우물 안 개구리

I’m back once again to this question of electricity and power in its various forms, as I think the long-term story of generating power in NE Asia (1880’s-present), and specifically on the Korean peninsula, sheds some interesting light on the transnational history of the contested region, this in distinct contrast to the individual national histories of power industries.  I would love to be able to link: (1)  electrification (late 19th century), to (2) the colonial period (especially the hydroelectric power plants in the North along the Yalu and Tumen), to (3) the electrical showdown / cutoff of May 1948 (North stops providing access following UN elections), to (4) the period of the war and reconstruction (temporary barges, and later thermal stations), to the (5) decision to pursue atomic power (late 1950’s, with a commercial industry by the late 1970’s).  For now, though, I’ll just briefly touch on the Bechtel project associated with the mid-1950’s, which covers #4.

I recently managed to get a copy of the Bechtel in-house report on the project, with three major thermal stations, completed between 1954 -1956, at Tangin-Ri, Samchok, and Masan (which was the image from my last post in August).

This map shows that the effort was an attempt to plug into the existing grid at various points in the country (roughly comprising a triangulation) in 1954.  What I don’t know, and would love to know, is how much of this grid predates 1948, as I suspect much of it does.

And below  is a letter of thanks from the Korean side, following completion of the project, although I have not had a chance to look this document over.

For now, this consists of little more than musing on the topic, but in the aftermath of the Recent awarding of the reactor project for the UAE (Korea and Hyundai won the bid as part of a consortium),  and Lee Myung-Bak’s mobilization of the ROK domestic nuclear industry, I really want to put together something more substantive: that is, to take a long look at the history of power from the standpoint of a thorough transnational history (involving the U.S , Korea, Japan, Canada, at the very least).  More on this later~

Now that I’m teaching my Korean History course I am, of course, running into questions I cannot answer. I’m going to post them here periodically:

• Though the Choson-era Korean Army (in its various commanderies and provincial forms) was conscripted from peasantry (and officered, it appears, by military Yangban), where did the Navy get its personnel? You can’t just conscript a peasant and put him on a ship and expect him to be useful: did they recruit from fishing communities, or was there a training process?
• What’s the numerical breakdown of Choson society? I’ve seen suggestions that as much as 20-30% were in the unfree categories at the bottom of the social scale, but I can’t seem to get a handle on the Yangban and Chungnin classes, either in total population or (as one of my students asked) rate of shedding members to lower classes.
• Who was the aged, deeply bearded gentleman depicted on the Japanese colonial-era Korean bills? (See below)

(more…)

In my first post here I said that I was going to be teaching a Korean history course for the first time: I lied. Or rather, I was scheduled to teach it, but the course didn’t make its minimum enrollment. However, the time has come to try again.

The last time I did this, I was going to focus it on upper-level undergrads and make it as much about primary sources as possible. The only four books I’d ordered were Korea Old and New: A History (Eckert, Lee, Lew, Robinson, Wagner), The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Korean Poetry, and the two volumes of the new Sources of Korean Tradition from Columbia.¹ Ambitious and, apparently, off-putting in the extreme.

I’m torn, really, on the question of whether to teach a “Rice Paddies” style course — all of Korean history in a single semester — or break it up (as I have my China and Japan courses) into pre/post 1700 (and start with the later one, which should draw more students at first). If I teach the whole history, I might well keep the poetry — I do poetry in my China and Japan courses, and the Korean stuff is lively and diverse — but I can’t see using the Sources sets as-is. This time I want to pitch the course much more broadly, and draw in some of the business and language students — Koreans actually make up one of our largest groups of foreign students, and our business department has a long-standing interest in Korea — so that the course really does reach critical mass. So I’m thinking that the heavy dose of Columbia primary materials is probably not a great idea. That said, I prefer to have students read primary materials as much as possible, or ethnographic-style observations, or historical scholarship which evokes a clear and detailed recreation of a moment or era.

I’d love to hear thoughts from our readers about what works and what doesn’t, what’s come out recently that’s good for students, and especially if there are better textbooks at this point.

Update: I just ran across Kenneth Robinson’s Korean History Bibliography, which looks like a great starting place.

1. Vol. 1: From Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century ; Vol. 2: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries [↩]

This image comes from a USIS publcity shot taken at Masan in the mid-  1950’s, detailing the work of electrical restoration undertaken prior to,  during, and in the aftermath of the Korean War.   A couple of quick  observations:

(1) The man responsible for putting together a pre-war group (with ECA  funding) looking into the problem, Walker L. Cisler, had also helped  restore the electrical grids of various European nations in conjunction  with the Marshall Plan.  With his connections to Eisenhower, Cisler would pop up again in the mid-1950’s (Summer 1956), this time trying to market the Fermi breeder reactor to South Korea.

(2) The electrical capacity of the South after the “cut-off” of May 1948 by the North was extremely low, as the mid-1950’s restoration work undertaken by Pacific Bechtel allegedly doubled the ROK’s capacity.

(3) The persistence of older models would continue in state  planning well into the late 1950’s, with both hydroelectric (along the Han) and tidal plants investigated as possible options, before settling on primarily thermal plants in the mid and late 1950’s.

All of this goes towards a simple point, that the disentanglement of infrastructure between North and South, a complicated issue in the 1945-1948 period, would continue into the post-war era.  The South would not resolve its electricity shortages until the 1970’s with the availability of commerical electricity from the first nuclear plant.

I would love to know more about the South in terms of the necessary engineering expertise to run this kind of plant (above), and as for the northern case, Aaron S. Moore (ASU) is currently working on Japanese engineers in Manchuria and the North, looking at how they re-invent themselves as development specialists after 1945.

I recongize that none of this pertains directly to the previous two posts, but I think the passing of Kim DaeJung and the North’s presence at his funeral fits with this brief look at the electrical issue, thereby anticipating the nuclear issue.

Todd Crowell reports that Kim Dae Jung is seriously ill and reflects on his life and career as a “Giant of [Asian] Democracy”

For Kim achieving the presidency was the culmination of a lifelong struggle. After two unsuccessful attempts, he won his first seat in parliament in 1961, only to find the National Assembly building surrounded by tanks in the military coup that brought Park Chung Hee to power three days later. In 1971 he made the first of four bids for president — running against Park himself.

He engendered Park’s undying enmity by winning as much as 46 per cent of the vote. In that first presidential campaign he was hit by a car, perhaps deliberately, and suffered an injury that made him walk with a shuffle for the rest of his life.

In 1973 he was abducted by agents of the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) in Japan and brought back to South Korea forcefully. His political rights were restored shortly only after Park’s assassination in 1979. A year later Kim was accused of treason after students and residents of the southwestern city of Kwangju rose in a bloody insurrection.

In all, Kim spent five years in prison, seven under house arrests and two years in exile in the United States. Returning to Korea in 1985, he and his supporters had Aquino’s assassination two years previously strongly in mind. A couple of U.S. congressmen accompanied him to discourage any “copy cat” killings.

In the 1997 election Kim Dae Jung proved he was not only courageous but could also be shrewd, practical, even ruthless when he had to be. His comeback, which marked the first peaceful transfer of power from a ruling to an opposition party in South Korea’s history, was a masterpiece of political manipulation.

He made an alliance of convenience with the conservative Kim Jong Pil, the very man who had masterminded the coup that prevented him from taking his assembly seat more than 30 years before and the founder of the KCIA, the agency that had tried to kidnap him.

He leaked allegations that the sons of his main opponent, Lee Hoi Chang, had avoided military service. These revelations, damaging enough to Lee, encouraged the ambitious mayor of Inchon, Rhee In Je, to enter the race, thus splitting the conservative vote and allowing Kim to squeak into power with about 40 percent of the vote.

As president, Kim Dae Jung showed toughness in getting his way with the legislature and Korea’s large business conglomerates, but he also steadfastly held to his vision of reconciliation with North Korea, known as his “sunshine policy.” He was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace for his summit meeting with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 2000.

Some of the luster went off of that achievement when it was later revealed that he had arranged with several large business conglomerates to bribe the North with about $500 million in cash to hold the meeting in Pyongyang. There was personal sadness two when his two sons were accused of corruption.

These days the sun does not shine so brightly on the sunshine policy. A cold wind continues to blow from Pyongyang. The election of conservative Lee Myung Bak as president (another peaceful change of power) reflected growing disillusion in South Korea. Still elements, such as the Kaesong industrial zone across the Demilitarized Zone, remain in place.

I would emphasize something of that last paragraph: the second peaceful transition of power marks a significant step in the creation of a procedurally sound democracy and should be considered a triumph rather than merely a defeat. And the short-term failure of the “Sunshine policy” — and the need to bribe the North Koreans — I’ve always felt that more bribery, rather than less (see also) would produce better results, and I think Kim Dae Jung’s reputation will continue to rise rather than fall as things progress.

Japan Focus has an article detailing and displaying Gobau’s Korean War art which has a plethora of arresting images. Gobau worked from the Republic of Korea side: North Korean forces are not shown in a good light, but South Korean forces don’t get a pass on their purportedly anti-communist atrocities.

Thanks to Adam at Mutantfrog for pointing me to these North Korean Propoganda posters. I think this is my favorite but the whole group is worth a look.

Seungsook Moon at Japan Focus has an interesting historiographical essay about the contested life and legacy of Park Chung Hee, who led Korea through the 60s and 70s. The debate is particularly interesting because it parallels discourses which are ongoing in other post-dictatorial societies, including the debates about Stalin in Russia, Mao and Deng in China, Chiang Kaishek in Taiwan, etc. The history itself is fascinating, though I do wish Moon had spent a little more effort mediating some of the factual basis for the competing narratives.

On April 16 this year, my teacher and the man who basically created the Korean history studies in the former USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak, has passed away. His death greatly saddened everybody in the Korean studies in Russia and many other parts of the “post-Soviet” space, and was marked by obituaries in some South Korean newspapers (Tonga Ilbo, Hangyoreh, Seoul Sinmun and a handful of others). Not that much, however, emerged on Mikhail Pak and his scholarship in English, and his death seemingly did not attract that much attention in the Anglophone academia. In order to convey some understanding about what Mikhail Pak and his scholarship meant to me and many of my colleagues, I decided to put here the obituary commissioned to me by Acta Koreana. It is expected to appear in Vol. 12, No 1, in June this year:

Obiturary: Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak (Pak Chunho), (21.06.1918–16.04.2009)

Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja, Oslo University)

In the world of the Korean Studies in the successor states of the former USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was widely recognized as a ”living legend”. He is known as the scholar who made the historical studies on Korea into a legitimate field of its own in the Soviet and Eastern European academia. He is also credited with creating a systematic, analytical framework for understanding Korea’s ancient and mediaeval history, which largely defined the way Korea’s past has been described in the Soviet and post-Soviet academic world since the 1950s onward. His lifelong enterprise, the fully annotated, academic translation of Samguk Sagi into Russian, firmly put Korea on the map of the Russophone world history studies, giving the non-Korean studies majors a direct access to a first-hand source on Korea’s ancient history and thus largely succeeding in “de-ghettoizing” the Korean history field as a whole. A caring pedagogue, whose extremely liberal approach and respect for the individuality of each and every student looked like a rare bright spot in otherwise quite authoritarian world of the Soviet humanitarian academia, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak tutored several generations of the Soviet and post-Soviet Russophone Korea specialists, who further developed his approach to the Korean past.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak (Korea name: Pak Chunho) was born on June 21, 1918 in a large Korean village, Yanchihe, in the border region of Russia’s Maritime Province, to a family of a well-educated second-generation Korean immigrant. His native village, Yanchihe, was famed in the 1900-1910s as a breeding ground of the nationalist movement, and his family was on close terms with some of its leaders, including a legendary Korean self-made man and one of the chief sponsors of the 1907-1908 ‘righteous armies’ movement, rich trader Ch’oe Chaehyǒng (1860-1920). In the 1920s and 1930s, in Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s formative years, the leadership of the Soviet Union-based Korean national movement was firmly in the hands of ‘national Communists’, the people who envisioned future, independent Korea as a beacon of Asian socialist revolution, but also struggled to preserve Korean cultural legacy among the émigré community. One of these ‘national Communists’, Kye Pongu (1880-1956), a former activists of the early 1900s ‘enlightenment’ movement who became, after Russia’s 1917 October Revolution, one of the closest comrades of a renowned Korean Communist leader, Yi Tonghǔi (1873-1935), was Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s teacher of classical Chinese and Korean history in the early 1940s. At that time, both met in Kzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan, where so many Russian Koreans were forcibly exiled in 1937. In many ways, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s scholarship and personality were animated by Russian-Korean Communists’ ethos and élan – by their deep attachment to the Korean cultural legacy as the nucleus of the “cultural nation”, and by their quest for social justice and modern development. The forcible removal of all the ethnic Koreans to Central Asia in 1937 added a sense of urgency to this commitment. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s translation of Samguk Sagi, started in early 1950s, was partly motivated by his ardent wish to transmit the Korean traditional culture to the new generation of Soviet Koreans, who no longer could study their language and legacy in the place of their exile and had to read Korean sources in Russian. In this way, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was definitely a Soviet-Korean intellectual with a deep sense of ethno-cultural commitment. His later engagements with the Russian-Korean associations of the 1990s-2000s (he used to chair the All-Soviet/All-Russian Association of Koreans from 1989, and remained its honorary chairman until his death) was a logical continuation of his passion for the case of Korean national culture. He also retained the Marxist beliefs of his youth, albeit in more critical and self-reflective form, until his death.
The sense of mission as a guardian of the endangered Korean tradition aside, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak as an intellectual was largely formed by MIFLI (Moscow Institute for Philosophy, Literature and History). He studied there in 1936-41, side to side with such future luminaries of the Soviet culture as novelist K.Simonov (1915-1979) and poet A.Tvardovsky (1910-1971). MIFLI was renowned for its commitment to erudite cultural education – Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak majored there in Latin for three years, before switching to East Asia and eventually to Korea – and for its tradition of non-dogmatic, open-minded Marxism, which contrasted a lot with the growing fossilization of Stalinist ‘Marxism-Leninism’ elsewhere in the USSR. Creativeness in applying the Marxist formulae to the Korean material was amply showed by Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak when, after getting his junior doctorate in 1947 with a dissertation in late 19th century Korean political history, he was appointed in 1949 to teach Korean history at the mecca of the Soviet scholarly world, Moscow State University (MGU).

In mid-1950s, in several articles published in the most authoritative historical journals of the USSR (some of them were then republished in Chinese), Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak directly challenged an influential Marxist interpretation of Korea’s ancient history by a group of veteran Korean Marxists who ended up becoming a nucleus of North Korea’s humanitarian academia, including mighty Paek Namun (1894-1979), North Korea’s long-time Minister of Education. While Paek Namun and many others viewed 1-7th centuries Korea as “slave-owning society” – thus mechanically applying the classical Marxian model based on the experiences of the Mediterranean society, to the Korean case – Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak suggested that Korea at that point was at the “early feudal stage”. Korea’s “early feudalism” as viewed by Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak, was characterized by a pronounced role of the state-centered redistributional apparatus and much more developed bureaucratic organization that the feudalisms in contemporaneous Europe, and also demonstrated lots of “transitional” traits, archaic clan-based communities inherited from the pre-class era still remaining the backbone of the societal structure. While the wholesale characterization of all the developed pre-capitalist state societies as “feudal” is hardly acceptable for today’s historian, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s challenge to the mechanical application of the “slave-owning mode of production” dogma was hugely productive. Eventually, the North Korean scholarship moved to recognizing the 1-7th centuries proto-Korean states as “feudal” as well (but the “slave-owning society” was applied to Ancient Chosǒn rather than discarded). In the USSR, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s disciples – including such prominent historians of ancient Korea as Roza Shataevna Dzharylgasinova and Sergei Vladimirovich Volkov – were now free to describe the first states of the Korean Peninsula for what they really where, namely agrarian bureaucracies ruled by the aristocratic classes. At least at the Korean historical studies, the deadly grip of the Stalinist orthodoxy was almost not felt, since anybody who did not wish to custom-tailor the Korean history to the rigid model of “primitive communism to slave-owning society to feudalism” could resort to invoking Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s authority. This authority was firmly buttressed by the scrupulous textual research. Silla Chronicles of Samguk sagi, translated and published in Russian in 1959, brought him the prestigious senior doctoral degree (Russian version of habilitation – 1960). Then, the successive translations and publication of the Koguryǒ Chronicles and Paekche Chronicles (1995) and the whole text of Samguk Sagi (2001) made him one of the best-known experts in the Korean historical texts study in the whole world.

A Soviet/Russian-Korean national activist and one of the greatest living specialists in Samguk Sagi and Korea’s early history, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak was also a great manager of scholarship. Much of his organizational talent was demonstrated after the Soviet collapse in 1991, when much of the humanitarian scholarship in the former USSR became a victim of a headlong “transition to capitalism” followed by general disorder and impoverishment. In 1991 he managed to attract South Korean sponsorship and to establish an independent International Center For Korean Studies (ICFKS) at Moscow State University, which, to this day, published more than 30 monographs on Korea, played host to many important international conferences and provided access to a well-stocked Korean research library to growing numbers of students and researchers. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s authority – cemented also by several South Korean governmental medals he received in the 1990s and 2000s – was crucially essential for ICFKS fundraising in South Korea, and, by extension, for the survival of the Korean studies as such in post-Soviet Russia. It remains a matter of serious concern whether ICFKS, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak’s most-loved brainchild, will be able to continue its activities on the same level without its founder’s unparalleled charisma.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pak died on April 16, 2009 at his own home, while checking his granddaughter’s draft translation of yet another Korean classic, Samguk Yusa. He died with a Korean classical work at his hand – a death which represents well the very essence of his life.

Note: The History Carnival is still looking for a May 1st host, as well as hosts for the summer and beyond. Contact Sharon Howard (sharon$@$earlymodernweb$.$org$.$uk) to volunteer.

This is not a timed test, but you will be required to account for your periodization afterwards. This is not a graded exercise, as the answers are usually blatantly obvious or impossibly indeterminate. Whether this is a professional or recreational exercise is entirely between you, your cooler students, and your tenure committee.

(more…)