Gender Politics in Early Cold War North Korea: National Division, Conscription, and Militarized Motherhood from the Late 1940s to 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Suji Choi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
National Division

Ideology Was A Uniform to Be Taken On and Off: An Anti-Communist Prisoner’s Survival from Manchuria to Korea to India

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-306
Author(s):  
Sunwoo Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
United Nations ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
Japanese Occupation ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Chi Ki-ch’ŏl’s story reveals a man not driven by ideology, but buffeted by it. He began adulthood as a Korean exile in Manchuria, where the Japanese occupation army conscripted him. After Japan’s defeat in August 1945, he joined a Korean contingent of the Chinese Communist Army and fought in the Chinese Civil War. His unit later repatriated to North Korea, where it joined the invasion of South Korea on 25 June 1950. When U.S.-led forces of the United Nations shattered that invasion in September, he quickly arranged to surrender to U.S. troops. While in custody, Chi worked with Republic of Korea (rok) intelligence to organize prisoner of war (pow) resistance to their being returned to North Korea after the impending armistice. He enjoyed privileges as an anti-Communist in the pow camps, and hoped it would continue. Although an active anti-Communist, Chi judged that he would not be able to live in South Korea as an ex-pow. After refusing repatriation to North Korea, he also rejected staying in South Korea. But Chi would survive elsewhere. He relocated to India, where he thrived as a businessman. He chose the space of neutrality to succeed as an anti-Communist, where life nevertheless reflected the contentious energy of the Cold War. Chi’s decision demonstrated how ideology, despite its importance to him, was not sufficient to translate his rejection of Communist North Korea into a commitment to South Korea.

Friendship in Chinese International Relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 177-199
Author(s):  
Chih-Yu Shih
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Scope Of Application ◽  
Tributary System ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Chinese Diplomacy ◽  
Contemporary Chinese

Confucian friendship adds to the literature on friendship distance sensibilities and aims to maintain and even reinforce the Confucian ethical order, whereas contemporary international politics fails to provide any clear ethical order. The use of friendship and the concomitant creation of a friendly role by China indicate an intended move away from the improper order, including the tributary system, the Cold War, imperialism, and socialism. Confucian friendship continues to constitute contemporary Chinese diplomacy under the circumstance of indeterminate distance sensibilities. It highlights the relevance of the prior relations that are perceived to have constituted friendship. This article explores several illustrative practices of a Confucian typology of friendly international relations, divided into four kinds of friendship, according to (1) the strength of prior relations and (2) the asymmetry of capacity, including the policies toward Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam, among others. Such a Confucian friendship framework additionally alludes to foreign policy analysis in general. The US policies for China and North Korea are examples that indicate this wide scope of application.

Dialogue with John Dunn on Korean Denuclearization

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 293-311
Author(s):  
Sang-Jin Han
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Global Risk ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The North ◽  
Fundamental Limit ◽  
National Division ◽  
Reasonable Solution

This dialogue addresses the global risk that broke out of the North Korean development of nuclear weapons and missiles. It starts from the brutal consequences of the national division for Korea and asks why North Korea has been so preoccupied with nuclear projects as has been found to be the case since the 1990s, and how much and why Kim Jung-un today differs from his father in terms of his future, and where the fundamental limit lies in Moon Jae-In’s as well as Trump’s approaches to Korean denuclearization and peace. The highlight of this dialogue is to explain the intrinsic difficulties for Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un in finding a reasonable solution to their respective demands for denuclearization and regime security, and explore the likely future of the Korean Peninsula from the vantage point of Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy and metamorphosis.

From Violated Girl to Revolutionary Woman

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-657
Author(s):  
Suzy Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Sex Difference ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Top Down ◽  
State Feminism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Made In

Feminism, both as theory and praxis, has long grappled with the dilemma of sex difference—whether to celebrate women’s “difference” from men as offering a more emancipatory potential or to challenge those differences as man-made in the process of delineating modern sexed subjects. While this debate may be familiar within contemporary feminist discourses, communist feminisms that stretched across the Cold War divide were no less conflicted about what to do with sex difference, most explicitly represented by sexual violence and biological motherhood. Even as communist states implemented top-down, often paternalistic measures, such policies were carried out ostensibly to elevate women’s status as a form of state feminism professing equality for the sexes. Comparing North Korea with China, this article explores how communist feminisms attempted to tackle the dilemma of sexual difference. Through an intertextual reading of two of the most popular revolutionary operas in 1970s communist East Asia—The Flower Girl from North Korea and The White-Haired Girl from China—it attends to the diverse strategies in addressing the “woman question” and the possibilities as well as limits opened up by communist feminisms.

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.

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