Korea’s Place in the Sun

A Modern History

Updated edition, 2005

by Bruce Cumings
Preface to the Updated Edition

With this updated edition of Korea‟s Place in the Sun, I have sought to bring the book current,
which proved fairly easy for two reasons. First, in the past decade South Korea has developed
politically much along the lines that my narrative suggested, with its strong civil society and
democratizing politics yielding the successive elections of two former dissidents—first 김대중 and 메모 [b1]: 권위주의 독재정권에

then 노무현. Second, North Korea is stuck in the aspic of its own failure to find a new path that 반대하는 反體制人士

would enable it to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, and after George W. Bush took 메모 [b2]: 고기 젤리; 편육

office in 2001, U.S.—North Korean relations returned to the pattern of confrontation and
stalemate that marked the Cold War years, enabling the North to dust off its well-practiced
strategies of obstinacy and recalcitrance. Thus it is difficult to say that much changed during
President Bush‟s first administration, and the likelihood for the second is more of the same—

stalemate.

Only two episodes in the past decade merit extended discussion: the first is the financial crisis in
1997-98, which bankrupted the South Korean economy and rang the curtain down on the
decade-long discourse about “the Korean miracle.” That high American officials were instrumental
in trying to refashion the Korean model of development that they had for so long—and so
loudly—supported caused a spate of “anti-Americanism” at the time, something that was only
deepened with the arrival of the Bush administration, amid a growing estrangement between
Seoul and Washington over how to deal with the North. The second episode was a sincere
attempt by the administration of President Bill Clinton to engage North Korea in the late 1990s,
one that nearly achieved major success in 2000. Readers will find much food for thought in these
two experiences, both of which departed dramatically from the general pattern of Korean history

in the past six decades.

Son this version is a modest effort to bring the book up to date rather than a full revision, which
can happen only after the shape and trajectory of Korea in the twenty-first century become clear.
I would like to thank Steve Forman ... for suggesting that an updating would be appropriate, and
for seeing this version through to publication. Professor Elaine Kim ... was also kind enough to
dun the publisher about bringing the book current. Writing now in this new century, I remain 메모 [b3]: 빚督促; 들들 볶다

amazed and humble before the turbulence and complexities of Korea‟s modern history.
Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea for this book germinated when John W. Boyer, dean of the college at the University of
Chicago, provided me with some summer money to prepare a reader on Korea for the college‟s
justly respected civilization program. Some years later when I told him—a historian of Germany
and Austria—my book title, he could not suppress a laugh: it seemed a bit Bismarckian. The Greek
word asu and the Latin word oriens connoted “rising sun” or „the east,‟ and for centuries
everything east of Istanbul signified „lands of the rising sun,‟ just as occidens conjured the territory
of the setting sun; Martin Luther identified Europe with the Abend (or evening) land, the Orient
with the Morgen (morning) land. Now only Japan claims to be a land of the rising sun, and only
anxious Americans identify their country with the setting sun. The world that has given us rises
and falls and periodic eclipses is not that of Greece and Rome, however, but the industrial epoch,
with its relative handful of advanced industrial states and their incessant competition. It is that
solar system that Korea has now joined (and that is all I mean by the title).

To the left [below] is the 강리도, a map of the known world drawn by Korean cartographers in
1402, nearly a century before the Western voyages to the Americas. Korea, the „Eastern country,‟
hangs like a large grapefruit next to China, into which is collapsed India and South Asia. The
Japanese Islands are insignificant, placed down near the Philippines. This map may be old, but it
tells us what Koreans think about their country and always have: an important, advanced,
significant country, which may have been „a shrimp among whales‟ during the imperial era, a
small country jammed cheek-by-jowl against great powers during the Cold War, a poor and
divided country after the Korean War, but now is a nation reoccupying its appropriate position in
the world.
혼일강리역대국도지도(混一疆理歷代國都之圖) 또는 단순히 강리도(疆理圖)는 조선 태종(太宗) 2년(1402년)에 제작된 세계
지도이다. 지도 이름은 역대 나라의 수도를 표기한 지도라는 뜻이다. 김사형 및 이무, 이휘 등이 제작하고 권근이 발문을
썼다. 6백년 전에 이미 아시아와 유럽, 아프리카까지 아우른 세계지도를 작성했다는 데에서 이 지도의 가치는 매우 높다.

Korea is roughly the size of England, with a population in both Koreas approximating that of
unified Germany. If it were not a peninsular promontory headland of China, we would not think of 메모 [b4]: 突出된 岬

it as a small country (no one thinks of Japan or England as a small country). Many Americans also
believe Korea is „remote‟ or „far-off‟; for different reasons the Japanese enjoy referring to North
Korea as „the remotest country.‟ Northeast Asia is remote only from the Eurocentric and
civilizational standpoint of „the West‟—something much prized these days because it is much
threatened. Many Westerners still believe that European civilization „has had some unique
historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit,
which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities, at all
times in history and down to the present.‟ We will find that Koreans think about the same thing,
except they replace Europe with their own country—or, historically, China. Beijing sits in the
middle of the 강리도 because it was the seat of known civilization.

What is meant by modern Korea? When other countries start acting a bit like Western ones, we
often say they „modernize.‟ Today we have many such countries, but according to some recent
accounts none—including the economic giant Japan—know true freedom as do the nations of
Europe. Somehow this prize at the end of the modernizing rainbow remains elusive. The twentieth
century was so full of stunning events, however, running the full spectrum from the great and
wonderful to the horrible and unimaginable, that we can no longer use the term „modern‟ as a
sign of tribute, or progress as a sign of approbation. Modern has meant that people work in
industrial settings, use advanced technology as a tool, live in cities or suburbs, enjoy or suffer the
attentions of the most industrially advanced nations, and experience a democratic or an
authoritarian politics rather different from previous political forms. The twentieth century was one
of industrialization and technological change, the world-ranging power of those nations having
both and putting both to good military use, and the full emergence of masses of the population
as political participants. The modern is not a sign of superiority but a mark, a point, on a rising
and falling scale. Korea began the twentieth century near the bottom of that scale and begins the
twenty-first near the top. Along the way there have been many gains and many losses, and a

remarkable story of human triumph over adversity. But we now have a modern Korea.

Korea presents the Westerner not with a smooth narrative of progress toward industrial mastery,
however, but with a fractured, shattered twentieth-century history. In 1910 it lost its centuries-old
independence and remained an exploited colony until 1945. Then came national division, political
turmoil, a devastating war, and the death and dislocation of millions—which only left Korea still
divided and in desperate poverty. A decade later South Korea began to industrialize, and today it
has a mostly democratic politics, but only after two military coups and several popular rebellions.
North Korea developed more quickly after the war, but soon reaped the diminishing returns of a
political and economic system designed the remedy the problems of the 1930s, not those of the
1960s or 1990s. For several years many analysts have said that North Korea is on the verge of
collapse, but the peninsula remains divided and subject to all the conflicts and passions that the
rest of the world knew during the long years of the Cold War. How Korea will reconcile their two

different systems and finally unify the country remains a mystery for the future.

So, this is another theme: modern, yes; whole, no. A related theme is the marginal beginnings of
Korea‟s modern effort. No Westerner imagined a modern Korea in 1900, none predicted it in 1945,
and experts still did not envision it just a generation ago. Instead, Korea seemed lacking in
everything that counted in the West: bustling commerce, empirical science, a stable middle class,
a spirit of enterprise, innovative technology. How, then, did the Koreans do it? Something must
have been missed, something overlooked, in observations of old Korea. It might have been history
that was overlooked. Korea‟s long past of continuous existence on one territory may light our
path to an understanding of one of the twentieth century‟s most remarkable achievements. It is

with this history that we will begin, seeking to comprehend its legacies for our own time.

There are also other problems we will want to examine: race, for example. Elaine H. Kim has
written that most Americans see Koreans “primarily through the lens of race; they see us as all
alike and caring only about ourselves.” Too many Koreans look through that same lens, thinking
they have some essential quality making them and only them real Koreans, tracing a unique,
homogeneous bloodline back some five thousand years. All too many non-Koreans think they and
only they really KNOW what makes Koreans tick. When I say, “Koreans do this, Koreans do that,” I
use a shorthand. In reality there is no homogeneous category called Korean—no racial essence,
no homogeneous ethnicity, no unique genetic stamp. Koreans come in all shapes and sizes, and

the full human range of personality types.

The twentieth-century Korean is a complex mixture of ancient peoples who traversed the Korean
peninsula, certainly including Japanese, Chinese, Manchu, and many other East and Central Asian
ethnicities, but perhaps also including peoples known historically as Caucasians. (I once read a
book entitled Koreans Are White.) Archaeological science has recently shown that the Korean
genetic pool of DNA, like the Chinese pool, has many affinities with European DNA, and fewer
with African or Middle Eastern DNA—that is, an infinitesimally smaller range of DNA than is found
in Africans, who have the largest pool of DNA, a range that makes no difference whatsoever in
human behavior. Science has proved race to be a stupidity, however much weight it may exercise

in our social and political life.

If race is a stupidity, hierarchy and inequality are difficult concepts for Americans, especially
younger ones, to grasp. Yet hierarchy and inequality were deeply ingrained in Korean society until
just the past few decades, and for many Koreans these remain not just “facts of life” but IDEALS
of how to organize a proper society. Since we seek in this book an understanding, an act of
empathy for Korea, we should try—temporarily—to disabuse ourselves of American assumptions
that get in the way of knowing, of seeing, a truly different society: a brief encounter not with the
aberrant but with the different.

A suspension of judgment to achieve an understanding is precisely what made Alexis de

Tocqueville such a brilliant student of American society. He wasn‟t so sure that 1840s America
really promoted the individual nonconformity and egalitarianism prized in its values (and it didn‟t
do so at all in the slaveholding South), but it did well enough to make a stark contrast with

aristocratic France:

„Individualism‟ is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted
with egoisme (selfishness) .... Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the
community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends, so
that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.
<Tocqueville> p. 104

When we think about the hierarchy and inequality that marked Korean society, it is crude and
unhelpful to begin with the dictatorship in North Korea or the patriarchy of the South. We should

“think rather of the child” (in Louis Dumont‟s words about a different society)

slowly brought to humanity by his upbringing in the family, by the apprenticeship of language and moral
judgment, by the education which makes him share in the common patrimony .... Where would be the 메모 [b5]: 아버지에게 물려받은
humanity of this man, where his understanding, without this training or taming, properly speaking a creation, 유산

which every society imparts to its members, by whatever actual agency? <Dumunt> p. 5

Korean mothers, it seems to me, often look upon their child in just this way: not merely a
biological outcome but a being to be shaped and reared as a human creation, like a work of art.
The premise of the maternal sculptor, however, must be her “knowing what‟s best for the child,”

her unquestioned authority.

It is a small step to the idea that family rearing principles can be extended to politics, to the state,
and to the family-state of ancient kings or of Kim Il Sung (at least in the imaginings of his
ideologues). The individual is not an atom, detached from society, but the building block of the
whole, the basis of a society conceived organically. The problem for our understanding is that ALL
societies evolved through an organic conception (see Tillyard‟s marvelous reconstruction of
Elizabethan England, for example), but in America we have left that idea so far behind that we
really have few ways to fathom a society still captured between ancient organic conceptions and
“modern” individualistic ones.

Hierarchy conjures in our minds notions of illegitimate privilege, arbitrary command, and unfree
subordination. Dumont said of India that hierarchy instead conferred “degrees of dignity,”
religiously originated and then, later, socially defined. This means several things: an apportioning 메모 [b6]: 分配

of dignity, some greater, some lesser; degrees of personal rank in relation to the whole; but also
an attribution of dignity to all who are part of the society. “Knowing one‟s place,” an idea that we
abhor, nonetheless was something honorable, dignified, a locus where human beings could realize
themselves. Hierarchy without shame, hierarchy that is self-conscious but without conscious abuse,

without necessarily infringing on what it means to be human: think about it.

The United States, founded on ideas of liberty and equality, often experiences “unfreedom” only
as an aberration. Yet our former colonizer, England, is still a country of wide liberty and little
equality. Furthermore, our egalitarian and democratic disgust with hierarchy, which makes of
America such a rich and diverse society, may have the unexpected consequence of leaving us
bereft of ways to understand manifest inequality, or even to organize in our minds the society
that we experience: and thus we have easy recourse to racism, which offers the most obvious way
to distinguish and separate people amid the general equality. There is, however, no question in
my mind that the American organization of society in our time, speeded up by a globe-ranging
media, carries every alternative social form before it. It is deeply popular because it convinces
people everywhere that they can live a life of carefree individuality, and thus it transforms and
dissolves the alternatives one after another, including old Korea. We can now begin an
appreciation of that venerable but rapidly disappearing thing: old Korea.

In this book meant for the general reader I have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, with most
making quick reference to a book in the bibliography that offers further reading on the subject at
hand; for the same reason, to the extent possible I have stayed away from Koreans words in the
text, large numbers of Korean names, and Korean-language sources. Still, there will be all too
many Kims: about one-third of Koreans have that last name (some three hundred Korean family
names circulate, but only a handful are in wide use). At one point the North Korean leadership
consisted of Kim Il Sung, Kim Il, and Kim Jong Il, in that order; only the first and the last were
related. Unless I say so, the reader may assume that none of the Kims, Paks, Yis, or Chongs are
relatives. With the exception of Syngman Rhee and one or two other people, I have rendered the
name as they do in English. Otherwise I have used the McCune-Reischauer system of
transliteration for Korean and the Wade-Giles system for Chinese.

I have written other books dealing with modern Korean history. Everything in this book, however,
has met a fresh assessment and as much familiarity as I can muster with recent work by my
colleagues. I reserve the right to retain interpretations that still seem correct to me and to revise
views that may have been found in my work before, on the principle that to change one‟s mind is
a sign of growth. Readers familiar with my work will be able to trace both, but I see no need to
do that for the reader coming to it for the first time. My involvement with Korea now runs to
three decades, and from time to time I will also revisit that personal experience with the reader.

acknowledgments

The organization of this book is neither chronological nor analytical, but some chronology is
necessary for order, and some analysis for setting off what is distinct and separate, or familiar with
a difference, in Korea‟s experience. The first chapter is a long introduction to the background of
modern Korea, but not nearly long enough: covering year one to the 1860s, it seeks to retrieve
elements in the Korean past salient for our contemporary understanding. This is not my field, nor
is it my main subject, and I have relied on excellent recent work by my colleagues to guide me.
Chapter 2 is the first in this modern history, the modern being marked by the arrival of the big
powers in Korea. There follows an account of Korea‟s capture by a Japan that adapted itself more
quickly to the industrial era than did Korea, giving it a temporary leg up on its near neighbor.
Middle chapters examine Korea‟s determining crisis at mid-century, which began in the ashes of
Japan‟s defeat and ended with two thoroughly divided nations inhabiting the same peninsula.
Chapters 6 and 7 look at South Korea‟s rise to industrial strength under incessant prodding from
an authoritarian and interventionist state, and the popular resistance to that which ultimately
produced a relatively industrialized, relatively democratic country—in other words, a modern
Korea. Chapter 8 examines the North Korea of Kim Il Sung, just as chapter 10 begins with the
accession of his son to power, the 1990s crisis in U.S.—Korean relations, and the prospects for
reunifying Korea. In between is a chapter about the Korean experience in this country: a
requirement in a book written by an American, for Americans, and for Koreans who are now of

America.

This American perspective may strike Koreans as a liability, but I work in the United States and
consider myself as American as apple pie, so it can‟t be helped. It might also be a blessing: there
is no such thing as “a thing in itself”; we can know our world only through comparison and
analogy and metaphor, through a perspectival stance that reconnoiters the object of our desire as
it illumines ourselves. In his last book, L‟Identite de la France, Fernand Braudel wrote,

The historian can really be on an equal footing only with the history of his own country; he understands
almost instinctively its twists and turns, its originalities, and its weaknesses. Never can he enjoy the same
advantage, however great his learning, when he pitches camp elsewhere. So I have saved my white bread
until last; there is some left for my old age.

Because of a similar intuition my tent has been pitched at the intersection of East Asia and
America, just as I have lived my life at that crossing since I was twenty-two. I am also putting

away some white bread, just in case I need it in my old age.