A Fractured Liberation

Korea under US Occupation

Kornel Chang

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Hardback

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English

Harvard University Press
08 July 2025

History; Asian history; History: specific events & topics; The Cold War; Political structures: democracy

A poignant return to Korea's forgotten ""Asian Spring""-a moment ripe with possibility denied by the postwar US military occupation.

When Japanese imperial rule ended in August 1945, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes that had been bottled up for forty years. New mother Chŏn SukhuXXXXXi marveled at the news, envisioning her son growing up free in an independent Korea. Yi Ilchae, who only days before had been drafted into the Japanese army, threw himself into union activism. An electrifying excitement jolted Koreans into action everywhere. Peasants occupied Japanese-owned farmlands, workers seized control of factories, and women demanded political and economic equality.

A Fractured Liberation brings to vivid life the brief but intense moment in postwar Korea when anything seemed possible, but nothing was guaranteed. The country had been abruptly split into US and Soviet military occupation zones, but, as Kornel Chang shows, ordinary people threw themselves into achieving self-governance throughout a unified Korea. The mostly left-leaning efforts were bolstered by an eclectic group of American supporters, including New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists.

The Koreans' greatest obstacle, however, proved to be the US military government in the south and its rigidly anti-communist leadership. Despite promising liberation from the hated Japanese-imposed institutions, the US occupation government under General John R. Hodge hired back Koreans who had worked for the Japanese to do the dirty work of curbing protests and muzzling reformers. As concern over the budding superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union overshadowed the Koreans' democratic aspirations, the United States increasingly narrowed the possibilities for Korean independence, helping to cement the North-South divide and ensure decades of authoritarian rule on both sides.

By: Kornel Chang
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 640g
ISBN: 9780674258433
ISBN 10: 0674258436
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 08 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Kornel Chang is the author of Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands, winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Prize in History. He is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University–Newark.

Reviews for A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation

A Fractured Liberation is a fascinating study of a moment in South Korean history that could have set the peninsula on a radically different course. Using new materials and written in a lively, engaging style, Chang’s work illuminates a host of hitherto neglected reformist figures, both Korean and American, and their heroic but tragically unsuccessful efforts to avoid a permanent division of Korea. -- Carter J. Eckert, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea Most Americans know nothing about the US occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948, but it deeply shaped postwar Korean history and was a crucial antecedent to the origins of the Korean War. Kornel Chang has written a brilliant analysis of this episode that will be of equal value to the specialist and the general reader. Lively, very well written and researched, often funny, but also deadly serious, it deserves a wide audience. -- Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War: A History The U.S. military occupation of Korea after World War II lasted only a few years, but they were fateful ones, as Kornel Chang shows. A Fractured Liberation is an absorbing, poignant account of a political tragedy: how a newly freed country teeming with democratic movements was plunged into autocracy and permanently, painfully divided. -- Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States