Sino-NK

Painting of Mao Zedong in the Jinggang Mountains (i.e., the cradle of the Chinese Revolution). | Image: China.org.cn

Conventional interpretations of the origins of modern nationalisms and national identities, which focus primarily on Western countries, underscore certain modernizing processes — urbanization and industrialization, military conscription, and the standardization of education — as those which generated (and continue to generate) a sense of national self and solidarity among otherwise disparate peoples. These processes are doubtless important to non-Western countries, namely North Korea and China, but the colonial experience under Japanese rule sets these countries’ national origin stories apart from that of France, Germany, and even other post-colonial nation-states (e.g., the United States). The difference in national origins for North Korea and China is worthy of further explication.

Leeds University graduate Benjamin Eckton takes up this challenge. In this featured essay on “exilic nationalism,” Eckton argues that national and revolutionary origins of the modern North Korean and Chinese states are found outside the urban, industrialized centers.¹⁾This essay represents part of Benjamin Eckton’s undergraduate thesis, Inception in Isolation: The National Struggles of Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung, 1927-1949, completed at the University Leeds under the supervision of Dr. Adam Cathcart. In the hills of Manchuria or the rough terrain of the Jinggang Mountains, the exiled leaders Kim Il-sung and Mao Zedong would develop and nurture ideas of revolution and national liberation. Once returned, Kim and Mao would use these ideas to mobilize entire populations, and forge new, post-liberation national identities. – Steven Denney, Managing Editor

In the Cradle of Exile: The National Origins of Communist China and Korea

by Benjamin Eckton

Inception in Isolation: Exilic National Identity Formation in China and Korea | In 1862, Lord Acton wrote that “exile is the nursery of nationality,” with the contemporary “exilic nationalism” which is nurtured there becoming a pivotal part of national identity formation.²⁾Cited in Benedict Anderson, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1992), 1; and Yossi Shain and M. Sherman, “Dynamics of Disintegration: Diaspora, Secession and the Paradox of Nation-States,” Nations and Nationalism 4, no. 3 (1998): 322. In the twentieth century particularly, the phenomenon of nationalism had outgrown its conventional definition of a phenomenon realized in centralized, urban, and industrialized centers. National communities were being “imagined” in a new and delocalised way. These “imagined communities” are central to our understanding of how national identity emerges from positions of exile.³⁾Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 1-9, 37-9; and Loring Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transitional World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 80.

Scholarship has examined Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung individually; a focused view of circumstantial comparison which overlooks wider points of contact in their ideological formations and standpoints. The leaders shared some hardships and faced different struggles. Extensive analysis of Mao and Kim’s lasting narration of their periods as the nuclei of resistance in exile is indispensable in explaining their successes. These national identities were internalized by the people, and coupled with the promise of raising their countries from the prostrate conditions of Japanese and imperialist domination to positions of strength and independence. The perpetuation of such humiliation developed an “ideological bonding” with and of the people and an “elaborate lexicon” which accompanied it.⁴⁾David E. Apter, “Discourse as Power: Yan’an and the Chinese Revolution,” in New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution, ed. Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 200.

The victory of Mao and Kim’s national identities fall somewhere between consolidating power of the “ideological apparatus” of the state, and the organic “incipient… expression of the ‘nation-popular’” subscribing to it.⁵⁾Homi K. Bhabha, Introduction to Nation and Narration by Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3; and Guoguang Wu, “From Post-Imperial to Late Communist Nationalism: Historical Change in Chinese Nationalism from May Fourth to the 1990s,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 468. The success of the communist states in China and North Korea was instigated by a small, dispersed intellectual elite dependent upon crystallizing a panoply of ideologies into a shared cultural medium and sense of national identity in order to consolidate their national revolutions.⁶⁾Apter, “Discourse as Power,” 200-209.The potential ideological fecundity of Mao and Kim’s positions in exile is clear. The process of circularity and reciprocal interaction between Mao and Kim’s exiled parties, their disaffected peoples and the institutions who ascribed them into their positions of exile bred a powerful national identity.⁷⁾Frank Diktter, “Culture, ‘Race’, and the Nation: The Formation of National Identity in Twentieth Century China,” Journal of International Affairs 49, no. 2 (1996): 592.

A picture depicting Kim Il-sung leading Anti-Japanese People’s Guerrilla Army in the hills of Manchuria (the cradle to North Korea’s revolution), circa 1932. | Image: KCNA

Intra-national bonds were constantly fueled by the divisive contemporary systems of rule by both the Kuomintang (KMT) government in China and the Japanese imperial project in Korea and then China proper, accentuating divisions between themselves, rebellious political factions, and the popular masses.⁸⁾Stuart S. Schram and Nany J. Hodes, “General Introduction: Mao Zedong and the Communist Revolution, 1912-1949,” in Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949: Volume III: From the Jianggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930, ed. Stuart S. Schram and Nancy J. Hodes (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), xv-xvii; and Benjamin Yang, From Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March (Oxford: Westview Press, 1990), 40-59. These processes solidified modern opposition, not only increasing this inequality in China and Korea, but producing an awareness and resentment of said inequality at a popular level.⁹⁾Mancur Olson, “Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force,” Journal of Economic History 23 (December 1963): 539-49; and Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 1962), 3-5. Many exiled factions in China and Korea, including Mao and Kim, experienced fundamental “political restructurings;” redefining “who they were” in order to re-establish and preserve a sense of belonging with the defining homeland.¹⁰⁾Jolanta A. Drzewiecka and Rona Tamiko Halualani, “The Structural-Cultural Dialectic of Diasporic Politics,” Communication Theory 12, no. 3 (2002), 340-342.The inflated egos of the leaders and intellectuals at the apex of society were entwined with their own ostracized positions, leading to ever more ardent claims for nationalist regeneration.¹¹⁾Ibid., 600.In their positions of exile, Mao and Kim imbued their national identities with “consciously constructed emotional content” revolving around humiliation and a sense of collective responsibility for forging a nation removed from the oppression of colonial and “counterrevolutionary” activity.¹²⁾Diktter, “Culture,” 602.

This diasporic brand of national identity would ultimately create a pervasive ideal for the masses. Officially-authored images of solidarity such as the myths surrounding their guerrilla actions are alleged to have spread throughout both nations in the 1930s and 1940s. Although at times this work has gone well beyond the historically inaccurate, the synergy of popular dislocations from the familiarity and of the village system and the “cultural-linguistic medium” purported by Mao and Kim unquestionably produced a combustible and powerful alternative to the vacillation of the KMT and the oppression of Japan.¹³⁾Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Christina Szanton-Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects and the Deterritorialized Nation-State (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 34; and Drzewiecka and Halualani, “The Structural-Cultural Dialectic,” 340. The communist movements thus allowed for the limited exercise of popular will to escape from their delimited identities and degradation.¹⁴⁾Frederick Herz, Nationality in History and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 12-25.

The paramount catalyst in establishing the national visions of Mao and Kim amongst the masses was the Japanese occupation of China and Korea. The expansion of the occupation is a hazy field in East Asian studies, where partitions have been created along the borders of nation-states, therein making students focus on China, Korea, and Japan in isolation. There have seldom been studies of Manchukuo and its lasting effects which deviate from the rigid theme of the state as a Japanese “puppet,” leaving the wider transnational consequences as a footnote.¹⁵⁾Suk-Jung Han, “Review: Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion by Yamamuro Shin’ichi,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 34, no. 1 (2008), 110. Neglect of such studies leads to an imbalance in the analysis of exile and its formative utility in Mao and Kim’s lives. As Mark Selden states, the “network of wartime base areas became the building blocks for a reunified China” — a forge for socioeconomic policy and purges to be hammered against the anvil of national identity.¹⁶⁾Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 220.

Chalmers Johnson in his days advising the CIA. | Image: Alchetron

The Fallacy of Pacification: Japanese Imperialism in the Far East | The imperialistic thrusts of the Japanese occupation directly impacted knowledge production in the occupied areas.¹⁷⁾Louise Young, “Review: Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern by Prasenjit Duara,” The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 2 (2004): 474-5. The Chinese people were largely ambivalent towards the social policies of the CCP from 1927, despite the abundance of young men “in conditions of relative deprivation.”¹⁸⁾Chong-sik Lee, Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 2.  Mao’s endorsement of incorporating a united front against Japan garnered “electrifying results,” contributing to the Chinese establishing a truly mass movement of nearly one hundred million in base areas by 1940.¹⁹⁾Ibid., 1; and Suk-Jung Han, “The Problem of Sovereignty: Manchukuo, 1932-1937,” Positions: East Asia Critique, 12, , no. 2 (2004), 465-72. The “rural man” as Chalmers Johnson argues, learnt that his peril was also China’s peril, leading to situations conducive engagement in “mass-movement.”²⁰⁾Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 3-4.

Johnson’s analysis hinges upon the creation of these mass-movements amongst peasants, and is applicable to situations in both China during the occupation and North Korea following Japan’s capitulation. Despite the utility of Johnson’s conclusions, it is misleading to argue that the peasant nationalist movement was a spontaneous consequence of the occupation.²¹⁾Tetsuya Kataoka, “Communist Power in a War of National Liberation: The Case of China,” World Politics 24, no. 3 (1972): 410-9. Mao and Kim’s brands of exilic national identity shaped the politicized peasantry, gaining legitimacy from Japanese repression and the hardships they created for the “rural man.”²²⁾Suzanne Pepper, “The Political Odyssey of an Intellectual Construct: Peasant Nationalism and the Study of China’s Revolutionary History: A Review Essay,” The Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 1 (2004): 106-7.

Japanese repression attempted to regulate the population and to sever ties between the peoples under dominion and the guerrillas who offered liberation.²³⁾Lee, Revolutionary Struggle, 274. The violent nature of these policies is exemplified by R.H. Clive, the British Ambassador to Japan in 1935, in conversation with a Mr. Ohashi, the Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs. Mr. Ohashi remarked to him that “if they (Chinese agitators) come here we will kill them. We will kill all opposed to Manchukuo!”²⁴⁾R.H. Clive, “Letter to the Foreign Office,” Correspondence File: Manchuria: Communism, Kew: The National Archives, FO 262/1918 (1935), 9. This revealing insight is supported by Ishigaki Sadakazu, the Vice-Governor of Huan-Zhen xian under the occupation, who stated that the occupation program was “forced through mercilessly, inhumanely, without emotion – as if driving a horse.”²⁵⁾Ishigaki Sadakazu, “Pacification Activities in the Communist Bandit Area,” in Office of information, Department of General Affairs, Council of State, Manchukuo, Sembu gepp (Pacification Monthly) 4, no. 4 (April 1939): 38.

The deprivation caused by the “collective hamlet” system was staggering. By 1937, there were 10,629 hamlets established, with five and a half million people herded into the enervating environments.²⁶⁾Lee, Revolutionary Struggle, 271. As archives have slowly opened to the western historian, telling stories have emerged from the hamlets where Chinese and Koreans struggled to survive. In Tonghua xian, the Second Pacification and Supervisory Team of the Security Operations Committee assessed that “the loss suffered by the farmers from destruction and construction of houses (was) appalling.”²⁷⁾Manshkoku Gunji Komonbu (Military Advisor’ Department, Manchukuo), Kokunai chian taisaku no kenky (Study of Domestic Security measures) (Changchun, 1937), 286-90. Similarly in Xi’an, half the residents were starving, with crops only permitted to be grown in tiny areas of land which was hardly arable for large amounts of people. The Kwantung Army requisitioned grain and crops for their own supply during the winter months, aggravating the problems of shortages exponentially in the collective areas.²⁸⁾Ibid., 287. Although Chong-sik Lee admits that these examples may not be representative of every experience, he cites Japanese officials stating that pauperization of the farming class was “universal in all the collective hamlets.”²⁹⁾Lee, Revolutionary Struggle, 274. Construction of “security highways” linking the settlements further exacerbated conditions for the peasants, whereby they were forced into hard labour on meagre rations.³⁰⁾Ibid., 274-275.

In territory surrounding the hamlets and in the urban centers of Manchuria, brutality was carried out upon ethnic Chinese and Koreans suspected of being involved in communist activities.³¹⁾P.D. Butler, “Report to the British Embassy in Tokyo,” Correspondence File: Manchuria: Communism, FO 262/1918, Kew: The National Archives (1935), 21. Many Chinese workers were returned to the British firms in large cities such as Shanghai and Dairen after interrogation by Japanese officials bearing clear signs of torture methods such as screws to the fingers, water torture, consisting of pumping water into the victim’s stomach through a hose, and beaten feet.³²⁾P.D. Butler to Sir Alexander Cadogan, Correspondence File: Manchuria: Communism, FO 262/1918, Kew: The National Archives (1935), 48. According to Miles W. Lampson, “warlike parades” were commonplace across occupied China, with sporadic machine gun fire becoming part of the prevailing atmosphere.³³⁾Miles W. Lampson to the British Embassy, Tokyo, “Japanese Aggression in Manchuria,” Correspondence File: Japan and China, FO 262/1773, Kew: The National Archives (1931), 276. Stories of indiscriminate bombing outside of Mukden and passenger trains being strafed by Japanese aircraft abounded in the vernacular press, meaning that it was no longer safe for British diplomats to travel along the Peking-Mukden line.³⁴⁾Ibid., 281; and Kew: TNA, Correspondence File: Japan and China, FO 262/1773 (1931), 178. There was no escaping the psychological and physical damage of the Japanese colonial project, either in rural areas or in the cities where virtual martial law was enacted.³⁵⁾U.S. War Department, Military Intelligence Division, “The Chinese Communist Movement” July 5, 1945, in U.S. Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary, Institute of Pacific Relations (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1952), 2332.

Extensive economic upheaval coupled this overt suppression of the Chinese people. The Japanese policy of planting their nationals in farmland previously occupied by Chinese farmers drew significant resentment from the peasant class, as shown by the popular uprising started by Hsieh Wen-tung’s revolt in Tangyun province over the dispossession of the peasantry by Japanese landlords.³⁶⁾Lee, Revolutionary Struggle, 269. By 1942, the Japanese had coerced twenty million hectares from Chinese farmers. The Japanese collectivized living in many xian in China, meaning that only two hundred thousand hectares were cultivated, leaving the rest to lie fallow.³⁷⁾Man Shi Kai (The Society for the History of Manchuria), Mansh kaihatsu yonjnen-shi (Forty-Year History of Development in Manchuria), Vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1964), 700. This “agricultural development” drew bitter resentment from the peasantry; a policy mirrored throughout the Korean peninsula from 1910.³⁸⁾Kim Yong-sa, “Survey of Plunder: Land Survey,” in Hanguk hyundaesa (History of Modern Korea), ed. Shin-gu Munhwasa, Vol. 4 (Seoul, 1969), 96-130. Although the peasantry were physically separated from the guerrillas, the actions of the Japanese drew them closer to the communist cause spiritually and morally. ³⁹⁾Lee, Revolutionary Struggle, 274. Recognizing that these deplorable conditions sensitized the peasant classes to alternative political futures does not represent a colossal logical leap.⁴⁰⁾Johnson, Peasant Nationalism, 5.

Without the Japanese placing the Chinese and Korean people in these exploitative tracts, the respective communist movements would never have gained the popularity and legitimacy which they did. When the KMT withdrew their influence from areas of China, establishment retreated with them and repression was left in their wake.⁴¹⁾Ibid., 2. Even Japanese officials, such as Lieutenant General Itagaki Seishir , admitted that the Chinese and Korean communist partisans flowed into these ruptures, providing at once resistance and hope for liberation to the oppressed who were exiled within their own country.⁴²⁾Itagaki Seishir, Chief of the General Staff, Japanese Expeditionary Force in China, Kokky skoku ni kan suru kansatsu (Observations Regarding Kuomintang-Communist Rivalry) (March 22, 1940), 2.

Bruce Cumings lecturing at University of Washington, May 4, 2010. | Image: Adam Cathcart

Torn from Familiarity: The Korean Experience | Whilst the Chinese experience of Japanese colonialism revolved around systematized repression, the Korean peasant was brought to subscribe to exilic national overtures through a dislocation from their village identities. Direct Japanese labour mobilization presented him with ever widening political choices. Joining the anti-communist movement, laboring in a mine, fighting the war, collaborating with the system, or resisting and facing the consequences were the only feasible options open to the colonized peoples of Korea.⁴³⁾Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 31-32. The life working in a mine in particular was dirty, harsh, and risky, and was a practice socially shunned in Korean society.⁴⁴⁾Ibid.

When resistance occurred, which it invariably did through a variety of movements, the perpetrators would undergo “thought reform” programmes, ironically similar to the very campaigns launched by the North Korean state in the unfolding years. Participation in anti-communist “spiritual” discussion was a compulsory element of workplace life, with branches of the Korean Anti-Communist Association established in every police office, district, and province under Japanese dominion.⁴⁵⁾Chsen nenkan 1945 [Korea Yearbook 1945] (Keijo: Keijo nippo-sha, 1945), 33. Communists were created, sometimes through forced confession, and “marched before the Korean public as examples unworthy of emulation.”⁴⁶⁾Ch’in-Il p’a kunsang [The Pro-Japanese Groups] (Seoul: Samsaeng munhwa-sa, nippo-sha, 1945), 161. Suppressing communist ideas to this degree attests to their attractiveness to the Korean people, emerging from the breakdown of the village system by Japanese colonial administrators. Massive population shifts occurred under Japanese policy, with 11.6 percent of Koreans living outside of Korea by 1944.⁴⁷⁾Cumings, The Origins, 54. This staggering statistic is accompanied by the assertion that perhaps 20 percent of the whole Korean population, including the aforementioned group, were inhabitants in a province other than the one which they were born in.⁴⁸⁾Cumings, The Origins, 54-55.

These massive dislocations were aimed at creating a new industrialized class of Korean; an aim which was never fully realized. As Cumings aptly posits, “the Japanese mortgaged human capital instead of investing in it.”⁴⁹⁾Ibid., 50. The peasants were torn away from their villages, shown the horrors of modernization, but were never fully integrated into the system.⁵⁰⁾Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 14-21. When the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula was dissolved, the Korean peasants did not remain in industry but were spewed back onto the Korean canvas, unable to return to the lives of subsistence; fully aware of their prostrate conditions and their role in the class struggles which were to unfold.⁵¹⁾Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Dover, 1959), 236.

In both China and Korea, the increased number of mobilized peasants thus translated themselves into political participation.⁵²⁾Alexendre Y. Mansourov, “In Search of a New Identity: Revival of the Traditional Politics and Modernization in Post-Kim Il-Sung North Korea,” Department of International Relations, Australia National University, Working Paper Number 3 (May, 1995), 1-12. Both communist movements succeeded in wresting control of the revolution, consequently offering “new hope and a magic torch… far stronger than the occasional bomb throwing exercise of the Nationalists.”⁵³⁾Dae-Sook Suh, The Korean Communist Movement, 1918-1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 132. Mao and Kim’s visions planted a deep core of influence among the Chinese and Korean people — particularly the students, youth groups, laborers, and peasants.⁵⁴⁾Cumings, The Origins, 31-33. To the older generations, who had groveled for so long before seemingly endless foreign suppression, communism seemed a beacon of hope amongst dark memories. The idealism of Mao and Kim’s exilic national identities developed into a ubiquitous facet of everyday life — of strength in adversity, of the value of guerrilla struggle, and of the justice of arming the oppressed to extirpate the oppressor.⁵⁵⁾Geremie R. Barm, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 1-22; and Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (London: The Bodley Head, 2012), 14-15.