The Kingdom of Korea

The Kingdom of Korea is a constitutional monarchy of about 75 million people occupying the whole of the Korean peninsula, between the Empire of China to the north and west, the Empire of Japan across the eastern sea, and a short, cold land border with the Russian Republic in the far north-east. It is one of the ten largest economies in the world, the country the semiconductor trade cannot route around, and the only state in its region that nobody finds frightening.

Its independence rests on a treaty. The Treaty of Peking of 1950 provides that an attack on Korea is an attack on the Empire of China, that assistance is automatic, and that no foreign forces are stationed on Korean soil in peacetime. Korea may terminate it on notice and has threatened to four times. Nothing in it says what Korea gives in return, and the price is deference, which is exactly what Koreans have been arguing about for seventy-five years.

It was occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945, and it was never divided. There is no line across the peninsula, no second Korean state, no fortified frontier and no exchange of artillery. The northern industry that Japan built is Korean industry; Pyongyang is a working second city; a container leaving Pusan can be in China by rail the next day. What did not happen here is the single most important fact about the country, and this article sets out why it did not and what followed from it.

Its throne was restored in 1946 in a collateral branch of the House of Yi, because the senior branch had taken Japanese peerages and in several cases had taken them willingly. Its constitution dates from 1948, its present shape from 1982, and the years between were not gentle: a decade of political killings the state denied for fifty years, and twenty years of a general who industrialised the country behind a throne that signed everything he asked for and, at the end, refused.

Name

The state is the Kingdom of Korea in English and Choson in Korean, the dynastic name of the kingdom that ruled the peninsula from 1392 until the Japanese protectorate, deliberately restored in 1948 in place of the imperial style.

The imperial style was available. The Korean court had proclaimed an empire in 1897, in the brief window between Chinese and Japanese overlordship, precisely to assert that Korea answered to nobody. That title was one of the instruments Japan used against it: an empire that could not defend itself was an argument for protection, and the protectorate of 1905 was justified in those terms.

So the restored state took the older name and the lesser title. The Allies would not have restored an empire in 1945 in any case, and the Koreans did not press for one. The kingdom is therefore older than the empire it replaced, which is the kind of paradox Korean constitutional lawyers enjoy and foreign ones find tiresome.

In English the country is Korea, from Goryeo, the dynasty that preceded Choson and that traders of the middle ages met first.

History

Early history

The peninsula was divided among three kingdoms for most of the first millennium, and united under Silla in the seventh century. That unification is a thousand-year-old argument in Korean historiography and a live political fact: a country arguing about whether it is naturally one thing has been arguing about it since before England existed.

Goryeo followed, gave the country its English name, met the Mongols, and printed with movable metal type two centuries before Europe. Choson succeeded it in 1392 and lasted more than five hundred years, which makes it one of the longest-lived dynasties in the world.

Four facts from those centuries are carried forward in everything the modern country does.

Hangul. In the fifteenth century a king invented an alphabet for a language that had been written in Chinese characters, against the objections of his own scholars, explicitly so that people who could not afford a classical education could read and write. It is the only widely used writing system in the world whose inventor, date and reasoning are all known, and Korea keeps a national holiday for it.

The invasions of the 1590s. Japanese armies crossed the peninsula twice, burning as they went, and were stopped at sea by an admiral whose ships and tactics are the country’s proudest military memory. The ruin took a century to repair and the memory has never been repaired at all.

The Manchu submission. Forty years later the Manchus invaded, and the Korean king was made to kneel in the snow before their emperor. Korea’s relations with China have never since been simple, and the modern treaty is read by educated Koreans against that memory whether or not they mention it.

The examination state. Government by written examination, in a Confucian curriculum, conducted by a scholar-official class whose families held office for generations. It produced an administration of real competence and a society of ferocious credentialism, and the modern country’s examination culture is its direct descendant.

The opening, 1876 to 1905

Choson closed itself deliberately in the nineteenth century, earning the name the hermit kingdom, and persecuted the Catholic communities that grew inside it anyway, killing thousands.

The closure ended by gunboat. French, American and Japanese expeditions tested the coast; the treaty of 1876, extracted by Japanese warships, opened three ports and began seventy years in which Korea’s sovereignty was the subject of other countries’ arrangements.

A peasant rebellion in the 1890s brought in both Chinese and Japanese armies, invited by a court that could not suppress it, and the war between them decided the peninsula’s century: China lost, and the Qing were expelled from Korean affairs sixteen years before their own transformation at home. In 1895 Japanese agents murdered the Korean Queen in her own palace, an act that Korea has never treated as a historical curiosity and that Japan did not acknowledge for a century.

In 1905 Korea became a Japanese protectorate.

The occupation, 1910 to 1945

The annexation

The last king of the senior line abdicated rather than sign the instrument of annexation. His successor signed it, and that signature is part of why the senior branch was passed over in 1945.

Korea’s legal position ever since has been that the annexation was procured by duress and was void from the beginning. Japan’s position for most of the twentieth century was that it was lawful and has been superseded. The 1950s normalisation treaty left the question open by drafting around it, which is the reason a legal argument from 1910 is still capable of causing a diplomatic incident.

Cultural suppression

Colonial rule set out to end Korea as a distinct thing. The language was pushed out of the schools and then out of official life; Korean names were replaced with Japanese ones under a registration scheme that was voluntary in form and not in substance; the Korean press was closed, reopened under censorship and closed again; the history taught in Korean schools was written in Tokyo.

The colonial state also built: railways, ports, mines, dams and heavy industry in the north, schools and hospitals in numbers Korea had not had before. Korean historians have never found this difficult to hold alongside the rest. The building was done for the empire’s purposes with Korean labour and Korean land, and the country inherited it in 1945 in the same way a house is inherited from a man who took it from your father.

The rising of 1919

On 1 March 1919 a declaration of independence was read aloud in a Seoul restaurant by a group of religious leaders, and then in towns across the country. What followed was months of demonstrations involving perhaps two million people, put down with thousands of deaths, mass arrests and, in one village, the burning of a church with its congregation inside it.

It failed, and it is the founding event of the modern nation. The signatories were clergy rather than politicians, which set the pattern by which Korean churches have been political institutions ever since. 1 March is the national day of the kingdom, and the restored state dates its own legitimacy from the provisional government that the rising produced rather than from the Allied administration that installed it.

The exile government and the armies

A provisional government was founded in exile after 1919. It sat in Qing China and moved inland as the Japanese advanced, sustained by Chinese subsidy, and a second wing of it operated among the Korean communities of the Realm’s Pacific coast. The two wings distrusted each other thoroughly, and the politics of the restored kingdom is in part a continuation of that quarrel.

In Manchuria, independence armies fought Japanese forces from the 1920s, some under Chinese command. Assassination and bombing campaigns were conducted against Japanese officials and were celebrated in Korea and called terrorism at the time by everybody else. In the 1940s the exile government raised a Korean corps that fought in the Allied advance, which mattered more to the legitimacy of the postwar state than to the outcome of any battle.

The left wing of the resistance was substantial, and its fighters were in many cases the same people the Korean state shot in the decade after liberation.

Forced labour and the survivors

Koreans were conscripted in enormous numbers into Japanese mines, factories and construction, and Korean women and girls were taken into the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery. Both are recorded in canon as Japanese crimes and are treated in the Empire of Japan article.

What belongs here is what happened to the people afterwards. The normalisation treaty of the 1950s settled claims between the two states and made no provision for individuals, and Japan has held ever since that the question is closed. Korea holds that a state cannot settle a person’s claim. The survivors’ campaign has run for forty years, has produced a fund, an apology whose wording is disputed, a Korean government that accepted the settlement and a Korean public that did not. Almost all the survivors are now dead, which is the cruellest fact in the whole business and the reason the argument has moved from money to wording.

Liberation and restoration

Liberation, August 1945

Japanese rule ended in August 1945. The Korean corps of the exile government entered ahead of the Allies, which is the story Korea tells and which the Allies have never quite denied, and a joint Allied administration followed within weeks.

No line was drawn across the peninsula. There were two reasons and Korea prefers the second. The reason is that the Russian Republic was never in the Pacific war: it stayed out, sold to both sides, and never entered Manchuria, so there was no second great power to demand a zone. The explanation Koreans prefer is that China wanted a whole friendly Korea rather than half of one and was strong enough to insist. Both are true. Only one of them was decisive.

The choice of branch

The Allies chose the monarch, on the exile government’s advice, which is why the Korean left has always described the throne as an imposition and why the charge has never quite gone away.

The senior line was unavailable in the only sense that mattered. Its men had held Japanese peerages; several had held them willingly; all were stripped of them at the surrender. A collateral branch with a cleaner record was brought forward, and King Yi Ugyom was enthroned in 1946 under Allied administration. Korean historians have argued about the choice ever since without much wishing it undone.

The monarchy itself was never seriously in doubt, for a reason that is easy to miss: it was the one national institution the occupation had not compromised, because the occupation had abolished it.

The constitution of 1948

Sovereignty and the constitution both came in 1948. The instrument created a parliamentary monarchy: a Prime Minister responsible to an elected National Assembly, a Crown acting on advice, an independent judiciary, and a bill of rights that the following decade largely ignored.

Korea entered the League of Nations the same year, sponsored by China, which was the first practical fruit of a relationship that had not yet been written into a treaty.

Land, and the end of the landlords

Land reform was radical and early. Japanese estates in the north were seized outright; land elsewhere was bought compulsorily and sold to its tenants, with the former owners compensated in bonds that the inflation of the next decade destroyed. The landholding order that had run Korea for five centuries ended inside a decade, and the country began its industrial period without a landed class to obstruct it, which is among the most consequential things that ever happened to it and is almost never mentioned by Koreans themselves.

The collaboration trials

The collaborators commission of the 1940s had teeth. Titles were abolished, property confiscated, careers ended, and a generation of the colonial administration’s senior Korean servants were removed from public life.

It went too far in places: families were ruined on thin evidence, and property was taken on denunciation by neighbours with reasons of their own. The commission’s records were reopened in the present century and are still producing quarrels between families in the same towns.

What it did not do was reach the police. The men who had policed Korea for Japan were, in many cases, the men who policed it afterwards, and the first decade’s killings were carried out substantially by them.

The first decade of the restoration

Korea was governed from 1948 to 1960 by Prime Minister Ho Kyongsik, a returned exile: authoritarian, anti-communist, electorally unbeatable and, in the end, removed by student demonstrations rather than by any institution of the state.

Two things from that decade are in the Failings below. A rebellion on the island province was put down with mass killings of civilians, which the state denied for fifty years and a truth commission established in the 2000s. And a national security round-up detained and executed suspected leftists in numbers that are still disputed, on the basis of lists that had in some cases been compiled under the occupation.

The Korean left was suppressed in that decade, violently, and legalised later. The party that governs Korea today descends from the people the state shot, which is a sentence Korean conservatives dislike and cannot refute.

The absence of partition

The absence of a partition is the central fact of modern Korea, and its consequences run through everything else.

The industry stayed. The heavy industry, hydroelectricity and mines that Japan built in the north are Korean, and the country began its industrial period with a base that a southern rump could not have had. The north is still the industrial half and the south the commercial and agricultural one, and that is the country’s internal fault line: north against south, with the old rivalry between the south-eastern and south-western provinces running as a subplot inside it.

Pyongyang is a second city, not a closed capital: steel, chemicals and machine works, the centre of gravity of the northern half, an older capital than Seoul with a claim on the national story that Seoul has never wholly answered, and the historic centre of Korean Christianity, which is why the country’s churches are northern in origin.

The peninsula is a land bridge. Rail runs from Pusan north through Seoul and Pyongyang to the Chinese border and on into the Empire’s network, and containers move that way in quantity. The line to Russia is open in law and is the one everybody photographs and nobody ships on.

There is no refugee state, no famine, no dynasty of the north, no artillery aimed at Seoul, and no nuclear question. The Realm’s Pacific planning has never had a Korean crisis in it. Korea’s defence budget is that of an ordinary middle power. Where a divided peninsula would have put the most militarised frontier on earth, there are provincial boundaries.

And the Koreans who stayed in Japan after 1945 had one country to be citizens of rather than two, which removed the grim choice of allegiance that shaped their lives elsewhere and left them an ordinary minority with an ordinary minority’s problems.

The military government, 1961 to 1981

The coup of 1961

On a night in 1961 a few thousand troops marched on Seoul under General Han Chongsu, against a government nobody would defend, and the seizure was presented as a temporary rescue of the constitution.

Han was a poor farmer’s son who had served as an officer in the Japanese colonial army, which is the fact his enemies never let go of and the fact he never answered.

His constitutional cover came in two stages: managed elections and a controlled Assembly first, then, in the 1970s, a new constitution that made him effectively permanent, and emergency decrees renewed indefinitely until the constitution existed only on paper.

Industrialisation

The industrial model was directed and deliberate: five-year plans, credit allocated by the state through the banks, and export targets that firms met or were destroyed. In the 1970s the state forced heavy and chemical industry into existence, steel, ships and petrochemicals, at a cost economists at the time called ruinous and history has judged otherwise.

The conglomerates were made by the state and kept dependent on it, which is the arrangement that still governs Korean capitalism. Wages were held down by law and by police, which is the other half of the miracle and is named as such here.

The capital came from three places: the Japanese normalisation settlement, paid to the state rather than to the victims and spent on steel mills; Chinese credit under the treaty relationship, which is why the guarantee has an economic history as well as a military one; and Korean labour sent abroad, miners and nurses to Germany and builders to Arabia, whose remittances were counted in the plans.

Korea sent no troops to the Indochina war. The guarantee made it impossible and Peking said so, and the general resented the loss of the money. What Korea took instead were the construction and supply contracts, which the Realm awarded freely and which built the conglomerates as effectively as a war would have.

The apparatus of the regime

A central intelligence agency answering to him alone, with its own prisons and its own budget. Torture as routine practice in facilities a commission later named. The abduction of an opposition leader from abroad, which nearly ended him diplomatically. Censorship by pre-publication approval, which most newspapers accepted and two did not.

Labour was policed. Strikes were broken by police and company squads, the labour law went unenforced, and the union movement organised itself in churches because there was nowhere else safe, which is the origin of the Korean Christian left.

Kwangju, 1971

In 1971 a killing by police in Kwangju, in the south-west, brought the city into the streets. It held its own ground for days and was retaken by paratroopers, with hundreds dead.

It was called a communist insurrection at the time. A commission established the truth in the 1980s, the dead were reburied in a national cemetery, and the date is now a public holiday.

The four days of 1981

In 1981 a student died in custody and the denial was disproved within a week; days later the general announced that he would take another term under his own constitution. The country came out into the streets and stayed there for a month, and the army was ordered to clear it.

King Yi Sangjin refused to sign the emergency decree that would have put troops on the streets of Seoul, which left the army without the legal cover it had always been given. Two days later he refused to receive the general at the palace, which in Korea is a public act and was understood instantly.

The order was withdrawn. The general resigned within the week.

The end of the regime

Han was tried in the 1990s for the dead of Kwangju and for the emergency years, convicted, and died in prison.

His legacy is contested in the ordinary Korean way, and the split is generational and regional: the people whose wages rose defend him, the people whose relatives disappeared do not, and both groups are large. This article states the industrial record and the prisons in the same paragraph and declines to weigh them.

The settlement of 1982

The constitution of 1982 did four things. It established direct election of the Assembly with no reserved seats, and a five-year limit on the premiership, total and lifetime, written against Han and productive ever since of a politics of short premierships. It created the Chamber of Provinces to bind the north into the settlement. It bound the Crown explicitly to advice, to end the argument about what the King had and had not done. And it replaced the national flag, because the old one had been his.

The palace papers

In 2011, on the thirtieth anniversary of the general’s fall, the palace opened its own papers of the emergency years, voluntarily and without conditions.

They showed that the throne had obstructed quietly throughout: assents delayed, audiences declined, ministers warned in writing, and at least eleven decrees returned for redrafting in terms that amounted to refusal without the word. The refusal of 1981 had not been a sudden act of conscience. It was the end of a long one.

The disclosure changed the monarchy’s standing more than any event since the restoration, and Korean republicans have never recovered from it, which the palace certainly understood when it chose the anniversary.

Government

The Crown

The Crown is held by the House of Yi, restored in 1946 in a collateral branch, and is ceremonial and genuinely powerless. The Japanese model was chosen deliberately in 1948 and tightened in 1982 so that the throne could not be blamed for politics again, which is a formulation that reads differently after the palace papers.

Era names were dropped at the restoration as an imperial habit, and Korea uses the common year alone, though the calendar of the mythical founding is still printed in a corner of official documents.

Queen Yi Hyewon has reigned since 2013. She is the first queen regnant in Korean history, and she reigns because the succession act of the 2010s made the Crown pass to the eldest child regardless of sex. The traditionalist campaign against it was noisy and short, and it was answered in the Assembly rather than from the palace, which kept the throne out of an argument about itself. Her heir is her eldest child, Crown Prince Yi Chongho.

She was trained as a scientist and kept her profession as long as the succession allowed. In public she is scrupulously silent on politics and unusually visible on the dead: industrial disasters, the ferry, the survivors’ campaigns and the annual observances of Kwangju and the island. It is as close to a position as she goes, and it is understood.

The Crown’s working arrangements are modest by comparison with Europe’s. The civil list is voted by the Assembly and audited. The palaces are public buildings and the family lives in a working residence behind one of them. The Confucian state rites are performed by the monarch and argued about every year by the Christian third of the country. The press convention is deliberately unglamorous: the family is photographed at duties and not otherwise, and the two newspapers that broke that rule in the 1990s were frozen out of the palace for a decade and did not repeat it.

The Prime Minister and the Assembly

The Prime Minister is the head of government, commanding the National Assembly and holding office for a maximum of five years in a lifetime. The limit was written against Han and it works as intended and at a price: Korea has a politics of short premierships, and every Prime Minister spends the second half of the term as a person with no future.

The National Assembly has about 300 members, elected for four years by mixed-member proportional representation.

The Chamber of Provinces is the second chamber: equal representation for each province and special city, directly elected on a separate cycle, which gives it a mandate of its own and makes the Assembly resent it. It may delay ordinary legislation and holds a real veto on provincial boundaries and on the treaty. Its existence is the price the north was paid for the 1982 settlement, and it has been worth it: the northern provinces have never had reason to believe the country is run against them, which is not a sentence that could be written about any divided country.

Prime Minister Chong Miyon of the People’s Alliance has governed since 2024 on a narrow majority, in a continuous argument with the conglomerates about labour law, the small-firm wage gap and the liability of directors for industrial deaths.

The courts and the prosecutors

The Constitutional Court created in 1982 has done three things worth naming. It removed a Prime Minister once, on an Assembly impeachment, which is the most consequential judgment in the country’s modern history. It struck down the worst of the security law decades after the general, over the prosecutors’ objections. And it refused to decide the collaborators question, holding it political, which satisfied nobody and is probably right.

The prosecution service is the most feared institution in the Korean state. It holds a near-monopoly on indictment and the power to end any career by opening a file, it has been reformed twice, and it remains what it was. Every government arrives promising to curb it and leaves having used it.

Corruption trials of former leaders are routine to the point of national embarrassment. Most former Prime Ministers have been investigated and several imprisoned. Koreans regard this simultaneously as proof that the system works and as evidence that it does not, and both readings are defensible.

Truth commissions

Korea has held four, which is more than most countries and fewer than its history required.

The collaborators commission of the 1940s, whose records were reopened in the present century. The commission on the first decade’s killings, including the island, which reported in the 2000s. The commission on the general’s twenty years, which published the torture facilities and the names of the men who ran them. And one still sitting, on the adoption industry and the institutions.

Provinces and local government

Nine historic provinces and the special cities, with elected governors and assemblies restored in 1982 after two decades in which Han appointed everybody. The island province holds a special status that the killings of the first decade made unavoidable.

Politics

Three blocs, stable for a generation.

The People’s Alliance is the left, descended from the resistance and from the people the state shot, strongest in the south-west, in the northern industrial cities and among the unions and the Christian left.

The National Party is the conservative bloc, descended from the general’s political machine and long since respectable, strongest in the south-east, in the farming provinces and among the older electorate.

The Reform Union is the liberal centre of the professional cities, holds the balance more often than it holds office, and supplies most of the country’s ministers of finance whichever bloc is governing.

The press divides along the same line. Three national dailies of the right complied with the general and have never lost their circulation. The public broadcaster’s independence is fought over at every change of government. And the two papers that refused in the emergency years, one closed and one reopened in 1982, are the left’s press to this day.

Geography and cities

Korea is a peninsula of about 220,000 square kilometres, seventy per cent mountain, with its population and its agriculture concentrated in the western plains and the river valleys. The mountains run down the east coast and throw spurs west, which is why the country’s railways and its politics both run north to south on the western side.

Seoul holds about a third of the country in its region: a capital of twenty-odd million, on a river between mountains, inside walls that no longer contain it, which every government has promised to decentralise and none has. Its palaces were burned in the invasions, rebuilt, used by the Japanese as offices, and restored as the seat of a working monarchy. The city has rebuilt itself twice in a century.

Pyongyang is the second city and the industrial capital, described above.

Pusan is the great port and the second commercial city, with its own accent and its own grievance about Seoul. Inchon is the airport and the western gate. Taegu and Kwangju anchor the south-eastern and south-western provinces and their politics. Hamhung and Wonsan in the north-east are Korea’s rust belt, holding the heavy industry that has been shrinking for forty years. Kaesong and Kyongju, old capitals both, are kept as historic cities. The island province in the south has tourism, its own dialect, its women divers and the memory of the killings.

The sacred mountain in the far north, on the Chinese border, is the site of the founding myth and is shared by treaty, which is an arrangement both countries find preferable to the alternative.

Economy

Korea has one of the ten largest economies in the world and the most concentrated industrial structure of any of them.

The conglomerates

Four conglomerates dominate. Songwon Electronics, which makes semiconductors and is the reason the world cannot route around Korea. Taeryok Heavy Industries, ships and heavy engineering, whose yards were never given up. Chungil Motors, cars and now batteries and the electrical supply chain. And Hwasin, the trading and construction house, which built much of the Pacific’s infrastructure and took the Indochina contracts that built the others.

They were created by the state, kept dependent on it, and have outgrown it. They own more of the country’s politics than anybody admits in public, and every generation produces a corruption trial that reaches the top of one of them.

The financial crisis

The external crisis of the late 1990s broke the weakest houses, forced a humiliating rescue and a year of austerity, and is remembered chiefly for the queues of ordinary people bringing their gold to the treasury to be melted. It is the most-cited moment of Korean solidarity and the most-cited example of a country asked to pay for its own oligarchs’ borrowing.

The economy since

Semiconductors above everything. Shipbuilding, still. Cars, batteries and the electrical supply chain. Culture as an export industry with its own ministry. And underneath them the weakness: small firms that pay about half what the houses pay and employ most of the country, which is the structural fact behind almost every social problem in the following sections.

Employment

The longest hours in the developed world, falling slowly, with a statutory maximum the small firms ignore. Industrial deaths at a rate that shames the country, and a law making directors personally liable that the houses fought and lost. Unions strong in the great plants and absent everywhere else, and militant in a way that startles foreigners. And retirement at sixty into work that pays nothing, which is why old-age poverty is Korea’s quiet scandal and why its elderly suicide rate is what it is.

Housing

Seoul is unaffordable. The deposit-lease system ties a family’s entire savings to a single landlord for the term of a lease, and its periodic collapses ruin thousands of households at a time. The state builds new towns every generation, and the newest policy nobody quite admits to is northern relief: cheap flats, government offices moved north, and a deliberate effort to make the industrial cities somewhere a young family would go.

Health

A single national insurance covers everyone. It is cheap, fast, crowded and much admired abroad. The pension system arrived too late for the generation that built the country, which is the same sentence as the one about old-age poverty and is the largest unfinished business in Korean welfare.

Society

Population

About 75 million, overwhelmingly Korean, in a country that has never thought of itself as one of immigration and now is one.

Immigration is necessary and resented: workers from South East Asia and ethnic Koreans from China’s border prefectures, on permits that tie them to a single employer. The border Koreans are the sharpest case, being Korean enough to claim entry and foreign enough to be treated as labour.

Abroad there are perhaps seven million Koreans: in China’s prefectures, in Japan, in the Realm’s Pacific cities, in the Russian far east, and across the Pacific. A citizenship law admitting their grandchildren is now, quietly, the most effective part of Korean population policy.

The fertility collapse

Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world and a state that has spent a fortune failing to raise it. Koreans give the reasons in this order: housing costs, education costs, a labour market that punishes any interruption to a woman’s career permanently, and, last and most honestly, an argument between the sexes that the country conducts in the open and has not resolved.

Education

The examination culture in full. A national examination day on which the country stops: aircraft grounded during the listening paper, offices opening late, police driving candidates to halls. A parallel system of private academies that swallows household income and adolescent sleep. And a state that acknowledges the cost to childhood in white papers and has not touched the cause, which is that the examination decides everything and everybody knows it.

Language

Korean, written in Hangul, near-universally. Chinese characters survive in law, scholarship and the older newspapers, and whether to teach them is an argument that returns every decade. Northern and southern speech differ as accents rather than as standards, which is what happens when a country is not cut in half for eighty years.

Religion

Christianity at full scale: about a third of the country, the largest single congregations in the world, and political weight to match. The Protestant right lobbies heavily on family law. The Christian left hid the labour movement under the general and still carries the credit. Catholic bishops opposed him publicly and are listened to accordingly.

Buddhism is older and quieter, with the great mountain temples and a vegetarian cuisine that is a national treasure.

The Confucian order sits underneath both, in family law, in ancestor rites, in the language’s grammar of respect and in the monarchy’s own ceremonial.

And shamanism persists: the mudang and their rites, consulted by people who would not admit it, suppressed by every modernising government since 1876 and still here. A Prime Minister’s reliance on a spiritual adviser brought down a government in the present century, which Koreans found humiliating and foreigners found fascinating.

Public debate

An anti-discrimination law, proposed for twenty years and blocked by the churches every time. Same-sex partnership, on which the courts have moved and the Assembly has not. Disability rights, advanced by protests in the Seoul underground that irritated commuters into paying attention, which was the point. And the suicide rate, the highest among comparable countries, which the state treats as a public health emergency and has not reduced.

Rural life and fisheries

Rice is protected fiercely, and the farmers’ movement has blocked trade agreements and thrown its hats at police lines to do it. The villages are emptying and hold the oldest population in the country, with foreign brides in many of the ones that remain. A rural modernisation campaign under the general is remembered fondly by the people it reached and treated carefully by historians.

At sea, a distant-water fishing fleet with a poor reputation abroad and a domestic fleet in decline; the women divers of the island province, who dive without air and are nearly all over sixty; and a ferry disaster in the present century that killed hundreds of schoolchildren and broke the country’s trust in its own regulators, which has not been repaired.

Technology and daily life

The most wired country in the world, and the first to treat internet access as something the state guarantees. Delivery of everything at all hours, by riders on the worst terms in the economy. And a digital government that puts services on the telephone and expects the old to keep up, which they do not.

Culture

Literature here is a literature of occupation, industrialisation and the risings, rather than of division. Celadon and white porcelain, and the temple architecture that survived the invasions, are the classical inheritance. Pansori and the drumming traditions were revived in the 1980s, in several cases by the institutions that had been suppressing them a decade earlier.

The culture industry is an export with its own ministry: popular music, television and film that the world consumes without quite understanding how a country of this size produced it. The article states the cost, because Korea’s own commissions have. The industry runs on long training contracts signed by children, controlling conduct, appearance and earnings in terms that other countries’ law would not permit, and the state that funds and promotes the industry regulates it reluctantly. Korean cinema and television are the part Koreans are proudest of, and webtoons and games are the newer export, with the working hours behind them.

Food. Kimchi is a national institution with regional variants and a season for its making. Northern cooking, colder and plainer, was kept by a country that was never divided, and the cold noodles of Pyongyang are eaten in Pusan. Drinking is an occupational duty and there is a slow revolt against it. Temple cuisine is its opposite and is fashionable.

Sport. An Olympic games at Seoul in the 1980s, awarded under the general and held after he fell, which the country treats as its coming-out. Football and baseball are the mass sports, the second inherited from the occupation and never resented for it. And archery, in which Korea simply wins.

The mountains are the national pastime: a country that is seventy per cent mountain hikes them in a recognisable uniform of bright synthetics, and the trails are busiest on Sunday mornings in autumn. The tiger is extinct in the peninsula and present everywhere in its art, advertising and sport.

The founding myth is Dangun, the bear-woman’s son, who founded the first kingdom on the sacred mountain. It is taught in schools as myth and used in politics as fact, and its calendar is still printed on official documents.

Defence

Korea keeps a professional army of about two hundred thousand, and no conscription. The guarantee is the reason, and the Korean argument for the arrangement is that a country which does not intend to fight its neighbours alone should not pretend otherwise by holding a million men in uniform.

The forces are weighted to the sea and the air: a navy built for the approaches, the western island chains and the fishing grounds, and an air force oriented north-east, towards the only border anybody thinks about. The army is small, well equipped and organised for the defence of the northern passes for as long as it would take the treaty to operate.

Korea has a substantial arms industry that exports, because a country that makes ships and electronics makes weapons well, and Korean artillery, armour and frigates are bought across the Pacific and in Europe.

It holds no nuclear weapons and has no programme, in a region where two of its neighbours have them. The question is raised at intervals by the right and has never had a serious constituency, for three reasons its strategists give in the same order: the guarantee makes it unnecessary, the attempt would end the guarantee, and Japan’s example of deliberate abstention is next door and visible.

Joint exercises with China are held annually under the treaty. The left attends them grudgingly and has never cancelled one.

The Chinese guarantee

Terms of the treaty

The Treaty of Peking was signed in 1950, when pressure from the Russian Republic on the northern border was at its height, which is why nobody had to write Russia’s name into it.

Three sentences carry the whole relationship. The first two are stronger than most alliances anywhere: assistance is automatic and requires no further decision. The third is the one Korea insisted on and is the reason there are no Chinese garrisons in Korea, and also the reason there are no American ones.

The price of the guarantee

Nothing is written. The treaty imposes no obligation on Korea beyond reciprocity, and in the seventy-five years since, Korea has never been required to do anything by its terms.

What it does instead is defer. It consults Peking before it concludes anything of security consequence with Japan or with the United Kingdom of America. It has declined alliances it might otherwise have wanted. It has moderated its position on the Korean population of China’s border prefectures more than once when the moment was inconvenient. None of this is compelled, all of it is understood, and Korean politics has been divided about it since the ink dried.

The left has wanted to terminate the treaty for two generations and has never done it in government. The right regards it as the foundation of the country’s security and resents being told it is a leash. Both are correct, which is why the argument does not end.

Threatened terminations

Korea has threatened termination four times and has never come close.

Twice under the general: once when Peking objected to Korean firms taking construction and supply contracts in the Indochina war, and once over a maritime boundary in the Yellow Sea. Twice since: once in the present century over Chinese handling of the autonomous Korean prefecture on its side of the border, and once when a Chinese minister described Korea in public as a protected state, which produced the most unified week in the Korean Assembly’s modern history and an apology within nine days.

China’s interest

Chinese policy has been consistent since the 1940s and is not sentimental. A whole, friendly, independent Korea is worth more to the Empire than a divided one would be: it removes a route of advance into Manchuria, it produces no refugees, it requires no garrison, and it presents no opportunity to any other power. Chinese support for Korean independence in 1945, the sponsorship of Korea’s admission to the League of Nations in 1948, the treaty of 1950 and the credit that followed it are one policy, pursued without interruption by every Chinese government since.

Korea’s own view is that this is fortunate and is not friendship, and the Korean foreign service trains its people to say so privately and never publicly.

Foreign relations

China

The relationship is the country’s foundation and its longest argument. It is a treaty of mutual defence, a credit relationship going back to the 1950s, the largest single trading partnership either country has, and a permanent Korean anxiety about deference.

The autonomous Korean prefecture inside the Empire, on the far side of the border, is the sorest point. Its schools teach in Korean, its young people leave for Korea, and it is emptying. Korean interest in its welfare is the one subject that makes Chinese ministers cold, and both governments handle it in the manner of people carrying something breakable.

The sacred mountain on the border is shared by treaty, and the arrangement has held for seventy years.

Japan

Warmer than anyone in 1945 would have credited, for the reason the Japan article gives: a unified Korea never needed Japan as a security partner, and could therefore deal with it from a position of strength rather than dependence.

The trade is deep, the supply chains are shared, and people cross constantly for work and study. The 1950s normalisation treaty settled claims between states and not between people, and the survivors’ question is not closed and will now be closed by mortality rather than by agreement. There is no territorial dispute: the islands question was settled in Korea’s favour in the 1950s, because Japan had nothing to bargain with, which removed from the relationship the one issue that poisons it elsewhere.

The Koreans who stayed in Japan are an ordinary minority with an ordinary minority’s grievances, which is better than the alternative their counterparts have in worlds where there were two Koreas to choose between.

The United Kingdom of America

Commercial and correct. The Realm’s forces left in 1949 and never returned; what remains is an embassy, a trade mission and an enormous flow of goods in both directions.

The Realm’s industry depends on Korean fabrication and knows it. The trade agreement between them took a decade to negotiate and nearly failed twice over agriculture and cars. There is a large Korean community in California and the Pacific cities of the Realm, organised substantially through its churches.

The Realm has not sought an alliance, and its Pacific planners regard a neutral, prosperous, undivided Korea as a better outcome than a contested one. That position is sophisticated, genuinely held, and the subject of periodic complaint from the Realm’s own admirals.

Korea’s posture is stated openly and without embarrassment: it leans to China in security and to the Realm and Japan in economics. Both larger powers find this irritating and neither has found a way to break it.

Russia

Cold and commercial. Korea buys gas and timber and sells nothing that matters. The border crossing is open and quiet. Russian naval visits to the eastern sea are understood by everybody as messages to Peking rather than to Seoul.

The Koryo-saram, the Koreans deported across Russia in the last century and their descendants, are admitted by Korea and not much helped by it, which is among the smaller entries in the Failings below and is felt keenly by the people concerned.

The Pacific and the world

Korea is close and commercial with the Kingdom of the Philippines, New Wessex and the Pacific realms, and Korean firms have built half the region’s infrastructure. The labour flows the other way, on the tied permits described above.

In the League of Nations Korea is a serious middle power: peacekeeping contributions, a development programme larger than its size would suggest, and a Council seat in rotation. Its diplomatic reputation is that it is the only country in its region that is not frightening to anybody, and its foreign service is trained from the first day in the balancing of three larger neighbours.

Failings

The purge that went too far. The collaborators commission did necessary work and ruined families on thin evidence while doing it, taking property on denunciation in towns where the denouncers had reasons of their own. Its reopened records are still producing quarrels between neighbours.

The killings of the first decade. A rebellion on the island province was put down with the mass killing of civilians, and a national security round-up detained and executed suspected leftists on lists partly compiled under the occupation. The state denied both for fifty years, and the island is the one the country still cannot discuss calmly.

The general’s twenty years. Torture as routine in named facilities, an intelligence service with its own prisons, an opposition leader abducted abroad, censorship by pre-publication approval, a labour law unenforced by design, and Kwangju, called a communist insurrection for a decade while its dead lay in unmarked ground.

The adoption industry. Over four decades Korea sent about two hundred thousand children abroad, more than any country in the world. Agencies were paid per child. Consent was forged, coerced or never sought; mothers were told their babies had died; records were falsified so that children would be legally available. The state treated the traffic as a welfare saving and an export earner and promoted it as evidence of international goodwill. The adoptees are now middle-aged and returning, and the records they come home for were falsified by the agencies and destroyed by the state, and the commission examining it is still sitting.

The institutions. Disabled people, unmarried mothers, orphans and the homeless were held for decades in institutions run on public contracts, under conditions of forced labour, violence and sexual abuse, with deaths recorded as illness. The largest of them was praised in its day as a model of social provision. The exposure came late, the prosecutions came later, and the compensation is unfinished.

Labour and the dead. Wages held down by police under the general; a union movement that had to organise in churches; and an industrial death rate that shames a country of Korea’s wealth, which is the reason the directors’ liability law exists and the reason the houses fought it.

The Koryo-saram, admitted and unhelped, and the tied permits under which the country’s migrant workers live now, which is the same failing in the present tense.

Symbols

The flag is the plum blossom of the House of Yi, white on a plain blue field, with the charge centred and no stripes, in the East Asian manner. It was adopted in 1982, after the general fell, because the flag that had flown for the previous twenty years had been his and nobody wanted it.

The plum blossom was the dynasty’s emblem before it was the country’s, which is the sort of thing a republic would object to and Korean republicans, after 2011, mostly do not.

The anthem is a patriotic song of the independence period, adopted in 1948, and the dispute about its composer’s conduct under the occupation has never been resolved: the country sings it, and a third of the country knows the argument.

There is a separate royal anthem, used only in the monarch’s presence, and Korea is one of the few countries where the two are never confused.

The national days are 1 March for the rising of 1919, 15 August for liberation, and 9 October for the alphabet, which is the only national holiday in the world for a writing system. The two great family festivals, the lunar new year and the autumn harvest, empty the cities entirely and fill every road north and south.

Assessment

Korea is the country that was spared the twentieth century’s worst arrangement, and the question it is left with is whether it has been honest about what it did to itself instead.

The sparing was real and it was not earned. Russia stayed out of the Pacific war, so no second power demanded a zone; China wanted a whole friendly Korea, and was strong enough to have one. Korea contributed its exile corps, its resistance and its dead, and the decisive facts were decided elsewhere by people who were not thinking about Korea when they decided them. Every Korean schoolchild is taught the second reason. The first is in the textbooks too, in smaller type.

What the country did with it is the strongest part of its record. It kept its industry, its northern cities and its land bridge. It held a monarchy that could not be blamed for politics and, when it mattered once, would not sign. It built an economy that the world cannot do without from a peninsula with no resources and a recent famine in living memory. It legalised the people it had shot and let their descendants govern. It has held four truth commissions, published what they found, tried its own general and left him to die in prison.

And the list of what it did to itself is long, and most of it was done in the years when the country was being praised for its miracle. The children sold abroad, the institutions, the island, Kwangju, the men in the cells and the workers under the machines were not the price of anything. They were what a state does when nobody with power has any reason to stop.

The honest answer to the closing question is: partly, and later than it should have been, and more than most of its neighbours. Korea has admitted the killings, the torture and the trafficking, in public, in commissions whose reports are in print. It has not finished paying for any of them, it has never quite admitted that the fortune of 1945 was luck rather than virtue, and it has a habit, common to countries that have come a long way quickly, of regarding its own past as a story of endurance rather than a record of decisions. The endurance was real. The decisions were also real, and the people they were taken against are in the same country, reading the same reports.

Chronology

See also

• Empire of Japan
• Empire of China
• Russian Republic
• Kingdom of the Philippines
• League of Nations
• Orbit Airlines
• United Kingdom of America

Trivia

Categories

Nations of the World · Asia and the Pacific · Constitutional Monarchies · The Pacific Order