A History of Korea (79 page)

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The Liberation Period, 1945–50

CHRONOLOGY

1945 August	Liberation from Japanese colonial rule
1945 September	Formation of the Korean People’s Republic
1945 September	Start of the Soviet occupation in the north and American occupation in the south
1945 October	Return of Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung to Korea
1945 December	First Soviet–American Joint Commission, announcement of trusteeship
1946 October	Mass general strike in southern provinces
1947 April	Dissolution of the Joint Commission
1947 July	Assassination of Y Unhy ng
1948 April	The Cheju Island Uprisings
1948 May	Elections for members of the National Assembly in southern Korea
1948 June	Syngman Rhee elected president of southern government by National Assembly
1948 August	Proclamation of the Republic of Korea (South Korea)
1948 September	Proclamation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)
1948 October	Y su-Sunch’ n Rebellion
1948 December	Passage of the National Security Law
1949 June	Promulgation of the South Korean land reform
1949 September	Dissolution of the Committee for Investigating Anti-National Behavior

THE MAY ELECTIONS IN SOUTHERN KOREA, 1948

On May 10, 1948, in southern Korea, people formed long lines waiting to do something they had previously only heard about: choosing government officials in a national election. These first-time voters were
electing legislators for the provisional National Assembly that would be charged with devising a constitution for the Republic of Korea. These citizens were responsible, then, for helping to establish a new Korean government. That this government would come into being three years after the end of Japanese colonial rule, and that its jurisdiction would cover only the southern half of the peninsula, encapsulated the uneasy circumstances leading to this momentous event. The jubilation that had greeted liberation from thirty five years of Japanese colonial rule in the summer of 1945 had quickly shifted to a more somber realization that freedom from Japan did not mean freedom from foreign rule. Indeed the division of the peninsula into separate northern and southern occupation zones headed by the Soviet Union and the US, respectively, turned the peninsula into the first Asian theater of the emerging rivalry between these Second World War allies: the Cold War.

For Koreans in the southern zone, the American occupation would bring forth greater political and economic freedoms than the Japanese colonial period had, but an almost equally repressive stifling of their aspirations for autonomy. The unremitting clashes between American priorities and Korean goals, American disregard for Korea’s internal dynamics versus Korean ignorance of geopolitics, and often bitter divisions among Koreans came to dominate the “liberation space” in the southern occupation zone. This tense five-year period between liberation in 1945 and the Korean War in 1950 brims over with historical significance, primarily because it must be viewed in relative terms: unable to escape the foreshadowing of the Korean War, but also bound inescapably to the colonial legacy. One can consider the liberation space a transitional period from colonial subjugation to national division, a short-lived interregnum between two devastating wars, or a wasted opportunity to reset Korea’s modern historical trajectory. In any case, what took place at this time would cast long, dark shadows over the rest of Korea’s twentieth century, and indeed frame the perspective on Korea’s modern experience as a whole.

THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS: A MULTI-LATERAL DYNAMIC

Korea’s modern history appears to be dominated by politics, so intense and rapid have been the political changes and their repercussions. The intrusion of politics into every other sphere of
existence was never more acute than in the post-liberation period. Political interests and conflicts, from village disputes over property and ideology to the geopolitical rivalry between the Allied victors-turned-occupiers, seem to have overwhelmed everything else. Complicating the situation even further were the constant shifts in the political forces arrayed against and alongside each other: the two occupation armies and governments, the various Korean organizations of all ideological stripes, the emigrant workers and independence activists returning to their homeland, those who benefited from as well as those victimized by the colonial wartime mobilization, and so on. There simply was little room in the liberation space for much else beyond politics.

This reality seemed far-fetched during the enormous celebrations that spilled into the streets beginning on August 16, 1945, the day following the Japanese emperor’s proclamation of unconditional surrender that had been heard by some on the radio. The joyous news spread like wildfire, and for several days Koreans marched up and down urban boulevards shouting and waving placards and makeshift symbols like the Korean flag. For some, however, this was not a surprise. A few days before liberation, the Japanese colonial leaders had asked the man they considered the
de facto
Korean leader still in the country, Y
Unhy
ng, to form a provisional governing organization. Y
, a moderate leftist, consented to this request and quickly formed the Committee for the Preparation for Korean Independence (CPKI). Scarcely could he have known that, upon the signal for Koreans to exercise their new freedoms, a host of other political groups would emerge to push a variety of interests and ideologies. This was a portent of things to come.

By early September the CPKI gave way to the Korean People’s Republic (KPR)—like the CPKI a coalition of ideological and political interests—which served as the central governing institution connecting the hundreds of “people’s committees” that sprang up around the country. The people’s committees lie at the heart of a great historical debate concerning this period, namely, whether the Korean population in the south, aroused by the destabilizing demobilization of wartime society—including the return of those
Koreans who had been abroad—sought a leftist social revolution. Despite their name, however, the people’s committees and even the KPR appear to have represented diverse concerns of disparate localities. Indeed the most pressing, common item on their agenda was to secure local order and ensure a rectification of the traumas caused by the wartime dislocations, the first steps in the great challenge of decolonization. To be sure, many of the people’s committees quickly fell under the sway of the promises and prowess of Korean communists emerging from their underground existence, but clearly most of the participants themselves had little inkling of the larger communist program. Indeed the KPR’s original platform called for nothing more radical than standard labor laws and the redistribution of ill-gotten gains. There was hardly a set ideological agenda in this preparatory period of flux.