The Contingent Rise of Divergent Koreas
Korea’s modern history is part of an ongoing reality, with the prevailing balance of power affecting historiography and vice versa. Impassioned debates on what happened in the past century are in progress because “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” as George Orwell quipped.
Different power groups in the Korean peninsula promote seemingly incompatible narratives to establish legitimacy and blame opponents for treason. One camp in the South Korean political landscape describes the other as descendants of pro-Japanese collaborators, an insult, which, in the latter’s eyes, is a corollary of the romanticization of Pyongyang aristocracy’s resistance past under Chinese command. Bruce Cumings, a history professor at Chicago University, revived the North Korean perspective, to portray the Korean War as a civil war between patriots and traitors. According to Henry Kissinger’s alternative viewpoint, the unfinalized conflict represents a consequence of Stalin mistakenly deciding to pursue imperialist projects through Kim Il Sung. As many within and without Korea believe, sex workers, known as “comfort women,” were enslaved into prostitution serving Japanese troops, but, according to Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law School professor, they were indentured servants, with not a single Korean girl being mobilized under coercion. As the conventional wisdom says, Japanese exploitation resulted in declining living standards in colonial Korea, while in recent revisionism, Japanese incursion reversed the Malthusian deterioration of the pre-colonial centuries. These three debates have a great potential to threaten the diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea, hence intensify the confrontation between America and China.
This book presents structured narratives of the Korean divergence that are controversy-driven, evidence-based and theory-guided. Historiography of modern Korea is charged not just politically but also emotionally because the Japanese occupation left deep scars on Koreans’ self-esteem and because the English-speaking world fought cruel battles with Japan during WWII. This book represents the outcome of conscious efforts to overcome bitterness.
As the accumulation of quantitative evidence indicates, a large majority of Koreans enjoyed rising incomes and expanding opportunities until the Japanese Imperial Military rose, destroying nascent democracy in Japan, taking the entire empire into WWII, transforming a market into a command system, neutralizing the income gains made in the preceding decades, and setting up military brothels. As scrutiny of testimonial evidence shows, the documented instances of coerced enlistment of comfort women were typically authentic rather than contrived for financial reparations. The two Cold War superpowers established client states, instituting former independence activists of their choosing, neither of whom could afford to dispense with colonial elites with a collaborationist past in their quest for the reunification of the peninsula. Pyongyang implemented land reforms, prompting the South to follow suit, which sharply reduced inequality, but contrary to what many with opposing political inclinations have asserted, lowered productivity. Impatient to overthrow adversaries militarily, the leaders of the two Koreas escalated confrontation, embroiling the patron states and transforming a civil war into an international war, although Russian archives left little doubt that North Korea moved first. As recent statistical evidence shows, North Korea, which had a significant income advantage over South Korea in 1945, quickly lost ground against its rival in the following decades primarily due to the inefficiency caused by Stalinist interventions, while incomes grew rapidly in South Korea because U.S. pressure and democratic transition forced the state to deregulate.
Well-publicized nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula have been often cited as evidence that “institutions matter.” This book contends that the Korean divergence was a contingent event, ultimately driven by geopolitics, which determined institutions, policymaking, and the defense burden. The post-1945 reversal of fortunes between the two Koreas resulted less from the inherent flaws of the command system than from the very different fortunes due to their establishment by the two distinct patron states with vastly different capacities. Had South Korea been forced to bear as high a defense burden as North Korea and to adopt the Stalinist strategy to boost self-sufficiency in munitions supply, the country’s living standards today would differ trivially from those prevailing in the North. This amounts to rejecting the Great Man Theory of the South Korean growth miracle, which represents either South Korean policymakers’ act of hubris or a flawed inference based on apophenia, namely, the tendency to perceive causation between unrelated events. South Korea’s growth miracle would not have happened had Park Chung Hee been allowed to persist in his industrial policy in the absence of U.S. intervention to establish the country as a showcase of the democratic market economy.
Myung Soo Cha 