Pen/Insular_Notes

I’m going to be away for a few weeks and not sure whether I’ll be able to post. Might be able to follow Tak’s example and provide updates on my travels, but we’ll have to see.

In the meantime, some interesting reading material in place of a proper post. For readers of Korean (or Japanese if you can find the article), there’s a really good discussion between Korean novelist Hwang Sok-yong and Japanese novelist Oe Kenzaburo which appeared earlier this week in the Hankyoreh to mark the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation / the end of the Pacific War. (It also appeared in a Japanese newspaper, but I’m not sure which one, I’d guess Asahi though).

And for a leftwing take on recent goings-on in Japan and Koizumi’s decision to call a snap election, you can read Nobuhiko Ono’s piece in this week’s online edition of Socialist Worker. Nobuhiko’s someone I see around at practically every demonstration or major political rally in London, usually documenting the event with camera in one hand and camcorder in the other. It’s good to see him writing something too.

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding the joint North-South celebration of the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, the problems related to the government’s recognition of nationalist heroes provide an interesting sideshow.

Until 2004 the South Korean government clung fast to its traditional anti-communist ways and refused to acknowledge the contribution of independence fighters tainted with any sort of leftwing politics. But this year 47 are being honoured, including Kim San, apparently known as the ‘Che Guevara of the East’ (if you can believe what the Korea Times says).

On the other hand, some have not been so lucky yet. According to a Hankyoreh editorial (thanks to Muninn for bringing this to my attention), Jo Bong-am (조봉암), a left independence activist who later struggled against Syngman Rhee in the 1950s, has not been included because he received a guilty verdict from the supreme court. The editorial points out that the verdict against Jo for espionage (for which he was executed) was completely fixed and politically motivated. But it seems Jo and his descendants will have to wait a bit longer for due recognition.

While the recognition of long-dead independence fighters might seem purely symbolic, I think it is important and particularly significant in terms of building a more realistic view of Korean history, undistorted by the anti-communism of the past. By coincidence, I have a book on Jo Bong-am sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, perhaps this will spur me on a bit.

I’ve been following the excellent writing of Oh My News correspondent in the UK, Pak Song-jin, over the last few months and posted here before about his articles. His latest is on a very disturbing subject - the effects of racism on the Korean community in London (thanks to the friend who e-mailed me this).

The article concentrates on two recent incidents that have disturbed the London Korean community. The main one, which gives the article its title, was a racist hammer attack on a Korean student in New Malden (London’s ‘Koreatown’). Despite seemingly ample evidence against the perpetrator of the crime (photos of the incident, multiple witnesses, the weapon used etc), the authorities decided not to prosecute the attacker…. for lack of evidence. The second recent incident has been the very lenient sentence (five years) handed to British man who brutally murdered his Korean wife (I wonder in the latter case whether sexism wasn’t as much the problem as racism).

Pak rightly connects this with the revelations of the last decade or so about ‘institutional racism’ in Britain, particularly in the police force. The most notorious case, and the one which really put this problem into the public arena was that of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the subsequent bungled police investigation.

While I’ve no doubt that the Korean community here does suffer from racism, both institutional and from the public at large, I think it would be wrong to get it out of proportion. I have little doubt that it is people from an African/Afro-Caribbean or South Asian background that suffer the worst racism in the UK. Obviously this is partly due to the relatively small size of the Korean community and its social makeup, which must be dominated by students and middle-class professionals. However, one thing that struck me while reading this article is that the relative size and weight of the community is clearly growing and Koreans in London can no longer be an ‘invisible minority’ on the sidelines of society. As time goes on more and more Koreans are going to be born or grow up here and Koreans will no doubt become a more active and ‘visible’ minority. Which can only be a good thing of course.

Mr Flava

Time for another in my occasional series of guest columns on Stalinist ornithology. This comes from yesterday’s edition of KCNA English news:

Pyongyang, August 11 (KCNA) — This summer a larger number of migratory birds have come to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea than usual. Seen in the country are more than 110 kinds of summer birds.
Among them over 20 kinds of birds including Horeites cantans, Acrocephalus ardinaces, Motacilla flava and Emberiza tristrami Swinh have sharply increased in number this year.
In particular, the number of Halcyon coromanda, Halcyon pileata, Phylloscopus tonelipes Swinh, Emberiza spodocephala Pall and others nearly doubles that in the past.
Scarlet-finch, needle-tailed swift and various other species of seasonal birds, their number being 1.5 times that of the last year, have flown into the dense forest around the secret camp in Mt. Paektu.
Meanwhile, an increasing number of birds belonging to Egretta and Rallidae have nestled in west coastal areas of the country and Saxicola torguata Steju in the central area.
The government has set March and July every year as the period for protecting useful animals and organized various activities such as tree-planting, river and swampy land improvement and installation of artificial nests to provide good environment to birds. A special attention has been directed to making favorable conditions for the protection and propagation of birds.

This month’s English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique has a long and detailed article by Martine Bulard on China’s global strategy (China: middle kingdom, world centre). It’s well worth a read for an insight into how the Chinese ruling class is thinking about geopolitics and strategy at the moment. I’ll just comment on a couple of passages that struck me.

The first one concerns the possible arms race developing between the US and china:

The second crucial event was the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were no regrets over the disappearance of this rival communist ­regime but many academics recall that the USSR wore itself out in a fruitless confrontation with the US and a financially ruinous arms race. According to an anonymous defence expert: “The US presses for competition and an uncontrolled increase in military spending but we should confine ourselves to modernising the weapons required to strengthen our defences.” This counsel of moderation is more show than substance, since military spending already accounts for 2.4% of China’s GDP, but it is worth deploying against the general staff, which would like it to be much higher.

Clearly there is an understanding in Chinese elite circle of the US strategy of encirclement and military competition. The problem, it seems to me, is that understanding is one thing, and actually being able to overcome it is another. The Chinese ruling class want their country to become an economic superpower in a multipolar world, where they play a central role but not the central role. However, military and economic competition in the capitalist system have a logic of their own that is not so easily shaped by participants.

Might it not be that China’s current obsession with ’stability’ and Hu Jintao’s ‘Four Nos’ that Bulard quotes…

“No to hegemony, no to force, no to blocs, no to the arms race”

… are actually just the outward expression of the strategy most appropriate to China’s current stage of development as a world power and not some sort of new paradigm as some seem to be suggesting. I doubt the Chinese ruling class would hesitate to dispense with its objections to any of the above ‘nos’ when the time was right.

One other good aspect of this article is that it pays due attention to the relationship between China and Japan (some US/British commentators appear to have forgotten that Japan exists when they discuss the rise of China).

The talk given by Pak Noja recently at Yonsei University seems to have been quite an event with a thousand-strong audience. A transcript of his talk and the ensuing discussion with chairwoman Kim Ha-yong (who readers of this site may have heard of before) is now available on the Ta Hamkke website.

It would be great to have this in English, but translating the whole thing is a bit beyond the time I can spare at the moment, perhaps we can hope that Pak Noja will provide something in English on this subject sooner or later.

In the meantime I thought I’d just roughly translate a short extract, partly because this topic fits quite well with my recent post on autonomism in Korea and the discussion that followed. Apologies for the somewhat stilted translation. I’ve also had some difficulties with some of the terminology, I’ll try to come back to this and make some improvements at a later stage.

In this extract, after a discussion of the role played by nationalism and French imperialism in Vietnam, Pak turns to North Korea:

For us, one of the most difficult things to talk about is the North Korean revolution. The strength of the influence exerted by the legacy of imperialism and the intellectual inheritance of nationalism on the process of the North Korean revolution is worth thinking about. To some extent, we can talk about this even before the revolution in the North took the extreme form of a one-man dictatorship.

It is a fact that in the 1940s the North looked like a far more advanced and people-oriented society than the South. The fact that a great number of progressive intellectuals migrated to the North in the late 40s shows just how attractive the revolution was. For a considerable proportion of those who went North it would be hard to say that they were communists in the strictest sense of the word. Many intellectuals who were inclined towards nationalism and populism migrated. The land reforms carried out in the North were actually one of the reasons that land reform was achieved in the South at that time. The North Korean reforms provided a model and gave Yi Sŭngman (Syngman Rhee) a sense of crisis: “if we don’t also do this to some extent we will not be able to compete with the North.” So the historical contribution of quite a few aspects of the North Korean revolution can be evaluated positively.

However, already if you look at the series of campaigns that were waged between late 1946 and 1948, there is something about it that smells a bit strange. For example, the ‘Mass Mobilisation Campaign for the Cultivation of National Ideology’ (건국사상총동원교양캠페인) that began in late 1946 was aimed at educating people through a mass mobilisation of the whole nation to cultivate a national ideology. What was the purpose of this movement? According to the words of Kim Il-sung at the time it was “an ideological revolution to create among the workers of the new Democratic Chosŏn a national spirit, customs, morals and militancy.”

What is the meaning of ‘national spirit’ (국민정신) and ‘mass mobilisation’ (총동원)? Mass mobilisation was a phrase that was continuously used during the latter years of Japanese colonialism, and one of the phrases that expressed in the most compressed manner the fascism of the late colonial period. Talk of making people do ideological study through mass mobilisation was a commonplace of this period. Terms like ‘citizen-like spirit’, ‘national spirit’ and ‘spirit’ were actually Japanese words that were first brought to Korea by students returning from study in Japan. But the term ‘national spirit’ was something that was also created within the paradigm of nationalism following the model of Japan. The fact that the term ‘national spirit’ came to be used at that time in the North shows the influence of early nationalist ideology and perhaps also the influence of the Soviet Union, but we cannot eradicate the impression that the North Korean regime just took over a term that had been used as a commonplace in the late colonial period. Although of course at that time it referred to a different nation’s citizens.

Many of the other campaigns carried out in North Korea also had some similarities in their methods to the mass campaigns of the late colonial period, like the ‘Serving the Country behind a Gun Campaign’ (총후보국캠페인). Propagandists were sent out on a mass scale to forcibly mobilise people for education. Those who did not get on with the education programme or had different opinions were made to do self-criticism and undergo ‘ideological reconstruction’ (사상개조). If you look at the campaigns that were carried out in the late colonial period by state organs of ‘ideological cultivation’ like the Taehwasuk [an organisation of pro-Japanese Koreans] the similarity is quite noticeable.

So, when General Kim Il-sung was constructing a nation state, he brought in considerable parts of the apparatus of state control and repression that were taken from the mechanisms of administration of the Japanese imperialists, the very people he had been struggling against up until then. In other words, it is hard to get rid of the sense that the state created by the nationalists in some way inherited a great deal from the imperialist state.

I’d like to make some brief comments on this. Really the question that comes to my mind is: why was it that regimes founded by nationalists (whether or not they called themselves ‘communists’ let’s accept that’s what they were/are) took on much of the ideological and institutional apparatus of their erstwhile oppressors? I think it’s worth considering the possibility that these things were much the same from the point of view of the new rulers (Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi-min or whoever) as the factories that they inherited from the former colonialists. They were setting about creating an independent nation state (or in other terms an ‘independent centre of capital accumulation’). They needed the ideological tools for the job of mass coercion that is required when setting out on the path of primitive accumulation, just as much as they needed the physical tools that would combine with human labour to produce the steel, concrete, petrochemicals and so on.

I suppose what I’m saying is that since nationalism (in the colonial/post-colonial context) ultimately means achieving a capitalist state, it is natural for it to utilise the tools necessary for this job, however brutal they may be. Nationalism ceases to have any really progressive tendencies not long after it comes to power.

A well-thumbed biography of a Korean nationalist who I’ve taken a liking to for some reason. Actually I know very little about Yŏ Un-hyŏng, although you can read a short and somewhat hagiographic bio here at the Kimsoft website and a more prosaic one here at Wikipedia. He seems to be one of those figures that every developing nation state of the twentieth century must have had - a not-quite great leader.

In the case of Mong-yang (his pen-name), one of the reasons for this is quite plain: he was a centre nationalist at a time (the mid 1940s) when the Korean peninsula was being polarised in two directions towards the ‘left’ nationalism of the North and the ‘right’ nationalism of the South. Perhaps you could say more honestly that Korea was being pulled rapidly in one direction by Soviet imperialism and in the other by US imperialism. Nationalists who didn’t really want to rely on either of the new great powers tended to be left high and dry.

During his lifetime Yŏ had been in the mainstream of the Korean nationalist movement, operating in Shanghai, Siberia and Japan. He had earlier founded the New Korea Youth Party, but in 1920 he actually joined Korea’s first Communist Party and attended the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, where he apparently met Lenin. Later he joined the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and worked for Chiang Kai-shek. According to the Kimsoft biography he was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese in 1929, although the English Wikipedia entry says that it was the British who arrested him and then handed him over to the Japanese. Interestingly the Korean Wiki entry notes that Yŏ was arrested at Shanghai baseball stadium - I wonder if it still exists?.

At liberation Yŏ emerged as one of the leaders of post-colonial Korea, but the People’s Committees and the People’s Republic of Korea that he helped to form in September 1945 were short-lived and were soon crushed by the US military government (in the North the People’s Committees were co-opted by the Soviet/Kim Il-sung regime). During 1946 Yŏ found himself on the left of the nationalist movement but was striving to bring elements of the right and left together in a coalition, working in particular with the main communist leader in the South: Pak Hŏn-yŏng.

One thing that caught my eye about this book was its publication date. It was originally published in 1946, but this edition was reprinted in late July 1947. Yŏ Un-hyŏng had in fact been gunned down at the Hyehwa-dong Rotary in Seoul just a few days before this on July 19, by a hitman thought to have been acting on Syngman Rhee’s orders. Here’s a description of the assassination from Kimsoft:

When Yo’s car slowed down at the Hyehwa-dong intersection, suddenly, a large truck pulled out from behind the police station and blocked Yo’s car. Yo’s driver pressed on the breaks and the car came to screeching halt, when the assassin jumped on the rear bumper and fired two pistol shots at Yo through the rear window. One bullet hit Yo’s back and came out of his stomach and the other went through his heart, killing him instantly. It was one pm.

According to the Kimsoft biography, the hitman was a rightist refugee from North Korea called Han Chi-gŭn. The site also has a whole page discussing the assassination.

By a quirk of fate, a combination of the British and Yŏ’s love of sport seem to have been his twin nemeses, getting him into trouble on more than one occasion. First when he was arrested at the baseball stadium in 1929 and then again in July 1946, when he was on his way home to change into a clean shirt before attending a friendly football match between British and Korean teams.

If you want more resources on Mong-yang, there is a Wikipedia entry in Korean and he has his own website, run by his memorial foundation (every dead nationalist must have one of these it seems).

Newsnight last night carried a very good report on rural unrest in China and the way that peasant farmers are fighting back to save their land from the gangster-capitalist property-developers, throwing up high-rises around Chinese cities at a phenomenal rate. This was one of those rare news reports that is truly informative and at the same time moving and even a little inspiring. You can watch the film here (at least for the time-being anyway) and there is a somewhat condensed article on BBC News too.

The massive scale and violence of the struggles that Chinese peasants are waging is quite amazing. They are up against not only bands of hired thugs, often working for state-owned companies, but also the police and corrupt local officials. In some places the uprisings have been on the scale of historical rebellions of Chinese peasants: 100,000 in Sichuan last November, 20,000 in Zhejiang in April.

What is perhaps even more amazing is that Chinese farmers are making documentaries of their struggles and filming their battles with the armies of thugs that come to take their land and demolish their villages. The Newsnight report includes footage from one such battle in Shengyou near Beijing this June. As the narrator comments, it is like watching a medieval Chinese battle scene: a muddy chaos of peasants with bamboo poles and farm tools. Well at least until the gunshots and explosions begin.

Kerim of Keywords has a superb post on the ‘Oompa-loompanproletariat‘ which I feel obliged to share. Everything you could ever want to know about the struggle of these small persons for liberation from capitalism and Wonkaism.

Organising protests seems to be the same wherever you are these days: the importance of text.

The BBC has come up trumps today with an good piece on the democracy movement in Egypt and even a photo gallery of activists organising protests.