Tense Times in Korea

 

American and South Korean troops began military exercises in the Sea of Japan after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the Korean peninsula and imposed sanctions on North Korea for its role (which it denies) in sinking a South Korean naval ship in March 2010. Ted Thornton, who is chair of NMH’s history and social science department and teaches the class Asia Rising, interprets the situation.

 

 

 

Historian Bruce Cumings, an American expert on North Korea, argues that the ferocity of the American campaign against North Korea in the early 1950s is a chief reason for the bellicosity of Kim Jong Il’s regime toward the United States and South Korea. U.S. troops, Cumings says, massacred North Korean civilians in large numbers, and U.S. aircraft dropped more bombs and napalm in Korea than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II.

 

The relationship between North and South Korea has been complicated ever since. The ceasefire that ended the Korean War on July 27, 1953, never led to a formal treaty, so technically, the two countries are still at war. There have been attempts to improve their relationship: the “Sunshine Policy” launched by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in the late 1990s; the North-South summits of 2000 and 2007; and following the death last year of Kim Dae Jung, North Korea sent a delegation to the South carrying a message of condolence and a pledge to make progress on shared economic ventures and the reunions of families separated since the war. Yet the North and South have continued to clash periodically, and 2010 has been very tense, with the Cheonan incident and the subsequent decision by the South to suspend trade relations. 

 

Many in the South dream of reunification. Others fear that the resulting economic burden the South would have to shoulder could add up to $900 billion. Few seem to want to move quickly toward reunification. 

 

North Korea made statements that the military exercises happening east of the Korean peninsula could lead to “sacred war” and nuclear retaliation. This sounds scary. How serious a danger is it?

 

 

The DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) separating North and South Korea was a major fault line in the Cold War. It continues to function as one of the areas—Taiwan is another—where the U.S. and China challenge each other for influence.

 

China appears to be growing more worried and restive about North Korea. While China has little love for Kim Jong Il, it fears even more the tidal wave of North Korean refugees it thinks would flood across the border if and when the Kim regime collapses. China is also terrified of the danger from North Korean “loose nukes” if the ruling elite in that country breaks apart. China received Kim Jong Il with mixed feelings when he traveled to Beijing in May to ask for financial help. 

 

 

During the famine of the mid-1990s, at least a million North Koreans starved to death—five percent of the population. They could see what was coming as early as 1992, when the government began promoting the national “virtue” of eating only two meals a day. Then, last November, North Korea enacted a disastrous currency reform that wiped out the savings of many people. The government later admitted the reform was a mistake, and in March publicly executed the official in charge, Pak Nam-gi.

 

There also is growing evidence of splits in the tiny ruling elite that surrounds Kim Jong Il, due in part to doubts about his health (he suffered a stroke in 2008) and to the question of who will succeed him. The country has reached the point where the ruling elite are losing control.

 

Many North Koreans have learned how to survive off the official grid, trading in back-alley “skeleton markets.” Information about the outside world—most immediately about China, the big, wealthy neighbor to the north—is getting into the country via visitors, along with DVDs and cell phones smuggled in from South Korea. After the Korean War, the president Kim Il Sung (Kim Jong Il’s father) set in place a policy of juche, which is Korean for self-reliance, or “master of one’s self.” But now North Koreans, after the enormous hardships they have endured, are less likely to buy into the regime’s posture of isolating the country from the rest of the world.