A History of Korea (76 page)

The land sale began on the eve of the general elections to establish the National Assembly, which were held on 10 May 1948, and triggered land sales by Korean landlords who feared that the land reform would ultimately be expanded
to include their own land. As a result of both the Military Government’s sale of previously Japanese-held farmlands and Korean landlords’ sales, the land tenure structure in southern Korea underwent significant changes. At the end of 1947, 18.7 percent of the total farmer households were landlord and owner households; 38.8 percent were part-owner/part-tenant households; and 42.5 percent were full-tenant households. By June 1949 the number of landlord and owner households increased to 37.0 percent of the total and that of part-owner/part-tenant households rose to 42.0 percent. On the other hand, the number of full-tenant households decreased to 21.0 percent of the total.
¹⁸
It is undeniable that the Military Government’s farmland policy produced a beneficial result for the Koreans—an unequivocal, substantial improvement of the ageold tenancy system in Korea.

Another major contribution that the Military Government made to the future growth of South Korea was the development of Korean education. Americans opened educational opportunities to everyone, with the new educational system modeled after the U.S. school system, including six years of elementary school, six years of secondary school (three years of middle school and three years of high school), four years of higher education, and additional years for graduate studies. In January 1948 attendance up to the sixth grade became compulsory. In mid-June 1946 the Military Government announced a plan to establish a Seoul National University, in which the former Ky
ŏ
ngs
ŏ
ng Imperial University would be transformed into a Korean national university. The plan caused intense conflict between leftists and rightists, with both vying for the leadership of the university. In September of that year Seoul National University was finally established. In three years of military occupation, the elementary education population doubled, and the number of students in secondary education tripled. The popular educational system that the Americans established in the country ultimately produced the well-educated workforce that was primarily responsible for South Korea’s subsequent economic and industrial growth.
¹⁹

During their military occupation, the Americans also introduced important social reforms. As already pointed out, every South Korean was made legally and socially equal, thus laying the very foundation for democracy. The Military Government guaranteed freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and religion to every Korean, and these basic rights were written into the new constitution of the Republic of Korea in July 1948.

Overall, the U.S. Military Government produced some important achievements in economic and social areas. Exemplified by their efforts to prevent
widespread starvation, Americans’ goodwill as a whole outweighed the administrative mistakes and individual sins of this foreign occupation force.

After the Soviet Union declared war against Japan on 8 August 1945, units of the Soviet 25th Army, commanded by Colonel General Ivan Chistiakov, attacked the northernmost Korean towns of Unggi (present-day S
ŏ
nbong) and Najin. After running into light Japanese resistance, Soviet forces entered Korea by 10–11 August. After landing at the port city of Ch’
ŏ
ngjin on the East Sea on 12 August, they rapidly occupied most of the country north of the 38th parallel, and on 22 August the Red Army marched into Pyongyang.

The Soviet Union was much better prepared than the United States to deal with the problem of Korean occupation. When Soviet forces entered northern Korea, they encountered the people’s committees in all the regions, immediately recognizing these self-governing organs and establishing close working relationships with them. By using these people’s committees, the Soviet Union administered northern Korea without establishing a military government. Together with local Koreans willing to cooperate with the occupation forces, the Soviet army was accompanied by many other Koreans who were naturalized Russian citizens or members of the Red Army. The Soviet Union was able to use all these Koreans in fashioning a provisional government in North Korea.

Still, however, the Soviet occupation forces were unpopular among the overall populace, generally because of their crude behavior, specifically raping and looting. Reportedly, after they entered Korea, every night two or three Russians were killed by Koreans who had no weapons other than rocks.
²⁰
In late November 1945, at Sin
ŭ
iju on the Yalu River, youth and student groups, mostly Christians, revolted against the Soviet occupation. The Soviet forces cruelly suppressed the anticommunist revolt, killing 23, wounding more than 700, and arresting more than 800. Thereafter freedom of political activity no longer existed in the Soviet occupation zone.

Although it wanted to establish a pro-Soviet power base in North Korea, the Soviet Union initially did not try to create a communist regime directly. It sought to set up a united front of political forces dominated by the communists. Russians were afforded an opportunity to do that when, after liberation, provincial
branches of the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (
CPKI
) were organized in northern Korea. On 17 August 1945 Cho Man-sik, a moderate nationalist, established the South P’y
ŏ
ngan province branch of the
CPKI
. At about the same time, other provincial branches were also organized throughout North Korea. On 22 August the Russians arranged a merger of the South P’y
ŏ
ngan and the Pyongyang branches to form the People’s Political Committee. Cho Man-sik was so important that the Russians appointed him chairman of the indigenous interim administration. Although it aimed ultimately at securing communist hegemony, as it had in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union used Cho as a figurehead leader of the coalition government comprised of communists and nationalists.

By the end of August 1945, people’s committees had been in existence throughout northern Korea, and on 6 September they sent their delegates to the national convention in Seoul to establish the Korean People’s Republic under the leadership of Y
ŏ
Un-hy
ŏ
ng. The people’s committees in the North recognized the
KPR
as the sovereign body that would administer the Korean peninsula. Cho Man-sik’s People’s Political Committee also recognized the
KPR
and was placed under its authority.

When the Americans in southern Korea refused to recognize the
KPR
, the northerners created the North Korean Five Provinces Administrative Bureau on 28 October 1945. Again, Cho Man-sik was elected chairman of this body that only coordinated local people’s committees and entrusted them with full administrative powers.
²¹
This form of government did not last long, however, ending in early February 1946 with the establishment of the North Korean Interim People’s Committee.

Unlike the Americans who were not equipped with detailed or long-range administrative plans and political guidelines to cope with the problems of Korea, the Russians had arrived with a background of considerable knowledge of Korean affairs and well-prepared plans for administering northern Korea with the cooperation of many friendly Koreans. Obviously their goal was to integrate northern Korea into the Soviet orbit politically as well as economically.

Six months after liberation North Korean politics entered a new phase, with Kim Il-sung’s rise to power. The Russians appear to have chosen Kim as North Korea’s leader, as they thought he was cooperative and would be sufficiently pro-Russian.
²²

Kim Il-sung’s emergence to power and the rise of the “Kimist” system dated from early 1946. His prime assets were his record of anti-Japanese resistance, organizational skills, and ideology. Kim was fortunate to survive the 40-year independence struggle against the Japanese that had killed off many leaders of the older generation. North Korea claimed that Kim was
the
leader of all Korean independence fighters, but the fact is he was only one among many leaders of the independence struggle. Kim did, however, win the support and firm loyalty of several guerrilla fighters, including Kim Ch’aek, Ch’oe Hy
ŏ
n, Ch’oe Yong-g
ŏ
n, and others, who were all young and tough, and as nationalistic as Kim Il’sung. The prime test of legitimacy for leadership in postwar Korea was one’s record under the hated Japanese rule, but Kim was further helped when his allies assumed military power. This military background functioned as a formidable weapon against rivals with no military experience.

Although he was supported by the Red Army, at first Kim was not North Korea’s undisputed leader. To consolidate his power in the later Korean Workers Party, Kim tried to reorganize the party. He probably had gained his organizational skills from his experience in the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s. Unlike intellectual or theoretical communists such as Pak H
ŏ
n-y
ŏ
ng, he broke from Soviet orthodoxy and aimed to make the
KWP
a “mass” party rather than an “elite” or vanguard party by recruiting masses of poor peasants and laborers. In December 1945, when Kim Il-sung replaced Kim Yong-b
ŏ
m as head of the North Korean Branch Bureau of the Korean Communist Party, party members numbered no more than 4,500, but its membership soared to 366,000 in August 1946, when the Kim Il-sung group and Kim Tu-bong’s Korean New People’s Party merged to form the North Korean Workers Party (
NKWP
). In August 1948, immediately before the establishment of the North Korean regime, its membership rose again to 752,000. Most of the new party members were poor peasants and laborers. Following in the steps of Chinese communist leaders, Kim pursued a style of leading the masses by getting close to the people; for example, he often visited farms or factories for “on-the-spot guidance” and instructed his subordinates to do the same. The unflinching loyalty of newly accepted party members enabled Kim to emerge as the top leader of the North Korean regime.

Kim Il’sung’s rise to power, though it fit into the Soviet Union’s strategy for Korea, owed mainly to his long history of nationalism rather than any deep communist beliefs. From the 1940s Kim’s ideology had already been revolutionary and nationalist rather than communist. Indeed, the prevailing governing
ideology in North Korea under the rule of Kim and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, has been termed the so-called
juche
doctrine. Although the term
juche,
meaning “autonomous subject,” is usually translated into “self-reliance,” it originated in 1946 but was not officially used until Kim Il-Sung’s speech delivered on 28 December 1955. The juche doctrine, in its stress on self-reliance and political independence, was appealing to the Korean people at first.

On 25 September 1945 Kim Il-sung, with a number of other Soviet-trained Koreans, landed at W
ŏ
nsan. Then, on 14 October, the Soviet occupation forces held a ceremony to celebrate Kim’s return to Korea. Still in his mid-thirties, Kim represented a new generation in Korean leadership.

When Soviet forces arrived in northern Korea, four major communist groups were available to them for manipulation—Kim Il-sung’s followers, known as the “Kapsan [or partisan] faction,” who were the smallest; a group returned from Yan’an, China, led by (Kim) Mu Ch
ŏ
ng and Kim Tu-bong, known as the “Yan’an faction”; the Soviet Koreans; and a domestic Korean communist group. H
ŏ
Ka-i’s “Soviet faction” was mostly of second-generation Soviet Koreans who returned to Korea with the Soviet occupation forces, and the less cohesive “domestic faction” comprised northern party leaders who had worked underground during the colonial period and tended to support Pak H
ŏ
n-y
ŏ
ng, then in Seoul. The strongest and most popular political group in the North, however, was the “nationalists” under Cho Man-sik, who had no ties to the communists. The power struggle among these groups continued for at least a decade, but Kim Il-sung held the upper hand with the support of the Soviet Union. The Russians did not trust the Koreans who lived in Korea and thus helped Kim’s accession to power as the surest way to maintain Soviet influence in North Korea.

As part of making Pyongyang the center of Korean communism, Kim Il-sung and his followers, aided by Soviet occupation forces, established the North Korean Branch Bureau of the Korean Communist Party in October 1945, which was renamed the North Korean Communist Party in April 1946. On 17 December 1945 Kim he took office as the party’s First Secretary, replacing Kim Yong-b
ŏ
m. But Cho Man-sik, as chairman of the North Korean Five Provinces Administrative Bureau, remained the top leader. Until the end of 1945, under the authorization of Soviet forces, a coalition regime of communists and rightist nationalists controlled the political arena in northern Korea. As part of a national united front movement between the communists and nationalists, however, the Russians and Kim Il-sung urged Cho Man-sik’s nationalists to form a noncommunist political party. Finally, on 3 November 1945, the Chos
ŏ
n
Democratic Party was founded. Later on, as has been demonstrated, the united front proved unstable.

This transitional pattern of politics finally ended in early 1946, as a dispute over the trusteeship issue led to the collapse of the united front movement between the communists and nationalists and the emergence of a separate northern regime. On 31 December 1945 Soviet occupation forces urged Cho Man-sik to declare his support for the Moscow agreement and trusteeship. Shortly after his firm refusal, on 6 January 1946 Cho was confined to a hotel in Pyongyang for months and indeed was never seen in public again.
²³
On 8 February 1946 the North Korean Interim People’s Committee (
NKIPC
) became the new governing body under the Soviet occupation. Kim Il-sung was named chairman of the
NKIPC
, his first major administrative post in the North.