North and South Korea

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From South Korea Download PDF

I finished reading this book within three days of buying it. When I’d finished, I asked everyone I knew what they knew about Chun Tae-il — no one could tell me much. This surprised me because his story struck me as hugely significant to both the working classes (the “minjung”) of his time, and to the struggles we face today. The author of this biography, Cho Young-rae, could for his own safety only be identified after his death. The first versions of the book were inevitably banned by the South Korean authorities. It has since been turned into both a film and a play. Chun Tae-il set himself on...

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Yoo Ki-soo, General Secretary of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), was arrested on 26 May by the South Korean government, after a protest calling on the government to take responsibility for the Sewol Ferry Disaster. The ferry was carrying 476 people — mostly South Korean schoolchildren. It sank on 16 April off the southern coast of the country. The death toll has reached 288, with 16 people still unaccounted for. No bodies have been found since 21 May. Many people believe the disaster to be the result of deregulation and poor government oversight of industrial health and safety...

In December, South Korea was rocked by a massive strike of rail workers that lasted for 22 days. The strike, led by the Korean Rail Workers’ Union, opposed the introduction of private companies into the state-owned rail network. Early on in the dispute, the government declared the strike illegal and issued arrest warrants for the union leadership, who were forced into hiding. The rail union had its offices raided and its computers confiscated. Police attempted to break into the headquarters of the KCTU union federation but were fought off by a large crowd of workers. The repression generated...

The downfall of Chang Song-thaek, once considered the second most powerful person in North Korea, is a lesson in history for a new generation – and not only in Korea. The parallels to Soviet history are so striking that one almost wonders if Kim Jong-un read Robert Conquest's “The Great Terror” – the classic history of the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. That's not an entirely rhetorical question either, as Kim was educated abroad and may well have had access to history books denied to ordinary North Koreans. In any event, the regime he now heads openly reveres Stalin and is perhaps the...

If you want to know the truth about North Korea there can be no better starting point than this excellent book by award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney. North Korea is one of the most repressive and totalitarian states in the world, but it is a state as bizarre as it is repressive — like a Kafkaesque nightmare combined with Orwell's 1984 and Alice in Wonderland. As Sweeney describes it... the vast motorways with no cars, the university with no students, the library with no books, the children’s camp with no children, the farm with no animals, and the hospital with patients, but only in the...

Socialist Worker last week reported on the escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula — but in topsy-turvy world of the fast-decaying SWP, it denounced “imperialist war-mongering against North Korea” which “threatened to bring the region to the brink of nuclear war.” Allow me to make one or two small corrections. First, it is not “the region” alone which faces the risk of nuclear war. North Korea's Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles have a reported range of 6,000 km. That puts Alaska, the northern bits of Australia, the entire Pacific ocean, all of China, most of Russia and the Indian sub...

In early April North Korea declared that it was cancelling the armistice which ended the 1950s Korean war and was “in a state of war” with South Korea. It threatened to hit the USA with nuclear weapons. It has withdrawn 50,000 North Korean workers from a special industrial zone which is on the northern side of the Korean border but houses South Korean companies. No-one knows what North Korea may do further. The 86-year-old Fidel Castro has called the situation “incredible and absurd”, and urged North Korea to restraint, while also denouncing any US military action. We know something of what...