Is this how North and South Korea reunite?
Japan’s defeat in 1945 brought liberation for Korea, after 35 years under colonial rule. American intercepts of Japanese intelligence that summer suggested that Koreans seized the moment: local government offices were taken over, colonial police disarmed and collaborators punished. Newly-freed political prisoners, numbering in their thousands, began laying the foundations for self-rule.
It was not to be. As Victor D Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo point out early in Korea: A New History of South and North, three factors have long determined the fate of the peninsula: its location, the relative power of its rulers, and the intentions of the larger players that surround it. Over the centuries, it has been a Chinese satellite, a staging post for Mongol armies hoping to conquer Japan, and a 680-mile-long approach road for samurai intent on invading China. The post-war era brought more of the same. With the division of the peninsula into American and Soviet zones of occupation, Korean aspirations were sacrificed to the politics of an emerging Cold War.
Cha and Pacheco Pardo have years of expertise in Korean international relations, and the result here is a book that in style and focus – largely on big-picture geopolitics – occasionally reads like a briefing paper. This is not necessarily a bad thing: what A New History lacks in social or cultural analysis (the authors’ own anecdotes do much of the heavy lifting), it makes up for in a crisp and balanced account of how and why North and South have diverged since 1945.
One of the most compelling aspects of that account is the human cost associated with Korea being – as a local proverb puts it – a “shrimp among whales”. Three million Korean civilians died during the Korean War, and more than half of the peninsula’s factories, roads, railways, power-plants and homes were destroyed. Recovery was a matter, Cha and Pacheco Pardo write, of each side knowing how to play its “pawn status” to the best advantage. Under Kim Il-sung, handpicked for greatness by Stalin, North Korea had the more coherent economic and industrial plan. It was also richer in natural resources. The South took longer to get going, helped by billions of dollars of American aid, US troops and nuclear weapons on its soil, and lengthy periods of authoritarian rule.
A longstanding concern for Koreans, North and South, is the prospect of unification. The authors know this territory well: in 1997, Cha brought together officials from South Korea’s unification ministry with German bureaucrats who had worked on their own country’s reunification after 1990. Watching the South Korean delegation “furiously scribbl[ing] down everything that was said”, he was shocked to realise that after seven years they had yet to think seriously about the German example.
The challenges are daunting. Experts talk about “hard landing” scenarios – the collapse of the regime in the North; all-out war – and the “soft landing” of peaceful integration. Even in the latter case, the government of a united Korea would face the cost of raising living standards and upgrading infrastructure in the North, while managing enormous movements of people: northerners heading south for jobs; southerners travelling north to stake old claims to property. Still, say Cha and Pacheco Pardo, the rewards could be extraordinary: a “marriage of South Korean cutting-edge technology and capital with North Korean cheap labour and abundant mineral resources”, and a peninsula transformed from shrimp to “shaper and generator of change” in the region.
Given China’s reluctance to part with its North Korean ally – a source of cheap raw materials, and a buffer against the “iron triangle” of American, Japanese and South Korean power – Cha and Pacheco Pardo are right to be cautious about making predictions. They do, however, appear optimistic about the jangmadang phenomenon in North Korea: local markets for goods and services that began to emerge in the 1990s, some of them trading across the border with China and most of them run by women. Tolerated (and taxed) by the regime, these markets appear to some observers like the seeds of a market economy, even a new civil society. Might this “entrepreneurial class” end up forcing the pace on the peninsula? It is, to say the least, an intriguing idea.
Korea: A New History of South and North by Victor D Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo is published by Yale University Press at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
