Henry Em

1982년 12월, 필리핀 루손섬 남부에 위치한 남카마리네스주의 한 마
을. ‘해방구’에 도착한 지 이틀째 되는 날이었다. 버스에서 내리자 가이드
는 남카마리네스-케손로(路)에서 그리 멀지 않은 집으로 나를 데려갔다...

December, 1982. Somewhere in Camarines Sur, southern Luzon, Philippines. It was my second day in the “liberated area.” Getting off from the bus, my guide had led me to a house on the edge of a barrio just off the Camarines Sur-Quezon Road...

How does North Korea become visible and legible to us? What seems like propaganda and what seems like the real North Korea, and why? After more than 70 years of hostility it is an understatement to say that disrespect is deeply entrenched on both sides of the DMZ. Nonetheless, since the end of the Cold War in Europe and the cultural turn in Cold War Studies, scholarship on North Korea has become much more interesting. The monographs and articles examined here shed light on North Korea, but also speak to broader questions about human rights and hegemonic politics, visuality and capitalism, revolution and modernity, work and ideology, and the ethical framework for ending civil wars. In what is referred to here as critical scholarship on North Korea, we catch a glimpse of divergent post-Cold War currents and logic, with some shared commitment to look back, and to look again, from a position of proximity.

July 9, 1987. It was a Thursday. Rev. Mun Ikhwan’s shout, Jeon Taeil yeolsayeo! reverberated across Yonsei University campus. His invocation of Jeon Taeil, as a martyr for dignity, justice, and recognition for workers, brought about an immediate stillness among the many thousands who had gathered for Yi Hanyeol’s funeral. Yi Hanyeol was a Yonsei student killed by fragments from a tear gas canister fired by riot police. I have no doubt that the mourners who crowded onto the campus felt what I immediately felt: shock, and visceral awareness that everyone present had been called. I sat up straight. Jeon Taeil, the garment worker who died by self-immolation for workers’ rights in 1970, that name was followed by many others, and those names, piercing, came wave after wave. When Mun Ikhwan’s list ended with Yi Hanyeol’s name, we were all ready to face the riot police. In the march from Yonsei University campus in Sinchon to Seoul’s City Hall, hundreds of thousands of people came out of their homes, shops, and offices to join the demonstrators. By the time the marchers reached City Hall we were a million strong.

To create South Korea, the United States Army Military Government in Korea (1945-1948) relied heavily on missionaries and Korean Christians. Former missionaries served as intelligence officers, policy advisors, and publicists in the USAMGIK, and together with Korean Christians, they helped establish some of the fundamental structures of the Republic of Korea. Christians provided rhetorical, institutional, and material support to the totalitarianism vs. freedom paradigm that would explain and justify the creation of a separate state south of the 38th parallel, and American support for the colonial elite in a revolutionary situation. Anticommunism did not have broad popular support in South Korea prior to the Korean War (1950-1953), and Christians made up less than 3% of the population. Even so, this special issue shows how anticommunist Christianity became the de facto state ideology of South Korea from its founding in 1948 until the April 19 student-led revolution in 1960.

Drawing on Yun Ch’iho’s Diary, and outlining some of the ideological and transnational aspects of a Protestant, bourgeois consciousness that emerged in Korea at the turn of the last century, this article presents a critical reassessment of liberalism, Protestant Christianity, and the type of free laborer that bourgeois Protestants like Yun Ch’iho wanted to create. As a pious liberal, Yun Ch’iho led efforts to establish civic and religious organizations that sought to construct a free conscience that would form and maintain public opinion. This was a militant agenda in the sense that, like the evangelical teachers he met in Shanghai and at Emory College, Yun wanted to build public pressure to dismantle the Confucian political order. As a Protestant entrepreneur of free men, Yun sought to “kill the Korean.” This militant, liberal agenda aimed to discipline and embody new desires, especially among youth, to produce the free laborer, and to render the extraction of profit as a form of exchange.
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[Trust] in no Korean, be his words as fair as fair can be. By the way, when a Korean is learned or able, 能, or clever 有才, shun him or kill him.
—Yun Ch’iho, Diary

Article type: Conceptual paper

Purpose— Political scientists have written about the South Korean state as a garrison state, a developmental state, and a neoliberal state. Instead of focusing on institutional attributes that characterize regime type, this essay examines the rationalities and techniques of government deployed since South Korea’s founding in 1948.

Design/methodology/approach— This essay focuses on three issues identified as emblematic of unruliness: military service avoidance, criminality / espionage, and non-productivity. The first two illustrate how sovereign power came to be established. The third example illustrates how governing rationalities have shifted since the 1990s. 

Findings— In spite of the authoritarian character of the Park Chung Hee regime, actions that seemed to equalize duty and punishment helped establish South Korea’s “state-ness.” As for governmentality in contemporary South Korea, neoliberal rationality and techniques do not act as a democratizing force, and authoritarian government remains within the general horizon of the political.

For over two decades Kim Dong-Choon has written about the history of violence levelled at the population since Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule and partitioned by Soviet and American forces in 1945. His research and theoretical reflections on state violence – committed by US forces, the South Korean police, military, and right wing groups, as well as by leftist guerillas and the Korean People’s Army – offer unique insight into what he calls war politics that established and consolidated North and South Korea. Rather than ending the war, the Armistice that halted the fighting in 1953 institutionalized this war politics, sustaining a near war situation not only along the DMZ but also a “state of exception” within both Koreas. In the interview, conducted by Henry Em and Christine Hong in 2012, Kim Dong-choon explains how the division system, and the war politics that sustains it, function as a bulwark against the consolidation of democracy in South Korea. Since the interview, tensions between North Korea and the US-ROK alliance intensified to the point where, in 2013, the Korean peninsula was again on the brink of war. Henry Em provides, in the preface, an outline of recent events that led to the near-war and the abandonment of important democratic principles in South Korea. The preface, which draws on Kim Dong-choon’s work published since 2012, and the interview, show the past and present of the unending war in Korea.

With permission from the publishers, portions of this article were drawn from: Em, Henry H. “Minjok as a Modern and Democratic Construct,” in Colonial Modernity in Korea, edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999; and Em, Henry H. “Democracy and Korean Unification from a Post-Nationalist Perspective,” Asea y¡n-gu 41.2 (December 1998).

“In this deeply researched book, Henry H. Em ranges across the entirety of Korean history to illumine how a unique civilization defined its own sovereignty and particularity, first for itself and vis-à-vis its neighbors, China and Japan, and then for its place in the world as a modern nation. Learned, subtle, and theoretically informed, The Great Enterprise is a major achievement.”—Bruce Cumings, Chair, Department of History, University of Chicago


"A much-needed contribution to the intertwined history of nationalism and historiography in Korea, with the distinctive ability to unsettle many of our received wisdoms."  — Namhee Lee, author of The Making of Minjung


"In this clear, concise, and fascinating book, Henry H. Em addresses key issues in Korean history and historiography, especially the writing of nationalist history. His emphasis on what might be called the redemptive potential of the nation for a democratic politics is highly original. It will interest students of nationalism, regardless of their area of study." — Andre Schmid, author of Korea between Empires, 1895–1919

Edited by Jim Stentzel, Henry Em, et al., and published by the Korea Democracy Foundation in 2006, this volume contains reminiscence by members of the Monday Night Group including George Ogle (Urban Industrial Mission), Faye Moon (wife of Rev. Moon Dong-hwan), Linda Jones, and Fr. Jim Sinnott.

Henry Em, Kun-woo Kim, and Youngju Ryu in conversation

Henry Em: I’d like to start our conversation by quoting a passage from Ham Sŏkhŏn’s 1958 essay “A People Must Think to Survive: Historical Lessons from the June 25 Fight,” published in Sasanggye...

Ham Sŏkhŏn (1901-1989) wrote and spoke like a Hebrew prophet, with fiery eloquence. He unsettled his audiences through uncommon insight and rebuke, meant to force self-reflection. In 1956, when a Republic of Korea (South Korea) armed forces magazine asked him to contribute an essay, Ham Sŏkhŏn sent a manuscript that compared waging war to taking a shit. War is sometime unavoidable. But just as one would not take pride in having to shit, he found it incredible that soldiers took pride in their medals. How can a ROK soldier take pride in having killed one’s compatriots? It saddened him that he knew of no soldier who threw his medals into a trash heap. Like shit, war is nasty, to be disposed of quickly, as far away as possible. The ROK Army did not publish his essay...

December, 1982. Somewhere in Camarines Sur, southern Luzon, Philippines. It was my second day in the “liberated area.” Getting off from the bus, my guide had led me to a house on the edge of a barrio just off the Camarines Sur-Quezon Road...