Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. viii, 184 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-07391-7658-0.
Jae-Jung Suh’s edited volume Origins of North Korea’s Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development, is a much welcome addition to the field of Korean studies. The essays in the volume, most of which appeared in a 2006 edition of the Journal of Korean Studies edited by Suh, analyze the origins and evolution of the “Juche Institution,” a system that, according to Suh, “has resulted from interactions between North Koreans and outsiders, that has evolved in response to shifting conditions and as a result of anticipated and unanticipated outcomes of choices, that structures not just the North’s political, economic organizations but also constitutes social order, and facilitates certain choices and impedes others as North Koreans continuously respond to indigenous developments and exogenous shocks” (7). The volume thus correctly attaches much more significance to Juche than recent treatments of the idea, and makes important corrections to the narrative of Juche’s origins and application. The essays trace the development of Juche from the colonial period through the 1970s, suggesting that the Juche Institution emerged not purely as a tool of suppression in a brutal leadership competition—as the standard narrative in the English-language historiography has long suggested—but also as a device to limit the impact of North Korea’s putative allies (China and the Soviet Union) on the trajectory of political and economic developments. This developed out of the experiences of North Korea’s leaders with China and the Soviet Union, both proving to be unreliable, and worse, at times exploitive and overly intrusive. Two additional essays in the volume are less explicitly tied to the theme of the Juche Institution and examine the history and collapse of North Korea’s agricultural sector and leadership dynamics in what many incorrectly consider a one-man dictatorship.
This volume makes a very valuable contribution to the existing literature on North Korean history by introducing the work of Korean scholarswho have made significant contributions to the Korean-language historiography on the postwar development of the North Korean political and ideological systems. For this fact alone, the volume should be on the reading lists of students of North Korea. For decades, the research of Korean scholars working on North Korea had been hindered by South Korea’s infamous National Security Law, which restricted the access of scholars to North Korean materials. Restraints were lifted, to a degree, in the early 2000s at a time of improved relations between the two Koreas under the progressive governments of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun. Given the opportunity to work more freely with the available North Korean materials, Korean scholars, primarily political scientists, made significant contributions to the field of North Korean studies. The work of some of these scholars, including Gwang-Oon Kim and Young Chul Chung, are nicely summarized in the essays presented in this volume.
The first three essays (tied together in the editor’s introductory essay) in the volume deal directly with Juche’s origins and evolution. Hongkoo Han’s essay nicely summarizes the findings of his pathbreaking University of Washington Ph.D.dissertation on the so-called Minsaengdan incident that led to the massacre of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of Korean communists at the hands of their Chinese comrades in the early 1930s because of suspected ties to a pro-Japanese organization. Han’s dissertation was already well-known by most students of North Korean history. Han argues that the seeds of mistrust between Korean and Chinese communists were sewn as a result of this incident, over two decades before the founding of the DPRK, during which the future leader of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, himself narrowly escaped persecution.
Gwang-Oon Kim’s essay, which summarizes the argument in his monumental work Bukhan Jeongchisa yeongu 1(The Political History of North Korea 1), identifies crude and transparent attempts by Soviet officials to assert their hegemony over and exploit Korea in the years immediately following the country’s liberation. Kim argues that the Soviet influence on the North Korean system should not be overstated. The North Korean state that emerged was not a Soviet puppet regime, but successfully indigenized a variety of influences; Soviet, Chinese, and homegrown.
The argument presented in Young Chul Chung’s essayis largely absent from the English-language historiography, despite representing a developed historiographical line on North Korea’s post-Korean War development in Korean. The essay goes beyond the “power-centred” narrative of the introduction ofJuchein 1955 as an instrument of suppression that has long dominated the English-language historiography to reveal significant differences among leading North Korean government and party officials over postwar economic development.Chung’s essay in this volume is representative of the work of a number of Korean scholars working on this critical period in North Korea’s history, including Taeseop Lee, Younchul Kim, and the late Dongman Suh.
The last two essays in the volume are less explicitly connected to the origins and evolution of the Juche Institution. Chong-Ae Yu’s article provides an historical overview of North Korean agricultural development, from the redistribution of land and subsequent collectivization (or as the North Koreans called it, cooperativization or hyeopdonghwa) through its spectacular collapse in the 1990s. Yu describes some of the many triumphs of North Korea’s agriculture prior to its collapse, noting that it was once considered a “poster child for successful socialist modernization”(119). One important component of this was the successful mechanization of agriculture, which was carried out both for practical (labour shortages in a country that put so much emphasis on industry) and symbolic (mechanization symbolized modernity) reasons. Unmentioned in the early history, however, was the country-wide famine of 1954–1955 that was a result of the chaotic (and often violent) process of cooperativization. Yu’s comprehensive explanation of the tremendous failure of the agricultural system in North Korea in the 1990s, however, convincingly argues that the eventual collapse of agriculture was in part a result of its earlier successes with mechanization and the interconnectedness of agriculture with energy production and industry.
Finally, Patrick McEachern’s essay challenges the notion that under the leadership of the late Kim Jong Il, North Korea was a one-man dictatorship. He suggests instead that there were divergent and even competing interest groups in the military, Korean Worker’s Party, and cabinet. McEachern’s essay summarizes the argument of his 2011 book Inside the Red Box.
While not enough to diminish from the value of the volume, there are a number of minor errors and inconsistencies between the essays that could have been addressed before going to press. Suh’s essay inaccurately places the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo in 1969 instead of 1968. Inconsistencies in the volume include the use of different styles of citation in essays and references to Kim Jong Il in the present tense. The latter is less forgivable considering the fact that the volume was published approximately eighteen months after Kim’s death.
While Suh’svery theoretical introduction might discourage those other than political scientists from reading further, the volume as a whole presents much that should be basic knowledge for anyone with even a passing interest in North Korea. The editor should be commended in particular for assembling works by scholars who primarily write in Korean. The volume will be of interest to both political scientists and historians.
James Person
Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars, Washington DC, USA
pp. 621-624