the broad-based left-wing rhetoric later utilized by Hyŏn Chun-hyŏk and Lyuh Woon-hyung to even the ultra-nationalism adopted by many rightists in the south. Kim Seong-suk (1898-1953), an independence activist, socialist, and Buddhist monk wrote of the early intellectual ferment of the 1920s: “Anarchism was the most popular among all the -isms. I think all of the leftist ideas were infused in it. For anarchism, I read Kroptikin’s Confession. This was a very good book for [even the understanding of] socialism.” In the face of the Japanese government's absolute monopoly on force, by necessity indigenous resistance was decentralized and largely leaderless, instead relying upon mass action in bringing about lasting social change. The political strategies for resistance were threefold: direct and indirect protest in both industrial and agricultural contexts, mass-emigration to areas outside of direct state surveillance, and, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, armed mobile insurgency. [3]
Political Strategies for Mass Action
To begin with industrial protests, between 1915 and 1928 Korean participation in the Japanese industrial economy rapidly increased both in Korea itself as well as in Japan proper, with an increasing segment of the Korean populace available as a cheap labor force due to declining land ownership (as will be addressed below). Their participation in the workforce was matched by a growing participation in labor activism, with the Yūaikai (Greater Japan Labor Federation) adopting the hereto unprecedented stance of fighting for the equal treatment of Japanese and Korean laborers in 1921. However, in the midst of the Great Depression, Japanese capitalists routinely used Korean workers to divide the labor movement, with firms downsizing targeting Koreans in Japan at far higher rates than their Japanese compatriots. By 1932, the Yūaikai had reversed their stance, being well along the way in its transformation into a right-wing government-directed organization. Following the invasion of China in 1937, Koreans would once again be widely utilized as a cheap labor force to fill the ranks of mobilized soldiers and to increase wartime industrial capacity. Pyongyang became a center of industrial activity close to the front, with Japanese-owned chemical plants, steel mills, and munition factories filling the skyline.
In this context, Korean labor activism varied considerably. During the earlier period, strike activity was conducted alongside Japanese laborers seeking better working conditions, cooperating as relative equals. Following the economic collapse of the late 1920s, however, these labor activities took on a far more radical and nationalist character even under the pall of desperation and coercion. Protests, work stoppages, and sabotage were all notable labor actions conducted by Koreans both in the peninsula and abroad, but these also had severe risks associated with them. Perhaps the most popular avenue of resistance was the simple abandonment of duties. Between 1939 and 1942, for example, a mining company in Hokkaido lost close to a third of its conscripted laborers after they fled its horrible conditions. Similar events would be repeated by Koreans elsewhere, with mass action impeding the war production effort. [4]
With regards to agricultural protests, the late 1910s and 1920s saw a tremendous expansion of agricultural capacity in southern Korea, with the first World War leading to a rice boom in the peninsula due to shortages in Japan. However, this explosive growth saw its benefits limited to the Japanese administrators and the absentee Korean landlords, with rising prices for rice crops seeing only increased taxation for tenant farmers along with a continual demand to limit their own consumption of grains to millet, wheat, and barley imported from abroad. As close to seventy percent of the rural population operated as tenants and semi-tenants, this state of affairs being a continuation of late Chosŏn economic trends in land tenure rather than a direct Japanese imposition, the increasing power of the landlords placed higher and higher pressures upon rural farmers and limited any form of social mobility.
Tenancy protests in the early 1920s operated under the relative moderation of Japanese cultural policies brought about after the 3-1 Movement. These initial protests were largely limited to the heavily commercialized agriculture of the south, with the demands including landlords paying their own rising land taxes rather than merely passing the economic burden down to their tenants, rent reduction, and the allowance of additional self-cultivation. These nascent peasant unions utilized threats of non-cultivation or harvest reduction while refusing to pay rents. Though a few groups made some limited headway, these movements were largely ineffectual and were often suppressed by force, especially after 1926. After the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, efforts to simply improve local economic situations fell by the wayside in the face of widespread starvation and destitution.
During the 1930s the Japanese domination of the peninsula and overall economic collapse saw the regression of land ownership among hundreds of thousands of Korean peasants. Former self-cultivators and semi-tenants were forced into highly unfair tenancy agreements where they proceeded to accumulate massive debt. Thus the conditions on the ground saw the limited agricultural reformers transform into rural revolutionaries. The most enduring form of agricultural protest in the public mind from the period are the so-called Red Peasants Unions (chŏksaek nongmin chohap), in large part because of their later subordination to the dominating narratives of the post-Liberation Korean People’s Republic. In truth these were a diverse array of local actors whose activities spanned over a decade, but a broad set of attributes as to the nature of these projects can be outlined. These organizations were largely based in the less populated north of the peninsula, where the percentage of land owner-cultivators was relatively high. Local peasant unions routinely acted as the nucleus of (limited) self-governance where, unlike the previous reformist disputes, protests directly confronted colonial officials and mobilized large numbers of the peasantry.
Northeastern Korea in particular had long been considered a provincial backwater and was often excluded from the political decision making in Korea even prior to Japanese rule. Before the 1930s, governmental interference in the north, while present, was largely limited to the population centers near Pyongyang. This made the sudden outburst of insubordination in the rural Hamgyŏng provinces appear all the more surprising to the Japanese colonial elite. Beginning in 1931, mass protests among Korean villagers sought not only a fairer accommodation with their landlords, but a revision of tax policy, the end of governmental interference into village affairs, an end to discrimination against Koreans, and a loosening of overall political restrictions. Far from being spontaneous actions, these protests were highly organized with the self-led unions often holding reading circles and night schools for political education. The Japanese response to these demands were often brutal, with thousands arrested and forced into colonial prisons. After the wider invasion of China, political suppression of these groups would become only more intense.
Though direct protest was notable, indirect protest was far more common and lasted throughout the wartime years. With agricultural goods like rice and cotton being demanded by the militarist regime to feed and clothe the ever-growing Japanese machine of war, farmers would often hide crops from tax assessors and secretly shift their production to wheat and barley. Korean villagers spread anti-Japanese rumors, sang folk songs with coded messages of resistance, and routinely hid from the ever-increasing conscriptions to fill the labor shortages in factories and mines in both Korea and abroad. There was also a notable uptick in the amount of Koreans continuing the trend of fleeing to the outskirts of Manchuria and other places beyond the direct reach of the state.
Mass emigration as a political strategy began as early as the annexation of Korea in 1910, with hundreds of thousands of Koreans fleeing to Manchuria, Russia, and elsewhere over the next thirty years. Manchuria in particular saw sustained settlement as the borderland between the two regions was porous and, despite the often harsh conditions, a substantial community of Koreans was present even prior to the 1931 Manchurian Incident. Even after their invasion of the region, Japanese political control over Manchuria was tenuous and waxed and waned with troop movements and their strength of arms. While the activities of the communist partisans in the region have been long celebrated by the KPR, contemporaneous with (and by some accounts preceding) them was the anarchist controlled region that became known as the New Korean People’s Association (Shimin Joseon Ch'ongyŏnhaphoe). [5]
By 1929, there were close to two million Koreans in Manchuria, living in disparate villages throughout the border provinces. Drawn from the anarchist tradition in China, as the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin’s power collapsed, the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAFM) and the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF) emerged as several of the leading political entities in the region, alongside anti-Stalinist left-wing forces and a group loyal to the right-wing Korean Provisional Government based in Shanghai. Working in close cooperation with one another, the two anarchist groups founded an autonomous zone of loose control, operating on the basis of mutual aid and personal liberty. Villages and camps were run based on the principles of participatory democracy, with elected officers training their participants in local governance and self defense. Following the Japanese invasion in 1931, however, the People’s Association dissolved. Rather than attempting to hold territory, the KAFM and KACF instead devoted all resources to resisting the advance of the invading army using hit and run tactics, even as they themselves suffered raids and assassination attempts from both the Japanese and Stalinist aligned forces. Despite this acrimonious relationship with the communists, in 1935 the anarchists chose to align themselves with the broader Chinese communist forces in a popular front, continuing to fight against Japan until Liberation.
Rough representation of partisan zone of influence in Manchuria, c. 1930. The green zone corresponds to anti-Stalinist leftist groups, the purple to the anarchists, and the yellow the KPG-aligned rightists. Source: HelloHistory (Blogpost)
When the surrender of Japan came in August 1945, what has been described as a spontaneous uprising rocked all of Korea. Villages and cities began to self-organize, fields were seized from absentee landlords, and laborers took over factories and established workers’ councils. Far from being an awakening to the age of mass politics, as Curtis Debruce once wrote, Koreans utilized the political training and methods of resistance they had been learning diligently for the past thirty five years to seize power from their oppressors. Unfortunately, the masses soon found themselves in the grip of not only two foreign occupiers, but a class of imposed leadership which would quickly target the hard-earned rights and freedoms they had just won...
[A] The above work is built from my reading of two texts: Dongyoun Hwang's Anarchism in Korea, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016 and Gi-Wook Shin's Peasant Protest & Social Change in Colonial Korea, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1996. The pro-anarchist slant of the former work is represented in my own text here, as Hwang outlines a hugely popular anarchist movement yet it unable to truly provide evidence for it within his (extremely fascinating) work. Here, the ITTL historian Sung-jae Pak links together any form of non-centralized resistance to ideological anarchism, which is somewhat dubious. However, the information about direct and indirect protest should be taken as accurate and true to OTL developments, with TTL material being largely reserved for Part 2. This is also a history from below, directly rejecting a focus on the "great men" of the era, which is a departure from much of the texts I've presented prior to it.
[1] Despite my warnings above, anarchism was indeed a popular ideology in Korea as it was in much of the world. However, it entered into a period of decline globally during the 1920s faced with the triumph of Communism in seizing power, with it being largely eclipsed as a major ideology. Additionally, the influence of nationalism on anarchism was (and still is) seen as a right-wing deviation by many anarchists, being a major point of contention for colonized peoples seeking their own state.
[2] Pak Yol and Fumiko Kaneko were real individuals, even recently being portrayed in the 2017 film Anarchist From Colony in South Korea. Osugi Sakae was an influential Japanese anarchist, also infamously assassinated by the Japanese military in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake.
[3] This quotation originates from the OTL work edited by Hakjun Kim, Hyeokmyeong gadeul ui hang-il hoesang: Kim Seongsuk, Jang Geonsang, Jeong Hwaam, Yi Ganghun ui dongnip tujaeng [Revolutionaries' Recollections of Anti-Japanese Struggles: Struggles for Independence by Kim Seongsuk, Jang Geonsnag, Jeong Hwaam, and Yi Ganghun.] Seoul: Mineumsa, 1988. This was originally sourced from my reading of Anarchism in Korea, pg 94.
[4] I actually wrote my MA thesis on the colonization of Hokkaido, with pre-war and war-time mine labor forming a large portion of my text. This event is true to OTL.
[5] Typically this is presented in OTL as the Korean People's Association in Manchuria. The extant of popular control or actual governmentality of this group is difficult to discern and almost impossible to source. I will also note that the local level democracy being praised here can also debatedly be said to have been found in almost all of the partisan groups, including Kim Il-sung's, so the "success" of political anarchism found in these isolated and militant cells should be treated with as much suspicion as the "success" found in the study of the modern day Zapatistas or Rojava. Though broadly sympathetic, the activities of partisan groups present little information for how they will actually govern.
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Rosenheim
Donor
While conducting some further research for a general culture update, it turns out that Ahn Eak-tai (the composer of South Korea's Aegukga) became unpalatable to the left due to his relative collaboration with both the Japanese and the Nazis, having served as a conductor for a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Manchuria and being tremendously active in Nazi-held Europe during the 1940s. While far from a die-hard supporter (Europe was the place to be if you were a classically trained composer and conductor and "Symphonic Fantasy Korea" had already become a popular nationalist/anti-Japanese song even prior to its tune's usage for the national anthem), I can only imagine that the Soviets and North Koreans would push for a properly "revolutionary" anthem in its place.
As such, the south adopted it as in OTL, with it eventually being banned in the north. Unfortunate for music, but that's part-in-parcel of the cultural domination of a totalitarian communist state.
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GiantMonkeyMan
Banned
Great timeline so far. I'd heard about the anarchist federations but it's great to learn about them in detail.
So, both the current SK tune and the lyrics get axed in there is a reunification?
Rosenheim
Donor
Unfortunately, thems the brakes.
I'm sure that, in the event of a (forceful) reunification, the SK anthem will still be popular among the 1st and 2nd generation exile communities. A negotiated reunification would allow for more freedoms, but the tensions at play make that unlikely.
7. The Great Betrayal (Part 2)
Rosenheim
Donor
A/N: Well, with our buddy Kim reappearing in the North Korea, I figured it was a sign that I should attempt to resurrect this timeline of mine. There's no reason that this post took five months, especially since this chapter really isn't done - there will have to be a part 3. But, I right now I need to post something or I know I never will. As was the case with this TTL author last time, remember that the text is more predisposed to see the influence of anarchism in Korea than perhaps is reasonable.
Pak, Sung-jae (September 2017). “Chapter 4: The Origins of Popular Action and Resistance during Liberation,” The Great Betrayal: Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 98-102. [A]
Anarchy and Liberation
The heady first days of Korea’s Liberation have often been described by historians as a period of “judicial anarchy”, an assertion originally posited by US military intelligence in the aftermath of Japan’s retreat from the peninsula. That this formulation conveniently legitimizes the imposition of an unelected military government, the perpetuation of the colonial-era police force, and the propping of small far-right parties as “proper representatives of the Korea people” is less often stated. Similarly, proponents of the old revisionist school tend to regard the installation of Red Army officers as “advisors” in the north as being brought about by a genuine desire of the Soviets to reestablish order as much as in seeking to lay the foundations of the future communist state, even if a few critiques of the authoritarian nature of the occupation are offered.
Though it can be said that popular action during Liberation operated in the absence of any prevailing social institutions which could demand moderation, or even a uniformity of aims among its participants, the weeks prior to and months immediately after the official surrender of Japan on August 15 were not the image of chaos and disarray put forward by either of Korea’s occupiers. The tacit acceptance of these dominating narratives has loomed large over studies of the Liberation period, presenting an image of a Korea that needed to be managed rather than one that was rapidly mobilizing along its own course before external intervention. Even when political histories do recognize the independent actors of the period, they tend to write solely of the stories of Seoul and Pyongyang. They attempt to carefully reconstruct the interplay of the various faction leaders, the jockeying for position that would establish the political classes which would become dominant under the power structures developed by the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus while one can find a complete listing of the leadership of the CKPI and their opposition in the DPK with regards to Seoul, along with the various political positionings of Cho Man-sik, Kim Sŏng-ju, and Kim Tu-bong being tracked in great detail in post-Liberation Pyongyang, little has been written about the broad political consciousness spread across the peninsula during the period. [1]
The replacement of the diffuse and organic grassroots movement of the moment’s actuality with either Lyuh Woon-hyung’s rightful action in “attempting revolution” or the individual heroism of figures like Syngman Rhee in halting it, depending on the bias of the historian in question, represents the deliberate silencing of 1945 Korea’s mass democracy. This period saw the attempt to restructure society from the bottom-up by all manner of local actors, from factory occupations and self-directed land reform on the left to the organization of the nascent provincial political structures on the right. Far from being an affair driven by Seoul or Pyongyang, these organs of democracy varied wildly in nature and sought to establish themselves on their own terms, enjoining with the state or resisting state control based upon decisions made at the individual level. It was only through their ultimate subversion (as in the north) and/or elimination (as in the south) that these active and amorphous entities became solidified as the politically inert, lifeless, and uniform “People’s Committees” found in history. [2]
“People’s Committees”, Local Democracy, and Mass Action
Between August and September 1945 a wide multitude of local-level political committees flourished throughout the nation, claiming to represent 14 provinces, 2 islands, 21 cities, 218 counties, 103 villages, and over 2000 smaller townships in total. Though small, overlapping, and often ill-disciplined, these new local administrations were largely successful in maintaining the peace and organizing basic social services. This brief period is typically referred to by modern historians as being that of the first abortive “People’s Republic of Korea,” bookended with either the landing of Lieutenant General John R. Hodge in Incheon in early September or the November 9 Incident two months later. Thus all of these emergent organs for local democracy are prominently labeled in history as “People’s Committees”, established and operating as part of the CPKI (and the first PRK) under Lyuh Woon-hyung.
Image of downtown Seoul, August 15, immediately after the announcement of Japan's unconditional surrender. Source: Korea Times.
In truth, such political activity did not simply emerge overnight upon receiving marching orders from Seoul (or Washington or Moscow, for that matter). Everyday life in colonial Korea had long become snared in an intricate web of overlapping spheres of political mobilization, with leftist groups, peasant unions, and Japanese backed anti-communist patriotic societies all training the populace in the ways of mass politics. When Japanese rule was broken, it is thus unsurprising that the Korean people immediately began to organize on their own terms. To examine the nature of Liberation as experienced outside of the city centers, we can only turn to eyewitness accounts. Speaking in papers smuggled out of her house arrest, the imprisoned anti-Communist dissident Kye Hye-bin wrote of her teenage experience in a rural village in what was then Hwanghae Province in the north:
After the bureaucratic organs, military, quasi-military, and policing organizations were some of the first and most common groups to be established during Liberation. In some cases this was as simple as formerly conscripted units defecting from the Japanese military en masse, taking on a new name and leadership. In others, able-bodied students joined with martial artists and physical education teachers to train together and keep the peace. Ch’oe Yong-dal gave recognition to these movements with his formal establishment of the CPKI’s Youth Peace Preservation Corps, but also included in their number was the right-leaning Korean Student-Soldier League and the National Preparatory Army (NPA). [5/6] The national leadership of these organizations was established long after their formation on an individual basis from town to town, thus it is notable that ultimately violence was contained and reprisals minimized by largely self-directed entities. These bodies of course existed in deliberate opposition to the preexisting colonial-era police force, which consisted of Japanese officers and their Korean collaborators and had been a routine vehicle for political suppression, torture, and state killings. The latter group retained its power throughout the south of the country, especially in and around the prominent port cities which were being used to transfer Japanese personnel to the metropole. In the north, however, the incoming Soviet forces chose to temporarily transfer authority to indigenous peacekeeping organizations before establishing their own politically reliable force.
Photograph of the committee representing the port region of the city of Incheon, welcoming US soldiers. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The leadership of both the political committees and peace-keeping groups largely arose from those Koreans who had been most prominent in opposing Japanese rule rather than coming from those holding any one definitive political creed. Though largely left leaning on the whole, as the conservative elite had been heavily embraced by the colonial administration, the umbrella cast by these movements was wide and eclectic indeed. Even as student activists, political prisoners and communist radicals formed some of their core ranks, a good portion of the rural upper peasantry had been as fiercely opposed to Japanese rule as their poorer cousins and were welcomed with good graces, along with religious leaders and a number of prominent industrialists. The end goals of such groups were often widely varied as well, with some (as in David Park’s account) expecting their role to be merely temporary and transitional, while others viewed their organizations as being embryonic formulations of a new Korean state. It took until early September for the CPKI to achieve any semblance of widespread political penetration into the nation, with foreign troops having already seized control of significant portions of the country. The adoption of CPKI/PRK name and creed among local organizations should be understood as a largely post-hoc event, as the center recognized the de facto leadership of the political periphery.
It is also clear that mass action from the periphery did not wait for de jure legitimization by the “leadership” in Seoul. When the Soviets and the Americans entered Korea in late August and early September respectively, they found towns and cities being restructured from the ground up. Peasant unions had spread across the country like wildfire, some trying to dispossess their formal landlords outright while others argued for “merely” substantial land reform and a rationalization of tenant relationships and rents. These groups also led the collection of the new rice harvest and managed much of its distribution long before any central control was established. In the cities, numerous Japanese-owned factories were found occupied by worker’s unions, either clandestine groups now emerged from hiding or freshly organized radicals. Some of these factories were being run by the workers themselves, while others saw these workers having auctioned off the management to skilled and wealthy loyal Koreans. This state of affairs did not follow the typically conceived radical-moderate divide between north and south. In South Gyeongsang Province, near Busan in the south, the workers freely managed the factories prior to American intervention, while both Seoul and Pyongyang saw labor action in the immediate Liberation period more limited to strikes and work stoppages. In almost all cases, the leadership of the center lagged behind the mass movements.
By the last days of August, however, it became clear to all that Korea would be occupied by two large foreign powers regardless of the wishes of its populace. The remnants of Japanese colonial administration and their forces largely aligned themselves with the incoming Americans, selling off the factories and resources they controlled to their favored elite and spreading word of widespread civil disorder. When Lt. Gen Hodge arrived in September and established the American military government, he quickly identified the PRK as communist in nature and set loose his forces against it. While Lyuh remained confined to Seoul, taking ever more frantic measures in hopes of shoring up his waning power before his eventual flight north, the American military forces spread out through the south and dispersed the local committees. Some adopted these changes with good grace, with much of the rural elite eagerly falling behind the new order. Left-leaning groups however were swiftly and often brutally repressed and the piecemeal land reform and factory seizures rolled back. In the north the committees would remain and some of their political and social advances were recognized, yet the power and independence of these entities would be drastically reduced and the freedoms won would be withdrawn in the lived reality of everyday life despite the fact that they remained on paper.
Even with the establishment of foreign occupation, the principles of anarchist mass action would remain. From late 1945 to 1954, post-Liberation period Korea found itself roiled with strikes, protests, and calls for true liberation. From the chaos of the November 1st Incident, to the 1946 and 1947 Agricultural Protests and rebellions in the south, to the advent of the Second 3-1 Movement in the face the north and south dropping any pretense towards reunification, the state responses to these events would ultimately define the very nature of government in both the north and south. [7]
[A] Again, the above work is built from my reading Dongyoun Hwang's Anarchism in Korea, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016, though Chapter 3 of Bruce Cumming's Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981 is also used substantially throughout.
[1] This is also a significant problem in OTL's historiography of the division of Korea, especially in English-related material. To put it simply, we just don't have the historical data for a lot of the areas outside of Seoul and Pyongyang.
[2] While the term "People's Committee" [Inmin Wiwǒnhoe] was widely used throughout the peninsula, there were a number of other terms used contemporaneously and they tended to differ drastically from each other in terms of organization, scale, and aims.
[3] Kye Hye-bin has no direct counterpart in OTL North Korea. ITTL she was arrested in the late 1970s and remained under house arrest until her death in 1992 at the age of 66.
[4] This quote is based of that of Richard Kim, from his semi-fictionalized autobiography, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, New York City, NY: Praeger, 1970, 164-165. This passage is largely similar in tone, though Kim lived in the north during his youth compared to TTL's David Park.
[5] Ch’oe Yong-dal would later emerge as a powerful member of the Korean Worker's Party in the north, serving as the head of the Department of Justice.
[6] The National Preparatory Army would essentially shatter upon the American assumption of control in the south. While elements of it would go on to serve in the militaries of both the south and north, much of it would either dissolve outright or serve as armed muscle for various backers during the chaotic period.
[7] This being the focus of the next upate.
Pak, Sung-jae (September 2017). “Chapter 4: The Origins of Popular Action and Resistance during Liberation,” The Great Betrayal: Anarchism and Communism in Korea, 1919-1954. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 98-102. [A]
Anarchy and Liberation
The heady first days of Korea’s Liberation have often been described by historians as a period of “judicial anarchy”, an assertion originally posited by US military intelligence in the aftermath of Japan’s retreat from the peninsula. That this formulation conveniently legitimizes the imposition of an unelected military government, the perpetuation of the colonial-era police force, and the propping of small far-right parties as “proper representatives of the Korea people” is less often stated. Similarly, proponents of the old revisionist school tend to regard the installation of Red Army officers as “advisors” in the north as being brought about by a genuine desire of the Soviets to reestablish order as much as in seeking to lay the foundations of the future communist state, even if a few critiques of the authoritarian nature of the occupation are offered.
Though it can be said that popular action during Liberation operated in the absence of any prevailing social institutions which could demand moderation, or even a uniformity of aims among its participants, the weeks prior to and months immediately after the official surrender of Japan on August 15 were not the image of chaos and disarray put forward by either of Korea’s occupiers. The tacit acceptance of these dominating narratives has loomed large over studies of the Liberation period, presenting an image of a Korea that needed to be managed rather than one that was rapidly mobilizing along its own course before external intervention. Even when political histories do recognize the independent actors of the period, they tend to write solely of the stories of Seoul and Pyongyang. They attempt to carefully reconstruct the interplay of the various faction leaders, the jockeying for position that would establish the political classes which would become dominant under the power structures developed by the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus while one can find a complete listing of the leadership of the CKPI and their opposition in the DPK with regards to Seoul, along with the various political positionings of Cho Man-sik, Kim Sŏng-ju, and Kim Tu-bong being tracked in great detail in post-Liberation Pyongyang, little has been written about the broad political consciousness spread across the peninsula during the period. [1]
The replacement of the diffuse and organic grassroots movement of the moment’s actuality with either Lyuh Woon-hyung’s rightful action in “attempting revolution” or the individual heroism of figures like Syngman Rhee in halting it, depending on the bias of the historian in question, represents the deliberate silencing of 1945 Korea’s mass democracy. This period saw the attempt to restructure society from the bottom-up by all manner of local actors, from factory occupations and self-directed land reform on the left to the organization of the nascent provincial political structures on the right. Far from being an affair driven by Seoul or Pyongyang, these organs of democracy varied wildly in nature and sought to establish themselves on their own terms, enjoining with the state or resisting state control based upon decisions made at the individual level. It was only through their ultimate subversion (as in the north) and/or elimination (as in the south) that these active and amorphous entities became solidified as the politically inert, lifeless, and uniform “People’s Committees” found in history. [2]
“People’s Committees”, Local Democracy, and Mass Action
Between August and September 1945 a wide multitude of local-level political committees flourished throughout the nation, claiming to represent 14 provinces, 2 islands, 21 cities, 218 counties, 103 villages, and over 2000 smaller townships in total. Though small, overlapping, and often ill-disciplined, these new local administrations were largely successful in maintaining the peace and organizing basic social services. This brief period is typically referred to by modern historians as being that of the first abortive “People’s Republic of Korea,” bookended with either the landing of Lieutenant General John R. Hodge in Incheon in early September or the November 9 Incident two months later. Thus all of these emergent organs for local democracy are prominently labeled in history as “People’s Committees”, established and operating as part of the CPKI (and the first PRK) under Lyuh Woon-hyung.
Image of downtown Seoul, August 15, immediately after the announcement of Japan's unconditional surrender. Source: Korea Times.
In truth, such political activity did not simply emerge overnight upon receiving marching orders from Seoul (or Washington or Moscow, for that matter). Everyday life in colonial Korea had long become snared in an intricate web of overlapping spheres of political mobilization, with leftist groups, peasant unions, and Japanese backed anti-communist patriotic societies all training the populace in the ways of mass politics. When Japanese rule was broken, it is thus unsurprising that the Korean people immediately began to organize on their own terms. To examine the nature of Liberation as experienced outside of the city centers, we can only turn to eyewitness accounts. Speaking in papers smuggled out of her house arrest, the imprisoned anti-Communist dissident Kye Hye-bin wrote of her teenage experience in a rural village in what was then Hwanghae Province in the north:
David Park, who would later become a prominent member of the refugee community in the United States, shared the following image of Liberation in the rural southern county of Hapcheon in his autobiography:
Liberation was a moment of latent energy and emotion, one which led almost immediately to direct political action. Local committees were organized, some by election and some by the fiat of headmen and other prominent leaders. Unlike other cases of national liberation following WWII, such as was the case in France or the Netherlands, Korea had no formal institutions for self-government and indigenous administration. As such, the concerns of such committees were primarily in removing the remnants of Japanese control, establishing food and material supplies, and opening lines of communication with other bodies.
After the bureaucratic organs, military, quasi-military, and policing organizations were some of the first and most common groups to be established during Liberation. In some cases this was as simple as formerly conscripted units defecting from the Japanese military en masse, taking on a new name and leadership. In others, able-bodied students joined with martial artists and physical education teachers to train together and keep the peace. Ch’oe Yong-dal gave recognition to these movements with his formal establishment of the CPKI’s Youth Peace Preservation Corps, but also included in their number was the right-leaning Korean Student-Soldier League and the National Preparatory Army (NPA). [5/6] The national leadership of these organizations was established long after their formation on an individual basis from town to town, thus it is notable that ultimately violence was contained and reprisals minimized by largely self-directed entities. These bodies of course existed in deliberate opposition to the preexisting colonial-era police force, which consisted of Japanese officers and their Korean collaborators and had been a routine vehicle for political suppression, torture, and state killings. The latter group retained its power throughout the south of the country, especially in and around the prominent port cities which were being used to transfer Japanese personnel to the metropole. In the north, however, the incoming Soviet forces chose to temporarily transfer authority to indigenous peacekeeping organizations before establishing their own politically reliable force.
Photograph of the committee representing the port region of the city of Incheon, welcoming US soldiers. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The leadership of both the political committees and peace-keeping groups largely arose from those Koreans who had been most prominent in opposing Japanese rule rather than coming from those holding any one definitive political creed. Though largely left leaning on the whole, as the conservative elite had been heavily embraced by the colonial administration, the umbrella cast by these movements was wide and eclectic indeed. Even as student activists, political prisoners and communist radicals formed some of their core ranks, a good portion of the rural upper peasantry had been as fiercely opposed to Japanese rule as their poorer cousins and were welcomed with good graces, along with religious leaders and a number of prominent industrialists. The end goals of such groups were often widely varied as well, with some (as in David Park’s account) expecting their role to be merely temporary and transitional, while others viewed their organizations as being embryonic formulations of a new Korean state. It took until early September for the CPKI to achieve any semblance of widespread political penetration into the nation, with foreign troops having already seized control of significant portions of the country. The adoption of CPKI/PRK name and creed among local organizations should be understood as a largely post-hoc event, as the center recognized the de facto leadership of the political periphery.
It is also clear that mass action from the periphery did not wait for de jure legitimization by the “leadership” in Seoul. When the Soviets and the Americans entered Korea in late August and early September respectively, they found towns and cities being restructured from the ground up. Peasant unions had spread across the country like wildfire, some trying to dispossess their formal landlords outright while others argued for “merely” substantial land reform and a rationalization of tenant relationships and rents. These groups also led the collection of the new rice harvest and managed much of its distribution long before any central control was established. In the cities, numerous Japanese-owned factories were found occupied by worker’s unions, either clandestine groups now emerged from hiding or freshly organized radicals. Some of these factories were being run by the workers themselves, while others saw these workers having auctioned off the management to skilled and wealthy loyal Koreans. This state of affairs did not follow the typically conceived radical-moderate divide between north and south. In South Gyeongsang Province, near Busan in the south, the workers freely managed the factories prior to American intervention, while both Seoul and Pyongyang saw labor action in the immediate Liberation period more limited to strikes and work stoppages. In almost all cases, the leadership of the center lagged behind the mass movements.
By the last days of August, however, it became clear to all that Korea would be occupied by two large foreign powers regardless of the wishes of its populace. The remnants of Japanese colonial administration and their forces largely aligned themselves with the incoming Americans, selling off the factories and resources they controlled to their favored elite and spreading word of widespread civil disorder. When Lt. Gen Hodge arrived in September and established the American military government, he quickly identified the PRK as communist in nature and set loose his forces against it. While Lyuh remained confined to Seoul, taking ever more frantic measures in hopes of shoring up his waning power before his eventual flight north, the American military forces spread out through the south and dispersed the local committees. Some adopted these changes with good grace, with much of the rural elite eagerly falling behind the new order. Left-leaning groups however were swiftly and often brutally repressed and the piecemeal land reform and factory seizures rolled back. In the north the committees would remain and some of their political and social advances were recognized, yet the power and independence of these entities would be drastically reduced and the freedoms won would be withdrawn in the lived reality of everyday life despite the fact that they remained on paper.
Even with the establishment of foreign occupation, the principles of anarchist mass action would remain. From late 1945 to 1954, post-Liberation period Korea found itself roiled with strikes, protests, and calls for true liberation. From the chaos of the November 1st Incident, to the 1946 and 1947 Agricultural Protests and rebellions in the south, to the advent of the Second 3-1 Movement in the face the north and south dropping any pretense towards reunification, the state responses to these events would ultimately define the very nature of government in both the north and south. [7]
[A] Again, the above work is built from my reading Dongyoun Hwang's Anarchism in Korea, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016, though Chapter 3 of Bruce Cumming's Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981 is also used substantially throughout.
[1] This is also a significant problem in OTL's historiography of the division of Korea, especially in English-related material. To put it simply, we just don't have the historical data for a lot of the areas outside of Seoul and Pyongyang.
[2] While the term "People's Committee" [Inmin Wiwǒnhoe] was widely used throughout the peninsula, there were a number of other terms used contemporaneously and they tended to differ drastically from each other in terms of organization, scale, and aims.
[3] Kye Hye-bin has no direct counterpart in OTL North Korea. ITTL she was arrested in the late 1970s and remained under house arrest until her death in 1992 at the age of 66.
[4] This quote is based of that of Richard Kim, from his semi-fictionalized autobiography, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, New York City, NY: Praeger, 1970, 164-165. This passage is largely similar in tone, though Kim lived in the north during his youth compared to TTL's David Park.
[5] Ch’oe Yong-dal would later emerge as a powerful member of the Korean Worker's Party in the north, serving as the head of the Department of Justice.
[6] The National Preparatory Army would essentially shatter upon the American assumption of control in the south. While elements of it would go on to serve in the militaries of both the south and north, much of it would either dissolve outright or serve as armed muscle for various backers during the chaotic period.
[7] This being the focus of the next upate.
Last edited:
Rosenheim
Donor
Thank you for the kind comments. Right now Flowers of Unification is unfortunately on the back-burner, but I hope to get back to writing it soon. Lots of work and "living in a foreign country in the middle of the apocalypse"-stuff getting in the way at the moment, haha.
Rosenheim
Donor
Possibly, though my thoughts were more along the lines of say the Iranian, Cuban, or general Vietnamese community in the US rather than any political body per se. The first few generations of any broader refugee/exile population will have very strong opinions about the groups which removed them from their homes, while later generation either won't care as much or will even gain new affection for their ancestral homeland and defend it.