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Korea Education Toolkit

Nodutdol’s Korea Education Toolkit offers introductory knowledge about Korea from anti-imperialist and revolutionary perspectives. Please feel free to engage with the resources in any order, but we have organized them into the following historical sections:

Disclaimer: This toolkit primarily draws on resources originally written in the English language. While we have prioritized politically incisive analyses, recommending these resources does not mean that Nodutdol agrees with all of the political views expressed by these sources or their authors.

1. Japanese Colonialism

At the end of half a century of commercial imperialism, warfare, and unequal treaties, Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, besting imperialist rivals such as the US, tsarist Russia, and other powers that sought to dominate Korea. Prior to formal annexation, Japan and the US conspired in the Taft-Katsura Memorandum (1905) to divide up the Philippines and Korea. The resistance of the Korean people to imperialism can be traced back to the first encounters with capitalist powers in the 1860s, and first took on the characteristics of an organized, mass armed movement during the Donghak Revolution of 1894-1895. Throughout the colonial period, the national liberation movement developed in phases, and eventually split along class and ideological lines between bourgeois nationalists and communists. These divisions would prove to be pivotal in the partition of Korea and the Korean War.

Japanese colonization accelerated Korea’s integration into the world capitalist system at the expense of the masses of Korea, which was a primarily agrarian and feudal society at the start of colonization. Japanese monopolies expropriated land from the peasants with the cooperation of Korean landlords. As peasants were driven from the land, many were forced into cities or overseas, often becoming proletarianized as wage workers in the process, as Japan increasingly turned to partial industrialization of Korea to serve both capitalist expansion and the territorial conquest of China. The diasporas that formed in Japan, China, and the Soviet Union would go on to play a role in anti-colonial resistance from abroad, while often also contributing to socialist revolution in their new homes.

Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, colonial rule in Korea became increasingly harsh. The colonial government increasingly identified the very existence of Korean national identity as a threat, and embarked on a campaign of forced cultural assimilation that targeted the Korean language, defaced or destroyed national treasures, and forced the adoption of Japanese names and religious practices. At the height of World War II, Japan conscripted millions of Korean men and women into war efforts as soldiers, forced labor, and into a system of militarized sexual slavery known as the “comfort women” system. This section features short articles that shed light on Japanese colonization, the national liberation struggle, and their continuing relevance today.

Articles and books

Website

2. Korean War

Immediately after Japan's surrender, the Korean masses' fight for national liberation and sovereignty faced a new foreign occupier, the United States, which was more than willing to use nuclear weapons on Korea to eliminate the seeds of the communist revolution. The US Military quickly imposed a partition and occupied the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, less than 4 weeks after Korea's liberation. Quashing the sovereignty of the People's Republic of Korea, the US Army Military Government in Korea instituted elections only in the south and established the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1948. Those in the north founded the socialist Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) the following month. Opposing the south-only elections and the new puppet government, Koreans fought against the US military occupation. Among those rebellions was Jeju Island, whose residents fought hard for a unified, communist Korea and met with a massacre.

The US military occupation escalated into a full-scale war in 1950, engulfing the entire peninsula. The US committed war crimes flattening entire cities, destroying dams, and massacring civilians indiscriminately. Decimating 10% of the Korean population, the US devastated Korea until the Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953. The unspoken memories of the ongoing war continue to shape everyday life in Korea and the diaspora. In this section, we have selected readings as well as multimedia websites that illustrate the Korean War as an anti-imperialist resistance. These resources interrogate the impacts of the unending war, including the rise of the transnational adoption industry as a key institution that undergirds the imperialist rhetoric of benevolent liberalism.

Articles and books

  • Martin Hart-Landsberg (1997), “Chapter 5: The Korean War” in Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy
  • Soobin Kim (2023), "South Korea's Forgotten Anticommunist Killings"
  • Soojin Pate (2014), “Introduction: Challenging the Official Story of Korean Adoption” in From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption
  • Grace Cho (2008), “Introduction: The Fabric of Erasure” in Haunting the Korean Diaspora

Websites and videos

3. Republic of Korea (ROK: South Korea)

The Republic of Korea (ROK), or South Korea, is often praised for its successful postwar economic development; however, a closer look reveals that the ROK's capitalist development was brokered through a neocolonial, client-state relationship to US imperialism . The first president Rhee Syngman instituted the National Security Law to crack down on any political activities deemed "anti-state," which continues to be used against trade unions and peace activists alike to this day.

Under US-backed military rule in the Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan periods, South Korea underwent a rapid process of industrialization financed by the US and Japan, during which the workers’ and democratic movements were brutally suppressed. The most famous example of such repression was the Gwangju Massacre of 1980, in which the Chun military regime gunned down thousands of protesters with the knowledge and support of the US. Beyond these infamous acts of repression, South Korean capitalist development was also closely tied to US occupation and war. For decades, the ROK and US military worked in tandem to facilitate a militarized sex industry in so-called “camptowns” around US bases, trafficking Korean and later migrant civilian women; South Korean participation in the Vietnam War was also crucial to securing vast sums of investment capital in the 1960s which accelerated capitalist development.

Despite the democratization in 1987, the neoliberal world order has limited the power of workers by expanding irregular forms of employment. The 1997 IMF Crisis, for instance, forced the ROK to liberalize trade, privatize state-owned assets, and raised the poverty level to 20% in the following decade. The readings in this section provide an overview of these historical events to show the mechanisms of the US military occupation of Korea.

Articles and books

Fiction

  • Han Kang (2014), Human Acts

4. Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK: North Korea)

Among all countries in the world today, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, is arguably among the most maligned and least understood. There is a void of ignorance surrounding the DPRK in the western media, academy, and political life—a space often filled by stereotypes, rumors, and assumptions rather than research, facts, and historically informed analysis. In fact, the imperialist propaganda campaign targeting the DPRK is so powerful that to even point out the ignorance, racism, and intellectual dishonesty with which it is treated is often considered taboo.

The political effect of this is intentional; the Korean national liberation struggle cannot be comprehended without an understanding of the DPRK, and that requires learning about its historical origins in the anti-Japanese independence struggle, its historical trajectory through the Cold War, and the deliberate attempts by US imperialism to destroy its political project.

In this section, we provide a list of resources that look into the realities of the DPRK: the origins of its state in an anti-imperialist, democratic revolution, the characteristics of its socialist system, the origins of the imperialist propaganda that pervades western media, and the challenges the DPRK faces in the present, along with the solutions the Workers' Party and the people are implementing today.

Articles and books

Videos and podcasts

5. Contemporary US Imperialism

The anti-imperialist struggle in Korea is not simply a matter of history, but present reality. With 62 military bases and 28,500 US troops, Korea is among the most heavily occupied countries in the world. In the age of the New Cold War on China, US militarization and aggression in Korea are rapidly escalating, as Washington seeks to once again use the Korean Peninsula as a frontline for its imperialist wars. The everyday effects of the US occupation and its growing belligerence profoundly impact the people of the Korean Peninsula .

Imperialism, however, is also far more than a mere military phenomenon; imperialism is a stage in the historical development of capitalism as a global economic system, characterized by the emergence of monopolies that carve up the world's resources, markets, and labor for the profits of a tiny ruling class who own the most important pillars of the world economy.

This section of our reading list provides an introduction to the military and economic realities of US imperialism in Korea, from the environmental impact of the US military occupation to the place of the peninsula in US imperialist geostrategy, and from the effects of the 1997 IMF Crisis on the South Korean working class to the ravaging of South Korea's food system under capitalist "free trade."

6. Films

Documentaries

  • The Game of Their Lives (2002)
  • Memories of Forgotten War (2013)
  • Homes Apart (1991)
  • North Korea: Beyond the DMZ (2005)
  • The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military (1995)
  • My Brothers and Sisters in the North (2016)
  • Loyal citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul (2019)
  • Mother (2009)
  • War in Daechuri (2006)
  • Gureombi (2013)
  • The Sky Blue Symphony (2016)

Feature Films

  • A Single Spark (1995)
  • The Night Before the Strike (1990)
  • Taxi Driver 택시운전사 (2017)
  • The Attorney (2013)
  • Jiseul 지슬 (2012)
  • Default 국가부도의 날 (2018)