The Korean War Through the Prism of Chinese Society: Public Reactions and the Shaping of 'Reality' in the Communist State, October-December 1950

Abstract

For nearly three decades after end of Korean War, American veterans of conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned fact that Korea had become a war. fact, in United States there were signs that was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese? As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between good war and war; that is, between World War II and Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after end of World War II, Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by myth and memory of Second World War. On surface, at least, Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from start, Korean War became a prisoner of rigid mentality and ideology of early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral of and memory of World War I. Perhaps on one hand Korean War inherited too much myth from World War II. And on other hand, perhaps it generated too little myth of its own. As a result, and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became part of fiber of our own lives, as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula. Second, it is imperative to examine structures of power and hegemony and how they worked at various levels in order to understand how and why Korean War was fought and how memory and of conflict have been thus far constructed. Indeed, discourse of and its immediate aftermath begs to be studied and interpreted more fully. Recently, adherents of discourse theory and new cultural have suggested use of Michel Foucault's methods to understand that the power to shape symbolic systems of language and meaning is power over `knowledge' and `reality.' (4) If this is case, then it seems only logical to extend that theory to include shaping of myth and memory, which are inextricably linked to knowledge, reality, and history in Foucauldian sense. Much more remains to be done from this perspective, both from a domestic and geopolitical vantage point. Understanding discourse and structure of war's representation from standpoints of myth, memory, and reality is key to unlocking historiographical vault surrounding Korean War. As far as hegemonic constructs are concerned, Korean War fit a forgettable trajectory of American Cold War foreign policy that kept certain nations--like West Germany and Japan--within America's sphere of defense dependency. As Bruce Cumings has written, In Korea, United States picked up glove of Japanese empire and sought to keep South Korea and Taiwan within Japan's historic economic area ... [similarly] in Vietnam [it] picked up French glove. (5) same fashion, American involvement in Korean War fit into a larger schema that viewed Northeast Asia as an integral of United States' imperative to maintain and expand liberal capitalism around world. …