Choice of Topic 🔗

To many of us, the image that is inevitably conjured up of our image of North Korea is that of an endless march of goose-stepping soldiers, or possibly foreign receptions, maybe the launching of a rocket. North Korea is an almost comical existence to Americans – and especially so to younger generations. Yet, what is lost in this simplistic thinking is that at one point in history North Korea was seen as the country with an optimistic future. For a period of about twenty years in the 1950s up through the 1960s, vast numbers of Koreans across both borders were highly sympathetic to the Kim regime. To understand why this was the case can give us insight as to why North Korea has had such staying power. It can also explain why millions of Koreans were willing to die for it.

To go beyond a purely superficial understanding, understanding the context under which the Korean War developed can also help explain the foreign policy of North Korea. Juche, roughly meaning “self-reliance,” has been a cornerstone of the ideology of the state, which some observers have deemed the “hermit kingdom.” North Korea has long held antipathy towards the Western world generally, but relations with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation are also not as clear-cut as the extravagant ceremonies would make it seem. Although this can be rather baffling to foreign observers, if we look at the context of North Korea and especially the twenty or so years after the Korean War, many of the actions of both the Korean people and the Kim regime begin to make at least a little more sense.

Analysis 🔗

Possibly not so important to the overall arc of Korean history, but a good illustration as to how Koreans of that time thought, was the political leanings of ethnic Koreans in Japan. Many Koreans had come to exist in Japan throughout the colonial period through both voluntary and forced migrations. After the war, these Koreans found themselves excluded in many ways from the broader society. Filling this void, organizations began to establish themselves, providing business loans, establishing Korean language schools, and teaching history in preparation for an eventual return to Korea. The most prominent of these was called the General Federation of Resident Koreans in Japan, otherwise commonly known as Soren. On the surface, possibly innocent enough, but the organization was also pro-North Korean and pro-Communist. North Korea was taught to an entire generation of ethnic Koreans in Japan as being a Communist paradise and the guardian of the Korean people against colonialism. Throughout the 1950s, Soren had the support of over 90 percent of Koreans in Japan.¹ This was a very enticing worldview to Koreans at this time, which was further solidified by the economic success of North Korea in this decade.

During Japanese colonial times, North Korea had been where industrial development was concentrated. The Japanese had built dams, built railroads, established mining operations, and constructed military factories. Atkins writes that, “By all accounts, Korea was one of the most intensively developed colonies in the world. The peninsula’s strategic value to Japan’s continuing encroachments into Northeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s was multifaceted: it was a site for factories, mills, capital investment, and military garrisons, a source of labor, food, and raw materials, and, eventually, even of soldiers.”² North Korea was able to largely adopt this infrastructure from Japan and appropriate it for its own use. Furthermore, North Korea had embarked on a wide range of programs that were broadly popular with the public. The North Korean Red Peasant Union had confiscated all lands owned by the Japanese, all lands owned by landlords, and all lands owned by religious organizations. North Korea also had implemented a successful literacy campaign, so that by 1948, 92% of the population was literate. By many measurable metrics, North Korea seemed to be heading in a positive direction.

In the international context following World War II—the second “Great War”—the European powers had been greatly weakened. Nationalist and independence movements swept the world, people were searching for new world views in ways to confront this new era. Communism/Marxism/Socialism was a particularly seductive ideology because it promised liberation, it promised solidarity, and, above all, it promised progress. In Korea, the old Confucian moral and political system did not meet the needs of a modern, industrialized nation. Multitudes of Koreans looked to the Soviet Union as a powerful, modern country worthy of imitation. For, as Lankov puts it, “After all, in those days, everybody knew that the USSR made good fighter jets and had the world’s best ballet while almost nobody knew that a few million Soviet farmers had starved to death in the 1930s.”³ Koreans wanted to break from past Japanese colonial rule, and they saw the regime in the South as too much of a continuation of what had come before. The Soviet Union had positioned itself as the anti-imperialist power committed to “liberation” movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Many Koreans bought into (as peoples everywhere did, and probably forevermore will) the rhetoric, and Kim Il Sung had managed to create a popular footing for his regime.

Contributing to the popularity of North Korea, the South Korean government did not have the best reputation either within Korea or internationally. Except for a brief stint after the death of Syngman Rhee, South Korea was a very authoritarian country all throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Under Park Chung-hee, the country was ruled by the military. It was a period marked by repression of student movements, labor unions, regional uprisings, and leftists. During the Korean War, the South Korean government used the full might of the state to crack down on those thought to be sympathetic with the Communists. After the fall of Pyongyang, anger reached a tipping point. Following the “seemingly endless cycle of violence and retribution that characterized the war since it began, the South Korean government rounded up suspected ‘enemies’ for summary execution. By the second week of December, mass execution of alleged communists by South Korean security forces took place on a large scale.”⁴ South Korea was seen by many Koreans as a capitalist, colonialist project by the United States and supported by the old elites that had prospered under Japanese rule. For all these reasons, public opinion of the country, both inside and outside of Korea, had sunk quite low.

Within the broader historical narrative of Korea, of being a tributary state of China, a colony of Japan, the encroachments of Russia, and the intervention of the two major superpowers in the Korean peninsula, the Korean consciousness had been deeply traumatized. Korea saw itself being torn apart by foreign powers. Deeply rooted in this trauma, the state ideology of “juche” developed in North Korea. Survival became the modus operandi, and through the lens of national security, every aspect of North Korea was shaped. Historical events leaving deep scars in Korea meant that, “The political cost of Korea’s political colonial experience… is the persistent ‘one nation, two states’ arrangement on the Korean peninsula, a direct consequence of the schism within the colonial-era nationalist movement between socialist revolutionaries and moderate ‘cultural nationalists.’”⁵ North Korea was the guardian of the Korean people, protecting them from foreigners who wanted to exploit them and tear them apart. The narrative may seem rather unconvincing to non-Koreans or even present-day Koreans, but the Koreans at the time had these ideas keenly on their minds. To them, North Korea represented a bastion in a world that was out to get them. To underestimate the pulling power of the Communist ideology would be to underestimate and belittle the decades of uncertainty that had shaped Korea since the end of the Chosen Dynasty.

Propaganda and popular narratives, which are easily digested, can have a tremendous effect on a populous. Most people do not have a worldview of moral grayness or subtlety. Most people do not spend years of their life studying history, economics, and politics. Most people do not study budgets or use comparative analysis. Leftism preys on such ignorance and likely always will. It has long been an irony of history that the “revolutionaries” seldom come from the most downtrodden classes. This is equally true from the liberals in Mexico to the Congress in India. If you start to point fingers, you can come up with a list of names that are responsible. The list includes “Starry-eyed West European intellectuals … in the 1840 and 1850s[,] … young East Asian idealists … in the 1920s[,] … battle-hardened Soviet commanders … in the 1940s[,] … [and] the North Koreans who in the 1950s came to believe that the Soviet (or, rather, Stalinist) model would provide them with a blueprint for building a new Korean nation, powerful, prosperous, and proud?”⁶ Then once their policies fail, they will either deny or throw their hands up in the air and say, “We had good intentions; how could we have known bad actors would infiltrate?” In North Korea’s case, they will likely have to pay for it for decades to come. The Cold War had not yet been fought. People did not have decades of experience of the ways which Marxist states governed themselves. Maybe historians or people who study history know the stories of Cambodia or Angola, but common people do not really internalize it before it is too late.

Reflection 🔗

The behavior of Koreans in Japan had long been a point of personal interest to me. I still do not believe they deserve to be defended or that they did not deserve to naively ship themselves to North Korea, but through this class and researching the topic I have come to appreciate more how they developed the beliefs in which they did. Lankov further says in the book, “The sad part of the North Korean story is that most of its key players—or key culprits, should we say?—were decent human beings, often driven by noble and admirable motivation. They made decisions that seemed logical at the time.”⁷ This sort of apologetics really downplays the agency and the perpetrators. Yet, it explains the tremendous staying power of North Korea. Many believe that tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy are either imposed from the top-down or bottom-up. Except, that is not borne out by historical precedent. Many tyrannies or oligarchies were swept in popularly by the people. The Kim regime had won the loyalty of a plurality of Koreans through the programs I described in the analysis. Whether it was rational is really besides the point – they were swept in through a democratic mandate of the people.

Modern-day China is probably most accurately classified as an oligarchy. For all its faults, the Communist Party of China was able to produce one of the most remarkable statesmen in Deng Xiaoping. The PRC was able to reform itself without collapsing in on itself. A sort of social contract was formed with the Chinese people, where if they were able to produce the economic metrics, they would continue to have a wide range of people who considered their rule legitimate. Possibly for this reason we can say China is somewhere in between an oligarchy and an aristocracy, leaning more towards oligarchy. This displays the remarkable talent and ingenuity of the Chinese people, but when we look to North Korea we do not see this. North Korea is ruled by a single family and keeps its people ignorant with little pretense of maintaining a popular mandate among citizens—thus a tyranny. In this, I think we can see a lack of virtue imbued in the Korean people.

Finally, in an ironic twist of fate, South Korean-American relations might be as strong as they have ever been, with a far greater consensus among South Koreans about goodwill from the American side and faith in their political institutions. Throughout most of the existence of North and South Korea, both have maintained that they are the sole legitimate government under whose banner the entire peninsula should be one day united. For decades, Koreans maintained this posture, and people picked sides over which was the better side. It has only been in recent times that this thinking has started to truly breakdown. With every passing year, North Korea and South Korea grow further and further from each other, considering themselves not Koreans first but South Koreans. The sheer disparity of the complete failure of the Northern system became increasingly more apparent to broader and broader swathes of the South Korean population. The final nail in the coffin might have been the “Sunshine Policy,” where it came out that South Korea had mostly bribed North Korea for engagement, and it was widely seen in the end that South Korea gave up too much while North Korea gave up very little, which simply meant a strengthening of North Korea’s position. Nowadays, very few South Koreans have even the slightest bit of sympathy for the North, and most do not see the American involvement in the South as a colonizer/colonized relationship. In the long run, it looks like the forces set in motion following the Pacific War by America have prevailed in South Korea and are bound to prevail across the entire peninsula in the coming decades.

Bibliography 🔗

1. Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2015).
2. E. Atkins, “Colonial Modernity,” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History, ed. Michael Seth (London: Routledge, 2016), 124–140.
3. Jager, Sheila Miyoshi. Brothers at war: The unending conflict in Korea. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
4. Moon, Rennie. “Koreans in Japan.” FSI. Accessed December 7, 2025. https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/koreans_in_japan.