Review by New York Times Review
Two books explore the reasons for North Korea's confounding survival. A QUARTER-CENTURY ago, North Korea seemed to teeter on the brink of collapse. The end of the cold war in the late 1980s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 suggested that the era of reclusive Communist dictatorships was over. How, asked hopeful observers around the world, could Kim Il-sung's Stalinist wasteland possibly survive under the pressure of its spectacular economic failures and the tide of democracy and capitalism rising around its borders? Things got even worse for North Korea in the years that followed. Chinese leaders lost interest in propping up a regime they believed to be doomed. Deprived of foreign support, North Korea descended into a hellish famine that killed between 600,000 and one million of its citizens, an astonishing 3 to 5 percent of the total population, between 1995 and 1998 . Perhaps most dangerous of all to the government in Pyongyang, desperate North Koreans responded to starvation by planting private gardens and setting up local markets, displays of grass-roots entrepreneurship that struck at the core of the government's authority. And yet North Korea not only survived the 1990s but lives on today with no end in sight. Despite some concessions to economic necessity, North Korea's essential character remains unchanged, and the family dynasty founded by Kim Il-sung in the 1940s persists without apparent challenge. How can we explain the remarkable longevity of a regime that, by all rights, should have landed in the dustbin of history long ago? This question lies at the heart of two superb new books. As both studies argue, understanding North Korea, too often dismissed as a merely irrational and reckless pariah, is the starting point for devising sensible policy to manage the dangers that it poses. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a professor of East Asian studies at Oberlin College , and Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at Koomkin University in Seoul, South Korea , approach the question in different but equally fascinating ways. In "Brothers at War," Jager focuses on the international arena, examining how the United States, China and Russia have competed for control on the Korean Peninsula since World War II. More than half of the book provides an elegant and balanced, if not especially innovative, history of the Korean War. Thereafter, Jager enters less familiar terrain, examining why the division of North and South Korea has endured ever since the fighting stopped in 1953. One reason was the willingness of the superpowers to provide economic and military aid to their Korean protégés, including, on the South Korean side, the stationing of thousands of American soldiers. But stability did not result solely from a balance of military power on the peninsula. By the 1970s, Jager shows, the status quo had become a comfortable fact of life for almost everyone in the region. Revealingly, when President Jimmy Carter proposed withdrawing United States forces in the late 1970s, he encountered resistance not only in Seoul and Tokyo but also in Moscow and Beijing . All of them saw that a new crisis might mean bloodshed, humanitarian disaster and huge flows of refugees that no one wanted. After the cold war, when Soviet aid disappeared, Pyongyang lost its most important benefactor. Yet North Korean leaders refused to embrace reform, fearful that any opening to the wider world would invite rebellion by enabling their people to see the enormous gap between their deprivation and the fantastic prosperity south of the demilitarized zone. The key to the regime's survival, Jager argues, was its dramatic acceleration of the decade-old nuclear program. When North Korea disavowed the nonproliferation treaty in 1993 and threatened to turn Seoul into "a sea of fire ," Americans reasonably feared a dangerous escalation of tensions. But Jager insists that North Korean saber-rattling was aimed mostly at extorting economic aid from Washington, Seoul and other governments anxious to preserve peace at almost any price . Playing the "nuclear card" worked just as the North Koreans hoped. Washington decided against confronting Pyongyang, instead negotiating a compromise that sent American economic aid in return for small North Korean concessions . More recent North Korean provocations, including nuclear tests beginning in 2006 , have been similarly aimed, Jager makes clear, at extracting foreign assistance crucial to the North's survival. Lankov agrees with all of these conclusions, but his book, "The Real North Korea," concentrates not so much on international affairs as on the nature of North Korean society. Lankov is unusually well placed to take this approach. Born in the Soviet Union during the cold war , he enjoyed access to North Korea as a student and clearly benefits from a network of acquaintances and informants in the country. The book, an engaging blend of scholarship, reportage and memoir, offers striking details about daily life in a country reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984." Lankov describes, for example, the government's efforts to assure that every household displays portraits of the ruling family and maintains them properly . Elsewhere, Lankov cites a 2011 North Korean report about a study showing that North Koreans were the second-happiest people on earth, behind only the Chinese, while citizens of the United States and South Korea ranked at the bottom . Such absurdities underscore one of the most important reasons, in Lankov's view, for North Korea's persistence: its ability to prevent the vast majority of the population from receiving information about the outside world. But he points to other factors as well, including the sheer resourcefulness of ordinary North Koreans who manage to eke out a living under conditions unimaginable in most other parts of the world. Whether such stability will last over the long term is a different matter. Both Jager and Lankov contend that North Korea cannot resist change forever, though they offer different visions of the nation's likely future. Jager foresees the country's gradual absorption into an economic sphere controlled by Beijing . Lankov touches on that scenario but stresses the possibility of dramatic political upheaval resulting in the disintegration of the North Korean regime. Such a crisis might lead to Korean unification but would be exceedingly dangerous in the short term. Both books make clear that the government in Pyongyang will never surrender its nuclear weapons, North Korea's sole source of international leverage, and is unlikely to go down without a fight. Yet Jager and Lankov offer glimmers of hope. The mysterious new leader who took power in 2011, Kim Jongun, may prove to be a reformer. Alternatively, the spread of radio and DVD players in the North may gradually create a better-informed population that will leave him or his successors no choice but to opt for union with the South. The best reason to hope for a softlanding, however, may be the same basic fact that has prevailed since the 1970s: No major power concerned with East Asia, including China, has any interest in another Korean War. BROTHERS AT WAR The Unending Conflict in Korea By Sheila Miyoshi Jager Illustrated. 605 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35. THE REAL NORTH KOREA Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia By Andrei Lankov Illustrated. 283 pp. Oxford University Press. $27.95. North Korean girls stand at attention at the end of a performance of mass games in Pyongyang in July, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. How can we explain the longevity of a regime that should have landed in the dustbin of history long ago? Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is "The Vietnam War: A Concise International History. "
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 1, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
After visiting the heavily fortified DMZ separating North and South Korea, Bill Clinton called it the scariest place on earth. As the current crisis with North Korea illustrates, that description remains apt. Jager writes an ambitious, engrossing, and often disturbing history of the conflict, including its origins and its continuation since, technically, the war has never ended. As Jager indicates, Korea, which had a national identity as far back as the seventh century, was dominated by foreign powers for a century before WWII. The postwar division of the peninsula was inherently unstable, and there was considerable violence in the south even before the North Korean invasion in 1950. In analyzing the war, Jager provides multiple perspectives, including Korean, American, and Chinese. The war turned a civil conflict into a battleground of the Cold War. She now views the war as, however, a struggle for legitimacy between the two Koreas. This is a struggle that the North cannot win, and Jager sees that regime as dying but extremely dangerous. This is a superbly researched work that should be an essential tool in understanding the current crisis on the peninsula.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This timely primer on the past, present, and possible future of the Korean Peninsula, by Jager, an associate professor of East Asian studies at Oberlin College, opens at the close of World War II. At the time, the United States was scrambling to draft a proposal that would secure itself a share in the beleaguered and communism-susceptible region, rather than allowing Stalin and the Soviets sole occupation. Hence, the 38th parallel, whose path was traced late at night on a National Geographic map to divide North and South Korea into separate occupied zones. When the North Koreans, under Soviet supervision, crossed the parallel in 1950, war erupted; less than six days later, the U.S. had committed troops. Initially dismissed as a mere "police action," the war has now spanned six decades and is buffered only by a fragile armistice (which North Korea voided in early March 2013). Jager carefully examines how the war has evolved over time, and how this struggle for "Korean legitimacy" has influenced the global power order, from the U.S.'s turbulent diplomatic efforts (Bill Clinton once called the DMZ "the scariest place on earth") to the rise of China. Insightful, in-depth, and much needed, this book is required reading for anyone who hopes to understand the situation in Korea. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Korean War is not over. The armistice signed in 1953 largely stopped the hostilities, but a peaceful settlement of the conflict has yet to be achieved. Jager (East Asian studies, Oberlin Coll.; Narratives of Nation Building in Korea) uses this reality to provide a long view of the war beginning with its origins in World War II and continuing to the funeral of leader Kim Jong-il in 2011. Readers will find not only a thorough account of the fighting, but also a description of the conflict's impact on the Cold War and beyond. The author reveals the war's long-term effects on the domestic politics and international relations of the Koreas, China, and the United States. Jager places current Korean issues in the context of the unending Korean War, and predicts in her epilog's final analysis that North Korea will be assimilated as another province of northeast China. VERDICT Essential reading for all students of recent North and South Korean history. Though scholarly and meticulously researched, the book is written in prose that is accessible to experts and novices alike. For a work that focuses exclusively on the active shooting war, see David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter.-Joshua Wallace, South Texas Coll. Lib., McAllen, TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A protracted chronicle of the north-south conflict in Korea and the ultimate yearning for peninsular peace. Jager (East Asian Studies/Oberlin Coll.; Narratives of Nation Building in Korea, 2003, etc.) provides a well-grounded understanding of the evolution of the paranoid, isolated North Korean state as it emerged from Soviet protection and attempted to enforce its legitimacy across the entire peninsula by waging war on the South. She posits the war as the galvanizer for American militarization during the Cold War and the tool for bolstering Mao Zedong's leadership in China and giving new impetus to the "resisting America" theme that would carry through the subsequent Vietnam War. The lessons of the Korean War were acute, if not always heeded, resulting in the lack of a clear victory, the militarization of American society in the forms of a large standing army and huge defense expenditures, and the newfound confidence of China, which spooked both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Despite the North's continued aggression and early economic supremacy in the 1960s, the impoverished South gained as a beneficiary of American aid, grew its military after the Korean War and contributed massive manpower to the U.S. during the Vietnam War, a fact that is not widely acknowledged. The South's rapprochement with Japan and America's with China also threatened the North and fueled the long-running competition between leaders Kim Il-sung and Park Chung-hee. Jager presents a thorough look at this deadly fraternal power struggle, the North's persistent pattern of provocation to tip the hand of the larger powers and the deep heartsickness the division has caused the Korean people. An authoritative record of the divided Korean peninsula to go alongside Victor Cha's The Impossible State (2012).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
