Destination Hong Kong: The Geopolitics of South Korean Espionage Films in the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Market Potential ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Developmental States ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract As the apparent progeny of Cold War politics in the West, espionage films witnessed unprecedented popularity around the globe in the 1960s. With the success of Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964)—along with French, Italian, and German copycats—in Asia, film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea recognized the market potential and embarked on churning out their own James Bond-mimetic espionage films in the late 1960s. Since the regional political sphere has always been multifaceted, however, each country approached genre conventions with its own interpretation. In the US-driven Cold War political, ideological, and economic sphere, developmental states in the region, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, vigorously adopted anti-communist doctrine to guard and uphold their militant dictatorships. Under this political atmosphere in the regional sphere, cultural sectors in each nation-state, including cinema, voluntarily or compulsorily served as an apparatus to strengthen the state’s ideological principles. While the Cold War politics that drive the narrative in the American and European films is conspicuously absent in Hong Kong espionage films, South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, explicitly promulgated the ideological principles of their apparent enemies, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in their representative espionage films. This article casts a critical eye over South Korea–initiated inter-Asian coproduction of espionage films produced during the time, with particular reference to South Korea–Hong Kong coproduction of SOS Hong Kong (SOS Hongk’ong) and Special Agent X-7 (Sun’gan ŭn yŏngwŏnhi), both produced and released in 1966.

Transcending the Past: Singing and the Lingering Cold War in the Korean Christian Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.

Mass Immunization in East Asia and Global Health, 1960–80

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Rural Health ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Mass Immunization ◽  
The Republic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter investigates the role of mass immunization in Chinese medical diplomacy programs during the 1960s and 1970s. While most scholarship has stressed the influence of barefoot doctor and other paraprofessional training programs in the emergence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a global model for rural health services, mass immunization programs in China had measurable results—in terms of lowered incidence of disease—that helped legitimize these training efforts and the nation's program of rural health care more broadly. Ultimately, the global popularization of Chinese public health was a consequence of regional competition within East Asia. During the Cold War era, the PRC used medical aid to foreign countries to compete for power and influence with the Republic of China on Taiwan, where institutions and personnel that the Nationalist Party brought to the island after 1948 built upon practices established during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). The involvement of Taiwan in medical diplomacy reflected the expansionist agendas of its Western allies in the Cold War as well as competition with the PRC for recognition as the legitimate government of mainland China.

Departure and Repatriation as Cold War Dissensus: Domestic Ethnography in Korean Documentary

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-457
Author(s):  
Jinhee Park
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Given

Abstract This article examines autobiographic documentaries about families that expose “dissensus” in the mapping of transborder migration and diasporic desire that were the results of the Cold War in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Jae-hee Hong (dir. My Father’s Emails) and Yong-hi Yang (dir. Dear Pyongyang and Goodbye Pyongyang) document the ongoing Cold War in their fathers’ histories through their position as a “familial other,” who embodies both dissensus and intimacy. Hong reveals that anticommunism in South Korean postwar nation building reverberated in the private realm. Yang documents her Zainichi father, who sent his sons to North Korea during the Repatriation Campaign in Japan. The anticommunist father in South Korea (Hong’s) and the communist father in Japan (Yang’s) engendered family migration with contrasting motivations, departure from and return to North Korea, respectively. Juxtaposing these two opposite ideologies in family histories, as well as juxtaposing the filmmakers’ dissonance with the given ideologies in domestic space, provide the aesthetic form for “dissensus.” The politics of aesthetics in domestic ethnography manifests in that the self and the Other are inextricably interlocked because of the reciprocity of the filmmaker and the communist or anticommunist subject.

Leading the Way: The United Kingdom's financial and trade relations with Socialist China, 1949–1966

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERTO PERUZZI
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
British Colony ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThis article aims to deepen scholarly understanding of the special political and economic connection between Britain and Socialist China during the 1950s and the 1960s. After 1949, the British government had substantive reasons to preserve a link with Beijing, despite the unfolding of the Cold War. First, British assets in China were numerous. Second, the Crown colony of Hong Kong was an indispensable strategic enclave, although militarily indefensible. Third, the Foreign Office considered that Asia should represent an exception to unquestioned British loyalty to the Atlantic alliance, since the United Kingdom needed to prove that it was able to represent and preserve Commonwealth interests in the area. The article will point out that the United Kingdom maintained a privileged role as the main trading partner of the People's Republic of China (PRC) outside the Socialist bloc, thanks to the financial and commercial role played by Hong Kong. This is proved through an analysis of the fate of British financial institutions in China, which represented a favourable exception in the bleak scenario of the PRC nationalization process, as well as of the industrial development of the British colony, which was based on importing food and labour from the mainland, while serving as a financial hub in support of the PRC economy.

From Seoul to Paris

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-602
Author(s):  
Katri Kauhanen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
National Council ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Korean Literature ◽  
International Council ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Cold War

The Korean National Council of Women, a women’s organization established in 1959, has received criticism in Korean literature for its collaboration with the authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea for decades. This article, however, argues for a different kind of interpretation. The Korean National Council of Women came together to join the International Council of Women, a major international women’s organization that was looking for new affiliations in the recently decolonized parts of Asia and Africa in the midst of Cold War competition. Thus, we should view the existence of the Korean National Council of Women in the framework of transnational women’s activism and how the Cold War shaped it. After outlining the connections made between South Korean women and the International Council of Women, the article analyzes the projects proposed by the Korean National Council of Women under the anti-communist authoritarian regime. Based on archival research in South Korea and Belgium, this article argues that instead of following rules from above, the Korean National Council of Women negotiated a way to combine the advancement of women’s issues with the development of the nation. The International Council of Women, while criticizing communist women for their close relationship with the state, celebrated the achievements its South Korean affiliate made as a state-registered organization.

Cold War Mnemonics: History, Melancholy, and Landscape in South Korean Films of the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-412
Author(s):  
Hyun Seon Park
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article examines the way that cinematic mnemonics of 1960s South Korean films ciphers the heterogeneous and conflicting experiences regarding two entangled wars: the Korean War and the Cold War. In a close reading of Kim Suyong’s Mist (An’gae, 1967) and Yi Sŏnggu’s The General’s Mustache (Changgun ŭi suyŏm, 1968), the article argues for the multifaceted aesthetics of Cold War mnemonics, which illuminates a binding and unbinding technology of affective memories in which the traumatic experience of the Korean war parallels the dominant narrative of Cold War historiography. In Mist and The General’s Mustache, historical trauma and the experience of loss take up important positions in relation to melancholic landscape and mnemonic devices. Visualizing the interstice between melancholy and mourning, between memory and history, and between landscape and interiority through the devices of flashback, widescreen, montage, and metanarrative structure, the exploration of mnemonic technologies is inextricably linked with the postwar Korean subject’s dual efforts to remember historical loss and to incorporate shameful memories. While Mist shows the male protagonist’s short visit to his countryside hometown, during which he is troubled by memories of the past and, thus, his encounter with the unfinished work of mourning, The General’s Mustache, beginning with a photojournalist’s suspicious death, assembles the fragmentary pieces of modern Korean history’s secrets through multiple frames of testimony and confession. Produced during the time of Cold War turmoil as well as at the height of global modernization, these films release alternative thinking about time, memory, and history, asking us to remember what is left behind in Cold War historiography.

Anticommunism as regime legitimisation strategy in South Korea in the 1960s

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Natalia Matveeva
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Military Regime ◽  
American Military ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Park Chung Hee ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

Since its founding in 1948, South Korea existed on the forefront of the Cold War divide between the two rival blocs. The 'communist threat' was never far from the South Korean leaders' minds, yet it was not until the 1960s that anti-communism was turned into a strategy for regime legitimisation. In 1961, as a result of a coup d'état, a military regime came to power. Its first and most important goal was to legitimise itself both domestically and internationally. General Park Chung-hee, the leader of the military junta, chose anticommunism as part of his strategy. It was deployed to convince the US of the new regime's commitment to defending the country against any possible threat; to prevent American military and economic withdrawal from Korea, and to justify the intensive drive for rapid economic development, for which the general later became renowned. This article argues that South Korean anticommunism in the early 1960s was a complex and conscious strategy aimed at establishing the foundations for the new military regime and ensuring its continued survival. Based on Park Chung-hee's speeches and books and the available archival sources, the article illustrates the way in which anticommunism was presented and how it was used as part of the regime's legitimising strategy.

Bilateralism, Multilateralism, and the Making of an Alliance Consensus

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-56
Author(s):  
Andrew Yeo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Over Time

Chapter 2 recounts the origins of bilateralism in Asia and the legitimization of the US-led hub-and-spokes system among Asian elites during the Cold War. It also outlines the rise of ASEAN in the 1960s. Exploring postwar US alliances forged with the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Thailand, I demonstrate how material threats, institutions, and ideas interact to produce an alliance consensus among political elites in Asia. Despite periodic domestic opposition to US alliances, and the weakness of ASEAN, the hub-and-spokes system and ASEAN become entrenched over time.

Monstrous Science: The Great Monster Yonggari (1967) and Cold War Science in 1960s South Korea

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-421
Author(s):  
Chung-kang Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Success ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Nuclear Disaster ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Korean Film ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThis essay explores the cinematic Cold War in 1960s South Korea, focusing on a popular film, The Great Monster Yonggari (Taegoesu Yonggari, 1967), and its transnational production, circulation, and responses. Initially produced as a children’s movie by Korean film director Kim Kidŏk, Yonggari had great success at the box office in South Korea. Later, with cooperation and international marketing by the Japanese company Toei, this film was introduced by American International Pictures television in the United States in 1969 with the title Yongary, Monster from the Deep. The transnational cultural nexus in the production and distribution of The Great Monster Yonggari obviously reflects the global Cold War politics among the nations in the “free world.” While paying attention to this ideological aspect of the film and the centrality of science as a national developmental agenda in South Korea, the essay also looks closely at the anxieties behind the Cold War science within Yonggari, as the “silenced” nuclear disaster of Japan started to be publicly spoken in South Korean media in the mid-1960s. The film reminded Koreans of the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of East Asian “Hot Wars” that were hidden behind monstrous Cold War science.

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