The Origins and Early Course of the Korean War

CHAPTER ONE
THE COURSE OF THE WAR
On the very day that President Barack Obama fielded a
student’s question
in Moscow about whether a new Korean War was in the offing
(July 7, 2009),
the papers were filled with commentary on the death of Robert
Strange
McNamara. The editors of The New York Times and one of its
best columnists,
Bob Herbert, condemned McNamara for knowing the Vietnam
War was
un-winnable yet sending tens of thousands of young Americans
to their deaths
anyway: “How in God’s name did he ever look at himself in the
mirror?” Herbert
wrote. They all assumed that the war itself was a colossal error.
But if McNamara
had been able to stabilize South Vietnam and divide the country
permanently
(say with his “electronic fence”), thousands of our troops would
still be there
along a DMZ and evil would still reside in Hanoi. McNamara
also had a minor
planning role in the firebombing of Japanese cities in World
War II: “What
makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he

asked; people like
himself and Curtis LeMay, the commander of the air attacks,
“were behaving as
war criminals.” McNamara derived these lessons from losing
the Vietnam War:
we did not know the enemy, we lacked “empathy” (we should
have “put
ourselves inside their skin and look[ed] at us through their
eyes,” but we did not);
we were blind prisoners of our own assumptions. 1 In Korea we
still are.
Korea is an ancient nation, and one of the very few places in
the world
where territorial boundaries, ethnicity, and language have been
consistent for
well over a millennium. It sits next to China and was deeply
influenced by the
Middle Kingdom, but it has always had an independent
civilization. Few
understand this, but the most observant journalist in the war,
Reginald Thompson,
put the point exactly: “the thought and law of China is woven
into the very
texture of Korea … as the law of Rome is woven into Britain.”
The distinction is
between the stereotypical judgment that Korea is just “Little
China,” or nothing
more than a transmission belt for Buddhist and Confucian
culture flowing into
Japan, and a nation and culture as different from Japan or China
as Italy or
France is from Germany.
Korea also had a social structure that persisted for centuries:
during the five
hundred years of the last dynasty the vast majority of Koreans
were peasants,

most of them tenants working land held by one of the world’s
most tenacious
aristocracies. Many were also slaves, a hereditary status from
generation to
generation. The state squelched merchant activity, so that
commerce, and
anything resembling the green shoots of a middle class, barely
developed. This
fundamental condition—a privileged landed class, a mass of
peasants, and little
leavening in between—lasted through twentieth-century
colonialism, too,
because after their rule began in 1910 the Japanese found it
useful to operate
through local landed power. So, amid the crisis of national
division, upheaval,
and war, Koreans also sought to rectify these ancient inequities.
But this
aristocracy, known as yangban, did not last so long and survive
one crisis after
another by being purely exploitative; it fostered a scholar-
official elite, a civil
service, venerable statecraft, splendid works of art, and a
national pastime of
educating the young. In the relative openness of the 1920s,
young scions
proliferated in one profession after another—commerce,
industry, publishing,
academia, films, literary pursuits, urban consumption—a
budding elite that could
readily have led an independent Korea. 2 But global depression,
war, and
ever-increasing Japanese repression in the 1930s destroyed

much of this progress,
turned many elite Koreans into collaborators, and left few
options for patriots
besides armed resistance.
Korea was at its modern nadir during the war, yet this is where
most of the
millions of Americans who served in Korea got their
impressions—ones that
often depended on where the eye chose to fall. Foreigners and
GIs saw dirt and
mud and squalor, but Thompson saw villages “of pure
enchantment, the tiles of
the roofs up-curled at eaves and corners … the women [in]
bright colours,
crimson and the pale pink of watermelon flesh, and vivid
emerald green, their
bodies wrapped tightly to give them a tubular appearance.”
Reginald Thompson
had been all over the world; most GIs had never been out of
their country, or
perhaps their hometowns. What his vantage point in 1950 told
him, in effect, was
this: here was the Vietnam War we came to know before
Vietnam—gooks,
napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy,
fundamentally
untrained GIs fighting a war their top generals barely
understood, fragging of
officers, 3 contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home,
devilish battles
indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from Gen.
Douglas
MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or
lunatics, an
ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid
dictatorship run by

servants of Japanese imperialism. “What a Quixotic business,”
Thompson wrote,
trying to impose democracy—to try to achieve “an evolutionary
result without
evolution.” The only outcome of fending off the North, he
thought, would be a
long occupation if not “conquest and colonization.”
THE CONVENTIONAL WAR BEGINS
The war Americans know began on the remote, inaccessible
Ongjin
Peninsula, northwest of Seoul, on the night of June 24–25,
1950, Korean time;
this was also the point at which border fighting began in May
1949, and the
absence of independent observers has meant that both Korean
sides have claimed
ever since that they were attacked first. During the long, hot
summer of 1949,
one pregnant with impending conflict, the ROK had expanded
its army to about
100,000 troops, a strength the North did not match until early
1950. American
order-of-battle data showed the two armies at about equal
strength by June 1950.
Early that month, MacArthur’s intelligence apparatus identified
a total of 74,370
Korean People’s Army (KPA) soldiers, with another 20,000 or
so in the Border
Constabulary. The Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) order of
battle showed a
total of 87,500 soldiers, with 32,500 soldiers at the border,

35,000 within
thirty-five miles, or a day’s march, of the 38th parallel. This
data did not account
for the superior battle experience of the northern army,
however, especially
among the large contingents that had returned from the Chinese
civil war. The
North also had about 150 Soviet T-34 tanks and a small but
useful air force of 70
fighters and 62 light bombers—either left behind when Soviet
troops evacuated
in December 1948, or purchased from Moscow and Beijing in
1949–50 (when
war bond drives ensued for months in the North). Only about
20,000 South
Korean troops remained in the more distant interior. This was
the result of a
significant redeployment northward toward the parallel in the
early months of
1950, after the southern guerrillas appeared to have been
crushed. The northern
army had also redeployed southward in May and June 1950, but
many KPA
units—at least one third—were not aware of the impending
invasion and thus
were not mobilized to fight on June 25. Furthermore, thousands
of Korean troops
were still fighting in China at this time.
Just one week before the invasion John Foster Dulles visited
Seoul and the
38th parallel. By then he was a roving ambassador and, as the
odds-on
Republican choice for secretary of state, a symbol of Harry
Truman’s attempt at
bipartisanship after Republicans opened up on him with the
“who lost China?”

campaign. In meetings with Syngman Rhee the latter not only
pushed for a direct
American defense of the ROK, but advocated an attack on the
North. One of
Dulles’s favorite reporters, William Mathews, was there and
wrote just after
Dulles’s meeting that Rhee was “militantly for the unification
of Korea. Openly
says it must be brought about soon … Rhee pleads justice of
going into North
country. Thinks it could succeed in a few days … if he can do it
with our help, he
will do it.” Mathews noted that Rhee said he would attack even
if “it brought on
a general war.” All this is yet more proof of Rhee’s provocative
behavior, but it
is no different from his threats to march north made many times
before. The
Dulles visit was merely vintage Rhee: there is no evidence that
Dulles was in
collusion with him.4 But what might the North Koreans have
thought?
John Foster Dulles peering across the 38th parallel, June 19,
1950. To his
left, in the pith helmet, is Defense Minister Shin Sung-mo;
behind him, in the
porkpie hat, is Foreign Minister Ben Limb. U.S. National
Archives

That is the question a historian put to Dean Acheson, Truman’s
secretary of
state, in a seminar after the Korean War: “Are you sure his
presence didn’t
provoke the attack, Dean? There has been comment about that—
I don’t think it
did. You have no views on the subject?” Acheson’s deadpan
response: “No, I
have no views on the subject.” George Kennan then interjected,
“There is a
comical aspect to this, because the visits of these people over
there, and their
peering over outposts with binoculars at the Soviet people, I
think must have led
the Soviets to think that we were on to their plan and caused
them considerable
perturbation.”
“Yes,” Acheson said. “Foster up in a bunker with a homburg
on—it was a
very amusing picture.”5 Pyongyang has never tired of waving
that photo around.
At the same time, the veteran industrialist Pak Hung-sik
showed up in
Tokyo and gave an interview to The Oriental Economist,
published on June 24,
1950—the day before the war started. Described as an adviser to
the Korean
Economic Mission (that is, the Marshall Plan), he was also said
to have “a circle
of friends and acquaintances among the Japanese” (a bit of an
understatement;
Pak was widely thought in South and North to have been the

most notorious
collaborator with Japanese imperialism). In the years after
liberation in 1945 a lot
of anti-Japanese feeling had welled up in Korea, Pak said,
owing to the return of
“numerous revolutionists and nationalists.” By 1950, however,
there was “hardly
any trace of it.” Instead, the ROK was “acting as a bulwark of
peace” at the 38th
parallel, and “the central figures in charge of national defense
are mostly
graduates of the former Military College of Japan.” Korea and
Japan were
“destined to go hand in hand, to live and let live,” and thus bad
feelings should be
“cast overboard.”
The current problem, Pak said, was the unfortunate one that “an
economic
unity is lacking whereas in prewar days Japan, Manchuria,
Korea, and Formosa
economically combined to make an organic whole.” Pak Hung-
sik was the
embodiment of the Japanese colonial idea—having been born a
Korean his only
unfortunate, but not insurmountable, fate. For Pak and Kim Il
Sung, the 1930s
were the beginning: hugely expanded business opportunities for
Pak (the founder
of Seoul’s Hwashin department store, its first on the American
model), a decade
of unimaginably harsh struggle for Kim. After this beginning, a
civil war
between the young leaders of Korea who chose to collaborate

with or to resist
Japan in the 1930s was entirely conceivable, and probably
inevitable.
War came on the last weekend in June 1950, a weekend about
which much
still remains to be learned. It is now clear from Soviet
documents that Pyongyang
had made a decision to escalate the civil conflict to the level of
conventional
warfare many months before June 1950, having tired of the
inconclusive guerrilla
struggle in the south, and perhaps hoping to seize on a southern
provocation like
many that occurred in 1949, thus to settle the hash of the Rhee
regime. Maturing
clandestine American plans to launch a coup d’état against
Chiang Kai-shek on
Taiwan complicated this same weekend; Dean Rusk met with
several Chinese at
the Plaza hotel in New York on the evening of June 23, 1950,
hoping that they
would form a government to replace Chiang’s regime, which
was threatened by
an impending invasion from the Chinese Communists. He and
Acheson wanted a
reliable leader in Taipei, so that their secret desire to keep the
island separate
from mainland control would field a government that Truman
could justify
supporting. 6
The fighting on Ongjin began around 3 or 4 A.M. on June 25;
initial
intelligence reports were inconclusive as to who started it. Later
on, attacking
elements were said to be from the 3rd Brigade of the
Democratic People’s

Republic of Korea (DPRK) Border Constabulary, joined at 5:30
A.M. by the
formidable 6th Division. At about the same time, according to
the American
official history, KPA forces at the parallel south of Chorwon
assaulted the 1st
Regiment of the ROKA 7th Division, dealing it heavy
casualties; it gave way and
the 3rd and 4th KPA divisions, with an armored brigade,
crashed through and
began a daunting march toward Seoul. South Korean sources
asserted, however,
that elements of the 17th Regiment had counterattacked on the
Ongjin Peninsula
and were in possession of Haeju city, the only important point
north of the 38th
parallel claimed to have been taken by ROK forces.
Roy Appleman, America’s official historian of the war, relied
on James
Hausman’s heavily sanitized account of the war’s start on the
Ongjin Peninsula.
Hausman later told a Thames Television documentary crew that
his good friend
Paek In-yop (brother to Paek Son-yop) was the commander on
Ongjin, “and
when the war broke out as you know he was there not only
defending his line but
counterattacking” (that is, across the parallel). As for “those
who think that the
South may have started this war,” Hausman went on, “I think …
I think they’re
wrong.” Another Thames interviewee, Col. James Peach, an
Australian who was

with the UN observer group, reported that the Ongjin
commander, Paek, was “a
get-going sort of chap” who led the “twin-tiger” 17th
Regimental Combat Team:
“I, I never quite knew what went on. There’s a bit of a mystery
still about Haeju,
I think it might have been Paek and his merry men, the 17th
Regiment, attacking
it … We didn’t hear anything about it until the war had been
going for a while,
and I never quite knew what went on. It’s been said that they
attacked there and
that the North Koreans responded.” Peach went on to say that he
didn’t think this
version held much water. (Note also that if the South Koreans
attack, it is “Paek
and his merry men”; when the North Koreans do the same, it is
heinous
aggression.) 7
Whether 17th Regiment soldiers may have occupied Haeju on
June 25, or
even initiated the fighting on Ongjin, is still inconclusive, with
the existing
evidence pointing both ways. There is no evidence, however, to
back up the
North’s claim that the South launched a general invasion; at
worst there may
have been a small assault across the parallel, as happened many
times in 1949.
Whatever transpired, the North met it with a full invasion.
South of the attacking KPA units was the ROK 7th Division,
headquartered
at the critical invasion-route town of Uijongbu; it had not
committed its forces to
battle even by the morning of June 26, probably because it was
waiting to be

reinforced by the 2nd Division, which had entrained northward
from Taejon.
When the 2nd Division arrived later that day, it collapsed and
the troops panicked.
It was through this gaping hole in the Uijongbu corridor that
North Korean troops
poured on the afternoon and evening of June 26, thus
jeopardizing the capital. An
American official on the scene later wrote that “the failure of
the 2nd Division to
fight” was the main reason for the quick loss of Seoul. South
Korean units
mutinied or fled before the oncoming Northern troops for many
reasons,
including their relative lack of firepower, their poor training,
their officers who
had served Japan, and ultimately the unpopularity of the Rhee
government—which had nearly been voted out by a moderate
coalition in
reasonably free elections held on May 30, 1950.
President Rhee tried to leave the city with his top officials as
early as
Sunday evening, and on June 27 the entire ROK Army
headquarters relocated
south of Seoul, without telling their American allies. That left
troops engaging
the enemy north of Seoul without communications, and
panicked both the troops
and the civilian population. The next day most ROK divisions
followed suit,
withdrawing to the south of the capital, and Gen. “Fatty” Chae
famously and
egregiously blew the major Han River bridge without warning,

killing hundreds
who were crossing it. Later that day President Rhee took off
southward in his
special train. During the battle for Taejon he vowed to stay
there and fight to the
death, but soon he was back on his train, headed for the
southwestern port of
Mokpo, thence by naval launch to Pusan, where he would
remain inside the
defensive perimeter.8 Military morale evaporated and civilians
panicked. Seoul
fell to a Northern invasion force of about 37,000 troops. By
month’s end fully
half of the ROKA soldiers were dead, captured, or missing.
Only two divisions
had their equipment and weapons, all the rest (about 70 percent
of the total)
having been left in place or lost on the battlefield.
The quick and virtually complete collapse of resistance in the
South
energized the United States to enter the war in force. Secretary
of State Dean
Acheson dominated the decision making, which soon committed
American air
and ground forces to the fight. On the night of June 24
(Washington time),
Acheson decided to take the Korean question to the UN, before
he had notified
President Truman of the fighting; he then told Truman there was
no need to have
him back in Washington until the next day. At emergency White
House meetings
on the evening of June 25, Acheson argued for increased
military aid to the ROK,
U.S. Air Force cover for the evacuation of Americans, and the
interposition of

the Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and the China mainland—
thus obviating a
Communist invasion of the island, dividing China and leaving
Taiwan governed
by the Republic of China even today. On the afternoon of June
26 Acheson
labored alone on the fundamental decisions committing
American air and naval
power to the Korean War, which were approved by the White
House that
evening.
Thus the decision to intervene in force was Acheson’s decision,
supported
by the president but taken before United Nations, Pentagon, or
congressional
approval. His reasoning had little to do with Korea’s strategic
value, and
everything to do with American prestige and political economy:
“prestige is the
shadow cast by power,” he once said, and the North Koreans
had challenged it;
American credibility was therefore at stake. South Korea was
also essential to
Japan’s industrial revival, Acheson thought, as part of his
“great crescent”
strategy linking northeast Asia with the Middle East (and which
we discuss later
on).
George Kennan, who supported the June decisions, recalled
from notes
taken at the time that Acheson broke off collegial discussions
on the afternoon of
June 26:

He wanted time to be alone and to dictate. We were called in
[three hours
later] and he read to us a paper he had produced, which was the
first draft of the
statement finally issued by the President, and which was not
significantly
changed by the time it finally appeared, the following day …
the course actually
taken by this Government was not something pressed upon
[Acheson] by the
military leaders, but rather something arrived at by himself, in
solitary
deliberation.
Acheson later concurred with Kennan, saying, “that’s as I
recall it.” Kennan
noted that the decisions of June 26 were the key ones; Acheson
agreed that they
were taken before congressional or UN consultations (“it wasn’t
until 3:00 in the
afternoon [on June 27] that the U.N. asked us to do what we
said we were going
to … in the morning”). 9
On this same summer Saturday evening the Soviet ambassador
to the UN,
Adam Malik, was taking his ease on Long Island rather than
wielding his much
used and abused veto on the Security Council, a boycott
conducted ostensibly
because the UN had refused to admit China. He was planning to
return to
Moscow for consultations on July 6.10 The longtime Soviet
foreign minister,
Andrei Gromyko, later told Dean Rusk that on Saturday night

Malik instantly
wired Moscow for instructions, and for the first time ever in its
experience got
back a message direct from Generalissimo Stalin: nyet, do not
attend. 11 Stalin’s
reasons are not known, but he may have hoped to facilitate the
entry of U.S.
forces into a peripheral area, thus to waste blood and treasure,
or perhaps he
hoped that American dominance of the UN would destroy the
perceived
universality of the international body.
Acheson’s June 25–26 decisions prefigured the commitment of
American
ground forces, which came in the early hours of June 30. The
Joint Chiefs of
Staff remained “extremely reluctant” to commit infantry troops
to the fighting
right up to June 30, and were not consulted when Truman made
his decision.
They were reticent both because Korea was a strategic cul-de-
sac and perhaps a
trap in the global struggle with Moscow, and because the total
armed strength of
the U.S. Army was 593,167, with an additional 75,370 in the
Marines. North
Korea alone was capable of mobilizing upward of 200,000
combat soldiers in the
summer of 1950, quite apart from the immense manpower
reserve of China’s
People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The immediate precipitating factor for the decision to dispatch
U.S. ground

forces was MacArthur’s conclusion, after visiting the front
lines, that the ROK
Army had mostly ceased to fight. From the start of the war and
throughout the
summer and fall of 1950, Korean units ceased to exist, lacked
equipment to fight
the North Koreans, or proved unable to hold the lines in their
sectors. Most
veterans of the first two years of the war thought South Koreans
“did no fighting
worthy of the name,” they just broke and ran. (By the summer
of 1951 the
ROKA had lost enough matériel to outfit ten divisions,
according to Gen.
Matthew B. Ridgway, and still needed “thorough training and
equipment and
instruction on all levels.”) An American colonel told the British
journalist Philip
Knightly, “South Koreans and North Koreans are identical. Why
then do North
Koreans fight like tigers and South Koreans run like sheep?”
The Morse code
“HA” was used all over the front to signal that South Korean
forces were
“hauling ass.” ROKA officers exploited their own men, and beat
them
mercilessly for infractions. One GI observed an officer execute
a man for going
AWOL, shooting him in the back of the head and kicking him
into a grave. The
man had a wife and three children. But racism also infected GI
views of their
Korean enemy and ally. Most Americans, a veteran remembered,
“had an

ingrained prejudice against Koreans” that made any kind of
empathy or
understanding difficult. “They hated Koreans by reflex action.”
It was only after
truce talks began in 1951 that the ROKA had the time to
develop, however
slowly, its fighting temper. 12
But the Americans also had no idea that they would be fighting
against truly
effective troops, a disastrous misjudgment of the Korean enemy
that began right
at the top, on the day the war began. “I can handle it with one
arm tied behind my
back,” MacArthur said; the next day he remarked to John Foster
Dulles that if he
could only put the 1st Cavalry Division into Korea, “why,
heavens, you’d see
these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you
would see no
more of them.” At first MacArthur wanted an American
regimental combat team,
then two divisions. Within a week, however, he cabled
Washington that only a
quarter of the ROKA troops could even be located, and that the
KPA was
“operating under excellent top level guidance and had
demonstrated superior
command of strategic and tactical principles.” By the beginning
of July he
wanted a minimum of 30,000 American combat soldiers,
meaning more than four
infantry divisions, three tank battalions, and assorted artillery; a
week later he
asked for eight divisions. 13
Misjudgments also grew out of the ubiquitous racism of whites

coming
from a segregated American society, where Koreans were
“people of color”
subjected to apartheid-like restrictions (they drank from
“colored” fountains in
Virginia, could not marry Caucasians in other southern states,
and could not own
property in many western states). Consider the judgment of the
respected military
editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, three weeks
after the war began:
We are facing an army of barbarians in Korea, but they are
barbarians as
trained, as relentless, as reckless of life, and as skilled in the
tactics of the kind of
war they fight as the hordes of Genghis Khan.… They have
taken a leaf from the
Nazi book of blitzkrieg and are employing all the weapons of
fear and terror.
Chinese Communists were reported to have joined the fighting,
he erred in
saying, and not far behind might be “Mongolians, Soviet
Asiatics and a variety of
races”—some of “the most primitive of peoples.” Elsewhere
Baldwin likened the
Koreans to invading locusts; he ended by recommending that
Americans be
given “more realistic training to meet the barbarian discipline of
the armored
horde.”14

A few days later Baldwin remarked that to the Korean, life is
cheap:
“behind him stand the hordes of Asia. Ahead of him lies the
hope of loot.” What
else “brings him shrieking on,” what else explains his “fanatical
determination”?15 Mongolians, Asiatics, Nazis, locusts,
primitives, hordes,
thieves—one would think Baldwin had exhausted his bag of
bigotry to capture a
people invading their homeland and defending it against the
world’s most
powerful army. But he came up with another way to deal with
“the problem of
the convinced fanatic”:
In their extensive war against Russian partisans, the Germans
found that the
only answer to guerrillas … was “to win friends and influence
people” among the
civilian population. The actual pacification of the country
means just that.
(A pacification, perhaps, like that in the Ukraine.)
Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about
“women
and children slain by American bombs,” Baldwin went on to say
that Koreans
must understand that “we do not come merely to bring
devastation.” Americans
must convince “these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples …
that we—not the
Communists—are their friends.”16 Now hear the chief counsel
for war crimes at
the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:

The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not
identical with
those that have developed in the Occident … individual lives
are not valued so
highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to
expect the individual
Korean soldier … to follow our most elevated precepts of
warfare.17
In the summer months of 1950 the Korean People’s Army
pushed
southward with dramatic success, with one humiliating defeat
after another for
American forces. An army that had bested Germany and Japan
found its back
pressed to the wall by what it thought was a hastily assembled
peasant military,
ill-equipped and, worse, said to be doing the bidding of a
foreign imperial power.
By the end of July, American and ROK forces outnumbered the
KPA along the
front, 92,000 to 70,000 (47,000 were Americans), but in spite of
this, the retreat
continued. In early August, however, the 1st Marine Brigade
went into action and
finally halted the KPA advance. The front did not change much
from then until
the end of August. The fighting stabilized at what came to be
called the Pusan
Perimeter, an eighty-by-fifty-mile right-angled front. Kim Il
Sung later said that
the plan was to win the war for the South in one month, and by

the end of July he
had nearly done so.
This perimeter had its northern anchor on the coast around
Pohang, its
southeastern anchor in the coastal Chinju-Masan region, and its
center just …
06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Chinese line of
control;
Indian claim
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 1 9/19/12 10:27 AM

Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May
not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due
to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Modern East Asia
06499_fm_rev04.indd 3 9/11/12 10:50 AM

06499_fm_rev04.indd 4 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Modern East Asia:
From 1600
A Cultural, Social, and Political History
Third Edition
PATRICIA EBREY
University of Washington—Seattle
ANNE WALTHALL
University of California—Irvine
06499_fm_rev04.indd 5 9/11/12 10:50 AM

06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
This is an electronic version of the print textbook. Due to
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 6 9/12/12 3:24 PM

Maps and Figures xv
Preface xvii
Conventions xxi
Chapter 15 Joseon Korea (1392–1800) 247
Chapter 16 The Creation of the Manchu Empire
(1600–1800) 270
Chapter 17 Edo Japan (1603–1800) 288
PART FOUR
The Age of Western Imperialism
(1800–1900) 305
Chapter 18 China in Decline (1800–1900) 314
Chapter 19 Japan in Turmoil (1800–1867) 333
Chapter 20 Meiji Transformation (1868–1900) 347
Chapter 21 Korea in the Turbulent Nineteenth
Century (1800–1895) 363
PART FIVE
East Asia in the Modern World 381
Chapter 22 Rise of Modern Japan
(1900–1931) 382
Chapter 23 Modernizing Korea

and Colonial Rule (1896–1945) 400
Chapter 24 Remaking China
(1900–1927) 415
Chapter 25 War and Revolution, China
(1927–1949) 439
PART SIX
Intensified Contact and
Divergent Paths 455
Chapter 26 War and Aftermath in Japan
(1931–1964) 456
Chapter 27 China Under Mao
(1949–1976) 472
Chapter 28 Korea
(1945 to the Present) 490
Chapter 29 Contemporary Japan
Chapter 30 China Since Mao
Index I-1
B R I E F C O N T E N T S
vii
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 8 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Maps and Figures xv
Preface xvii
Conventions xxi
Yi Seonggye’s Rise to Power 247
Kings and Yangban Confucian Officials 249
Dynastic Decline and the Japanese Invasion 251

MATERIAL CULTURE: Yangban Children’s
Board Games 252
BIOGRAPHY: Interpreter Jeong
Myeongsu 253
Relations with the Manchus 254
Internal Politics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries 255
Economic Growth and the Decline of
Slavery 257
DOCUMENTS: Lady Hyegyeong’s
Memoirs 258
Cultural Developments 258
Literature 258
Northern Learning 260
Christianity and Western Learning 260
The Family and Women in the Confucian Age 261
Making Comparisons: Women’s Situations 264
Connections: Europe Enters the Scene 265
(1600–1800) 270
The Manchus 271
Ming Loyalism 272
The Qing at Its Height 273

Kangxi 274
BIOGRAPHY: Jiang Chun, Salt Merchant 275
Qianlong 276
The Banner System 277
DOCUMENTS: Fang Bao’s “Random Notes from
Prison” 278
Contacts with Europe 280
Social and Cultural Crosscurrents 281
The Conservative Turn 281
The Dream of Red Mansions 281
MATERIAL CULTURE: Jin Nong’s Inscribed
Portrait of a Buddhist Monk 282
The Less Advantaged and the
Disaffected 283
Tokugawa Settlement (Seventeenth Century) 288
Government 289
Agricultural Transformations and the
Commercial Revolution 291
MATERIAL CULTURE: Night Soil 294
Urban Life and Culture 294
DOCUMENTS: Ihara Saikaku’s “Sensible Advice
on Domestic Economy” 296
Intellectual Trends 296

BIOGRAPHY: Tadano Makuzu 299
Maturation and Decay (Eighteenth Century) 299
Popular Culture 300
Hard Times and Rural Uprisings 301
Making Comparisons: Neo-Confucianism 304
C O N T E N T S
ix
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PART FOUR
The Age of Western Imperialism
(1800–1900) 305
Connections: Western Imperialism
(1800–1900) 306
Economic and Fiscal Problems 314
Midcentury Crises 315

The Opium War 315
MATERIAL CULTURE: The Grand Canal 316
Taiping Rebellion 318
BIOGRAPHY: Manchu Bannerman Guancheng 319
Other Rebellions 321
The Second Opium War 321
Self-Strengthening 322
Empress Dowager Cixi 324
Foreigners in China 325
The Failures of Reform 326
DOCUMENTS: Comparing the Power of China
and Western Nations 328
The Boxer Rebellion 328
The Decline of the Qing Empire in Comparative
Perspective 330
Domestic Discontents (1800–1842) 333
Domain Reforms 334
Religion and Play 335
DOCUMENTS: Kohei’s Lawsuit 336
Foreign Affairs (1793–1858) 338
The Closing of Japan 338
Unequal Treaties with the United States 339
Debates on the Foreign Threat 339

MATERIAL CULTURE: From Palanquin
to Rickshaw 341
Political Turmoil (1858–1864) 342
BIOGRAPHY: Kusaka Genzui, Radical
Samurai 343
The Fall of the Shogunate (1864–1867) 343
The Meiji State (1868–1900) 347
MATERIAL CULTURE: New Food for
a New Nation 348
Reforms and Opposition 350
BIOGRAPHY: Deguchi Nao, Founder
of a New Religion 352
Constitution and National Assembly 353
Industrialization 355
Civilization and Enlightenment 357
Conservative Resurgence (1880s–1900) 358
Imperialism and Modernity
(1870s–1895) 359
DOCUMENTS: Fukuzawa Yukichi’s
“Leaving Asia” 360
Century (1800–1895) 363
Politics and Society Under Child Rulers

(1800–1864) 363
Social Change and New Social Policies 364
Social Ferment and Popular Culture 364
Economic Developments and Rebellion 366
MATERIAL CULTURE: Gimchi 367
DOCUMENTS: Donghak Beliefs 368
Choe Jeu and the Donghak Religion 369
Attempts at Reform and External Pressure
(1864–1894) 369
Reaction to Reforms 370
Military Pressure from the West 370
BIOGRAPHY: Queen Min 372
The Ganghwa Treaty of 1876 373
x Contents
06499_fm_rev04.indd 10 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Contents xi

Chapter 23 Modernizing Korea and Colonial
Rule (1896–1945) 400
Attempts at Reform (1896–1910) 400
Russia’s Interests 401
Nationalist Movements 401
DOCUMENTS: Louise Yim’s Writings
on Female Independence 402
The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) 403
Japanese Colonial Rule (1910–1945) 404
Japan’s Impact on Rural Korea 405
The Growth of Korean Industry 406
Education and Modern Mass Culture 407
Militant Nationalism 408
The Rise of Communism 409
Manchuria 410
BIOGRAPHY: Kim San, Communist
Revolutionary 411
Korea During the Asia-Pacific War 411
MATERIAL CULTURE: A Colonial Gold
Mine 413
(1900–1927) 415
The End of Monarchy 416
Local Activism 416
The Anti-Manchu Revolutionary

Movement 417
The Manchu Reform Movement 418
The 1911 Revolution 418
The Presidency of Yuan Shikai and the Emergence
of the Warlords 419
Toward a More Modern China 420
The New Culture Movement 420
MATERIAL CULTURE: Shanghai’s Great World
Pleasure Palace 421
Industrial Development 422
DOCUMENTS: Lu Xun’s “Sudden Notions” 423
BIOGRAPHY: Sophia Chen and
H. C. Zen, a Modern Couple 424
First Attempts at Modern Diplomacy 373
Abortive Reform and the 1884 Gapsin
Coup 374
Qing Control 375
Introducing Modern Institutions and Modern
Technology 375
Protestant Christianity 376
The Donghak Rebellion and the Sino-Japanese
War (1894–1895) 376
Gabo Cabinet Reforms 377
Making Comparisons: Slavery 380
PART FIVE

East Asia in the Modern World 381
(1900–1931) 382
Japan’s Drive for Great Power Status 382
Japan and Korea 383
Japan and China 383
Japan and the West 385
Economic Development 385
World War I and the 1920s 385
Constitutional Government 386
Imperial Democracy 387
Women and Democracy 388
Mass Movements 388
DOCUMENTS: Negotiations Between Strike
Group Representatives and Company
Directors 392
Minorities 393
Radicals 394
Modern Urban Culture 395
MATERIAL CULTURE: Houses for the Middle
Class 396
BIOGRAPHY: Kobayashi Ichizō,
Entrepreneur 397
Alternatives to Modernity 398
06499_fm_rev04.indd 11 9/11/12 10:50 AM

The May Fourth Incident 425
The Women’s Movement 426
Reunification by the Nationalists 428
Connections: World War II 430
(1927–1949) 439
The Chinese Communist Party 439
Mao Zedong’s Emergence as a Party Leader 441
The Nationalist Government in Nanjing 442
BIOGRAPHY: Yuetsim, Servant Girl 443
Shanghai 444
Relocating the Communist Revolution 445
DOCUMENTS: Wang Shiwei’s Wild Lilies 446
MATERIAL CULTURE: Qipao 448
The Japanese Invasion and the Retreat to

Chongoing 448
The Chinese Communist Party During the War 451
The Civil War and the Communist Victory 452
PART SIX
Intensified Contact and
Divergent Paths 455
(1931–1964) 456
Road to War (1931–1937) 456
Junior Officers and the Citizenry 457
Social Reform 457
Wartime Mobilization (1937–1945) 458
DOCUMENTS: Excerpts from the Diary
of Hayashi Toshimasa 460
Occupation (1945–1952) 461
Despair and Liberation 462
Occupation Goals 462
Occupation Reforms 463
Economic Developments 464
Labor and the Reverse Course 464
Political Settlement and Economic Recovery
(1952–1964) 465
Political and Social Protest 466
Post-Occupation Economic Development 467
Postwar Culture 468

MATERIAL CULTURE: The Transistor 469
BIOGRAPHY: Daimatsu Hirobumi, Soldier and
Volleyball Coach 470
Chapter 27 China Under Mao (1949–1976) 472
The Party in Power 473
Ideology and Social Control 474
MATERIAL CULTURE: The Monument to the
People’s Heroes 475
The Korean War and the United States
as the Chief Enemy 475
Collectivizing Agriculture 476
Minorities and Autonomous Regions 477
BIOGRAPHY: Jin Shuyu, Telephone Minder 478
Intellectuals and the Hundred Flowers
Campaign 479
Departing from the Soviet Model 480
The Great Leap Forward 480
The Sino-Soviet Split 483
The Cultural Revolution 484
Phase 1: 1966–1968 484
DOCUMENTS: Big Character Poster 485
Phase 2: 1968–1976 487
The Death of Mao 487

Chapter 28 Korea (1945 to the Present) 490
National Division and the Korean War
(1945–1953) 490
The Korean War (1949–1953) 491
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
xii Contents
06499_fm_rev04.indd 12 9/11/12 10:50 AM
The Roaring 1980s 516
The Good Life 518
MATERIAL CULTURE: Manga 519
Twenty Years Without Progress 520
Social Problems for the Twenty-First Century 521
Chapter 30 China Since Mao (1976 to the
Present) 524

Political Transformation 525
DOCUMENTS: Bloggers on Corruption 526
The Economic Miracle 527
Encouraging Capitalist Tendencies 527
Shrinking the State Sector 529
Regional Disparities and Internal
Migration 529
Environmental Degradation 530
Consumer Culture 530
BIOGRAPHY: Cheng Junyu, Migrant
Worker 531
Social and Cultural Changes 532
Education 532
The Arts 532
Gender Roles 533
MATERIAL CULTURE: High-Speed
Railways 534
Population Control and the One-Child Family 535
Family Life 536
Critical Voices 536
Taiwan 538
China in the World 539
Connections: East Asia in the Twenty-First
Century 540

Index I-1
Economic Development 494
State and Society 495
Expansion of Personal Power 495
BIOGRAPHY: Kang Chol-hwan, Survivor of a
North Korean Prison Camp 497
International Relations 497
North Korea’s Nuclear Challenge 498
The Republic of Korea: Dictatorship and Protest
(1953–1987) 498
The Dictators 499
Building a New Economy 500
Social Change and Official Arts 501
International Relations 501
MATERIAL CULTURE: Modern Traditional
Handicrafts 502
Democracy in South Korea (1987 to the
Present) 503
Economic Crisis and Recovery 503
Opening Up International Relations 504
The Korean Inflection of Modernity 504
DOCUMENTS: South Korean Women Workers
and the International Monetary Fund 506
Making Comparisons: Popular
Religion 509

Political Protest and Environmental Pollution 510
Strains of the 1970s 512
DOCUMENTS: Fujita Mariko, “‘It’s All Mother’s
Fault’: Child-Care and the Socialization of
Working Mothers in Japan” 514
Continuing Social Issues 514
Contents xiii
06499_fm_rev04.indd 13 9/11/12 10:50 AM
06499_fm_rev04.indd 14 9/11/12 10:50 AM

Map 15.1 Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910 250
Map C5.1 Seaborne Trading Empires in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 266
Map 16.1 The Manchu Empire at Its Height 272
Map 17.1 Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1868 292
Map C6.1 Western Imperialism in the Late
Nineteenth Century 312
Map 18.1 Grand Canal During the Ming and Qing
Dynasties 316
Map 18.2 Internal and External Conflicts During
the Nineteenth Century 320
Map 19.1 Location of Shimoda relative
to Edo 339
Map 20.1 Modern Japan 350
Map 21.1 Military Pressure from the West, 1866
and 1871 371
Map 22.1 Japanese Imperial Expansion,
1868–1910 384
Map 22.2 Modern Tokyo 389
Map 24.1 Northern Expedition and

Warlords 416
Map C7.1 World War II in Asia and the
Pacific 435
Map 25.1 China in 1938 449
Map 27.1 Languages Spoken in China 479
Map 28.1 Korean War 493
Map 30.1 Population Density in China 529
M A P S A N D F I G U R E S
xv
Figure 15.1 Hangul Chart 248
Figure 29.1 Hourly Wages for Japanese Workers,
by Age, 1989 513
06499_fm_rev04.indd 15 9/11/12 10:50 AM
06499_fm_rev04.indd 16 9/11/12 10:50 AM

There are many reasons to learn about East Asia. A fifth of the
world’s population lives there.
Every day newspapers carry articles on the rapid
transformations of the world economy that make
China, Japan, and Korea a growing presence in our
lives. Globalization means not only that people are
crossing the Pacific in ever-increasing numbers but
also that U.S. popular culture is drawing from many
sources in East Asia, from Korean martial arts to
Japanese anime and Chinese films.
But why approach East Asia through its history
rather than, say, its economy or contemporary cul-
ture? Many reasons suggest themselves. We cannot
gain an adequate understanding of modern phe-
nomena without knowing the stages and processes
that led up to them. Moreover, the peoples of East
Asia are strongly historically minded. To a much
greater extent than in the United States, they know
and identify with people and events of a thousand
or more years ago. In all three countries, readers
still enjoy The Three Kingdoms, a novel written in
fourteenth-century China about the leaders of three
contending states in third-century China. Historical

consciousness also underlies the strong sense of sep-
arate identities among the people of China, Korea,
and Japan. The fact that time and again Korea was
able to protect its independence despite the attempts
of both China and Japan to conquer it is a central
part of Korean identity today. Yet another reason to
learn about East Asia’s past is its comparative value.
As a region that developed nearly independently
of the West, East Asia sheds light on the variety of
ways human beings have found meaning, formed
communities, and governed themselves, expanding
our understanding of the human condition.
What makes this East Asian history book distinc-
tive? In it we cover all three countries from a broad
range of perspectives, from the earliest signs of
human civilization to the present, and we balance the …
Forgotten war, forgotten
massacresÐthe Korean War
(1950±1953) as licensed mass killings
DONG CHOON KIM
Prologue
In 1999, the Associated Press (AP) revealed the existence of
startling documents
about the Korean War showing that United States troops had
killed hundreds of
civilian refugees in the early stages of the Korean War at No
Gun Ri, a small town
in South Korea. However, this news was neither `̀ new'' nor
astonishing to the

Korean survivors of the mass killings who had long pleaded
with the Korean
government to investigate the truth and to settle their painful
grievances. For the
survivors, this `̀ revelation'' merely con®rmed a widely known
story to which
Westerners had until now paid little heed. The AP's report
forced the US
government for the ®rst time to inquire into the alleged mass
killings committed by
US forces during the Korean War. After a one-year joint
investigation by US and
South Korean of®cials on the No Gun Ri incident, a report
acknowledging that
American soldiers did shoot unarmed Korean civilians in July
1950 was released.
Asked about the circumstances under which the US soldiers shot
the civilians at
No Gun Ri, however, the Pentagon said it found `̀ no
information that the First
Cavalry Division was in that area.''
1
Later, the US government of®cially ascribed
the shooting only to the `̀ confusion of combat,'' denying the
existence of written
orders directing the American soldiers to engage in the shooting
of civilians at No
Gun Ri.
2
Though President Clinton expressed regret in January 2000 for
the death
of the Korean refugees shot by American soldiers, no further

investigations were
made.
The No Gun Ri incident, however, may be the tip of the iceberg
in regards to the
matter of mass killings committed by US and South Korean
troops during the
Korean War. More than sixty cases of mass killing committed
by US troops, by
shooting, bombing, stra®ng or other means, have already been
revealed in the
aftermath of the news of No Gun Ri incident.
3
However, what may be more
unknown are the mass killings committed by Koreans against
other Koreans in the
early days of the war. Under the aegis of removing `̀ traitors,''
whose threat
Journal of Genocide Research (2004), 6(4),
December, 523±544
ISSN 1462-3528 print: ISSN 1469-9494 online/04/040523-23 ã
2004 Research Network in Genocide Studies
DOI: 10.1080/1462352042000320592
imperiled the very survival of the state, the Republic of Korea's
(ROK) Rhee
Syngman government ordered the execution of hundreds of
thousands potential
collaborators. Even though these stories have been of®cially
left untold to this day,

both the US troops' indiscriminate shooting of Korean civilian
refugees and the
illegal executions by Rhee's government have been `̀ open
secrets'' among at least
some Koreans since the end of the Korean War.
The Korean War may be one of the bloodiest wars of modern
history; it resulted
in several million deaths and several times that number of
wounded and maimed.
Despite such violent ®ghting and enormous casualties, the
Korean War, and
especially the aspect of mass killings, has remained a `̀
forgotten war,'' not only to
Westerners but also to many Koreans themselves. From the end
of World War II to
the present, almost no war has had so little attention paid to it
by the world public
as a whole. Due to its characterization by American political
leaders as `̀ an anti-
communist crusade,'' `̀ police action'' and `̀ war between good
and evil,'' the
bloody stories have been squelched during the last ®fty year's
Cold War period. As
McCarthyism and the Korean War occurred at the same moment
in time and
played off against each other in a mutually reinforcing manner,
4
North Korea's
`̀ illegitimate'' invasion'' fostered a war time anticommunism
that served to justify
any methods that the US and South Korean army employed to
oppose it. This is
why existing books or articles dealing with massacres or

genocides have never
included the cases of the Korean War. Except for a few Western
scholars who
dared to mention the misconduct of American soldiers and the
brutality of the
ROK army, only a small number of scholars or reporters have
ever raised the issue
of `̀ criminal'' actions of the US and ROK army.
5
Though thorough and comprehensive investigations on the
Korean War
massacres have not yet been conducted, existing records or
testimonies of the
survivors of the mass killings can demonstrate what the `̀
forgotten war'' was
really about, because the manner in which a war was conducted
may, in some
sense, be more crucial to comprehending the nature of that war
than the matter of
who ®red ®rst. Moreover, the revelation of hidden stories of
mass killings during
the Korean War may help conclusively demonstrate the
character of the US's
anticommunist military interventions in the Third World and
clarify what the US
really did in attempting to `̀ make the world free.'' The
genocides or massacres are
often committed simultaneously or in parallel with state-
organized modern war.
But it would be dif®cult to put the line between the `̀ licensed
killing'' and `̀ unjust
killings'' during a war. Especially in cases where warfare
extended to cover an
entire country, distinctions between soldiers and civilians may

be blurred and war
would bring mass deaths.
6
Theoretically or legally, it would be dif®cult to justify a
war having massacre as a main component, a highly politicized
war like the
Korean War may be a typical case. For this reason, reviewing
the mass killings
during the Korean War would be instructive for clarifying the
existing concept of
massacre and the comparative study about the wartime mass
killings or political
massacres (policide) during conventional war or warlike
situations.
7
Unfortunately, most of the records of the Korean War atrocities,
if any exist,
have either been lost or deliberately destroyed over the course
of the long Cold
DONG CHOON KIM
524
War, just as those of other cases have been. Moreover, the
majority of Korean War
documents have not yet been released. Most victims and
eyewitnesses to the
massacres have already died. In spite of these dif®culties, I will
attempt to

reconstruct the untold story of the Korean War massacres by
using recently
disclosed materials about it and testimonies of Korean
survivors. Even though
most of the nightmarish stories have not yet reached
Westerners, South Koreans,
many of whom have been forced to keep silent for more than
half century, are now
raising their voices about their traumatic experiences.
The political character of the Korean WarÐcontextual
considerations
The Korean War both as internal con¯ict and international war
Since the Korean peninsula still remains divided and the two
Koreas stand
antagonistic to one another, the Korean War may be seen as an
ongoing situation
rather than as a past incident. This ongoing antagonism may be
the primary
obstacle for the two Koreas to overcome in reaching a common
ground in their
historical characterizations of the Korean War. Among the
opposing viewpoints
that have hindered dialogue between the two Koreas, one of the
abiding questions
of foremost importance is `̀ who initiated the war and who is
responsible for the
tragedy and the sufferings caused by the war?'' Traditionalists
or neo-tradition-
alists among US historians have generally maintained that North
Korea, under
Stalin's sponsorship, attacked the South ®rst. In particular, new
information from
post-Soviet Russia bolstered the theory of Moscow-centered

conspiracies as the
catalyst for North Korea's invasion of the South. As these
viewpoints have been
regarded as heavily imbued with a Cold War worldview, they
intended tacitly to
both demand that the communist bloc assume responsibility for
every tragedy
caused by the Korean War and also to justify American
involvement in a `̀ just
war.'' On the other hand, Western revisionist scholars focused
on American
responsibility and the internal origin of the Korean War.
8
Among them, John
Merill and Bruce Cumings were the ®rst to focus on the
political character of the
Korean War, uncovering documents attesting to atrocities that
occurred both
before and during the war.
As it is said that the Korean War originated from the
combination of the external
clash of American and Soviet policy towards East-Asia and the
internal con¯icts in
the Korean peninsula, it is undeniable that America's foreign
policy after World
War II played a decisive role in shaping the regional politics of
East-Asia. On the
Korean peninsula, the question of who would disarm the
Japanese imperial troops
was a pivotal issue that was connected to the future of an
independent Korea after
the collapse of Japanese imperialism. Thus, the US and Soviet
Union's separate

disarming of the Japanese troops according to their position
above or below the
38th parallel was the de facto beginning of the Korean War. In
this respect, the
Korean War might be interpreted as the logical extension of US
and Soviet
occupation policy. Had US and Soviet troops not entered the
Korean peninsula and
FORGOTTEN WAR, FORGOTTEN MASSACRES
525
not picked preferential leaders, the post-colonial civil con¯ict
over nation-building
might not have developed into a full-scale war.
Particularly, the fact that the US military government favored
the restoration of
Japanese-trained military leaders and police instead of their
removal ignited the
political con¯ict in Korea after 1945. The Truman Doctrine of
1947 had
inaugurated the US postwar policy that juxtaposed the `̀ free
world'' against the
`̀ communist world.'' His decision to aid Greece, Turkey, and
later Western
Europe expressed his `̀ containment'' policy against world
communism. In East-
Asia, this policy expressed itself in a naked counter-insurgency
policy and the
revival of Japanese capitalism as a `̀ democratic basis'' for
containing the Soviet
threat and Chinese communist `̀ rebels.'' As Johnson mentioned,

South Korea was
the ®rst place in the postwar world where the Americans set up
a dictatorial
anticommunist government.
9
Like the Vietnam War, the Korean War was a result
of US containment policy, even though it was ignited by the
North Korean
invasion. This background explains why the Korean War,
though initially a sort of
civil war, eventually developed into a war between the two
blocs.
From another perspective however, North Korea's invasion in
June 1950 may
be regarded as a ®nal event in the sequence of post-colonial
internal con¯ict
towards the uni®cation of Korea. With the withdrawal of
American troops from
1948 to the summer of 1949, violent political con¯ict in
southern Korea had
already intensi®ed into a bloody civil war such that it was only
a matter of time
before that civil war would lead to a full-scale war between
South and North
Korea.
10
As the leaders of both halves of the Korean peninsula were
desperate to
unite the country before 1950, the withdrawal of US forces
ignited the fever of
uni®cation by any means. Considering the international and

ideological context of
the Korean War, it was highly probable that the war would bring
massive civilian
casualties. According to this reasoning, the Korean War was,
®rst of all, supposed
to be the continuation of ®erce political con¯ict over nation
building. The situation
that Koreans faced after 1945 was a combination of war and
revolution. It should
be pointed out that the 38th parallel was more an imaginary line
than a hard and
fast border between states. The fact that in the South more than
100,000 Koreans
were already killed from August 1945 to the outbreak of the war
of June 1950 and
that about 20,000 suspected communist were in jail can support
this argument.
11
When the total war began, there had never before been a major
war like the Korean
War, in which battle lines were so unstable and warfare swept
south and north
several times within a national territory. The Korean War was
doomed to be
guerilla warfare, waged among and, to some extent, by the
entire population of
Korea. Such a war invariably led to what John Horne called `̀ an
enormous number
of civilian victims.''
12
As has been often discussed, the fact that Truman decided to
dispatch US troops

against the North Korean attack seemed to be a drastic switch
from their
ambiguous position before June 1950 regarding the defense of
South Korea. The
discourse of `̀ police action,'' which Truman dubbed at the time
of dispatching the
US army to strike back against North Korea's invasion,
13
well conveys the
rationale of US intervention in the Korean War. This rationale
was also used to
DONG CHOON KIM
526
preemptively legitimize the possible civilian casualties that
were sure to come.
The US fought under the justi®cation that they went to Korea
on a kind of
anticommunist `̀ crusade,'' characterizing the North Koreans as `̀
subversives,
bandits, and rebels,'' whose defeat in war would serve to stop
the aggressive
designs of Soviet `̀ imperialism.'' Their intervention, executed
under UN auspices,
was authorized as the `̀ United command under the United
States'' by the UN
Security Council to defend South Korea. The ROK also yielded
its troops to the
US controlled command. Thus, General Macarthur became
Commander-in-chief

of all land, sea and air forces of the Korean Republic. On June
25, 1950, American
troops took charge of not only military operations but of all
Korean security
affairs.
The intervention of US threatened the survival of the new born
Chinese
communist government. After US troops reached the 39th
parallel of the Korean
peninsula, China also reacted, with massive force. In January
1951, the war
became a Sino-US war and its nature was transformed. The
armistice agreement of
July 27, 1953, was ®nally signed by General Mark Clark, the
UN commander;
Kim Il Sung of the Korean People's Army; and General Peng
Dehuai, commander
of the Chinese People's Volunteers. Since then, the US military
has controlled the
ROK army, leaving a lingering legacy in the minds of many that
when the Korean
people's destiny fell on the military command of foreign forces,
the ROK
government could do nothing to safeguard their people. Lacking
any security, they
were destined to be victims of that hot war in the midst of the
Cold War.
For the US commanders, the Korean War was a fundamentally
different kind of
warfare than the battles of World War II in Europe. The Korean
War may stand as
the ®rst test case for US troops found suddenly engaged in a
Third World civil war
without fully understanding its historical background. As the

US government
taught their soldiers that those who attacked them were all `̀
communists,'' any
Korean civilians who did not welcome them might be suspected
as enemies,
foreshadowing the later case of My Lai in Vietnam. To South
Korean political
leaders who had been entirely dependent on American military
and economic
assistance to preserve their precarious regime, North Korea's
invasion was a
deadly crisis, because US had pulled its troops out of South
Korea in 1949
irresponsibly without any ®rm promise to protect them in case
of emergency. This
life and death situation that South Korean leaders faced upon
the communists'
invasion at the beginning of the Korean War may have forced
them to resort to
extreme measures of exterminating internal enemies who had
been believed to
rebel them in cooperation with the North Korean troops. In this
way, both the
international context and internal politics at the beginning of
the Korean War
created the dangerous conditions that made massive killings a
sadly unavoidable
probability.
Counter-revolutionary mass killings preceding the Korean War
Genocides or massacres in underdeveloped countries are an all
too frequent by-
product of the nation-building projects in which revolutionary
fever and counter-

527
revolutionary violence coexisted in a post-colonial power
vacuum. Between 1947
and 1950 the southern part of the Korean peninsula was shaken
by violent political
con¯ict as the ex-Japanese collaborators, with the assistance of
US forces, tried to
defend their vested interests against the nationalists and the
communists by any
means. The Korean peninsula at that time was positioned in a
situation similar to
that of Greece.
14
It was not only communists, but also those nationalists who
fought against imperialism or fascism who were labeled as `̀
communists'' and
forced to go underground to wage guerilla warfare. Contrarily,
ex-collaborators of
the Japanese were revived and given positions of authority as
proxies of America's
anti-communist world policy. Through this anticommunist
military campaign in
the early stage of the Cold war, many `̀ pure'' nationalists were
convicted as
`̀ puppets'' of the Soviet Union and eventually removed by
extreme rightists. As in
the cases of Taiwan and Greece,
15

the coming to power of the rightists resulted in a
`̀ white terror'' followed by widespread repression, torture and
massacres. We can
view the series of Korean War massacres that happened from
1946 to 1953 in this
context.
The Cheju Insurrection and Yosu-SunCheon Rebellion in 1948
in southern
Korea may have been a turning point where political con¯ict
developed into a civil
war with accompanying massacres. When left-wing activists ¯ed
to Halla
Mountain in Cheju, the ROK army, under the consultation of the
KMAG (Korean
Military Advisory Group), burned villages and killed civilians
who were suspected
of collaborating with the communist guerillas. Even though the
estimated guerrilla
force in Cheju Island was less than 500, the number of civilians
killed through the
rooting out operations of the ROK army and Korean police was
estimated to be
more than 30,000.
16
Similar massacres continued around Yosu, where a band of
left-wing soldiers openly refused to serve the counterinsurgency
mission for
subduing the Cheju Insurrection. This unorganized rebellion of
the ROK army's
Fourteenth Regiment in Yosu was soon suppressed under the
direction of the
KMAG, but the operation was also accompanied by widespread

violence by
rightists against innocent civilians, as was the case in Cheju.
Given that the South Korean armed forces were trained by the
KMAG and that
their equipment was completely dependent on the US, `̀ the
withdrawal of US
troops in June of 1949 threatened the very survival of the US-
supported ROK.''
17
When US troops withdrew from South Korea, leaving only a
handful of KMAG
soldiers, a civil war seemed highly probable. This situation
made the President of
South Korea take recourse in `̀ extreme measures,'' namely `̀
exterminating''
guerillas and political dissidents.
18
From the winter of 1948 to June of 1950,
massive `̀ rooting out'' operations were waged against rebels in
the mountainous
areas of South Korea. When even the guerrillas attacked a
police station or killed
rightist ®gures in a village, combined forces of both police and
troops would
partake in reprisals twice or three times as severe against
residents who were
believed to have served the guerillas.
Rhee's Korea has often been viewed as a reactionary police
state, bolstered by
vicious police and landlords, because its maintenance depended

exclusively on the
brutality of the police. When some of their members were killed
by a surprise
DONG CHOON KIM
528
attack by guerrillas, corrupt police and untrained soldiers often
sought revenge on
innocent civilians living in isolated areas, reporting to the top
command that they
succeeded in cleansing the base of `̀ communists.'' South
Korea's President Rhee
also dehumanized `̀ communists'' as the enemy of human
society. He used the
discourse of `̀ exterminating the traitors,'' `̀ rooting out the
Reds,'' and `̀ removing
the Soviet puppet,'' legitimizing the secret killing of left-wing
activists. The
vengeful reprisals of Rhee's police and soldiers on those who
cooperated with
guerilla force were relentless. While the guerrilla force was
rendered nearly
inactive through effective military operations by ROK troops,
North Korea's
invasion on June 25, 1950, constituted another opportunity
when the weakened
guerrilla forces could revitalize their troops and, at the same
time, restarted the
unrestricted massacres against the internal enemies on a
national level.
We can categorize the mass killings that happened during the

entire war period
(from the June 25 of 1950 to the July 27 of 1953) into three
types. The ®rst type
contains those cases committed in direct confrontation with
military forces in the
course of military operations. US troops shot, bombed, and
bombarded Korean
civilians as a part of their combat activity. ROK troops also
killed hundreds of
thousands of civilians in villages that were suspected of serving
the North Korean
force. The second type would be the ROK's executions of `̀
suspicious civilians''
or political prisoners who were expected to rebel or threaten the
ROK government.
Though most of the victims were `̀ suspected communists''
living in South Korea,
North Korea also killed many POWs and rightists when they
retreated toward the
North. The third type is comprised of state-sponsored political
or personal
reprisals committed by irregular youth groups and civilians
themselves.
Oftentimes, when a family member was killed in a village by a
band of youths
under the authority of the occupying force, the victim group
would avenged itself
by killing all family members of their foe when the attackers
eventually retreated.
This sort of village-level mutual revenge occurred at every
corner of the Korean
peninsula during the war. These three types of mass killings
occurred almost
simultaneously, but in different places and different occasions,
primarily in the
early stages of the Korean War.

Mass killings during the Korean WarÐWho killed whom, and
under what
context?
Military operations
US forces. Under the aegis of `̀ maintaining and restoring
international peace,''
the US decided to mobilize their soldiers onto the Korean
peninsula when
North Korea's armed forces attacked South Korea. The US
Eighth Army
soldiers who stumbled into action in Korea at the beginning of
July 1950 to
repel the `̀ communists'' were an ill-prepared lot, pulled away
from their job of
occupying Japan. The US soldiers were composed of `̀ boys in
their teens and
early twenties who couldn't understand the nature and immense
complexities of
the problems in Asia.''
19
Nobody taught them that the Korean peninsula had
529
been in turmoil before the war; they were only told that the
Soviet Union was
behind North Korea's attack.

To further complicate matters, the North's surprise attack
generated a severe
refugee problem, clogging roads with civilians surging to the
south. Fearing North
Korean in®ltration of these ranks of refugees, US leadership
and soldiers as well
panicked. Under these circumstances, the US Eighth Army, the
highest command
in Korea, issued unreasonable orders to stop all Korean civilian
refugees and `̀ ®re
at everyone trying to cross the lines.'' The panic and ill-
preparedness of the US
commanders might be partly responsible for the savagery that
followedÐblotting
out whole villages and shooting randomly into crowds of
refugees, among whom
North Koreans were suspected to be hiding. In 1999, the AP and
BBC discovered
`̀ top secret'' papers showing that US commanders issued orders
to forces under
their control to `̀ [k]ill them all.''
20
The No Gun Ri incident, which might mark one
of the largest single massacres of civilians by American forces
in the twentieth
century, occurred under this condition of confusion and panic of
the early days of
the war.
After killing civilians at No Gun Ri, US soldiers went on to
demolish two
bridges in North KyungSang province, Ouguan bridge and
Dugsung bridge, that
were jammed with refugees, including women and children.

Directives ordering
US soldiers to treat the refugees `̀ enemies'' might enable such
indiscriminate
shooting and bombing by American soldiers. Though it is
understandable that
these inexperienced soldiers could hardly distinguish their
enemies from ordinary
citizens, we have no records indicating that disguised North
Korean columns
attacked US soldiers. In the end, it is clear that the great
uncertainty of the combat
situation and the extreme fears of the soldiers who felt they
were surrounded by an
enemy disguised as civilians helped push American soldiers to
commit
unrestrained killings.
21
However, neither panic nor the confusion of US
commanders can explain the continued killings of Korean
civilians.
For example, on 11 July 1950, the US Air Force bombed the
peaceful Iri railway
station located far south of the combat line and killed about 300
civilians,
including South Korean government of®cials. US warplanes
also bombed and
strafed gathered inhabitants or refugees in Masan, Haman,
Sachon, Pohang,
Andong, Yechon, Gumi, Danyang and other regions. Roughly 50
to 400 civilians
were killed at each site and several times of that number were
severely wounded.
In dozens of villages across southern South Korea, US planes

engaged in repeated
low-level stra®ng runs of the `̀ people-in white,''
22
In the southeast seaside city of
Pohang in August of 1950, US naval artillery bombarded the
calm villages and
killed more than 400 civilians. In addition, another ®fty-four
separate cases of
attacks equivalent to No Gun Ri are logged with South Korean
authorities but have
not yet been investigated.
23
It has been known that `̀ saturation bombing'' by American air
forces and naval
bombardment destroyed some North Korean cities like Wonsan
and Pyangang,
leaving them almost completely in rubble with no more than a
few buildings
standing. As British journalist Reginald Thompson testi®ed,
civilians died in the
rubble and ashes of their homes. Alan Winnington, a
correspondent for the British
DONG CHOON KIM
530
Daily Worker, when he saw how thousands of tons of bombs
had obliterated towns
and resulted in thousands of civilian casualties testi®ed that `̀ it

was far worse than
the worst the Nazis ever did.''
24
According to the witnesses, US air and ground
forces shot at children, women, and aged people who were
easily distinguishable
as unarmed civilians. North Korean authorities have long
accused American
troops of `̀ criminal acts'' before and after the outbreak of the
Korean War.
25
They
maintained that the US army killed more than a million innocent
civilians by
bombing, shooting, and the use of napalm or chemical weapons.
26
While it must
be acknowledged that the North has politically exploited such
claims, the facts on
the ground force us to not discount their veracity. For example,
though the No Gun
Ri incident was reported to the world through the AP's report in
1999, this incident
was ®rst reported by North Korean newspapers and of®cially
used as good
materials for propaganda with other numerable cases.
27
In every aspect of the

warÐAmerica's use of napalm, indiscriminate bombing, and the
shooting of
`̀ voiceless'' civilians of the Third World, the Korean War
preceded the Indochina
War in many tragic ways.
Another factor that may have precipitated these mass killings by
American
troops may be related to the combination of deep racial
prejudices of US soldiers
on one hand and the relative isolation of the incidents on the
other. With total
ignorance of Asia, young soldiers regarded Koreans (and
Chinese) as `̀ people
without history.'' They usually called Koreans `̀ gooks,'' a term
used during World
War II for Paci®c Islanders.
28
The fact that many Korean women in the villages
were often raped in front of their husbands and parents has not
been a secret among
those who experienced the Korean War.
29
It was known that several women were
raped before being shot at No Gun Ri. Some eyewitnesses say
that US soldiers
played with their lives like boys sadistically playing with ¯ies.
30
On the other
hand, the `̀ total isolation'' of the Korean situation from the

Western public;
McCarthyism also emboldened US commanders to issue
indiscriminate com-
mands which would invariably bring mass death upon innocent
citizens. With
McCarthyism at its peak, US authorities tightly controlled the
Western media and
nobody could raise doubts as to the legitimacy of the US's
military intervention or
the US's responsibility for civilian deaths. Unlike other cases of
genocide before
and after the Korean War, it was not just …
06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 1 9/19/12 10:27 AM

06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Modern East Asia
06499_fm_rev04.indd 3 9/11/12 10:50 AM
06499_fm_rev04.indd 4 9/11/12 10:50 AM

Modern East Asia:
From 1600
A Cultural, Social, and Political History
Third Edition
PATRICIA EBREY
University of Washington—Seattle
ANNE WALTHALL
University of California—Irvine
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 5 9/11/12 10:50 AM

06499_fm_rev04.indd 2 9/11/12 10:50 AM
This is an electronic version of the print textbook. Due to
electronic rights restrictions,
some third party content may be suppressed. Editorial review
has deemed that any suppressed
content does not materially affect the overall learning
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06499_fm_rev04.indd 6 9/12/12 3:24 PM

Maps and Figures xv
Preface xvii
Conventions xxi
(1600–1800) 270
PART FOUR
The Age of Western!Imperialism
(1800–1900) 305
Century (1800–1895) 363
PART FIVE
East Asia in the Modern!World 381
(1900–1931) 382
Chapter 23 Modernizing Korea

and Colonial Rule (1896–1945) 400
(1900–1927) 415
(1927–1949) 439
PART SIX
Intensified Contact and!
Divergent Paths 455
(1931–1964) 456
Chapter 27 China Under Mao
(1949–1976) 472
Chapter 28 Korea
Chapter 30 China Since Mao
Index I-1
B R I E F C O N T E N T S
vii
06499_fm_rev04.indd 7 9/11/12 10:50 AM

06499_fm_rev04.indd 8 9/11/12 10:50 AM
Maps and Figures xv
Preface xvii
Conventions xxi
Yi Seonggye’s Rise to Power 247
Kings and Yangban Confucian!Officials 249
Dynastic Decline and the Japanese Invasion 251

Kangxi 274
BIOGRAPHY: Jiang Chun, Salt Merchant 275
Qianlong 276
The Banner System 277
DOCUMENTS: Fang Bao’s “Random Notes from
Prison” 278
Contacts with Europe 280
Social and Cultural Crosscurrents 281
The Conservative Turn 281
The Dream of Red Mansions 281
MATERIAL CULTURE: Jin Nong’s Inscribed
Portrait of a Buddhist Monk 282
The Less Advantaged and the
Disaffected 283
Tokugawa Settlement (Seventeenth Century) 288
Government 289
Agricultural Transformations and the
Commercial Revolution 291
MATERIAL CULTURE: Night Soil 294
Urban Life and Culture 294
DOCUMENTS: Ihara Saikaku’s “Sensible Advice
on!Domestic Economy” 296
Intellectual Trends 296

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