Below the Divide: A Review of ‘Fractured Liberation’, by Kornel Chang
Chang, Kornel. A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025. 304 pp. ISBN 9780674258433.
A Fractured Liberation is a tautly-paced look at South Korea during the three years after August 1945, a period of time which was by turns turbulent, violent, and hopeful. But just because these years were foundational for the Republic of Korea, according to author Kornel Chang, this does not mean that the the patterns which emerged were somehow pre-ordained. Nor does Chang want readers to primarily interpret his historical data in the framework of the looming Korean War. Chang’s ability to tease out and document other potential lines of development (for both Koreans and the Americans who constrained, educated, occasionally killed, and often frustrated them) is among the most significant contributions of his book.
General John R. Hodge remains an unavoidable figure in the study of early post-liberation South Korean history, as military governor below the 38th Parallel. A Fractured Liberation succeeds in widening understanding of the orbit of personalities around Hodge. The American general was receiving advice, for example, from State Department experts like H. Merrill Benninghof and his US-educated Korean interpreter and political operator Yi Myo-muk. Students today become easily engaged in criticism of Hodge, particularly when guided by the double-barrel of critics including US historians Bruce Cumings, or James Matray. (‘Hodge Podge’, a term coined by Matray in the title of his 1995 Korean Studies article, remains a rare and reliable hit for discussion in undergraduate classrooms, particularly the imputations of anti-Asian racism).
Chang in some areas is conventional in his treatment of Hodge, placing him against the backdrop of the colossal ego of his superior, General Douglas MacArthur, head of US Far East Command. “Hodge,” he writes, “left behind neither a shred of personal paper nor a single interview about his tenure in Korea, to the everlasting chagrin of historians” (p. 63). But the author also cannily peels back Hodge’s perspectives, particularly his reliance on the colonial-inflected – or in many cases colonial-trained – police forces, and colonial laws themselves. The book traces clear lines of Korean influence over Hodge’s decision-making, particularly that of Yi Myo-muk, who helped to animate the appointment of Cho Pyong-ok, a 1925 PhD in economics from Columbia University, as chief of the Korean National Police, who in turn endorsed hiring former Japanese collaborators.
Analysis of the early head of the South Korean government Kim Ku, and the occasional forays back into the colonial period, show how the changing contours of politics aligned or clashed with nationalistic sentiments and emotional patterns of resistance. As with Hodge, the book’s treatment of Kim Ku eschews a pure binary of hagiography-villainy. The book demonstrates that Kim was not without hypocrisy, acidly noting that “his horse-betting habit, as well as his coterie of concubines, also required financing from time to time” (p. 90). Hodge went on to threaten Kim Ku with imprisonment (alongside Japanese prisoners of war in Inchon) for Kim’s orchestration of anti-trusteeship demonstrations and his supposed involvement in the assassination of Song Chin-u, leader of the Korean Democratic Party. In a particularly intense meeting on New Year’s Day 1946, Hodge threatened to kill Kim Ku, then had to back off as Kim upped the ante and offered to “kill himself right then and there” (p. 91).
High-level US-Korean interaction is given its due, as is some of the “interagency” friction and mutual frustration between institutions like the US State Department and the army. But ultimately Chang sees the post-1945 liberation period as being centred on Koreans themselves. There are long stretches of the text which provide Korean perspectives, sometimes in the form of channelling summaries and snippets from short stories or novels by Korean authors in this era, including Hwang Sun-won (pp. 47-48). These episodes are highly effective. There were no Koreans present at the formal transfer of power between Japan and the United States at Seoul City Hall in early September 1945, but Chang gives a kaleidoscope of Korean perspectives both toward and radiating outward from that event.
Unlike Chang, US historian Allan R. Millett sees the years 1945-1948 as foundational for the Republic of Korea’s defence forces and its defensive posture against the northern threat.[1] Chang very intentionally turns away from this perspective, just as he eschews the broader geopolitical architecture around this period discussed so often in Cumings’ vast oeuvre. According to Chang, the creation of the ROK was not simply the forging of a spear for an upcoming war with the Stalinists north of Kaesong.
Instead of focusing on national defence, Chang provides a more societally-oriented, factual inquiry into labour (and the rights of workers, linked to the fate of national industry), and land. These two issues are worked skilfully into this broader survey, as are discussions of Korean women in industry. Chang’s analysis of the railway strike of the autumn 1946 is skilful and insightful, summoning visions of nearly 50,000 workers striking in the sector, and protests of up to 300,000 people (pp. 77-81). One wonders where Korean railway workers rights would have ranked, globally speaking, had they won out in their demands and not been forced back into membership in more governmentally-compliant labour unions.
Foreign perspectives on Korean labour movements are brought out in the book, including that of the American civil liberties activist Roger Nash Baldwin. Chang has drawn from Baldwin’s papers in Princeton, which document his visit to Korea in 1947. The book’s analysis of Colonel Preston J. Meacham shows how Hodge leapt at American advisors who leaned left. The land issue is brought out well via analysis of the partnership between the agriculturalist Roger Bunce and Yi Hun-gu, a Korean conservative politician and landowner. Bunce’s career in colonial Korea embraced Danish-style agricultural cooperative experiments and YMCA school establishment in the north.
In terms of land reform, the book’s discussion of 1946 is fascinating. Here, Chang takes a rare look across the occupation boundary to note the North Korean decision in March 1946 to engage in land reform. This resulted in Chang’s own grandparents’ fleeing the north with some 50,000 compatriots that spring. The unrest of 1946 is linked to the failure in the South to engage in more radical land redistribution, along with rising grain prices. “Resistance seemed foolhardy, given that the Americans had the guns and the peasants did not” (p. 81). But Chang indicates that there was some easing from the Japanese-era system, not least when the American military authorities sponsored changes in the form of Ordinance 9, “the brainchild of Yi Hun-gu.” (p. 82)
Yi’s connections to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the “Wisconsin School” suggest the possibility of a greater transpacific understanding across postwar Asia as to how best to manage a small agricultural enterprise. This includes the knowledge and theories behind such ideas, and the extent to which American-educated East Asian elites with developmental expertise were able to enact changes in the era. In the broader sense, the discussion of Yi and other “mid-level” elites like him help to diversify the discussion away from the more stultifying personality of Syngman Rhee and his paramilitary tendencies.
The book is written with style, diverse perspectives, and pace. It outperforms Millett’s A House Burning for a readable narrative of the postwar years. It is a fine resource for specialist historians of postwar Asia, postcolonial state building, US-Korea relations, and for general readers looking for something beyond a simple binary set up to the Korean War.
[1] Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1945-1950: A House Burning (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
