Vladimir Tikhonov shared a link.
====
Special Section:
Unpicking the Hegemonic Threads in the Production of Korean Studies
in English: Eurocentrism, Cold War Logics and Questions of Authorship1
ADAM BOHNET Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario2
VLADIMIR TIKHONOV Professor, University of Oslo3
---
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Special
Section:
Unpicking
the Hegemonic Threads in the Production of Korean Studies in English:
Eurocentrism, Cold War Logics and Questions of Authorship1
ADAM
BOHNET Associate Professor, University of Western Ontario2
VLADIMIR
TIKHONOV Professor, University of Oslo3
In 2015, Adam Bohnet, one of the co-authors
of this Introduction, taught a seminar course on Korea during the Cold War. At
that point, Charles Armstrong’s prizewinning Tyranny of the Weak had been out for a few years.4
He had no strong opinions on Armstrong’s scholarship, although he had been
frequently annoyed by Armstrong’s attempts to link North Korea to a very
vaguely understood notion of Korean “pre-modernity,” a tendency that Armstrong
shared with his mentor at the University of Chicago, Bruce Cumings.5
But within the field of North Korean history, Armstrong was certainly a known
authority, and Tyranny of the Weak
was award-winning and had generally received positive or at worst mixed
reviews. Although he did not assign it as a textbook, he did lean upon it quite
heavily for lively anecdotes in his lectures on North Korea, spending a certain
amount of time on what seemed to be a nearly unbelievably amazing story,
purportedly based on Soviet sources, of the North Koreans arresting a dissident
within the Bulgarian embassy.
It was only in the following year that he discovered this
incident was unbelievable for a reason—it was an event that had not happened,
at least not in the form described by Armstrong. The Soviet observer who was
supposed to have observed it was not in Pyongyang at the time, and the actual
incident (with unbelievable details absent), appeared in Balázs Szalontai’s Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, but
based on Hungarian sources.6 The incident, which he had
described with great enthusiasm and excitement to his students, was, as
subsequent investigation and growing scandal related to the Tyranny of the Weak beginning in 2016
revealed, one of many cases of events that in fact originated in the Hungarian
archive, had been made publicly available to English-language readers by
Szalontai, that Armstrong had subsequently changed (in this and in others
cases, also rendered inaccurate and misleading), while also attaching a
spurious citation to Soviet or East German archival documents. While the bulk of
the plagiarism was from Szalontai’s work, the work of several other scholars
was also similarly misappropriated, amounting to, at the most recent count, at
least 98 such cases.7
The committee in charge of investigating these accusations
of academic dishonesty at Columbia has completed its investigation, the school
has finally recognized the academic misconduct, and Armstrong has gone into
early retirement. Cornell University Press has taken the book out of print.8
Why then do we revisit this incident now? The incident riled up the Koreanist
social media from 2016–2019, seemingly with no obvious solution. Social
media—beginning with BR Myers’s blog Sthele
Press, the Koreanists e-mail list (the KS world list), Koreanists Facebook
and Twitter—struck us as playing a vital role in beginning the discussion (it
would hardly have come to light at all without the contributions of BR Myers’s
blog), but as insufficient for responding to what amounted to be not only a
case of academic dishonesty but also a failure of peer review. Social media,
with its well-known pathologies—a tendency to be histrionic, partisan,
posturing, male-dominated—struck us as counter-productive so far as convincing
people or bringing proper accountability for the incident went. Above all, as we
waited for a conclusion, it became clear to us that what was needed was a
formal record of the incident in the medium which academics accept, treat as
authoritative, and take responsibility for: An article within a properly
indexed academic journal. The discussions by many distinguished scholars of
North Korea in North Korea News9
and the Daily NK,10
and the excellent student journalism in the Columbia
Spectator,11 while beneficial, could not replace a public academic
response in an academic forum.
Our original purpose for first a conference (held online
via the University of Oslo in August, 2020), and then a special issue was the
need to provide some accountability in what seemed at times to be the
desperately slow and un-transparent process whereby relevant organizations (for
instance, the American Historical Association and Columbia University),
responded to the problem, or even seemed to minimize the problem (as was
initially the case of Cornell University Press, which issued its “corrected
edition” in 2017).12 Open criticism of Armstrong
was overwhelmingly expressed by scholars (including graduate students), located
outside of North America—although we were aware that many North American
scholars of modern Korea were highly critical of Armstrong in private. Even now
that some accountability has been obtained, the incident itself seems to call
upon us the need to reflect upon the power-dynamics of English-language Korean
Studies academia, and the distortions caused by global academic hierarchies
centered in prominent US universities. It is common to hear academics in both
South Korea and the English-speaking world pathologize South Korean academia as
“factional,” “hierarchical” and “authoritarian.” The assumed contrast to South
Korean authoritarian academia has generally been US academia, and yet the
development of the debate concerning fraudulent citations in Tyranny of the Weak—whether the
defenders of Armstrong who accused Szalontai of being “jealous” of Armstrong’s
success, the general caution of the majority to make public statements
concerning the affair, or even the fact that Szalontai’s work had been obtained
by Armstrong via Szalontai’s dissertation when Szalontai was still a junior
scholar13—suggested a very hierarchical academic world indeed,
quite similar to the friendly and jovial way that South Korean academic
hierarchies generally actually form (as opposed to a cartoonish representation
of the same). The hegemonic position of US universities—especially top US
schools—within global academia in the Post-Cold-War era seemed also highly
visible in this case, as Armstrong, a prominent professor at Columbia,
misappropriated the work of a Szalontai, then a junior scholar from Central
European University in Hungary.
Above all, the affair suggested a need to reflect on the
complacency of English language Korean Studies. It struck us that it would do
English-language Korean Studies a disservice if we exclusively focused on
Armstrong (although a thorough discussion of the Armstrong affair itself is
obviously necessary). We reflected, for instance, on the frequency with which
South Korean “nationalism” has been the key tradition critiqued in English
language scholarship on Korea, and how often the US and Anglo-American academia
is treated as a disinterested outsider. Focusing on Chosŏn history, this is
notable in an article in the Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies by James Palais, entitled “A Search for Korean
Uniqueness,” in which he provides us with a summary of nationalist distortions
committed by South Korean historians of Chosŏn Korea (described as an
unfortunate response to the distortions of Japanese colonial scholars),
followed by a parade of generally American and Japanese scholars providing
solid scholarship to correct these nationalist distortions.14
What is lacking in such accounts, in which South Korean nationalism is treated
as a simple response to the Japanese colonial period, is a recognition of the
role of the US and of US hegemony in the formation of both South Korean and
English-language Korean Studies. Indeed, with some consistency, brief histories
of Korean’s “nationalist historiography” focus, like Palais, mostly on
post-1894 and colonial era historians, such as Sin Ch’aeho (1880–1936), and are
sparse in their analysis of the political context of scholars—Korean, American,
Japanese, or otherwise—working post 1945 in the context of Japanese and South
Korean academic worlds under US hegemony. In fact, we need not look far to find
a representative offender!15 By contrast, the yŏn’gusa sections of South Korean
articles are generally overwhelmingly focused on scholarship since 1945,
although they will often include some initial reference to colonial-era
scholarship.
Palais, of course, was not an apolitical or uncritical
historian—nor did he claim to be. He used his prominence to criticize the
US-backed military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, and famously refused to take
Korea Foundation money lest it limit his independence against those regimes.16
However, in “Pursuit of Korean Uniqueness,” he briefly acknowledges problems
with the depiction of Korea in the textbook by Fairbank and Reischauer, but,
unlike the Korean nationalist historians whom he criticizes, he does not place
either scholar in broader political context.17 And yet Reischauer, for all
his merits, was even then an obviously political scholar with a close
association with the US empire, beginning with his seemingly consequential
advice on US policy to Japan in the 1940s,18 his highly open and
significant role as US ambassador to Japan in the 1960s,19
his politically-oriented publications,20 his role as co-signatory of
the so-called Tuxedo Statement in support of the US involvement in the Second
Indochinese War,21 and of course his use of modernization theory itself.
Edward Wagner, whom Palais discusses at the very beginning of “A Search for Korean
Uniqueness,” participated in that early organ of US empire in Korea, USAMGIK.22
A growing body of South Korean scholarship has indeed rightly sought to explore
the political context of both scholars and their relationship to Japanese
scholarship.23
Since the 1990s, especially, a degree from a top US
university has gained a dominant position in South Korea, perhaps exceeding its
significance in the US—as may be seen, inter
alia, in popular publications recounting the Harvard experiences of Koreans
or the Korea-experiences of American Harvard graduates,24
as well as of course the boom in “Geese Parents” raising their children in the
US or Canada with the hope of providing them with English-language fluency or
easing their entrance into an American university.25 English
language scholarship, much like Korean-language scholarship, needs to be placed
in a broader political and ideological context—and this should not only be true
of scholarship on South Korea post-1945 (where it happens more often), but also
of scholarship on Chosŏn and earlier periods (which is often not placed clearly
within that context). Here, we think it is important to consider not only work
by specialists on those periods, but also the accounts of “pre-modern Korea” in
the writings of scholars of the twentieth century, who, much though they may
critique the US’s role in modern Korean history, often make use of a stagnant
and unchanging pre-modern Korea as a foil to their scholarship on the dynamism
of Korean modernity. This is not a matter of dismissing English-language
scholars as representing an “American” or “Canadian” view, any more than
critiques of nationalism within Korean-language scholarship should dismiss
these views as “merely Korean nationalism.” But it should involve greater
willingness to place the English-language scholarly tradition within its
institutional and political context, and to recognize the hegemonic role of the
US, and US academia, in South Korean academia post-1945.26
Such critical analyses of Cold War scholarship on China and of modernization
are, of course, already common.27 Specialists in Chosŏn history
should take the lead in critiquing problems generated by scholarship of the
period during the era of the Cold War— lest it becomes the task of scholars of
twentieth-century Korea who may have only a partial understanding of the
subject matter being debated.
Our preparation for the initial conference, and the
subsequent planning of this special issue have been delayed first by the
initially controversial nature of the affair, which made us cautious to contact
people whose views we did not already know, and thus excessively narrowed the
scholars with whom we were initially in discussion. Secondly, it was further
delayed by the Covid 19 pandemic, which overwhelmed scholars and teachers
everywhere, causing many to drop out of our initial conference, and others to
be cautious of spending time on producing a new publication. Because our
original project reached out to a too narrow community of scholars, we
reinterpret this interruption due to the pandemic as an advantage, as we hope
it will open doors to the participation of more scholars, and more diverse
perspectives, concerning the role of the US, and of English-language academia,
in Korean studies.
This special issue resulting from the conference held online
at the University of
Oslo in August 2020 consists of three
papers. The first one, by Robert WinstanleyChesters (University of Leeds, Bath
Spa University), offers a definitive record of the events happening between the
publication of Armstrong’s Tyranny of the
Weak on June 18, 2013 and the early retirement of its disgraced author on
September 10, 2019, after an investigation by Columbia University, his
erstwhile employer, found the allegation of plagiarism true. The record offered
in the article by Winstanley-Chesters provides ample ground for a serious,
deep-going reflection on the status of the prevailing practices inside the
academic community including Korean Studies—the practices which, to put it
mildly, do not necessarily dove-tail with academia’s self-chosen role as a
defender of reason. Especially disturbing is the unconditional support
initially offered to Armstrong by a number of senior scholars in the field—the
support which puts into serious question academia’s ability to function in a
truly meritocratic fashion, judging its members by the same professional
standards irrespective of their institutional belonging or place inside the
private networks. Winstanley-Chesters, however, goes further than simply reconstructing
the course of the events in “Armstrong affair.” It questions the very concept
of sole, individual authorship in the world of scholarship where de facto
co-production by multiple actors is an increasingly dominant reality, and
suggests the necessity of further perfecting the rules which would allow de
facto co-authorship to be accounted for, when the symbolic Capital of
publication credit is distributed in academia.
The article by Kathryn Weathersby (Georgetown University)
focuses on the America-centric epistemology in research focused on Korea’s
tragic contemporary history which partly stems from the easier availability of
American documents to researchers from North America and Europe (the same, in
fact, is applicable to the predominant number of Japanese or South Korean
researchers as well). A careful scrutiny of American records makes, for
example, abundantly clear all the failings of the American occupation policy in
the southern part of Korea in 1945–48; from its suppression of the political
Left, to its reluctance to cooperate with the Soviet authorities on building a
unified, independent Korea. A researcher whose main source are chiefly American
documents may then jump to the conclusion that the US is solely culpable for
the ensuing division of the Peninsula. Soviet documents, however, make
essential corrections to this rather simplistic and US-centred picture. They
demonstrate that Moscow took a number of essential steps to secure its
interests in North already in 1945–46, starting as early as in spring 1946 to
re-mould North Korean society in accordance with its own ideas on how a
Sovietfriendly country should look like. They also demonstrate a very high
level of Soviet control over the operations of early North Korean (proto-)state
apparatus—which was certainly one source for the (legitimate) resentment on the
part of Kim Il Sung and other national leaders of North Korea, leading them
eventually to complement Soviet “Marxism–Leninism” with chuch’e (Juche) ideology explicitly emphasizing the importance of
national independence.
The third article, by Vladimir Tikhonov (Oslo University),
attempts to re-assess a number of endeavours to write on Korean history by US-based
historians of Korea in the 1910s–1980s as reflections of inherently
self-centric picture of the world. In this Eurocentric picture, traditional
Korea was locked into a historical trajectory via which “modernity” was
unachievable. Tikhonov agrees that American historiography of Korea achieved a
tremendously high level of professionalization by the 1960–70s. While American
academics writing on Korea in the early twentieth century did not even consider
it necessary to use any Korean sources, the US-based professional historians of
Korea—such as Edward Wagner or James Palais mentioned above—were following the
expected historical protocols, analyzing the original Korean sources in a way
hardly different from the modus operandi of the historical community in East
Asia. Nevertheless, as Tikhonov argues, their epistemological perspectives did
not necessarily catch up with the heightened levels of professional
sophistication. To both Wagner and Palais, pre-modern (Chosŏn) Korea was more
defined by what it supposedly was not (a society on the track towards
developing the assumedly standard capitalist modernity), rather by what it was.
Concomitantly to this, there was a strong tendency to see it as a sui generis case rather than one of the
bureaucratic monarchies of early modern Eurasia, sharing a lot with its peers
in, say, Europe of the absolutist age.
As academics focused on history, we have to be humble. We
know only too well that modernity did not lead the world into the realm of
rationality once promised by Enlightenment thinkers. We live instead in a
highly hierarchical world-system, in which the perceptions of the periphery by
the observers from the core—historians, as well as many other professional
categories included—have been historically shaped by all the inequalities which
characterize this system as a whole. As Korea was historically a part of
world-system’s colonial periphery, it applies to Korean Studies in the
universities of North America or Europe as well—both on the level of knowledge
production and on the level of academic practices, some of which, as the
“Armstrong affair” demonstrated, may lead to serious distortions of
scholarship. It remains to be hoped that the attempt at a post mortem of the
“Armstrong affair” undertaken in this special issue, will contribute towards
the long-drawn out process of de-hegemonizing knowledge production surrounding
Korean history in the academia outside Korea. While “objectivity” is perhaps
hardly more than an elusive dream28 it is hoped for that the
lessons learned through the experiences of the “Armstrong affair” may make us,
at least, more self-reflective about both our own cognitive biases and the
inherent inequalities immanent to and embedded in the institutional structures
and construction of the Korean Studies community. This will be a step in the
right direction.
Notes
1. The
publication of this special section and the workshop which served to generate
the research and work behind these papers was supported by the 2020 Korean
Studies Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2020-C-16). We are
grateful for all the anonymous reviewers who contributed so much to improving
the papers and this special section.
2. Email:
abohnet@uwo.ca.
3. E-mail:
vladimir.tikhonov@ikos.uio.no.
4. Charles K.
Armstrong. Tyranny of the Weak: North
Korea and the World, 1950–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2013).
5. See for
example Bruce Cumings. Korea’s Place in
the Sun: A Modern History (New York, NY: WW Norton, 1997), p. 442.
6. Balázs
Szalontai. Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev
era: Soviet–DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). For the problems with the
record of this event, see http://sthelepress.com/wp-content/
uploads/2016/09/Tyranny-of-the-Weak_Table-of-98-Cases.pdf, case 71.
7. The initial
discussion of this topic was on Sthele
Press, BR Myers’ Blog, in an entry entitled “Revoking a Recommendation”
first published on September 13, 2016, and regularly updated with dated entries
after that. http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/13/revoking
-a-recommendation-b-r-myers/. Readers are also directed to a document, compiled
by Balázs Szalontai himself, entitled “A Table of 98 Examples of Source
Fabrication, Plagiarism, and Text-Citation Disconnects in Charles K.
Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak (2013).” This document is currently made
accessible via Sthele Press.
http://sthelepress.com/wp-content/
uploads/2016/09/Tyranny-of-the-Weak_Table-of-98-Cases.pdf.
8. For a
discussion of this, see Coleen Flaherty. “Fake Citations Kill a Career,” Inside Higher Education Sept. 13, 2019,
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/09/13/columbia-says
-historians-acclaimed-book-north-korea-was-plagiarized-publisher-says#:~:text=Fake%20
Citations%20Kill%20a%20Career,been%20taken%20out%20of%20print.
9. Andrei
Lankov. “Tyranny of the Weak”: The Row Engulfing North Korean Studies,” North Korea News October 5, 2016.
https://www.nknews.org/2016/10/tyranny-of-the-weak-the-row
-engulfing-north-korean-studies.
10. Fyodor
Tertiskiy. “Speaking Truth to Power: The Biggest Scandal in Korean Studies
should be Talked About,” Daily NK,
December 13, 2016, https://www.dailynk.com/english/
speaking-truth-to-power-the-bigges/.
11. Notably,
Khadija Husein. “Amid public allegations of plagiarism, reputation and academic
integrity of Korean studies program face scrutiny,” Columbia Spectator January 28, 2019,
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2019/01/28/amid-public-allegations-of
-plagiarism-reputation-and-academic-integrity-of-korean-studies-program-face-scrutiny/.
12. The brief
existence of this new edition is discussed, for instance, by Scott Jaschik.
“Amid dispute, Award Returned,” Inside
Higher Education July 5, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.
com/news/2017/07/05/history-book-award-returned-amid-questions-about-citation-errors.
13. Note that an
article published by Armstrong in 2005, well before the publication of
Szalontai’s book, was derived in fact from Szalontai’s unpublished
dissertation. The article has subsequently been retracted by the journal.
Charles Armstrong. “RETRACTED ARTICLE: ‘Fraternal Socialism’: The International
Reconstruction of North Korea, 1953–1962” Cold
War History 5.2 (2005): 161–87.
14. James
Palais. “A Search for Korean Uniqueness.” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 55.2 (1995): 409–425.
15. Adam Bohnet.
Turning Toward Edification Foreigners in
Chosŏn Korea (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), pp. 4–8,
also jumps, problematically, from the colonial period to the recent present.
16. “An
Interview with James B. Palais,” The
Review of Korean Studies 4.2 (2001): 306–307.
17. Palais. “A
Search for Korean Uniqueness.” p. 413.
18. T Fujitani.
“The Reischauer Memo: Mr. Moto, Hirohito, and Japanese American Soldiers,” Critical Asian Studies 33. 3 (2001):
379–402.
19. For a brief
outline of his career, see, among others, John Whitney Hall. “Edwin Oldfather
Reischauer (1910–1990),” Journal of Asian
Studies 50.1 (1991): 225–228. Also see numerous references to his role in
Nick Kapur. Japan at the Crossroads:
Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2018).
20. For example,
see Edwin O. Reischauer. Wanted: an Asian
Policy (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1973) and Beyond Vietnam; the United States and Asia (New York, NY: Knopf,
1968).
21. See Fabio
Lanza. The End of Concern: Maoist China,
Activism, and Asian Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p.
31.
22. James
Palais. “Obituaries: Edward W. Wagner (1924–2001),” The Journal of Asian Studies
61. 3 (2002): 1137–1139.
23. An
Chongch’ŏl. “Chuil daesa Edŭwin Raishawŏ ŭi ‘kŭndaehwaron’ kwa Han’guksa
insik,” Yŏksa munje yŏn’gu 17.1
(2013): 293–332; Chang Sejin, Raishawŏ (Edwin O. Reischauer), Tong Asia,
‘kwŏllyŏk/chisik ŭi t’ek’ŭnolloji—chŏnhu Miguk ŭi chiyŏk yŏn’gu wa Han’gukhak
ŭi paech’i” Sanghŏ hakpo 36 (2012):
87–140.
24. The classic
of this commercially valuable genre is Hong Chŏng-uk. 7-Mak 7-Chang: Mŏmch’uji annŭn salm ŭl wihayŏ (Sŏul T’ŭkpyŏlsi:
Samsŏng, 1993). A more recent example is Emanuel Pastreich, Insaeng ŭn sokto ga anira panghyang ida:
Habŏdŭ paksa Yi Man-yŏl Kyosu ŭi tae Han’guk p’yoryugi [Life is a matter of
direction, not speed: Harvard Profossor Yi Man-yŏl] (Kyŏnggi-do P’aju-si:
21-segi Puksŭ, 2016).
25. There is
considerable scholarship on this phenomenon, of which two examples are Yean-Ju
Lee and Hagen Koo. “‘Wild Geese Fathers’ and a Globalised Family Strategy for
Education in Korea,” International Development
Planning Review 28.4 (2006): 533–53 and Jiyeon Kang and Nancy Abelmann.
“The Domestication of South Korean Pre-College Study Abroad in the First Decade
of the Millennium,” Journal of Korean
Studies 16.1 (2011): 89–118.
26. A valuable
example of the start of this sort of reflection may be found in Seung-Kyung Kim
and Michael Edson Robinson, eds. Peace
Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the United States
(Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2020).
27. For
instance, Tani Barlow. “Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies,” In Formations of Colonial Modernity in East
Asia, ed. Tani Barlow, 317–412 (New
York, USA: Duke University Press, 2020).
28. Peter
Novick. That Noble Dream: The Objectivity
Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Authorship,
Co-Production, Plagiarism: Issues of Origin and Provenance in the Korean
Studies Community1
ROBERT
WINSTANLEY-CHESTERS University of Leeds, Bath Spa University2
Abstract
The long controversy and struggle over
Charles Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak
may have, for the Korean Studies community felt uniquely transgressive and
offensive, but the malfeasance and academic corruption of the episode is not by
far the only instance of productive difficulty in the recent history of the
academic field. This paper not only attempts to think through questions of
authenticity and intellectual ownership in Korean Studies’ difficulties with
the writer formerly known as Professor Charles Armstrong, but also to explore
other moments of complexity, both historical and contemporary, in the
discipline. These include questions and problems surrounding co-production and
practices of shared and creative authorship in many recent North Korean defector/refugee
narratives, alternative views of truth telling and notions of “truthyness”
familiar in a world of #fakenews and post-truth. The paper seeks a longer,
deeper historical frame for considering Korean Studies “wicked” problems of
authorship, touching on complicated processes of misinformation, disinformation
and re-publication from the Cold War, past visions of political and ideological
realities weaponized by security agencies and actors whose agendas and
ambitions have not always entirely been clear. Ultimately beyond concrete
notions of truth and objectivity, the paper asks whether Korean Studies should
be concerned with the origin stories and provenance of text as much as with
source and citation.
Keywords: Authorship in Korean Studies, Charles Armstrong,
Plagiarism,
Co-Production, Provenance
When Brian Myers, specialist on North
Korean ideology and political culture widely known for his iconoclastic
observations (and in his work as a literary critic, known for his iconoclastic
book reviews),3 uploaded a blogpost titled “Revoking a Recommendation” to his then new website
www.sthelepress.com on the 13th of September, 2016,4 a storm
was unleashed into the field of Korean Studies and its academic community. On
September 10th, 2019, very nearly three years later, the subject of Myers’
revocation Charles Armstrong, was forced into early retirement, declared guilty
of research conduct and plagiarism by his own employer, thoroughly disgraced.5
Since this moment Armstrong’s reputation has been further tarnished as
allegations of sexual assault against him have been levelled by a former
student supported by Columbia University Graduate Worker’s Union.6
Current events aside this paper seeks to recount, as much as possible, the
narrative set in motion publicly by Myers in 2016. The extraordinary story of
Charles King Armstrong and his at one time, tour de force monograph Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the
World, 1950–1992 and his fall from grace at the hands of what can only be
described as his own academic malfeasance. This narrative of course is not
recountable without describing the details of the dogged pursuit of Armstrong
by the academic he had repeatedly wronged, Balázs Szalontai and a small team of
colleagues who picked apart the offending book and detailed the injustices that
had been done with a substantial degree of intricacy. This paper cannot
possibly cover all of these details or intricacies; one of the hallmarks of the
whole affair was that the level of detail Armstrong had gone into when it came
to academic impropriety, is matched by the volume of detail produced by those
who sought to unpick it. There is a vast body of documentary material that
Szalontai and the group around him produced, itself underpinned by an equally
vast body of archival material related to it which both Szalontai and Armstrong
used. There is also correspondence on the matter between Szalontai and
Armstrong and between Armstrong and his employer, Columbia University of New
York. There is a still larger body of public comment on the matter, which spans
the gap between the more closed academic world and public social media
landscapes, such as the furious discussion which arose on the Korean Studies
world email list (often known as the KS list), after the 15 September 2016.7
It would be possible to write a monograph, a weighty monograph, purely focusing
on all of this material and this affair, but this paper, while obviously
foregrounding the Armstrong affair aims not to focus solely on it.
Instead this paper will seek to use the experiences of
2016–2019 to explore previous moments of unsavory, unconventional or
substandard academic practice in Korean Studies both historically and in
contemporary times. While the Armstrong affair is a recent bright flair up,
Korean Studies as a field is no stranger to such matters. This paper therefore
seeks to question and consider issues of authorship, co-production and
plagiarism in Korean Studies more widely than simply a highly detailed review
of the issues surrounding Charles Armstrong. In order to do so the paper will
have to a certain extent, define terms and concepts. When it comes to
authorship or by co-production what do we mean as scholars of Korean Studies?
The author of this paper is a Human Geographer by discipline, and geographers
have a very specific use of the word co-production which refers to the complex
and fluid way in which humans and their societies produce in tandem, the
landscapes in which they live, work and place, with the ecologies, materials
and eco-systems those landscapes, in their rawest sense are made from. However
this is not simply a uni-directional process and so those materials and
ecologies also co-produce the human beings and societies who live amongst, next
to or within them. Co-production is in this sense an unconscious process which
necessarily impacts both parties, remolding and reshaping them as it unfolds.8
When the same terminology is used by writers or creative developers in the film
or television industry it has a different sense, in that they jointly create a
product, franchise or product for sale, and this is I suspect closer to the
sense that academic writers have of it.9 That co-production is akin to
co-authorship an act of literary or intellectual joint creation, using a shared
writerly voice.
I want to suggest that co-production in Korean Studies is
at times closer to the version derived from Geography; that not only does a
piece of written scholarly work get produced, but that the authors of that work
through the process of the writing and the finding, or attempt to find of a
unified voice, become in some ways unwittingly involved in the co-production
and generation of each others’ intellectual landscape, influencing and shaping
the framing and conceptual networks of any work produced. No doubt for the most
part this co-production involves a fair distribution of work or labor, but this
paper will ask essentially can it be co-production, when one author with either
native language skills, or with a higher degree of seniority, influence or
professional regard holds the key either to research materials or potential for
publication? Co-production therefore is not always balanced equitably or
fairly, so much so that its prefix “co” may become a little meaningless. To
avoid confusion and unnecessary misunderstanding, it is worth perhaps in Korean
Studies, rather than Geography introducing a typological approach to the
variations in form of academic co-production. These essentially range from the
fully acceptable to the fully unethical: Firstly a form of co-production based
on mutual agreement and open acknowledgement (where all co-producers are named,
trust each other, and don’t seek to disadvantage each other); secondly a form
of co-production which is also based on mutual agreement, but in which only partial
acknowledgement or credit is given (where one partner, such as a research
assistant, is only briefly mentioned, and the extent of their contribution is
downplayed); thirdly a co-production based on mutual agreement but where there
is a lack of acknowledgement or credit (where the contribution of one partner
is wholly concealed, though with their consent); fourthly a form of
co-production based again on open acknowledgement, but with only partial
agreement between the parties (where one partner is not entirely truthful or
correct toward the other); and finally a form of co-production which lacks any
acknowledgement, agreement, or mutual awareness between the parties; in other
words plagiarism, where the consent of the person plagiarized was never asked for
and they discover the fact of the “co-production” only later.10
It is worth also in this paper considering more deeply what
we actually mean by authorship, when much of the work undertaken in the field
of Korean Studies is done through translation, or using translated materials.
How can the voice of the author or original producer of knowledge or evidence
being focused on, possibly come through in an equal manner in the work of
another author whose language almost necessarily privileges their work over the
original. In Korean Studies we encounter for instance many writers and scholars
who write and work in the Russian language whose data and scholarship is
repurposed into English by English speaking authors who are much more famous
and well known than their source material.11 The same is true of course of
Koreans. There are innumerable Korean scholars whose work is projected and
amplified into the domain of English language scholarship and publication, not
by themselves, but by others who utilize their material as the raw data for
their own. Who in these cases is the actual author, and who perhaps might
instead be translators, transformers or transfigurers
of the original source material? Here Korean Studies comes into intersection
with the field of literature and translated literature, even with non-fiction
and semi-fiction writing, which is very important in the field of North Korean
defector or refugee memoirs, which this paper will seek to touch on and which
have created some of the most publicly and globally famous moments in which
truths become undermined or deconstructed in some way.
Mentioning truth in the preceding paragraph at the same
time as talking about such ostensibly non-fiction material reminds the reader
that we are writing and reading in a historical moment when truth is hugely
important and contested. As much as some writers would have it that we live in
a “post-truth” age, the energy revolving around popular claims and counter
claims suggests that far from being beyond truth, truth is still hugely
important.12 New terminologies have arisen in recent years to give
a sense of some of the energy behind truth claims made in the public and media
arenas. Something is said to have a “truthiness” about it when it feels like it
is much more likely to be true, or to contain content which in spite of other
aspects which might not seem so, core elements of the content certainly feel
they should be true.13 There is a lot about the
industry around North Korea defector/refugee writing which is possessed of a
degree of “truthiness.” Given the sense that North Korea is a catastrophically
autocratic country, content on harming, depriving and traumatizing its own
people, it stands to reason for readers that horrible things have happened,
almost indescribably horrible things which appear almost beyond conventional
levels of horror. It is “truthy” that such things have happened, and “truthy”
that those who have somehow escaped from such things bear witness to them, and
will be able to recount honest and uninflated versions of them. The same in a
sense is true of the writing of Charles Armstrong. For academics it seemed
“truthy” that Armstrong would produce a book such as Tyranny of the Weak, erudite, but rooted in complex, deep readings
of archival collections, even those in foreign languages. It was unlikely or
“untruthy” that Armstrong could have co-opted or appropriated the work and
scholarship of someone else, all the better to amplify and project his own
academic authority and prestige.
At the same time as considering notions of truth or
truthiness, it is worth the paper returning to our conceptualization of what is
plagiarism and what is it to plagiarize the work of another. A number of
readers will no doubt work in academic institutions and mark or assess the work
of students. For the most part that assessment will be done in tandem with a
complex and ubiquitous piece of technology known as “Turnitin” through which we feed all the material submitted to us
and expect it to be able to determine what is or is not sourced correctly.14
This piece of software technology has in our own professional work become the
primary arbiter of what is plagiarized and what has been attributed correctly.
With Turnitin we obtain a percentage
similarity for every piece of work and can actually track backwards, using its
enormous database of inputted material, to any original source. This in part
outsources our responsibility and perception of what is plagiarized, as well as
redefining what is plagiarism itself. Previously what academics would have
considered simply bad or incomplete attribution can be become full scale
plagiarism, but on the other hand, well paraphrased or reconfigured writing,
even without sourcing, can pass the systems by. Likewise material which has
convincing source or attribution markers can also pass the systems by.15
Thus plagiarism as we know it has become an algorithmic, technical or
mechanical process. But just as it is hard for us to keep hold of our handle on
what is “truthy” or what is possessed of “truthiness,” this means that
plagiarism that is more artful or creative approach can get lost. It can also
be subsumed into the prerogatives and pressures of the publication and academic
industry. As some presentations of the Armstrong story sought to demonstrate,
we are all under enormous pressure to publish, and certain moments in academic
life, tenure preparation or REF censuses (in the UK), can only amplify those
pressures.16 Early on in the process of this story, it was
suggested the Armstrong affair was a case when an academic’s compass on what
might constitute plagiarism or appropriation of another’s work had become lost
or displaced, when faced with an endless set of reference notes behind the book
in question, which after many years working may not have been in the most
comprehensive or coherent order. As readers will actually see, when the results
of Columbia University of New York’s investigation were actually released, this
was not the case at all.17
Having considered notions of authorship, co-production,
truth and “truthyness” and plagiarism or appropriation the author of this paper
suggests that perhaps another conceptual frame might be useful or helpful in
which to locate a future approach or reconfiguration for Korean Studies, one
based on consideration of origin or provenance from Art History and curatorial
practices. Provenance as a term originally derived from practices of business
and trade, relating to the validity of notes and accreditation documents held
by a trader or middleman attesting to their creditworthiness or reliability in
ages when communication was slow and it was just not possible to verify one’s
credentials on the spot. Such notes had to be produced in a certain way, using
particular forms such as seals and watermarks, and the validity of such
documents and whether the value they bestowed on the trader before a client
could really be transferred or not, this reliability was their provenance. As
trading and economic practices developed and items of value became more and
more specific and unique, it became particularly important that those things
being traded could be verified as what they were claimed to be. This was
particularly true when it came to painted fine art and sculpture as the
economic structures of the art world moved from roots in patronage and direct
connection to the ruling and highest classes, to one based on an “art market”
through which painted, sculpted and later photographed and graphically produced
works could be freely traded.18 These art and creative objects
had values which were set up by this market and trading, values connected to
their scarcity and more esoteric trends of desire and fashion. As the value of
painted and sculptural art in particular increased in the 19th century, and as
the technological revolutions, which in part generated the capital for the
market, threatened to make their reproduction possible and increasingly
inexpensive, strategies for accrediting their originality and uniqueness became
ever more important.19
Art provenance thus became one of the key pillars of the
art market and a sub-industry focused on the techniques, abilities and
knowledge sets which would allow interested parties, buyers and sellers, to
trace art pieces’ histories and ownerships. This became particularly important
in Europe after the 1939–1945 war during which Nazi Germany sought to steal and
appropriate collections of art from the many countries occupied by their armed forces,
as well as to appropriate culturally important (and other) property from
populations marked for extermination by fascist ideology.20
Following the war the remaining descendants and family members who had owned
these artworks, together with national collections from liberated countries
sought to recover their property (and in a number of cases are still trying to
do so), from the post war West German state. To do so they had to prove by
provenance that works which had changed hands and changed geography many times
since they had been stolen or appropriated, had once belonged to them.21
Already existing strategies and practices of provenance became hugely important
in this exercise, and techniques developed even further. This development with
the invention of X-ray, CT scanning and MRI technology has progressed in recent
years beyond matters of simple ownership to explore below the paint or plaster
itself in order to interrogate the age of a painting or the chemical make up of
the pigments it was produced with.22
Moving beyond art and cultural products and production, but
remaining with the world of technology, provenance has accrued another meaning
or field in recent years with what is known as data provenance or data lineage.
Essentially as computer systems and interlinked networks have become ever more
vital to the functioning of global economic structures and social practices and
needs, the links between computers, systems and databases provided by the
hypertext protocol based internet become ever more intrinsic to their
functioning, it becomes more and more important to be able to trace what is
flowing through those links.23 Open Source data and computing
systems thus require a level of traceability of the information and data that
flows within and around them, in order to establish the lineage or provenance
of that data. In part this is to avoid bad data, bugs or errors to flow around
the system, but in another part this to allow rights holders to establish
whether their data is being used in a way which is allowed by contracts and
licenses. Equally, Open Source software and data must be open everywhere and
not appropriated by profit seekers, and so its free lineage becomes also vital.24
In pure science research open data and data lineage or provenance are also
hugely important when it comes to the requirement for reproducibility—there is
an epidemic of irreproducibility in recent years in many pure science
disciplines which drives even further the need for the original data to be open
and clear. It is worth considering whether the Armstrong case demonstrates a
real need for both data provenance and data lineage in Korean Studies, as other
elements of this paper will recall, one of the key elements of the whole affair
was the complication involved in the tracing of where particular elements of
the knowledge or data derived from. As such this paper considers whether
Koreanists and other Asian Studies academics might gain from incorporating
practices of provenance and lineage into our ethical and practical frameworks.
This is of course what referencing or citation is ultimately for, however might
we as an academic community take this further and consider alternate strategies
to avoid such instances in the future.
Finally moving beyond provenance and lineage, but not
beyond the issue which lies beneath them, namely traceability, the author of
this paper hopes that readers might consider Origin as a further potential tool
to connect with our disciplinary notions of authorship and co-production in
order to avoid such instances of appropriation, plagiarism and malfeasance in
the future. My use of the term “origin” is deliberate, and I also deliberately
derive it from French property law. Ultimately I am referring to the “Law of 6 May 1919 relating to the Protection
of Appellations of Origin,” a law which regularized in modern legal
frameworks, a particularly French route to the protection of food and drink
producers, rooted in the location of a producers production, the first instance
of which was in 1411 when the people of Roquefort sur Soulzon in southern
France were granted the legal monopoly on the sale and production of their
famous soft blue cheese, now known as Roquefort, by King Charles VI.25
1919’s law gave birth to what we now know as Appellation D’origine Contrôlée or “controlled designation of
origin” in English. This legal principle regarding food production has been
translated into many different legal frameworks in Europe and elsewhere and has
been used to protect not only the geographic areas in which food and drinks can
be produced, but the breeds of animal involved in their production, the
techniques used, and even in the case of Mimollette cheese from Lille in
France, the fact that the cheese is in part aged by the use of cheese mites on
its surface (though the use of fly larvae in the production of Sardinia’s Casa
Marzu has not allowed the granting of a “Denominazione Origine Protetta,” but
instead the banning of the cheese’s production entirely on health and safety
grounds).26 Obviously academic work and scholarship is some
distance away conceptually from food production, but it is clear in Korean
Studies that a lot of that work derives from access to particular places and
locations, not simply for fieldwork, but also for archival and documentary collection.
Another of the important elements in the Armstrong story
was the geography of the collecting of data by Balázs Szalontai, and also
supposedly by Charles Armstrong. A researcher engaged with this level of
research in Korean Studies develops a repertoire of productive skills when it
comes to archival research, similar perhaps to those skills of production
involved in food production. Each archive has its own bureaucratic process and
empirical landscape, and a researcher must know the vagaries of each. The
collections within each must harvested and extracted in a particular way, and
received by the researcher in a specific format or style. Each catalogue must
be searched or interrogated in its own unique manner, and in fact sometimes
constructed or crowd sourced by the academic and those they might know. Also
each country a researcher visits, not only has its own language and set of
cultural norms, but it has its own set of academic principles and scholarly
traditions—these traditions necessarily often build upon the work of
generations of scholars from that country, and the writing and research done in
those places is often a product not only of the scholars themselves, but of the
national traditions and processes behind them. It is very possible, as was the
case in the investigation of the Armstrong affair, for academic practices
derived from the origin of the data and material extracted by an academic in
their work of collection, to be marked by the geographical and cultural
traditions of the place from where it came. This, it will become clear, made it
obvious to this author, that Armstrong had never himself seen some of the
sources he had claimed to have used, in situ as he suggested he had in his
research process. This paper suggests therefore that collectively the Korean
Studies community might conceptualize a way of taking into account “origin” as
a factor or an important element in our approach and framework of authorship
and production, and develop strategies perhaps to use as a tool in the investigation
of future moments of plagiarism and academic malpractice.
Armstrong
also examines the competition for legitimacy between the two Koreas during the
Cold War. His book builds on the work of projects hosted at the Wilson Center,
in Washington, D.C., and on his travels to various capitals; the result is a
superb example of international history that makes use of multiple archives.27
With notions of authorship, production and co-production,
plagiarism, origin and provenance in mind this paper is worth returning to the
book which essentially drives the interest of this paper, and so many others’
concerns. Tyranny of the Weak: North
Korea and the World 1950–1992 was published on 18 June 2013 by Cornell
University Press as part of its Studies
of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series. It would not be an
understatement to say that at the time it was acclaimed.28
Charles Armstrong’s first monograph The
North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 had been well received, and he was now a
tenured Professor at Columbia and an important player in much of the
institutional superstructures behind Korean Studies as a discipline in the USA,
sitting on many funding committees and on the Editorial Boards of a number of
journals. The very positive review which starts this section of the paper,
published in Foreign Affairs, and
still like many such statements of support for the book, in-spite of what has
happened, available online with no additional comment or retraction, was one of
many such reviews in both academic journals and other more publicly facing
media.29 What is interesting with hindsight is that one of the
things many of these reviews sort to focus on and praise in Armstrong’s book at
the time was the perception that it was especially strong in its use of
archival sources and a careful reading of some highly unconventional and hard
to access sources. Very quickly Tyranny
of the Weak ended up on university reading lists, at my own institution the
University of Leeds, Adam Cathcart used it as a key element of the reading list
in his Korean focused modules for instance between 2014 and 2016.30
One review it seems appeared in 2013 which reads like a
premonition of what was to come, that by Brian Myers in the journal Acta Koreana, volume 16.2, which
includes the pointed assertion (after having communicated with the original
author), “Several pages unfold events and quotations in a sequence so similar
to Balázs Szalontai’s Kim Il Sung in the
Khrushchev Era” (2005) that one either starts or ceases to wonder why
Armstrong was so reluctant to cite it.”31 Szalontai had already had
concerns about these similarities, had begun to investigate, and was supported
by Myers to trace the collection of Russian documents Armstrong claimed to have
used in the creation of Tyranny of the
Weak.32 Concerned that Szalontai’s analysis of the issues
could take a long period of time, on 13th September, 2016 published Revoking a Recommendation.33
In the post Myers outlined four initial points of interest, one from page 81 of
Tyranny of the Weak which mentions
North Korea’s First Congress of Artists and Writers in 1953, the second from
page 105 refers to North Korean Minister of the Interior Pang Hak Se’s
conversation with a diplomat from the Soviet Union in 1960, a third from page
156 where Armstrong discusses the North Korean response to the Prague spring of
1968 and finally a fourth instance from page 63 of the book where Armstrong
considers the support Eastern European technicians and advisers gave to North
Korea following the Korean War.34 In all four cases Myers
suggested while he understood that flaws and mistakes can get into the first
edition of a book, Tyranny of the Weak
has already been reconfigured for a paperback version and all of these mistakes
continued to be in the text. More than that though, if there were mistakes in
these four instances, they were a very particular form of mistake. Either, as
was the case in the third example, a complete misreading of the original source
material, or in the case of the first, second and fourth, misattributions of
sources, which could be very much more easily and coherently found in a book by
Balázs Szalontai published in 2005 titled Kim
Il Sung in the Khruschev Era.35 Myers’ core assertion at this
point was that these four examples demonstrated that Armstrong had utilized
materials from Szalontai’s book and created tenuous false attributions and
citations to cover up the fact he had done so. Only four examples at this
point, though enough when news of Myers’ blogpost emerged a couple of days later
on the Korean Studies global email list, courtesy of a brief posting by a
curious and disappointed sounding Jiyul Kim,36 to elicit an extraordinary
outburst of rage in support of Armstrong and against the critique from Myers.
Professor Donald Baker of the University of British Columbia and famous scholar
of Korean religious and shamanistic traditions opening comment was “I wouldn’t
trust Brian Myers to evaluate someone else’s scholarship”37
Frank Hoffman (then moderator of the list), infuriated by Myers posting,
remarked a couple of days later “No balls, no decency, no academic conduct, and
swarm mentality? Is this really where we are now? Is this where we really want
to go? Is this what you teach your students?”38 Sir James
Hoare, former Charge D’Affaires at the British Embassy in Pyongyang and
connected to SOAS, University of London followed up “We all make mistakes. My
PhD supervisor, a distinguished historian of Japan, apologized in one of his
last books for having spelt the name of the first US representative in Japan,
Townsend Harris, consistently as ‘Townshend Harris’ from his very first book in
1955. Footnotes are notorious as a source of mistakes. They should not happen
but they do. Each of us will have to decide whether such mistakes invalidate a whole
book.”39 It is fair to say that these exchanges on the Korean
Studies list were one of the most bad tempered of recent years. The author of
this paper and many others known to them felt it was extremely disappointing to
read famous and senior scholars dismissing such potentially terrible academic
practice so readily, and in many sense using their academic authority to close
down, curtail or restrict debate and discussion on the matter.
Myers of course was not to be discouraged, and reported on
3 October that, spurred on by the intemperate discussions on the list, he had
on the 21 September, 2016 sent Berlin’s Political Archive a list of 17
documents that Tyranny of the Weak
claimed to have utilized from East German collections, in order to check
whether they in fact existed at all.40 The reply from the archives to
Myers was that in fact only one out of these 17 documents actually existed with
the similar cataloguing numbers, but that document did not really support what
was written in Armstrong’s book—however Myers asserted that a re-reading of
this section revealed it to be a semi-paraphrasing of writing from Szalontai in
which he was commenting on a document from the Hungarian Foreign Ministry
archives recounting a similar situation Hungarian intelligence had reported on
the policing of embassies in East Germany.41
From this point on the issues with Tyranny of the Weak seemed to snowball. A group of scholars brought
together by Balázs Szalontai worked together using various Google documents to
essentially deconstruct the citations claimed in Armstrong’s book, the initial
four contentious citations or sections, grew to over twenty and at the end of
the exercise comprised some 98 separate instances. Szalontai later constructed
these 98 instances into a more coherent and comprehensive set of documents
which partition the concerns over Armstrong’s book into main categories.42
Firstly there were 55 instances in which a section of Tyranny of the Weak had used plagiarized material, but to hide this
had fabricated a non- existent source. Secondly there were a further 28 cases
in which Armstrong had used plagiarized material, but had sought to use a
completely irrelevant source to cover the plagiarism.43
There were even a number of cases in which the exercise of using irrelevant or
completely fabricated sources utterly distorted the actual narrative Armstrong
was writing about. Szalontai on this matter records: “In one such case, for
example, the words of a Hungarian diplomat are placed in the mouth of his
Soviet counterpart. In another one, the greater seriousness of which will be
apparent to all scholars of diplomatic history, the North Korean security
organs are said to have arrested a dissident inside the Bulgarian Embassy, when
in fact he was arrested outside. In a third case, the author cites a report
supposedly written by the “GDR Embassy in the DPRK” on 22 December 1953, though
the GDR did not open an embassy in North Korea until the summer of 1954”44
Ultimately Armstrong appears to have attempted to discount
these concerns, claiming East German and Soviet archival documents throughout Tyranny of the Weak to back up his
scholarship, when in fact he had used the work of Balázs Szalontai, whose
writing was underpinned by archival material from the Hungarian Foreign
Ministry archives. Szalontai asserted that it appeared that Armstrong somehow
had had access to the materials which made up his book Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era in manuscript for other form at
some point in 2005, as material which had been in previous versions of work
that became part of that book was itself part of the exercise of plagiarism.
The collection of 98 instances was not exclusively derived from Szalontai’s
work, but also that of Sergey Radchenko, Alexandre Mansourov, Kathryn
Weathersby, Barry Gills, and Rűdiger Frank. There are some fairly egregious
uses of Woodrow Wilson Center translation documents, translations by Sergey
Radchenko and elements of German language publications from Professor Frank.45
Some of the material Armstrong claimed to have used was
from the Russian Federation’s Foreign Ministry Archives, while Szalontai and
others asserted that much of this was in fact derived from material held by the
Hungarian Foreign Ministry Archives and written about in Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era. While it appears from
Szalontai’s careful analysis that Armstrong’s claims were unlikely to be true,
it was worth utilizing a quirk of Russian archival practice to confirm this.
Soviet and Russian archival practice has been to organize material around the
bureaucrat or employee responsible for it. Therefore documents are organized
into folders, or fondy containing all
the material relating to a particular issue that a bureaucrat is tasked with or
working on.46 When a scholar recalls such folders from the archive,
the physical folder has a document attached to it which records the names and
details of other scholars or archival workers who have recalled it in the past.
It is often therefore possible to obtain a reasonably good idea of all of the scholars
in the past who have been interested in a particular document or set of
documents from these cover documents. Having used the Russian Federation
Archive of the Economy and the Russian Federation’s Foreign Ministry Archive in
the past, this author employed a Research Assistant to check the fondy which Armstrong claimed to have
used in order to construct Tyranny of the
Weak. It will not surprise the reader to discover that having done so, no
evidence that Charles Armstrong nor any research associate, colleague or
employee of his, nor in fact anyone during the period he was supposed to have
done the research, could be found on the dated cover sheets in the archive.
As the evidence and number of instances of potential source
manipulation, distortion and plagiarism grew, Armstrong himself, perhaps more
than his most vociferous supporters, sounded at least outwardly and initially,
apologetic. His first public statement on the matter was a post amidst the
florid outburst on the Korean Studies email list on the 17 September, 2016.47
Armstrong wrote “For the errors in my own work I of course take full
responsibility, which includes the responsibility to correct my errors and
improve the work.”48 At the same time Armstrong
sought to perhaps narrow the framing of any problems in Tyranny of the Weak, suggesting that “the criticism is directed to
a small section of Chapter 3 of the book, basically pp. 121–123.”49
By December 2016 however Armstrong was less apologetic, and on 30 December
published a post on his own (now defunct), blog www.charleskarmstrong.com which
outlined the fact he had now instructed his publisher Cornell University Press
to produce a revised version of the book which included corrections to make
good the situation. This blog ended however with the rather provocative, given
hindsight statement: “For those who find the book flawed, inaccurate, or
insufficiently researched, the answer is simple: write a better book. I would
look forward to reading it.”50 As well as being rather more
provocative and assertive, Armstrong in this post continued to frame the issue
as being rather less dramatic or extensive than appeared to be the case, and
only dealt in detail with four particular incidents in the book, most of which
derived from the original four outlined by Myers in his first post on the
matter from September.
As the numbers of issues with the book grew into the 90s,
Cornell University Press did actually work with Armstrong to publish a revised
version of Tyranny of the Weak,
including some 52 corrections. This revision, coinciding with the publication
of the paperback and digital versions of the book, did not stop on the 29 June
2017, Charles Armstrong having to return the prestigious Fairbank Prize to the
American Historical Association, which was a great honor for the book and
author and been so much a part of its selling by the press.51
It was an extraordinary example of a revision however, really unlike any other
this author had seen. Although there were 52 changes, according to Dean Smith,
Director of Cornell University Press “the press reviewed the book after the
corrections were made and believed that its substance was accurate and was not
affected by the citation errors.”52 So much so that the revised
version published by Cornell in July 2017 not only does not flag up on the
cover that it is a revised second edition, but fails to do so almost entirely
in the pages of the book, and includes only the vaguest of descriptions of the
affair in the acknowledgements. Intriguingly, the date of publication of the
book remains 2013, as if this of course were exactly the same book had been
first published, unencumbered by any hint of scandal or concern.
Behind the scenes of course the number of instances of
concern around Tyranny of the Weak
had grown to 98, Balázs Szalontai had filed an official complaint to Columbia
University, which began its own slow moving investigation and disciplinary
process, and colleagues such as Professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager has resigned
from the Advisory Board of the Woodrow Wilson Center in protest at Armstrong’s
continued place on that board.53 From a personal perspective it
was clear to this author that although friends and supporters continued to
advocate positively for Armstrong in public and in print, the authority
surrounding him was beginning to drain away. The edited volume proposed on
“North Korean Culture” whose editors were supposed to be Armstrong and ANU’s
Ruth Barraclough and which I was contracted to be produce a chapter for,
published of course by Columbia University Press, suddenly disappeared off
institutional screens and is no longer talked about.54
Armstrong was quietly removed from other boards and appeared on few panels and
at few conferences. The University of Leeds which had purchased a copy of the
revised edition of Tyranny of the Weak
for its high demand collection, felt the book tainted to such a degree, that a
special note was applied by the library to the book which recommended the
reader did not use it as a scholarly reference, instead only to use it in discussions
of plagiarism and academic malpractice.55 By January 2019, even Columbia
University’s own student newspaper The
Columbia Spectator published an article concerned with the seeming lack of
action and the apparent disinterest or lack of urgency on the subject.56
Khadija Hussein’s article of January 28 2019 wrote that there was concern about
the impact on the reputation of Columbia’s history department and an anonymous
faculty member suggested it would be better for graduate students to not come
to the department until the matter was resolved. In Hussein’s article Professor
Jager was quoted with a pointed assertion: “I have every reason to believe that
Columbia University, one of the most respected institutions of higher education
in the world, will thoroughly and impartially investigate this case. It should
take appropriate corrective measure in accordance with its findings. The longer
the investigation and actions are delayed and Columbia University stays silent,
the greater the danger that professor Armstrong’s transgression will not be
seen as such.”57
The extraordinary saga of Armstrong and Tyranny of the Weak, concluded
unexpectedly on 10 September, 2019 when Columbia’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences, Maya Tolstoy, wrote an open letter to the faculty stating that
investigations and inquiry had concluded that Professor Armstrong had
“committed research misconduct, specifically plagiarism in his book Tyranny of the Weak.”58
Following this Armstrong would be retiring at the end of the 2020 academic year
and would be on sabbatical until his retirement. In this statement there was
little detail about what had been found by the investigations and inquiry team,
however not much time later the website retractionwatch.com which focuses on
issues of academic malpractice, published online a partial version of the
report of Columbia’s Research Misconduct committee on the issue.59
While 98 potential issues of plagiarism certainly sounded a lot, what the
report suggests was a huge surprise to followers of the whole issue, and really
amplified the level of malpractice Armstrong had engaged in, as well as the
span of time involved. While Tyranny of
the Weak was published in 2013, it appeared that a substantial part of the
book with a number of chapters had actually been written as far back as
September 2003.60 In part this is perhaps because Professor Armstrong
had his successful tenure review on the 2 September 2003, and was required to
produce material for future publication in order to support his tenure.
Armstrong in fact included a number of chapters which would later comprise
elements of Tyranny of the Weak in
his 2003 tenure file, chapters which contained material apparently plagiarized
from the work of Balázs Szalontai. Extraordinarily, and as Szalontai has
suspected, Armstrong had obtained a copy of Szalontai’s own PhD dissertation “The Failure of De-Stalinization in North
Korea: The DPRK in Comparative Perspective, 1953–1964” (which Szalontai
would only successfully defend at Central European University in Budapest in
June 2003), after they had met, Armstrong making a specific trip to Budapest to
meet Szalontai in 2002.61 Armstrong had either been
given a copy of the dissertation either by Szalontai himself, or by Bruce
Cumings of the University of Chicago, Armstrong’s erstwhile PhD supervisor.62
This copy of Szalontai’s dissertation was actually found in Armstrong’s office
at Columbia by the investigation team when they searched it.63
Ultimately therefore, Armstrong had originally engaged in the plagiarization of
Szalontai’s work as far back as 2003, and perhaps obtained his own professional
tenure at Columbia on the back of plagiarized material which would later appear
in Tyranny of the Weak. The report is
fairly clear on the findings and the opinion of the committee on what had
happened and when: “The Committee finds it more likely than not that around
this time [September 2003] Dr. Armstrong inserted citations into chapters 2 and
3 of his book draft that he knew to refer to the documents that he never
checked, and that he inserted into the same chapters that he knew he had
borrowed from the Szalontai Dissertation in draft chapters he wrote in
2002–2003…”64
When it came to the numbers of instances of plagiarism, the
committee found that 61 cases in the book offered “sufficient and
incontrovertible evidence of research misconduct” and that these include pure
fabrication and citing non- existent or irrelevant sources in order to cover up
the use Szalontai’s work. The committee also rejected entirely Armstrong’s
various defenses and his attempt to discredit Szalontai’s original complaint
(Armstrong had claimed it was spurred by an academic dispute). Finally when it
came to Armstrong’s “state of mind” argument on the issues, the committee says:
“The Committee does not find ‘passage of time’ to be a mitigating factor to a
finding of misconduct … Dr Armstrong’s systematic erasure of Dr. Szalontai and
of Hungarian sources provides further support for a finding that the misconduct
was committed knowingly. It is particularly noteworthy that Dr Armstrong used
an indirect citation style frequently throughout the book for documents, of
which he owed his knowledge to other secondary works, but never with respect to
Dr. Szalontai’s work … The pattern is too systematic to be chance error, and
the committee concludes that Dr. Armstrong knowingly omitted references that
would show his reliance on the Szalontai dissertation.”65
The almost total dismissal of Armstrong’s defense and near
total vindication of Szalontai’s primary and continued argument throughout, by
the report from Columbia’s committee is only amplified by the unbelievable
reality that the affair extended much further back in time, than anyone
expected, and that perhaps even Professor Armstrong’s own tenure was obtained
as a part result of work generated by acts of plagiarism. Almost as an aside to
the affair, not only has Armstrong lost his career and Tyranny of the Weak discredited to the point it will be taken
permanently out of print (according to Cornell), but on the 10th of February
2020, the journal Cold War History retracted his article “‘Fraternal
Socialism’:
The International Reconstruction of North Korea, 1953–62” as it had also
been constructed of plagiarized material from Szalontai’s dissertation and
book.66 Brian Myers has also raised concerns about potential
self-plagiarism in other works of Charles Armstrong, given the similarity of material
found in his first book “The North Korean
Revolution” and that in a chapter titled “North Korea and the Education of
Desire,” in a 2016 edited volume from Alf Lüdtke titled Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship (Fyodor Tertitsky goes into
similar further detail on this in an article for Daily NK from 2017).67,68 For clarity, the Armstrong
case at something like its conclusion fits into the final category offered by
the typology of co-production offered by this paper, namely that of pure
plagiarism, where the consent of the person plagiarized is not sought, and the
fact of the “co-production” is discovered only in retrospect.
While the issues surrounding Armstrong and Tyranny of the Weak (along with
potentially many other of his publications), may seem like a florid and
colorful outlier given his seniority and the rupture caused by the affair, this
paper, although it has gone into great detail on the matter, does not want to
suggest it is entirely an aberration. Far from it, such plagiarism and issues
of authorship and unauthorized co-option of other’s material is found in a
number of other circumstances and at other times in Korean Studies.
In 1996 Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush, then Professor of
East Asian Culture and History at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne,
published “The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong:
The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea”
with the University of California Press.69 This book was a translation of
the diaries of Lady Hyegyŏng, a noble woman born into a very prominent yangban
family, the P’ungsan Hong, who married King Yŏngjo’s second son, Crown Prince
Sado in 1744 and thus became a crown princess. Lady Hyegyŏng of course
experienced some extraordinary events in Korean history from her position,
including the death of her husband in 1762 by execution at the behest of her
own father. Her own second son would become King Jeongjo. Haboush’s translation
was fairly widely acclaimed, Martina Deuchler declaring in Korean Studies that “Haboush must be congratulated for an exemplary
annotated translation that preserves the tone and color of the original texts.”70
In 1998 however a publisher in Milan, ObarraO Edizone
released a volume titled Memorie di una
Principessa di Corea del XVIII Secolo, the princess whose name in the book
is Hong, is of course the very same Lady Hyegyŏng as translated by Professor
Haboush, only this time her diaries were, it was claimed translated directly
into Italian from Korean, by a Vincenza D’Urso.71 The
obvious should be said, that there are very few direct translations into
Italian from the diaries of eighteenth century Korean princesses so this would
certainly have been an unusual publication. Since the volume was in Italian, it
would perhaps also have not garnered quite the same level of interest in the
Korean Studies community as Haboush’s work. However D’Urso’s publication
certainly arrived in the discipline’s spotlight the following year when a
letter appeared in 1999’s Newsletter of
the Association for Korean Studies in Europe in which Haboush bluntly
states “It has come to my attention that Memorie
di una Principessa di Corea del XVIII Secolo, Traduzione del coreano di
Vincenza D’Urso, bears a striking resemblance to my book …”72
Haboush in her three tightly argued pages, recounts that D’Urso’s Italian
version suggested it had followed a version of Lady Hyegyŏng’s diaries which
was the oldest available, known as the Asami text, held at the University of
California, Berkeley, which explained its organization and the separation of
the diaries into four separate sections.73 However, Haboush continues,
the Asami text, does not in fact do that at all, in fact none of the historical
available versions of Lady Hyegyŏng’s diaries follow that pattern. Haboush
asserts that in fact during the process of her translation for her 1996 book
she reorganized the text and the four separate sections to best reflect the
passing of time and historical events in the diaries.74
Haboush also suggests that in the section marked in her own book as “The
Memoire of 1795” there are long sections of text, descriptions and a particular
structure which do not appear in the Asami version, but which are exactly the
same in D’Urso’s version.75 Further to this Haboush
suggests that many elements of the diaries which were excluded from her version
are also directly excluded in D’Urso’s translation. Fascinatingly, Haboush goes
into to say Lady Hyegyŏng’s diaries were in their original form unpunctuated,
and that adding punctuation into a translation of such a text requires a great
deal of time and expertise in translation practice and no two translators agree
on exactly the same punctuation style across a text; however D’Urso’s approach
to punctuation directly follows that taken by Haboush in her 1996 publication.76
Finally, as is the case in many academic texts focused on Korean history and
language, due to complications with language and Romanization, many names of
Koreans and Korean things have become standard or common uses, despite not
being exactly proper when it comes to naming and language convention. For
example Park Chung-hee is known in academic publications by that spelling, when
his name, if using McCune Reischauer Romanization, should be spelt as Pak
Chŏnghŭi. Haboush suggests that to make it easier for contemporary readers to
engage with and read, she utilized the names that were familiar and have become
common usage in Korean Studies and Korean History in translating names in the
diaries, rather than the exact names Lady Hyegyŏng had used originally—Haboush
uses the fact that Lady Hyegyŏng refers to her own husband in the text as
Kyŏngmo-gung, the name of his grave shrine, as an example, and instead had used
the name Crown Prince
Sado which is much more commonly
used—D’Urso, according to Haboush’s letter, of course uses exactly the same
approach and the same reconfigurations of such names.77
The Association of
Korean Studies in Europe, being a collegiate and respectful organization of
course allowed D’Urso right of reply, and so in the same issue of the Newsletter there is also a letter from
the accused.78 While this is some seventeen years previous, it is
interesting to read D’Urso’s letter with the defense and initial response given
by Charles Armstrong in mind when confronted over the matter of his
appropriation of Balázs Szalontai’s work between 2016–2019. Armstrong
repeatedly confirmed that of course he had read Szalontai’s book, and that he
respected its scholarship. Armstrong also suggested that the issues were to do
with issues of publication and time, and evidence from Columbia University’s
own investigation of that affair suggested that perhaps the pressure of
obtaining tenure and the need to demonstrate a strong future publication
schedule or agenda was behind some of the impetus for what happened—equally
Armstrong appeared at least to offset some of the issues onto his publishers,
Cornell University Press and a need to push through with publication which
perhaps meant that some stages in the review process which might have caught
any issues, earlier. D’Urso is, it has to said, more florid than Armstrong when
it comes to her defense. Responding to Haboush’s claim that there was a
“striking similarity” between her translation and the Italian, D’Urso suggests:
“She is right. I adopted the same four chapter structure she proposed in her
version. But how could it be otherwise?… During the translation, her book was
on my desk like the Bible on the desk of a priest … By deciding to follow her
structure I meant to give credit to her work, recognize her scholarly
achievements and honor her long years of research …”79
The rest of D’Urso’s letter continues in a similarly
unconvincing manner, suggesting that in fact part of the issue was down to the
fact that the Italian publisher aimed for the translation of Lady Hyegyŏng’s
diaries into Italian to be a general book for a non-academic audience and (“the
book was to have no quotations, no bibliography, no academic content that could
scare the reader away,” that it was an apparently brand new publisher with
little experience in the field.80 Further to this, and perhaps
even more unrealistically, D’Urso claimed never to have seen a copy of the final
draft and was not able to fully engage with the process because she worked in
Venice, lived in a different town in the south of Italy and the publisher was
in Milan.81 D’Urso’s assertions that essentially much of the
confusion and many of the issues were down to the publisher, obviously did not
go un-noticed in Milan and the Association
for Korean Studies in Europe Newsletter for the year 2000 contains a
further letter. In response to D’Urso, Maurizio Gatti, on behalf of the ObbaraO
Publishing company replies: “What you have made publicly known in your letter
as to facts, pieces of information and ObbaraO commercial policy is inexact,
misleading and definitely pointless to the charges raised against you by
Professor Haboush … it is in open violation of the pledge of secrecy undertaken
by you in the contract with us …”82 While it is fairly clear from
D’Urso’s letter from 1999, that whatever the approach to publication and
authorship credit she made for her Italian translation Lady Hyegyŏng’s diaries,
in relation to the already existing version produced by Professor Haboush, it
was not at all conventional. The story however beyond this point is not very
clear, and whether either took further steps or whether the book was withdrawn
or corrected is not something the author of this paper has so far been able to
ascertain. It is interesting though, that unlike Professor Armstrong, in 2020,
Vincenza D’Urso remained an Associate Professor at Ca’ Foscari University of
Venice for sometime and continued to publish. Her offending book, Memorie di una Principessa di Corea del
XVIII Secolo, remained in print for some time, and is still listed on
ObarraO Edizione’s website (though out of stock), so perhaps some accommodation
was reached behind the scenes.
Beyond these two important cases of plagiarism or
appropriation, this paper finally wants its readers to consider issues of
co-production and co-authorship as they effect Korean Studies and publication
of Korean interest. In many ways there is a great deal about Korean Studies
material and literature that is, as a Geographer would have it, about
co-production. Much material and much writing around Korean Studies is
necessarily in translation, either from Korean into English or vice versa, or
from other languages in which much is written about Korea, for example, French,
Russian, German, Chinese and Japanese, to name but a few. Many of these
academic communities which write in these languages, along with English,
require translation of materials, and publications in those languages are
themselves translated (the work of Wada Haruki for instance which has appeared
in a number of different languages).83 As anyone who has ever read
literature, written originally in a different language, surely can feel,
translated work is necessarily a process of co-production between the original
writer and the translator of their words. This co-production is sometimes
fairly straight forward, as is the case with some translations of novels
between closely related European languages. However, as Sho Konishi in 2013’s Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and
Japanese–Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan demonstrated,
translation is often much more than about words, punctuation or grammar.84
A translator must translate an entire cultural milieu, ways of being,
landscapes and lifescapes, much more than simply translating a story or a
narrative, and in so doing, they may write a completely new story. Konishi as
an example focused on the translation of works by Tolstoy into Japanese towards
the end of the 19th century, which essentially required completely retelling
into a Japanese context in order to make sense to a Meiji era readership. That
is also certainly the case when it comes to translations from Korean into
English. Janet Poole’s landmark translation of Yi T’aejun’s colonial era essays
Eastern Sentiments from 2013 is just
such a retelling and reconfiguration of the original material,85
as is Inshil Ch’oe Yoon’s brilliant translation of Yi Chung-hwan’s T’aengniji, the Korean Classic for Choosing
Settlements from 2019.86
Of course there is one other, and very much more famous
subset of Korean literature which can be seen through the lens of
co-production, and that is North Korean defector or refugee memoirs. It is
worth saying at the outset of this section, that to consider or name these
works as co-productions, or acts of co-authorship, and to talk about them in
the same paper as issues of plagiarism, and to talk about provenance and origin
in the same space as them, is to some people highly offensive. I suggest in
that sense reading the work of Norman Finkelstein, on the creation, propagation
and continued existence of a different sort of literary industry, related
perhaps, by dint of that body of work, and North Korean defector/refugee narratives
essentially being about holocausts and the importance of such events occupying
a particular category of human experience or cultural importance.87
I do not of course mean to be offensive, nor cast doubt on the events and
narratives described in them, but, as has been the case with many of them,
there are undoubtable issues with these stories, issues which only become
multiplied and amplified as they reified and made monolithic by certain popular
narratives and academic work. The first, or surely the first famous example
would be 2001’s The Aquariums of
Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, co-a uthored by the French
anti-communist, neo-conservative historian Pierre Rigoulot and Kang Chol-hwan,
a former North Korean.88 Rigoulot and Kang’s story
recounts Kang’s experiences as part of a family who had emigrated to North
Korea because of its promise of authentic socialism, only to be incarcerated in
a labor camp because of their untrustworthy background as former residents of
Japan. The book’s framing of personal redemption and salvation in South Korea
(Kang even meets George W. Bush in the 2005 edition),89
after degradation, squalor and misery is now highly familiar. Its familiarity
was driven firstly by Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North
Korea.90 This book is a work of absolute co-production, Demick
skillfully weaving together material from the stories told to her by a series
of refugees from the coastal town of Chongjin (famous as the home port of many
of North Korea’s Ghost Ships and whose nickname is now “widows town”). Nothing to Envy is rightly famous for
co-produced first-hand accounts of life during the arduous march, the famine
period in North Korea after 1992, and many other moments of complication and
difficulty. It is intriguing for giving the reader a sense of the small acts of
resistance and the navigation of “absurd” and miserable circumstances many
North Koreans had to engage in to live their lives. While the writing,
structure and framing may be artful and creative, of course the actual
identities of the co-authors who gave Demick their lives and narratives are
unknowable. Rigoulot and Kang’s effort fits within the first category of this
papers’ typology of co-production, Demick’s work on Nothing to Envy is surely an example of the third category.
Unknowable or unreachable co-authors are something of an
occupational hazard when it comes to writing about North Korea, but sometimes
their unknowability is convenient given the complexities of those co-authors
and their narratives. This was especially true in the case of perhaps the most
famous of all North Korean defector narratives, that co-authored by Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden
and Shin Dong-hyuk in 2012, Escape from
Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.91
This work, also a direct collaborative co-production recounts Shin’s childhood
in North Korea’s “Camp 14,” a Kwanlliso (관리소) or long term labor camp92 and his truly
horrible experiences, including the execution of his own mother and brother
after he had informed on them for storing illicit rice and potentially planning
an escape. Shin made his own escape from the camp with a friend “Park,” who was
fatally killed trying to climb over electrified wires, but whose body
inadvertently served to ground them both, so that Shin himself was not killed
by the electricity. Escape from Camp 14
was hugely successful, and was translated into more than twenty languages. Its
account of the brutality and misery of North Korean prison camp life spurred on
much of the effort through the United Nations Commission of Inquiry, to
restrict and contain Pyongyang. In October 2014, it proved too much for North
Korea to not respond to and its team at the United Nations released a DVD
containing a video which included footage of Shin’s own father (who was not
dead), speaking out against him and claiming his narrative had not been the
same as the book’s.93 Within a year Shin Dong-hyuk
had admitted to Blaine Harden that not all of their co-authored work was in
fact true, and that he had not been incarcerated in Camp 14, the highest level
of camp, throughout his entire life, but had also lived in the less severe Camp
18. He had also escaped before and made it to China on one occasion.94
Early in
2015, Shin Dong-hyuk changed his story. He told me by telephone that his life
in the North Korean gulag differed from what he had been telling government
leaders, human rights activists, and journalists like me. As his biographer, it
was a stomach-wrenching revelation.95
As a professional journalist exploring complicated issues
and difficult stories no doubt Blaine Harden had encountered discomfort in his
professional life in the past, but having the man who he co-authored and
co-produced one of the most famous pieces of writing on North Korea of all
time, recount to him at length that his narrative, which served as and was
advertised as truth and witness against Pyongyang’s regime, was not entirely
true, must have been a painful experience. Harden’s understated admission that
Shin was, given all of this perhaps an “unreliable narrator,”96
generous considering what he must have been feeling. Harden and Shin’s
complicated relationship of co-production therefore also fits within category
four of this paper’s typology of co-production, in which there is certainly
agreement between the parties, but the truth of elements involved is not clear.
While professionally embarrassing, this incident could have curtailed the
momentum which has seen the privileging of defector/refugee narratives as an
existentially different sort of truth about North Korea, testaments akin to the
diary of Anne Frank or the video reels shot by British troops on arrival at
Bergen Belsen in 1945. Truths, that although they could be not seen with one’s
eyes, or verified with one’s own fingers, could not be argued with, and which,
helpfully dovetailed with so many political opinions and aspirations for North
Korea’s containment or rollback. They even made superstars out of characters
such as Yeon-mi Park.97 But what power do they have if
these co-productions are not the whole verifiable truth, what if they, as
Harden and many others have suggested, are marked and shaped by the trauma
those telling them have gone through. What if this shaping and trauma, is
marked itself, by survival strategies honed in North Korean prison camps, where
to cheat, lie, and obscure the truth may mean the difference between life or
starvation, or being executed? Does it even matter, after all, whatever the
level of reliability of these narratives and co-productions, didn’t they always
have a level of “truthiness” about them? Given the picture a particular
approach to North Korea and North Korean studies, and its attendant ideologies
and conceptual frames, paints onto the country, would it be surprising if such
tales of torture, misery and degradation were true.
Returning to “truthiness,” co-production and issues of
authorship or attribution towards the end of this paper, it is worth, having
explored some moments of translation malpractice and academic appropriation in
the near present, mentioning, since so much writing on North Korea, and in fact
so much that Cold War historians or historians writing about the Cold War, like
Charles Armstrong, write, the situation prior to 1992. Writing on nations like
North Korea of course did not begin in 1992, academics and institutions of the
non-Communist or non- Socialist world had been hugely interested in nations of
the Warsaw Pact and the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, and certainly
did so. However much of the academic production of these countries was simply not
available to foreign or non-Communist scholars, because the two poles of the
Cold War essentially ran academic publishing industries and institutions
entirely disconnected from each other. While both sides of course saw academic
production and research, aiming for objective truths, as vital in the processes
of statecraft and development, neither could access the output of the other in
an official way. While this was not entirely the case in European Korean
Studies, which saw connections between Soviet, Czech, Hungarian and Polish
academics with western Koreanists as early as the founding of AKSE in 1978
(Halina Ogarek-Czoj of the University of Warsaw being an early and persistent
crosser of the ideological divide, who had studied at Kim Il Sung University,
in Pyongyang receiving a doctorate in 1961 and actually married a North Korean
at one point, before she was expelled along with her daughter in 1965),98
academics elsewhere could not hope to gain access to the research materials and
any evidential data from the other side. United States agencies such as the United States Information Agency, the Joint Publications Research Center and
the Defense Technical Information Center
had a solution to this though, translation and republication of material from
the other side, without of course agreements or permissions. Journals such as Problems of Communism and in the UK Soviet Studies (published by the
University of Glasgow’s Department for the Study of the Social and Economic
Institutions of the USSR), not only reported and offered commentary on
scientific or academic matters, and reviewed books published in, the Soviet
Union, they also directly translated publications from journals published in
the Soviet Union and other countries, co-opting and appropriating the output of
the other side in the global conflict (Volume 1.1 of Soviet Studies for example features a translation of Professor
Dogvadov’s article “Stages in the Development of the Soviet Collective
Agreement” originally published in
Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR (Economics and Law), 1948, vol 2).99
Recent years have seen the beginning of a trend in Korean
Studies focused publications, which directly reprints in translation writing
from North Korean authors, though most of the instances are at the moment works
of literature (Immanuel Kim’s recent translation of Friend, by Paek Nam-nyong for Columbia University Press, is a good
example).100 While I am sure a conversation can be had about the
dynamics of power when it comes to the negotiating of contracts and permissions
with the original author in these cases, unless they become a case similar to
that of D’Urso and Haboush, it is worth perhaps establishing a convention as a
discipline, around these reprintings and translations, lest we repeat the
ethical curiousness of the pre 1992 era. In a search for truth through direct
co-option, to replace “truthiness” provided by potentially “unreliable
narrators,” there are other risks which have to do with both origin and
provenance in our field. These are all “wicked problems” and we have literally
in recent years seen them become floridly and colorfully “wicked,” to the
extent that they are having a substantial impact on the way our discipline, be
it Korean Studies or North Korean Studies is received by the wider public and
wider academic community. As Hussein contemplated in her Columbia Spectator article, it is not just History at Columbia
which was implicated and tarnished by Armstrong’s actions over many years, but
also the wider field of North Korean studies. As public and media narratives
navigate the tightropes and boundary lines of the “truthy” or of “truthiness,”
individual academics and a wider Korean Studies community must find ways and
practices to bolster our empirical truth claims and objectivity against such
practices which would diminish them or negate them.
Authorship, Co-Production and Plagiarism, notions of course
which are different, and which do not in many situations belong together, but
brought together by Charles Armstrong and others they have been. Hopefully by
taking a longer historical frame, and viewing the furor around Tyranny of the Weak, not simply as a one
off aberration, but merely the latest example of the complicated navigation of
notions of individual authorship in our discipline, this paper gives its
readers lines of flight, or at least food for thought when it comes to future
directions of travel, and future strategies to avoid such altercations in the
future. Taking seriously the sense that, in our discipline, when it comes to
archival research and research which necessarily involves the work of other
authors in other languages, the idea of a single author is not tenable at
times, and that we must find new ways of incorporating and regularizing notions
of Co-Production, in order to better protect against malfeasance and
plagiarism. Alongside a renewed and developed notion of the author or authors
as co-producers of knowledge or material output, Korean Studies would do well
to take into account notions of Origin and Provenance, when it comes to data
and knowledge collection. The material we collect as archive delvers, or
library bashers is not often found simply by our own hands, our own
initiatives, but in the case of Record
Group 242 at the US National Archives (NARA) in College Park, Maryland,
focused on North Korean captured documents, for example, the work of many
hands, a collective of enquiry that has come before us to unpick the knotty
problems of incomprehensible catalogues and misplaced data. It is the work of
previous scholars we have to thank on many occasion for the ease of use of many
collections of data and evidence that we use, and that eventually compile and
coagulate into books like Tyranny of the
Weak. One of the “wicked problems” of our own academic community is the
myth of the heroic single archive hunter and author, and although is certainly
a wicked problem, solve it, through a more comprehensive consideration of the
issues raised in this paper, we must.
Notes
1. The
publication of this paper and the workshop which served to generate the
research and work behind these papers was supported by the 2020 Korean Studies
Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2020-C-16). I am grateful
for all the anonymous reviewers who contributed so much to improving the paper
and to Adam Bohnet and Vladimir Tikhonov for having me in this project. Thanks
to Balázs Szalontai for his support in the process of writing this paper, and
to all contributors to the search for documentary evidence surrounding the
Charles Armstrong affair over the years (who know who they are), and especially
Brian Myers for lighting the blue touch paper in September 2016.
2. Robert
Winstanley-Chesters is a Lecturer and Visiting Fellow of the University of
Leeds and Bath Spa University, and from September 1 2021, a Lecturer in Human
Geography at York St John University. Email: r.winstanley-chesters@leeds.ac.uk.
3. Brian Myers.
“Smaller than Life” review of
Johnathan Franzten’s Freedom, The Atlantic, October 2010,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/smaller-than-life/ 308212/
(accessed July 7 2021).
4. Brian Myers.
“Revoking a Recommendation,” Sthele Press,
13 September 2016, http:// sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/ (accessed 20
August, 2020).
5. Maya
Tolstoy. “Letter to Faculty of Arts and Sciences Columbia University,”
September 10 2019, available at,
https://retractionwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Armstrong -report.pdf
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
6. Julie Moon.
https://twitter.com/GWCUAW/status/1380894750144876546, April 10 2021 (accessed
30 April, 2021.
7. Jiyul Kim.
“Re: Revoking a Recommendation,” Korean
Studies mailing list, 15 September, 2016,
http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/2016September/012251.html
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
8. “Geographies
of Co-Production,” RGS-IBG Publications
Hub, 1 August, 2014, https://rgs-ibg.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1475-4959.geographies-of-co-production.
9. Jean-Luc
Renaud and Barry Litman. “Changing Dynamics of the Overseas Marketplace for TV
Programming: The Rise of International Co-production.” Telecommunications Policy 9.3 (1985): 245–261.
10. This
typology of co-production was arrived at in discussion between the author of
the paper and Balázs Szalontai.
11. Sergei
Kurbanov. North Korea’s Juche
Ideology: Indigenous Communism or Traditional Thought?, Critical Asian Studies 51.2 (2019): 296–305.
12. Lee
McIntyre. Post Truth (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2018).
13. Nicole
Cooke. “Posttruth, Truthiness, and Alternative Facts: Information Behavior and
Critical Information Consumption for a New Age,” The Library Quarterly 87.3 (2017): 211–221.
14. Tshepo
Batane. “Turning to Turnitin to Fight Plagiarism among University Students.” Journal of Educational Technology &
Society 13.2 (2010): 1–12.
15. Phillip
Dawson, Wendy Sutherland-Smith, and Mark Ricksen. “Can Software Improve Marker
Accuracy at Detecting Contract Cheating? A Pilot Study of the Turnitin
Authorship Investigate Alpha.” Assessment
& Evaluation in Higher Education 45. 4 (2020): 473–482.
16. Robert
MacDonald. ““Impact”, Research and Slaying Zombies: the Pressures and
Possibilities of the REF.” International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 37. 11–12: (2017), 696–710.
17. “Draft
Report of the Ad Hoc Committee to the Standing Committee on the Conduct of
Research at Columbia University,” 17 August, 2018,
https://retractionwatch.com/wp-content/ uploads/2019/09/Armstrong-report.pdf
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
18. Gail
Feigenbaum and Inge Reist. Provenance an
Alternate History of Art (Los Angeles, CA:
Getty Publications, 2013).
19. Ibid.
20. Jonas
Tinius. “Awkward Art and Difficult Heritage: Nazi Collectors and Postcolonial
Archives.” An Anthropology of
Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors (2018), p. 130.
21. Nancy
Karrels. “Renewing Nazi-era Provenance Research Efforts: Case Studies and
Recommendations.” Museum Management and
Curatorship 29.4 (2014): 297–310.
22. Claudio
Bonifazzi, P. Carcagni, Raffaella Fontana, Marinella Greco, Maria Mastroianni,
Marzia Materazzi, Enrico Pampaloni, Luca Pezzati, and Davide Bencini. “A
Scanning Device for VIS–NIRM Multispectral Imaging of Paintings.” Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics
10.6 (2008): 064011.
23. Peter
Buneman, Sanjeev Khanna, and Wang-Chiew Tan. “Data Provenance: Some Basic
Issues.” In International Conference on
Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science
(Berlin: Springer, 2000), 87–93.
24. Brian Levine
and Marc Liberatore. “DEX: Digital evidence provenance supporting
reproducibility and comparison.” Digital
Investigation 6 (2009): 48–56.
25. Emilie
Vandecandelaere, “Geographic Origin and Identification Labels: Associating Food
Quality with Location.” In Innovations in
Food Labelling (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing, 2010), 137–152.
26. Heather
Paxson. ““Don’t Pack a Pest”: Parts, Wholes, and the Porosity of Food Borders.”
Food, Culture & Society 22.5
(2019): 657–673.
27. Andrew
Nathan. “Brothers at War; Tyranny of the Weak,” Foreign Affairs, November/ December, 2013,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2013-10-21/ brothers-war-tyranny-weak.
28. Christopher
Green. “Review of ‘Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1952,’”
Journal of East Asian Studies, 14.2
(2014): 303–304.
29. Sandra Fahy.
“Review of ‘Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1952,’” The Journal of Asian Studies, 75:3
(2016): 847–851.
30. Personal
communication with Adam Cathcart, 2020.
31. Brian Myers.
“Review of ‘Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1952,’” Acta Koreana, 16:2 (2013): 629.
32. Personal
communication with Balázs Szalontai, May 2021.
33. Personal
communication with Balázs Szalontai, May 2021. 34. Brian Myers, “Revoking a
Recommendation.”
35. Ibid.
36. Jiyul Kim,
“Re: Revoking a Recommendation.”
37. Donald
Baker, “Re: Revoking a Recommendation,” Korean
Studies mailing list, 15 September, 2016,
http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/2016
-September/012252.html (accessed 20 August, 2020).
38. Frank
Hoffman, “Re: Revoking a Recommendation,” Korean
Studies mailing list, 19 September, 2016,
http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.
com/2016-September/012271.html (accessed 20 August, 2020).
39. James Hoare,
“Re: Revoking a Recommendation,” Korean
Studies mailing list, 17 September, 2016, http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/2016
-September/012264.html (accessed 20 August, 2020).
40. Brian Myers.
“From Berlin, News of More Bogus Sources,” Sthele
Press, 3 October 2016, http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/ (accessed
20 August, 2020).
41. Balázs
Szalontai, “A Table of 98 Examples of
Source Fabrication, Plagiarism, and Text-Citation Disconnects in Charles K.
Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak (2013),” unpublished document personally
supplied by Balázs Szalontai.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Mark Kramer.
“Archival Policies and Historical Memory in the Post-Soviet Era,” Demokratizatsiya, 20.3 (2012): 204–215.
47. Charles
Armstrong. “Re: Revoking a Recommendation,” Korean
Studies mailing list, 17 September, 2016, http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.
com/2016-September/012261.html
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Charles
Armstrong. “Corrections to Tyranny of the Weak,” personal blog, 30 December,
2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20170107005201/https://charleskarmstrong.com/2016/12/30/
corrections-to-tyranny-of-the-weak/ (accessed 20 August, 2020).
51. American
Historical Association. “2014 Fairbank Prize Returned,” American Historical Association, June 29 2017,
https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/2014-fairbank -prize-returned
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
52. Scott
Jaschik. “Amid Dispute, Prize Returned,” Inside
Higher Ed, July 5 2017, https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/05/history-book-award-returned-amid-questions-about
-citation-errors (accessed 20 August, 2020).
53. Khadija
Hussein. “Amid Public Allegations of Plagiarism Reputation and Academic
Integrity of Korean Studies Program Face Scrutiny,” Columbia Spectator, January 28 2019, https://
www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2019/01/28/amid-public-allegations-of-plagiarism
-reputation-and-academic-integrity-of-korean-studies-program-face-scrutiny/
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
54. Personal
communication between Robert Winstanley-Chesters, Ruth Barraclough and Charles
Armstrong, 2017.
55. Communication
between Adam Cathcart and University of Leeds library service.
56. Khadija
Hussein. “Amid Public Allegations of Plagiarism Reputation and Academic
Integrity of Korean Studies Program Face Scrutiny.”
57. Ibid.
58. Maya
Tolstoy. Letter to Faculty of Arts and Sciences Columbia University, September
10 2019, available at,
https://retractionwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Armstrong -report.pdf
(accessed 20 August, 2020).
59. “Draft
Report of the Ad Hoc Committee to the Standing Committee on the Conduct of
Research at Columbia
University.”
60. Ibid, p. 15.
61. Ibid, p. 13.
62. Ibid, p. 14.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid, p. 32.
65. Ibid, p. 34.
66. “Statement
of Retraction: ‘“Fraternal Socialism”: The International Reconstruction of
North Korea, 1953–62’,” Cold War History,
10 February, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/
abs/10.1080/14682745.2020.1724643?src=recsys (accessed 20 August, 2020).
67. Fyodor
Tertitsky, “Tyranny of the Weak: Part of a decade-long pattern?” Daily NK, 20 February 2017,
https://www.dailynk.com/english/tyranny-of-the-weak-part-of-a-deca/ (accessed
20 August, 2020).
68. Brian Myers,
“A Mystery is Solved,” Sthele Press,
25 February 2017, http://sthelepress.com/ index.php/2016/09/ (accessed 20
August, 2020).
69. JaHyun Kim
Haboush. “The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong:
The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea”
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
70. Martina
Deuchler. “Review of ‘The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical
Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea’,” Korean Studies, 21 (1996): 136–138.
71. Memorie di una Principessa di Corea del XVIII Secolo, translated
by Vincenza D’Urso, Milan: ObarraO Edizione, 1998.
72. JaHyun Kim
Haboush. “Letter to the Editor,” AKSE
Newsletter 23 (1999), Association of Korean Studies in Europe.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Vincenza
D’Urso. “Letter to the Editor,” AKSE Newsletter
23 (1999), Association of Korean Studies in Europe.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Maurizio
Gatti. “Letter to the Editor,” AKSE
Newsletter 24 (2000), Association of Korean Studies in Europe.
83. Wada Haruki.
The Korean War: An International History
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).
84. Sho Konishi.
Anarchist Modernity Cooperatism and
Japanese–Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013).
85. Yi T’aejun. Eastern Sentiments, translated by Janet
Poole (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016).
86. Yi
Chung-hwan. A Place to Live: A New
Translation of Yi Chung-hwan’s T’aengniji, the Korean Classic for Choosing
Settlements, translated by Inshil Choe Yoon (Honolulu, HI: University of
Hawaii Press, 2019).
87. Norman
Finkelstein. The Holocaust Industry:
Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2003).
88. Pierre
Rigoulot and Kang Chol-hwan. The
Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (New York, NY:
Perseus Press, 2001).
89. “President
George W Bush Welcomes Chol-hwan Kang to the Oval Office,” June 13 2005,
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/06/images/20050613-1_
p45011-005-515h.html (accessed 20 August, 2020).
90. Barbara
Demick. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives
in North Korea, New York (NY: Spiegel and Grau, 2009).
91. Blaine
Harden and Shin Dyon-hyuk. Escape from
Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
(London: Penguin, 2013).
92. Debra
Liang-Fenton. “Failing to Protect: Food Shortages and Prison Camps in North
Korea,” Asian Perspective, 31.2
(2007): 47–74.
93. “North
Korean Defector Changes Story After Seeing Father in Video.” The Guardian, 19 January, 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/19/north-korea-defector
-change-story-shin-dong-hyuk (accessed 20 August, 2020).
94. Blaine
Harden. “New Foreword to Escape from Camp
14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West,”
https://blaineharden.com/escape-from-camp-14 -reviews/ (accessed 20 August,
2020).
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. Alex
Preston. “Interview with Yeonmi Park,” The
Guardian, 4 October, 2015, https://www.
theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/04/park-yeon-mi-in-order-to-live-north-korea-interview
(accessed 20th August, 2020).
98. Nicolas
Levi. Tangible and Intangible Legacies of
70 Years of Polish–North Korean Relations (forthcoming, Warsaw: Polish
Academy of Sciences, 2021), p. 123.
99. V.M.
Dogvadov. “Change in the Nature of Soviet Collective Agreements,” Soviet Studies, 1.1 (1949): 79–84.
100. Paek
Nam-nyong. Friend, translated by
Immanuel Kim (New York: NY: Columbia University Press, 2020).
-------
US
Hegemony in Korean Studies and the Soviet Role in Early Postwar Korea
KATHRYN
WEATHERSBY Georgetown University
Abstract
This paper examines some of the ways the
US-centric framework of Anglophone Korean studies has distorted scholarship on
post-colonial Korean history. First, an over-emphasis on the American role in
the division of Korea has exaggerated the possibility that the US and USSR
could have compromised to create a unified government for the peninsula. The
Soviet documentary record reveals that Moscow was determined to obstruct such
an outcome if it endangered Soviet security. Second, by focusing on the serious
damage the American occupation inflicted on the South, scholars have
understated the control Soviet occupation authorities exercised in the North.
The resulting over-estimation of Korean agency in the establishment of the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has obscured the driving force behind the
North’s Juche ideology. From the late 1950s the DPRK leadership was driven
primarily by resentment of Soviet and Chinese domination. Soviet bloc documents
reveal that during the war of 1950–53 both Stalin and Mao Zedong demanded that
Kim Il Sung sacrifice the physical existence of the DPRK for the sake of Soviet
and Chinese aims.
Keywords: Postwar Occupation, Trusteeship, Kim Il Sung, Armistice
Negotiations, Juche
Introduction
It is perhaps not surprising that the
United States has exerted hegemonic influence over Anglophone Korean studies,
given the concentration of institutional and financial resources in the US and
the country’s dominant role in postwar Korea. Now, however, as the global
balance of power has shifted, it is an auspicious time to examine how a
framework built around American roles and perspectives has affected scholarship
on Korea’s modern history. This paper offers some observations about one aspect
of this issue: how an over-emphasis on the US role has distorted our view of
key events in the first years following liberation from Japanese rule. It looks
first at the division of Korea from 1945–1947 and the establishment of a
Communist state in the North. It then discusses the reasons the catastrophic
inter-Korean war that began on 25 June 1950 was prolonged through two years of
armistice negotiations. I argue that to the extent the United States has been
placed at the center of the story of Korea’s early postwar history while the
role of the Soviet Union has been minimized, our understanding of these three
events has suffered. Specifically, Anglophone scholarship has overestimated the
possibility that the US and USSR could have compromised to avoid the division of
the peninsula. In the same way, it has exaggerated Korean agency in creating a
Soviet-style system in the North and has failed to apprehend the reasons the
fratricidal war of 1950–53 was prolonged for two additional years after
negotiations for an armistice began in July 1951.
The Division of Korea
As a singularly important event in Korea’s
modern history, the division of the country into two hostile states in the wake
of World War II has been the focus of extensive scholarship. Until the 1990s,
however, American scholars had access only to the US record of this tragedy and
moreover were naturally concerned with documenting and analyzing the abundant
failures of the American occupation. James Matray, for example, painstakingly
lays out the convoluted process on the American side that eventually resulted
in the creation of two states. However, with little knowledge of Moscow’s
decision-making, he assumes that the Soviets were open to cooperation on the
issue and therefore overstates the possibility that the two occupying powers
could have created a different outcome for Korea.1
If we examine the Russian record along with the American
one, the process that led to the division emerges as a series of hastily
improvised solutions driven by mutual concerns about future security threats
from Japan. The Soviets feared a Japanese or Japanese/American attack on the
USSR via the Korean land bridge.
The Americans feared that Soviet control of
Korea would propel the Japanese Communist Party to victory, thereby bringing Japan’s
latent but still considerable war-making capacity into the Soviet camp. As the
two powers navigated the rapidly shifting environment at the end of the Pacific
War, they took actions regarding the political settlement for Korea that were
designed to forestall these eventualities.
As is well-known, at the allied conference at Potsdam in
July 1945, the political settlement for Korea was not discussed but Soviet and
American military leaders readily agreed that the Red Army would be responsible
for defeating Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea—the role the US had been
entreating the Soviets to play since the day after Pearl Harbor. However, by
the time Soviet forces actually entered the Pacific war on August 9, State
Department officials had become increasingly concerned about the political
consequences of a Soviet occupation of the peninsula. They feared that a Korean
government subservient to Moscow, like the one the Red Army had just created in
occupied Poland, would increase the likelihood of a communist takeover of
Japan, thus tilting the global balance of power in Moscow’s favor.2
Consequently, on the day after Soviet forces entered Manchuria and Korea,
Washington tried to modify the Potsdam agreement so that US ground forces would
occupy the southern half of the Korean peninsula.3
While American motivations for proposing the division are
well-documented, we can only infer the reasons Joseph Stalin accepted this
sudden change of plans. When the Soviet leader received the lengthy draft of
General MacArthur’s Order Number One governing the surrender of Japanese
forces, which contained the proposal to create two occupation zones in Korea,
he requested only two amendments: that all of the Kurile Islands be included in
the Soviet zone, which clarified the Yalta agreement that the islands were to
pass into Soviet possession, and that the northern half of Hokkaido be included
in the area to be occupied by Soviet troops.4 Stalin accepted without comment
the creation of an American zone in Korea, apparently calculating that this
concession would improve his bargaining leverage on higher priority issues.5
We can glimpse how fluid Soviet thinking on Korea was at
this time from the briefing paper the Foreign Ministry prepared for anticipated
discussions of the Korea issue at the Council of Allied Foreign Ministers
meeting that was to open in London on 11 September 1945. The Ministry viewed
the American idea of trusteeship—to which Stalin had agreed in a private
meeting with President Roosevelt during the Yalta conference in February
1945—as a mechanism through which the victorious powers would gain control over
desired portions of Korea, as well as of other former Japanese territories.
Since Moscow wanted to secure the sea lanes from Vladivostok to Port Arthur,
the Soviet delegation was to demand exclusive control over Pusan, Inchon, and
Cheju Island, using as leverage the Americans’ “wish to receive for themselves
strategic regions in the Pacific Ocean.” Should this demand be rejected, Moscow
would propose joint Soviet–Chinese control of the strategic regions, extending
the arrangement already made for the Manchurian Railway.6
The Foreign Ministry also hoped that the joint trusteeship
over Korea would make it possible to gain control over additional Japanese
territory by annexing it to Korea. Thus, the Soviet delegation in London was to
demand that Tsushima be transferred to Korea, on the ostensible grounds that
“throughout history” it “has served as a staging ground for aggressive actions
by Japan against the continental countries and in particular against Korea.” To
overcome anticipated American resistance to this demand, Moscow would propose
that an international trusteeship be established for the Pacific islands seized
by Japan that the US intended to claim: Bonin, the Volcanos, Marianas,
Carolinas, and Marshall Islands. The Soviet delegation would then offer to
rescind this proposal in exchange for American acquiescence to their proposal
for Korea.7
In the end, the Soviet delegation in London never put
forward its proposals regarding Korea because Stalin, who guided Foreign
Minister Vyacheslav Molotov throughout the meeting via frequent telegrams,8
instructed his foreign minister to press insistently for his first
priority—gaining a greater role in occupation policy for Japan. Molotov
accordingly continued to raise the Japan issue, persisting even after Secretary
of State Byrnes refused to place it on the agenda.9
American intransigence on Japan at the London meeting
apparently persuaded Stalin that it would be useless to try to use trusteeship
over Korea as a bargaining chip for territorial gains. Instead, without
rupturing the cooperation with the United States that he needed in order to
secure Soviet gains elsewhere, Moscow would move with dispatch to put in place
structures that would guarantee lasting control over its occupation zone. Thus,
regardless of the outcome of the eventual discussions with the Americans, at
least the northern half of Korea would serve as a reliable buffer against
future attack from Japan, as well as a readily available source of valuable
economic resources.
To carry out this goal, Stalin’s personal representative in
Korea, ColonelGeneral Terentii F. Shtykov, established a Soviet Civil
Administration to supervise political and economic affairs in the Soviet zone.
Bruce Cumings and Charles Armstrong10 argue that the indirect rule
the SCA established, in contrast to the direct military rule the Americans
established in the South, indicates that Moscow had little interest in Korea.
The Russian record, however, indicates just the opposite. Because of the
importance of protecting against a future attack from
Japan, the Soviets quickly put in place a
native administration for their zone that would secure Moscow’s long-term
interests beyond the period of military occupation.
Toward this end, Shtykov identified Korean communists loyal
to Moscow, selecting, for lack of a better alternative, the small group of
partisans who had fought with the Chinese communists in Manchuria and taken
refuge in Siberia in 1941. He then moved carefully to establish a separate
communist party organization for the Soviet zone, a step Koreans resisted since
it suggested that Moscow intended to solidify the supposedly temporary division
of the country.11 He also quickly completed the simpler job of
suppressing non-communist parties, followed by the establishment of a separate
governing structure in November.12
By early December 1945, US–Soviet negotiations over allied
control machinery for Japan had ground to a halt, with Moscow forced to accept
Washington’s refusal to grant a Soviet veto over occupation policy. At that
point, US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes suddenly proposed that a second
meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers be held in Moscow in just two
weeks, so that the British, Soviet, and American diplomats could discuss the issues
causing difficulties among them before the United Nations General Assembly
convened in January. Molotov immediately agreed, ready to turn his attention to
other areas, including Korea.
The discussions that led to the infamous Moscow Conference
agreement on trusteeship are well-known from US records and from published
Soviet documents,13 but Russian archival records reveal that by this time
Soviet and American aims regarding Korea had hardened into irreconcilable
goals. Thus, while American scholars are correct to note that the Truman
administration was unwilling to cooperate with Moscow in creating a unified
government for the peninsula, examination of Soviet decision-making shows that
such cooperation was, in fact, impossible.
As it prepared to discuss the Korean issue at the Moscow
conference, the Soviet Foreign Ministry faced a dilemma. It considered it
politically inexpedient to oppose the establishment of a unified government for
Korea but found it difficult to foresee a way to unify the country without
jeopardizing Moscow’s essential security requirements.14
As the briefing paper prepared for the Moscow meeting put it, “if Soviet policy
is directed at the destruction of the military capability of the Japanese
aggressors, at the eradication of Japanese influence in Korea, at the
encouragement of the democratic movement of the Korean people and preparing
them for independence, then judging by the activity of the Americans in Korea,
American policy has precisely the opposite goal.” The paper noted that the
Americans had retained the old colonial administrative apparatus, with many
Japanese residents and Korean collaborators left in leading posts, and had
allowed
Japanese residents to enjoy political
rights and economic possibilities. Thus, the “main obstacle to the restoration
of the unity of Korea is the working out and realization of a single occupation
policy,”15 the sine qua non
of which was the exclusion of Japan from Korea.
A second problem, in Moscow’s view, was that a
non-communist, Americaninfluenced government in Seoul would inevitably pose the
risk that the peninsula would be used as a bridgehead for a Japanese attack on
the Soviet Union. Therefore, “the question of whether Korea will in the future
be turned into a breeding ground of new anxiety for us in the Far East” will
depend on “the character of the future government of Korea.” The Foreign
Ministry thus viewed the “multiplicity of political parties and groups” in
southern Korea, “the lack of unity among them and the solicitations of the USA”
as an obstacle to creating a Korean government of the character Moscow
required.16
Nonetheless, the Soviet delegation had to propose some
mechanism for creating a Korean government. Jacob Malik noted that the Cairo
declaration promised the creation of an independent Korea, that all political
and social groups within the country declare their desire to have their own
government and are taking steps toward organizing one, and that the Americans
support the establishment of a single governing organ, all of which made it
politically inexpedient for the Soviet Union to oppose this step. Instead,
Moscow should turn its attention to the composition of the government to be
created, since “the character of this government will be one of the decisive
factors in the determination of the future position of Korea from the point of
view of our political, economic, and defense interests in the Far East.”17
The Foreign Ministry concluded that if a Korean government
were created through an agreement between the USSR, the USA, and China
(inexplicably omitting Great Britain), its composition would be unfavorable
since the USA and China would support reactionary elements hostile to the
Soviet Union. Instead, apparently confident of the strength of the leftists in
the more populous South, the ministry recommended convening a Representative
People’s Assembly elected through universal, secret, and equal voting, which
would then create a government.
Malik elaborated a complicated set of steps the allies
should take toward holding elections for a Representative Assembly. First, the
four great powers (this time including Britain), must express support for
Korean independence and for the creation of a provisional government elected
with the participation of all social and political organizations. Given the
proliferation of communist-backed mass organizations in the South, stipulating
the participation of “all social and political organizations” would work in
Moscow’s favor. Next, an elected provisional committee would prepare for the
convocation of a constituent assembly, which would then elect the government.
To guarantee the participation of all strata of the population—the key to
Moscow’s strategy—“broad democratic meetings” would be held in towns and
villages and among sectors of the population, divided Soviet-style into
workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers, employees, and other groups, at
which candidates for delegates and officeholders would be nominated and
discussed. To control the process, a joint commission composed of Soviet and
American representatives, and possibly Chinese and British, would supervise the
meetings and elections.18
The Foreign Ministry also worked out plans to ensure control
of the economic resources of the Soviet zone. As set forth in another briefing
paper, Moscow would resume its confiscation of industrial plants by claiming as
war trophies all Japanese military and heavy industry in Korea. These
considerable properties were to be transferred to the Soviet Union as partial
payment of reparations and as compensation for no less than “the huge damage
inflicted by Japan on the Soviet Union throughout the time of its existence,
including the damages from the Japanese intervention in the Far East from 1918
to 1923.”19
Since these confiscations could be imperiled if the Red
Army’s closure of the sectoral border were lifted, it was necessary to deflect
continued American attempts to do so, repeated most recently in a November 8 letter
from Harriman to Stalin that reiterated the request for discussions on the
resumption of trade, railroads, coastal shipping, establishment of uniform
fiscal policies, solution of displaced persons, and other urgent matters.
Viewing such issues as a matter of rival claims to Korean resources rather than
an integral part of the creation of a unified government for the country, Malik
recommended the creation of a Special Soviet–American Commission that would
“resolve the immediate questions arising from the fact of the presence on the
territory of Korea of Soviet and American troops.”20
As negotiations proceeded in Moscow, Molotov responded to
the initial American proposal with a counter-proposal that made use of the US
formulation to ensure that the Soviet Union would be able to block any
settlement in Korea it considered politically unacceptable. The Soviet proposal
called first for the establishment of a provisional government that would
“undertake all necessary measures for the development of industry, transportation,
and agriculture,” thus allaying American concerns over the economic issues
while stipulating that the creation of a government would precede rather than
follow their resolution. Conflating Byrnes’ recommendation for a unified
administration with the vague American formulations for trusteeship, the
Soviets proposed that in forming this provisional government, the Koreans would
be assisted by a Joint Commission composed of representatives of the Soviet and
American commands, which, before submitting recommendations to their respective
governments, would consult with Korea’s “democratic parties and social
organizations”—a standard Soviet phrase that was the key to Moscow’s strategy.
With China and Great Britain omitted from the commission, Moscow would have one
of two votes rather than one of four, and could therefore block the creation of
a provisional government whose composition was not reliably “friendly” to
Moscow.
Before the Joint Commission convened in March 1946,
Shtykov’s men moved quickly to establish the foundation for a Soviet system in
the North by carrying out a thorough land reform. On March 5 the Provisional
People’s Committee passed a law decreeing the confiscation of land and
implements belonging to Japanese, Korean collaborators, Koreans who had fled
South, landlords who owned farms of a certain size or who did not farm the land
themselves, and churches that owned more than a certain amount of land.”21
Five weeks later Kim Il Sung reported to an enlarged plenum of the party’s Organization
Bureau that the land reform “has destroyed feudal relations in the countryside,
and laid the foundation for the development of the entire economy of North
Korea.”22
Having ensured that whatever the outcome of the Joint
Commission meetings, at least the northern half of the peninsula would be
“friendly” to the Soviet Union, the Foreign Ministry drafted a detailed
description of the “democratic” state that must result from the Provisional
Government that the Joint Commission was to create. After describing the
administrative structure and voting procedures to be established, the directive
laid out a political platform for the future Provisional Government, an
ambitious socialist agenda within the Korean context: “1) Final liquidation of
the remnants of the former Japanese rule in the political and economic life of
Korea, the struggle against the reactionary anti-democratic elements within the
country, forbidding the activity of pro-fascist and anti- democratic parties,
organizations, and groups. 2) Realization of local self-government in the whole
territory of Korea through the People’s Committees, elected by the population
on the basis of universal, direct, equal, and secret voting without
discrimination by sex or religion. 3) Securing political freedom: freedom of
speech, press, assembly, religion, activity of democratic parties, professional
unions and other democratic organizations. 4) Securing the inviolability of
persons and domiciles, securing through law the private property of citizens.
5) Replacement of the legislative and judicial organs established by the
Japanese rule; democratization of the legal organs. 6) Introduction of
universal free and obligatory schooling in the native language; broadening the
network of state primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. 7) Development of
the national Korean culture. 8) Development of agriculture, industry, and
transport to raise the people’s wellbeing. 9) Confiscation of land belonging to
the Japanese and to Koreans who are traitors of the people, as well as large
landowners, liquidation of the fulfillment system and transfer of all
confiscated land without pay to Korean peasants. 10) Confiscation of irrigation
systems belonging to the owners of the confiscated land, and its transfer
without payment to the Korean state. 11) Nationalization of large-scale
industry, banks, oil, forests, and railroad transport belonging to Japanese and
Korean monopolies.23 12) Creation of a network of
special schools for the preparation of cadres for the state apparatus, industry,
transport, communications, agriculture, education, culture and health care. 13)
Establishment of control over market prices, struggle against speculation and
usury. 14) Establishment of a single just tax system, introduction of a
progressive tax. 15) Introduction of an 8-hour working day for workers and
employees and 6-hour working day for children from 13–16 years of age;
forbidding exploitation of labor of children under 13 years of age. 16) Job
security for workers and employees, establishment of a minimum wage. 17)
Establishment of social insurance and introduction of protection of labor in
enterprises. 18) Broadening the network of medical institutions, the struggle
against epidemic diseases, and securing free medical care for the poor.”24
Regarding the process for consulting with democratic
parties and social organizations, the directive stipulated that the Joint
Commission “must not consult with those parties and groups that speak out
against the decision on Korea of the Moscow Conference of Three Ministers.”
Since the only party that voiced support for the Moscow decision was the
communist party, which did so on orders from Soviet officials, the Americans
clearly would never accept this condition.25 Nonetheless, the Foreign
Ministry outlined details of the consultation process, ending with instructions
for rebuffing any American attempt to discuss the economic unification of
Korea. In such case, the delegation was to “explain that the exchange of goods
between North and South Korea will be conducted according to agreement between
the commanders of both zones of military responsibility in the form of mutual
deliveries.”26
In keeping with this directive, when the Joint Commission
opened its meetings on March 20, the head of the Soviet delegation, Colonel-General
Shtykov, stated that “the task of the US–Soviet Commission is to help the
Korean people create a provisional Korean government capable of fulfilling the
tasks arising from the democratization and reconstruction of the country. The
future provisional Korean democratic government must be created on a basis of
wide unification of all the democratic parties and social organizations
supporting the decision of the Moscow Conference of Ministers of Foreign
Affairs. Only such a government will be able to abolish entirely the remnants
of the former Japanese domination in the political and economic life of Korea,
to launch a decisive battle with reactionary anti-democratic elements inside
the country, to carry out radical measures in the rehabilitation of economic
life, to give political liberties to the Koreans and fight for peace in the Far
East. The Soviet Union has a keen interest in Korea being a true democratic and
independent country, friendly to the Soviet Union, so that in the future it
will not become a base for an attack on the Soviet Union.”27
Unsurprisingly, the Joint Commission deadlocked over the
issue of which parties to consult in the formation of the Provisional
Government. The Soviet delegation would not compromise on its demand that the
Commission consult only with groups that supported the Moscow Conference
decision. Since this would mean that only the communist party and affiliated
groups would be eligible to participate in the work of the Commission, the
American delegation refused this demand. After repeated restatements of these
irreconcilable positions, the Joint Commission adjourned May 8 sine die. Although it reconvened in 1947
and made some progress toward agreement on whom to consult, the small
compromises the two sides made fell far short of what was necessary to create a
provisional government. With Moscow determined to maintain the tractable
government it had established in its zone in order to provide a reliable
security buffer, and the Americans determined to establish their version of a
friendly government in order to protect against communist takeover of Japan,
the only possibility that remained was the creation of separate states in the
South and North.
The division of Korea was thus the result of an improvised
series of tactical moves by the two occupying powers that were designed to
protect their security interests regarding Japan. Responsibility for this
tragedy must be attributed equally to the Soviet Union and the United States;
an exaggerated focus on the American role only obscures the history of the
division.
The formation of the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea
A US-centered perspective has also
distorted scholarship on the creation of the DPRK, and hence on the
well-springs of North Korea’s distinctive ideology. In the context of polarized
politics in both the US and the ROK, a false dichotomy took root. If the
American occupation of southern Korea was oppressive and chaotic, as it surely
was, then the Soviet occupation of northern Korea must have been its mirror
opposite. Thus, in his first book, The
North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, Charles Armstrong details the creation
of Soviet-style political, economic, and cultural structures in northern Korea,
while arguing illogically that this process should be seen as an indigenous
revolution, with the Soviet occupation merely providing the context. Moreover,
Armstrong asserts that the supposedly nationalist origins of the founding of
the DPRK explain why it has outlasted the communist regimes the Red Army
established in Eastern Europe.28
Armstrong’s determination to present North Korea in a
particular way leads to striking failures of imagination, first of all
concerning his sources. He bases his account primarily on the collection of
documents US forces captured when they occupied the North in the fall of 1950.
Following the example of Bruce Cumings, who used the captured documents to
argue for North Korean agency in initiating the Korean War,29
Armstrong fails to question a striking fact about this large collection:
namely, that it contains very little documentation from high levels of the
North Korean government and nothing whatever of interaction with or decisions
by high levels of the Soviet government. If one were to approach the documents
dispassionately, one would certainly notice this huge lacuna. Moreover, the
reason for it would not be difficult to imagine. Soviet officials preparing to
evacuate Pyongyang as UN/ROK forces advanced into the DPRK in October 1950
destroyed important documents rather than allow them to fall into American
hands.30 Consequently, while the captured documents provide
valuable and extensive information on the activities of lower-level governing
bodies and social organizations—records Soviet officials perhaps considered not
important enough to destroy—they are far from providing an adequate view of the
creation of governing structures in the North.
A second reason Armstrong exaggerates Korean agency in the
creation of the DPRK is that he fails to take into account the political
culture of the occupying power.31 The Soviet apparatus of the
late Stalin era simply could not have taken a hands-off approach to the
occupation of a strategically important territory that they were determined to
transform into a reliable buffer. It should come as no surprise that Russian
records reveal that Soviet officials in Moscow and Pyongyang exercised
extremely close supervision of affairs in northern Korea. They drafted all laws
for the new state, as well as Kim Il Sung’s speeches, the marching order for parades,
and decisions on even minor issues of politics and economics.32
A third failure of imagination concerns the skill sets of
the Koreans who staffed the new governing structures in the North. Much is made
of the nationalist credentials of Korean Communists who spent the 1930s and
early 40s as anti- Japanese guerilla fighters in Manchuria. However, regardless
of how inspiring this background may be, it hardly equipped them to create the
governing, economic, and social structures needed by a new state. The records
on Korea held in the archive of the Soviet Foreign Ministry include a steady
stream of urgent requests from Kim Il Sung to grant permission for groups of
students to be admitted to Soviet institutes of metallurgy, railroad
engineering, public health, etc. Partly to fill this gap in expertise, the
occupation was structured so that an experienced Soviet officer was responsible
for monitoring the work of each department and approving each decision.33
Records from the archives of the Foreign Ministry and
Communist Party have revealed much about the occupation, but since it was
conducted primarily by the Soviet Army, we need records from the archive of the
Ministry of Defense to get a more granular understanding of these formative
years. Fortunately, the Korean War Archive project at Korea University has
begun to receive documents from this vast repository. They are being translated
and will eventually become available on the project website. In the meantime,
we can examine a thesis that has been written on the basis of some of these
documents by Vasilii Lebedev, who completed an M.A. at Korea University in
2018.34
Lebedev examines the creation of the North Korean police,
which was the first priority of Soviet occupation officials as they sought to
establish order in the chaos that followed Japan’s surrender. He documents how
the Commandant offices that carried out the occupation at the local level were
held responsible for all aspects of political and economic affairs in their
region. Given the extreme centralization of decision-making, they forwarded
requests for nearly all decisions to higher levels of the Soviet apparatus.35
Two months into the occupation they carried out orders to disarm and disband
all of the military and paramilitary groups Koreans had formed since
liberation, confiscating thousands of weapons and enormous quantities of
ammunition, sometimes against active resistance.36 They then
created a new police force, which was required to work “in accordance with the
directives of the Soviet military command, which has its representative in the
department. The head of the department is obliged to execute all orders and
directives of the Soviet military representative.”37
Some Korean communists chafed at this level of control by
their “fraternal” occupiers. Future Defense Minister Choe Yong-gon, who became
head of the Police Department, exhorted the new police chiefs to “cooperate
with the Soviet army,” even though their “interference in administrative
affairs is great and their meddling in our affairs is not small.”38
Nonetheless, the Red Army was creating what Korean communists had long hoped
for—a transformation of their country according to Marxist principles.
Moreover, at that point the international communist movement was still without
question headed by the Soviet Union. It was only natural that throughout the
occupation Korean party members willingly subordinated to Soviet officials,
even on important issues such as unifying the country. Thus, for example, when
Kim Il Sung received a proposal from Kim Koo and Kim Kyu-sik in March 1948 that
leaders from North and South meet to discuss a plan to create a unified
government, Kim Il Sung relayed the invitation to Shtykov, who then transmitted
the information to Foreign Minister Molotov.
It was only after Shtykov received
Molotov’s approval that Kim Il Sung sent his affirmative reply to Seoul.39
This willing subordination continued even after the
occupation ended. As Kim Il Sung put it when he appealed to Soviet officials in
January 1950 to allow him to discuss with Stalin his urgent desire to use
military force to gain control of the South, he was “a Communist, a disciplined
person, and for him the order of Comrade Stalin is law.”40
I would argue that the prewar period is not where we find the origins of a
distinctively Korean form of socialism. Instead, we should look at the profound
transformation in attitudes toward the Soviet Union caused by the North Korean
leadership’s painful subjugation to Soviet and Chinese decisions during the catastrophic
war of 1950–53.41
The Prolongation of the Korean War, 1951–1953
English-language scholarship on the
unusually lengthy negotiations for an armistice in Korea, which lasted from
June 1951 to July 1953, has detailed the slow course of the negotiations and
identified the American demand for voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war
as the main reason for the prolongation of the talks, after the two sides
reached an agreement on the military demarcation line. The issue of POW
repatriation was indeed the focus of extended discussions for fifteen months,
which frustrated the American leadership to the point that the new Eisenhower
administration threatened to use nuclear weapons against China to break the
logjam.42 Western accounts of the negotiations tend to assume,
perhaps naturally, that the two sides approached the talks in good faith, both
wishing to reach an agreement to end the war.43 However,
Soviet records reveal that for the Communist side, the armistice negotiations
had a very different purpose.
By January 1951, with Chinese forces having eliminated the
danger that the UN command might destroy the Soviet security buffer in Korea,
Stalin began to regard the war as advantageous to the Soviet Union. By keeping
the Americans bogged down in Korea for another two to three years, the Soviet
bloc states of Eastern Europe would have time to build powerful military forces
with which to buffer the USSR against anticipated attack from the West.
Consequently, the Soviet leader summoned the top political and military
officials of the European fraternal states to Moscow to discuss the
opportunities created by the American failure in Korea. Crowing that the US is
“unable even to cope with a small war such as the one in Korea,” Stalin
declared that “the fact that the US will be tied down in Asia for the next two
or three years constitutes a very favorable circumstance for us,” which the
fraternal states must use to create “modern and powerful military forces.”44 To
ensure that the US would remain bogged down in Korea, Stalin informed Mao
Zedong when the armistice talks resumed in November 1951 that the Soviet
leadership “considers it correct that the Chinese/Korean side, using flexible
tactics … continue to pursue a hard line, not showing haste and not displaying interest
in a rapid end to the negotiations.”45 Accordingly, the North Korean
and Chinese representatives at the talks refused to accept any terms advanced
by the Americans. By early 1952, however, the North Korean leadership began to
voice a desire to bring to an end the destruction their country was suffering
from American bombing. On 16 January Foreign Minister Pak Hon-Yong communicated
to Peng Dehuai that “the Korean people throughout the country demand peace and
do not want to continue the war.” However, ever a loyal communist, Pak added
that “if the Soviet Union and China consider it advantageous to continue the
war, then the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party will be able to overcome
any difficulties and hold their position.”46
In July Kim Il Sung raised the issue of ending the war with
Mao Zedong, who had concluded that the war was not only beneficial to the
Soviet bloc, but also to People’s Republic of China. Kim Il Sung argued that
even though the enemy’s demand for voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war
was unreasonable, “we need simultaneously to move decisively toward the soonest
conclusion of an armistice, a ceasefire and transfer of all prisoners of war on
the basis of the Geneva Convention.”47 Mao refused to yield, however,
writing to Kim Il Sung that “when the enemy is subjecting us to furious
bombardment, accepting a provocative and fraudulent proposal from the enemy,
which does not signify in fact any kind of concession, is highly
disadvantageous to us.” The only harmful consequence of rejecting the enemy
proposal will be further Korean and Chinese losses, but since China began to
aid Korea, the Korean people have been standing “on the front line of defense
of the camp of peace of the whole world.” Moreover, through the sacrifices of the
Korean people, both North Korea and Northeast China have been defended from
American aggression. Mao declared euphemistically that “the people of Korea and
China, especially their armed forces, have received the possibility of being
tempered and acquiring experience in the struggle against American
imperialism.”48 The war was in fact performing the essential service
of transforming the People’s Liberation Army from a guerilla army into a modern
military force, as Soviet advisers trained Chinese units to use the advanced
weapons the Soviets sent to Korea and created modern logistical and
communication systems for the Chinese forces.
Mao further emphasized to Kim Il Sung the international
importance of the war in Korea, asserting that the increased might of the
Korean and Chinese people in the course of this war “is inspiring the
peace-loving peoples of the whole world in the struggle against aggressive war
and is facilitating the development of the movement for defense of peace
throughout the world.” This international support “limits the mobility of the
main forces of American imperialism and makes it suffer constant losses in the
East.” Moreover, with US forces bogged down in Korea, the Soviet Union, “the
stronghold of peace throughout the world,” can accelerate its rebuilding from
World War II and “exercise its influence on the development of the
revolutionary movement of peoples of all countries. This will mean the delay of
a new world war.”49
With the international stakes so high, Mao Zedong
admonished his Korean “younger brother” that to accept the enemy’s proposal
“under the influence of its bombardment” would put China and North Korea in a
disadvantageous position both politically and militarily. Rather than bringing
any lasting peace, it would encourage the enemy to make new provocations. Since
the Koreans and Chinese would then be in a disadvantageous position, they would
possibly fail to rebuff the new enemy provocations. In that case, the
advantages the war has brought to the global struggle against American
imperialism will be lost. Consequently, even if the enemy does not make a
concession and the negotiations are further delayed, or if the enemy breaks off
the negotiations, Korea and China must continue military operations until they
find “a means for changing the present situation.”50
China’s Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai discussed the status of
the war in talks with Stalin the following month, reporting that the North
Koreans were ready to end the war by accepting the UN offer to return 83,000
POWs.51 He reported that Mao Zedong believed they should hold
firm in their demand that all POWs be repatriated, but the Koreans “believe
that the continuation of the war is not advantageous because the daily losses
are greater than the number of POWs whose return is being discussed.” Mao, in
contrast, “believes that the continuation of the war is advantageous to us,
since it detracts the USA from preparing for a new world war.”52
Stalin agreed with Mao’s view and dismissed the Koreans’
concerns with the memorable comment that they “have lost nothing, except
people.”53 The Chinese and Koreans do not need to accept the
American terms, Stalin declared, because the US knows it will have to end the
war. The communist allies must therefore endure and be patient. “Of course,” he
conceded, “one needs to understand Korea—they have suffered many casualties.
But it needs to be explained to them that this is an important matter. They
need patience and lots of endurance. The war in Korea has shown America’s
weakness. The armies of twenty-four countries cannot continue the war in Korea
for long, since they have not achieved their goals and cannot count on success
in this matter.”54
It may be that Stalin decided to end the war in early 1953,
as Wada Haruki argues.55 In any case, once the Soviet
leader died on 5 March 1953 the collective leadership that took power in Moscow
moved with dispatch to bring the war in Korea to an end. On March 19 the
Council of Ministers adopted a lengthy resolution on the war, with attached
letters to Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung outlining the statements their delegation
should make to indicate their willingness to resolve the outstanding issues in
order to reach an armistice.56 The Chinese leadership had by
then also decided to bring the war to an end and therefore welcomed the Soviet
initiative, as Zhou Enlai communicated to his allies while he was in Moscow for
Stalin’s funeral.57 The efforts of South Korean President Syngman Rhee to
sabotage the conclusion of an armistice delayed its signing until July, as the
Chinese leadership felt the need to respond with a demonstration of strength
and secure a favorable position for the dividing line. Nonetheless, the turning
point in ending the war was the decision of the Soviet leadership to finally
conclude an armistice.
American demands during the armistice negotiations were
certainly important in prolonging the war, as they shaped Soviet and Chinese
calculations about how the war could be used to enhance the prestige of the
communist side internationally, as well as build domestic support for the
government in Beijing. They also affected the United States’ relations with its
wartime allies and its position in the larger Cold War. Scholars will surely be
occupied for generations with the daunting task of understanding the
catastrophic war of 1950–3. As they proceed, they will need not only to
continue to expand the source base but also the intellectual framework,
anticipating that very different processes may be driving the actions of the
states involved.
Conclusion
This brief discussion of some aspects of
the Soviet role in Korea in the early postwar years suggests some ways that a
US-centric framework has distorted our view of basic issues in contemporary
Korean history. It has clouded both the scholarly and public understanding of
the division of the country by exaggerating the American contribution to this
tragedy. The assumption that a unified government could have been created if
only the US had only been more willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union fails
to acknowledge the power Moscow had to obstruct such an outcome, and its
determination to do so if necessary for Soviet security. The issue here is not
where to place blame, but rather how to understand the combination of
circumstances, perceptions, and actions that brought about the division.
With regard to the state created in the north of Korea, the
US-centered approach has had convoluted and long-lasting consequences. In the
context of the binary politics of the Cold War era, by keeping the spotlight on
the serious harm the American occupation did in the South many scholars, as
well as the left-leaning portion of public opinion in the South, have
understated the control Soviet occupation authorities exercised in the North.
The resulting exaggeration of Korean agency in the establishment of the DPRK
has then led to a failure to understand the driving force behind the North’s
distinctive ideology. Thus, for example, Benjamin Young’s valuable new book, Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader,58
presents a wealth of new information about North Korea’s involvement in the
Third World but takes at face value the DPRK’s relentless focus on Kim Il
Sung’s history as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter. Young consequently depicts
Pyongyang’s promotion of a Juche
ideology of national autonomy, anti- imperialism, and self-reliance as a
response to the experience of Japanese rule.
A more persuasive explanation for Juche, I would argue, is that while the legacy of Japanese rule
remained important, from the late 1950s the North Korean leadership was driven
primarily by resentment of the more recent and still ongoing danger of Soviet
imperialism. If we apprehend the degree to which Kim Il Sung and his circle
began their time in power with a willing subordination to the communist
“Vatican,” then we can appreciate the intensity of their response when the
Soviet leader betrayed their trust during the war of 1950–53. In October 1950,
when Mao Zedong informed Stalin that they would not intervene in Korea without
Soviet air support, the Soviet leader ordered Kim Il Sung to evacuate his
forces from the peninsula rather than provide such support. Stalin revoked this
order the following day, after learning that the Chinese had changed their
mind, but he allowed Soviet air force units to protect only the Yalu River
corridor, not the bulk of DPRK territory. In 1952 the Soviet leader refused the
North Koreans’ request to bring an end to the war that was causing
extraordinary physical destruction of their country because he viewed the
conflict as beneficial to the Soviet Union. He furthermore insisted that the
Koreans subordinate themselves to the decisions of the Chinese leadership, who
similarly regarded the continuation of the war as important to their own
security. With this background in mind, it is easier to understand why Kim Il
Sung described Soviet intervention in 1956 as an attempt to destroy the party
from within.
In conclusion, as the field of Korean studies considers the
lessons to be learned from Charles Armstrong’s egregious plagiarism of Balázs
Szalontai’s work, we can see, first of all, the crude imperialism of a highly
placed American scholar falsifying his footnotes in order to claim as his own
the work of a young historian from Hungary. But we can also observe that
Armstrong’s extraordinary misconduct arose from his recognition that East
European archival records were essential for writing North Korea’s history. An
appropriate response to the scandal, therefore, would be to broaden the field
by encouraging and embracing the work of scholars from a wide range of
countries and academic backgrounds.
Notes
1. See James
Matray. The Reluctant Crusade: American
Foreign Policy in Korea, 1941–1950 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii
Press, 1985), pp. 75–98. See also Bruce Cumings. Korea’s Place in the Sun, A Modern History (New York, NY: Norton,
2005), pp. 186–197. These scholars have held to these interpretations despite
the release of Soviet documentation, much of which has been translated into
English. See, for example, the paper James Matray presented at a conference on
the division of Korea held at Korea University in August 2015.
2. United
States Department of State. Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS): Diplomatic Papers, The Conference of
Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), 1945, Volume II, Paper no. 732,
“Trusteeship for Korea” from Henry Stimson, p. 631.
3. United
States Department of State. Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS): Diplomatic
Papers, The British Commonwealth, The Far East, 1945, Volume VI, Records of
the StateWar-Navy Coordinating Committee, “Draft Memorandum to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff,” p. 1039.
4. Ministry of
Foreign Affairs of the USSR. Correspondence
Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents
of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic
War of 1941–1945, Volume II (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House,
1957): p. 266. A copy of the telegram Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sent to
the Soviet ambassador in Washington on 17 August 1945, communicating to Truman
Stalin’s reply to the draft of General Order No. 1, is found in the Dmitrii
Volkogonov Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC,
Reel 18.
5. For an
excellent discussion of Soviet goals at the end of the war with Japan, see
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy:
Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press: 2006).
6. “Notes on
the Question of Former Japanese Colonies and Mandated Territories,” September
1945. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней
политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond фонд 04311, Opis опись 1,
Delo Дело 52, Papka Папка 8, Listy Листы 40–43. The author of the paper is not
indicated, but the document is included in the files labeled proposals and
notes of Tsarapkin.
7. Ibid.
8. For a
well-documented account of Stalin’s behind the scenes role during the London
meeting, see Vladimir Pechatnov. “‘The Allies are Pressing on You to Break Your
Will …’ Foreign Policy Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov and Other
Politburo Members, September 1945–December 1946,” Working Paper No. 26, The Cold War International History Project
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars).
9. For records
of the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, see FRUS, 1945, Volume II, General: Political
and Economic Matters, pp. 99–559.
10. Bruce
Cumings. The Origins of the Korean War:
Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990); Charles Armstrong,
The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY and London:
Cornell University Press, 2003): pp. 52–57.
11. See the
detailed and persuasive account of the creation of a separate party
organization found in Hak S. Paik, “North Korean State Formation, 1945–1950”
(Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1993), Part I, pp. 119–135.
12. Robert
Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee. Communism in
Korea, Part I (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California
Press, 1972), p. 332.
13. See FRUS, 1945, Volume II, pp. 579–821; The Soviet Union and the Korean Question
(Documents) (Moscow: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1948), pp. 7–10.
14. Jacob Malik.
“On the Question of a Single Government for Korea,” 10 December 1945. Archive
of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики
Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ),
Fond 0102, Opis 1, Delo 15, Papka 1, Listy 18–21.
15. Petukhov,
Adviser to the Second Far Eastern Department. “Soviet–American Occupation of
Korea and the Question of Economic and Political Ties Between North and South
Korea.” December 1945. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation
Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 0102, Opis 1, Delo 15, Papka 1, Listy 8–10.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Suzdalev. “A
Report on Japanese Military and Heavy Industry in Korea,” December 1945.
Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики
Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ),
Fond 0102, Opis 1, Delo 15, Papka 1, Listy 22–29.
20. Jacob Malik.
“On the Question of a Single Government for Korea.”
21. F.I.
Shabshina. “Koreia posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” Akademiia nauk SSSR. Krizis kolonial’noi sistemy,
natsional’no-osvoboditel’naia bor’ba narodov vostochnoi asii (Moskva,
Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1949), p. 262.
22. Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History Российский государственный архив
социально-политической истории (RGASPI РГАСПИ), Fond 17, Opis 128, Delo 205,
Str. Стр. 7–12.
23. Small
enterprises and immovable property that formerly belonged to Japanese residents
in Korea and was officially seized by Koreans with the approval of the Soviet
and American commands after the capitulation of the Japanese armed forces will
not be subject to nationalization.
24. March 13,
1946. Lozovsky to Molotov. “Draft directive to the Soviet delegation at the
Joint Soviet/American Commission on the Formation of a Provisional Korean
democratic government.” Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation
Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 18, Opis 8, Delo 79, Papka 6, Str. 4–11. The
final draft of the directive is found in AVPRF,
Fond 07, Opis 11, Delo 280, Papka 18.
25. See US Army Handbook for Korea (Washington,
DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 38; Joungwoon Alexander Kim. Divided Korea: The Politics of Development,
1945–1972 (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 62.
26. Ibid.
27. United
States Department of State. Foreign
Relations of the United States (FRUS): The Far East, 1946, Volume VIII,
“Lieutenant General John R. Hodge to the Secretary of State,” [740.00119
Control (Korea)/3–2246: Telegram], pp. 652–654.
28. Charles
Armstrong. The North Korean Revolution,
1945–1950. Kim Young Jun repeats this interpretation in Origins of the North Korean Garrison State:
People’s Army and the Korean War (London: Routledge, 2017).
29. Bruce
Cumings. The Origins of the Korean War:
Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945–1947.
30. It is
obvious from the contents of the collection that this is so, but the
Presidential Archive documents on the war also include a specific reference to
this destruction of documents.
31. A
particularly vivid example of this culture of centralized control is the thick
file on Pak Hon-yong’s request to visit the Lenin Library when he was in Moscow
for medical treatment in 1949. The request, which one would think would be
rather routine, passed through numerous levels of the apparatus before it was
finally approved by none other than a resolution of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
32. The records
of the Korea section of the International Department of the Soviet Communist
Party, held in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, include
original drafts and revisions of speeches Soviet officials wrote for Kim Il
Sung, laws for the northern zone, and countless policy instructions to the
Korean leadership. For specifics examples, see Kathryn Weathersby. “Making
Foreign Policy Under Stalin: The Case of Korea,” in Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent
Jensen and Erik Kulavig, eds., Mechanisms
of Power in the Soviet Union (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), pp.
224–240.
33. Ibid.
34. Lebedev is
preparing a condensed version of the thesis for submission in article form.
35. Central
Archive of the Ministry of Defense, Центральный архив Министерства обороны (TsAMO ЦАМО). Fond Military Komandatury
of North Pyongan Province, Opis 536317, Delo 19, List 55. Cited in Vasilii
Lebedev. “In Search of Law and Order: Soviet Occupation of North Korea and the
Creation of the North Korean Police Force (1945–1946). Thesis for the Master’s
Degree, Department of History, Korea University, June 2018.
36. TsAMO, Fond 234, Opis 3213, Delo 54,
Listy 160–162. Cited in Lebedev. “In Search of Law and Order: Soviet Occupation
of North Korea and the Creation of the North Korean Police Force (1945–1946).”
37. “The basic
provisions on the organization and work of the police organs in North Korea.”
TsAMO, Fond USGASK, Opis 343253, Delo 3, List 28. Cited in Vasilii
Lebedev. “In Search of Law and Order: Soviet Occupation of North Korea and the
Creation of the North Korean Police Force (1945–1946).
38. TsAMO, Fond USGASK, Opis 342253, Delo 3,
Listy 43–44. Cited in Lebedev. “In Search of Law and Order: Soviet Occupation
of North Korea and the Creation of the North Korean Police Force (1945–1946).
39. March 13,
1948. Shtykov and Tunkin to Molotov. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the
Russian Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond
0102, Opis 4, Delo 18, Papka
8, Listy 1–3.
40. Ciphered
telegram from Shtykov to [Foreign Minister] Vyshinsky, 19 January 1950. Archive
of the Foreign Relations of the Russian Federation (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 059a, Opis 5a, Delo 3, Papka 11, Listy 87–91.
41. See Kathryn
Weathersby. “North Korea and the Armistice Negotiations,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, 90 (2016):
21–46.
42. See Roger
Dingman. “Atomic Diplomacy During the Korean War,” International Security 13.3 (Winter 1988/1989): 50–91; Rosemary
Foot. “Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,” International Security 13.3 (Winter
1988/1989): 92–112.
43. See, for
example, Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for
Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); William Stueck. The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995); Walter Hermes. Truce
Tent and Fighting Front (Washington DC: US Army Center of Military History,
1966); James Matray, “Progress and Paralysis: The Korean Truce Talks, July 1951
to May 1952,” in Mark Wilkinson, ed., The
Korean War at Fifty: International Perspectives (Lexington City, VI:
Virginia Military Institute, 2004).
44. Notes by
Emil Bodnaras on the meeting with Stalin in Moscow, 9–12 January 1951,
published in C. Cristescu, “Ianuarie 1951: Stalin decide inarmarea Romanei”
[January 1951: Stalin Decides to Arm Romania], Magazin Istoric (Bucharest), 10 (1995): 15–23.
45. Politburo
decision of 19 November 1951, approving the attached answer to Comrade Mao
Zedong, Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней
политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF
АВПРФ), Fond 3, Opis 65, Delo 828[9], Listy 42–43, and Archive of the Foreign
Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 059a, Opis 5a, Papka
11, Delo 5, List 64. For the text of the document, see Weathersby, “New Russian
Documents,” p. 72. For a more extensive discussion of the Soviet role in
prolonging the armistice negotiations, see K. Weathersby “North Korea and the
Armistice Negotiations.” The following discussion draws from this article.
46. Ciphered
telegram from Mao Zedong to Filippov [Stalin] 8 February 1952 conveying
telegram of 22 January 1952 from Peng Dehuai to Mao and 4 February 1952 reply
from Mao to Peng Duhuai. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian
Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 45, Opis 1, Delo 342, Listy 81–83. For the text
of the document, see Weathersby, “New Russian Documents,” pp. 75–76.
47. Ciphered
telegram from Kim Il Sung to Stalin via Razuvaev, 16 July 1952, Archive of the
Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики Российской
Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 45,
Opis 1, Delo 348, Listy 65–68 and Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian
Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 059a, Opis 5a, Delo 4, Papka 11, Listy 40–43.
For the text of the document, see Weathersby. “New Russian Documents,” p. 77.
48. Ciphered
telegram from Mao Zedong to Filippov [Stalin] 18 July 1952, conveying the
telegram from Mao to Kim Il Sung on 15 July 1952 and the reply from Kim to Mao
on 16 July 1952. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив
внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF
АВПРФ), Fond 45, Opis 1, Delo 343, Listy 72–75 and Archive of the Foreign
Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 059a, Opis 5a, Delo
5, Papka 11, Listy 90–93.
For the text of the document, see Weathersby “New Russian
Documents,” pp. 78–79.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Record of
Conversation between Comrade I.V. Stalin and Zhou Enlai, 20 August 1952,
Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Архив внешней политики
Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ),
Fond 45, Opis 1, Delo 329, Listy 54–72. Translation by Danny Rozas. For the
full text of the document see “Stalin’s Conversations with Chinese Leaders,” CWIHP Bulletin 6/7 (Winter 1995/1996):
10–14.
52. Record of
Conversation between Comrade I.V. Stalin and Zhou Enlai, 20 August 1952, p. 12.
53. Ibid. Translation by the author.
54. Ibid.
55. Wada Haruki.
The Korean War: An International History,
translated by Frank Baldwin (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014): chapter
7, “The Armistice,” pp. 257–292.
56. USSR Council
of Ministers Resolution, March 19, 1953. Archive of the Foreign Policy of the
Russian Federation Архив внешней политики Российской Федерации (AVPRF АВПРФ), Fond 3, Opis 65, Delo 830,
Listy 60–71.
57. For the full
text of this document, see Cold War
International History Project Bulletin 3 (Fall 1993): 15–17.
58. Benjamin
Young. Guns, Guerillas, and the Great
Leader: North Korea and the Third World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2021).
Incongruity
of Nationalisms?
Interactions
between Korean National History and American Historians of Korea, the 1910s to
1980s1
VLADIMIR
TIKHONOV Professor, University of Oslo2
Abstract
The heuristic starting point for this paper
is a critical approach to the enterprise of modern historiography per se, based
on the understanding of it as inherently bound by teleological epistemology.
While “Korean nationalism” is the usual vantage point for the critique of
modern Korean historiography, the current article attempts to reverse this
analytical perspective and re-assess a number of attempts to write on Korean
history by US-based historians of Korea in the 1910s–1980s as reflections of
inherently self-centric picture of the world. In this Eurocentric picture,
traditional Korea was locked into a historical trajectory via which “modernity”
was unachievable.
Keywords: Eurocentrism, teleology, epistemology, United States, Edward
Wagner, James Palais, Andrew Grajdanzev
Introduction: pre-1980s American Historiography
of Korea and its “Regime of Truth”
If the post-1980s linguistic turn and the
popularity of Foucauldian theories made at all a contribution into the
development of history as a discipline, it was the ultimate dismissal of the
idea of historical objectivity that benefitted the field most. A “noble dream”
of history becoming as objective as any science should aspire to be—as one
prominent American historian aptly referred to it,3—proved to
be exactly that: a dream. While simply inventing facts, documents or materials
would most likely eventually put a historian outside of the
profession—something that the “Armstrong scandal” of the late 2010s has proven
in the end4—historians create their narratives inside the
frameworks of the regimes of truth specific for their time and place.5
The overarching ideological paradigms define which facts are selected into the
narrative, and how they are interpreted. History, in such a view, appears as a
Janus-like creature, with two fundamental epistemological aspects inherent to
it. On the one hand, in contrast to the mytho-history of the traditional
societies (exemplified, for example, by the Korean myths of the dynastic
founders)6 or the pseudo-history as a part of the modern realm of
commercialized “edutainment,”7 the academic discipline of
history is distinguished by a solid apparatus aimed at verifying the facts of
the past as well as the causality of the relationship between these facts.
Openly political misuses of history tend to be fiercely criticized by the
academic historians. They see such misuses as encroachments of politicians or
“edutainment” entrepreneurs upon their realm of specialist expertise.8
On the other hand, the same professional historians tend to be also painfully
aware that this realm is inherently anything but neutral or objective. Indeed,
an important sub-genre of the contemporary historiography deals exactly with
the ways in which the modern nation state and the concept of sovereignty upon
which it ideologically rests affected the business of history writing.9
Arguably, an essential trait of a professional historian is exactly the
awareness of the degree to which history narratives are being conditioned by
the world-system consisting of sovereign nation states.
In such a system, epistemological nationalism—the view of
the world, which takes the historical experiences and presumed interests of the
given nation as its starting points—is an intrinsic phenomenon, immanent to the
ideological apparatuses of the nation states. As Michael Billig persuasively
argues, in a world dominated by nation states nationalism is akin to the air we
have to breathe: one divides the world into nations and accepts one’s belonging
to one of them as one’s basic epistemological assumption. One also tends to
unconsciously appropriate the current mainstream regime of truth inside the
national discursive space as something self-evident, as the truth rather than one
of the possible epistemological frameworks.10 It is also typical that the
mainstream regime of truth currently dominating the national discourse ends up
claiming universality. If the nation state in question considers itself—or the
historical regions it happens to belong to—the benchmark of modernity, then its
epistemological self-centeredness often takes the form of modernity’s
teleology. History-writing, essentially, develops into a complex system of
explanations on the reasons why “our” modern progress was just as inevitable as
diverse Others’ failure to reach the same stage (at least, without the impulses
“we” provided). In the case of Euroamerican nation states, the epistemological
nationalism of this kind is often referred to as Eurocentrism.11
On some very basic level, its self-centeredness is an heir to the pre-modern
traditions of ethno-centric epistemology: to the mediaeval and early modern
view of Islam and Muslims as infidels or treacherous enemies, for example.12
Eurocentrism, of course, hardly ever completely disappeared
from the American historiography of Korea even after the self-reflective turn
of the 1980s, and later decades problematized the self-centered ways in which
Americans or Europeans were accustomed to approach the history of the rest of
the world. This paper, however, focuses on the American scholarship on Korean
history after Korea’s colonization by Japan in 1910 and until the beginning of
the 1980s. It does so on the understanding that the 1980s ushered a new period
in the history of America’s Korean studies, historical studies included. First,
the number of practitioners started to grow quickly, in harmony with South
Korea’s upward trajectory in the international system. Even a cursory analysis
of the post-1980s historiographical trends would require a separate paper.
Second, the field of Korean studies in America was becoming increasingly
heterogeneous after the 1980s, as a number of South Korean graduate students
with US doctorates was entering it. They were often coming with their own
agendas, be they the research on South Korea’s growing working class, or
feminist research on capitalist patriarchy in Korea. While the continuity with
the pre-existing American research on Korean history was not entirely absent in
the post-1980s historical Korean studies in the USA, the diversity of their
agendas, theoretical approaches and idiosyncrasies makes it necessary to
research on them separately.13 The present article will focus
on the pre-1980s American research on Korean history. It will attempt both to
trace the continuity of the Eurocentric approaches, and their evolution,
related, among others, to Korea’s 1945 de-colonization and the growing
professionalization of the Korean history field in the USA after the 1960s. It
will also shed light on the incongruity between the Eurocentric approaches of
the American historians and the post-1960s attempts of South Korean historians
to appropriate the (intrinsically Eurocentric) teleology of modernity for their
own purposes.
Japanese
Colonialism as Modernization?
If we turn to the early American scholarship
on Korea, the job of detecting epistemological self-centeredness is hardly too
complicated: mainstream historians of early twentieth-century America, not
unlike their European colleagues, were only too willing to identify their own
version of industrial civilization with The
Civilization as such.14 Civilization was predominantly
used in singular rather than plural, and the history of Korea’s intercourse
with the US and other “civilized” nations—the primary preoccupation of the
professional American historians of the 1900–1920s as long as Korea was
concerned—was only too easy to conceptualize as a story of civilization’s
triumphal marsh over the Pacific. Pre-World War II American historiography did
not develop an overarching, coherent grand narrative on Korea since the
interest in this country was relatively marginal. Fragmented information on
Korea was scattered in writings on diplomatic, military, or political history
of what was then customarily referred to as “Far East.” The two main sub-genres
of the American historiography, which dealt more actively with Korea-related
topics in the early twentieth century, were military history and diplomatic
history. In the world where nation states are the main actors on both military
and diplomatic field, both sub-genres were, by necessity, national narratives
produced in modern academic style—with footnotes and references to the
first-hand sources. An article which rather well typifies both sub-genres, was
a 1910 study on Commodore Shufeldt’s “opening of Korea”’ by Charles Oscar
Paullin (1869–1944), a naval historian. That the article, on thirty pages and
with copious references to the American diplomatic documents and personal
correspondence between the US officers and diplomats, failed to use a single
Korean or Chinese source, is perhaps expectable: Paullin was no “Oriental
Studies” expert and claimed no knowledge of East Asian languages. However, in
addition to that, he “forgot” to mention that Shufeldt’s 1882 treaty with
Korea, “giving to American consuls in Korea extraterritorial jurisdiction,”
failed to bestow any rights onto the Korean subjects in the United States.
“Natives”—that is how the naval historian referred to Koreans throughout the
text—were supposed to take their inequality with the “civilized nations” for
granted. Paullin even did not bother to explain the reasons why the US
government exhibited an interest in imposing a treaty upon Korea. It was
self-evident that the possessors of superior civilization were supposed to be
eager to bring it to the “natives” on the margins of their world.15
Yet another luminary of the American historiographical
world who pioneered the Korean issues in the professional historical domain was
Tyler Dennett (1883– 1949), widely known for his trailblazing—and controversial—work
on the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement.16 His 1923 article on the early
US diplomacy vis-à-vis Korea was written and published after the March First,
1919, independence movement in Korea made the aspirations of Korea’s
anti-colonialism known to the American public. Consequently, Dennett formulates
his research question in a way rather uncharacteristic of pre-1919 writings on
Korea. His inquiry was to deal with the issue of whether America “betrayed”
Korea and eventually left it exposed to the Japanese imperialist ambitions,
failing to make good on the promise of “good services” stipulated in Shufeldt’s
1882 treaty. Dennett answers the question in the negative. US diplomacy, as he
saw it, ideally wished to keep Korea de facto independent, but was in no position
to decisively intervene and provide Korea with the needed guarantees at the
face of Chinese, Japanese and later Russian encroachments. Dennett concluded
that “In the midst of ever- increasing intrigue in an Oriental court, the
American Government (…) studied absolute neutrality,” and made exactly these
“intrigues by the powers”—rather than Korea’s history per se—into the
centerpiece of his narrative. Dennett does not refer to any Chinese or Korean
sources, although he does use an Englishlanguage account by German-trained
Ariga Nagao (1860–1921), a Japanese legal scholar. It is abundantly clear that,
aside from Euro-American “great powers,” it were Westernized Meiji Japanese
and, to a certain degree, Chinese (“civilized” or not, China still had to be accepted
as a regional power) whom Dennett accorded the status of the actors in his
narrative. Koreans, by contrast, were relegated to supporting roles.17
The regimes of truth, as a form and a part of social power
relationship,18 are expected to mutate in sync with the ever-changing
demands of the power elites. In the mid-1920s, when Japan was hardly perceived
yet as a serious threat to the American interests in Asia, praising Japanese
colonial policies in Korea was a commonplace for the academic establishment on
both sides of the Atlantic. Alleyne Ireland (1871–1951), a Briton who lectured
on “colonial problems” at several American universities, published in 1926 a
notorious paean to Governor General Saitō Makoto’s (1858–1936) “just and
tolerant administration.” “The feelings of the anti-Japanese extremists”
inimical to the Japanese rule despite all the “benefits” it supposedly brought
were explained away by the militaristic “stiffness” of the Japanese government
in the 1910s.19 Some American academics with stronger political
influence than Ireland offered only marginally more critical opinions. Joseph
Hayden (1887–1945), an academic (historian and political scientist) and a US
colonial administrator in the Philippines, could offer some measured praise to
the achievements of his Japanese colonialist colleagues in Korea. “Railroads,
steamship lines, hotels, banks, mines, afforested mountain sides, scientific agricultural
projects, schools, hospitals, and cities of stone, brick and cement” were to be
lauded as “the visible products of the marvelous mechanism of colonization
which Japan has built up during the past generation”; Japan’s failure to allow
the “natives” (whom Hayden compared to the “redskins” of the American West), at
least some measure of self-rule was to be mildly censured.20
The tone, expectedly, changed by the late 1930s, although
the change was only gradual. In 1930, when Japan, under the weight of the Great
Depression, was preparing to turn to the policy of autarchy and further
continental expansion, Henry Burgess Drake (1894–1963), a Briton who taught
English in Seoul in 1928–1930, was still telling the world—including his
American readers—that lazy, lethargic Koreans were in no position to govern
themselves, without the “help” of the Japanese administration.21
The attitudes of this sort were still persistent in US even in the second half
of the decade, although with increasing number of critical caveats. Paul
Hibbert Clyde (1896–1998), a historian of the “Far East” and Duke University’s
professor in 1937–1961, offered serious criticisms of Japan’s bullying
behaviour vis-à-vis China and some mild rebukes to Japan’s colonial policy in
Korea. However, he assured the reader of his 1937 outline of “Far Eastern”
history that Japan originally had no intention to invade Korea.22
Koreans, according to Clyde, brought the calamity of Japanese annexation upon
themselves by assassinating supposedly benevolent Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909).23
Furthermore, they further stubbornly continued to worsen their own lot by
failing to fully cooperate with Saitō Makoto’s “tolerant” colonial policies of
the 1920s.24
However, as the Japanese aggression was destroying Chinese
mainland, the critical evolution of the American scholarly attitudes towards
Japanese imperialism—including its Korean colonial enterprise—was accelerated.
Koreans were becoming increasingly visible as America’s potential allies in the
battle against Japan. Korean émigré groups in the United States were seeking
recognition and support, and at the later stage of the Pacific War, some
Koreans were trained by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) for sabotage
behind enemy lines.25 Knowledge on Korea under
Japanese control was now being eagerly thought. Andrew Grajdanzev was an émigré
Russian PhD in economics who subsequently worked for the US Occupation in Japan
and was placed under strict surveillance as a possible “Soviet sympathizer” as
the Cold War climate worsened (he subsequently Anglicized his surname to “Grad”
and ended up working for a small local library).26 He
offered timely and fact-based criticisms of the Japanese colonial policies in
Korea already before Pearl Harbor in his 1939 article on Korea’s wartime
economy. Gone were the “marvelous mechanism of colonization” and all its
“achievements.” A relatively progressive American scholar, writing in the time
when Japan and USA were following a trajectory of deepening conflict, found in
Korea undernourished peasants, development of natural resources aimed at
serving Japanese rather than Korean needs, and complete domination of the
Japanese corporate capital in the industry and mining. Fluent in both Chinese
and Japanese, Grajdanzev utilized a plethora of Japanese sources but no Korean
ones.27 In fact, throughout the 1930s, Korea’s pioneering
Marxists—Han Wigŏn (1896–1937), Pak Mun’gyu (1906–1971) and others—were
actively debating the issues of rural impoverishment, growing tenancy rates,
usury problems etc in the leftist journals inside and outside Korea: Kyegŭp T’ujaeng 階級鬪爭 (1929–1930), Pip’an 批判 (1931–1940), Sin’gyedan 新階段 (1932–1933), Sinhŭng 新興 (1929–1937).28 However, hardly
any contemporary American scholar has ever read any of these journals, nor are
they cited in English-language historiography. Aside from missionaries—who had
to be in daily contact with their “native” converts29—few
Americans related to Korea via diplomatic or academic pursuits, Grajdanzev
included, bothered to learn Korean at all, since all official business was
transacted in Japanese anyway.
After the Pearl Harbor attack, the expertise of this émigré
scholar was in even higher demand. Still, even such a thorough critic of Japanese
imperialism as Grajdanzev had built his arguments mostly based on the sources
produced exactly by the colonizers whom he criticized. Grajdanzev’s widely
praised masterpiece, his 1944 Modern
Korea,30 included, however, some references to the works in
English by Korean émigré nationalists, notably Nebraska and Northwestern
University-educated Henry Chung’s (Chŏng Han’gyŏng 鄭翰景, 1890–1985) Case of Korea, published in 1921 and
containing ample evidence of Japan’s brutal colonial policies.31
Chung’s book was reviewed by some learned journals,32 but
entirely ignored by the likes of Hayden or Clyde. After all, it obviously did
not fit the paradigm of “benevolent colonialism,” the basic framework of their
colonial history research. Grajdanzev, on his part, had no trust in Japan’s
“benevolence.” Moreover, he prophetically warned his readers about the dangers
of “class government” by the formerly pro-Japanese local elites in liberated
Korea and, in much more radical way than rather moderate Henry Chung ever attempted,
even proposed to nationalize the Japanese-owned enterprises after the victory
and re-build Korea into a quasi-socialist state with its basis in agricultural
cooperatives and strong state sector.33
Post-1945: “Stagnant Korea,” Unable to Modernize on
Itself?
As Korea was experiencing the maelstrom of
the 1945 liberation, national division, 1950–53 Korean War and separate
nation-building projects in North and South, American historians of Korean
found themselves saddled with several—partly overlapping—tasks. They were
supposed to search for the historical roots of the leftist “totalitarianism” in
the part of Korea which now became America’s geostrategic enemy, and which was
following the road suggested in general traits by Grajdanzev in 1944, but in a
much more radical version. However, concurrently, “modernization” of “our” part
of Korea—which preserved the privileges of the old colonial elite, something
that Grajdanzev strongly advised against—was yet another pressing task. It
necessitated both the search for any historical lineages of modernity in Korea,
as well as the reasons why Koreans were “incapable” of achieving the feet of
“modernization” themselves at earlier times. One important caveat is needed
here. American historians of Korea and Korea experts in general never
represented a monolithic group. Some were more liberal and critically inclined
than the others. The liberals could voice relatively unorthodox opinions even
during the harsher years of the Cold War. There existed, however, a clear-cut
framework inside which a measure of tolerance for criticism could be expected.
As long as one, in accordance with the basic tenets of the Cold-War era regime
of truth, believed in the democratic credentials and underlying goodness of the
Free World, one could expect some toleration for one’s criticisms of its
occasional failures to be true to its essential mission. George M. McCune
(1908–1948), America’s perhaps brightest Korea hand in the wake of 1945
liberation of Korea, could allow himself to rebuke the US Occupation
authorities in Korea for their failure to practice democracy rather than simply
preach it34 without jeopardizing his career at UC Berkeley. McCune
did not try to doubt the most basic point of the reigning orthodoxy: that
bringing “democracy” to peripheral peoples and shielding them from what he
termed “extreme leftism” was benevolent America’s task and the main meaning of
its policies. “Extreme leftism,” in Korea and elsewhere, was, in turn, the
professional domain of a special group of “Communism experts” who sometimes,
but not always, possessed also Area Studies skills (the command of local
languages etc.).
One of the first books to deal in a scholarly way with the
“inimical” Korea run by “extreme leftists” was a 1959 volume by Columbia University-trained
Philip Rudolph, originally an expert in “Communism,” proficient in Russian but
not in Korean. Rudolph’s main research question was how the “Russian patterns
of Communist takeover were applied” in the Korean case. His conclusion was that
North Korea, occupied by the Soviet Army in 1945, was turned into a “Communist
regime subservient to the Soviet interest” imitating the Soviet model in
relatively short time. Concurrently, as Rudolph saw it, it demonstrated
socialist radicalism more reminiscent of contemporary China than of relatively
more liberalized ‘Soviet satellites’ in Eastern Europe. Rudolph was a careful
enough observer to discern strong elements of Korean nationalism in Kim Il
Sung’s rhetoric, but—even in 1959—had little doubt about him being a Soviet
puppet.35 On a deeper level, Rudolph’s belief that Koreans were
manipulated and controlled by omnipresent “Russian Communists” appears to be
congruent with Drake’s postulate about Koreans’ inborn inability to govern
themselves, or the historical studies by Paullin and Dennett in which Korea
emerged as simply an arena for great powers’ rivalry. Unlike Paullin or
Dennett, Rudolph, however, made some erroneous claims based on flawed sources.
He believed for example, that no less than 30,000 Soviet Koreans were
dispatched by the Soviets to North Korea after 1945, his reference being a
sloppily written article in a middlebrow American journal.36
The real number, as we know now, was much more modest—slightly above four
hundred people,37 hardly enough to “control and manipulate” North Korea
at will.
In a Hegelian picture of the world in which benevolent
America was leading the Free World, southern part of Korea included, to the
teleologically predestined triumph of freedom, while “protecting” it from the
“Communist threat,” “modernization and development” of “our” Korea played,
expectedly, an important role. The picture of the “civilized peoples” tasked
with “developing and modernizing” their lesser charges elsewhere was not,
indeed, an entirely new phenomenon per se. Were not the paeans sung by Ireland,
Hayden or Clyde to Saitō Makoto predicated on the belief that Japanese
administration was bringing development to the natives? The colonial-era
language of the proverbial mission
civilisatrice was now remolded into the modernization discourse. The
colonialist discourse was not necessarily even fully discarded. David Brudnoy
(1940–2004), an East Asia historian who eventually reinvented himself as a
radio talk show host, could confidently praise Japan achievements as lately as
in 1970: “Japan took a backward nation with one of the world’s least efficient,
most corrupt governments, and brought important elements of modernization.”
Brudnoy had no illusions about the oppressiveness of the Japanese rule in the
1910s or the economic exploitation and racial discrimination involved in
this—or any other—colonialist project. However, he was still willing to give at
least some credit to the avowed intention of the Japanese administrators to
improve Koreans’ lives and bring them closer to the Japanese “civilizational
standards.” He was, in his own words, seeing colonized Korea as a giant—albeit
eventually failed—experiment in creating a greater Japanese nation. Otherwise,
Brudnoy assessed the possibilities of Korea modernizing on itself as nearly
non-existent. His judgement was unequivocal: “long years of political
corruption, exploitation, and relative impotence under the Yi, coupled with an
absence of strong dedicated reformers (such as the Meiji leaders), made significant
reform for strengthening impossible.”38
Stagnant Korea incapable of modernizing itself was
something most American academics dealing with Korea had agreed upon, since the
days of Dennett and until the post-colonial awakening of the 1980s in the wake
of the emergence of Edward Said’s Orientalism
in 1978.39 Korea’s “orientalization,” in terms of it being
represented as inherently unable to “develop” on itself, had affected even
relatively progressive Grajdanzev. He saw Korea as a stagnant “hermit nation”
and in long-term decay since the 1592–98 Hideyoshi invasion.40
“Stagnation theory” as applied to traditional Korea was one point on which
Japanese colonial historiography of Korea41 and the majority of the
pre-1980s American writings on pre-modern Korea converged. The quintessentially
“Orientalist” denial of any potential claim to self-induced modernity on the
part of a peripheral nation outside of the established world-systemic core
(Western Europe, North America, and Japan) was an obvious common ground. The
earliest standard narrative on pre-modern and modern Korea from the American
historical academia was Lee Chong-Sik’s (b. 1931) impressive 1965 volume on
Korean nationalism’s pedigree (a reworked version of Lee’s 1963 University of
California doctoral dissertation). It pictured pre-1876 Korea as an unchanging
“Confucian society” with little or no social mobility, complete social
domination by yangban aristocratic
lineages, absolute power of the intrigue-ridden and factionalized court, a
closed middle stratum of technicians and self-sufficient villages. Little trade
that took place in such a static society was simply purveying for the court.
The prospects for the development of modernity or modern nationalism were
absent.42 As early as in 1960, the canonical narrative by the
two most authoritative scholars in the field, Japanologist Edwin Reischauer
(1910–1990) and Sinologist John King Fairbank (1907–1991), judged traditional
Korea nothing more than a “variant of Chinese culture pattern,”43
so the search for any heterogeneous developments inside what was pronounced to
have been a “model Confucian monarchy” was discouraged. Historians of
traditional Korea were supposed to further elaborate on what the Korean
“modification of the Chinese pattern” could imply, whereas the modern
historians and political scientists were to look for the modernization
possibilities in a society, which was not supposed to possess any immanent
roots to such a line of development.
from “Korea Hands” to Professional Historians:
Henderson and Wagner
The Korean War and South Korea’s post-1953
role as an anti-Communist bulwark in East Asia brought a surge in the general
interest towards (and often also sympathy with), Korea and Koreans on the part
of broad American public.44 Both public interest and
strategic necessity brought a rapid institutional development of the
university-level Korean studies. By the end of the 1950s, University of
California in
Berkeley, University of Washington and
Harvard all had faculty members trained in history, linguistics, or geography
with Korea as their main field of study. In the 1960s, both Columbia and
Western Michigan University introduced Korea-related disciplines, and in 1972,
the first-ever Center for Korean Studies was established at the University of
Hawai’i at Manoa. Around thirty Korea-themed doctoral dissertations were
defended at the American institutions in the 1950–60s, although in most of the
cases, the authors were South Koreans or Korean migrants to America.45
In sync with the general trend towards institutionalization
of the Korean studies inside the American academia, the work on Korea’s
traditional history was becoming increasingly professionalized throughout the
1960s and 1970s. Professionalization implied that research was to be conducted
by the scholars specifically trained in the use of sources in classical Chinese
and on the basis of primary materials, with secondary sources from contemporary
Korea (and Japan) used as additional references. The older type of a “Korea
hand”—a scholarly inclined official from the world of diplomacy or missionary
work—was still in existence, but this kind of academic activity was undergoing
a gradual decline. Gregory Henderson (1922–1988), known for his stints at the
US Embassy in Seoul in 1948–1950 and 1958–1963, was perhaps the best
representative for this category of scholarly writers. His lengthy 1958–59
account of Korean Confucian history— co-authored with Dr. Yang Kibaek (Library
of Congress), and mostly based on the colonial-era scholarship of the likes of
Takahashi Tōru (高橋亨, 1878–1967), but also on the pre- and post-Liberation
writings of Yi Pyŏngdo (李丙燾, 1896–1989), Ch’ŏn Kwan’u (千寬宇, 1925–1991), Hong
Isŏp (洪以燮, 1914–1974) and other
Korean historians—is remarkable for its
meticulous and generous treatment of its subject. Henderson—contrary to much of
the accepted wisdom of his day—did not squarely put the blame for Chosŏn court
factional strife entirely on Korean Confucianism’s door. He even acknowledged
the progress which Confucian institutes and Confucian public opinion brought to
the country hitherto ruled by closely-knit aristocratic lineage groups. The
final judgement of America’s most scholarly “Korea hand” of that time did not,
however, differ qualitatively from the reigning consensus in both colonial-age
Japanese and, to a large degree, contemporary Korean scholarship. As Henderson
put it, “Korea’s lack of swift progress in the last centuries of Yi rule, her
inability to adapt herself successfully to the radical changes of the late
nineteenth century or, ultimately, to retain her own freedom, are valid
symptoms of the weakness and failure of the Confucian institutions of the Yi
dynasty.”46 As long as “Confucian Korea” could not achieve the Western—
or at least Japanese—feet of modernization, it was to be judged a failure in
the last analysis. In line with the thinking of the colonial-era nationalist
savants, like Chŏng Inbo (1893–1950), whom he cites, Henderson suggested
elsewhere that more practically oriented sirhak
實學 scholars, like Tasan Chŏng Yagyong (茶山丁若鏞, 1762–1836), might have prolonged
“Yi Dynasty’s” rule, although even they, according to him, were powerless to
change “Confucian Korea’s (…) traditional hostility to technology.”47
While Henderson did not have even to look at Tasan’s
original works while writing an introductory article about the Chosŏn Dynasty
genius, the 1960–70s saw emergence of a different professional protocol. Using
the first-hand sources in the original became de rigueur for any serious scholar. One of the most important
historians of traditional Korea of the 1960–90s—in terms of the ability to
train many graduate students, forming a school of his own—was Edward Wagner
(1924–2001), a Harvard professor and the founder of Harvard’s Korea Institute
(1981). Wagner’s scholarship was distinguished by his thorough reliance on the
standard set of the main original sources (The
Veritable Records of Chosŏn Dynasty, examination rosters, genealogical
books, local gazetteers etc.), and his collaboration with Song Chunho (宋俊浩,
1922–2003), a famous South Korean historian specializing on the sociology of yangban class. Wagner’s work may be
summarized as an attempt to establish the basic framework for the understanding
of Chosŏn polity and its ruling stratum. Many of his primary claims, in fact,
did not significantly deviate from the findings of his mainstream South Korean
contemporaries—at least until the late 1960s, when increasing number of
historians in South Korea started to pay closer attention to the dynamic
aspects of Chosŏn history and the non-yangban
social groups. He viewed factionalism as an inbuilt element in a polity, which
combined strong royal power with the prerogatives of aristocratic lineages. In
such a polity, the top positions of influence were scarce and the number of
potential claimants was much higher and rising.48 He
analyzed the importance of civil-service exams as both a vehicle for preserving
the hereditary status of the aristocratic lineages and achieving a degree of
upward mobility, at least inside the yangban
milieu.49 The most potentially controversial claim was
that—contrary to what his South Korean contemporaries tended to believe—Chosŏn
Dynasty society exhibited stronger patterns of social mobility before rather than after its
post-Hideyoshi invasions restructuring in the sixteenth century. The claim,
however, was substantiated by the analysis of just a single 1663 household
register from an area of Seoul.50 Generally, the scope of
Wagner’s research was—almost selectively—narrow, disproportionally focusing on
the world of yangban lineages rather
than the lifeworld of diverse semi-elite and commoner groups, with all the
dynamism they have been exhibiting in Late Chosŏn age.51
Despite improving his scholarly methods to an incomparably higher professional
level, Wagner largely subscribed to the same epistemological matrix as his
predecessors, Grajdanzev and Henderson. He viewed sixteenth to nineteenth
century Korea as a mostly stagnant society without a significant element of
internal socio-political development.
Palais: Weberian Theory Applied to Korean
History
The scholarship of one of Wagner’s most
distinguished doctoral students, University of Washington’s professor James
Palais (1934–2006), signified a further professional refinement of traditional
Korea’s understanding in the United States. In his 1975 book on Taewŏn’gun’s
reform attempts (1864–1873), Palais conceptualized the Chosŏn Dynasty’s
institutional history in terms of an equilibrium of sorts. Royal power, propped
by its centralized bureaucracy, never succeeded in practicing the sort of
absolute authority which it possessed in theory. There were too many factional
cleavages inside the bureaucratic power machine, and the control of the center
over the village society was far from complete. Concomitantly, the aristocratic
lineages whose control over the main resources (primarily, land) played a role
of a check on the royal and bureaucratic power, were feverishly fighting for
bureaucratic status between themselves. In this rivalry, each main contestant
needed the royal house to take its side (via intermarriage with the royals
etc), to secure an upper hand against the competitors. The net result of these
interlocking power contests was an inability of any major contestant, central
monarchical power included, to conduct the resource mobilization needed for sweeping
reforms and catch-up modernization.52 While this picture of a
fractured and complicated system of bureaucratic rule and aristocratic-b
ureaucratic resource control appears quite persuasive per se, one key question
remains unanswered. Were the ruptures, cleavages and constant contest over
resources between central and peripheral forces a unique feature of the Chosŏn
monarchy? Did the contemporary centralized monarchies elsewhere in the early
modern world function in essentially different registers?
It appears as if the issue of universal applicability of
the pattern, which he was describing, interested Palais himself too. His only
identifiable attempt at universalizing his findings were, however, references
to Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s (1923–2010) 1963 volume, The Political System of Empires. As Palais saw it, Chosŏn Korea
closely conformed to Eisenstadt’s model of an underlying confrontation for
“free-floating resources” between aristocracy and bureaucracy in a centralized
bureaucratic state.53 Eisenstadt was a historical
sociologist who worked in the tradition established by Max Weber (1864–1920)
and later Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). It was Parsons’ structural functionalism
that enabled Eisenstadt to group together as “centralized bureaucratic empires”
such mutually dissimilar societies from different epochs as Mesopotamian or
pre-Columbian states on one pole and late dynastic China or European absolutist
kingdoms of seventeenth-eighteenth century on the other pole.54
As Eisenstadt saw them, these “centralized bureaucratic empires” stood
somewhere halfway on the historical trajectory from the Weberian patrimonial
polities outside of Europe or European (and Japanese) feudal regimes and the
modern statehood. Weberian influences appear to have reached Palais more
directly as well. In a 1984 paper on the aristocratic- bureaucratic balance in
Korean history, he defined the original nucleus of Korea’s traditional ruling
class as Weberian patrimonial bureaucracy. He even referenced Weber’s Religion of China55
to define what he understood as Korean Confucianism’s “non-rational aspects”
(preference given to heredity as opposed to meritocracy).56
If Palais’ scholarship on traditional Korea was framed by any theoretical
understanding at all, it was the intellectual tradition of Weber, Parsons and
Eisenstadt that influenced him most.
This tradition, of course, is far from homogeneous. Seen
from today, Weber’s writings on Chinese patrimonial bureaucracy belong more to
the domain of (Eurocentric) ideology than fact-based scholarly research: no
wonder given that the starting point of German sociologist’s inquiry was the
question of why “they” (Chinese, Indians, or any other non-Europeans), could
not modernize, unlike “us” (Europeans and specifically Protestants). It is now
plausibly argued that Weber, in his comparisons between the bureaucracies of
the European absolutist monarchies and the dynastic Chinese bureaucracy, went
to great lengths to over-emphasize the supposed rationalism of the former and
the patrimonial traits of the latter, on a shaky factual basis. It was, after
all, dynastic China rather than European states that first developed the
mechanism of merit-based bureaucratic recruitment and promotion.57
Eisenstadt, living in a different historical epoch, amidst the de-colonization
upheavals, tended to build his categorizations in a much less explicitly
Western-centered way. He, however, also made clear distinction between the
“most differentiated type of the centralized bureaucratic societies,” as
represented by English or French absolutism of seventeenth or eighteenth
centuries, and “Oriental” agrarian bureaucracies of dynastic China.58
“Agrarian” in this context sounds rather awkwardly given that, as late as in
1700, Beijing’s almost one million-strong population was twice the size of the
population of London.59 Eisenstadt’s belief in the
“collective” nature of land property in Tang China, or “restricted use” of
money in the dynastic Chinese society until its end seems to be grounded in
both latent Eurocentrism and his inadequate access to factual information.60
In contemporary scholarship, the monetized market economy of eleventh-century
Song China is understood to be the largest in the mediaeval world.61
Eisenstadt of the 1960s, all his effort at nominal inclusiveness
notwithstanding, still associated the development of modernity almost
exclusively with European (or Japanese) historical trajectory, making visible
distinction between the European absolutist monarchies, on their way to
predestined modern transformation, and the assorted Others of modern Europe.
It was hardly possible to expect that all these tendencies
in the intellectual landscape forming the backdrop to Palais’ scholarship would
have failed to influence Palais’ research on pre-modern Korea. They evidently
did, leading the great Korea historian to mistakenly recognize as supposedly
“uniquely Korean”—and, implicitly, working to inhibit Korea’s prospects for
modern development—these features of pre-modern Korean society that were hardly
unknown to other contemporary bureaucratic monarchies across early modern
Eurasia. One such feature was the relative prominence of nobi 奴婢—the unfree men and women owned by state agencies or private
individuals. As most other Chosŏn social categories, nobi was a complex taxonomic unit. It consisted of several sub- categories
of unfree producers. Some of them, living inside or close to their owners’
residential quarters (solgŏ 率居), were
tasked with menial or managerial services (nobi
could, for example, manage an agricultural estate, collecting rent from the
tenants on behalf of their owner). Sometimes they were even ordered to launch
official appeals or petitions or conduct monetary transactions in lieu of their
masters. They may be best described as bondservants. Others, who discharged
their duty towards their masters by tilling their land or presenting them
annual tribute while living separately from them (oegŏ 外居) were perhaps more akin to the serfs of absolutist-age
Eastern Europe.62 The proportion of nobi
in Chosŏn population peaked at ca. 30–40 per cent in late seventeenth century
and then gradually receded, to the level of ca 10 per cent by the
mid-nineteenth century.63 The diversity of nobi population notwithstanding, Palais
lumped together all the unfree groups of Chosŏn society as “chattel slaves” and
informed his readers that Korea continued as a “slave society” throughout the
Chosŏn era, even despite the visible reduction in the “slave” numbers towards
the era’s end.64 Doubtlessly, no historian would fail to mention both
existence and relative numerical prominence of the unfree primary producers in
Chosŏn Korea. However, Chosŏn’s nobi
figures would be dwarfed by the Russian Empire of the late eighteenth century,
where serfs constituted ca 50 per cent of total population,65
more than twice as much as in contemporary Korea. The figures were lower, but
still high for the rest of early Eastern and Central Europe as well, or for
Ottoman Turkey.66 They indicate that the phenomenon, which Palais
regarded as “specifically Korean,” was perhaps more of a general feature of
many regions on the semi-periphery and periphery of the world-system
immediately before and during its global transition to the capitalist mode of
production.67 It looks however, as if special conservatism of Chosŏn
Korea was exactly the point which Palais wanted to emphasize, without much
regard towards the world-historic context of Chosŏn Korea’s development.
Modernization paradigm, and the emphasis on the perceived “failure to
modernize” in Korea’s specific case, short-circuited impulses towards more comparative
global history.
It was perhaps inescapable that world-historical
contextualization would remain a weak spot of what has been developing in
postwar America as “Area Studies,” with all the epistemological nationalism
that required concentration on one or several specific “areas” implies.
Nevertheless, the development of the historical understanding of pre-modern
Korea in the US academia from the 1950s and to the 1980s was nothing short of
impressive. In the 1950s or early 1960s, the likes of Henderson or Lee
Chong-Sik operated with the clichés on “stagnant” Chosŏn Korea and its “failure
to modernize” largely borrowed from the colonial-age Japanese scholarship. By
contrast, already in the late 1960s–early 1970s, Palais was building a rather
persuasive model of the Chosŏn period’s institutional history, based on
meticulous study of the original sources, and in good awareness of both South
(and North) Korean and Japanese secondary research. However, the idiosyncrasies
inherent to Palais’ scholarship remained, via the influence of the American
tradition of Weberian historical sociology, deeply Hegelian. “Korea” was
approached as something essentially distinctive from the “Western” experiences,
as a society the historical trajectory of which was immanently different from
its “Western” counterparts. Both continuity and incremental change, both status
inheritance and bureaucratic attempts to centralize resource control and
promote at least some degree of meritocracy inside the administrative apparatus
were usual to any early modern bureaucratic monarchy. However, Palais’ emphasis
was squarely on the elements of continuity and inheritance, just as his mentor
Wagner’s. Both were influenced by Reischauer’s and Fairbank’s narratives on
China’s ultimate—and supposedly historically predestined—failure to modernize,
and both saw Korea as slightly more aristocratic and slavery-ridden “variation
of the Chinese pattern.” Both were distinguished historians whose work was
meticulously grounded in primary sources. It is thus hard to establish a direct
trajectory of continuity between the popular interwar clichés about “stagnant”
Korea which needed Japanese to modernize, and Wagner’s or Palais’ academic
work. The latter demonstrated, after all, a completely different degree of
embeddedness in primary materials and intellectual sophistication. However, a
deeply Eurocentric epistemology, with Korea being a priory taken as something
essentially foreign to the predestined modernizing track of “West” (or Japan)
remains a common thread in both cases. It was until the 1980s that this
epistemology became, under Saidian influence, an object for critical
reflection.
South Korea: the Quest for “Indigenous Roots of
Modernity”
Not unlike their American colleagues,
Korea’s domestic historians of Korea underwent their own process of
professionalization. It has to be remembered that it, in fact, this process
took place much earlier in Korea compared to North American “Area Studies,”
mostly a post-1945 phenomenon. Already in the mid-1930, amidst a fashion for
“Korean studies” (Chosŏnhak 朝鮮學) in Japan’s Korean colony, nascent historical
academia was taking shape there, institutionally as well as methodologically.
Pioneering historical societies, such as Chindan Hakhoe (震檀學會, established in
1934), were putting together graduates of diverse Japanese institutions of
higher learning, both Marxists and more conservative nationalists. Most of
them, however, agreed that academic research on Korean history should involve
both meticulous study of primary sources and attempts to approach Korean past
as a part of global historical development. By the end of the 1930s, Korean
history acquired a basic shape as an academic discipline in Korea.68
After the 1945 Liberation, Marxists generally either chose North or were
sidelined and silenced,69 while the more conservative
nationalist historians remained in the South and largely followed the
pre-Liberation trajectory of source-based research. This research was, however,
supposed now to lead to a “reconstruction” of history in which the ethno-nation
(minjok 民族) was the main protagonist.70
When the industrial development took speed in the 1960s, the ruling military
junta felt that “excessively Westernizing” modernization might threaten the
conservative “national values” and instead encourage its liberal-democratic
opponents. It consequently wanted historical research to take more assertive
view of Korea’s traditional past. Historians, in their turn, were sometimes
more liberally minded than South Korea’s rulers, but nevertheless felt by the
end of the 1960s that South Korea’s newfound industrial prominence would
justify an attempt to challenge West’s and Japan’s perceived monopoly on the
pre-destined modernizing trajectory of development. Such historians as Seoul
National University’s (later Yonsei University’s) Kim Yongsŏp (金容燮, born 1931)
started making influential attempts to prove that late Chosŏn was experiencing
an internally driven modernization of agriculture. His colleagues were soon
joining the flow, tracing down “proto-modernity sprouts” in the history of
commerce, ideas or social system developments.71 This
development was going into an explicitly different direction if measured
against the trajectory of America’s Korean studies. Korean scholars’ preferred
regime of truth was grounded in a dual affirmation—the affirmation of Korean
tradition’s value per se and its presumed linkage to the coveted modernity.
American scholarship was, however, either elusive or skeptical on both counts.
That was the obvious reason why much of the pre-1990s US
scholarship on Korea was being largely omitted from the South Korean historical
record. In theory, South Korean academics were interested in outsiders’ view
which, as they assumed, could have potentially been more objective than their
own.72 Of course, US scholars are being dutifully mentioned
when their research bring to the academic attention the previously unknown
materials which South Korean historians direly need. Tylor Dennett, for
example, is regularly referred to in connection with his re-discovery of
Taft-Katsura Agreement,73 while his work on early
American diplomacy in Korea attracted much less attention. Alleyne Ireland’s
paean to the Japanese “modernization” of Korea was deemed to possess enough
value as a historical document—with its first-hand observations—to merit a
recent translation into Korean.74 It received, however, almost
no media or academic exposure. The same applies to Henry Drake’s volume,
translated into Korean as a first-hand record of colonial-age everyday life in
the Korean capital.75 Grajdanzev’s Modern Korea was given an honor of being
translated into Korean as early as in 1973, by Yi Kibaek (李基白, 1924–2004), one
of South Korea’s finest— and politically liberal—historians.76
The book, its influence and its author have become an established subject of
scholarly research in South Korea.77 However, it was Grajdanzev’s
critical pathos vis-à-vis the Japanese colonial rule and his vast corpus of
statistical materials, rather than his view on “stagnant” Chosŏn society that
his South Korean translator and his colleagues appreciated. Likewise,
Henderson’s brilliant expose on South Korean society and politics of the 1950s
and 1960s (which he witnessed first-hand), is translated into Korean and
considered an important reference on the history of contemporary Korean
political culture.78 His views on Tasan, however,
never attracted any attention in South Korea. To put it succinctly, American
historical materials on modern and contemporary Korea are in constant high demand,
as well as the records of personal observations by knowledgeable American
participants-observers of Korea’s turbulent history. The overall regime of
truth, however, is the different matter, in which South Koreans tended to cling
to their positions, rooted in an entirely different combination of historical
dynamics and collective desires.
Post-nationalist South Korean Historiography and
its American Others
These positions, of course, were bound to
mutate following South Korea’s own historical evolution. By the early 2000s,
neo-liberal South Korea, increasingly bold global investor state with growing
non-ethnic Korean population, officially embraced multiculturalism: belonging
to South Korea as a political community was no longer principally limited to ethnic
Koreans.79 In the field of Korean history, in sync with these
developments, both the role of ethnic nation as the main protagonist of the
historical narrative and the obsessive desire to prove that early modern Korea,
no less than the “West,” was following the pre-destined trajectory towards
development of modern capitalism and nationalism, were now subjected to a
critical inquiry.80 Riding the post-nationalist wave, the works by Wagner
and Palais, previously mostly politely ignored or simply mentioned in passing
by the majority of South Korean historians as an example of foreign-based
Korean studies, enjoyed a degree of visibility perhaps unimaginable in the
1980s or 1990s. Yi Hunsang, a Pusan historian who for several decades was
almost alone in his efforts to make the Anglophone scholarship on Chosŏn period
better known in South Korea, published in 2007 a co-translated volume of
Wagner’s papers from different decades.81 In one of the few articles
which presented Wagner’s scholarship in details for professional South Korean
audience, Yi Hunsang noted that Wagner’s view on the relatively stability of
Chosŏn’s inherited status system anticipated the current mode of critical
reflection over exceeding emphasis on supposedly proto-modern “disintegration
of hereditary statuses” in the scholarship from the 1970s to 1990s.82
On the other hand, a leading (right-wing) critic of the nationalist search for
Chosŏn period “modernity sprouts,” Seoul National University’s Professor (in
the time of this writing, Professor Emeritus) Yi Yŏnghun, took an equally
critical stance towards Palais’ “slave society” theory. He plausibly argued
that separately living, tribute-presenting nobi
should have been rather described as “serfs,” and that putting Chosŏn’s
predominantly agricultural employment of nobi
into the same category as chattel slavery in societies with predominantly
market-oriented commercial production (ancient Athens, or the US South before
the Civil War), is ahistorical.83 A mainstream Seoul National
University historian, Chŏng Hohun, agreed with Palais that Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s (柳馨遠,
1622–1673) Confucian vision of an ideal
state where monarchy takes control over the landed property had little in
common with modernity understood in Western terms. He noted, however, that
Palais took Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s utopic vision of an ideal monarchy out of the
seventeenth-century political and ideological context and, moreover, greatly
underestimated the reformist potential inherent in Yu’s challenge to the
established patterns of private (rather than public) management of most
agricultural land.84 Most South Korean historians
seem to agree that Wagner’s and Palais’ skepticism towards nationalistically
motivated search for the “proto-modern” elements in Chosŏn reality was at least
partly justified. At the same time, their understanding of concrete Chosŏn
social or ideological systems— from nobi
ownership to iconoclastic thinkers of Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s kind—is seen as deeply
flawed, lacking world-historical awareness and systematic understanding of the
main flows of political and ideological development of Chosŏn times. Their
totalizing view of all Confucian thinkers as espousing essentially one and the
same model of “Confucian polity” appears to be one more factor limiting their
influence on South Korea’s post-nationalist historiography. After all, South
Korean post- nationalism is built on critical reflections over the whole
Eurocentric modernity project85 while Wagner’s and Palais’
views on “Confucian society” or “Korean model,” seemingly immutable and lacking
in dynamism and historical prospects in modern age, are deeply Eurocentric.
South Korea is a highly trade-dependent
economy. It concurrently demonstrates great sensitivity to the global currents
of thought and worldwide intellectual vogues. A former Marxist and now a highly
influential post-nationalist literary historian, Ko Misuk (born 1960) explains
Hŏ Chun’s (許浚, 1539–1615) system of classical East
Asian medicine in Foucauldian terms of
biopolitics and control over the sexual desires.86 Her work
is perhaps one of the best expressions of this sensitivity to the global
trends. South Korean scholarly community’s principal openness towards foreign,
included American, scholarship on Korea has been eloquently demonstrated by the
importance of Robert Scalapino (1919–2011) and Lee Chong-Sik’s fundamental work
on Korean Communist movement history87 for the incipient research on
Korean Communism in South Korea in the 1970s and until the late 1980s. Then,
such studies were either suppressed or tightly controlled by South Korea’s
military dictatorship. The American volume, its rather depreciating view on
Korean Communism as a Soviet “import” notwithstanding, provided a crucially
important stimulus for early South Korean research on the colonial-age Left.88
Unfortunately, due to limitations of space, neither the influence of Scalapino,
Lee Chong-Sik or Suh Dae-Sook’s (born 1931) scholarship nor the impact made by
the progressive revisionist approach to Korea’s contemporary history typified
by Bruce Cumings (born 1943) onto South Korean academia cannot be considered
here. Suffice it to say that especially the impact made by the latter American
scholarly trend in 1980s–1990s South Korea was profound, something acknowledged
even by the conservative South Korean critics of Bruce Cumings’ approach.89
Yet another topic which, due to the considerations of space cannot be covered
here, is the impact of the post-1980s scholarship by US-based academics—often,
but not always, of Korean origins,—on the current academic agenda in South
Korea. This impact is tremendous, especially in the fields were US-based
scholarship is seen as filling the under-researched niches in the study of
contemporary Korea while putting Korean phenomena into a global context and
suggesting progressive, forward-looking alternatives to certain particularly
problematic Korean realities and institutions. For example, Vassar
College-based Moon Seungsook’s (born 1963) pioneering (in both American and
Korean contexts) study on the effects of South Korean conscription system on
the patterns of masculinity and femininity stereotypes, promptly translated
into Korean,90 received highly positive reviews.91
If anything, South Korea is extraordinarily receptive to the intellectual
influences from the parts of the world which South Koreans commonly refer to as
“advanced countries” (sŏnjin’guk 先進國),
especially if the foreign-based scholarship directly engages with the issues of
interest to Korean scholars.
In
Place of Conclusion: a Possibility of Non-Teleological Universalism in
Historiography?
The failure of the scholarly tradition
which Wagner or Palais represented, to implant itself on the South Korean soil
should be, in the end, attributed to the incongruence of modernist teleologies
between the American and South Korea historians of traditional Korea in the
1960–90s. To put it in a simplistic way, whereas Wagner and Palais saw Korea’s
“failure to modernize” as historically predetermined, South Korean historians
were searching for the lost “sprouts” of modern developments in their
pre-modern past. By the 2000s, such searches were already out of fashion, but
so was also the Weberian, Eurocentric patterns of determinism on which so much
of Wagner’s and Palais’ scholarship was based. The age of compulsive search for
the trajectories leading to the desired modern results was over. It does not
imply, however, that the over-determinist, teleological approach to history is
overcome as such, and that is exactly the reason why the Eurocentric
teleologies of the pre-1980s American historiography of Korea may be still of
current interest. Charles Armstrong’s 2013 book on the history of North Korean
diplomacy, for example—exactly the book which was found to be built on
plagiarized materials triggering the scandal mentioned in the beginning of this
article— was constructed on the assumption that North Korea’s “failure” was a
predestined outcome of its developmental trajectory. As Armstrong sees it, the
“Marxist– Leninist” attempts to charter a trajectory different from orthodox
capitalism were in any case predestined to their ultimate “ignominious fall
into the dustbin of history.” North Korea, in this view, was a “Third-world
state” which logically ended up with “level of poverty more typical of the
poorer states of southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,” as it failed to
integrate itself into the successfully developing capitalist world under the
leadership of a small, closely- knit, “tyrannical” ruling elite.92
There are, of course, good grounds to criticize North Korean leaders for both
internal oppression and diverse policy failures. However, the logic of
predestined failure does little to explain North Korea’s persistent success in
surviving against all odds. Nor does it explain the mainly geopolitical reasons
why North Korea, unlike the fellow Party-states in China, Vietnam, Laos or even
Cuba, never managed to integrate itself into the technological and financial
flows of global capitalist market, despite a number of important attempts since
the 1970s (which Armstrong himself assiduously documents). Perhaps the
recognition of both plurality and inherent open-endedness of the historical
trajectories will provide us with better lenses to understand both the
genealogy and the current topology of the world-system in terms different from
rather judgements pronouncements of “success” or “failure.” On the way towards
such recognition in the case of Korean history, the critical reflections over
the intellectual trajectory of the historiography of Korea in the USA are
essential.
Notes
1. The
publication of this paper and the workshop which served to generate the
research and work behind these papers was supported by the 2020 Korean Studies
Grant Program of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2020-C-16).
2. E-mail:
vladimir.tikhonov@ikos.uio.no.
3. Peter
Novick. That Noble Dream: The
‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
4. Khadija
Hussain and Karen Xia. “History professor Charles Armstrong found guilty of
plagiarism, to retire in 2020” Columbia
Spectator, September 12, 2019. Available at: https://
www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2019/09/12/history-professor-charles-armstrong-found
-guilty-of-plagiarism-to-retire-in-2020/ (accessed July 2, 2020).
5. Michel
Foucault (trans. A. Sheridan). Discipline
and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books 1977), p.
23.
6. On the
best-known such myth, dealing with the supposed progenitor of ancient Chosŏn,
Tan’gun, see: Song Hojŏng. Tan’gun,
Mandŭrŏjin Sinhwa (Tan’gun, a Made-up Myth) (Seoul: Sanch’ŏrŏm, 2004).
7. On Korean
pseudo-history, with focus on contemporary South Korea, see: Andrew Logie.
“Diagnosing and Debunking Korean Pseudohistory,” European Journal of Korean Studies 18.2 (2019): 37–80.
8. Margaret
MacMillan. Dangerous Games: The Uses and
Abuses of History (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2009).
9. On the case
of early modern Korean historiography, see Henry Em. The Great Enterprise:
Sovereignty and Historiography in
Modern Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
10. Michael
Billig. Banal Nationalism (London:
Sage Publications, 1995).
11. The term was
introduced by Samir Amin (1931–2018). Samir Amin. Eurocentrism (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press 1989).
12. David R.
Blanks and Michael Frassetto, eds. Western
Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other
(New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
13. Michael
Shin, “Miguk nae Han’gukhak Kyebo” (The Genealogy of Korean Studies in America)
Yŏksa Pip’yŏng 4 (2002): 76–98.
14. Lucien
Febvre. “Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in Peter
Burke, ed., A New Kind of History and
Other Essays, pp. 219–257 (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973).
15. Charles
Oscar Paullin. “The Opening of Korea by Commodore Shufeldt” Political Science Quarterly, 25.3
(1910): 470–499.
16. Raymond
Esthus, “The Taft-Katsura Agreement—Reality or Myth?” Journal of Modern History, 31.1 (1959): 46–51.
17. Tyler
Dennett. “Early American Policy in Korea, 1883–7” Political Science Quarterly, 38.1 (1923): 82–103.
18. Michel
Foucault (trans. C. Gordon), “The Political Function of the Intellectual,” Radical Philosophy, 17 (1977): 12–14.
19. Alleyne
Ireland. The New Korea (New York, NY:
E.P. Dutton and Co, 1926), pp. 61–82.
20. Joseph
Hayden. “Japan’s New Policy in Korea and Formosa” Foreign Affairs, 2.3 (1924): 474–487.
21. Henry
Burgess Drake. Korea of the Japanese
(New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1930), pp. 201–207.
22. Paul Hibbert
Clyde. History of the Modern and
Contemporary Far East (New York, NY: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1937), p. 266.
23. Paul Hibbert
Clyde. History of the Modern and
Contemporary Far East, pp. 436–437.
24. Paul Hibbert
Clyde. History of the Modern and
Contemporary Far East, pp. 442–443.
25. Mark Caprio.
“The Eagle has Landed: Groping for a Korean Role in the Pacific War,” The Journal of American–East Asian Relations
21.1 (2014): 5–33.
26. Hajimu
Masuda. Cold War Crucible: The Korean
Conflict and the Postwar World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015),
p. 30.
27. Andrew
Grajdanzev. “Korea under Changing Orders,” Far
Eastern Survey 8.25 (1939): 291–297.
28. Sin Chubaek.
1930nyŏndae Minjok Haebang Undongnon
Yŏn’gu 1 (A Study of the National Liberation Movement Theories in the 1930s
1) (Seoul: Saegil, 1989), pp. 40–41.
29. On
missionary language training, see K. Kale Yu. Understanding Korean Christianity: Grassroots Perspectives on Causes,
Culture and Responses (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019), p. 44.
30. Andrew
Grajdanzev. Modern Korea. New York,
NY: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944).
31. Henry Chung.
The Case of Korea: A Collection of Evidence
on the Japanese Domination of Korea (New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell
Company, 1921).
32. See, for
example, Payson Treat’s rather unsympathetic review in American Political Science Review, 15.4 (1921): 612–613.
33. Andrew
Grajdanzev. Modern Korea, pp.
280–290.
34. George
McCune. “Post-War Government and Politics of Korea,” The Journal of Politics, 9.4 (1947): 605–623.
35. Philip
Rudolph. North Korea’s Political and
Economic Structure (New York, NY: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1959),
pp. 61–64.
36. Philip Rudolph.
North Korea’s Political and Economic
Structure, 26. The American journal article which he cited was: “Korea—the
Crossroads of Asia”, from Amerasia,
October 1945, p. 272.
37. Andrei
Lankov. From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The
Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2002), pp. 110–135.
38. David
Brudnoy. “Japan’s Experiment in Korea” Monumenta
Nipponica, 25. 1–2 (1970):
155–195.
39. Edward Said.
Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon
Books, 1978).
40. Andrew
Grajdanzev. Modern Korea, p. 25.
41. Henry Em. The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and
Historiography in Modern Korea, p. 12.
42. Chong-Sik
Lee. The Politics of Korean Nationalism
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 3–18.
43. Edwin
Reischauer and John King Fairbank. East
Asia: the Great Tradition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 394.
44. Steven
Casey. Selling the Korean War:
Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion 1950–1953 (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp. 352–353.
45. See an
outline in John Lie. “The Tangun Myth and Korean Studies in the United States” Transnational Asia, 1.1 (2016).
https://doi.org/10.25613/y8g5-wh68 (accessed March 5, 2021).
46. Key Yang and
Gregory Henderson. “An Outline History of Korean Confucianism: Part I: The
Early Period and Yi Factionalism,” The
Journal of Asian Studies, 18.1 (1958): 81–101; Key P. Yang, Gregory
Henderson. “An Outline History of Korean Confucianism: Part II: The Schools of
Yi Confucianism,” The Journal of Asian
Studies, 18.2 (1959): 259–276.
47. Gregory
Henderson. “Chong Ta-san: A Study in Korea’s Intellectual History,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 16. 3
(1957): 377–386.
48. Edward
Wagner. The Literati Purges: Political
Conflict in Early Yi Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974),
pp. 1–3, 121–123.
49. Edward
Wagner. “The Ladder of Success in Yi Dynasty Korea,” Occasional Papers on Korea, 1 (1974): pp. 1–8.
50. Edward
Wagner. “Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century Korea: Some Observations
from a 1663 Seoul Census Register,” Occasional
Papers on Korea, 1 (1974): pp. 36–54.
51. John Lie
made this point as well: John Lie, “The Tangun Myth and Korean Studies in the
United States.”
52. James
Palais. Politics and Policy in
Traditional Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp.
2–24.
53. James
Palais. Politics and Policy in
Traditional Korea, p. 17.
54. Shmuel Noah
Eisenstadt. The Political Systems of
Empires. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1963), pp. 10–12.
55. Max Weber. The Religion of China (New York, NY: The
Free Press, 1951).
56. James
Palais. “The Aristocratic/Bureaucratic Balance in Korea,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 44.2 (1984): 427–468.
57. Junnan Lai.
““Patrimonial Bureaucracy” and Chinese Law: Max Weber’s Legacy and Its Limits” Modern China, 41.1 (2015): 40–58.
58. Shmuel Noah
Eisenstadt. The Political Systems of
Empires, pp. 30–32.
59. Jonathan
Daly. The Rise of Western Power: A
Comparative History of Western Civilization (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp.
279–280.
60. Shmuel Noah
Eisenstadt. The Political Systems of
Empires, pp. 36, 44.
61. William
Guanglin Liu. The Chinese Market Economy,
1000–1500 (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 2015), pp. 55–78.
62. See a
detailed, archival documents-based research on the status of nobi owned by Kim’s family from
Ubandong, Puan: Chŏn Kyŏngmok, “Yangban’ga esŏŭi Nobi Yŏghal: Chŏllado Puan ŭi
Ubandong Kim ssi Ka ŭi Sarye tŭl Chungsim ŭro” (The Role of Nobi in Noble Families: A Case of Kims
family of Ubandong in Puan, Chŏlla Province) Chibangsa wa Chibang Munhwa, 15.1 (2012): 217–264.
63. Im Haksŏng.
“Chosŏn Sidae Nobije ŭi Ch’ui wa Nobi ŭi Chonjae Yangt’ae” (The Developments in
Nobi System during the Chosŏn Period and Nobi’s Forms of Existence) Yŏksa Minsokhak, 41 (2013): 73–99.
64. James
Palais. “A Search for Korean Uniqueness” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies, 55.2 (1995): 409–425.
65. Boris
Gorshkov. Peasants in Russia from Serfdom
to Stalin: Accommodation, Survival, Resistance (London: Bloomsbury, 2018),
p. 20.
66. On slave
owning in Ottoman Turkish cities, see: Donald Quataer. Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950 (New
York, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 20–22.
67. Manuela
Boatcᾰ. “Coloniality of Labor in the Global Periphery: Latin America and
Eastern Europe in the World-System” Review
(Fernand Braudel Center), 36.3–4 (2013): 287–314.
68. Sin Chubaek.
“Chosŏnhak Undong’ e kwanhan Yŏn’gu Tonghyang kwa Saeroun Sironjŏk
T’amsaek” (The Research Trends in the Study of ‘Korean
Studies’ Movement and New Experimental Quests) in Kim Insik ed., 1930 nyŏndae Chosŏnhak Undong Simch’ŭng
Yŏn’gu (An In-depth Study of the 1930s Korean Studies Movement), pp. 29–66
(Seoul: Sŏnin, 2015).
69. Henry Em. The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and
Historiography in Modern Korea, pp. 140–141.
70. On ethnic
nationalism in post-1945 South Korean studies on ancient Korean history, see:
Stella Xu. “Reconstructing Ancient History: Historiographical Review of the
Ancient History of Korea, 1950s–2000s,” ASIANetwork
Exchange, 19.2 (2012): 14–22.
71. Yun Haedong.
Kŭndae Yŏksahak ŭi Hwanghon (The
Twilights of Modern Historiography) (Seoul: Ch’aek kwa Hamkke, 2010), pp.
36–67.
72. That was the
reply which Palais, according to his later recollections, received from Han
Ugŭn (1915–1999), a senior South Korean historian, whom he questioned about the
appropriateness of foreigners commenting on Korean history. James Palais.
“Interview” The Review of Korean Studies,
4.2 (2001): 281–313.
73. See, for
example: Wŏn Ch’ŏl. “Chubyŏn Yŏlgang ŭi Hanbando Munje Hyŏbŭi Wa Ŭlsa Choyak”
(The Agreements between the Regional powers on the [Issues of the] Korean
Peninsula and the 1905 Protectorate Treaty). Yŏksa Hakpo, 192 (2006): 367–393.
74. Alleyne
Ireland, transl. Kim Yonjŏng. Ilbon ŭi
Han’guk T’ongch’I e kwanhan Semilhan Pogosŏ (A Detailed Report on Japan’s
Colonial Administration of Korea) (P’aju: Sallim, 2008). The book is a rather
literal translation of Alleyne Ireland. The
New Korea (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1926).
75. Henry Drake,
transl. Sin Pongnyong. Ilche Sidae ŭi
Chosŏn Saenghwalsang (The Appearance of Everyday Life in Korea in the
Japanese Colonial Age) (Seoul: Chimmundang, 2000). This book is a faithful
Korean rendering of Henry Burgess Drake. Korea
of the Japanese (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1930).
76. Andrew
Grajdanzev, transl. Yi Kibaek. Han’guk
Hyŏndaesaron (On Korea’s Contemporary History) (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1973).
This translation of Modern Korea was
re-published, in slightly edited version, by the same publisher in 2006.
77. See, for
example: Ko Chŏnghyu. “A.J. Grajdanzev wa Hyŏndae
Han’guk” (A.J. Grajdanzev and Modern
Korea) Han’guksa Yŏn’gu, 126
(2004): 239–275.
78. Gregory
Henderson, transl. Yi Chongsam and Pak Haeng’ung. Soyongdori ŭi han’guk Chŏngch’i (Korea’s Vortex Politics) (Seoul:
Hanul, 2013). This book is a translation of Gregory Henderson, Korea: the Politics of the Vortex
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
79. Nora
Hui-Jung Kim. “Multiculturalism and the politics of belonging: the puzzle of
multiculturalism in South Korea,” Citizenship
Studies, 16.1 (2012): 103–117.
80. See, for
example, a pioneering post-nationalist analysis of Korean history by a group of
South Korean, Japanese and US-based scholars: Im Chihyŏn and Yi Sŏngsi, eds. Kuksa ŭi Sinhwa rŭl Nŏmŏsŏ (Transcending
the Mythology of National History) (Seoul: Humanist, 2004).
81. Edward
Wagner, transl. Yi Hunsang and Son Sukkyŏng. Chosŏn Wangjo Sahoe ŭi Sŏngch’wi wa Kwisok (Achievement and
Ascription in Chosŏn Dynasty) (Seoul: Ilchogak, 2007).
82. Yi Hunsang.
“Edward Wagner ŭi Chosŏn Sidae Yŏn’gu wa I rŭl Tullŏssan Nonchŏm tŭl” (The
Critical Points in the Discussions over Edward Wagner’s Chosŏn Period Studies).
Yŏksa Pip’yŏng, 5 (2002): 99–125.
83. Yi Yŏnghun.
“James Palais ŭi Noyeje Sahoesŏl Kŏmt’o” (Critical Review on James Palais’
Theory of Korean Slavery Society) Han’guk
Munhwa, 52 (2010): 339–351.
84. Chŏng Hohun.
“20 Segi Huban Miguk esŏŭi Sirhak Yŏn’gu: James Palais ŭi Pan’gye Surok Yŏn’gu
rŭl Chungsim ŭro” (American Research on Shirak in the Late Twentieth Century—
On James Palais’ Study of Pan’gye surok)
Han’guksa Yŏn’gu, 168 (2015):
261–296.
85. See, for example,
a criticism of Eurocentric, modernist dichotomies by a representative
contemporary South Korean post-nationalist researcher of Korean literary
history, Ko Misuk, in Ko Misuk. Nabi wa
Chŏnsa (A Butterfly and a Fighter) (Seoul: Humanist, 2006).
86. Ko Misuk. Nabi wa Chŏnsa, pp. 384–433.
87. Robert A.
Scalapino and Chong-Sik Lee. Communism in
Korea. Part 1, The Movement; part 2, The Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press. 1972). It was translated by Han Honggu
(born 1959), then a doctoral student of James Palais, and published by Tolpegae
in Seoul, 1986–1987.
88. Im Kyŏngsŏk.
“Ilche ha Han’guk Sahoejuŭi Undongsa Yŏn’gu ŭi Sŏngkwa wa Kwaje” (The
Achievements and Tasks of the Research on the Korean Socialist Movement in the
Japanese
Colonial Era) Han’guk Saron, 26 (1996). Available at:
http://db.history.go.kr/download.do
?levelId=hn_026_0050&fileName=hn_026_0050.pdf (accessed August 7, 2020).
89. See, for
example, Kim Yongjik. “Han’guk Chŏnjaeng kwa Sahoe Undong: Bruce Cumings ŭi
Sahoe Hyŏngmyŏng—Naejŏn Kasŏl Pip’an” (The Korean War and Social Movement: A
Critique of Social Revolution—Civil War Hypotheses of Bruce Cumings) Han’guk Chŏngch’I Hakhoe Hoebo, 32.1
(1998): 35–57.
90. Seungsook
Moon. Militarized Modernity and Gendered
Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Translated into Korean by Yi Hyŏnjŏng as Kunsajuŭi
e Kach’in Kŭndae: Kungmin mandŭlgi, Simindoegi, kŭrigo Sŏng ŭi Chŏngch’i
(Modernity Imprisoned by Militarism: Citizen Making, Becoming a Citizen, and
the Politics of Sex) (Seoul: Tto Hana ŭi Munhwa, 2007).
91. See, for
example, Kwŏn Insuk. “Onŭl Nar ŭi Sŏng Yŏkhal I Pirottoen ‘Kŭ Kot’: Kunsajuŭi e Kach’in Kŭndae” (‘This
Place’ from Which Today’s Sex Roles Begin: Modernity
Imprisoned by Militarism) Sindonga,
4 (2007): Available at: https://shindonga.donga.com/3/all/13/106317/1 (accessed
August 7, 2020).
92. Charles
Armstrong. Tyranny of the Weak
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 183, 205, 289.
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