February 10, 2011

Charles K. Armstrong, Ph.D.

Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences

Department of History

Director, Center for Korean Research

Columbia University in the City of New York

MARK MINTON:
Well, good evening, everyone and welcome. I'm Mark Minton, the president of The Korea Society. It's an impressive gathering tonight, and I thank you all for coming out and helping us inaugurate a new series here, which we call Korea In-Depth. The idea is to offer a series of programs (six in all, over a period of as many weeks, at roughly the same time on Thursday evenings) which will provide a course on the development of contemporary issues in Korea today.

If you complete the whole series (and we strongly recommend and encourage that) your M.A. in Korean studies will be an honorary one, but you will have, in fact, looked through several windows into Korean history, culture, and society. The programs are quite varied.

Tonight, of course, we're starting with a program on recent Korean history, North and South, and the implications of that, which still have a great effect not only on the Korean Peninsula but internationally, as well.

Subsequent programs on other Thursday evenings, up through March 17, will be on such varied topics as old maps of Korea; the Sokkuram, which many of you know as the great statuary cave in Kyǒngju of Buddhist iconography and sculpture. We have a program on the Korean War coming up with Professor Ledyard who is in the audience tonight. Thank you for coming.

You can read about it in this calendar that lists The Korea Society's programs being presented through the end of April. You can pick up a calendar from the front desk.

Tonight it's my special pleasure to introduce Dr. Charles Armstrong from Columbia University. I'm going to read just a few of the many honors and publications that Charles has, because there's so many, they're difficult to remember.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, in the Department of History at Columbia University, and director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University.

He is also a frequent commentator both on the history, and especially the recent history, of the Korean Peninsula, North and South. He is also the author of many books: The Koreas; The North Korean Revolution; Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia; Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State and many, many articles; too many to mention.  

It's also a very special pleasure for me to welcome Charles back to The Korea Society. He is a frequent guest here because of his depth of knowledge about Korea. He is also a long-time friend and colleague. I remember Charles, very fondly, from the days when I was a more junior U.S. diplomat and he was a more junior academic at Columbia.

In the late nineties, Charles was instrumental in helping us bring some private talks (some of the first we ever had in depth with the North Koreans) to Columbia University, where we were able to (we thought at first) keep them out of the glare of publicity. Later the press caught on. It was a pleasure meeting Charles then, and it's been an even greater pleasure following his distinguished academic career in the last decade or so.

May I therefore introduce Dr. Charles Armstrong. [Applause]

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Thank you, Mark. Thank you for your kind introduction. As Mark said, we first met in the late nineties. It was actually just after my first year at Columbia University. I had just completed my Ph.D. and I was minding my own business, doing archival research, when the director of the East-Asian Institute (now the Weatherhead East Asian Institute) sent me an email saying, "The North and South Koreans are going to be meeting at Columbia, and you'd better get involved."

This was the first I had heard of it. I looked into it, and met Mark and the rest of the U.S. delegation who were involved in the preparation of the four-party talks which included North and South Korea, China and the United States. It was a fascinating experience to be on the outside looking in.

I have to say although Mark used the word instrumental, my main contribution to peace on the Korean Peninsula, at that time in my career, was to arrange a luncheon on the Columbia campus for the delegates of the four parties. That may or may not have been a significant contribution, but they did seem to enjoy the lunch, so I guess I can be pleased with what I accomplished there.

I am very pleased that Mark Minton has become head of The Korea Society, and that this organization is in his capable hands. It is my pleasure to accept his invitation to be the first speaker in this series.

There are some people in the audience who are very knowledgeable about this subject; indeed, more knowledgeable than I am in some respects, and so my apologies if my lecture is a little oversimplified. I understand that this is more of a general audience, on the whole, so I will couch my lecture in terms of an overview of Korea's recent history. I would like to speak for between forty-five to fifty minutes. I'd like to end at seven thirty. I'm sure there will be many questions and much to discuss, and I'd like to leave sufficient time for that discussion.

As you can see, divided Korea is still a problem very much with us today. On the left is a political map of Korea in which you have two states on the Korean Peninsula separated by the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone. My apologies to those in the audience who object to the naming of the sea on the right side of the map as the Sea of Japan. That is, for better or worse, the standard usage in English for what the Koreans call the East Sea. On the right is a photograph of the aftermath of the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island last November by North Korean artillery.

Divided Korea seems to be a relic of the Cold War; yet here we are. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the unification of Germany, after the unification of Vietnam well before that, Korea still remains divided; with the exception of the division between mainland China and Taiwan, which is a somewhat different type of division. The North-South division is the last of the Cold War divided nations that remain with us.

Tonight I'd like to give an overview of how that came to be, why that is the case, how Korea became divided, why Korea remains divided, and why division persists. I'd like to spend some time focusing on various attempts to overcome division, particularly through dialogue and interaction between North and South Korea, and the implications of divided Korea for the present international scene and going into the future.

To begin with, how did Korea become divided? The division of Korea was a product of the end of World War II. It was never expected to be a permanent division. It was more of an ad hoc, last-minute decision by the victorious Allies, primarily the United States with the cooperation of the Soviet Union.

The idea of what to do with the Japanese colony of Korea came up in various conferences as World War II came to its end. This is a photo at the top of The Big Three; Churchill, FDR and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1943, which was primarily focused on the disposition of Europe after the Germans surrendered, but also brought up the subject of the possibility of allied intervention in the former colonies of Japan, including the largest and most important being Korea.

On the bottom, there are a couple of old photos of the men who ultimately became the first leaders of the two Korean states, Syngman Rhee or Yi Seungman in the center on the left with John Hodge, the commander of U.S. Forces and the head of the U.S. military government in Korea on the right.

The right-hand picture shows Kim Il-sung with chopsticks having dinner with, I believe that is Romanenko, one of the leading Soviet generals. Does anybody recognize the man on the far left? Does anybody know the man in the headband and the hanbok with the glasses? Cho Man-sik; yes, Kodang Cho Man-sik who was the leading nationalist figure in the Pyongyang region. I will get to his fate in a moment.

With the defeat of Germany, the next question would be, as the summer of 1945 progressed, what do with Japan, whose defeat was also apparently imminent. The Soviet Union had been neutral since 1941 in the war with Japan, and America's interest was in getting the Soviet Union to cooperate in the war in order to accelerate its end.

There was, of course, concern on the part of the Americans that there would be a long and protracted war with the Japanese, including an invasion of the home islands, which could be an extremely bloody venture. Some of the war plans suggested that this war could go on well into the fall of 1945, perhaps October or so, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties before the Japanese ultimately surrendered.

As we know, of course, this is not the scenario that played out. On August 6 of 1945, the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. On August 9 the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and it was quite evident that Japanese surrender would happen in a matter of days.

The problem, as the Americans saw it, was that the Soviet Union was already in the region, and their ability to sweep down through Northeast Asia into the Korean Peninsula was far greater than the American ability to enter Korea from the Pacific. The question that the American war leadership had to face was what to do about the possibility that the Soviet Union would have control and domination over the entire Korean Peninsula. This was seen as something to be avoided if at all possible.

On the night of August 10-11, 1945, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee in Washington discussed what to do with Korea and discussed, in particular, how to divide responsibility with the Soviet Union and to have a role for the United States in Korea after World War II, after the Japanese surrender.

The story goes that two junior officers in the military, Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk (the latter was to become Secretary of State and this is according to Rusk's testimony later), were given the assignment of figuring out how to divide Korea. They looked at a National Geographic map of the Korean Peninsula, did not see any obvious, natural boundaries that could separate Korea between the North and the South, and decided on a line of latitude which roughly divided Korea in half; but very importantly gave Seoul, the capital, to the American side in the South. That line was the 38th parallel, 38 degrees north latitude.

This was communicated to the Soviet leadership and somewhat to the surprise, it seems, of the Americans, the Soviet Union agreed to this division; that the Soviets would take the Japanese surrender down to the 38th parallel, and the Americans would accept the Japanese surrender from the South up to the 38th parallel.

Part of the reason, it seems, that the Soviet Union agreed to this was that Stalin expected to have a share in the occupation of Japan, and specifically to occupy all or part of the northern island of Hokkaido. This turned out not to be the case, and the occupation of Japan was essentially a unilateral, American venture. But for whatever reasons, Stalin agreed to this division of Korea.

As I said, this was not expected to be a permanent division. This was a temporary expedience to accept the Japanese surrender and to establish a presence of both American and Soviet forces on the ground in Korea so that the Soviets would not have complete control over the peninsula; which could then be potentially a security threat to Japan in the future. It was then expected that there would be elections held in which there would be a unified Korean government over the entire peninsula.

Perhaps Professor Ledyard, when he talks about the Korean War, can go into more of this detail. It's a very complicated story. My Ph.D. advisor, Bruce Cummings at Chicago, wrote a 700-page Ph.D. dissertation on this, which became an 1,100-page book. And so, obviously there's a lot of detail that I'm going to have to skip over. And that's only from one scholar. There are many other contending opinions about this.

Essentially and briefly, the Soviet and American sides could not agree on the form of a postwar Korean government, a liberated Korean government. There were three meetings held between the Soviet and American officials; two in Korea and one in Moscow. In the meantime, there were political forces on the ground in Korea who were coalescing around the respective occupation governments; the Americans, of course in Seoul; and the Soviets having their headquarters in Pyongyang, the largest city in the North.

Initially, the Soviets worked through this man in the bottom right picture, Cho Man-sik until early 1946, when he opposed the outcome of the Moscow conference of Soviet, American and British delegates about Korea, which was that there would be a period of several years of trusteeship in which there would be a joint occupation, and then the Koreans would be given eventual independence. Many Koreans, needless to say, opposed that. Cho Man-sik was one of them. He was put under house arrest for his outspoken opposition and then disappeared sometime in the early stages of the Korean War.

In the end, it turned out that the Soviet supported leader of the North would be the young guerrilla fighter Kim Il-sung, who was also a resident of Pyongyang. Initially, interestingly enough, the Soviet documents we have seen tell us that the Soviets wanted Kim Il-sung to work with Cho Man-sik as his junior in a new political party, but Kim had bigger ambitions for himself and became the head of the northern branch of the Korean Communist Party, and then the head of the new government of the North.

Elections were ultimately held after things fell apart in terms of agreements between the two sides. Under U.N. auspices, the U.S. handed over the issue of Korea to the U.N. in 1947. Elections were held in 1948, which the North Koreans and the Soviets refused to recognize, so an independent government was established in the South alone, and then three weeks later, a new government was established in the North.

As a consequence, you had two governments, each claiming to be the legitimate government of the entire Korean Peninsula. As has been said, the Koreans left and right, North and South, might not agree on anything else except that there should be a single, unified Korea; and the result, almost inevitably, was a military conflict, a civil war which became an internationalized war through the intervention of the U.N. forces led by the United States, and then by the Chinese.

There's still more. History never ends, and when we think we've found the definitive answer to this, more comes out, and there's still more. I've just been reviewing in the last few days a new manuscript written by a Russian scholar that reveals new insights into the Soviet and North Korean side of the Korean War.

The war was, of course, a devastating experience for Koreans on both sides. Millions were killed, injured or displaced. The atomic bomb was almost used. It was seriously considered by Truman, and it involved a massive intervention of Chinese forces as well as, of course, the Americans and their allies.

But the greatest tragedy of the war, for the long term, might be seen as its lack of resolution; that the Korean division was not resolved by the war, and the result of the war, as we know, was not a peace agreement, but an armistice; a cessation to the hostilities and the division along the line, not exactly at the 38th parallel, but very close to it, the zigzagged line called the Demilitarized Zone.

This, also, was supposed to be temporary measure, after which a political solution was supposed to be reached in a year-and-a-half. The sides involved in the Korean conflict, as well as the Soviet Union (the Soviet Union was not officially a belligerent in the war, but a force behind the scenes) came to the conference held in April of 1954 in Geneva, which also resulted in an impasse.

This has been a recurrent theme, now, for sixty years. Why that is the case, I don't have an answer. Maybe some of you might have. Attempts to solve the Korean problem never seem to reach agreement. That was true in the initial division, in the Geneva conferences, and in every meeting since then.

So, division became solidified in a very literal sense with massive military forces on both sides of the DMZ, barbed wire, booby traps, mines and the introduction of tactical nuclear weapons from the late 1950s on the American side until the early 1990s.

This solidification of division was also reflective of a general, global division. One of the great, pioneering scholars of Korean studies, Gregory Henderson, who was a diplomat in South Korea in the late forties, wrote a book called Divided Nations in a Divided World. And Korea was very much a divided nation in a divided world, which seemed to reflect and embody the bipolar division of the Cold War itself. Again, this brings up the question I set out at the beginning. Why does Korea remain divided, when a Cold War is now increasingly distant history from the past? I'll try to get to that towards the end.

Korea, in its division, did seem to reflect the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, and when the bipolarity of the Cold War began to erode in the late 1960s, that also had an effect on the Korean Peninsula. But the most dramatic change, in the East Asian dynamic of the Cold War, was the rapprochement between the United States and China, and this finally led to the first real breakthrough in North-South relations, the first of four major openings.

The first was in a direct response to the Sino-Soviet rapprochement, the Kissinger visit to China and then later Nixon in China; a wonderful opera. Perhaps there will be an opera of Park Chung-hee and Kim Il-sung too, someday, although they didn't actually meet. But Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang, that would be a nice opera.

But the communiqué of July 4 of 1972 was the first agreement between North and South Korea to engage in dialogue, to find a peaceful way out of this impasse and to move toward unification. The July 4 communiqué was very brief. It didn't outline a lot of specifics. There were a series of meetings held between various officials after that, but by the summer of 1973, these talks began to break down. The North eventually pulled out completely, and the talks collapsed.

Nothing much happened, at least at the official level, for another twelve years. Then an  unexpected event triggered a new set of talks, and that was a flooding in the South. The South Korean side asked for economic assistance from the North, which sounds really astonishing today. The North gave cement and other materials. This led to a series of exchanges between their respective Red Crosses of both sides, and an exchange of cultural troops for the first time, as well as official talks that went on for a year or so.

Once again, however, this momentum did not continue, and the two sides returned to the old habits of mutual acrimony and hostility. It was not helped by the run-up to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, in which in 1987, a Korean air passenger plane exploded and North Korean agents were held responsible for that. This was the event which put North Korea, eventually in 1989, on the terrorist list of the U.S. State Department, where it remained until the Bush administration.

The next opening was with the end of the Cold War, itself, and that again changed the dynamic of the Korean Peninsula, as well. This led to (and I won't go into the details of this) the second and a much more extensive signed agreement on both sides, the Basic Agreement on exchange, cooperation and reconciliation; as well as an agreement on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in February of 1992.

This was a very different time, however, from the early 1970s, and twenty years before, there seemed a real possibility of cross recognition, a certain kind of equality between the two sides of North and South Korea. But the early 1990s was a time in which North Korea appeared to be an anachronistic holdover of a system that was about to die, and many in South Korea, in the West and elsewhere believed that North Korea would itself soon be history. That was, in part, the kind of background that made this possible.

But this also fell apart. This time one of the major factors was the first nuclear crisis of 1993-1994 in which North Korea was accused of diverting spent nuclear fuel to make weapons. They threatened to pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the U.S. and North Korea came very close to open hostilities in the summer of 1994. That was the worst moment in the state of conflict, between the Korean War and now, on the Korean Peninsula until perhaps very recently.

In the late 1990s, there was a shift once again, which had to do with, first of all, the changing relationship between the United States and North Korea (which Mark Minton was very instrumental in working out) as well as the coming to power of a new government in South Korea under Kim Dae-jung who put engagement with North Korea at the center of his policies.

The symbolic peak of that was the June 15 summit meeting in 2000 between the leaders of North and South, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il. There was another summit meeting, of course, in October of 2007, but we can see this period, this decade or so, as a high point of possibility and of real interaction between North and South Korea.

Another way to look at this, if we look at the four openings is also the corresponding stages of North-South relations. The first was a stage of no contact at all from 1948 to 1972, a period of on-again, off-again talks for twenty years, a period of relatively cautious opening in the early Kim Dae-jung administration, and then a period of deepening economic linkages with the setting up of tourism, of economic cooperation ventures and of human exchange.

I think this should not be forgotten. North Korea has not been completely isolated from the South or vice versa. There were considerable numbers of academic exchanges, of visits mostly, of course, from the South to the North; but there was a feeling of real expectation that this would be a breakthrough, that even unification and a kind of cooperation between both sides was a real possibility, and I think that was the first time, since the Korean War, that, that feeling was so widespread.

Since 2008 (and I'll get back to this toward the end) we may be in another stage of a return to confrontation. Maybe it will continue, or maybe it reached its peak last year. That remains to be seen.

Again, just to reiterate, let me go through these stages one by one. We might call this first period one of existential antagonism, that each side understood the other as a threat to its very existence and refused to recognize each other's legitimacy as political entities. They reflected, as I said, the regional and global Cold War divide, the bipolarity of the world to the Cold War which seemed very neat at the time; although, as we know, the relations on the Communist side were much more complex than they appeared in the 1960s. It ended, as I said, with Nixon's visit to China and U.S.-China reconciliation, and it opened up these talks that led to the July 4 communiqué.

If we look at the trend of it, we see this movement towards a cautious coexistence. The talks broke down, as I said, in the summer of 1973. Exchanges took place, again, in the mid-eighties, but what also changed is this shift in the economic position between North and South.

It's also, I think, useful to keep in mind that North Korea was not always the economic basket case that we see it today; and indeed in the late 1950s, North Korea was something of an economic miracle. It may have had the highest rates of industrial growth in the world in the late 1950s and the period of reconstruction after the Korean War, and it was South Korea that was seen, particularly by the Americans, as an economic basket case until, perhaps, the mid 1960s when it began to get on its feet.

But the 1980s was a very dramatic period of economic shift toward the South from the North, and there are various interpretations of how and why this took place. My own view was that the decisive moment came in the mid-1960s, and it had to do with both North and South Korea changing their economic policy. South Korea, which is the more well-known story, focused on rapid economic growth and export oriented growth under Park Chung-hee which became, in the course of the 1970s and the 1980s, one of the great economic success stories of the modern age.

But in about 1966, North Korea also took an economic shift, in a way, in the other direction in its policy to what the North Koreans called a policy of equal emphasis in which they would put equal resources into the military and the civilian economy. There was considerable debate within North Korea about this, but those who wanted to emphasize greater militarization won out, and those who wanted to emphasize greater diversification and orientation toward consumer economic production lost. North Korea began to decline in its economic growth, although it didn't actually go into a negative economic condition; but that was the point at which, I think, North Korea's economic decline relative to the South became ultimately irreversible.

Although I talked about Kim Dae-jung in the late 1990s, of course, before him there was Roh Tae-woo from the late eighties to the early nineties. He had a policy of what he called Northern Politics or Northern Policy which reached out towards Communist countries on the Asian mainland and in Europe, but also had a component of reaching out to North Korea, as well.

This built upon South Korea's already very impressive economic achievements, combined with the Eastern Bloc's desire to improve their own economies which were encountering increasing difficulties to win, if not friends, at least cooperative partners in the Eastern Bloc. Finally, as I've said, the end of the Cold War, and the North-South Basic Agreement of 1991-1992 culminated that phase of movement to a cautious coexistence.

The1990s was a complex roller coaster period of ups and downs on the Korean Peninsula. There was, as we know, the first U.S.-North Korean nuclear crisis, of course. Like World War I, they didn't think it was the first one, because they did not anticipate the second, which occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century, leading to an agreed framework between the U.S. and the DRPK of North Korea in October of 1994, which very simply froze (to simplify the agreement) North Korea's program in exchange for energy assistance, or at least the plutonium program as we were later to discover. That was another nuclear program that would emerge later on.

That, in turn, kind of floundered after a couple of years, until there was a new crisis in 1998 over North Korea's ballistic missiles, which led to a new series of talks with the U.S. It seemed to lead the U.S. and North Korea very close to a substantial breakthrough in diplomatic relations, even the possibility of normalization; at least, that's what it appeared from the outside. Perhaps Mark has a different view of really went on, but it did seem that the U.S. and North Korea were on the verge of a new relationship by 2000, after the June 15 summit and the visit of Vice Marshal Cho Myong-rok from North Korea to meet with Clinton, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang.

Much of this momentum came to a screeching halt under the succeeding administration of George W. Bush, which involved a reevaluation of Korea policy, the infamous placement of North Korea in the "axis of evil" in the 2002 State of the Union address, and in October of 2002 accusations of a secret parallel uranium enrichment program. Finally, in 2003, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which they had already threatened to do in 1993-1994, and it seemed, once again, we were on the verge of a serious conflict.

The solution of this was the Six-Party Talks (or at least that was the solution that the Chinese proposed as a way out of this impasse) which would involve more partners in this dialogue process. Beginning in April, South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan would convene meetings—they had all been in Beijing until now—to try to reach an agreement on North Korea's nuclear program, first of all; but also, more generally, to try to overcome this system of division, or perhaps more accurately of alienation, of North Korea from this growing, cooperative state of affairs in Northeast Asia; to bring North Korea out of this economic and diplomatic marginalization and to put it on a more normal footing in its relations with its neighbors.

The first serious breakthrough of that was the September, 2005 agreement on principles, but every time it seemed there was a step forward in this, something would happen that would set things back. There were missile tests in 2006, and then the first North Korean nuclear test in October of 2007. There was yet another agreement on February 13 despite this North Korean nuclear test, and that, too, did not lead very far. There was a second nuclear test in May of 2009, and sanctions imposed upon the U.N. that countered that.

This, as I said, is a very schematic kind of overview. We can talk more about the details of this complex process, and there are those in this room I think will have something to contribute to the discussion with their insights of many aspects of this.

Where we are now, as I think most of us know, is uncertainty. The Six Party Talks have been suspended. North Korea has engaged in very provocative acts. They've been accused of sinking the South Korean naval ship the Cheonan. I say accused because although an international commission gave evidence or concluded that they were responsible, the North Koreans have vehemently denied responsibility and the Chinese have tended to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, for better or for worse. There was also the shelling of the island of Yeonpyeong in November of 2010, which brought North-South relations and the North-South conflict to one of the highest levels that they've seen in many years.

Where do we go from here, as the two Koreas face the future? Korea is the last country divided by the Cold War. The Cold War, in a way, can no longer be the kind of excuse or rationale for why Korea remains divided, because the Cold War doesn't exist. Rather, Korean division has its own internal momentum, its own dynamic, that has long outlasted the Cold War divide, which has its own roots in its history and in the intractability of the two systems that have emerged on both sides, embedded also in a regional system in which the external forces have not been able to reach agreement on how, exactly, to overcome the system of conflict and division.

Up until the last couple of years, increasing economic contact hasn't disappeared completely, but it has certainly gone down considerably. The expectation that many have that engagement, that the so-called Sunshine Policy (as the term was used in the early days of the Kim Dae-jung administration) would lead to some sort of fundamental, substantial, even dramatic change in the North's political system turned out, at least for now, to be unfounded. The North hasn't changed. In some ways, the South changed more, as a result of engagement policy, and the South Korean people's understanding and expectation of the North changed to a considerable extent.

There had been a move toward de facto peaceful coexistence of recognition of both sides, but at the same time, one of the things that this North-South contact impressed upon many, in South Korea at least, was that unification in the near future was not necessarily a desirable outcome. The unification of Germany had taught Koreans that this kind of unification of separated nations would have enormous, not only economic costs, which was very worrisome, but also cultural and social costs, and that this could set back Korea's own economic situation in the South for some time to come.

I think the biggest question of all (and in a way is the key to the entire question of Korea's persistent division) is the North, and why North Korea is still there. Why does North Korea still exist when all the other countries which had so much in common with North Korea, including all of the Eastern European Communist states, are long gone?

I think part of the reason for that is that North Korea is not really as much like those former Soviet Bloc states as it may have appeared. There is a resilience and persistence in the North Korean system, a rootedness in Korean conditions and history that is often underestimated. North Korea was not, at least not after its very initial formation, a satellite of the Soviet Union. It was, in many ways, a highly nationalistic and independent-minded state.

North Korea lives in a different environment, adjacent to China, which has its own stake in perpetuating North Korea's continued viability, and remarkably North Korea has been able to maintain the viability of the regime with a rather extensive degree of social control despite economic implosion in the mid- to late-1990s.

I want to conclude with this famous nighttime satellite photograph of the Korean Peninsula. It was first displayed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in 2003 (at least, he's the one who made this initially famous) to show how backward North Korea is. One sees this dark mass surrounded, in contrast, by the bright lights of South Korea.

Of course, this is reality. North Korea does have a severe energy shortage. There aren't a lot of lights operating in the North, and it is far poorer than the South. However, it's worth keeping in mind that the date of the photo is September of 2003, a time when the North Koreans were very concerned that they would be next on the target list of an American invasion after the attack on Iraq. There was a very high state of alert in North Korea, and a blackout of the country.

I'm not saying that's what's responsible for the blackness of North Korea, but I don't think we should separate North Korea's economic problems from its leadership's perception that the condition it finds itself in is of a North Korea surrounded by a world that is extremely hostile. How to bring North Korea out of that, how to light up the northern half of the peninsula has been a problem vexing those dealing with North Korea for some time, but I don't think that this blackness itself should make us believe that North Korea is simply a nonentity that is going to disappear anytime soon.

For better or worse, North Korea is with us for the foreseeable future, and for now, we have to deal with it from the outside looking in, whether that be the South, the United States or another country. North Korea is not a very positive place in many ways, but it is only through interaction with North Korea by direct recognition of its raison d'être that this division can ultimately be overcome and the peninsula, in some way, integrated. Thank you. [Applause]

MARK MINTON:
Thank you very much, Charles. That may have been billed as a basic lecture for a general audience, but I've been involved with Korean Peninsula issues for over twenty years, and there was a lot of food for thought in that presentation. I'm sure we have a lot of questions and comments from the audience.

MALE:
My name is Philip [?? 00:57:22]. You discussed North Korea in a way that assumes that it's a state like every other, but you haven't, other than showing him eating rice with chopsticks, talked at all about Kim Il-sung and the idea that North Korea is actually a family business, a kind of le tout c'est moi approach. How does that factor into your thinking?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, North Korea has been run by the same family for sixty years. They're at the center of power, and I think that's one of the reasons it still exists. That system works, in part, because of that. How long into the future it will work is very hard to say.

I do think history matters, and when we hear a lot of speculation that Kim Jong-il's apparent successor, his son Kim Jong-un, can't keep the country together, it wouldn't hurt to go back to the discussions around the time of Kim Il-sung's death, and the widespread belief that Kim Jong-il couldn't possibly pull this off; that you couldn't have a family dynasty in a Communist country. I think North Korea has proven that you can.

That's not a value judgment. That is not to say that this is a good way to run a country, but it is the way North Korea is run. That's why I was not at all surprised (although some people were, including North Korean observers in the South) that it appeared that Kim Jong-un would come out as the heir apparent to Kim Jong-il. I don't think the North Korean leadership knows any other way to run a country than to have a lineal descendant of the Kim family in charge.

And yet, I don't think North Korea is a country like any other. I think North Korea is actually very unique, and that's one of the reasons it's still there, when many countries which we thought were a lot like it are long gone.

HENRY SEGGERMAN:
Henry Seggerman, International Investment Advisors. Most people look on the shelling of Yeonpyeong as an aggressive act, but from a historical perspective, could it be looked on as backwash from the ending of the Korean War?

The Northern Limit Line was drawn by U.N. forces without it being part of the Armistice Agreement. What it does is it hems in the North Korean coastline so that they're unable to get ships out of their only thought-out deep water port, Haeju, and it makes shipping extremely difficult for North Korea because they have to skirt around between the coastline and these islands. They've always been very adamant about disagreeing with the Northern Limit Line, and there can be no excuse for that type of violent action on their part. I just wanted to ask if you felt that this recent provocation, from a historical perspective, might be a kind of backwash?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
I wish I had a map of the Northern Limit Line. It's very interesting. You're correct that is wasn't part of the Armistice Agreement. It was a unilateral line imposed by the U.N. command that went basically up the coast of North Korea. It doesn't extend straight out, but it veers in such a way that North Korea is strangled by this boundary. And, of course, the contestation over the waters, which are rich in crab and other maritime resources, has been going on for a long time.

The Yeonpyeong shelling was certainly not the first clash in that sea, not even in the last year or so. There were two naval clashes in 2009. I agree that we shouldn't excuse the North Korean action, but we should see it in the context of this division which the North Koreans have not accepted. Now, they didn't say anything until the early seventies, in part because they were too busy rebuilding their country to be focused on these sorts of issues, but since the early seventies they've continuously brought up the issue that the Northern Limit Line is not a legitimate boundary.

There have been suggestions of how to resolve this. One would be to have a discussion among the U.N. command, the two Koreas, and perhaps China to establish the boundary or establish, perhaps, a kind of demilitarized area in the West Sea, possibly reviving the Military Armistice Command. That's been one suggestion.

I do think that we need to put this into a context of a state of continuous tension and disagreement between North and South Korea, in which the North Korean side should be listened to. This is not to say that they're necessarily right, but that they have a certain point to make. In other words, I think it is good to have a discussion on these issues of contention, and this one in particular, because they clearly are contentious.

There is also background to the Yeonpyeong shelling itself which I won't get into in detail. The North Koreans talked about the South Korean military exercises provoking them, which we may or may not accept. Nevertheless, when we have these kinds of military actions going on so frequently, in a way, what's surprising about the Korean situation is that there haven't been these sort of clashes more often. Certainly it would be beneficial to have more dialogue over issues of disagreement, such as the Northern Limit Line.

FEMALE:
Thank you for taking my question, Professor Armstrong. You mentioned China, which of course, has its own motivations as to why it wants to keep the division in tact between North and South Korea. I was wondering if you could comment a little bit about whether you can see, in the future, North Korea taking on a policy more similar to China in terms of opening markets. The Kim dynasty notwithstanding, do you see the possibility of North Korea moving in that direction at any point in the future?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Thank you. I always remind people that I'm a historian, and yet they always ask me questions about the future. As one of my teachers once said, I have enough trouble predicting the past, much less predicting the future.

I might make this into a historical question. Could North Korea have taken a different route than it did? It seemed that it was moving in that direction in the early 2000s. Certainly the Chinese have not wasted any opportunity to lecture North Koreans, to tell them that they should open up their economy and move in a market direction like themselves.

It's more difficult for the North Koreans to do that for a number of reasons. First and foremost is  the fear of the political consequences of a serious opening, given that South Korea is right there on their border, and that this could undermine the stability of the regime. Second, economic opening, itself, can have unpredictable consequences as we've seen in the crisis over the currency evaluation which was then drawn back. Third, there are still very strong ideological motivations within North Korea that resist this kind of marketization.

I think the reason that North Korea appeared to be moving in that direction around 2000-2002 is precisely because they felt a greater security in their external environment, and therefore were able to embark on these internal reforms. But when that changed (partly, of course, because of North Korea's own action) then they pulled back, and a lot of the reforms that were instituted in those early years of the last decade were, if not reversed, at least reduced after 2005.

North Korea has become more and more a dependency of China, and as that condition continues, North Korea may, de facto, be part of China's own economic reform process. In that sense, I think North Korea could change economically, but politically it will probably not change substantially. I don't know if I've answered your question of the internal economic direction of North Korea and the way it deals with the outside world.

One thing that I think is fairly obvious is that the approach the U.S. and South Korea are taking now toward the North is only encouraging North Korea's further integration into the Chinese orbit. I'm not sure if that's really in the interest of the U.S. or South Korea or even of North Korea, which really, I think, would prefer not to be so close to China.

MALE:
Isaac [?? 01:08:19] from J.P. Morgan. The issue of the Northern Boundary Line seems to me an issue that can legitimately be discussed in an International Court of Justice, and yet there doesn't seem to be any voice being raised in that regard. North Korea's rejection by the international community, and the shelling of the island, might have been a demonstration of frustration.

Also, you showed the photograph of the dark northern side. I think when the United States initially accused North Korea of having developed nuclear weapons out of the Yeonpyeong research facility, there was no infrastructure delivering the power being generated.

Now, it doesn't come cheap if the infrastructure itself costs billions of dollars, and I believe North Korea did try to reach out to the international banking community (for instance, the World Bank) and yet was rejected. Do you have any background information in regards to the North Korean attempt to reach out to the international financial community to resolve these types of issues?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Certainly, one of North Korea's goals, in recent years, has been to be able to connect to the international financial community, and that's in some ways one of its primary goals and one of its primary reasons to want to be dropped from the terrorist list and other sanctions that the U.S. has imposed; not just to improve relations with the U.S. itself, but to enable North Korea to have access to World Bank loans and that sort of thing.

I'm not an expert on this, but North Korea is suffering from severe energy problems, above all. This has to do with infrastructural weaknesses, and it's very difficult to see how it can overcome those, because the problems continue to compound upon each other. This is something, I think, a historian can comment on.

They're dealing with a railway system that was built, for the most part, by the Japanese in the 1930s; a road system which is not much more recent; power plants which are obsolete; and energy sources that are very limited and mostly coming from China at this point. Again, there seemed to be some real hope that there would be an opening, in this regard, eight or nine years ago.

North Korea is not as isolated as many people think. There are North Korean students studying business affairs, and other kinds of things, in other countries; not many in the United States (I won't comment on that) but mostly in China, Singapore and elsewhere. The North Koreans don't live in another universe. They understand what it is they need to improve their economy. It's just that the political constraints make it very difficult for them to actually put those into practice.

North Korea's ability to get that kind of financial assistance is extremely constrained because of the current condition of their relationship with the United States. My understanding is that the North Koreans feel that there is a lot at stake in trying to have some kind of a breakthrough (or at least that was their old feeling which now may have changed) with the U.S. in order to be able to get the kind of input that it needs.

MALE:
Yes, I would be interested in your view of how North Korea is possible, based on the deeper historical context of Korean culture and history.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
How is North Korea possible? In some, strange ways, North Korea is more traditional than South Korea. Bertolt Brecht once said that "It is not communism that is radical, it is capitalism." Capitalism has certainly transformed the South, in many ways beyond recognition.

There are certain elements (and I wouldn't exaggerate this) in the way North Korea is run that are deeply rooted in Korean history, including its paternalistic authority and social stability. One of the things that's really remarkable, when you study the long run of Korean history (and Gary Ledyard, you know this well) is the stability of their political regimes. You have had only two dynasties in the space of a thousand years of Korean history, and the ability to achieve a certain stable equilibrium seems to be, in some ways, very Korean.

But North Korea is very modern, too, and the way I look at it is that there are layers of history that North Korea rests upon. There is the Confucian layer, the deep values and behavioral patterns of traditional Korea. There is the history of Japanese colonialism, which I think is very important in the North Korean case. This highly militarized, totalitarian colonialism had a very profound impact on Kim Il-sung and other people who came to power in North Korea.

In a certain way, Kim Il-sung became like the Japanese emperor, except the Korean version, The Sun God. He was called The Sun, Our Sun, Uri T'aeyang. I think that kind of symbolic leadership has certain roots in the Japanese experience, as well. There is the Stalinist layer, which has a lot to do with the institutions of North Korea as they were initially established, and also, of course, to do with the cult of the leader that remains very central to North Korean ideology.

There is also the experience of the guerrillas, who came to power initially in North Korea like Kim Il-sung, and their kind of very disciplined, anti-colonial, almost xenophobic suspicion of the outside world, and the desire to hold onto what they saw as essential to Korean identity and autonomy.

So there are various roots. There is even, perhaps, an element of Christianity in the kind of almost religious aspect of the cult of the Kim family, which may have to do with Kim Il-sung's own Christian background growing up in Korea and Manchuria.

However, I don't think North Korea is simply a modern version of a traditional Korean state. I think it is very different, and even in the way that the family state is sort of defined. It really has to do with a modern family. Kim is the father, the party is the mother and the people are the children, which is literally how North Korean texts read. That is an outcome of, I think above all, a fusion of the experience of Japanese colonial totalitarianism and Stalinism, along with elements of other aspects of the Korean tradition.

North Korea is a very conservative society. I have been struck by that, especially in my early visits to North Korea. By that I mean resistance to social change (and certainly any kind of political change) and wanting to keep things the way they are. And that conservatism, in a way, is connected to what I first mentioned; the deep continuity and stability of Korean culture over a very long period of history.

Of course, that isn't inevitable, as we've seen in South Korea. There's no country, perhaps, in the world which embraces change as much as South Korea does. So, cultures are not fixed. It depends on the kind of historical circumstances and environment as to which direction they go. But what that has meant is that as time has gone by, North and South Korea have become very different, which has made the possibility of unification more and more problematic.

MALE:
I'm Mark [?? 01:18:52]. I'm an independent investment advisor and member. You described North Korea in the late 1950s. I don't think you said "economic powerhouse" but you certainly said they were growing faster than South Korea. Where did the capital come from to build that economic base, and why did they lose the momentum and turn into the mess that they are now?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
The capital came from the Soviet Bloc, primarily. There was a huge investment of Soviet aid; hundreds of millions of rubles primarily from the Soviet Union, but also from other Eastern European countries. East Germany gave the third largest amount and then China the second. It was the biggest multinational reconstruction project in the Communist world by far, but the aid ran out. It was intended to run out in the early 1960s. So, that's one thing that happened. The Soviet East Bloc aid dried up.

The other thing that happened is, as I said, the shift toward a more militarized economy, toward putting more resources into the military in the mid-1960s and diverting it from the civilian economy and from the development of new technologies.

And also, North Korea reached the economic limits of this kind of a system, as we saw in Eastern Europe as well. In all of these centrally planned economies, there can be very significant growth in the early stages as the economies are building, especially in a kind of militarized fashion and in a reconstruction economy.

However, once they try to enter a stage of more sophisticated, consumer oriented, technologically oriented development, they all fail unless they engage in market reforms. The problem of course, as we saw in the 1970s and 1980s, is when these single party states engage in economic reforms, that can lead to political consequences which undermine the regimes, and North Korea has not wanted to go that far. That's the structural answer.

But the other thing that happened in the 1990s was, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of energy assistance, above all, and other kinds of assistance; and the end of captured markets for North Korean goods. North Korea wasn't able to get inputs from these former Communist countries, and they had nothing that most other countries wanted to buy with the exception, perhaps, of missiles and other kinds of military technologies.

With all of that, then, they were hit by a series of natural disasters in 1995 and 1996; two years of flooding and then drought, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The whole economy collapsed at that point.

From what I understand, the current economic situation is relatively stable. It's certainly not enviable and not good by general world standards, but it's much better than it was ten years ago, and has reached a point where it is not likely to lead to the kind of crisis that it did in the 1990s. For a long time, North Korea has had to deal with the problem of getting beyond the point of minimal subsistence to a state of real economic growth and development. They haven't found the answer to that yet.

MALE:
Good evening, I'm [Alex Reno?? 01:22:58]. I have two questions, if I may. Why is it called the "Democratic" Republic of People's Korea?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
It's called the Democratic People's Republic.

MALE:
Sorry, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The second question is, if you know, whether the Chinese were invited to investigate the sinking of the Cheonan, and if they weren't, why not?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
There were a number of people's democracies after World War II that were single party states. There is the People's Republic of China, and North Korea took on the name of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea because I guess that sounded even more impressive. Democratic, of course, meant a kind of mass participation in the political system, not democracy the way most of us in the West would understand it. I think there were two other democratic people's republics that emerged at that time. I can't remember which they were.

Was China invited to investigate the Cheonan? I don't think so. Does anybody know the answer to this question?

MALE:
They had a multinational team. The entire team was made up of allies of the United States.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
The North Koreans asked to conduct their own investigation, and that was refused. The Russians have looked at the evidence, and they claim that it is inconclusive. And from what I understand, the Chinese weren't really interested in looking at the evidence. They had their own opinion about what happened, and they didn't want to be dissuaded from that.

Yes, the team could be accused of a certain bias. I am certainly not enough of an engineer to really evaluate the evidence on my own. It would have seemed reasonable to expect other parties, such as the Chinese and indeed, the North Koreans (why not), to be involved in the investigation, but they weren't.

MALE:
Thank you. My name is Andrew [?? 01:25:48]. I'm a student at NYU. I was hoping you could give some insight into the political legitimacy of the eventual successor Kim Jong-un. From my understanding, after Kim Il-sung developed himself as a deity in North Korea, and when he chose his son, Kim Jong-il, as the "second coming," it was fairly early in his regime and there was time to legitimize the claim that Kim Jong-il was the "second coming." In 1994 when he succeeded his father, it was already built in place that he was going to be the next in command. However, with Kim Jong-un, it seems like Kim Jong had three sons. The first one was picked initially, and now there is a changeover. I was wondering if you could comment on that.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, North Korea is not exactly a monarchy. You have to be a member of the Kim family to be the leader, but you have to prove yourself, and it's not necessarily the case that the eldest son gets picked.

The history of the family succession seems to go back to the early 1960s, and Kim Il-sung's concern about what would happen after he left the scene, especially after seeing what happened to the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. Initially, there was a kind of power struggle between Kim Jong-il and his uncle, Kim Yong-ju; Kim Il-sung's younger brother.

I've actually been investigating this for a book I'm working on. There are a number of really interesting Soviet reports on this from the late sixties and early seventies that talk about the Kim family and the competition between Kim Jong-il and his uncle over succession.

And Kim Jong-il went through a series of positions in the party beginning in the early 1960s, as soon as he graduated from Kim Il-sung University, which has, by the way, a fantastic museum of the revolutionary activities of Kim Jong-il. If you ever get to visit Kim Il-sung University, it's well worth seeing.

In 1973 or thereabouts, Kim Yong-ju faded from the scene and Kim Jong-il was more or less put forth. It became fairly obvious that he was going to be the successor, and one of the ways you knew this, I've heard from defectors, is suddenly there were songs about Kim Jong-il. You can understand a lot about North Korea by listening to what they play on the state radio. In fact, one person told me that in 1974, there were suddenly more songs about Kim Jong-il then about Kim Il-sung, which everyone understood to mean that Kim Jong-il was going to be the next leader.

So, he had quite a bit of time to prepare. He didn't really come out publicly as the successor, in an official way, until the October, 1980 Six Party Congress; therefore he had between fourteen and twenty years to prepare. I won't go into the details and the speculation, because we really don't know that much about why Kim Jong-un apparently was chosen to be the successor. Perhaps it was because he looks the most like Kim Il-sung. Perhaps it was because of his personality. As I said, there was a struggle within the Kim family to get the imprimatur of Kim Il-sung to be chosen as the successor.

Certainly the fact that Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son, got caught trying to sneak into Japan to bring his son to Disneyland made it very unlikely that he would be the successor, and he's been living in rather comfortable exile in Macao ever since. What I would guess is that Kim Jong-il is hoping to stay around long enough to build up Kim Jong-un the way he was built up by his father, Kim Il-sung, to be the legitimate successor, to have the power base within the military and within the party.

And it's interesting that Kim Jong-il came up through the ranks of the party, and his positions were always with the party until the 1990s; whereas Kim Jong-un's positions have been with the military. The whole emphasis on Kim Jong-un's official face has been with the military. He was named a 4-star general and placed on the Military Commission, which I think reflects the shift in power in North Korea from the party to the military in the intervening time. I think if Kim Jong-il sticks around for a few more years, which he may very well do, then the possibility of a smooth succession to Kim Jong-un is likely.

By the way, I don't think Kim Il-sung made himself a deity, exactly, but he did officially become immortal in 1998. He was named in the new constitution the "eternal president." So Kim Il-sung is the only political leader who is able to rule forever, which goes well beyond "dictator for life."

RONDA HAUBEN:
Ronda Hauben, and I cover the U.N. now for Tageszeit and Taz.de, and I did for all OhmyNews International.

My question is about the U.N. I wondered about your response to two events that have happened in the past year. One was the Cheonan and the way that, that was taken up at the U.N. under the Mexican presidency where there was a real effort to invite both North Korea and South Korea into the process with both presenting their positions.

Then North Korea had a press conference, one of the very rare ones at the U.N. It was under the Mexican presidency that there was a real effort to have a balanced process. That was the month of June, but then in July, there was the presidential statement that made the effort to include the positions of both, and to encourage diplomacy and discussion.

Then we come to the Yeonpyeong situation. In December, that very tense situation caused the Russian Federation to call for an emergency meeting. Although there wasn't any press statement at the end of that, the Russian ambassador made it very clear that he thought that South Korea was not wise to be firing into the waters at this time. And so, he included South Korea as being part of the problem.

I wondered, in light of what you say about North Korea not being listened to, that these two incidents were somewhat different. I was wondering what your response would be and if you have any insight into whether there is something happening that could be helpful from the U.N. and the Security Council towards drawing North Korea more into the world community in terms of presenting the problems rather than having to look for a military way of dealing with them.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, the role of the U.N. is very interesting. In a certain sense, the U.N. was a belligerent in the Korean War, but it hasn't really been treated that way. Everyone understands that it was primarily the United States that fought on the Allied side, and that the U.N. (although it could be in the early days), was seen by North Korea to some extent as the enemy. However, the U.N. has come to play a much more neutral role in Korean affairs.

The Security Council has tended to play a negative role in the sense that in recent years, since the 2006 nuclear test, the issue has been whether or not (and how strongly) sanctions would be imposed. And that's where Russia, China and the United States have played their roles in getting their interests into Security Council resolutions.

It is certainly conceivable that the U.N. could play a more proactive and positive role in bringing North Korea into dialogue and really giving North Korea a platform to talk about its positions on these issues. Certainly that happens in the General Assembly, but we have not seen that with the Security Council itself.

I also think there are a number of actors who are outside of those with immediate interests on the Korean Peninsula, such as Mexico, such as ASEAN, which would like to play a more mediating role. At the end of the day, I think that because of the nature of the Korean division and the Korean conflict, serious steps towards peace, toward resolving this conflict can only be taken by direct dialogue among the principles involved, and that would be at a minimum, North and South Korea, China and the United States. So whereas the U.N. can play a role as a platform, I don't see the U.N. playing a more direct role as an actor in this conflict.

MALE:
Hi, my name is George. I'm a member of the society. I think I want to join the DPR Korea military, like Kim Jong-un, and become general on the first day. No boot camp, no push-ups, no eating military rations. I think Sweden was a neutral member of the investigation into the sinking…

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Yes.

MALE:
… but I would like to ask some historical questions. Cho Man-sik, his pseudonym Kodang, could you expound a little bit more on him? Was Kim Il-sung installed by the U.S.S.R., and was Kim Jong-il born in the Soviet Union? Finally, WikiLeaks. Can you also comment on China apparently saying they would support a unified Korea under the direction of Seoul? Thank you.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, I'll start with the last one, which I know the least about. But from what I've read of the WikiLeaks, this is a report from the South Korean diplomat about what China said to the U.S. ambassador; so it's first of all, secondhand.

The other thing about that is I think it's a very positive sign that China is talking about contingencies, but I don't think that means China really expects this kind of a unification to happen, or that, that would be their first choice. I think that there's a certain kind of spin to the way that the Chinese message is portrayed in the WikiLeaks that might not give a really accurate window into what the Chinese are thinking. They understand, of course, that this is a possibility, and they may be able to live with it if they have to, but they would prefer not to see this eventuality, I think.

Cho Man-sik was a very prominent nationalist figure in the Colonial period, especially in the 1920s. He was a native of the Pyongyang region. He was a Presbyterian elder. He became the head of the South Pyongyang Provincial People's Committee, which was sort of an ad hoc caretaker organization following the Japanese surrender. He was the person introduced by the Soviets when they came in, or who introduced them and also preceded Kim Il-sung in October, 1945 when there was a big, public gathering in Pyongyang to show the people who was administering the country under the Soviet occupation.

He founded a party that became part of the ruling coalition in the North, called the Korean Democratic Party, but he came to disagree with the Soviets and their policies and was, as I said, put under house arrest in January of 1946. Initially, from what I've seen from the Soviet materials, Kim Il-sung was sent to work with Cho Man-sik in the Korean Democratic Party; but he was really a Communist. He was much closer to the Korean Communists and then he was moved there.

I think it's pretty conclusive that Kim Jong-il was born in the camp where Kim Il-sung retreated at the end of 1940 or early 1941 near Vyatskoye. And that wasn't discussed, actually, in the North Korean media. The birthplace of Kim Jong-il was not an issue until after 1980 when he was presented as the heir apparent. Then there was suddenly literature about Kim Jong-il being born on the slopes of Mt. Paektu, and that hadn't existed before. So, there was a real transformation in the way Kim Jong-il was portrayed, and his whole history was portrayed, after 1980.

FEMALE:
You had mentioned that Kim Il-sung was raised Christian, which is a little bit surprising to me, because at the time, I didn't think Christianity was something that was real popular in Korea. So, I'm interested in knowing how that came about, and how did he become  totally anti-Christian? Thank you.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, Christianity was very popular in the Pyongyang region. That was the center where he was born and raised. South Pyongyang Province was the epicenter of Protestant Christianity in the early twentieth century, so it's actually not surprising that he was raised Christian.

His father was involved in Christian activities, but his mother was the devout one; Kang Ban-sok "The Rock," as in the rock of Peter. She was a deaconess in the Presbyterian church. Presbyterianism was and remains the largest [Christian] denomination in Korea.

Kim Il-sung wasn't necessarily anti-Christian in the way he ran North Korea initially. In fact, his mother's cousin, Kang Jin-sok was the head of the Korean Christian Association in North Korea, and there were substantial numbers of Christian churches that were sort of regime supporters. But that was the issue that split the Christian community, because you had to be part of this government front organization, the Korean Christian Association; otherwise you were ostracized.

From the statistics I've read, about one-third of the churches in the North remained supporters of the regime under Kang Jin-sok, and then about two-thirds became disillusioned, and many left. Especially during the war, there seems to have been a step up in the persecution of Christians, partly, perhaps for religious reasons; but I think more importantly because of Christian association with American missionaries. So, there was considerable persecution of Christians in the North certainly before the war. During the war, many of them fled to the South.

We don't know that much about Kim Il-sung's Christian background. There is a story that he taught Sunday school for a while in his teens. And it may be that, that was part of the inspiration for the kind of cultish personality; the father, the son and the Holy Party. I think that is perhaps one element, but not the dominant one.

FELICIA KING:
I'm Felicia King. I teach a cultural course at a high school, a course on the Cold War.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
In high school? Well, that's great. Even my college students don't know what the Cold War is.

FELICIA KING:
Actually, I have two questions. On your last slide, you explain increasing economic contact, but not political contact between the North and South. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that? And then secondly, I was of the perception, partly based on images like this or information I learned in the West, that the North is primarily closed, and I'm surprised of so many scholarly exchanges. Could you elaborate on other exchanges, or if there are cultural exchanges? I know it opens up everyone's world. If you could just elaborate on those two, that would be great.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Sure, there have been quite a few exchanges across both sides. There has been academic exchanges of historians. The Academy of Korean Studies in South Korea has had a program with their North Korean counterpart.

Tourism from the South to the North (obviously not the other way around) had been pretty extensive until things basically shut down in the latter part of 2008. There was the Hyundai tours of Geumgang Mountains in the East, and then the Kaesong tour which I took one year. I actually took one of the last Kaesong tours in November of 2008. It was really fascinating. To go on a bus full of South Korean tourists to North Korea, through the DMZ, was quite an experience.

There have been many religious groups, Buddhists, Christians, others. There is a University of Science and Technology that recently opened in Pyongyang, which is funded entirely by Korean Christian donations. There's a lot actually, even now in a state of greater tension, than two years ago. There is quite a bit going on that we often don't know.

The tourism has stopped, and a lot of the business investments have been suspended, but they haven't been eliminated. The Kaesong Industrial project (the biggest of these) which is a special economic area for South Korean companies to establish offices in the city of Kaesong was of huge concern, and still is more or less viable.

And, as I've said, there have been quite a few North Korean students studying abroad. I don't know the exact numbers. They've always been studying in China, hundreds if not thousands of North Korean students every year have been studying in China; but also in places like Australia and parts of Europe. So, North Korea is not as isolated as it may seem. What I'm saying is the idea that, in the near term, this kind of exposure would lead to greater social and political transformations in North Korea has not turned out to be the case.

Having said that, no I haven't been to Pyongyang recently. My understanding is that there are quite visible signs of economic change within Pyongyang of private cars being driven, taxis on the street, shops and so on. So, North Korea is changing. I think what we see in retrospect is a certain perhaps naïveté in the 1990s that everyone was becoming a liberal democracy, and that North Korea was just a little bit more behind. That may not be the case. And North Korea has changed. North Korea will continue to change, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will in any near term time frame become a much more liberalized society.

MALE:
Good evening, Professor. My name is Taylor Barnette. I'm from [?? 01:48:48]. I was wondering if you could comment on what you think China stands to gain from reunification, and what it stands to gain from maintaining (or doing its best to maintain) the status quo; given that China is such a key player, or at least Americans seem to think it's a key player in Korean affairs.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
I think China is a key player. I think the mistake that a lot of Americans make is thinking that, that means that the Chinese can get the North Koreans to do what they want. An ever bigger mistake is to believe that the Chinese can get the North Koreans to do what we want the North Koreans to do. The North Koreans are very independent-minded people and an independent-minded regime, and even though China theoretically has enormous leverage over North Korea; if they pulled the plug on their energy and food, the system would presumably collapse almost overnight.

But, of course, the Chinese don't want to see that happen. They don't want to lose whatever leverage they have there. They don't want to lose that buffer toward American power in the South. They probably don't want to see American troops up near the Yalu River as they were in the fall of 1950; of course, now under different circumstances. Nevertheless, they’re rather leery about that.

I think right now China doesn't see a lot to be gained in Korean unification. That doesn't necessarily mean they want the status quo. My reading of China's interest over the last ten or fifteen years is they would like to see a North Korea that has its regime more or less remain in place, but is improving its economy considerably and becoming more open to the outside world; becoming less of a problem for China and more of an asset.

But the bottom line, I think, for the Chinese is they do not want to see North Korea pushed over the brink, and they're very sensitive about any actions that might lead to instability in North Korea and the kind of economic costs that would bring for China, as well as the loss of a security buffer that they seem to value as very important.

They have a tremendous economic interest in the South, as well, which does not mean that the South has leverage over China. It actually means the opposite, because South Korea is much more dependent on China's markets and on economic cooperation with China than China is with South Korea.

For whatever it means, I've often found it interesting that China is the only country in the world where you can look at a map of the Korean Peninsula and see two countries, Chosǒn in the North and Han-gok in the South. In effect, China has a more explicit two Korea policy than any other country.

MALE:
My name is John. I'm just visiting, I guess. I'm not that knowledgeable, since a lot of my knowledge about North Korea comes from my mom just telling me what's going on.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
She knows what's going on?

MALE: She reads a pretty biased Korean newspaper, so I guess I have a lot of bias right now. I think it's pretty clear that when we sit down to meetings, they always end with a lot of broken promises. You know, North Korea may agree to do something at one point, and then not do what they agreed to do.

I'm questioning our strategy in dealing with the North Koreans. I mean, are we maintaining the exact same strategy, hoping that this time they'll finally keep their word? I think a big problem in North Korea is the isolation issue, the fact that the people actually don't understand what's going on in the outer world. Shouldn't our strategies be more focused upon exposing the North Korean population to something other than what they think they know?

I'm wondering what the strategy is in our relationship with North Korea? Is it evolving or is it just staying the same? I mean, it's been like fifty years, and I don't really think the situation has changed a lot. I'm not a history buff, but Japan used to be isolationist nation and from what I've learned in class, we came barging in and made them open up to the world.

This may be completely wrong, but from what I understand, some dude came in a boat, shot guns, said I'm here… I don't really know…

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Okay. The dude's name was Commodore Matthew Perry…

MALE:
Yes, Matthew Perry. Matthew Perry.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
… and the Japanese did the same thing twenty-two years later with Korea, and opened them up. But if I may interrupt and try to answer some of your questions.

Let me just say one thing. I absolutely agree with you. The best thing to do is to get North Korean people exposed to the outside world and to break down that barrier of ignorance. But the question is, how do you do that? And how can you do that without engaging the regime? I don't think you can.

You have to, on the one hand, do what can be done to bring information into North Korea; and actually that is going on. There is much more information flow in and out of North Korea now than there was ten years ago. North Koreans are able to get broadcasts from the South and get away with it, although, of course, it's illegal. There are hundreds of thousands of cell phones in North Korea that are (on and off again) connected to the outside world.

But until you get a leadership decision to take the policy steps that will lead to a more significant and official opening up, that information flow can only extend so far. You're not going to see an uprising, like in Egypt, under the conditions that you have now. I mean, you may never see that, but you're certainly not going to see that in the conditions that you have now, when the regime is so disconnected from the outside world. So you have to deal with it.

I didn't go through the history of what promises North Korea has made and broken, but it's not a complete history of failure, and North Korea has taken steps that will follow the agreements that they've taken up. Over the long run, I think, there has to be a two prong policy of engaging with the leadership, engaging with the government; and of bringing information through whatever means to the general population. And I think that over time, those two can come together.

BEN MOORE:
My name is Ben Moore. I'm a member. I'm just curious. What is the down side (I've heard the answer to this given a lot, but I don't know if it's true) for us in just building that Berlin Wall there a little higher, camping out, being supportive of South Korea; but basically saying that North Korea and its ruler "Jim Jones Il-sung" or whoever he is, is China's problem. Let's let China see how long they can go on not flooding them with goods and services and a better lifestyle before that falls; and then once it falls, and they get rich, thanks to China, they suddenly remember they're Korean and want to reunify with South Korea. What is the downside for us in adopting that stance?

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, the downside is that you can't keep North Korea out permanently and all the time, and I don't think that many in this country want to see North Korea continue to build its nuclear arsenal and continue to engage in provocations that could escalate into something very serious. So, I don't think that simply pushing North Korea into China's embrace is the long-term solution. I think that we have to bring North Korea out, however difficult it is, and that will also bring the two Koreas together, more and more, which is the ultimate wish of the Koreans on both sides. Thank you. [Applause]

MARK MINTON:
Thank you very much, Charles, and thank you very much to all of you. This is a wonderful beginning of this series. I love the numbers and the enthusiasm and the really intelligent questions.

I would encourage everyone to get a program outside and think about coming back for the rest of the series. Our next program in the series will be next Thursday, again at 6:30, February 17th, and it's going to be Modern Korean Literature: Searching for Identity at Home and in the World with Ann Choi Wan, who will be analyzing contemporary modern Korean literature. We hope to see you next week, and at subsequent sessions of this series.

We still have refreshments back here. I'm sure Charles would be happy to chat a bit, maybe follow up for a few minutes, and thank you again for coming. See you again. [Applause]