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Forced march to modernity: State-imposed cultural change and regime stability in 20th-century east Asia

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Forced march to modernity: State-imposed cultural change and regime stability in 20th-century east Asia

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Forced March to Modernity: State-Imposed Cultural
Change and Regime Stability in 20
th
Century East Asia

Meredith Shaw

Dissertation for completion of degree: Doctor of Philosophy (Political
Science and International Relations)
Conferring program: Faculty of the USC Graduate School
Conferral date: August 2018
University of Southern California

2
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. 4
Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Cultural Politics ....................................................................... 7
Three Puzzling Cases of Cultural Imposition: Saudi Arabia, China, Afghanistan ........ 7
Theories of Culture, Politics, and Cultural Politics .................................................................. 18
Thinking of Cultural Systems like Economies ........................................................................... 24
Methodology, Key Variables and Case Selection .................................................................. 30
Definitions of relevant terms ...................................................................................................... 36
Nations, Nationalism and the State .......................................................................................................... 36
Contentious Politics and Revolutionary Potential ............................................................................... 38
Culture and Cultural Policy ........................................................................................................................ 41
Ruling Ideology .............................................................................................................................................. 44
Justification for Case Selection ...................................................................................................... 45
References ......................................................................................................................................... 52
Chapter 2: Imposed Culture and Mongolia’s Democratic Transition ........................ 54
Introduction: The Nomadic Misfit of Comparative Politics ................................................... 54
Background Reading: Theories of Soviet Collapse and the Missing Cultural Repression
Factor .................................................................................................................................................. 59
Background Condition: Soviet Cultural Repression in Mongolia and Elsewhere ............. 61
Cultural Policy in Communist Mongolia: Russian Cultural Chauvinism and Soviet-
Guided Modernization ..................................................................................................................... 66
Opposition Impact: Cultural Revival as a Protest Meme ........................................................ 73
Aftermath: Democratic Consolidation through Cultural Policy ........................................... 79
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 89
References .......................................................................................................................................... 95
Appendix I: Mongolia Interview Subjects .................................................................................. 98
Chapter 3: Juche Cultural Policy and the Puzzle of North Korean Regime
Survival .................................................................................................................................... 99
Introduction: The Surprising Longevity of the North Korean Regime ................................ 99
Background Reading: ................................................................................................................... 103
Applying Theories of Communism to the North Korean Case .................................................... 103
North Korea and Mongolia: The Case for Comparison .................................................................. 111
Background Condition: Escape from Soviet Cultural Hegemony ...................................... 115
Cultural Policy in North Korea: Everything “In Our Own Style” ..................................... 118
Opposition Impact: Nonexistent Protest .................................................................................. 128
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 132
References ....................................................................................................................................... 134
Chapter 4: Culture, Values, and Historiography in South Korea’s Democratization
Movement ............................................................................................................................... 136
Introduction: Two Competing Visions of Korean Cultural Legitimacy ........................... 136
Background Reading: Existing Work on South Korea’s Democratization Struggle ..... 140
Background Conditions ................................................................................................................ 141
Colonial-era Legacy of Cultural Protest ............................................................................................... 141
Uniquely Korean Obstacles to Mass Social Movements ................................................................ 144
Instruments of Yushin Cultural Policy and Soviet Similarities .................................................... 148
3
Cultural Policy in Yushin South Korea .................................................................................... 150
A “Correct” View of History ................................................................................................................... 150
Fashion Police ............................................................................................................................................... 154
Healthy Songs and Banned Songs .......................................................................................................... 156
Opposition Impact: Traditional Culture as Protest Medium .............................................. 159
Talchum and P’ungmulp’ae: Bringing back the rhythms of our ancestors .............................. 160
Madanggŭk: Dramatic Traditions of Korean Peasantry .................................................................. 164
Literary protest traditions .......................................................................................................................... 166
Aftermath: Cultural Reclamation and Victory Demolitions in the Democratic Era ...... 168
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 171
References ....................................................................................................................................... 177
Chapter 5: Postwar Japan’s Cultural Democracy ........................................................ 179
Introduction: Japan as a Problematic Anomaly Case ........................................................... 179
Background Condition: The Meiji and Showa Restorations ............................................... 181
Cultural Policies in Postwar Japan ............................................................................................ 189
Opposition Impact: Critical Junctures in Postwar Protest .................................................. 198
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 204
References ....................................................................................................................................... 208
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 210
The motives behind cultural interventions .............................................................................. 210
National Pride and Ideological Evangelism .................................................................................... 212
Commonalities of Cultural Policy .............................................................................................. 214
Commonalities of Cultural Resistance ...................................................................................... 216
Limits and Scope of Theoretical Model .................................................................................... 217
Some cultural policies are more successful than others ........................................................ 219

4
Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to my colleagues, mentors and friends who guided me through
the process of producing this dissertation. Particular thanks are owed to my advisor,
Professor David Kang, for his wise advice on time management, theory development,
elevator pitches and the importance of the “so what.” I am also very thankful to my other
committee members, Professors Pat James and Lon Kurashige, who have guided this
project from the beginning, and for Professor David Leheny who kindly agreed to join
the committee later on. Their comments and constructive criticism helped to shape this
dissertation into its current form
This project would not have been possible without the generous support of a
Fulbright Fellowship which enabled me to spend a full year in Seoul doing archival
research and interviews. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Chung Yong-wook of
the Seoul National University History Department and Dr. Lim Soon-hee of the Korea
Institute for National Unification (KINU) for agreeing to be my sponsors and advising
my on the South and North Korean chapters respectively. In addition, early work on the
Japanese section of this research was made possible by an ACE-Nikaido field research
fellowship. My sincerest thanks go out to all the people in Seoul, Tokyo and Ulaanbaatar
who agreed to be interviewed for this project, as well as the helpful archivists at the
Korea Democracy Archives in Seoul and the Mongolian National Archives in
Ulaanbaatar. I must also thank Tsendpurev Tsegmid for hosting me in Ulaanbaatar,
Batchimeg Sambalkhundev for going the extra mile as my Mongolian interpreter, and
Jade and Brian (pseudonyms), two young North Korean defectors who informally
answered my many questions about cultural life in North Korea.
5
Special thanks are owed to Gerald Munck and Jeffery Sellers, who both
served on my qualifying exam committee and whose class readings inspired much of
my early theory development on social movements and modernization theory. For
the original idea formation I am indebted to Robert English, with whom I spent a
semester doing a guided reading of comparative communism and produced a very
rough paper that was the seed of what would eventually become this dissertation. I
would also like to thank Carol Wise who kindly offered to review my dissertation
proposal, and Saori Katada who reviewed and offered suggestions on the first draft
of the Japan chapter.
Early drafts of various chapters of this research benefitted from comments
by conference discussants Cameron Thies of Arizona State University, Evelyn Goh of
Australia National University, and Robert Bartlett of the University of Vermont. I am
also endlessly grateful to Greg Noble of the University of Tokyo for his thorough
reading and extensively commentary on my first consolidated draft.
My thanks go out to my parents and brother for supporting my decision to
pursue a Ph.D. and providing a friendly sounding board for my ideas.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did no thank my USC colleagues for providing a
wonderful network of support and intellectual debate in which to develop this
project. I am particularly thankful to Kate Svyatets, R. Joseph Huddleston, Youssef
Chouhoud, Ronan Tse-Min Fu, Mao Suzuki, Chin-Hao Huang and Jiun Bang – amazing
scholars, colleagues, champions and friends throughout the long PhD process.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants.”
— Sir Isaac Newton
6

7
Chapter 1: The Puzzle of Cultural Politics

Three Puzzling Cases of Cultural Imposition: Saudi Arabia, China, Afghanistan

In May of 2016, Saudi Arabia’s leading religious authority declared a ban on
“taking photos with cats.”
1

The ban was issued by a prominent cleric and member of the Saudi Council of
Senior Scholars who was startled to learn that cat photos were becoming popular on the
internet. His reaction reflected a rather obscure Islamic taboo against taking “non-
essential” photos. It is unclear if the Saudi government took any concrete steps to enforce
the ban or if any offenders have been punished. But that did not stop Western comedians
and news outlets from gleefully poking fun at the stodginess of Saudi clerics.
The ban on cat photos came at the height of a period of serious debate and
reflection within the Saudi government over its proper role in shaping popular culture and
entertainment in the country. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, this
debate has been prompted largely by economic concerns, since “the lack of entertainment
options has undermined the quality of life in Saudi cities, deterring investors and foreign
workers” as the kingdom “tries to open its economy.”
2
The struggle over popular culture
reflects a larger ongoing conflict within Saudi society pitting pro-Western, younger,
cosmopolitan liberals versus anti-Western, older, provincial conservatives. In the article,
conservative Saudi officials were quoted criticizing Western music and cinema as

1
“Saudi cleric: You may not take photos with cats — or anything else,” The Washington
Post, May 26, 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/05/26/saudi-cleric-you-may-
2
“Saudis Wrangle Over How to Have Fun” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudis-
wrangle-over-how-to-have-fun-1485167404)
8
“harmful and depraved,” proclaiming “We don’t need people from Hollywood or other
places to come here to entertain us.” Liberalizing voices argued, “The majority of those
who oppose cinema are people who have never entered a movie theater. They don’t know
what cinema is.”
Liberalizing efforts had already yielded promising results. In April 2016, the
government moved to limit the powers of the religious police who are tasked with
enforcing strict moral codes and gender segregation. Under the new regulations, religious
policemen may no longer detain pedestrians or even request to see their identification.
Yet the changes have not been unidirectional. High-ranking Saudi clerics have made
headlines in recent years for issuing extremely detailed cultural prohibitions, struggling to
keep pace with an ever-growing list of Western cultural encroachments spurred by the
digital age.

International observers reacted with similar glee to reports that, in 2011, the
People’s Republic of China banned TV dramas about time travel. This was part of a long
list of banned items issued in recent years by China's top media regulator in a bid to
combat the promotion of "Western lifestyles" in entertainment media. The new
regulations specifically target content that expresses "overt admiration for Western
lifestyles," jokes about Chinese traditions or defiles "classic materials."
3
As for the
specific objection to time travel, the regulators reasoned that too many science fiction
dramas "casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and

3
“China to curb vulgar social, entertainment news,” Xinhua, Aug 29, 2016
(http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-08/29/c_135642868.htm).
9
even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation."
4
Some observers have
suggested that another reason China’s censors object to science fiction is that, in the
finest tradition of Star Trek, it tends to use historical allegories to offer veiled
commentary on current social issues. Indeed, the regulation stated that in many instances
"producers and writers are treating serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no
means be encouraged anymore."
These new regulations are the latest salvo in an intensifying cultural campaign by
the ruling Communist Party to revive popular enthusiasm for Chinese cultural
achievements and national traditions. As the government under President Xi Jinping has
adopted a more explicitly anti-Western cultural stance, even certain pastimes and
holidays have become controversial. In December 2014, the education bureau in
Wenzhou banned all Christmas activities in schools and kindergartens, saying people
were "obsessed" with Western festivals while ignoring those in traditional Chinese
culture. State-run television also highlighted a protest in Hunan province in which five
students wearing traditional Chinese costumes held up banners calling for a “ban on
Christmas” and declaring “Chinese should not celebrate foreign holidays.”
5
Since
Christmas in China is mainly a commercial gimmick to boost sales, this recent anti-
Christmas drive is a prime example of the Party putting seemingly minor cultural
concerns above economic interests.
Among 21
st
Century autocracies, China might be considered a least-likely case for

4
“China's latest ban: Time travel,” by Jane Leung, CNN, April 18, 2011.
(http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/life/chinas-new-ban-time-travel-274122/)
5
“Does Christmas really pose a threat to Chinese culture?” Teddy Ng, South China
Morning Post, Insight & Opinion, Dec 28, 2014. http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-
opinion/article/1669454/does-christmas-really-pose-threat-chinese-culture
10
an open campaign of cultural control. It certainly sullies the image that China has fought
hard in recent years to promote as a cuddly colossus of “soft power,” a benign autocracy
with all the stabilizing features of central rule but none of the unpleasant Stalin-y side
effects. China’s Communist Party has struggled mightily in recent years to improve its
soft power arsenal both at home and abroad, to better compete Western entertainment. In
a June 2016 speech to the CCP Central Propaganda Department, President Xi Jinping
criticized the nation’s propaganda bureau for failing to reach younger audiences and
called on them to be more innovative.
6
State media and the Communist Youth League
have worked together to churn out youth-friendly hip hop videos and animations
promoting China’s recent scientific and economic accomplishments, including a rap song
about Karl Marx that features midriff-baring dancers and the lyrics “You are my Venus,
my darling Marx.”
7

As the China analyst George Gao observes, “China’s soft power goals contain an
inherent contradiction: the country wants to use media as a tool to guide public values in
the Leninist tradition, and at the same time hopes to create entertainment products that
are well received worldwide.”
8
The results, like the hip-hop videos and the ban on time
travel dramas, seem tragically doomed to evoke contempt from domestic consumers and

6
“Zhōngyāng dì yī xúnshì zǔ xiàng zhōngyāng xuānchuán bù fǎnkuì zhuānxiàng xúnshì
qíngkuàng” (First Central Inspection Department reports special inspections to the
Central Propaganda Department)
(http://www.ccdi.gov.cn/special/zyxszt/djlxs_zyxs/fkqk_18jzydjl_zyxs/201606/t2016061
3_80397.html) “Propaganda With a Millennial Twist Pops Up in China,” Javier C.
Hernandez, The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2016.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/world/asia/china-propaganda-communist-party-
millennials.html?_r=0)
7
“Mǎkèsī shì jiǔ líng hòu” (Marx is a post-90) music video available online at
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTUzOTQ5OTc3Ng (accessed 10/19/2017)
8
“Why Is China So … Uncool?” George Gao, Foreign Policy, March 8, 2017.
11
ridicule from observers abroad. Yet the Chinese government continues to spend
tremendous resources and social capital in its quest to control the country’s cultural
direction. Why?

Cultural impositions are not solely the province of anti-Western autocrats; U.S.
occupation authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have gotten into the act as well. For
instance, during the years from 2002-2004, when Afghanistan was effectively under U.S.
control, the governing authorities initiated an ambitious program of sweeping
transformations of the country’s traditional gender roles.
Early on, occupying forces “established secure zones that enabled civilians to get
three million girls and women into schools and universities—up from an estimated 5,000
under the Taliban.”
9
Health services for women were modernized, and traditional
discriminatory practices such as “bad blood price” (the use of women as compensation
for crimes by one family against another) were outlawed (Grenfell 2004). In addition, the
authorities took steps to dramatically increase Afghan women’s roles in governance at all
levels. In 2002, under American pressure, women were for the first time allowed to serve
in loya jirga – the traditional tribal councils that rule on community affairs. Not only
were women allowed on the councils, the UN set the extraordinary goal of achieving
equal gender representation in order to bring Afghanistan into compliance with the
Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In a
country where, under Taliban rule, girls over eight years old had been forbidden from

9
Pond, Elizabeth. “Change in Afghanistan: Evolution or Revolution?” World Policy
Blog, Sept 10, 2012 (http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2012/09/10/change-afghanistan-
evolution-or-revolution accessed 8/9/2017).
12
attending school, authorities struggled to find female candidates both qualified and
willing to join the councils. In the Emergency Loya Jirga of 2002, 220 out of the
approximately 1500 delegates were women. Unfortunately, warlords and commanders
dominated the conversation, drowning out the voices of women (Grenfell). In 2003
Afghanistan acceded to CEDAW, which imposes binding rules granting women equal
participation in every aspect of the political process. The UN Commission on the Status
of Women’s 2003 report recommended “gender balance in the composition of …
delegations in [peace] negotiations… [and] adherence to gender balance in appointments
to senior government administration and judiciary positions.” (Grenfell)
The much-vaunted girls' schools came under attack in the transitional year of 2012
(Pond 2012). Women known to have participated in the loya jirga also fell vulnerable to
attack from unknown assailants as U.S. forces retreated amid the Taliban resurgence
(Béland et al 2015, 673). Any autonomous advances in gender equality that Afghans
might have made on their own were hindered by suspicions of Western involvement. For
Afghans, women’s rights and gender equality have now become permanently associated
with the West and the US-led intervention that brought so much fresh destruction and
chaos to the already war-weary country.
“I am haunted by my long-ago conversations with Afghan women we once
encouraged to gamble on a nobler future—and are now abandoning as fully
as we abandoned Vietnamese employees struggling to get onto helicopters
lifting off from the U.S. embassy roof for the last time. I wonder, heretically,
if it would have been better for them if we had not kindled Afghan hopes we
could never fulfill. Did our pursuit of a revolutionary best rather than a more
modest evolutionary good in raising aspiration for change make things worse
rather than better for Afghanistan's 15 million women?” (Pond 2012)
In the war-torn Afghanistan of 2002-4, occupying US forces had their work cut out
for them. Fighting was still ongoing throughout much of the country, infrastructure was
13
devastated by years of poverty and war, the economy had collapsed, social services were
non-functional, and basic law and order could not be enforced. The vital task of the day
was to win the “hearts and minds” of the traumatized population. Why, at this critical
time, did US authorities choose to push forward a predictably unpopular and near-
impossible cultural policy of imposed gender equality? Admirable though their goals may
have been, why not focus on establishing essential governing functions and infrastructure
first? And how might things have turned out differently if they had?

All over the map, governments have taken heavy-handed and often unpopular steps
to impose their will on the cultural direction of their constituent populations. Cultural
policies have been imposed by all kinds of governments across the breadth of the
ideological spectrum - whether communist or fascist, autocratic or democratic,
autonomous or foreign-installed. Sometimes these policies are motivated by a
chauvinistic desire to transform the native society into the mirror-image of that of the
occupying power; others may represent a “return” to a traditional way of life, real or
imagined, that was perceived to have been trampled by the previous regime. Some reflect
a belief that the existing culture is antithetical to desired modernization or sociopolitical
development, while others are driven by an ideological conviction that modernization
itself is a social evil that can only be warded off by reverting to traditional ways and
values. Some are clearly connected to defined ideological or religious strictures, while
others seem almost random and extremely petty.
Some of the most dramatic examples of top-down imposed cultural change in the
last century include the cultural Russification and secularization of the USSR’s various
14
soviets and satellite states; the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the struggle to
eliminate the “Four Olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas) in China under
Mao; the Vietnamese communists’ efforts to simultaneously eradicate traditional
“superstitions” and “bourgeois elements” imparted by the French; the Khmer Rouge’s
brutal assault on intellectualism and Western culture in 1970s Cambodia; and the
conservative transformation of secular Persian society following the 1979 Iranian
revolution. Less brutal but still significant state-imposed cultural transformations took
place in Japan during the Meiji Restoration, in South Vietnam during the French and
American periods, on the Korean peninsula during Japanese occupation, and most
recently in Iraq and Afghanistan under American influence.
The costs of state-imposed cultural policies are varied and often hard to measure.
Among the most obvious economic costs we may consider the cost of enforcement,
losses in consumer spending, damage to trade relationships, and potential foreign
sanctions. Additionally, state efforts to outlaw certain fashions, music, movies, and
foodstuffs often lead to the expansion of black markets where such items can be obtained,
disrupting the government’s control of the economy. Policies against existing arts and
entertainment have an immediate effect of leaving practitioners unemployed, with few
skills that can be transferred to other work. On the other hand, banning cultural products
inevitably allows greater opportunities for illegal contraband that can be used to secure
patronage relationships, and policies that harm weaker minority groups may win political
favor from the majority, at least in the short term. But the costs of attempting to
deliberately alter the organically evolving cultural direction of a country are likely to
considerably outweigh such benefits in the long run.
15
The other costs of cultural controls are political: alienation of select social groups,
exacerbation of inter-ethnic or class tensions, international embarrassment when some of
the more petty laws are publicized (as in the case of the Saudi cat photo ban), loss of
respect and influence in global institutions. The younger, better-educated and more
dynamic sectors of the population constantly chafe under petty cultural restrictions,
undermining the regime that enforces them. For example, the Soviets’ prohibitions
against blue jeans and rock music have been frequently cited as a driving force behind the
waves of immigration and illegal trade that ultimately brought down the iron curtain. In
addition, states that excessively isolate and control their domestic arts often find
themselves embarrassingly out of touch with global trends and unable to defend against,
or even understand, foreign soft power influence.
If cultural policies are costly, why do autocrats almost universally pursue them?
Most classic works of political economy teach us to view the autocratic state as an
essentially extractive institution, a “stationary bandit” (Olson 2000) bent on maximizing
its own rents as much as possible without getting thrown out of power. Tilly (1990)
famously argued that resource extraction needed to conduct wars was the catalyst that
created states; i.e., the state is principally concerned with finding the most effective
institutional structure to maximize resource extraction, in order to successfully prosecute
wars. The consensus view of autocracy is that, although different regimes may give lip
service to ideological concerns, at their core their primary aim must be to maximize rent
extraction while remaining in power. In Darwinian terms, we expect that any autocrat
who does not fully maximize this equation will be replaced by a more efficient autocrat.
Consequently, most theories of autocratic stability focus on the state’s ability to extract
16
rents efficiently and maintain a minimal “winning coalition” through patronage (Buena
de Mesquita 2011). If autocrats are primarily fixated on extracting rents and keeping their
winning coalition happy, why do they spend so much money imposing unpopular and
unprofitable cultural policies? And why do some regimes still not relent on these cultural
policies even when they demonstrably provoke popular resistance and threaten the status
quo? Why not focus on extracting resources and leave culture alone?
Perhaps more importantly, we must question why some cultural impositions
produce more effective popular resistance than others. If popular resentment of Soviet-era
cultural restrictions helped bring down the Iron Curtain, why have similarly restrictive
policies in China and Saudi Arabia not produced similar results? Why did the same
Afghans who so violently rejected Western cultural impositions accept the far more
severe cultural restrictions of the preceding Taliban regime with relative impassivity?

In short, the aim of this research is to explore two related questions, a “Why” and a
“When”:
1) Why do governments expend limited resources to impose unpopular cultural
interventions on their people?
2) When do cultural policies disrupt regime stability? More specifically, when do
opposition movements make use of unpopular cultural policies to achieve their
political goals?

Through the process of addressing these two questions, this research constructs a
new typology of state-imposed cultural policies and builds a theoretical framework for
17
predicting the likely impact of different cultural policies on the popularity and
effectiveness of anti-regime social movements.
As the case studies will show, the answer to question #1 is highly contingent on
the characteristics of the state leadership, their prior assumptions and prejudices, and their
relationship to the preceding regime. Intriguingly, however, the case studies will show
that the resulting cultural policies tend to coalesce around a few distinct patterns, and
each of these patterns affects regime stability and popular resistance in predictable ways.
I will thus defer to the individual case studies for answers to question #1 (the question of
the regime’s motivation), and focus my core hypotheses on answering question #2 (the
impact on regime stability).
As question #2 above implies, I have narrowed my query into regime stability by
focusing on the phenomenon of persistent grass-roots opposition as a destabilizing force.
Even more specifically, I focus on the question of how cultural symbols may be used to
help nascent opposition movements to gather a mass following, particularly among a-
political or politically uninformed sectors of the population. There are of course many
other ways that cultural policies may affect regime stability, and the emergence of mass
social movements is just one possible consequence. The decision to narrowly focus on
opposition social movements stems from the most promising initial findings of the case
studies that follow.
In brief, my hypothesis is that governments will be inherently more prone to
encounter recurrent, grass-roots, regime-change-seeking popular opposition if:
A) They are perceived to be foreign-imposed or based upon foreign
ideologies;
18
B) The ruling regime pursues policies that impose rapid cultural
transformation in a modernizing/Westernizing direction.
The principle innovation of this approach is that it allows us to consider a new
angle on the classic collective action problem: in culturally oppressive regimes, protest
groups can signal their affiliation and attract a larger and more diverse following by
making use of symbols of cultural loss (singing banned songs, breaking official strictures
on dress and hairstyle, praising officially condemned historical figures, etc). Cultural
protests are more difficult for a regime to suppress than overtly political acts, and thus
provide a safer method of signaling to like-minded followers. Inspired by Ruth Collier’s
(1999) model of class coalitions in democratization processes, I demonstrate that in
ethnically homogenous states cultural preferences also tend to form along class lines, and
thus a government’s cultural policies can work to either unite or divide class coalitions.
This dissertation also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of state-imposed
cultural policies by categorizing them based on the policy direction, on a scale from
“traditionalizing” to “modernizing.”
Theories of Culture, Politics, and Cultural Politics
Since this dissertation involves culture in the context of autocratic regime
transitions, it may be tempting at first glance to try to fit it in with the extensive literature
on civic culture (Almond and Verba 1963, Pye and Verba 1965, Putnam et al 1993,
Huntington 1997). However, unlike those works, this model does not postulate upon
which specific sort of culture is more or less conducive to producing stable democracy.
Rather, it treats culture as an object of contestation between a regime and its opponents,
in much the same way that economic policies and civil rights are contested. The specific
contents of that culture are not important, beyond the public perception of what is the
19
legitimate culture of the nation, and whether the regime supports or opposes it.
In fact, mine is technically not a theory of democracy at all, but rather a theory of
autocratic breakdown. State-imposed cultural change is not limited to autocracies, of
course; however, since the most obvious sorts of cultural controls require conditions of
autocracy in order to be implemented, the most useful cases for the purposes of theory
testing are those that start off as autocracies. And since this model deals with the
destabilizing effects of cultural change on such regimes, the optimistic reader may
naturally expect that the resulting polity will be a democracy. But this is not necessarily
the case; as Rustow observed, the very conditions needed to create a certain type of
political regime are often least helpful in sustaining it (Rustow 1970, 341). As previously
stated, the outcome of interest here is sustained, broad-based popular opposition to the
ruling regime which continues until a regime change occurs, either towards democracy or
something else. In short, my model has clear implications for democratization theory, and
therefore it must be applied to existing theories on democratization; but it does not
attempt to predict successful democracy – only autocratic breakdown.
The canonical literature on democratic transitions has long assumed a negative
relationship between cultural chauvinism and democratic consolidation. The conventional
wisdom is that extant nationalist forces, held in check by a strong dictator, tend to
fracture in the daylight of a nascent democracy, splintering the populace and disrupting
fragile democratic institutions (Przeworski et al. 2000, Petersen 2002, Fish 2002). But
none of the canonical works consider how, in an ethnically homogenous state, strong
cultural nationalism might actually be conducive to the political stability of a new
democracy, particularly if that democracy follows a period of culturally revisionist
20
autocracy.
Rustow cites “national unity” as the only explicitly required prerequisite to any
successful democratization, meaning that “the vast majority of citizens in a democracy-
to-be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they
belong to” for democracy to work (Rustow 1970, 350). Intriguingly, Rustow elaborates
that “Most of the rhetoric of nationalism has poured from the lips of people who felt least
secure in their sense of national identity,” (351-2) and advances the questionable
observation that Germans and Italians are prone to such rhetoric, but never Japanese. This
illustrates a problematic aspect of democratization theory; that most of our current
theories have been built upon detailed knowledge of European, Middle Eastern or
African examples, and take ethno-religious conflict as a given. Our existing models are
thus ill-prepared for the ethnically homogenous, yet still highly nationalistic, East Asian
cases.
This is where modernization theory enters the discussion. Since the 1960s
modernization theory has undergone waves of theory-building and revision in the face of
contradictory evidence (Geddes 2003). It began with the observation that countries seem
to get more democratic as they get richer, but debates raged over the precise causal
direction and preconditions for this change. Early modernization theorists predicted that
economic modernization causes cultural change in a direction conducive to stable
democracy. For instance, Moore (1963) argued that industrialization processes inevitably
transform social roles and status, forcing societies to modernize. Levy (1966) argued that
the diffusion of Western technology and values would transform traditional societies into
modern ones. But the basic intuition of early modernization theory was that economic
21
growth would drive organic cultural change, without help from the state.
These confident predictions almost immediately faced challenges as economic
development saw the entrenchment of exploitative regimes in the Global South. The most
prominent objections to modernization theory have involved theories of economic
dependency between core and peripheral countries (Wallerstein 1974, Cardoso and
Faletto 1979, etc). These theories themselves fell apart in the face of exceptional cases of
rapid economic and political development in some peripheral countries, chiefly the
“Asian Tiger” economies. The modernization-dependency debate has continually evolved
through numerous waves of democratization and democracy failure, but to date, neither
theory has provided a satisfactory explanation for the differing political outcomes across
similar levels of development.
Meanwhile, neither camp considered the possibility that there may be a qualitative
difference between cultural modernization that occurs naturally through popular demand
and that that is deliberately engineered and imposed by the state. Though they differ on
the specifics, the canonical works connecting economic development with democracy
(Lipset 1959, Jackman 1973, Przeworski and Limongi 1997) all assumed that economic
development organically produces some sort of cultural transformation (e.g. urbanization,
information literacy, social organization, labor specialization, etc) that in turn helps
smooth the way for political development. They do not consider the possibility that
governments, ironically influenced by some version of modernization theory, might try to
reverse causality and impose modernizing cultural changes on their people as a way of
hard-wiring economic development. This kind of “forced march” to modernity was
indeed part of the logic behind the drive in the early Soviet Union, inspired by Marxist-
22
Leninist theory, to transform workers’ education and create a “New Soviet Man.”
I consider this to be a blind spot of some magnitude, and I argue that a complete
model of the political impact of state-imposed cultural interventions can account for a fair
amount of the variation we see in the correlation between apparent cultural modernization
and democratization (or at least, autocratic downfall) that has bedeviled Modernization
Theory throughout its history.
In its most advanced incarnation, Modernization Theory has been revised by
Inglehart and Welzel (2005) based on two decades of survey data from around the world.
In their model, economic modernization leads to changes in values, which can be
measured across generations, but traditional values endure and produce different rates of
political modernization. In other words, modernization produces new values as people
become concerned less with survival and more with self-expression. This shift in values
contributes to the effective functioning of various democratic institutions.
But what of the people living in these societies, observing these dramatic changes
in values within their lifetimes? Are they all happy with what they see? If not, what do
they do about it? Like most democratization studies, Inglehart and Welzel’s survey data
shows an inherent bias towards the opinions of educated elites in urban areas, who stand
to benefit most from modernization. Inglehart and Welzel are careful to distinguish
between “self-expression” values and cultural Westernization; they show that in many
cases nations with increasing self-expression values reassert their own cultural traditions
even as they demand political freedoms. However, they do not evaluate class or
generational schisms within such evolving societies or consider the possibility that rapid
values shifts can produce backlash and unrest among those who still cling to traditional
23
survival values. They argue that it is the “mass acceptance of self-expression values” that
pushes people to clamor for change, but do not consider whether anger at the secular-
rational direction of social change may also play a role in driving opposition protests.
In other words, the scenario imagined by Modernization Theory, in all its various
incarnations, has always been thus: progressive-minded people see modernization
happening, like it, and push for democratic change in hopes of getting more of it. But
what of the opposite scenario: what if traditional-minded people see their autocratic
government pushing secular/modern reforms that they do not like and are not ready for,
and they take to the streets to protest? Statistically, the result looks the same, and fits
Inglehart and Welzel’s model: modernizing social change followed by disruptive mass
movements pushing for political reform or regime change. Determining which scenario is
accurate requires taking a deeper look at individual cases of protest movements,
evaluating the motives of different participant groups separately, and examining what
specific changes they are demanding.
Modernization Theory has always relied upon the perspective of modernity’s
greatest beneficiaries: liberal elites supporting democratic reform in hopes of achieving a
more modern, liberal system. But mass political protests are the products of anger and
despair, not hope; hopeful people do not take to the streets and clash violently with
security forces (Gurr 1970, Jasper 1998, Tilly 2003). When using Modernization Theory
to predict the sort of political transformation that happens through mass social unrest, we
would be better served by looking at the have-nots in a modernizing society.
In a democratic regime undergoing cultural modernization, we might believe that
such transformations are driven by grass-roots popular demand, and thus people pushing
24
for further reforms are reacting favorably to what they have seen so far. But in an
autocratic regime, nothing important happens without the autocrat’s tacit or explicit
approval; if such a regime is undergoing dramatic cultural modernization, it is most likely
happening at the autocrat’s decree.
Thinking of Cultural Systems like Economies

One of the goals of this project is to start thinking of cultural systems the way we
think of economic systems, that is, on a continuum from highly state-driven and
centrally-planned on one end to “free market” and supply-and-demand driven on the
other. I also distinguish cultural policies in terms of their direction on a continuum from
what I call “traditionalizing” to “modernizing.” “Traditionalizing” is shorthand for pro-
traditional and/or xenophobic; such cultural policies tend to invoke conservative values,
customs, “ways of life,” ancestral arts and pastimes, and reverence for co-ethnic
historical figures. This category also includes policies that favor home-grown cultural
trends and products, even if they are newly invented; North Korea’s “in our own style”
10

cinema is an example. Modernizing policies typically put priority on economic
development, modernization of education, global competitiveness and national defense. I
also include cosmopolitan or internationalist cultural programs under the “modernizing”
heading.
The free market approach is seen in most Western democracies today; because
their cultural direction is determined by popular demand, they can alternate between
traditionalizing and modernizing. By contrast, in the states of the former Soviet bloc, we
saw heavy state intervention in various national cultures, invariably pushing national

10
“In our own style” (uri-sik) is a recurrent motif in North Korean art as well as
politics which we will explore more fully in chapter 3.
25
cultures in a more modern, secular and Russophilic direction. The only exceptions to this
were North Korea and Albania, which broke away from the Soviet mold to pursue hyper-
nationalist and traditionalizing (but still heavily state-driven) cultural policies, even while
attempting modernizing economic and defense policies. In the present day we can
observe state-planned cultural intervention in a traditionalizing direction in states like
Saudi Arabia and Iran, particularly in regard to gender roles, fashion, and popular culture.

Low Intervention
“Free Market”
High Intervention “State-
planned”
Traditionalizing
Most Western
Democracies
Iran
Saudi Arabia
North Korea
Modernizing
Soviet bloc states
Meiji-Showa Japan
Yushin South Korea
Afghanistan 2002-4
Figure 1: Cultural policy categories

Ultimately, a highly state-planned cultural policy is problematic for the same
reason that a state-planned economy is: it is inefficient and fails to optimally meet
popular demand. Inevitably some groups will be displeased with the general direction of
cultural trends, just as some groups are inevitably left out in a free market economy. Any
attempt by the state to deliberately intervene in culture is bound to make some people
unhappy - otherwise, the regulation would not be necessary. On the other hand, it will
likely make some groups very happy indeed, which is often why it seems like a good idea
in the short-term. But in the long term, the more free the market of cultural ideas is, the
26
more likely it is to produce the optimal level of traditional versus modern culture for a
society at any given moment. The more the government steps in and attempts to interfere
with this free market, imposing its own vision for optimal cultural change, the more
difficult it will be to balance popular demand.
One mechanism through which this danger manifests itself is through cultural
signaling – the use of forbidden or officially discouraged cultural memes to gather like-
minded social groups to the opposition camp. Those who seek to model social
movements are heavily concerned with issues of “signaling” and the collective action
problem (Olson 1965, Lohmann 1993, Goldstone 1994). That is, under conditions of
repressive autocracy, there may be many people who feel dissatisfied, but nobody is
willing to act upon those feelings because the government can easily repress small
groups. Thus, an opposition movement needs to ensure that it has captured a critical mass
of sympathizers willing to join in before taking any direct action. Yet under an oppressive
autocracy, activists cannot exactly go door to door asking their friends and neighbors. In
such circumstances it is often useful to have some sort of non-political signal, to gather
like-minded people and gauge interest. Calhoun (2007) and Scott (1990) have extensively
studied the functions of traditional culture as a tool for solidarity and identity formation
among proto-democratizing social groups.
As folk culture is already imbued with special meaning to collective subgroups, its
rituals and performances naturally fit well in the role of covert protest acts. As Scott
writes, “The condition of (folk culture’s) public expression is that it be sufficiently
indirect and garbled that it is capable of two readings, one of which is innocuous. As with
a euphemism, it is the innocuous meaning – however tasteless it may be considered – that
27
provides an avenue of retreat when challenged.” (Scott 1990, 157) The secret meanings
transferred through folk performances form part of what Scott calls the “hidden
transcript” of opposition movements, a body of discursive and performative acts through
which subordinate groups can signal their discontent to like-minded followers under the
very eyes of an oppressive regime. Scott elaborates that “[C]ultural expression by virtue
of its polyvalent symbolism and metaphor lends itself to disguise. By the subtle use of
codes one can insinuate into a ritual, a pattern of dress, a song, a story, meanings that are
accessible to one intended audience and opaque to another audience the actors wish to
exclude.” (Scott 1990, 158) The regime can crack down on cultural expression, of course
- but it tends to alienate a lot of people when it does so.
Another recurrent theme in the study of contentious politics is inter-class
coalitions. The canonical studies on this subject (Moore 1966, Skocpol 1979, Collier
1999) focus on the alignment of economic interests between class groupings. This
research hypothesizes that cultural common interests may also play a role in how
oppositional coalitions form. As Rustow put it, “Even in the same country and during the
same phase of the process, political attitudes are not likely to be spread evenly through
the population… A dynamic model of the transition [to democracy] must allow for the
possibility that different groups - e.g. now the citizens and now the rulers, now the forces
in favor of change and now those eager to preserve the past - may furnish the crucial
impulse toward democracy.” (Rustow 1970, 345)
Observationally, state-imposed cultural policies tend to appeal to some groups and
alienate others, and these divisions tend to coagulate along class and generational lines.
In general, older or less-educated people, and particularly the urban poor and rural
28
classes, tend to like the traditionalizing policies, while younger intellectuals, skilled
workers and the upwardly mobile urban classes tend to favor modernizing policies. But
the latter groups tend to be at the forefront of political opposition movements anyway, so
cultural policies that alienate these groups (i.e. traditionalizing policies) cannot be
expected to significantly increase the size or diversity of the opposition to an autocratic
regime. Modernizing policies, on the other hand, alienate exactly those groups that
normally tend to be most politically complacent. Thus, under the right circumstances, a
young, urban opposition movement can greatly expand its coalition by embracing
traditional culture and values while retaining its politically progressive demands.
If this is indeed the case, we should see the following processes unfolding:

Figure 2: Process model
Thus, according to this model, the ideal cultural conditions for generating a mass
movement for regime change occur when an autocrat denies civil rights and limits
democratic institutions, but at the same time imposes secular, modernizing cultural
policies at the expense of traditional ways of life. This was in fact the situation preceding
Govt restricts
participatory democracy
and civil rights?
Yes: Youth-led protests
begin in cities
Govt imposes no cultural
policy: Protests remain
urban and student-
dominated
Govt imposes cultural
policies
If traditionalizing: Protests
remain urban and student-
dominated
If modernizing: Protests
spread broadly, gain
support of religious
groups, urban poor and
rural workers
No: Social collusion with
government
29
the mass social movements that broke out in Mongolia in 1990, in South Korea in 1986,
and in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.
Alternatively, if a regime represses civil rights but at the same time imposes a
return to traditional culture, it is likely to see sporadic rebellions led by students and
young intellectuals that may be very violent but that never really pick up steam among
the wider population outside the cities. Such a scenario has been observed repeatedly in
Iran. Even in cases of extreme economic distress, as in North Korea and Iran, the
populace is more likely to rally around their government if they perceive that it is a more
faithful defender of their ancestral culture than the opposition.
The final wrinkle in this model is the element of perceived foreign interference in
the ruling ideology. If the population perceives that its government has been installed or
is being heavily manipulated by a foreign power, the level of resentment of imposed
cultural change is magnified — particularly if there is a public perception that the nation-
state has suffered greatly under a foreign-imposed ideology or political order in the past.
Conversely, if a government can effectively convince its constituents of its independence
and the authentic national character of its ruling ideology, the people will have a
heightened sense of “national ownership” of that ideology. Such people will be more
eager to see their government succeed and more willing to tolerate some degree of
cultural interference in service of that national ideology. They will endure greater
hardship and stomach more hypocrisy in the name of achieving the ultimate victory of a
“homegrown” ideology or political order rather than an imported one. Simply put, people
with a strong sense of national identity tend to want their own nation’s ideas to “win” and
invasive foreign ideas to “lose.”
30
This is the intuition behind the first part of the hypothesis stated in the
introduction: governments will be inherently more prone to encounter recurrent, grass-
roots, regime-change-seeking popular opposition if they are perceived to be foreign-
imposed or based upon foreign ideologies. Such states will find themselves plagued by
recurrent, determined, popularly-supported acts of rebellion and resistance throughout
their tenure, no matter how much repression they apply. By contrast, a state that
effectively assumes national ownership of its ideology will find a public willing to turn
on and condemn those isolated pockets of resistance. This hypothesis holds regardless of
cultural policy; however, it has particularly strong implications for the public’s
receptiveness to state-led cultural interventions.
On a cognitive level, high national ownership of ideology leads the people to want
“their” ideology to succeed and to spread internationally. It also helps to cultivate an
ingroup-outgroup dynamic that pits the state and society together against the rest of the
world, rather than state versus society. Citizens of such states are less likely to
acknowledge that problems are the result of weaknesses or failings of the system, and
more likely to look for outside explanations — hostile foreign encirclement, the
machinations of global capitalists, internal spies and saboteurs, and so on. By contrast,
low national ownership leads people to root against the ruling ideology’s success, to
actively seek out evidence of its shortcomings, and to blame it for various hardships in
their personal lives.
Methodology, Key Variables and Case Selection
As the flow chart above suggests, the outcome of interest here is sustained, grass-
roots, popular dissatisfaction with the ruling regime; in other words, a high level of what
Saxonberg terms the “revolutionary potential” of society (Saxonberg 2013, 13). In highly
31
repressive autocracies, this revolutionary potential may simmer in the background for
quite some time before erupting on overt protests, and those protests may or may not
necessarily bring about successful regime change. This makes it a relatively more
complicated outcome to code than a simple “regime change” or “mass protest” variable,
but there are clear signs that can be objectively measured through close case analysis. A
society with high “revolutionary potential” that is too heavily repressed to take to the
streets will make its feelings known through other means, what Scott (1990) terms
“weapons of the weak” - anonymous acts of sabotage, pamphleteering, passive resistance,
non-participation, grumbling, euphemisms, gossip etc. In states that actually have
experienced public protests, another way of measuring revolutionary potential is to
retroactively look at the speed with which the initial protest gathers participants and the
diversity of those participants.
State-imposed cultural policies, insofar as they disrupt the natural direction of a
nation’s cultural evolution, inevitably displease some subset of the population. They also
often have the side effect of generating a series of ready-made symbols of resistance, in
the form of banned cultural elements: dress, music, art, literature, religious practices,
historical figures, etc. These symbols are thus added to the arsenal of “weapons of the
weak.” Depending on what sort of cultural changes are imposed and the social position of
the subgroup they are perceived to target, these cultural weapons may serve to attract new
protest participants, or they may alienate the general public and drive dissident groups
underground. Colonial Korea and Soviet-era Mongolia are two prime examples of
societies with high “revolutionary potential” under modernizing cultural policies, that
despite heavy repression were able to make their dissatisfactions known through
32
precisely such “weapons of the weak,” as we shall see. Conversely, North Korea provides
the best example of a state with extremely low “revolutionary potential” under
traditionalizing cultural policies; despite extreme economic deprivation, there are few
signs of the broader population turning to the weapons of the weak that availed them
under the Japanese.
This reasoning borrows some of the intuition of Eckstein’s (1969) congruence
theory, which predicts that regimes will be more stable to the extent that their authority
structures mirror those of society as a whole. In this case, I am predicting that regimes
will be more stable to the extent that their cultural policy direction (modernizing or
traditionalizing) mirrors the cultural impulses of core groups in the underlying society.
Eckstein’s theory was primarily used to explain variations in the political resilience and
effectiveness of democracies, whereas my approach flips this idea and examines how the
mechanism affects the stability of autocracies first, before extending it to fragile foreign-
imposed or sponsored democracies.
In the following case studies, I evaluate cultural policies along two dimensions:
severity and direction.
For severity, I evaluate cases on a simple relativistic low-high scale along a range
of conditions frequently observed. Were people put in prison for violating cultural rules?
Were there high-profile trials of cultural leaders? (e.g. Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union,
Kim Chi-ha in South Korea) Was there a dedicated police force for enforcing cultural
laws? (e.g. the Religious Police in Iran) Also, I look at how much of the state’s resources
were expended on cultural production as well as censorship and monitoring of violations.
Finally, I consider the degree of disruption of traditional way of life caused by the
33
cultural policy. For instance, outlawing Buddhism would have a much greater impact in,
say, Tibet than it would in a place like Taiwan. This one is hardest to quantify, but
probably most important.
The direction variable reflects whether cultural policies are aimed at modernizing
or “traditionalizing” (reversing previous modernizing policies). Modernizing policies are
the kind we see throughout the Soviet bloc: the emphasis on “scientific man” and
secularism, cosmopolitanism, the transformation of traditional family and gender roles,
modernizing dress and food culture etc. Traditionalizing policies are the kind that
emphasize “family values,” religious faith, traditional gender roles, chastity, purity,
ancestral values, etc. These are constructed categories, of course, as are the very concepts
of “modernity” and “tradition.” However, they are constructions that are reproduced with
remarkably consistency across the diverse nation-states examined in these pages, and the
important thing for our purposes is that they accurately capture popular perceptions of
reality, not reality itself.

A seemingly related issue is the degree to which the public perceives their
government’s ruling ideology to be “homegrown” or foreign-imposed, what I refer to as
“national ownership of the ruling ideology” or “ownership” for short. As stated
previously, high ownership is defined as the widespread popular perception that the
ruling ideology was invented or greatly advanced by a member or members of that nation
(ethnicity), with little or no inspiration from foreign sources. On the surface, it would
seem obvious that regimes imposing modernizing cultural policies have low ownership,
while those moving in the traditionalizing direction have the opposite; indeed, this is true
34
in the majority of cases. It is, however, possible to imagine a scenario in which a
governing regime with high ownership of its ideology autonomously proceeded to
dismantle the native culture of its constituents in the name of progress; this indeed was
the case in Meiji Japan and in China during the Cultural Revolution. Conversely, there
are some cases in which a foreign-installed regime was relatively respectful of traditional
cultural symbols, as arguably was the case in post-WWII Japan under US occupation.
Therefore I maintain that these are two separate variables. The following chart maps
different combinations of cultural policy direction and degree of national ownership of
ruling ideology in several historical cases, along with the outcomes indicating
revolutionary potential.

35

Cultural Policy National Ownership Outcome
DPRK Traditionalizing High Survived
Islamic Republic of
Iran
Traditionalizing High Survived
Khmer Rouge Traditionalizing High Defeated by foreign
military
Communist Vietnam Traditionalizing Medium Survived with reforms
Japan under US
occupation
Modernizing/Traditio
nalizing hybrid
Low Survived
Meiji Japan Modernizing High Survived until
externally imposed
transition
PRC in Cultural
Revolution
Modernizing High Survived with reforms
Vietnam under
French
Modernizing Low Fell to guerrilla war
Iran under Shah Modernizing Low Fell to popular
revolution
PR Mongolia Modernizing Low Fell to popular
revolution
Figure 3: Independent variable demonstration cases

Some of the above will be controversial, but this serves as a good demonstration of
what I mean by “traditionalizing” versus “modernizing.” The Communist regime in
Northern Vietnam, for instance, followed some Marxist precepts about cultural
modernization early on, particularly in education and gender roles. However, as the war
effort put a premium on recruitment, the Viet Minh found it more effective to garner
peasant support by pledging to restore traditional cultural elements (particularly animism
and Buddhism) and reject French/American cultural intrusion (Giebel 2011).
Consequently, as the Vietnamese moved away from Chinese and Soviet influence after
36
achieving reunification, they encouraged greater respect for national culture and values
and abandoned the tenets of Marxist secularism. Post-war Japan is a complicated case in
which the occupied government championed cultural modernization in many functional
areas such as education and workplace norms, but also worked hard to restore or
manufacture “lost traditions” in the arts and religious practices that had been subverted
by state Shinto. I have dedicated an entire chapter to this complicated case.
To summarize, the dependent variable or outcome of interest in the following case
studies is the revolutionary potential of society, as measured through the size and
diversity of mass participation in covert or overt acts of resistance against the ruling
regime. The main independent variables that I consider are the cultural policy of the
ruling regime (both intensity and direction) and the degree of national ownership of the
ruling ideology.
Definitions of relevant terms
Nations, Nationalism and the State
Any theory of culture in politics must begin with clearly defined concepts of
nationhood and national consciousness within the context of the modern state. In the
strictest Weberian definition, national identity is based on a belief in common ancestry or
ethnicity, and indeed the four case studies analyzed here can be understood in that
context. However, it must be acknowledged that the study of nationalist politics has come
to adapt a more fluid definition of nationhood that ties in elements of language, heritage
and perceived community.
Benedict Anderson (2006) defines the state as “an organised political community
under one government” and the nation as "an imagined political community - and
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." The nation is imagined in the sense
37
that its members “will never know most of their fellow members . . . yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 2006, 6). No matter how they may
disagree and fight among one another, “the imagined alliance among people of the
same imagined nation is so strong as to drive men to heroic deaths in nationalistic
sacrifice” (7). This description more accurately correlates with the aforementioned notion
of “national ownership” of the ruling ideology and the emotive connection between a
nation’s people, their imagined core values, and the authors of their ruling ideology. The
dry Weberian concept of ethnic nationhood alone cannot account for the intense pride
people take in sharing a common national identity with “founding fathers” whom they
will never meet, or the lengths to which they will go to preserve and defend their
founders’ ideology, even when all available evidence indicates that it is failing.
The most detailed existing scholarship on the phenomenon of nationalism comes
from 20
th
Century European cases. Ernest Gellner defines nationalism as “a political
principle which maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond" (Gellner
1983). Gellner elaborates upon “extreme” nationalism, or the situation in which
“similarity of culture becomes both the necessary and the sufficient condition of
legitimate membership: only members of the appropriate culture may join the unit in
question, and all of them must do so” (Gellner 1983, 9). Miroslav Hroch. in his study of
the growth of national consciousness and the phenomenon of nationalisation of ethnic
groups in the last 150 years, identified three stages in development of a nation: the 'period
of scholarly interest' (Phase A), when intellectuals start to concern themselves with the
study of national culture and traditions, followed by a period of 'patriotic agitation' (Phase
B), when a group of patriots campaign to spread national consciousness among the
38
people, and finally by the 'rise of a mass national movement' (Phase C), when the national
movement takes on a more popular political character. Hroch and Gellner both base their
analyses on primarily European cases, where ethno-national divisions within state
boundaries are the norm.
In each of the case studies that follow, we see cultural nationalism in a somewhat
unfamiliar environment: the ethnically homogenous nation-state. While ethnic minorities
exist in each of the states studied here, their political power is so weak as to render them
insignificant for the purposes of our analysis. And yet we find in each of them sentiments
that can only be described as stridently nationalistic. There is plenty of Hroch’s “patriotic
agitation” and Gellner’s “extreme nationalism” in each of these cases. Yet the
inclusive/exclusive dynamics of nationalism in these cases are more neatly channeled
against foreign states and foreign cultural interference. We will see that in these
homogenous states, where there is no possibility of public splintering along ethnic lines,
burgeoning nationalist sentiment often serves as a powerful adhesive force, both for
autocracies and nascent democracies. That same nationalist cohesiveness makes it near
impossible for a foreign-installed or foreign-influenced government to implement any
sort of cultural policy without encountering significant resistance, even when things are
otherwise going well.
Contentious Politics and Revolutionary Potential
As previously stated, the outcome of interest here is “revolutionary potential” in
society, which may be expressed through various acts of resistance or outright rebellion.
This concept is most relevant to the literature on contentious politics and political
revolutions. McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly define contentious politics as “episodic, public,
collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one
39
government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims
would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.” (McAdam et al
2003, 8) The authors identify two broad categories of collective action: contained and
transgressive. This dissertation focuses on transgressive cases, that is, actions in which
“at least some parties to the conflict are newly self-identified political actors” and “at
least some actors may employ innovative action.”
This dissertation further narrows the set under consideration to those movements
whose primary aim (whether successful or not) is a change in the type of government or
regime. Whereas McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly include movements such as the U.S. Civil
Rights movement, which sought to change a set of laws within the existing political
order, “regime change” movements require a much greater level of participation from a
far more diverse subset of the population in order to be successful. Because they
challenge the ruling regime itself, they must capture a critical mass of the citizenry in
order to escape repression. Within the broad literature on contentious politics, I have
judged that Saxonberg’s (2013) “revolutionary potential” concept most closely captures
this notion of a critical mass of dissatisfied citizens.
It is important at the outset to distinguish between high “revolutionary potential”
and actual revolution. As the contentious politics literature makes clear (Kuran 1991,
Tarrow 2011), the overall level of discontent in a society is insufficient to predict when
mass protests will occur; even after reaching a critical mass of resentment, the opposition
tends to be unaware of its own size and strength and thus societies may remain quiescent
for quite some time. Hence a great deal of effort has gone into studying the patterns and
signals by which opposition forces gather and organize under conditions of repression.
40
Tarrow describes a pattern of cycles of contention: As one opposition movement widens
and "information spreads about the susceptibility of a polity to challenge," additional
groups may also "begin to test the limits of social control" (Tarrow 2011: 24). Eventually,
the progressive widening of contentious acts may tip over into a revolution. It is easy to
see how this formulation depends on disparate opposition groups sharing subtextual
messages in a common (but politically benign) language; folk and traditional culture can
provide such language, but only in societies with high ethnic and cultural homogeneity.
In the following pages, we will see how traditional culture provides abundant
opportunities for “testing the limits of social control” within a public context that is
difficult for the ruling power to oppress.
Kuran (1991) models the outcome of revolution as a result of a multitude of
individual decisions. Each individual in society has public and private preferences about
the regime and its opposition, which she may choose to conceal; she reaches a
“revolutionary threshold” when the cost of joining the opposition falls below the cost of
preference falsification (Kuran 1991: 17-18). This formula is highly dependent on the
individual’s perception of the likely size of the political opposition and its probability of
success versus brutal repression. But under a regime which has explicitly discouraged
aspects of popular culture, the defiant use of cultural symbols and performance acts can
serve as a public signal of the size and determination of the opposition even before they
make any overt political demands. Kuran’s theory also hinges on the government
accurately punishing its opposition and rewarding supporters; Individuals become more
sympathetic to opposition “if the government becomes less efficient, or the opposition
becomes more efficient at rewarding its supporters and punishing its rivals.” (Kuran
41
1991: 18) As the following chapters will show, repression of popular culture
consumption is among the most inefficient forms of repression, as it requires a massive
surveillance operation and often arbitrary or inconsistent punishments. A regime that
attempts it is likely to go too far or not far enough, triggering more individuals to cross
their personal revolutionary thresholds.
I concur with Kuran (1991) that mass revolutions require some sort of trigger event
that may not occur until well after a society has passed the “revolutionary threshold,” and
therefore the revolutionary potential variable alone is not sufficient to predict when a
revolution will occur. A theory of successful revolutions, resulting in regime change to a
stable new system, is beyond the scope of this project.

Culture and Cultural Policy
I do not use “culture” in the classic sense championed by the likes of Talcott
Parsons or Samuel Huntington, as purported group traits, or even the more nuanced
concept advanced by Geertz, as a static “system of inherited conceptions expressed in
symbolic forms” commonly understood among a certain group (Geertz 1973). Rather, I
favor the semiotic practices approach advocated by Wedeen, who sees culture as “an
account of how symbols operate in practice, why meanings generate action, and why
actions produce meanings, when they do.” (Wedeen 2002, 720) Wedeen’s concept of
culture in terms of semiotic practices has the advantage of dealing with culture as
something malleable and changeable over time, something that is interactive and
informed by lived experiences.
Wedeen argues that studying culture in this way “should not entail insisting on a
country’s allegedly specific characteristics, values, or beliefs.” (Wedeen 2002, 721)
42
Rather, practice-based cultural approaches may identify common patterns in the political
use of culture across a range of very different peoples and regions. For instance,
Wedeen’s study of Syrian political culture “does not entail identifying the traits that
inhere in Syrians, but investigating the rhetorical practices and symbols that generate
compliance for the regime.” (722) In the same way, I argue, the tools of politically
imposed cultural change are often similar across different cases, as are the uses of culture
by opposition movements.
In lieu of constructing an arbitrary definition of which practices constitute
“traditional culture” and “modern culture,” this study relies upon the perceptions of the
practitioners themselves as revealed by their own explicit descriptions. If research
subjects invoke a certain practice as “part of modern life” or “in line with global norms,”
I categorize such practices as “modern/cosmopolitan.” For instance, the South Korean
government’s 2009 “Walk Right” campaign encouraged the public to walk on the right
side of the sidewalk, with posters proclaiming “It is the walking culture of the world,” in
contrast with Koreans’ historical habit of walking on the left side. Conversely, if subjects
explicitly identify a practice as part of the “traditional way of life” or “unique to our
national culture,” then I accept such descriptors as adequate evidence to fit such practices
in the “traditional/national” category. Of course, political actors can and often do mislead
the public regarding national cultural heritage. However, since my theoretical model is
less concerned with actual cultural validity and more concerned with efforts to shape
public perceptions of what is considered traditional or modern, I do not see this as
problematic.
“Cultural policies” are defined here through similarly inductive means. Any law,
43
decree, act of promotion or censorship by the ruling authority that is expressly enacted
for the sake of reforming or preserving the national “culture” can be considered cultural
policy. Thus the government’s explicit framing is key in determining whether it
constitutes a part of “cultural policy” or not. For example, suppose a government enacts a
law forbidding the import of a certain type of livestock. If this law is chiefly defended on
the grounds of economic protectionism, or public health concerns, or punitive sanctions
against the chief exporting state, it should not be considered cultural policy. But if the
government invokes a concern for preserving the traditional diet of the nation against
foreign influence and the associated cultural diffusion, then it clearly falls within our
bailiwick. Care must be taken in cases where the expressed reason for a policy and the
actual, unspoken reason differ, but such nuances may be identified on a case-by-case
basis via Wedeen’s method of divining the semiotic practices associated with the law. For
instance, are the law’s violators condemned as culturally deviant, economically disloyal
or simply unhealthy? In the Chinese time-travel ban example mentioned in the
introduction, the government explicitly mentioned concern over “Western lifestyles”
polluting public values as its major rationale. It is those policies that are explicitly
justified in terms of defending “national culture,” “lifestyle,” “values,” “public morality”
etc., that fall within the category of cultural policies.
A similar method can be used to determine what constitutes a “cultural protest
symbol.” Political opposition groups employ a wide variety of symbols in protest acts to
represent different kinds of demands, not all of which are cultural. For instance, when
activists symbolically burn paper money, they may be protesting either inflationary
monetary policies or modern commercial culture which they feel conflicts with their
44
ancestral values. Only the latter would be a relevant example of cultural protest. Thus it is
important to consider the semiotic context surrounding each protest act when determining
whether it is cultural or not. In general, most of the symbols of cultural protest described
in the following case studies are derived in response to state cultural policies, simplifying
the coding process.
Ruling Ideology
The important independent variable “national ownership of the ruling ideology”
has already been described above, but it is necessary to clarify what is meant by “ruling
ideology.” Literary theorist Terry Eagleton defines ideology as “the whole complex of
signifying practices and symbolic processes in a particular society; it would allude to the
ways individuals ‘lived’ their social practices, rather than to those practices themselves,
which would be the preserve of politics, economics, kinship theory and so on.” From this
we can see that the “ideology” concept is closely related to the classic sociologist’s
definition of “culture.” In political theory, the term is strongly associated with the set of
rules or guiding principles by which a state’s governing institutions are built and
managed.
As an example, the U.S. constitution was built upon a foundational ideology that
all people are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This guiding
ideology is not a concrete law in itself, but it forms the elemental basis for the specific
provisions of the Bill of Rights and subsequent laws. I consider ruling ideologies to be
amorphous entities that can mutate over time and are heavily informed by the popular
mythology surrounding the state’s founding. For instance, the Japanese constitution was
founded amid the brutal aftermath of the nation’s defeat in WWII, and its ruling ideology
was dominated by demilitarization and the pacifist impulse encoded in Article 9. As
45
debate over Article 9 has intensified in Japan in recent years, so too has the popular
mythology surrounding the postwar order been called into question.

Justification for Case Selection
The following chapters build upon and illuminate my theory using the comparative
case study method. I have selected four key cases from 20
th
Century East Asia:
Communist Mongolia, North Korea, Yushin-era South Korea, and postwar Japan.
Cultural policies exist in some form in every polity on the planet. Even the most
liberal democracies pass legislation that influences or sets the tone for some aspect of
national culture (the recent gay marriage legislation in the U.S. is a good example). In
some cases, a nascent cultural phenomenon is popularly perceived as so revolutionary
that the state’s decision not to limit it may in itself be interpreted as a form of cultural
imposition; for instance, take the recent moves by many Western governments to
recognize same-sex marriage.
Nevertheless, historical evidence demonstrates that autocracies are the most
prolific and enthusiastic enactors of imposed cultural transformation. For practical
reasons that should be obvious, democratic governments are limited in their capacity to
impose cultural changes on an unwilling populace, even when they wish to do so. The
following case studies will proceed from the most obvious cases of state-imposed cultural
control (the communist dictatorships of Mongolia and North Korea) through
progressively more democratic societies (Yushin-era South Korea and postwar Japan)
whose cultural policies are less overt but still formidable, thus demonstrating that the
same model can be applied across a range of polities.
The four cases evaluated in this dissertation each contribute to building a
46
progressively more nuanced theoretical model. The first case, Communist Mongolia,
provides the most clear-cut example of a foreign-imposed modernizing cultural change
provoking discontent and increasing revolutionary potential. Through archival research
and interviews conducted during field research in Ulaanbaatar in 2015, I demonstrate
how long-simmering popular resentment of Russian cultural chauvinism in the ruling
regime helped small student protests to rapidly expand across diverse sectors of the
population, and how forbidden cultural icons, songs and artwork helped fuel the
successful democracy movement of 1989-90. After the reforms, the new government
took extraordinary steps to rapidly restore lost elements of Mongolian culture, and these
moves helped keep the population happy despite a prolonged period of extreme economic
hardship in the 1990s. Since most existing theories of post-communism have been based
upon the experience of Eastern Europe, this case is particularly useful in demonstrating
how the same rising tide of nationalism that was so destructive in multi-ethnic states like
Yugoslavia could ironically help to consolidate a weak new democratic government in a
mono-ethnic state like Mongolia.
Next, North Korea is presented as a counterfactual case of a similar Soviet-installed
communist state, minus the Russian cultural chauvinism. The parallels to Mongolia are
abundant: originally Stalinist, founded under Soviet military guidance, with similar
political and economic systems, experiencing similar degrees of economic hardship,
having recently emerged from a prolonged period of colonialism, part of a greater nation
fragmented by foreign powers, and possessing strong nationalist impulses. It is in the area
of cultural policy where these two cases diverge most sharply. Due to various historical
contingencies, North Korea was able to break away from Soviet cultural interference
47
early on and reverted to a highly nationalistic, traditionalizing cultural policy that
shunned foreign influences, promoted traditional Korean values, and championed home-
grown heroes. Since I was unable to conduct fieldwork inside North Korea, I based my
analysis on a close reading of North Korean internally-directed propaganda, movies and
works of fiction from the 1950s onward, with a focus on cultural themes. I demonstrate
that North Korean regime puts considerable effort into presenting itself as the only
qualified defender of Korean culture, while highlighting South Korea’s cultural
degradation at the hands of foreign invaders. I argue that this gives the North Korean
regime plausible cultural legitimacy in the eyes of the populace and makes it
prohibitively difficult for even a small opposition movement to get off the ground, even
in the face of severe economic hardship.
In the third case study I move away from the communist world to demonstrate that
the effects of state-imposed cultural change can be equally strong on the other side of the
ideological spectrum. I selected the case of Yushin-era (1972-81) South Korea as it
represents one of the most severe programs of state-imposed cultural modernization
outside of the Soviet bloc, and the common ethnic heritage provides useful parallels with
the North Korean case. Through a year of fieldwork and archival research in South
Korea, I documented numerous uses of traditional culture in protests, including
traditional drumming, mask dancing, public shamanistic rituals, and “madangguk” style
dissident theater performances. South Korea’s perpetually restive population, despite
continuous economic growth and expanding life expectancy, is a classic example of what
Saxonberg defines as high “revolutionary potential.” This, together with the historical
record of Korean resistance against the Japanese during the colonial era, should be
48
sufficient to erase any notion the reader may have gotten from the North Korean case
study that Koreans are a uniquely quiescent people or simply too respectful of authority
to rebel.
For the final case study I deliberately tackled the most problematic case for my
theory: postwar Japan. Since postwar Japan experienced modernizing cultural change
under a foreign-installed government system, my theoretical model predicts it should
have seen persistent, destabilizing unrest through the postwar decades, and yet Japan has
been relatively quiescent in terms of mass political protest. I looked at four specific
instances in which Japanese radicals attempted nationalistic acts of cultural protest that
failed to draw a following. The Japanese case highlights how the experience of a
devastating national failure can heighten public perceptions of their own culture’s faults
and lend an unusual sense of urgency toward modernizing reforms. In addition, the
previous experience of extreme self-imposed cultural changes in the 1920s made the
postwar cultural policies seem relatively mild by comparison, and indeed some postwar
reforms brought back traditional elements and customs that the wartime military
bureaucracy had previously eliminated.
These four cases demonstrate broad variation on the dependent variable of
“revolutionary potential”: Communist Mongolia (high), Yushin-era South Korea
(medium-high), postwar Japan (medium, lower over time) and North Korea (very low).
As my case studies move from the left to the right end of the political spectrum, I
demonstrate that state-driven cultural impositions have similar effects regardless of the
underlying regime ideology. In mono-ethnic states, governments that impose
modernizing reforms find themselves plagued by persistent broad-based acts of resistance
49
and protests that expand remarkably quickly, while those that make ostentatious shows of
defending traditional culture seem to encounter only moderate student-led protests at
worst. These effects can only occasionally be overcome in cases where a recent national
trauma has convinced people that cultural reform is vital to the nation’s survival, as was
the case in postwar Japan. In short, most people do not like governments "reforming"
their culture, unless they can be convinced that the reform is something their ancestors
would have approved of.
The regional bias of this study must be acknowledged; all four case studies are
taken from 20
th
Century East Asia, a region that historically has not been a popular
choice for theory-building in the field of contentious politics. This scholarly blind spot
has mainly been justified by the postwar contingency by which the foundational
governing structures of these states were effectively “engineered” by foreign occupying
powers. As Rustow argues, “To examine the logic of transformation within political
systems, we may leave aside countries where a major impetus came from abroad.”
(Rustow 346)
Nonetheless, there are several reasons why a focus on East Asia is particularly
fruitful for this analysis. First, the states in this sample all represent nearly mono-ethnic
societies, with no serious religious, linguistic or ethnic divisions within their constituent
populations. Such homogeneity is difficult to find in any other part of the world, and
largely results from geography and the lack of European colonization in the early modern
period. This lends theoretical simplicity as it eliminates the complications wrought by
contradictory notions of national and cultural identity within state borders. It also exposes
some surprisingly stabilizing effects of nationalism in developing monoethnic states -
50
effects that have been previously overlooked in the democratization literature, which
tends to focus on the multi-ethnic states of Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Second, as peripheral participants in the Sinocentric premodern order, the cases are
similar enough in their historical origins and cultural traditions to invite reasonable
comparison. For instance, all of them had their formative encounters with Western
mercantile expansion at roughly the same period (mid-19
th
Century), during which they
all experienced the threat of Western imperialism without ever being formally colonized
by any Western power. Consequently these cases can all be said to share similar degrees
of both anxiety and affinity toward Western culture and institutions at the dawn of the
modern era.
Furthermore, all had had stable polities in tributary or dependency relationships
with China for at least two centuries prior to Western interference, during which time
each had developed a consolidated sense of national identity to roughly the same degree
within the Sinocentric order. All had extensive Buddhist and Confucian influences, with
significant Christian influence coming later on, and all shared linguistic similarities as
Altaic languages with Chinese influences – a combination that necessarily meant that a
large proportion of the population remained illiterate prior to the 20
th
century,
necessitating culturally disruptive linguistic reforms. The significance of these formative
circumstances will become more clear through the case studies that follow.
True, the founding constitutions of Communist Mongolia, North Korea, South
Korea and postwar Japan were all essentially ghost-written by occupying foreign powers.
But this fact alone does not merit Rustow’s dismissive condition that the “major impetus
came from abroad,” absolving these cases ever after from theoretical relevance. Indeed,
51
all four cases saw significant domestic resistance to the original foreign-installed
institutional structures, and all of them eventually challenged conditions of the original
foreign-imposed constitutions – through popular revolt in Mongolia and South Korea,
through top-down revision in North Korea, and through painfully slow social evolution in
Japan.

52
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54

Chapter 2: Imposed Culture and Mongolia’s Democratic
Transition
Introduction: The Nomadic Misfit of Comparative Politics
Sandwiched between Russia and China (two states that together account for the
lion’s share of foreign policy articles in recent years), enjoying one of the most peaceful,
rapid and lasting transitions to democracy of all that followed the collapse of the former
Soviet bloc (an epoch-making event for the field of comparative politics), Mongolia is
more than worthy of attention to political scientists. Yet despite its unique political
history and geopolitical circumstances, there has been a shocking lack of scholarly
attention paid to Mongolia’s political development.
Comparativists seem to have given little thought even to which region Mongolia
properly belongs to. When Mongolia is treated comparatively, it is usually placed
alongside the “-stans” of Central Asia (Fish 2001, Fritz 2008, Pomfret 2012). But most
Central Asian area specialists leave Mongolia out of regional overviews (Mesbahi 1994,
Collins 2006); non-Islamic, ethnically homogenous, pluralistic and politically stable, it
appears as an outlier in nearly every chart or graph on Central Asia that attempts to
include it. Fish (2001) tellingly fails to justify his choice to compare Mongolia with
Central Asia polities and studiously avoids mentioning the Islamic elephant in the room.
Historians are more likely to identify Mongolia as a peripheral player in the “Sinocentric
tribute system” of premodern East Asia, but few modern East Asian area specialists
consider Mongolia part of their region (Chu et al 2010 is a notable exception).
Comparative analyses of former Soviet satellite states focus almost exclusively on
Eastern Europe, considering Mongolia to be too culturally and economically different for
55
meaningful comparison. Mongolia is far too interesting as a comparative political case
study to be left in limbo between regions like this.
Despite existing under Soviet control for longer than any other Soviet satellite, in
1990 Mongolia’s ruling Communist Party, the MPRP, peacefully agreed to hold multi-
party elections in the wake of massive popular protests and strikes. Mongolia’s
democratic transition was achieved “without shattering a single window or shedding a
single drop of blood,”
11
and its democratic institutions have stood the test of time better
than most other former Soviet satellites. Today Mongolia’s democracy is stable and
pluralistic, with two dominant parties (the MPRP and the Democrats) peacefully
alternating power several times in both the parliament and the presidency, an astounding
proliferation of competing media options, and an active civil society whose regular
protest actions go unmolested by the government. And yet, Mongolia in 1990 fell behind
its ex-communist peers on all four counts of Lipset’s classic “social requisites of
democracy”: education, wealth, urbanization and industrialization (Lipset 1959). Thus at
the very least, Mongolia presents a worthy challenge to classic theories on the
relationship between economic development and democracy. Yet Mongolia has received
the least attention in the post-communist literature to date.
The following figures illustrate Mongolia’s outlier status among its peers, broadly
defined as the former Soviet bloc states and republics. As Figure 1 shows, Mongolia had
one of the most precipitous and lasting shifts in its Polity score during the crucial years
after 1989. Figure 2 maps Polity scores versus GDP per Capita for 1995, the first year
that most of the former Soviet bloc states independently released such data. At that point,

11
President Elbegdorj’s speech at Kim Il Sung University, Oct 31, 2013.
56
and for many years after, Mongolia stood as the upper left corner point; no other ex-
Soviet state so poor had achieved such a high level of democracy. Figure 3, taken from
the Polity IV website, illustrates Mongolia’s geographic aberration; surrounded by
autocracies and anocracies, Mongolia stands out as an island of blue signifying full
democracy.

Figure 4: Polity score shifts of the former Soviet bloc (src: Polity IV)
1940 1960 1980 2000
-10 -5 0 5 10
Polity shifts in the former Soviet Bloc
Year
Polity
Albania
Bulgaria
Romania
Russia
Poland
Mongolia
57

Figure 5: Polity vs GDPPC (Src: World Development Indicators, Polity IV)
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000
-10 -5 0 5 10
Polity vs GDPPC across former Soviet bloc, 1995
GDP per capita (current US$)
Polity Score
Albania
Armenia
Belarus
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Estonia
Georgia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldova
Mongolia Poland
Romania
Russian Federation
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
Ukraine
Azerbaijan
Croatia
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyz Republic
Tajikistan
Turkmenistan Uzbekistan
58

Figure 6: Regimes by Type, 2013 (Src: Polity IV)
The highest-impact books and articles on communism’s demise invariably draw
their cases from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. A few (Fish 2001, Fritz
2008) have remarked on Mongolia’s uncommonly peaceful transfer of power and stable
economic growth, particularly in comparison to later developments in Central Asia and
the Baltics, but their explanations rely on institutional factors or characteristics of
individual leaders. These analyses ignore the greatest strengths of Mongolia’s democracy
movement - cultural unity and antipathy toward Russian interference. Mongolia also
stands as a contradiction to Levitsky and Way’s argument that weak new democracies are
likely to fall back into authoritarianism “[w]here Western linkages were weaker, or where
alternative, nondemocratic hegemons (such as Russia or China) exerted substantial
59
influence.” This may be why they neglected to mention it among their examples
(Levitsky and Way 2002).
This chapter analyzes the impact of cultural transformation on Mongolia’s political
development, from the earliest days of Soviet influence in founding the Mongolian state
in 1924 to the present. In the process, it presents an argument that latent popular
resentment of decades of foreign-imposed cultural modernization and Russification
played a critical role in building momentum for the democracy protests, and that acts of
cultural reclamation during the transition period were key to easing public acceptance of
democracy as the “only game in town” despite early economic and political crises.
Cultural policies are depicted here in the context of broader Russian cultural hegemony
throughout the USSR’s many satellite states and internal soviet republics.
Background Reading: Theories of Soviet Collapse and the Missing Cultural
Repression Factor
Most assessments of the causes of failure in the Soviet bloc have focused on the
economic strain of maintaining the behemoth central planning system (Kornai 1992,
Solnick 1998, Brown 2001), the political strain of maintaining high levels of repression
for extended periods (Tucker 1981, Saxonberg 2013), or the failure to adapt to changing
circumstances due to institutional rigidity (White 2000, Dimitrov 2013). Although the
Soviet bloc’s overbearing policies of cultural repression are well-known to have caused
considerable popular resentment, few analyses have considered repressed culture as a
major cause of regime collapse in the Soviet bloc.
Much work has been done demonstrating the relationship between the end of the
Cold War and the outbreak of nationalist conflicts in former Soviet bloc states (Lampe
1996; Hroch 2000; Goldmann et al 2000, Petersen 2002). The general conclusion is that
60
Soviet control successfully kept nationalist, segregationist and irredentist desires in check
in the various satellites until the Soviet Union dissolved and these impulses were set free.
However, surprisingly little scholarship attempts to switch the causal direction and assess
just how much the pressures of repressed nationalism and forced cultural homogenization
contributed to the demise of those Soviet bloc regimes in the first place. Furthermore,
analyses of post-Soviet political developments, which are typically focused on the
ethnically diverse states of Eastern Europe, invariably consider rising nationalism and the
resurrection of traditional cultural elements, particularly language and religion, as
antithetical to a stable transition and democratic consolidation.
Mongolians’ popular perceptions of national cultural homogeneity and premodern
nationhood set it apart among Soviet satellite states. Because of Europe’s historical
migration patterns and the Soviets’ penchant for arbitrarily drawn borders in Central
Asia, few Soviet Bloc states could boast the same level of consensus on ethno-cultural
identity, religion, and historical consciousness. 82% of Mongolia’s population is of the
Khalkha ethnicity, and the remaining minority groups share a sympathetic identification
as “children of the Great Horde” whose cultures were equally repressed under
communism. Prior to communism, Tibetan Buddhism had been the absolutely dominant
religion throughout the country since the time of Kublai Khan. Mongolia also had the
advantage of near-perfect linguistic homogeneity within its borders, and a unique writing
system adapted from the Uyghur script in use since the 13
th
Century.
Ethno-linguistic homogeneity is important because it required the Soviets to impose
much more severe anti-nationalist policies at the outset, it prevented them from finding
previously disenfranchised minority groups to co-opt, and it allowed the anti-regime
61
groups that emerged later on to use cultural symbols in their protest movements without
provoking a backlash from rival ethnic groups. By contrast, in the many ethnically
diverse states that emerged from communism in the 1990s, the good, unifying aspects of
nationalism were lost in the chaos of fragmentation along ethnic lines.
The following section reviews the historical circumstances of Stalin’s cultural
homogenization policies and in the process situates communist Mongolia within our
theoretical framework in terms of our key independent variables of cultural policy
direction, severity, and ideological ownership.
Background Condition: Soviet Cultural Repression in Mongolia and
Elsewhere
One of the putative goals of Marxist-Leninist ideology was to build a global
coalition of workers that would ultimately do away with nationalism, national
consciousness and the nation-state itself (Janos 1996; White 2001; Saxonberg 2013). The
original Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union called for a global
worker’s movement in which the state would eventually “wither away.” (White 2001, 5)
Under Stalin’s direction the internationalist aspect of Marxist-Leninism was actively
pursued through the formation of the communist states of Eastern Europe. The Soviet-run
Cominform was charged with making central decisions about everything from five-year
economic plans to education reform, and the various satellites were expected to
uniformly carry out these directives.
The Soviets historically had complicated relationships with local nationalists. At
times, in the process of early regime consolidation, nationalism had to be harnessed and
even stimulated in order to rally a sufficiently large section of the population around the
cause of “national liberation,” with the communists as the putative saviors liberating
62
weaker nations
12
from the grip of global imperialism. But this term had a large class
component to it; Soviet communists were not committed to protecting nations as entities
discrete from workers worldwide. Lenin’s position was that nations have the right to self-
determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide, and if the proletariat is truly
empowered it will always choose communism (Matlock 26). Throughout Eastern Europe
communist parties enlisted the help of nationalist coalition partners to gain power, but
then purged or co-opted them after cementing single-party rule (Gati 1990). Accordingly,
nationalist sentiments and affinities for “bourgeois” culture soon became criminal
offenses throughout the Soviet bloc.
Transforming culture to serve the needs of socialism was an early and important
objective of the Soviet leadership:
The creative arts were also expected to perform an ideological purpose.
Painting, for instance, was expected to be representational rather than
abstract or allegorical; music was expected to have a recognizable tune; and
novels were supposed to be optimistic in character, set ideally in a factory
with an identifiable hero who should triumph in the end over the stubborn
resistance of the class enemy. All of the arts were subject to the doctrine of
“socialist realism”, first approved in 1934, in terms of which the “truthful,
historically concrete presentation of reality in its revolutionary development”
had to be combined with the “ideological remaking and education of toilers
in the spirit of socialism.” (White p8)
In Ukraine, Grigorenko recalls how cultural policy obliterated his nation’s theatre
tradition: “There were no more productions of Ukrainian classics; the stage was given
over to Soviet propaganda playlets that depicted young people struggling against the
kulaks (wealthy farmers), the White Guards, bandits, and the workers’ lack of political
consciousness.” (Grigorenko 19)

12
Throughout this paper the term “nation” is used in the sense of a self-identifying
cohesive ethnic community, usually united by a shared history, language, etc. but not
necessarily forming an independent state of its own. This includes the various nations
subsumed within the USSR — Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, Buryiat, Armenian, etc.
63
The effect that these policies had on popular feelings in the satellite states has been
vividly illustrated by the exiled Polish writer Czesław Miłosz:
Millions of human beings in the People’s democracies must employ
exceedingly ingenious means of masking themselves.... The surest safeguard
is to manifest loudly one’s awe at Russia’s achievements in every field of
endeavor, to carry Russian books under one’s arm, to hum Russian songs, to
applaud Russian actors and musicians enthusiastically, etc. (Miłosz 1996,
52)
The tenure of the Soviets in various bloc countries was a constant balancing act
between the top-down directive to build a truly international socialist movement, the need
to satisfy Russian cultural chauvinism back home, and the need to accommodate
nationalist sentiment among unruly local populations. Gati describes how the Soviets
solidified their control in Eastern Europe after WWII through the process of
Zhdanovshchina, after the Soviet cultural minister Andrei Zhdanov. “The period marked
the introduction of socialist realism and the Leninist notion of partinost or ‘party-
mindedness’ in literature, music, and the arts.” (Gati 1990, 21) The dramatic emotional
impact of these changes on the Eastern European psyche is summed up by Milan
Kundera: “[T]he countries in central Europe feel that the change in their destiny that
occurred after 1945 is not merely a political catastrophe: it is also an attack on their
civilization.” (Kundera 1996, 218) From their perspective, the Soviet takeover
represented not a new transnational phase of human existence, but the culmination of
age-old Russian designs for European conquest. As a result, from the beginning the
Soviet-friendly regimes of Eastern Europe suffered a deficit of legitimacy among their
own people.
Tucker describes Stalin's ideology as "Russian national socialism," through which
the Communist revolution abroad was reconceived as a process of spreading out from a
64
base in the USSR to neighboring countries, a revived "gathering of Russian lands."
(Tucker 1981) As Matlock writes, "[T]he Soviet empire appropriated the history of
Russian imperial expansion as its own. It relied on the Russian language as a unifying
factor, and the spread of Russian at the expense of other languages was for many
indistinguishable from Russian national aggrandizement.” (Matlock 23) In Eastern
Europe, Soviet interference was viewed with great skepticism as a natural extension of
previous Russian incursions through the centuries. In Mongolia, foreign threats had
traditionally come from Manchuria or Han China, not Russia; thus the historical
association of Russia with conquest was much weaker, making the notion of a Russia-led
global worker’s movement initially easier to swallow. But with the wholesale slaughter
of the Buddhist hierarchy and the transformation of the nomadic lifestyle wrought by
collectivization, Mongolians too quickly learned the cultural consequences of Soviet
state-building.
In short, the Soviet Union under Stalin committed itself to culturally transformative
policies throughout its bloc despite the heavy toll such policies took on public support for
the young satellite regimes. These policies were not a requisite element of the original
Marxist ideology; rather, the internationalist component of Marxism was repurposed by
Lenin as a justification for Russian cultural imperialism and later carried to new extremes
by Stalin, who was eager to establish his ideological bona fides. Stalin’s chauvinistic
preferences were enabled and bolstered by Russian popular sentiment: “By the mid-
1930s, all these formative events of Stalinism were unfolding in an official atmosphere of
resurgent nationalism and traditional values, including a selective rehabilitation of
tsarism itself. Increasingly, the Stalinist leadership identified its revolution from above
65
less with original Bolshevik ideas than with tsarist Russia's long history of state-building,
struggle against backwardness, and aspirations to world power, which
undoubtedly gained Stalinism still more popular support." (Cohen 1986, 68-69)
After Stalin’s demise, some cultural transformations were reversed or at least halted
in the satellite states, where for practical purposes Marxist internationalism had to be
relaxed or set aside (Gati 1990; Tucker 1967; Bialer 1982, 207-). Different “paths to
socialism” were grudgingly permitted in some satellite states. Purged artists, directors
and musicians were released from prisons, surviving nationalist leaders were
rehabilitated, and strictures against religion were relaxed. But by that point the damage
was done: communism was mentally associated with transformation of language and the
arts, veneration of Russian culture and heroes, vilification of other traditional cultures,
and secularization. Mongolia, which experienced cultural Stalinism for far longer than
any other Soviet bloc state outside of the Soviet Union itself, suffered the most dramatic
cultural losses.
The above history paints a picture of wildly unpopular policies of cultural
transformation, essentially Russification, implemented throughout the Soviet bloc —
policies which were shaped largely by the personal preferences of one man (Stalin)
rationalized by Marxism’s internationalist tenet and buttressed by the prevailing social
attitudes of post-WWII Russians. Popular resentment of these policies remained a latent
force among the non-Russians within the bloc throughout the Cold War. Ultimately,
those nations that saw their native cultures most forcibly transformed were the ones that
ended up succumbing most quickly to mass protest during the volatile 1989-1993 period.
By contrast, those nations that had experienced less interference in their traditional
66
cultures (Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea) proved more willing to remain under single-party
communist leadership despite various ordeals.
Cultural Policy in Communist Mongolia: Russian Cultural Chauvinism and
Soviet-Guided Modernization
As a fragment of a once much larger and grander nation, Outer Mongolia in the
1920s was primed for nationalist and irredentist impulses. When Mongolia declared its
independence with the aid of its Bolshevik friends in 1921, it came on the heels of 200
years of severe oppression as a vassal state of the Qing dynasty. The Manchurian
conquerors had spent centuries warring against the Mongols and felt much greater
antipathy toward Mongolia than toward the more Sinicized nations in China’s southern
and eastern periphery. After conquest, they used the Mongolian aristocracy’s gambling
debts to enslave or incarcerate much of the laboring class (Sabloff 2013, 31-34). In the
National History Museum in Ulaanbaatar, Qing-era torture devices and photos of starving
Mongolian prisoners are still prominently displayed.
Thus the Qing period is still remembered in Mongolia today with far more
bitterness than the worst excesses of the Soviet era, and many Mongolians still regard the
Bolshevik fighters as noble allies who helped Mongolia regain its independence from
China and later helped protect it from Japanese invasion. The Russian Bolsheviks were
the first foreign culture with a modern military that the Mongolians encountered in large
numbers, and after observing how quickly they defeated the mighty Qing, they were
eager to emulate them in matters large and small. Thus from the beginning the Soviets
enjoyed considerable leeway in dictating the political and economic structure of the new
Mongolian People’s Republic.
67
Beginning with Sukhbaatar’s Soviet-aided achievement of national independence in
1921-4, Mongolia constituted the Soviets’ first experiment with state-building in a
foreign satellite. From the bones of the old Qing order they built up a People’s Republic
modeled in large part after the USSR. Soviet advisors entered into Mongolia with near-
complete ignorance about — and antipathy for — the local culture, history, values and
traditional practices. Even more than in Eastern Europe, the Soviets made elimination of
“bourgeois” culture and “superstitious” religious beliefs an early ideological priority as
they set up their first satellite state. The eradication of traditional culture was immediate
and extensive, transforming religion, language, historical consciousness, the arts, and
even traditional dress to be rebuilt in the Russian image.
The first and most urgent task of the Soviets was to crush the burgeoning
Mongolian nationalism which had arisen as the country emerged from Qing dynasty
control. Many of the early leaders of the MPR, including Choibalsan, were originally not
communists but rather pan-Mongolist in ideology, hoping to reclaim all of Buryiat, Inner
and Outer Mongolia within one autonomous nation-state (Radchenko 2012). In the 1930s
Mongolia’s party leaders, at the urging of their Soviet advisors, set about crushing all
political threats to communism in the young state, chiefly the Buddhist hierarchy. A
short-lived pan-Mongolia movement led by the Buryiat (Soviet) Mongols was crushed by
the early Bolshevik leadership, and nearly the entire adult male population of ethnic
Mongols in the Soviet Union’s Buryiat Republic was killed or imprisoned in the terror of
1929-31 (Becker 1993, 246).
Purges followed for both Outer Mongolia and the Buryiat Republic: “In the late
1930s the purges saw the destruction of the entire Buryiat intelligentsia and the Buddhist
68
monasteries which were the traditional repository of art and literature and to which every
family sent one son.” (Becker 1993, 246) In the MPR, purges of pan-Mongolian
nationalists and Buddhist lamas conducted on Stalin’s orders targeted by some estimates
killed over 100,000 people, possibly as much as one-eighth of the population. The
temples had been the primary center for education and posed the greatest ideological
threat to the MPRP, and therefore Stalin decreed that they had to go. Indeed, so
politically compromising was the task of liquidating the Buddhist lamas that the first two
Mongolian prime ministers to receive Stalin’s directive — Genden and Amor — refused
to comply and were purged, before Stalin finally found a willing accomplice in
Choibalsan.
Cultural loss extended to language. In the Soviet Buryiat Republic, “It was national
policy to assimilate all minorities to create a new race, the Soviets, with one language,
Russian, so there was no point even preserving or tolerating the existence of others.” In
both Mongolia and Buryiatia, “the Mongolian-Uighur script had already been replaced by
the Latin alphabet in the 1930s, and this together with the destruction of the monastic
libraries cut off the Buryiats from their own literature, history and culture” (Becker 1993,
250). Under the Soviets’ ambitious new literacy education program, the literacy rate
jumped from about 3% in 1921 (using the old vertical script) to 17.3% by 1940 (using
Cyrillic script) and 73.5% by 1950 (Yembuu 2006, 5), meaning that Cyrillic became
effectively the first and only written script for the vast majority of Mongolians. The arts
were transformed as well. Mongolian theatre was “all but destroyed by the 1940s,” its
playwrights, directors and actors imprisoned. After the death of Stalin most of those
surviving were released, and Mongolian theatre was revived “under the social realist
69
traditions of Soviet drama.” (Becker 1993, 105). Thus most of Mongolia’s early cultural
transformation was begun at the command of Stalin, but the task was later taken up with
enthusiasm by the “Muscovites” (Russian-educated Mongolian cadres) who dominated
the state bureaucracy. Muscovites often lacked sufficient skills in their native language,
felt uncomfortable around those who could not speak Russian, and saw Russian-style
civilization as the key to national salvation in the face of perceived Chinese and Japanese
encroachment.
[T]he MPRP leaders showed little interest in preserving those elements of
Mongolia’s cultural heritage which foreigners might regard as indicators of
backwardness. For example, in 1959 the Hungarian ambassador reported that
in the opinion of some Mongolian leaders, the inner cover of the gers should
be made of plastic to be produced in Mongolia, rather than felt, the material
traditionally used by nomadic herders. (Szalontai, 173)
Along the way to suppressing Mongolian nationalism and establishing ideological
control, the Soviets also reformed Mongolian education and implemented a reevaluation
of the historical role of Chinggis Khan and the Mongolian empire. “This new
interpretation depicted the first unifier of the Mongolians as a rapacious plunderer who
represented the feudal ruling classes and whose invasions retarded development of the
territories he and his troops had subjugated. Mongolian portrayals of Chinggis as a
national hero and deification of the founder of the Mongolian empire were condemned.”
(Rossabi 2005: 197) There was a dramatic incident in the 1970s when an underground
nationalist group tried to erect a statue of Chinggis Khan in northern Mongolia; the
perpetrators were promptly imprisoned.
13
Restoring Chinggis Khan’s place in history
would later become a popular demand of the Mongolian pro-democracy movement.

13
Interview with Bum-Ochir, Sept 9, 2015.
70
Ironically, some stereotypical aspects of the Soviet police state have their origins in
the Mongol empire. Becker writes that under Kubilai Khan’s rule in Yuan China, "Every
householder had to hang outside his door a list of the inhabitants and inns had to report
the arrival of all guests, specifying the day and hour. The Mongols also categorized the
population according to their political reliability.” (Becker 1993, 6) It is intriguing to
speculate that if the Soviets had merely acknowledged the Mongol origins of these
practices, Mongols may have taken some pride in them, or at least not resented them so
bitterly.
Architecture and iconography throughout the communist period reflected Russian
cultural chauvinism and Mongolia’s complicated dependent status. The design of the
central Sukhbaatar Square strictly followed the Soviet model, fronting the Hall of
Government and surrounded by the requisite state buildings such as the Hall of Culture
and the Children’s Palace. The centerpiece of the square was an iconic sculpture and
mausoleum for the eponymous General Sukhbaatar, erected in 1946 at a time when the
Soviet authorities decided to build a personality cult around the late hero of the
independence struggle, known as ‘Mongolia’s Lenin.’
The equestrian statue and mausoleum of revolutionary leader Damdin
Sükhbaatar constituted particularly conspicuous examples of the inflexible
imitation of European models… Sükhbaatar Square, a location where
Buddhist tsam ceremonies had once taken place, was to assume a social and
political role akin to Moscow’s Red Square – that is, a public space to hold
military parades and state-controlled mass rallies…
[T]he statue also symbolically revealed that behind the façade of
independence, Mongolia’s development closely followed Soviet guidelines.
Having been trained in the USSR, [sculptor] Choimbol depicted Sükhbaatar
riding a horse whose impressive size and appearance had more in common
with European cavalry horses than with the small, stocky, short-legged – but
extremely sturdy – native horses of Mongolia… (Szalontai, 171-2)
71
Having perfected the personality cult in Stalin’s later years, it seems the Soviet
advisors returned to Mongolia and completed the unfinished business of establishing a
grand mythical origin story for the MPR regime. This included the morbid but seemingly
inescapable Soviet practice of permanently displaying the remains of great leaders:
Following the death of Choibalsan in 1952, his embalmed body and
Sükhbaatar’s remains were interred into a mausoleum built on Sükhbaatar
Square, in obvious imitation of Lenin’s Mausoleum in the Red Square… [I]n
Mongolia the idea of such a public mausoleum stood in a stronger contrast
with local customs of burial than in Russia… In traditional Mongol
practices… corpses were usually left unburied, with no gravestone erected,
and in those cases when the lamas did embalm the bodies of certain Buddhist
dignitaries, the latter were buried in coffins, in a sitting position as if in
prayer. (Szalontai, 172)
Choibalsan ruled until his death in 1952, when he was succeeded by Yumjaagiin
Tsedenbal. Remembered today as an unimaginative bureaucrat who slavishly mimicked
Soviet directives, Tsedenbal allowed his Russian wife, Anastasia Filatova, to preside over
the wholesale transformation of the Mongolian fine arts. A party member and Komsomol
Youth League secretary hailing from Russian peasant stock, Anastasia was eager to
cultivate her image as a doyenne of high culture and took on a particularly domineering
role in developing the new Mongolian fine arts scene, including organizing a national
ballet troupe in the Russian style. Tsedenbal’s wife reportedly never learned to speak
Mongolian, and due to her own peculiar interpretation of Marxism, she believed
proletarians should have no culture.
14

Mongolian theater, painting, and music were all reimagined in the style of social
realism, and artists were oriented into state-sponsored collectives just like workers and
herdsmen. Mongolian painter Purev Dolgorjav, who studied art in Ulaanbaatar during the
1970s, recalled being assigned to work for the army painting military bases and political

14
Interviewed with Duger Yadam in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 8, 2015.
72
maps in factory-like conditions; his unit also designed many street posters. Purev had
desired to work in the monumental sector, but was assigned elsewhere. In the 1980s, he
became exposed to realism and abstract art through books smuggled back from Europe
by friends, and was instinctively drawn to it. In 1988, he attended an international
meeting of artists in Bulgaria, where he observed that the artists of Eastern Europe
seemed much more free to explore different styles.
15

Mongolian filmmaker Solongo Jambaa developed his interest in film as a boy in the
1970s, when the state would subsidize four films and ten documentaries every year. The
country had ten theaters, one per province. The theaters showed exclusively Russian and
Mongolian films, until finally in the 1980s they began introducing some ideologically
uncomplicated Western films such as Spartacus. The son of a disgraced former finance
minister, Solongo was not assigned to make films but managed to fight his way into the
industry through talent and hard work. He applied to attend the Moscow Film
University’s Institute of Cinematography but was rejected, despite finishing in the top
twenty on the national exam, due to his class background. He was eventually able to
obtain a visa to attend a smaller vocational school in Moscow and then to transfer to the
Institute. The films he made under communism were strictly circumscribed; they had to
deal with social realist topics such as class struggle against feudalism. Every work was
examined by the state propaganda office. Forbidden subjects included critiques of social
realism and anything that might reawaken Mongolian view of history. Solongo recalled

15
Interviewed in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 10, 2015.
73
one poet, named Chenom, who was jailed for mentioning Chinggis Khan and died in
prison.
16

Opposition Impact: Cultural Revival as a Protest Meme
The fever for democratic reforms that swept across the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe in the late 1980s soon infected Mongolia as well. In late December 1989, a
handful of Mongolian intellectuals, recently returned from study abroad in Moscow and
inspired by the reforms and social movements they had observed there, launched their
own small protest rally in Sukhbaatar Square on the occasion of International Human
Rights Day. Their pro-democracy movement rapidly gained popularity among common
people, factory workers and herdsmen.
As in most soviet satellites, many of the early initiators of Mongolia’s democratic
protest movement were educated young people who had the opportunity to study in the
USSR, where they experienced a more liberal political environment particularly after the
social upheavals launched in the 1980s by the new policies of Glasnost and Perestroika.
In 1976 the historian Boldbaatar went to Moscow to study history under Professor Yuri
Nikolaevich Gavrilov, who was very progressive and critical of system. There for the
first time Boldbaatar was able to read books only available in West, many of them copied
by hand by Gavrilov’s students, such as The Great Terror by Conquest and
Nomenclatura by Michael Voslensky. In classes and late-night bull sessions the students
discussed and criticized Stalin’s teachings. After returning from Moscow, Boldbaatar
worked as director of the Science Theory Department at the Higher Party School and
wrote several articles about democracy in Mongolia ’87- ’88, including one tract in the
dissident newspaper Truth entitled “No Need to be Afraid of Democracy,” which

16
Interviewed in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 6, 2015.
74
produced much controversy at the time and was well received by Ulaanbaatar’s young
intellectual class.
17

When Solongo Jambaa was a young film student in the Soviet Union, he learned
of a West German punk band named “Genghis Khan” [Chinggis Khan]. Solongo and his
friends secretly copied this band's songs, and in 1983 the Mongolian students in Moscow
organized a secret birthday party for Chinggis Khan. Solongo provided the vinyl record
player for this party. Such behavior was highly subversive in the eyes of the Soviet
authorities. As a result of this incident, 28 students were deported back to
Mongolia. Solongo would have been deported as well, if not for the intervention of his
professor, Sergei Gerasimov. A leading figure in Soviet cinema, Gerasimov warned the
Mongolian Embassy that if they deported Solongo, the Institute would not accept any
more Mongolian students in the future. When the 1990 protests began, Solongo was in
the square, filming. His is some of the only footage available from inside the protests. He
also participated in the meeting of the Democratic Union, in which all writers, directors,
painters and other artists met with the Political Committee to voice their demands for
Mongolian independence in the arts.
18

A challenge for these educated young dissidents was how to attract mass support
from the wider Mongolian population, most of whom did not read political tracts or listen
to foreign bands and had no experience of glasnost, political criticism or strike actions.
They found their answer in the use of well-recognized cultural symbols. An illustrative
example was the wearing of traditional dress at public protests. In Mongolia, the
traditional dress, or del, was perceived as a nationalist symbol and outlawed throughout

17
Interview with Solongo Jambaa in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 5, 2015.
18
Interview with Solongo Jambaa in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 6, 2015.
75
the communist era. It became a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts: during the protests in
1990, democracy activists brought their dels out of mothballs and wore them to rallies in
Sukhbaatar Square, so the del indeed became a symbol of resistance to communist rule,
often worn by protesters at rallies. "On Wednesday, March 7, at 2:00 P.M., with the
temperature at -15 degrees C., ten men, including the ubiquitous Bat-Uul, took their
positions in Sukhbaatar Square to begin their fast. By wearing their dels, or traditional
robes, they signaled a break with the values of the regime, which had denigrated the
remnants of the feudal past." (Ackerman & Duvall 448) Photos from the time reveal
protestors holding up hand-printed signs bearing words like “justice” and “freedom” in
traditional script, which most Mongolians by then could not read but nevertheless
appreciated as an element of their stolen past.
Additionally, the protesters performed traditional Mongolian songs and dances in
the Square, helping them keep warm on the long winter days. Oyungerel Tsedevdamba
recalls a subversive rock group called “Bell” led by the singer Tsogtsaihan:
They always sang about “banned topics” of communist life, therefore
producing such revolutionary hits. Their song “The Song of the Bell” calls
everyone to wake up under the bell sound. Their song “Rashaant 18” sang
about ger district people’s marginalized life for the first time. The song “I am
an unemployed” sang about an unemployed man for the first time. And of
course, they sang about a banned Chinggis Khan topic for the first time. The
song “Chinggis Khaan” … conveys a common man’s apology to Chinggis
Khaan, and literally sings “please forgive me for not having courage to call
your name, for forgetting you…Great Chinggis Khaan”.
19

Restoration of traditional culture — and rejection of Soviet control — were so
embedded into Mongolia’s protest repertoires that it is difficult to imagine the pro-
democracy movement gaining such broad grass-roots appeal without these elements.
Alongside demands for greater government transparency, market reforms and a multi-

19
E-mail correspondence with Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, September 25, 2017.
76
party system, there were also voices calling for restoration of the Mongolian script and
state support for rebuilding Buddhist monasteries (Rossabi 2005, 198).
Another way the Mongolian pro-democracy movement mobilized mass support
was through demands for the restoration of historical narratives and heroes. Chinggis
Khan in particular became a prominent, if unlikely, symbol of democracy during the
transition period. At the first truly mass protest in Sukhbaatar Square, on January 21,
1990, a diverse group of intellectuals, workers and engineers rallied together by singing
traditional folk melodies praising the legendary conqueror (Rossabi 2005, 16). A leading
pro-democracy activist rallied the crowd in Sukhbaatar Square by announcing the
foundation of an “Association for Remembering and Respecting Chinggis Khan,” which
would build monuments in his honor and advocate emulating his style of government
with a council of advisors (Becker 1993, 48). Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, who participated
in the protests as a young returning student, recalled one distinct image from that first
protest:
When the Mongolian Democratic Union, the first ever non-communist
movement in Mongolia, held a huge rally in mid-January 1990, over 100,000
Mongolians filled Sukhbaatar Square in front of Government House, holding
various signs expressing their dreams about a new society. Of course
“Democracy,” “Human Rights,” and “Freedom,” were the most common and
the loudest demands of the gatherers, but there was another famous symbol
among them. It was Genghis Khan’s portrait—but with an artistic, political
twist.
I can still vividly remember that placard. It was a small blue and white sign.
There was a frozen window depicted on it. Those who never lived in
Mongolia prior to the vacuum window era, cannot imagine what a frozen
window is. It means that ice is forming on the inside of a building’s
windows; opaque ice crystals spread across a window so that no one within
can see out.
The famous sign depicted just such a frozen window, and on it was a human
hand called “democracy” wiping away the window’s ice so that from within
one could just make out the face of Genghis Khan—Mongolia’s great hero
77
and law-giver, whom the communists had tried to erase from the public
memory. Even to utter his name was a crime.
The sign exactly described the feelings of the Mongolian people of that time.
Finally, we did not have communist censorship of our media, culture,
literature, movies, and holidays. We were wiping aside a frigid past that had
obscured our traditions. The search for a new national identity for the new
non-communist Mongolia had begun. (Oyungerel 2016)
More recent nationalist heroes were also restored (or invented) through the pro-
democracy movement, including artists and cultural leaders cut down in the 1930s purges
such as the poet Dashdorjiyn Natsagdorj, the composer Shirnengiin Ayuush, the
playwright Sodnombaljiryn Buyannemekh (Sanders 2010, 188), the nationalist writer and
journalist Tsendiin Damdinsüren (purged for resisting directives to convert Mongolian to
Cyrillic script) (Kaplonski 2013). Also restored to places of reverence were Prince Tögs-
Ochiryn Namnansüren, acknowledged as the first Prime Minister of Mongolia under the
brief reign of the Bodg Khaan (1912-1919) and suspected to have been assassinated by
the Bolsheviks, and former Premier Peljidiyn Genden, who was purged and killed in
1937 for resisting Soviet orders to destroy the Buddhist monasteries. Both men are now
honored with monuments in their native Övörkhangai Province. The protest narrative of a
“foreign-imposed” regime is easier to construct when there are historical individuals who
were persecuted under communism for defending the nation’s culture, distinctiveness and
independence, who can then be resurrected as nationalist heroes. As Oyungerel recalls:
Another artistic leader calling Mongolians’ national conscious in relation to
Chinggis Khaan and national culture was the late poet Choinom, who was
persecuted for his poetry during the communist time. In 1990, there was a big
demonstration to pay tribute to the famous late poet and his poetry about
“Meeting Chinggis Khaan in my dream” … Other banned poetry of the
1980s were a hit in the 1990s. Choinom’s poetry book, [and especially] his
78
banned poem “Sumtei Budriin Chuluu” or the Stones of a Monastery Hill,
was the greatest hit of early 1990s.
20

The political rehabilitation of such individuals is a concrete and simple demand the
protest movement can make of the incumbent government; when such demands are
accommodated, it demonstrates the power of the protest movement and gives the people a
taste for political protest.
In the MPR, as in most of the Eastern European satellites, there was very little sense
of national ownership of the ruling communist ideology. Because of the overbearing role
of Soviet advisors and Muscovite cadres in the process of installing and sustaining single-
party communist rule in Mongolia, the Mongolian people came to perceive the entire
communist system, and the hardships that went along with it, as something that had been
inflicted upon them by a foreign power in a time of weakness. The triumphant narrative
of the working class autonomously breaking free of bondage and overthrowing their
capitalist oppressors was thus lost. The Mongolian proletariat had little sense of having
seized ownership of their own base of production in a state where the most valuable
resources were extracted and shipped to Russia at low fixed prices. This popular
perception made it much easier for intellectuals to rapidly gather mass support for their
movement among people who had little awareness of such complex concepts as “market
economy,” “self-determination,” “majoritarian democracy,” “civil rights” etc.
One of Mongolians’ most widely remembered complaints about the old regime
related to the extraordinary privileges enjoyed by Russians in the country. Russian shops
had the most goods for sale, Russian security officers patrolled the streets each night in
big Russian cars, and every office had a Russian “advisor” who typically did little but got

20
E-mail correspondence with Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, September 2017.
79
paid twice as much as anyone else. These “advisors” had the last word in every major
office decision, although their Mongolian co-workers remember many of them as
“uneducated country bumpkins” with little practical knowledge of their assigned
businesses.
21
These Russian bureaucrats left when the Soviet Union collapsed and their
funding was cut off. While outsiders described this exodus as leaving a serious
technocratic void and inflicting a heavy blow to the Mongolian economy (Heaton 1992),
Mongolians remember the matter today as a welcome cleansing of a wasteful
bureaucracy.
By all indications Mongolian civil society rapidly expanded in membership across
classes and regions through the transition period. A 2005 CSS poll indicated a post-1990
increase in the number of people who sign petitions (from 6% to 12.9%) and participate
in public demonstrations (from 3.8% to 10%).
22
Participation was particularly massive at
the 1989-1990 popular protests for regime change. Since Mongolia’s traditional way of
life is so strongly tied to the natural environment, and since the environmental damage
wreaked by communist economic policies has become widely known, environmental
activism has also become closely associated with both traditional values and anti-
communist protest. In April 2015, when the first ever shamanic ritual protest was
conducted in Sukhbaatar Square, about forty to fifty shamans gathered to protest
environmental damages.
23

Aftermath: Democratic Consolidation through Cultural Policy
Mongolia’s transition to a market economy was far from easy. In the post-
transition year of 1991, the economy was described as being in “free-fall.” Soviet aid,

21
Solongo Jambaa interview, Sept 6, 2015.
22
Civil Society Index Report for Mongolia, p40.
23
Interview with Bum-Ochir.
80
which had previously covered between a third and a half of the annual budget, was cut
off when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Foreign trade plummeted, and unemployment
rose from 31,000 in February to over 80,000 in September; meat rationing had to be
introduced in Ulaanbaatar for the first time in history (Heaton 1992, 52-3). Figure 7
shows Mongolia’s per capita GDP alongside comparable Soviet satellite states in the
years before and after transition. The data show post-communist Mongolia had a rockier
start than even notorious basket-cases like Albania and Romania. Figure 8, using World
Bank data, illustrates the dramatic dip in per-capita GDP following the initial economic
reforms. Mongolians today still remember the first couple years after regime change as
“the starving time,” a period of great desperation and economic hardship in much of the
country.

Figure 7: Communist Bloc GDPPC Comparison, 1983-2005 (Src: World Development Indicators)
0
2000
4000
6000
8000
10000
12000
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
US$
Fig 4: Per Capita GDP (Current US$)
Mongolia
Poland
Romania
Albania
Hungary
81

Figure 8: Mongolian GDPPC 1985-1999 (Src: World Bank)
Thus, according to the “Relative Deprivation” model of contentious politics,
Mongolia’s democratic consolidation should have faced some of the heaviest popular
resistance. Yet while relatively well-off states like Poland, Hungary and the former GDR
were awash with labor strikes and more impoverished states like Albania, Belarus and
Romania were sliding back into quasi-dictatorships or rule by ex-communist
nomenklatura, Mongolia emerged from this tumultuous period with a stable two-party
system that peacefully transferred power from the People’s Revolutionary Party to the
Democratic Party in the 2009 presidential election, with the PRP remaining a significant
political force.
Mongolians take pride in their ability to survive the roughest period despite
relatively poorer circumstances, associating their success with their cultural norms of
toughness, basic living, and communal support. The former repression victim Duger
Yadam remarked that in Eastern Europe “one in one thousand” people died in the tumult
82
of the transition period, but “nobody died in Mongolia.”
24
The Mongolian historian and
anthropologist Tamir Chultemsuren has argued that the Mongolian democracy movement
was not a product of the Soviet reforms – that the wheels had been set in motion before
that. The social anthropologist Bum-Ochir posits a cultural explanation for the lack of
violence: “I can’t imagine Mongols fighting against Mongols; we don’t fight… We don’t
have guns. We are a peaceful people.” As further evidence, Bum-Ochir also cites the
public’s shocked reaction when police killed five people in a riot-suppressing action
following the 2008 election.
25

The government was able to achieve certain specific economic gains early on,
which it trumpeted to great effect. One of the earliest transformations occurred when
collectivized herds were broken up and private herding was brought back. When asked to
name what they considered the most positive change brought by the fall of communism,
multiple interviewees cited the same factoid: the total livestock count in the country
increased from 25 million head in 1990 to over 75 million head today. This simple
statistic seems to have become a well-known and frequently cited point of national pride.
Far beyond the simple economic benefits, the livestock privatization brought more
intangible benefits to the struggling regime, chiefly the revival of a traditional way of life
that had become nearly moribund under the Soviet system.
Culture was used often and with great effect by the young government as it sought
to consolidate new democratic institutions in place of the communist bureaucracy. Some
of the earliest laws debated in the reconstituted Mongolian legislature included motions
to restore reverence for Genghis Khan and allocate government funds to support

24
Interview with Duger Yadam, Sept 8, 2015.
25
Interview with Bum-Ochir, Sept 9, 2015.
83
traditional music and theater. Additionally, the 1990 Government Action Plan announced
an ambitious endeavor to “Organize the universal training of the old Mongolian script
‘Uigarjin’ nationwide” (Yembuu 2006, 14). This included a major campaign encouraging
adults to learn the Uigarjin script and incorporating it into the elementary school
curriculum beginning in 1990-91. Ultimately, the plan failed due to lack of “human
resources” to teach the old script, fears of a precipitous decline in literacy, and the fact
that most young people at the time were focused on acquiring more marketable skills
such as English and computer literacy (Yembuu 2006, 14).
Another early crowd-pleasing move was the restoration of Mongolian Buddhism.
In 1992 the government reestablished worship services at the Erdenezuu Monastery, a
formerly vast complex of which only four buildings survived at the end of the communist
period. Oyungerel recalls that this had a big effect, especially among older Mongolians:
“[H]aving liberty of exercising freedom of religion was a huge thing. The Association of
Mongolian Pilgrims were founded in 1990, and their first demonstration in the yard of the
Choijin Lana museum drew enormous crowd, especially old people holding their gods
and prayer beads.”
26
Another major step was taken when the Dalai Lama visited
Ulaanbaatar in August of 1995. As a visiting journalist wrote at the time: “A crowd of
10,000 assembled in the sweltering heat to see the Dalai Lama, a gathering that would
have been unthinkable prior to the Russian retreat. Soon, the searing heat turned into a
torrential downpour that reduced the Gandan Monastery to a sea of thick, sticky mud.
Many elderly, often unable to walk, were carried in by relatives to witness the Dalai

26
E-mail correspondence with Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, September 25, 2017.
84
Lama perform the Kalachakra initiation ceremony, a rite outlawed since 1937.”
27
The
rituals of Tibetan Buddhism have helped restore Mongolians’ spiritual link to their past.
Throughout the democratic era, Mongolian politicians and opinion-leaders have
scoured their history for elements of modernity and democratic principles that they can
claim as Mongol inventions. In a 2015 interview with Charlie Rose, President
Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj claimed that the Mongolian empire in Persia created world’s first
observatory, as well as the first hospitals and universities.
28
In a speech at North Korea’s
Kim Il Sung University, Elbegdorj boasted that the Mongolian empire created one of
Asia’s earliest written legal codes, respected freedom of faith and freedom to create,
created true diplomatic immunity through metallic plates carried by envoys guaranteeing
their protection, and “never waged wars without a justifiable reason.”
29
Sabloff (2013)
lists several innovations from Genghis Khan’s time that (much later) came to be
associated with democracy: 1) decrees written down in the Ikh Yasa, constituting an
early precursor to formal rule of law; 2) participatory governance through a “Council of
Wise Men”; 3) guarantees of some personal freedoms 4) merit-based rank among
soldiers; and 5) encouragement of literacy. Since the more distinctly feudal institutions of
serfdom and landed nobility emerged most prominently under Qing rule, these could be
added to the laundry list of foreign-imposed tyrannies, leaving Mongolians free to
fantasize that some sort of primitive quasi-democracy existed eight centuries ago under
their Great Empire. This improbable connection enables Mongolians not only to take

27
“Mongolia: The Bhudda and the Khan". Orient Magazine. Retrieved 2013-06-
28. http://wayback.archive.org/web/19980422190623/http://orientmag.com/8-30.htm.
28
The Charlie Rose Show, Oct. 13, 2015 (https://charlierose.com/videos/23741)
29
President Elbegdorj’s speech at Kim Il Sung University, Oct 29, 2013.
85
pride in their past but also to see their current system as a logical continuation of their
ancient traditions and values.
In recent years Mongolian historians have confronted Russian historical narratives
with increasing bluntness. At a 2008 conference organized by Dr. Boldbaatar, historian
Choisambuu drew attention to Russia’s “new historical narrative” in relation to the
Mongol conquest: “In recent years Russian researchers have begun to rewrite their
history, often distorting facts. For example, they deny the existence of the Mongol nation,
consider Genghis Khan and Batu Khan to be invented heroes, say that Batu Khan was in
fact Alexander Nevsky, and claim that the Mongols never invaded Russian soil.”
(Sanders 2010, 626) This continued revisionism of Mongolian history, even after the
Soviet era, reflects ongoing crises in Russian politics and social identity which would
deserve an entirely separate paper; but it suffices to point out that Mongolia’s newfound
ability to confront chauvinistic Russian narratives provides its democratic regime with
yet more ammunition to support its popular legitimacy and superiority to the former
Communist regime.
Statuary has become a recurring point of contention in post-transition Mongolia.
Beginning in 1990, statues of Soviet leaders went down one by one and were replaced
with prominent Mongolians. In 1991, the giant statue of Stalin in front of the National
Library was replaced with one of the Mongolian intellectual and ethnologist Rinchen
Byambyn (Diener and Hagen 2016, 148). On reformers’ attitude toward the Stalin statue,
Rossabi writes: “They were horrified at the placement of an image of the dreaded Soviet
dictator in front of one of the main treasuries of Mongolian culture. In their criticisms
of the placement of the statue, reformers could harp on patriotism and anti-Russian
86
sentiments. Having secured popular approval, they went to the State Library on the night
of February 22 and dismantled Stalin's statue." (Rossabi 17-18) Around the same time,
half of Marx Street was renamed after former Premier Genden, the other half after purged
former Director of the Institute for Scripts and Manuscripts Jamyan Gün. Removal of
statues and other visible symbols of foreign ideology was one way that reformist
elements in the government could appease the protesters and demonstrate that their
voices were being heard, in a way that was less complex and politically hazardous than
pursuing immediate institutional reforms. Purev, the painter, recalls feeling a sense of
rightness when the statues of Lenin and Stalin came down; it inspired him to set aside his
painting for a time and become more active in the revolution.
30

While most of the new statues feature democracy activists or figures from the
distant past, some Mongolian communist leaders escaped the bronze genocide. The
revolutionary hero Sukhbaatar remains frozen astride his horse, eternally charging
through his namesake Sukhbaatar Square in front of the parliament building. Choibalsan
stands proudly in Soviet military regalia in front of the National University, and even
Tsedenbal appears seated on a throne-like chair outside the National Drama Theater. But
the grandest statues in the country today are of Chinggis Khan, whose enormous likeness
appears seated atop the steps of parliament, flanked by his descendants Ögedei and
Khubilai Khaan as well as two bronze guards on horseback. Another Chinggis statue, this
one on horseback and over 40 meters tall, was erected in 2008 on the vast plain east of
the capital as a tourist attraction. Other recent statuary around the capital has depicted

30
Interviewed in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 10, 2015.
87
whirling dervishes, famous books in Mongolian script, rams, eagles and other symbols of
the country’s natural beauty.
As recently as 2012, controversy surrounded the removal of the last statue of
Lenin from the capital. It was a move promoted with much ceremony and fanfare by the
Democratic Party, but opposed by its rival the Communist Party and a not-insignificant
number of ordinary citizens. The opposition argued that the Communist system, despite
its faults, was an important part of Mongolia’s national history and its path to
independence. Questioned about the motives for pushing ahead with the statue removal,
Democratic Party official Ankhbayar remarked with a shrug that “we must get rid of the
old.”
31

The other newly independent states and former soviet republics also took steps to
reclaim their lost cultures. But due to their cultural diversity, few were able to utilize
these symbols effectively without creating a knock-on effect of ethnic strife. The
resurgence of Serbian nationalism prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia is a demonstrative
case. Ethnic tensions arose as ethnic majorities used their new democratic powers to
enact culturally restorative policies that served as uncomfortable reminders to minority
groups of the pre-communist past. In the republics of Central Asia, the public’s sense of
pre-Soviet nationhood was apparently too hazy to withstand the long decades of cultural
repression, making it difficult for the new democratic rulers to rally people around a
unified vision of the pre-Soviet culture (Schatz 2006, 270). In Kazakhstan, for example,
“robbed of crucial markers of their identity such as religion and ethnicity, Kazakhs were
not capable of engaging in any action aimed at recovering their cultural losses.” (Rorlich

31
Interview with Representative Ankhbayar in Ulaanbaatar, Sept 9
th
, 2015.
88
2009, 159) The result was the emergence of new autocrats who reinvented their own
vision of quasi-traditional culture. Mongolians’ much stronger sense of a unified, pre-
Soviet national identity centered on the Great Mongolian Empire helped them to escape
this outcome.
Today, Mongolian politics are a place of contention and compromise, with two
dominant parties (the MPRP and the Democrats) that frequently alternate in power. The
government is frequently divided in a state of equilibrium, with the president and
Parliamentary majority held by opposing parties (Ginsburg 1997). The MPRP has
distanced itself from its communist past and now emphatically pursues social democratic
principles, appealing to Mongolians’ sense of collectivism and community welfare
against the more individualistic, sometimes selfish nature of the new democratic society.
But it is the Democratic Party that makes the most strident claims to cultural fidelity, and
most of the major policy moves to promote traditional culture have been passed in times
of Democratic majority. The MPRP constantly struggles with the legacy of the
Communist era. As Oyungerel notes:
Compared with many post-communist Central Asian countries, and even
some Eastern European countries—most notably Russia—Mongolia’s public
is the least nostalgic about the past communist years. According to the Sant
Maral Foundation … over 90 percent of the Mongolian public voted “No”
every quarter for the past 25 years when asked, “Do you regret that Mongolia
chose democracy in 1990?” … From the family point of view, it means that
almost every family in Mongolia—which was the world’s second communist
country after Russia (the USSR) less than a century ago—appreciates the
democratic choice that the nation made. (Oyungerel 2016)
In recent years the Mongolian government has been burnishing its credentials as a
standard-bearer for democracy in the region. With much fanfare, it proudly hosted the
ministerial assembly of the “Community of Democracies” in 2013 with over 1200
89
participants from different countries.
32
Through their own initiative they have reached out
to autocratic neighbors in Central Asia and even North Korea, offering a more moderate,
Asian-oriented path to reform as an alternative to the overbearing demands from the
West. The North Koreans seemed very favorable to this approach and developed quite
warm relations with Mongolia, until President Elbegdorj visited Kim Il Sung University
in 2013 and delivered a lecture subtitled “It is the Human Desire to Live Free that is an
Eternal Power” in which he proclaimed “No tyranny lasts forever” and “Freedom is an
asset bestowed upon every single man and woman.”
33
Through this and other actions
Mongolia has proven to be something of a loose canon among the world’s democracies,
proud of its system and eager to promote it, but not slavishly following any particular
Western form or conventional wisdom.
Conclusion
As the Mongolian case shows, imposed cultural transformation and suppressed
nationalism under communist rule were key enabling factors in mobilizing anti-
communist sentiment during the transition period. Symbols of traditional culture were
used by democracy activists to draw support across class lines, including masses of
uneducated poor laborers, herdsmen and farm workers who had little notion of what

32
“7th Ministerial Conference of the Community of Democracies Showcases Mongolia’s
Democratic Transition,” By Meloney C. Lindberg, Jeremy Gross, and Tirza Theunissen,
May 1, 2013. (http://asiafoundation.org/2013/05/01/7th-ministerial-conference-of-the-
community-of-democracies-showcases-mongolias-democratic-transition/)
33
Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, “Foreign Policy of Mongolia and the Relations between
Mongolia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Speech at Kim Il Sung
University, Oct 31, 2013. Reprinted in “Documents on Democracy,” Journal of
Democracy, Volume 25, Number 1, January 2014, pp. 179-183.

90
democracy, civil rights and free markets were or how these things would improve their
lives, but who felt deep nostalgia for Mongolia’s lost nomadic culture.
After the end of the Cold War, long-suppressed cultural and linguistic traditions
were rapidly reclaimed throughout the Soviet bloc and nationalist tensions that had
remained frozen for decades boiled over in Eastern Europe. The tremendous passions
incited by these developments cannot be denied, raising the question of how much
cultural repression helped to fuel the groundswell of popular support for those pro-
democracy movements. We might reasonably ask: If Stalin had been a little less obsessed
with total cultural and ideological control of bloc member states, if he had been content to
simply influence their political and economic structures and ensure security alliances —
and there is nothing to suggest that such an approach would have been politically
infeasible — would communism still have been overthrown so rapidly and
enthusiastically in those countries following glasnost? Would the common people of
Eastern Europe and Mongolia have been motivated to take to the streets in such numbers
for the abstract goals of a free-market economy and democratic institutions, without the
added push of reclaiming lost cultural forms and values?
This brings us back to our “why” question from the introduction. If imposed,
foreign-influenced, modernizing cultural change is so clearly deleterious to a regime’s
popular support, why did the Soviet leaders and their satellite governments pursue it so
doggedly for so many years? In this case study, we identified a few specific motives
behind Mongolia’s cultural policies: Stalin’s cultural chauvinism, the Soviets’ need to
satisfy their own domestic audience back home by expanding Russian culture beyond its
borders, and Marxist-Leninist theory which viewed the “withering away of the nation-
91
state” as a necessary hurdle on the road to modernization and true communism. The
Mongolian political leaders and bureaucrats who assisted in implementing these policies
seem to have been motivated primarily by self-preservation, after witnessing the fate of
their more nationalistic predecessors during the 1930s purges, and also by certain
Russophilic sentiments in the case of devoted Muscovite cadres like Tsedenbal.
The cultural transformation imposed on Mongolia was repeated throughout the
USSR’s various republics and satellite states, although Mongolia arguably suffered the
worst. As the earliest and most culturally coherent satellite state of the Soviet bloc, it was
unlucky enough to experience the brutal nationalist purges of the 1930s, when Stalinism
and Zhdanovist cultural policies were in full swing. Thus the regime’s motives for
imposing cultural change were highly contingent on its particular historical
circumstances; yet these motives were hardly unique. A similarly chauvinistic and
“modernizing” rationale can be observed throughout the Soviet bloc, as well as in the
gender equality laws imposed on occupied Afghanistan in 2002, mentioned in the
introduction.
Also in the introduction, it was predicted that citizens will have a harder time
accepting their ruling ideology if it is perceived to have been imported from outside —
particularly if the receiving nation has suffered greatly under a foreign-imposed ideology
or political order in the past. The experiences of the Soviet bloc states provide abundant
evidence of this phenomenon. Even Mother Russia itself was not immune; as Pipes notes,
for “neo-Slavophiles like Alexander Solzhenitsyn… the whole problem in Russia lay in
Marxism, which they saw as a virus brought from the West and lacking roots in Russia’s
own past.” (Pipes 1996, 30) Ultimately, the foreign origins of communist ideology made
92
local populations more willing to point out its flaws and begrudge acknowledging its
successes. Even in Russia, the heart of the Soviet empire, when things got really bad the
people readily turned on their own ideology by emphasizing its foreign roots.
Mongolians did not invent democracy, but they have given it their own unique
flavor, with a rich media environment and an inventive civil society. They found ways to
trace elements of early democracy in the institutions of Genghis Khan’s Great Horde.
Their modern democracy and its institutions were not installed by any overbearing
Western provisional government, but rather were achieved through Mongolians’ own
struggles – through hunger strikes, mass rallies, long political meetings, and hard-won
compromises. The two dominant parties trade power peaceably back and forth, and while
they frequently disagree on many political and economic points, both are careful to pay
due diligence to the preservation of Mongolia’s cultural distinctiveness and traditional
way of life. The results speak for themselves – one of the most stable polities among the
Third Wave transition countries. Mongolians can and do participate in labor strikes and
protest actions, but there are no serious demands for regime change; even the most
politically disgruntled among them accept the democratic government system as “the
only game in town.”
The Mongolian case demonstrates the importance of taking the long view of a
nation’s cultural evolution over time. Cultural policies do not exist in a vacuum, but are
perceived relative to the policies that came before, which modulate the public’s
willingness to accept them and respond to them. If the previous regime imposed
overbearing internationalist, modernizing policies at the expense of national
distinctiveness and cultural pride, as was the case in much of the Soviet bloc, then the
93
new regime must take pains to restore what was lost or risk losing popular support and
being overthrown in turn. If, however, a state has just come off of a long period of highly
nationalistic, culturally conservative policies that have become directly associated with
disastrous economic or military failures – Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany come to
mind – the people will be unmoved by cultural restoration policies and may even actively
oppose them. This point will be further elaborated in subsequent chapters.
In terms of our key independent variables, Communist Mongolia was characterized
by very severe cultural policies moving in a modernizing cultural direction, with
extremely low national ownership of the ruling ideology. Post-transition, democratic
Mongolia saw relatively mild cultural policies moving in a decidedly traditionalizing
direction relative to what had come before, and moderate national ownership of the ruling
ideology aided by some creative re-interpretations of the democratic character of
Chinggis Khan’s empire. In terms of our dependent variable – revolutionary potential –
we can estimate that the public’s revolutionary potential in Communist Mongolia was
quite high, judging from the level of underground dissident activity and the speed with
which the first student protests gathered massive, broad-based popular support in 1990
(effectively the first moment that such protests became possible, due to Soviet ideological
softening under glasnost and perestroika). By contrast, the new Mongolian democracy
has remained stable through some hair-raising early economic crises. Mongolians today
frequently take to the streets or social media to express their displeasure with the
government’s environmental and trade policies as well as its endemic corruption, but
nobody seriously challenges the legitimacy of the current government. In this sense,
94
Mongolian society under the new democracy demonstrates very low revolutionary
potential.
In the next chapter, we will consider a case that is in many ways Mongolia’s
doppleganger – another East Asian communist regime engineered by Soviet military
advisors, with similar political and economic institutions, but which took a different
direction in terms of cultural policy and ideological ownership, with dramatically
different results for regime longevity.

95
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Communism would be difficult to resurrect; but the burden of the past lies heavy.
COMMENTARY-NEW YORK-AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE-, 101, 30-38.
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Mongolia." Journal of Asian Economics 23.2 (2012): 146-156.
Radchenko, Sergey. 2012. "Carving up the Steppes: Borders, Territory and Nationalism
in Mongolia, 1943-1949." Eurasia Border Review 3, Special Issue: 9-31.
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Papers, 31(2), 157-176.
Rossabi, Morris. Modern Mongolia: from khans to commissars to capitalists. Univ of
California Press, 2005.
Sanders, Alan. Historical Dictionary of Mongolia. Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Schatz, Edward. "Access by accident: legitimacy claims and democracy promotion in
authoritarian Central Asia." International Political Science Review 27.3 (2006):
263-284.
Szalontai, Balazs. “From the Demolition of Monasteries to the Installation of Neon
Lights: The Politics of Urban Construction in the Mongolian People’s Republic.”
Wongsurawat, Wasana (ed.), Sites of Modernity: Asian Cities in the Transitory
Moments of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism. Vol. 1. Springer, 2016 161-178.
Tucker, Robert C. 1967. "The Deradicalization of Marxist Movements." American
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Foreign Affairs 60, no. 2: 414-435.
97
White, Stephen. 2001. Communism and its Collapse. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

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Appendix I: Mongolia Interview Subjects

Solongo Jambaa: Filmmaker; graduate of Moscow Film University Institute of
Cinematography; participant in 1990 protest movement; Founder and Chairman of the
KUDS Mongolian Film Institute of cinematography; Director of the Mongol film state-
owned factory.

Boldbaatar Jigjidiin: Historian; "Honored Worker of Science" at the Academy of
Sciences in Ulaanbaaatar; PhD in History from Soviet Communist Party Central
Committee Academy of Sciences 1991; wrote provocative tracts for dissident newspapers
in 1980s; participated in glasnost movement as a student in USSR; author of “The Eight-
hundredth Anniversary of Chinggis Khan: The Revival and Suppression of Mongolian
National Consciousness.’”

Ankhbayar Dagdan: Was Party Secretary in the reform government; now heads the
Policy Department for the Democratic Party.

Bum-Ochir Dulam: TV pundit and well-known professor of Social Anthropology at the
National University of Mongolia; 2006 PhD from Cambridge.

Duger Yadam: A son of a well-off Mongolian herding family who were repressed as
kulaks in the 1930s and sent to collective farm; worked as a translator and traveled to the
USSR for university; participated in the 1990 protests; from 1990 was provincial
Democratic Party leader; now works with the Democratic Party helping track down and
record family histories of surviving victims of political repression.

Tamir Chultemsuren: Political sociologist at National University of Mongolia;
consultant at Independent Research Institute of Mongolia; Author, “Mass demonstration
and regime change in socialist Mongolia: Galactic policy against radial polity.”

Tsendpurev Tsegmid: freelance artist and curator based in Ulaanbaatar; born 1980; PhD
in contemporary art practice from Leeds; research focuses on modern Mongolian national
identity and its artistic representation in UK, contests existing stereotypes of Mongolness.

Purev Dolgorjav: Soviet-trained painter, Vanjil Arts Centre; Born 1958.

Oyungerel Tsedevdamba former Democratic Party Representative; former Minister
of Culture, Tourism and Sports; author and former protest participant (interviewed via e-
mail)

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Chapter 3: Juche Cultural Policy and the Puzzle of North Korean
Regime Survival

Introduction: The Surprising Longevity of the North Korean Regime

Few analysts predicted the dramatic events of the early 1990s, when communist
regimes rapidly collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and long-dormant
nationalism came to the fore in countries newly carved out of the Soviet bloc. As if to
make up for lost time, observers then confidently predicted imminent regime collapse in
the remaining communist states — particularly the economically beleaguered Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) (Manning 1993, Rosenberger 1994, Eberstadt
1999). They were wrong again; by the early 2000s the more honest among them were
revising their estimates of the North’s imminent demise and pondering where they went
wrong (Eberstadt 2004). Popular explanations for the DPRK’s continued longevity are
chiefly focused on the state’s draconian internal control mechanisms (Lankov 2008,
Byman and Lind 2010, Saxonberg 2013), their skilled use of an aggressive nuclear
weapons program to extract concessions from the international community (Cha 2002,
McCormack 2004), or foreign antagonism helping to preserve a garrison state mentality
(Cumings 2013).
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This chapter applies our theoretical framework on cultural policies to the case of
North Korea, and in doing so develops an alternative explanation for how the DPRK has
been able to survive while other Stalin-installed regimes have failed: the relative lack of
cultural repression. Specifically, I hypothesize that the DPRK remains strong in part
because its ruling ideology has historically swum with the current of nationalism and
traditional culture, rather than trying to swim against it like the other Soviet bloc regimes.
The North Korean case also sets the stage for a comparison with the cultural policies of
South Korea, the subject of the next chapter. By taking two cases involving the same
Korean people starting from the same baseline level of national consciousness and state
development, we can clearly see how the same people respond differently to different
cultural policies. Through the added dimension of state cultural policies, we can better
explain how it is that the impoverished, isolated, communist North Korean regime
remained remarkably stable for decades, while the capitalist, relatively wealthy South fell
prone to incessant protest movements and unrest, culminating in the massive democratic
movement that felled the South Korean military dictatorship in the 1980s.
North Korea is the “dog that didn’t bark” among my selected case studies; there is
no evidence of any significant public opposition to the government since the Kim Il Sung
regime was consolidated through a series of purges in the 1950s. While valid
observational research within the country is effectively impossible, there is sufficient data
from defector testimony and historical evidence to reasonably claim that domestic dissent
has remained negligible, even during the critical years of the Soviet collapse. Like
Mongolia, North Korea sent its best and brightest to study in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe up to and during perestroika; yet only a few returning North Korean
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students attempted to reproduce the rebellious spirit they had witnessed abroad, and their
activities were limited to some anti-government pamphleteering and minor student
debates (Becker 2005, 302; Martin 2004, 543-550). While other Soviet bloc states were
falling one by one to mass protests and labor strikes, North Korea remained largely
quiescent, even as its economy collapsed and its people starved on a massive scale. Food
riots occurred in several places in the mid-1990s, but these were directed solely at local
distribution centers and failed to expand into a broader anti-government movement. Since
1995, over 20,000 North Koreans have successfully defected to South Korea, where they
have been encouraged to speak freely about possible signs of resistance against the
regime. And yet, the best they could offer were scattered reports of a steel mill rebellion
in 1998 and some rare instances of graffiti or vandalism on statues. While there have
been some reliable reports of elite level coup attempts in the early 1990s (Becker 2005,
302-306), there has been no sign of organized dissent or unrest at the grassroots level on
a scale that would pose a threat to the regime. Even most defectors confessed that they
had never considered political protest themselves prior to defecting and still felt
uncomfortable condemning the North Korean leadership.
It is often claimed that the North Korean people would like to resist their
government, but are effectively prevented from doing so by the regime’s draconian
repression measures. There are several problems with such arguments. First, if all it takes
is draconian repression and a gulag system, why did the other Soviet bloc regimes fail to
do the same? Second, the experience of the Japanese colonial government from 1910-
1945 proves that Koreans are capable of mounting repeated, determined acts of overt and
covert resistance even under circumstances of strict information control and draconian
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repression (more on this in the next chapter). Third, as argued in the introduction, even in
cases of extreme repression people who truly wish to oppose their government will find
ways to do so, through such tools as Scott’s “weapons of the weak” –grumbling, coded
performances, non-participation, anonymous acts of sabotage, satire, and so on. Defector
reports of such behaviors are vanishingly rare. Repression and fear are undeniably
important tools in the North Korean government’s arsenal of state control, but they alone
cannot account for the remarkable docility of the twenty-two million people living under
the DPRK regime.
As the Mongolian chapter demonstrated, most Soviet-backed regimes relentlessly
repressed nationalism and traditional culture, even when such policies were massively
unpopular and antithetical to regime stability. As a result, from the beginning the Soviet-
friendly regimes of Eastern Europe suffered a deficit of legitimacy among their own
people. The only Stalin-installed regime where cultural de-nationalization seems not to
have been effectively imposed is North Korea, for reasons we will explore later in this
chapter.
It is striking to consider that of the remaining communist polities — China,
Vietnam, Laos, Cuba and North Korea — none relied upon Stalin for their original
institutional construction, save North Korea alone. And, as we shall see, North Korea
escaped Stalin’s culturally transformative policies due to special historical contingencies.
By contrast, nearly all of the communist states and breakaway Soviet republics that were
taken down by mass protest movements in 1989-1991 shared the common experience of
Stalin-directed cultural transformation early on and continued Soviet cultural guidance
throughout their tenures, establishing an embedded public resentment for a ruling
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ideology that was perceived as a Russian import. Indeed, this may be one of the few
features that holds constant across the fallen communist polities of Eastern Europe, the
Baltics, the republics of the Black Sea and Central Asia, and Mongolia.
The North Korean case demonstrates the skillful application of a traditionalizing
cultural policy: a government harkening back to a real or imagined past, making
ostentatiously efforts to preserve traditional arts and ways of life as a bulwark against
new ideas and foreign cultures. While North Korea pursued military and economic
modernization alongside its Soviet bloc peers through centrally-planned programs for
heavy and light industry, it quickly reversed course on policies of cultural modernization
and de-nationalization. While the slogan for the rest of the Soviet bloc was “workers of
the world unite,” the buzzwords for North Korea were “self-reliance” and “in our own
style.”
In the introductory chapter we predicted that any new ideology will have a much
harder time achieving popular acceptance if it is perceived to have been imported from
outside, and that people will endure greater hardship and stomach more hypocrisy in the
name of achieving the ultimate victory of a “homegrown” ideology or political order
rather than an imported one. As the following pages will show, North Korea effectively
seized ownership of its ruling ideology to a degree unique in the Soviet bloc, and
ultimately, that made all the difference for its regime survival.

Background Reading:
Applying Theories of Communism to the North Korean Case
As has been observed, most postmortems of the failures of communism have
focused on the more accessible and satisfyingly vanquished Eastern European cases.
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North Korea has been largely ignored or dismissed as “basket case” of runaway
Stalinism, and this has left a sizable lacuna in the communism and post-communism
literature. Now is an appropriate time to briefly examine the North Korean case in light of
the leading theories of communism’s collapse. As the last chapter mentioned, most
assessments of the causes of failure in the Soviet bloc have focused on the economic
strain of central planning (Kornai 1992, Solnick 1998, Brown 2001), the political strain
of repression (Tucker 1981, Saxonberg 2013), or institutional rigidity (White 2000,
Dimitrov 2013). This leaves the question of why some of the poorest (North Korea,
Laos), most repressive (North Korea, Cuba, China), and most rigid (North Korea, Cuba)
communist states have survived intact. Indeed, North Korea’s continued survival is a
thorn in the side of many post-communism theories.
Solnick (1998) argues that “the Soviet system did not fall victim to stalemate at the
top or revolution from below, but to opportunism from within”; more specifically,
Gorbachev's reforms affected institutional incentive structures in the USSR in a
revolutionary way, which resulted in the disintegration of the structural controls that kept
civil servants loyal to the state. In short, "Soviet institutions did not simply atrophy or
dissolve but were actively pulled apart by officials at all levels seeking to extract assets
that were in any way fungible" (Solnick 1998: 7). While Solnick’s analysis focuses on the
single case of the Soviet Union itself, there is nothing to suggest that it should not apply
to Soviet satellites where the same assumption holds that individual bureaucracies, built
upon the Soviet model, were primarily self-interested and highly opportunistic. This
certainly seems to be the case throughout Eastern Europe in the latter stages, and in
Tsedenbal-era Mongolia as well. It could be argued that North Korea, having a strongly
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hierarchical bureaucratic structure and being insulated from Gorbachev’s reforms, thus
escaped this disintegration of structural controls. However, accounts of high-level
defectors suggest that North Korea has been plagued by bureaucratic theft, graft, and
misreporting on a grand scale from as early as the 1970s,
34
and Lankov reports that
“official corruption started to grow exponentially” from the early 1990s (Lankov 2013,
77), alongside a steady weakening of information control that he terms “the natural death
of North Korean Stalinism.” This raises the question of how the North Korean regime
continues to survive under such kleptocratic practices in the absence of its once-
formidable surveillance mechanism. What glue is holding the North Korean people
together under the same corrupt, malfunctioning system that fell apart so quickly
elsewhere in the communist bloc?
Saxonberg argues that communist states transition through several phases of
legitimacy. In the early totalitarian stage, a regime bases its legitimacy on a superior
ideology with a historical destiny to triumph after an initial period of hardship. When
decades pass without such a victory and the regime’s ideological hypocrisy becomes
apparent, it enters the late post-totalitarian phase. In this later phase the regime becomes
“exhausted,” relaxes its ideological demands, and forms a new basis of legitimacy around
a "pragmatic acceptance" that "given certain external and internal constraints, the regime
is performing reasonably well" (Saxonberg 2013: 18). China can be considered a modern-
day example of this. When the economy fails in a late post-totalitarian state, Saxonberg

34
See “N.Koreans Tell of Rampant Corruption in Crumbling State,” Daily NK, July 12,
2014 (http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/07/12/2014071200365.html,
accessed 7/12/2014). Abundant anecdotal evidence is also available in Korean at the
defector-run blog Nambuk Story — see for example
http://blog.donga.com/nambukstory/archives/649 (accessed 7/12/2014)
106
asserts, the regime loses its final basis for pragmatic acceptance and must either collapse
or compromise with opposition movements.
Within his taxonomy, Saxonberg labels North Korea as "totalitarian patrimonialist"
on the basis of leader Kim Il Sung's extensive placement of blood relatives in top
positions and having "possibly the most totalitarian system the world has ever known.”
(Saxonberg 2013: 124) Saxonberg concludes that “The degree of totalitarian repression is
so great that the regime still enjoys hegemony, and it need not worry about its loss of
legitimacy.” (127) However, the supporting evidence he offers comes from older sources
that predate the extensive sociopolitical changes that have occurred since the famine of
the late 1990s (Haggard and Noland 2001, Lankov 2013). Even if we accept Saxonberg’s
characterization, it still leaves the question of how North Korea has managed to maintain
this totalitarian repression for so many decades, when Saxonberg himself acknowledges
that “eventually... totalitarian regimes start losing some of their power, since they cannot
rely on mass mobilization campaigns indefinitely.” (Saxonberg 2013: 13) If its basis for
legitimacy has in fact changed from ideology to pragmatic acceptance, we must question
how the regime justifies the current level of economic hardship as “performing
reasonably well.”
Thus, the DPRK regime poses a challenge to Saxonberg’s model, as it continues its
unchallenged grip on power in spite of the steady erosion of its core ideological
principles, the colossal economic failure in the late 1990s, and the regime’s failing
capacity to enforce totalitarian control measures. The following section will argue that
the DPRK’s legitimacy rests on a third element, that of strong national ownership of the
ruling ideology — based on a long-established and as-yet-unchallenged mythology that
107
Kim Il Sung and his descendants alone have defended the Korean nation and Korean
traditional culture where other nation-states (especially South Korea) have been swept
away by modernity and Westernization.
The idea of nationalist ideology aiding regime survival is not new — Armstrong
(2013) presents a similar argument in his explanation of North Korea’s continued
survival. That is, by doubling down on strict adherence to the state’s founding myths and
ideological purity at a time when others were embracing reform — a process Armstrong
refers to as “ideological introversion” — the state was able to withstand revisionist
pressures. However, Armstrong assigns a strong degree of agency to the DPRK
leadership in deliberately choosing and enforcing this policy: "The collapse of East
Germany, absorbed into its capitalist rival and fraternal state, was a chilling precedent for
North Korea. As the North Korean leadership saw it, the downfall of East European
communism was the direct result of materialist corruption and the erosion of ideology."
(Armstrong 2013: 101) Such a characterization raises further questions about how the
DPRK uniquely seized upon such a strategy. If regime survival were simply a matter of
choosing to resist reform and cleaving to ideological foundations, why didn’t other
communist states do the same? Was the DPRK leadership simply benefiting from “last
mover advantage” in observing the havoc wrought by reform in other countries, or did
they possess some foresight about the perils of ideological softening that the others
lacked? My argument differs from Armstrong’s in that it focuses more on structural
conditions that enabled North Korea to develop a nationalist version of communist
ideology, whereas other communist regimes had no choice but to follow Stalin’s
internationalist ideological line, whether they wanted to or not.
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One of the most intensive chroniclers of ideological change in the Soviet bloc is
Tismaneanu, who has argued that an inevitable transition from “revisionism to apostasy”
among the intellectual class was a key enabling factor for later reform and transition. In
attempting to accommodate cases of persistent communist rule in Asia, he concludes that
China was able to coopt its revisionist elites after Tiananmen, while North Korea remains
“the paradigmatic case of unreformed communism, what I have labeled national
Stalinism.” He further explains that “Dynastic, autarkic, terroristic communist rule was
the North Korean party’s answer to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other words,
hyperradicalization was their survival strategy at the end of the Cold War.” (Tismaneanu
in Dimitrov 2013: 68) While this assessment of the regime’s character seems accurate at
least up to the crisis and transformations of the mid-1990s, it does not answer the
question of how North Korea was able to maintain this level of “hyperradicalization”
while so many other communist states were obliged to de-radicalize over time. Like
Armstrong, Tismaneanu also attributes regime survival in both China and North Korea to
conscious choices on the part of the leadership: “the Soviet example served as a lesson
for the Chinese leadership, as the latter avoided open and public de-Stalinization (de-
Maoization)” (Tismaneanu 71). The problem with using deliberate policy choices as a
causal mechanism for regime survival is that it implies a higher level of foresight and
self-awareness on the part of the leadership than may be deserved. It also implies that
those systems that collapsed might have survived had they been gifted with cleverer (or
better informed) leaders. Tismaneanu’s conclusion provokes the question: if regime
survival in the Soviet bloc was simply a matter of the leadership making a conscious
choice to proactively crack down on revisionism and hew to a radicalized ideological
109
line, why did other communist regimes not take the same approach? What enabled North
Korean party leaders to sustain such consistently radical ideologies where other regimes
relented?

As the Mongolia chapter has shown, in those states where communist regimes were
set up under Stalin’s heavy guidance — which is to say, most of the Soviet bloc — there
was a very low level of national ownership of communist ideology. That is to say,
communism was portrayed as a foreign invention, and due homage was paid to its foreign
creators — Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. North Korea was no different initially, but
within a few years after liberation it was already distancing itself from the cult of Stalin
and building a new personality cult around its own leader (Becker 2005, 109-113). By the
mid-1960s, with the consolidation of the Kim family regime and the propagation of North
Korea’s own “Juche” ideology, the state had managed to very thoroughly appropriate
national ownership of its ruling ideology, erasing all mention of communism’s foreign
founding fathers in the process (Tertitskiy 2016). Some other communist leaders such as
Ceausescu, Tito, and Hoxha were also able to insert themselves into the popular narrative
of their ruling ideology’s development, but none of them came close to matching North
Korea’s level of historical amnesia regarding its ideological origins.
Saxonberg does touch on the issue of “homegrown” versus installed regimes and
the correlation with regime longevity. His remarks on the subject are worth quoting in
full:
In contrast to the argument … that "homegrown" communist regimes have
been able to maintain power because they retain the loyalty of their military
— this book argues that any communist regime, whether homegrown or not,
is likely to lose power if it has been without ideological legitimacy for quite
110
a while, and has subsequently lost its pragmatic acceptance besides.
Homegrown regimes have fallen in such diverse countries as the Soviet
Union, Albania, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, and eventually
Serbia/Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, not all of the remaining Communist regimes
are homegrown, as the North Korean regime is not technically homegrown,
despite its fervent nationalism. The Kim dynasty was placed in power by the
Soviet Union in 1948, and only survived the Korean War because of Mao's
decision to send Chinese troops. (Saxonberg 2013: 20-21)
Several interesting points here deserve closer examination. True, North Korea was
not originally a “homegrown” regime as the term is generally understood. But in
subsequent years it has assumed a level of national ownership of its ideology that
surpasses even that of the Soviet Union. The Soviets, after all, never tried to disguise the
fact that their ideology originated in the writings of Marx and Engels — two Germans,
and one of them a Jew. In fact, popular opposition to communism and anti-Semitism have
gone hand in hand from the earliest days of the Soviet Union up to the present era.
35
And,
Russian opponents of Stalinism were quick to point out Stalin’s Georgian ethnicity.
Russians were happy to take ownership of the international communist movement when
things were going well, but those who opposed the ideology always had foreign
scapegoats to condemn for leading their countrymen astray. North Koreans today have no
such scapegoat, having erased all traces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and the word
“communism” itself from their lexicon (Cheong 2000, Lankov 2013). When one focuses
on the degree of “national ownership” of the ruling ideology, rather than whether a
communist regime was originally “homegrown” or not, the correlation to regime survival
becomes much more clear. It is also significant to note that North Korea also has a much
higher level of continuity from its current leaders to the foundations of its ruling ideology

35
For a good overview of these issues see “Glasnost, Perestroika and Antisemitism,” by
Zvi Gitelman, Foreign Affairs, Spring 1991
(http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/46574/zvi-gitelman/glasnost-perestroika-and-
antisemitism).
111
than the Gorbachev leadership had with the founders of Soviet ideology. As Cohen
remarked of the 1980s Soviet Union, “[A]nti-Stalinism remains the only viable ideology
of Communist reform from above” (Cohen 1986: 126) — implying that at least the Soviet
leaders did have one viable ideology of reform that did not involve directly condemning
their own basis of legitimacy.

North Korea and Mongolia: The Case for Comparison
Though it is hard to find a suitable comparison case to North Korea, many of its
formative circumstances and early institutional structures bear resemblance to
Communist Mongolia. As such, it provides an interesting counterpoint to the previous
chapter – a look at how things might have gone differently for the MPR had Mongolia’s
leaders attained greater ideological and cultural autonomy.
Both Korea and Mongolia held subordinate places on the Chinese periphery for
centuries before the modern era, although Mongolia was a much later and more reluctant
participant in the Sinocentric order (Kang 2010). The two countries share passing
cultural, linguistic and religious similarities; both speak languages originating from the
Altaic language group, and both have strong Buddhist traditions — albeit of very
different sects. Both had long, bitter histories of colonial subjugation and cultural
destruction immediately preceding the communist era, making them particularly hostile
to foreign political interference. Looking at the geopolitical layout of the Cold War era, it
is intellectually tempting to draw parallels between the divided Mongolian nation (the
China-controlled Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, the nominally independent state
of “outer” Mongolia, and the Buryiat-Mongol Soviet Autonomous Republic) and the
divided Korean nation (South Korea, North Korea and the Korean autonomous prefecture
112
of Yanbian in China), both nations torn apart through the machinations of foreign
powers. As fragments of once much larger and grander nations, both were primed for
nationalist and irredentist impulses. Both the Mongolian People’s Republic (founded in
1921) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (founded in 1948) gained their
independence with Soviet help, and upon achieving independence both Mongolia and
North Korea developed their ruling communist parties (hereafter MPRP and KWP,
respectively) under Soviet guidance. The foundational leaders of both states (Choibalsan
and Kim Il Sung, respectively) were not the Soviets’ first choice but climbed to power
over the corpses of more politically experienced, ideologically informed, nationalistic
predecessors who proved too difficult for the Soviets to work with (Genden and Cho
Man-shik, respectively) (Radchenko 2012, Lankov 2002). Both Choibalsan and Kim
were nationalist war heroes with strong irredentist ambitions but little domestic political
experience, highly dependent on Soviet support at the outset. Yet these two Northeast
Asian Soviet bloc states took very different policy directions regarding national culture
and modernization.
When the Soviets took over the northern half of the Korean peninsula in 1945, they
enjoyed many of the same advantages as when they undertook their first Asian satellite
state-building project in Mongolia in the 1920s. Coming off of 35 years as a subordinate
colony of fascist Japan, the last fifteen of which were spent in forced servitude to the
Japanese war machine, Korea was ripe for a salvation myth, and the invading Soviets
who took control north of the 38th parallel could credibly set themselves up as saviors of
Korean independence and warriors defending the cause of national self-determination.
Given this advantageous setup and the near-total absence of any domestic political force
113
powerful enough to compete at the time, the Soviets should have enjoyed as much leeway
in 1945 North Korea as they had in 1920s Mongolia to set up a satellite socialist state in
accordance with their doctrinal preferences. As in Mongolia, they installed as leader a
military hero with strong ties to the Soviet Union (Kim Il Sung) who initially had little
independent support in his own country to head the new communist party and
government, and set about restructuring the political and economic systems in the Soviet
image.
Although Soviet advisors had a role in the formation of both states and the selection
of their leaders, it must be remembered that the transformations took place roughly 20
years apart, and the Soviets of 1924 had a very different character and different priorities
than the Soviets of 1945 — although Stalin played a dominant role in both places. Also,
China did not exist as a rival sponsor state in Mongolia’s nascent phase, and at any rate
Mongolians would not have accepted any political alliance with their recently ousted
oppressors. For the purposes of this paper, I treat 1924 Mongolia and 1945 North Korea
as very roughly equivalent entities in terms of their level of political development, sense
of national identity, recent history of colonial subjugation, anxiety about foreign
interference, and near-total dependence on Soviet support.
For simplicity, I have divided the histories of both countries into roughly equivalent
stages of state formation and cultural transformation which proceeded at different periods
in time. The following chart should be helpful for reference in the next section.

114
Figure 9: Chronological Comparison of Mongol-NK Political Development

Mongolia North Korea
Early state formation; achieving national liberation,
forming the party and military bureaucracies;
Soviet-guided land reform; some toleration of
nationalism and irredentism
1924-1934 1945-1950
Purge period; core party leadership crystalizes as
rivals are eliminated
1934-1938 1953-1965
Frozen period; purges abate; personality cult takes
form; Party extends control to all aspects of life;
economy stagnates and hardship sets in
1938-1954 1965-1994
First “great leader” dies; leadership transition and
ideological softening
1954 1994
Regime collapse and transition 1990-91 ????
It must be acknowledged that cross-time comparisons of this sort are inherently
dangerous. Similar though the circumstances may seem, East Asia was not the same
place in 1924 as it was in 1945. This period saw the devastating ordeal of the Second
World War, the opening salvos of the Cold War, and rapid innovations in the tools of
warfare, communications, and political control. Global awareness of and attitudes toward
the concept of “communism” were evolving. The Soviet leadership underwent significant
ideological and political changes between 1924 and 1945. Stalin himself was not the
same man in 1945 as in 1924. With this important caveat in mind, I maintain that the
115
Mongolian case still offers valuable insights for the North Korean non-revolution;
nevertheless I will proceed with caution in comparing the two cases, making every
attempt to acknowledge differences where they occur.
Background Condition: Escape from Soviet Cultural Hegemony
The international power dynamics of early 20th-century East Asia afforded the
Soviet Union the opportunity to conduct two nearly unimpeded experiments in social,
political and economic re-engineering: Mongolia, beginning with Sukhbaatar’s Soviet-
aided achievement of national independence in 1921-4, and North Korea, beginning with
the division of the Korean peninsula in 1945-8. Soviet advisors entered into Mongolia
and North Korea with similar degrees of ignorance about the local culture, history, and
traditional practices.
All else being equal, we might expect that the Soviets would have followed a
similar path in reconstructing culture and identity in the new state of North Korea as they
did in Mongolia twenty years earlier. They had few support staff capable of advising
them to do otherwise. “Among the people who in the late summer of 1945, much to their
own surprise, found themselves rulers of North Korea, there were no specialists in
international relations and foreign affairs, let alone experts on Korea... Most Party
functionaries, military and intelligence officers of Korean extraction perished during the
great purge of 1936-8.” (Lankov 2002: 4) Stalin had purged all Korean members of the
Comintern out of fear that some Soviet Koreans might be Japanese agents or
sympathizers, and had also ordered the forced deportation of 200,000 ethnic Koreans
from the Far East to Central Asia (Cumings 2013:225). This left the Soviets woefully
lacking in both experienced Korea hands and Soviet-affiliated ethnic Korean cadres.
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The initial Soviet occupation was led by Russian military personnel charged with
pacifying the countryside and accepting the Japanese surrender, and thus a handful of
officers and military commissars soon found themselves assigned a task for which they
were woefully unprepared, setting up a new social and economic system for North Korea.
They found their most capable early allies to be Korean nationalist leaders, particularly
the elderly Christian independence activist Cho Man-shik. “[T]he Soviet authorities had
to take into account the fact that the influence of Communists in the north at the time was
still insignificant. Using the prestige of Cho Man-shik and other well-known nationalist
leaders seemed very useful.” (Lankov 2002: 15) Cho was a Tokyo-educated Christian
with strong pacifist and anti-communist convictions. According to Lankov, the Soviets
supported Cho’s faction reluctantly only until the Korean communist party had
consolidated enough power to rule effectively without them. This closely follows the
pattern that was occurring around the same time in post-war Eastern Europe. However,
Cho and his nationalist faction quickly grew so recalcitrant and difficult to work with
that, after just four months, the Soviets purged Cho and secured the top party and
government leadership positions for “their man” Kim Il Sung, then a captain in the Soviet
army and a legendary name in Korea’s anti-Japanese resistance.
In Eastern Europe at this time, the nascent communist parties were struggling with
problematic internal dynamics: “Here and there in the Communist parties there was
tension between those who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union (the
‘Muscovites’) and those who had stayed behind participating in the resistance movements
(the ‘natives’).” (Gati 1990: 25) Muscovite cadres depended on the good graces of the
Soviet Union to maintain their faction’s status and avoid purges. In the KWP, by
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comparison, such native-foreign tension was not an issue. By the end of WWII the only
organized communists remaining on the Korean peninsula were operating in the South;
the northern communists were nearly all returned exiles with Soviet or Chinese
affiliations (Lankov 2002). Therefore, in Korea, the Muscovite-native tension Gati spoke
of could express itself purely as a North-South divide. Once the country was divided by
the war, it was easy to target and purge the southern “native” communists, leaving the
party firmly in the hands of Kim Il Sung’s clique of formerly exiled partisans. Thus
somewhat ironically, the hegemony of the Soviet faction in the ranks of the KWP
empowered them to gradually take a more independent stance from Moscow.
From the moment of its creation, the new Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK) found itself competing with the US-supported Republic of Korea for the title of
sole legitimate government of the Korean nation and preserver of traditional Korean
culture. On account of the social pressures of division, then, we might expect that the
Soviets would have tempered their demands for cultural transformation in Korea. Yet
1923 Mongolia was a divided nation as well, and by this logic the MPR ought to have
faced a similar pressures to stake its claim to legitimacy on the basis of fidelity to
traditional culture. Based on initial conditions at the time they fell under Soviet
patronage, then, we might expect Mongolia and North Korea to follow very similar
trajectories of cultural assimilation and institutional transformation.
History intervened in the early 1950s. The Korean War, in which the Soviet Union
offered only material support while Chinese “volunteers” fought and died by the
hundreds of thousands to save the DPRK regime, ensured that China and North Korea
would have a much closer relationship from that point on. The timely death of Stalin in
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1953, just prior to the war’s end, and the subsequent de-Stalinization drive in the Soviet
Union prompted the DPRK, fearful for its own personality cult, to further distance itself
from its Russian sponsors and to purge all of the Soviet Korean advisors in the ranks of
government (Wada 2012: 83-86). Thereafter North Korea took a much more independent
line, continually playing the Soviets and the Chinese off each other for aid and other
benefits while resisting control by either side, until the eventual collapse of the Soviet
Union.
Cultural Policy in North Korea: Everything “In Our Own Style”
The Kim regime learned early on the political necessity of shaking off appearances
of dependency on foreign powers, even going so far as to modify old photographs to
remove the Soviet army insignia from Kim Il Sung’s uniform. Juche, the ideology
attributed to Kim Il Sung, went further than Stalinism or Maoism in shaking off its
philosophical roots and claiming originality. “Mao and Stalin were presented officially as
the successors of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as the best disciples of the dead Communist
sages... Kim Il Sung was never presented in such a way. North Korean propaganda of the
early 1950s sometimes referred to Kim Il Sung as ‘Stalin’s loyal disciple,’ but this was
done in the times when the alleged primacy of the Soviet Union still remained a core
element of the regime’s ideological discourse. Such references disappeared by the late
1950s.” (Lankov 2013: 50) Recurrent themes in North Korean propaganda are “in our
own way” (uri-shik) and “our nation by itself” (uri-nara-kkiri). The central theme of
juche (often mistranslated as “self-reliance,” the term literally means “the main subject”)
has little to do with independence from foreign aid, and everything to do with
independence from foreign ideas and influence. The term first appeared in an ideological
treatise attributed to Kim Il Sung in 1955:
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"What is the main subject (juche) of our party's ideological work? We are
not carrying out some other country's revolution, we are carrying out
Korea's revolution. It is this Korean revolution that is the main subject of
our party's ideological work… To make revolution in Korea, one must know
Korean history, geography, and customs. Only then can we educate our
people in an appropriate way and instill in them a deep love of the
motherland… If you go to an elementary school, the pictures on the walls
are all of foreigners like Mayakowsky and Pushkin; there is not a single
photo of a Korean. Raising children in this way, what sort of confidence will
they have in their nation? Some say the Soviet way is best, others say the
Chinese way is best; hasn't the time come to make our own way (uri-shik)?"
(“On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism in Establishing Juche in
Ideological Work,” Kim Il Sung, Speech to Party Propaganda Bureau, Dec
28, 1955. Published in Kim Il Sung Selected Works Vol 1, Pyongyang,
1960)
Kim Il Sung’s chief ideological officer, Hwang Jang Yop, dusted off this speech in
1960 and retroactively elevated it as the foundational moment of the Juche idea, which
came to be promoted as North Korea’s very own proprietary ideology and humanist
philosophy (Becker 2005, 109). As Kim Il Sung’s personality cult expanded throughout
the 1960s, references to Stalin were replaced by references to Kim, and references to
Marxism-Leninism were replaced by references to Juche.
It is not the intention of this paper to argue that Juche was truly a novel invention
sprung fully-formed from the mind of Kim Il Sung, a product of the ingenuity of the
superior Korean man, as the regime has painted it (Myers 2010). Rather, the point is that
most North Koreans have been effectively persuaded that this is the case, and in fact such
conviction was essential to cementing the connection between nationalism and single-
party communist rule in North Korea. If the KWP acknowledged that its founding
principles were rooted in a foreign ideology, or even a homegrown improvement upon a
foreign ideology, the Korean people would not have accepted it wholeheartedly —
particularly having only just shrugged off the yoke of Japanese fascism. In the years of
privation and rebuilding after the war, it was important for Koreans to believe that they
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were serving a fundamentally Korean ideology, a novel creation of a mythically gifted
Korean leader, which had now become a guiding light not only for Koreans but for
oppressed peoples around the world.
After shaking free of Soviet influence, consolidating his power base and
disseminating his own homegrown ideology, Kim Il Sung felt the need to dispose of the
evidence of his earlier connections with foreign ideology. Old periodicals were removed
from circulation because “during the 1970s and 1980s, the government did not want the
average North Korean exposed to the paeans Kim Il Sung used to deliver to the great
Soviet army and Comrade Stalin during the 1940s.” (Lankov 2013: 44) Kim’s Soviet
army affiliation was downplayed and his guerrilla activities within Korea’s borders were
exaggerated (Goncharov et al 1993). Early post-liberation photos of Kim Il Sung were
modified to remove his Soviet army insignia.
As in Mongolia, the new communist party in the DPRK also cracked down on
religion, but the effects in terms of stirring nationalist resentment were very different.
Korea had traditionally observed a mixture of the more relaxed Mahayana sect of
Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism, but from the 19th century Christian converts
increased, and by the end of the Japanese period Christianity had become identified with
nationalism and the intellectual class. The Communists cracked down on Buddhism and
Christianity alike; but the loss of Christianity, itself a foreign import, probably did not
resonate with conservative Koreans and nationalists as much as a more ancestral religious
tradition would have, and Buddhism did not permeate political and intellectual life as
much as it did in Mongolia. There is another reason why the loss of religion was not felt
as keenly in North Korea. Whereas in Mongolia religion was replaced with empty
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Marxist atheism, in North Korea it was replaced with Juche and Kimilsungism, a cult of
personality so strong it has been categorized as a religion in its own right,
36
with a
mythology bearing a more than passing resemblance to Christianity (Myers 2010), the
religion of Kim Il Sung’s parents.
Where the MPR was forced to cast aside nationalist historical narratives and heroes
like Chinggis Khan, in the DPRK traditional heroes were not so much suppressed as they
were replaced by the ultimate Korean hero, Kim Il Sung, and his ancestors. His great-
grandfather was said to have participated in the brief but fierce battle against the
American armed merchant ship General Sherman, his father and two uncles were
independence activists, and 8-year-old Kim Il Sung himself was said to have been a
leader of the anti-Japan movement that swept the nation on March 1st, 1919. Pre-modern
Korean heroes like Admiral Yi Sun Shin or King Sejong were not condemned so much as
they were overshadowed by the new, modern heroes.
Although the Soviets made no known attempt to alter the Korean script in the way
that the Mongolian script was altered, that does not mean that the language remained
unscathed. After seven decades of separation the two Koreas have developed separate
dialects, to the point that northern defectors in the South sometimes have difficulty
making themselves understood. The North has eschewed foreign loan words, creating its
own terms for modern technologies such as “cell phone” and “computer.” North Korea
also stopped using Chinese characters in their script, making pre-1945 texts
incomprehensible to most North Koreans today. North Korean language was also

36
The website www.adherents.com identifies Juche as the world’s 10th largest religion.
With 23 million adherents (the population of North Korea), if it were a religion it would
be larger than Judaism.
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deliberately manipulated to accommodate Kim Il Sung’s personality cult: “Kim was
always referred to in honorific verb forms. Although traditionally used for everyone in
authority, honorific performs were reserved exclusively for Kim during his lifetime,
setting him apart from all other people in authority in a major break from the past.”
(Hunter 1999: 16) This might seem a manipulation of traditional culture as egregious as
the transformation of Mongolian script. However, a key difference is that this change was
initiated autonomously by Koreans themselves, and had nothing to do with Russification
or Westernization of the language.
Not only was Korean culture protected from the transformative pressures of Soviet
internationalism, Soviet culture and ideology soon joined the list of banned foreign
influences deemed hazardous to the ideological purity of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea.
In the late 1960s, the authorities undertook a massive campaign aimed at the
physical destruction of the foreign books (largely Soviet and Japanese) that
were then privately owned by the North Koreans. In libraries, all foreign
publications of a non-technical nature were (and still are) to be kept in a
special section, with only people possessing a proper security clearance
allowed to peruse them. Remarkably, no exception was made for
publications of the “fraternal” communist countries: Moscow’s Pravda and
Peking’s People’s Daily were deemed to be potentially as subversive as the
Washington Post or Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo. (Lankov 2013: 44)
Through this overview of its early political development, we can trace the origins of
policies that put North Korea on a very different trajectory from Mongolia in terms of
determining the place of culture and nationalism under communism. But how is it
possible that two initially similar polities were able to take such divergent paths in terms
of cultural policy, particularly under the conformist structures of the Cold War? One
possibility lies in the different targets of political repression in the early formation of the
two regimes. In most of the Soviet bloc, the early consolidation period was marked by
brutal purges of party officials at the directive of Stalin himself. Stalin captured pre-
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existing local secret police and used them to eliminate those he saw as threats to Soviet
control (Gati 1990: 25). The purges of the Buddhist lamas and pan-Mongolian activists in
the 1930s clearly followed this model. By contrast, Stalin never personally directed
purges of any magnitude in North Korea. The DPRK certainly had its share of purges,
and it undeniably borrowed from Stalin’s playbook; but Stalin himself did not preside
over them. North Korea’s Great Terror did not begin until the end of the Korean War, and
did not truly pick up steam until the 1960s. When it did, the purges were conducted at
Kim Il Sung’s discretion and targeted challenges to his political authority. This resulted
in a different class of people being targeted; whereas Stalin’s victims in Eastern Europe
and Mongolia were often accused of “nationalist-deviationist” and “regressive” values,
the most popular charges in Kim Il Sung’s purges were “reactionary” and “imperialist
running dog.” As a nationalist folk hero himself, Kim was happy to encourage nationalist
sentiments as long as they conformed to the narrative he was constructing. Thus for
North Koreans, admiring or engaging with traditional culture did not pose a significant
liability to upward advancement, and the purges did not create an alienation between
traditional culture and the Party.
More importantly, the emergence of the PRC as a rival to the USSR, together with
the timely death of Stalin near the end of the Korean War, gave the Kim regime the
flexibility to pursue a much more independent course and to use nationalism and culture
to their advantage. Mongolia, by comparison, continued to be highly dependent on the
Soviet Union — and resistant to any hint of cooperation with China — throughout the
Cold War period. A large part of the explanation for this can be attributed to the early
start the Soviets had in their first satellite, the timing of the MPR’s state formation at the
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height of Stalin’s power, and the fact that no other neighboring power was in a position to
challenge Soviet influence in Mongolia for quite some time (certainly China was not a
rival). Another explanatory factor may be that Mongolia simply was not the geopolitical
prize that North Korea was; with no ports and few natural resources, there was little in
Mongolia to tempt any of the other great powers of the time to challenge Soviet
influence.
Whatever the case, Mongolia’s Soviet-educated political leaders and their Soviet
advisors continued to run the show in Mongolia more or less unchallenged until the end
of the Cold War, while North Korea soon found itself in the enviable position of being
courted by two communist giants, China and the USSR, playing one off against the other.
Among other things, this had an effect of putting Mongolia and North Korea on markedly
different trajectories in terms of their cultural policies. While Mongolian cultural
traditions and historical consciousness continued to be subverted to Soviet desires, the
DPRK came to brandish Korean cultural symbols as part of its campaign to claim
legitimacy as the true government of all Korean people.
As an example, consider how North Korea has woven traditional culture into its
victory myth in the anti-Japanese struggle. North Korea’s films and novels, which are all
commissioned and produced by the KWP, are replete with stories of wily Korean
partisans using their traditional know-how and magic to humiliate the Japanese. As one
example, the story “Woori ŭi mŏt” describes how partisans used a well-known traditional
folk dance, Don-dol-ra-ri, to disguise themselves when a troupe of Japanese soldiers
stumbled upon a clandestine meeting organized by Kim Jŏng Suk (Kim Jong Il's mother):
One day, [Kim] organized a secret gathering, disguised as a group of river
fishermen, between members of the Fatherland Independence Association
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and the son of the patriotic martyr Ri Jun, to convince him to join in the pan-
national struggle against Japanese imperialism. Little expecting that a
Japanese patrol would pass by...
Alerted to the danger, the Fatherland Independence Association members
spontaneously began dancing the "Don-dol-ra-ri." They mocked the bastards
with their bright, cheerful and frank dance moves, as Mother [Kim Jŏng
Suk] joined in with the others beating the tune in the gourd pot rhythm
section.
The bastards, having no clue, turned and left, and the dance grew ever
more gleeful with the thrill of having brilliantly deceived the enemy.
It was said that in the Bukchŏng region "Don-dol-ra-ri" was so well-known
that it was said wherever a dance was happening, passing trains would slow
down and passengers would lean out the windows to watch. But due the
cultural annihilation policy of the Japanese imperialists and the acts of a few
narrow-minded individuals after liberation, the dance had gradually faded
from the people's memory. (Kim Ja Gyŏng, "Woori ŭi Mŏt," Chosŏn
Munhak, January 2013, p12)
This scene cleverly impresses the reader with two important points: 1) the Korean
partisans tricked the Japanese not through modern weapons but through their own
ingenuity and traditional culture, and 2) it was precisely the short-sighted cultural
annihiliation policy of the Japanese colonial authorities that gifted the partisans with a set
of coded resistance symbols known only to similarly patriotic Koreans. This is an exact
representation of Scott’s “weapons of the weak.”
Later in the same story, a present-day Kim Jong Il personally instructs his top
choreographer to put more authentic Korean flavor into his creation:
"Our literature and art must be spread to the world. But in creating a global
art form, we must not copy others' work or seek to match others' tastes.
"We often say that we must develop independence and national character
in our revolution and construction, but what does this mean? It is seeing the
value in our own things, our own flavor, and making them shine. Our own
things are the seed of independence and the basis for national character.
Even if we dance with great national pride, our dances must be matched to
the rhythm and taste of our people, just as our food must be matched to the
tastes of our people.” (Kim Ja Gyŏng, "Woori ŭi Mŏt," Chosŏn
Munhak, January 2013, p20)
126
North Korean fiction has depicted all three generations of leaders offering similar
advice along these lines in all fields of the arts, music, architecture and even military arts.
In the short story “Woori Kyesŭng” [Our Succession], a top military tactician is
compiling a book of modern military strategy while completely ignoring the advice and
experiences of his elderly father who fought in the Korean War. He argues, “How can
conventional warfare using tanks and cannons possibly relate to modern warfare, dealing
in missiles and nuclear warheads?” Kim Jong Un hears of this and quickly rebukes the
son straight with a stern speech: “Our present reality may have changed substantially
from the days of the Liberation War and the Pueblo Incident, but the essential spirit by
which the Great Leader [Kim Il Sung] and the Great General [Kim Jong Il] triumphed
remains the same. The new ‘military-first’ generation must have the tactical ability for
modern warfare, but our ability must be rooted in that essential spirit or it will collapse
like a house of cards” (Yun Jŏng Gil, “Woori Kyesŭng,” Chosŏn Munhak, September
2013, p22).
As a reflection of central KWP ideological concerns, North Korean state-produced
fiction can provide important clues to the internal messaging of the regime. The persistent
message seems to be the regime vigilantly seeks to protect classic Korean ways and
traditions, even when its people are lured by the siren song of modern foreign ways. This
message is all the more striking considering the tremendous pressure North Korea has
always felt, along with the rest of the communist world, to rapidly modernize its military
and economy.
The North’s claims to cultural fidelity are tied to its struggle for national unification
on its own terms. As its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the Korean
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people can no longer be defended on diplomatic, economic or even ideological grounds,
it has fallen back upon its cultural bona fides while portraying the ROK as a puppet state
that has sacrificed traditional Korean culture and values upon an altar to modernization,
wealth, and Western approval. In service to this myth, North Korea’s very weaknesses —
the lack of electricity, the reliance on inefficient and unmechanized traditional farming
methods, the dismantling of the industrial base built by Japan — suddenly become part of
the country’s quaint appeal, a throwback to simpler times. That this portrayal has
surprising resonance even among many South Koreans speaks to its cohesive power for a
nation still resentful of the changes wrought during the colonial period and deeply
uncomfortable with their place in the modern world.
B. R. Myers has argued that North Korea is best understood not as a Communist
society, but one where race-based nationalism is the state ideology. The regime has built
up an elaborate cult of personality in which Kim Il Sung and his descendents are the
divine guardians of Korean purity and innocence, protecting them from the danger and
contamination of the outside world (Myers 2010). Lankov describes the ideology of the
Kim Il Sung era as “a peculiar mix of Leninism and Maoism, heavily spiced with rather
extreme forms of nationalism and Confucian traditionalism” (Lankov 2013: 50). If
anything, this mix has trended closer to nationalist cult and further away from Marxist
thought with the passage of time; reportedly, the last public portraits of Marx and Lenin
in the country were removed
37
in 2012 shortly after the ascendance of Kim Il Sung’s
grandson, Kim Jong Un, and the 2009 revision of the DPRK constitution removed all

37
“Lenin and Karl Marx statues removed from North Korea's Kim Il-sung Square,” by
Julian Ryall, The Telegraph, Oct 15, 2012.
(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9608048/Lenin-and-Karl-
Marx-statues-removed-from-North-Koreas-Kim-Il-sung-Square.html)
128
references to “communism,” generally replacing it with the references to North Korea’s
own unique songun (“military-first”) political system.
38

Opposition Impact: Nonexistent Protest
In the last chapter, we observed how restoration of traditional culture — and
rejection of Soviet cultural intrusions — were vital to the success of Mongolia’s mass
protests in 1990. By contrast, in North Korea today many artifacts of Korean traditional
culture, such as traditional dress and performance arts, have been incorporated into the
general socialist kitsch of the country. If a pro-democracy movement were to take place
in North Korea today it would have to do without the triumphalist narrative of “taking
back” traditional culture that proved so compelling to working-class Mongolians.
As an illustrative example, we can consider the different roles of traditional dress in
the two states. In Mongolia, the traditional dress, or del, was perceived as a nationalist
symbol and frowned upon throughout the communist era. By contrast, in North Korea
today women proudly wear their traditional Korean dress, or chosŏn-ot, to mass dances in
Kim Il Sung Square, election day, and other ceremonial events. Recently a defector
woman who had returned, disillusioned, to the North was paraded triumphantly in front
of a press conference wearing a pale pink chosŏn-ot. The context was clear: this poor
soul, misled and tricked into sneaking off to the prosperous South, have seen the light and
returned to the Fatherland where she can once again wrap herself in the proud symbols of
her Korean heritage.
39

38
“North Korea drops communism, boosts ‘Dear Leader’,” Jon Herskovitz and Christine
Kim, Reuters, Sept 28, 2009.
(http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/28/idUSSEO253213)
39
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/29/north-korea-defector-returns-south
129
Recall how the Mongolian pro-democracy movement was able to use historical
narratives and heroes like Chinggis Khan to mobilize popular support for the revolution
and defend their legitimacy during the transition period. In North Korea, where
traditional Korean heroes were not so much suppressed as they were supplanted by the
ultimate Korean hero, Kim Il Sung, and his ancestors, any nascent pro-democracy
movement would have to fight against the ingrained popular reverence for national hero
figures. Furthermore, recall how the tearing down of Stalin’s statue and its replacement
with a native Mongolian hero was such an important early triumph for the democracy
movement. In North Korea, there are no prominent statues left of foreign leaders or
philosophers; there are only the ubiquitous statues of Kim Il Sung, his ancestors and his
descendants. These statues are treated with reverence, almost like shrines; people pay
obeisance to them on holidays and other important occasions, and propaganda depicts
model citizens going to extraordinary lengths to protect them. While it is impossible to
know their true feelings, it is difficult to imagine many North Koreans celebrating if such
statues were desecrated. Indeed, during the peak of the famine in 1997, defectors reported
that some murals and a statue of Kim Il Sung appeared to have been deliberately
damaged (Becker 2005, 307). The perpetrators were never found, and yet the vandalism
failed to inspire copy-cats or any larger acts of rebellion.
Likewise, whereas Mongolians were united around moves to restore traditional
animist practices and Buddhism, in North Korea the old religious traditions have been
replaced with the national cult of Kimilsungism. While there may be some underground
Christians still residing in the North, the promise of restoring Christianity is unlikely to
130
mobilize ordinary North Koreans on such a mass scale as Buddhism had done in
Mongolia.
In recent years the DPRK regime has increasingly played up its dedication to
cultural preservation, going so far as to “discover” sacred sites from Korean prehistory
including the grave of Tangun, the mythical founder of the Korean nation. A 2006 KCNA
article is typical of such promotional efforts:
April and November every year have been set as months for preserving
cultural remains in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. In this April
the management offices for cultural remains across the country are striving
to manage and preserve well the historical relics and remains associated
with wisdom and talent of the nation.
In Pyongyang city, efforts are being exerted to keep a lot of historical
relics in the area of Mt. Taesong and other parts of the city including the
mausoleums of King Tangun and King Tongmyong in their origin and to
arrange their surroundings well. People in South and North Hwanghae
Provinces are taking good care of the Samsong Temple in Mt. Kuwol,
ancient tomb No.3 in Anak, fort in Mt. Jongbang, Songbul Temple and other
historical relics and have built cultural recreation grounds for visitors. Over
20 historical relics are being repaired and arranged in North Hamgyong
Province. And Kaesong City has repaired roofs of more than 30 buildings
and forts, heaped earth over tens of old mounds and repainted structures
colorfully.
40

Passages like these suggest a regime eager to promote its cultural bona fides,
particularly in comparison to the westernized South. Not only is the DPRK “discovering”
new historical sites which validate the mythology of North Korea as the spiritual center
of all things Korean, the Kim regime is purportedly sparing no expense to ensure that
such sites are properly maintained and treated with due reverence. Anyone who would
protest against such a regime would be painted as not only anti-Kim but anti-Korean and
culturally degenerate as well.

40
“Efforts Directed to Preserve Cultural Remains,” Pyongyang, April 27, 2006 (KCNA)
(http://kcna.co.jp/item/2006/200604/news04/28.htm)
131
Holding the Mongolia and North Korea cases up side-by-side, it is clear that their
dramatically different policies regarding the preservation of original culture and
nationalism have had a significant influence on their regimes’ survival and the
revolutionary potential of their respective societies. Ultimately, the one that repressed
native culture and punished expressions of nationalism ended up collapsing peacefully
through a period of mass civil unrest in which the restoration of traditional culture and
values played an important, perhaps vital, part in mobilizing mass protest. The other,
whose regime embraced a nationalist myth of sanctifying and preserving traditional
culture, remains intact to this day despite far more dire economic conditions and
increasingly obvious political hypocrisy, and by all accounts has encountered no
substantial dissent among the general population.
Mongolia’s democracy movement could make use of revered leaders, artists and
poets who had been persecuted under communism, using them as rallying symbols to
chip away at the ruling government’s legitimacy and scoring symbolic victories with each
political rehabilitation. In the DPRK, by contrast, denouncing communism at this point
would mean denouncing the greatest heroes remaining in the nation’s collective memory,
and there would be little solace in rehabilitating long-forgotten individuals like Cho Man-
shik. Because of the strength of the Kim Il Sung myth and the erasure of all memory of
early Soviet involvement, the DPRK has an extremely high degree of national ownership
of its political system and ruling ideology, meaning that a rejection of that ideology
would amount to a rejection of (from their perspective) Korea’s greatest achievement.
Two important caveats must be inserted here. First, I do not claim that cultural
policy and national ownership alone can account for the different fates of communist
132
states. Weak national ownership of the ruling ideology is neither necessary nor sufficient
to guarantee regime collapse; but strong national ownership may be sufficient to
guarantee regime survival in the absence of other sustaining factors such as ideological
consistency, economic prosperity, or heavy-handed external support. Second, I do not
claim that North Korea’s leaders made any deliberate, calculated decision to adopt pro-
nationalist, culture-preserving policies, shrewdly anticipating that such policies would
help the regime to survive long-term. Rather, I have argued that the cultural policies in
question emerged from the previously described structural constraints and opportunities
that were present in the case of North Korea, but not in Mongolia or the regimes of
Eastern Europe.
Conclusion
The above analysis indicates that, in the case of North Korea, the combination of
traditionalist cultural policies and high national ownership of the ruling ideology have
effectively raised the bar in terms of the economic hardship necessary to mobilize
collective action against the regime. Conversely, the experience of heavy-handed foreign-
imposed cultural transformation in Mongolia and elsewhere in the Soviet bloc lowered
the bar and enabled spontaneous mass opposition to erupt even under more modest levels
of economic hardship.
In the previous chapter, we pondered the question: had the Soviet bloc states not
suffered such complete cultural repression under Stalin’s directives, had they been
allowed to retain their national distinctiveness and some degree of ideological ownership,
would communism still have been overthrown so rapidly and enthusiastically in those
countries beginning in 1989? North Korea has provided a partial test case for such a
hypothetical. Its leadership, governing institutions and economic system were initially
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installed by Soviet advisors with little input from local political leaders; its structures of
social control were more closely modeled on Stalin’s Soviet Union than anything in
Eastern Europe. As Andrei Lankov puts it, the DPRK regime managed to “out-Stalin
Stalin” (Lankov 2013: 34). The most significant difference was in North Korea’s lack of
cultural suppression and the political acceptance of nearly unbridled nationalism. The
North Korean case seems fairly unique among communist regimes in this regard, but it
would be worth further study to assess the levels of national ownership of ideology in the
other remaining communist regimes of China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba.
But for now, we will leave the communist world behind. In the following chapter
we will turn to the southern half of the Korean peninsula, to see how the same Korean
people reacted to a very different kind of cultural policy under a capitalist, pro-Western
regime. Although nobody would deny that the South Korean military dictatorship under
Park Chung Hee was staunchly anti-communist, its cultural policy targets and methods of
enforcement bear a striking resemblance to those of the Soviet bloc, making for an
interesting counterpoint to what we have seen thus far.

134
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Chapter 4: Culture, Values, and Historiography in South
Korea’s Democratization Movement

Introduction: Two Competing Visions of Korean Cultural Legitimacy
In the heart of downtown Seoul, two statues stand tall athwart one of the busiest
thoroughfares in East Asia. One is seated in Lincoln-esque repose on a great throne of
state, facing southward with his back to the main gate of the old royal palace, one hand
raised in benediction. The second statue stands some 250 meters in front of the first,
facing the same direction, on a high plinth towering above the street; armor-clad and
grasping an enormous curved sword, the figure stares down with fierce concentration as
if about to stomp on a particularly troublesome insect. Tourists love to photograph these
statues with the towering glass-fronted office buildings of modern Seoul in the
background, making artistic statements about the juxtaposition of modernity and ancient
wisdom in the heart of Korea’s greatest metropolis. Few are aware of the political
machinations and struggles behind the design, construction and placement of these two
statues. Indeed, the story of these statues is the story of South Korea’s political evolution
– from postcolonial impoverished U.S. dependency, to economically powerful but stifling
military dictatorship, to vibrant independent democracy.
The seated figure is King Sejong (1397-1450), Korea’s most-beloved Chosŏn
dynasty sovereign-sage, who is credited with commissioning numerous scientific and
artistic achievements as well as devising a phonetic Korean script, hangŭl, to replace
Chinese ideographs. The standing figure is Admiral Yi Sun-shin (1545-1598), the naval
commander credited with fighting and winning all of his twenty-three sea battles against
invading Japanese forces during the Imjin Wars and thus saving the nation from
barbarian subjugation. Though both have an aura of weighty antiquity, the Admiral’s
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statue predates Sejong’s by some forty years. Admiral Yi’s statue went up in 1968, a time
when earlier democratic gains were being eroded in the name of national stability and
economic growth under the iron rule of President Park Chung-hee, who had overthrown
the democratic government in a military coup seven years prior. For Park and his
supporters Admiral Yi came to represent a vision of premodern Korea as martial, highly
disciplined, ascetic, masculine, and driven to self-sacrifice for the nation. King Sejong,
by contrast, has come to represent Korea’s high Confucian culture of arts and letters and
also a sort of premodern progressivism, as his hangül alphabet is portrayed as an effort to
bring learning to the masses.
41
Though Sejong has always had a place of reverence in
Korean history, in the democratic era complaints arose that his existing statue was
“shabby and small,” tucked away in a minor palace. The new statue was erected in 2009
following extended public debate, but the plans for it were announced much earlier, in
1997, under the leadership of Kim Young-sam, considered South Korea’s first truly
democratic leader. The statue was heralded as a symbol of “the society of culture and
science” that Sejong had created.
42
Admiral Yi, meanwhile, came under fire from some
quarters for certain “design flaws” that had been simmering among Korean historians and
artists for many years. His sword and armor seemed too Japanese, or perhaps too
Chinese; he was holding the sword in the wrong hand; the sculpture itself imitated a

41
For a good example see “Oe Sejong Daewang ŭn Hunminjŏngŭm ŭl mandŭrŏssŭlkka?”
[Why did King Sejong create the hangŭl alphabet?] Yŏksakonghwaguk
Hanguksabŏbjŏng [History Republic: Korean History on Trial] Vol 24, Chaŭm gwa
Moŭm, Seoul: 2013. Part of a series of educational history booklets for children.
42
“Sejong Daewang t’anshin 6 baek dol dongsang kŏnrib dŭng haengsa p’ungsŏng,”
Hangyoreh, Jan 18, 1997, p26.
138
Chinese style.
43
Ultimately the statue was taken down for refurbishment in 2010 but
returned with no changes.
In the Mongolia case study we saw how statues played an important role in
linking political revolution with cultural restoration, as foreign heroes were torn down
and triumphantly replaced with native Mongolian ones. In the South Korean case the
central tension of cultural policy was not between foreign and domestic culture but rather
between two competing visions of traditional Korean culture, a conflict which played out
most prominently through the student-led “cultural movement” (munhwa undong) during
the period of the Yushin Constitution (1972-1981), also known as the Fourth Republic.
This chapter will describe the various cultural interventions imposed by the Yushin
government as well as the ideological needs underpinning them, and the ways in which
the pro-democracy movement was able to harness public antipathy for these cultural laws
to shore up its own cultural legitimacy.
The pre-democracy South Korean state offers an interesting counterpoint to what
we have already seen of state-led cultural interventions in Communist Mongolia and
North Korea. From a political culture perspective, this case provides a rejoinder to those
who seek to explain North Korea’s domestic stability by suggesting that Koreans are a
peculiarly quiescent people or culturally incapable of resisting authoritarianism. Both
Korea under Japanese rule (1910-1945) and South Korea under military dictatorship
(1963-1987) saw substantial infringement of human rights, propaganda and heavy press
censorship, brutal incarceration of dissidents, and violent police actions serving to

43
“Ilbonshik k’al ch’ago chunggukshik kabot ibŭn Yi Sun-shin changgun dongsang” [Yi
Sun-shin statue holds a Japanese sword and wears Chinese armor], Chungang Ilbo, Dec
21, 2010.
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intimidate and crush protest movements. Whether or not the military dictatorship of
President Park Chung-hee (1963-1979) rivaled the draconian repression of Kim Il Sŏng’s
North Korea, I leave to readers to decide for themselves. But surely no Korean would
dispute that the Koreans living under Japanese control faced repression measures as
daunting and absolute as any other East Asian regime. The actions of ordinary Korean
citizens during these periods demonstrate vividly their capacity for resistance through
ingenuity, subterfuge, satire and sabotage, even when heavy repression prevented
outright protest actions. As this chapter will demonstrate, time and again Koreans found
that traditional culture provided a widely-understood encoding for subversive messages
and a useful tool for drawing patriotic citizens to their cause.
From an institutional standpoint, the Yushin period saw some of the most
intensively state-driven cultural intervention in a non-communist state, and thus it makes
for a meaningful comparison with the communist cases. For instance, Yushin era cultural
institutions bear an intriguing resemblance to the mechanisms of cultural control seen
throughout the Soviet bloc, and some of the performative cultural elements adopted by
the South Korean student agitators in the 1970s and 80s bear a strong resemblance to
those taking shape around the same time in communist Mongolia. The frequent and
variegated use of traditional and popular culture memes in protest acts by South Korean
democratic activists elegantly speaks to the public antipathy toward these cultural laws
and their role in fueling public opposition.
For reasons of brevity, this case study of South Korea focuses mainly on the so-
called Yushin period (1972-1981) and subsequent “Fifth Republic” under Chun Du-hwan
(1981-1987). However, essential context must also be provided through a review of the
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cultural laws and culture-based protest movements of the colonial and postwar periods.
Furthermore, to understand the lasting impact of Yushin cultural rule we will also briefly
discuss the cultural reforms that followed full democratization.
Figure 10: Timeline of South Korean protests under military dictatorship
Date Event Size Location
April 19,
1960
April Revolution
(4.19혁명)
100,000+ Seoul, Masan
May 16,
1961
Park Chŏng-hee’s military coup d’etat
June 3,
1964
6.3 Movement Opposing
ROK-Japan
Normalization Treaty
(6.3항쟁,
한일협상반대운동)
30,000+ Nationwide
June-Dec
1969
Struggle to oppose giving
president a third election
(삼선개헌반대투쟁)
25,000+
44
Seoul, Chŏlla region
Oct 1972 Yushin Constitution adopted, Fourth Republic begins, state of emergency
declared
Oct 16-20,
1979
Bu-Ma Democratic
Protests (부마민주항쟁)
10,000+ Busan and Masan
Oct 26,
1979
Park Chung-hee assassinated, leading to Fifth Republic military junta
under Chun Du-hwan
May 18-
27, 1980
Gwangju Uprising
(광주민주화운동)
10,000+ Gwangju
June 10-
29, 1987
June Democracy Uprising
(6월민주항쟁)
1,000,000+ Nationwide

Background Reading: Existing Work on South Korea’s Democratization
Struggle
While many studies exist on South Korea’s democratization process, most of
them present it in terms of class struggle amid too-rapid industrialization (Koo 1991), or
a political reaction by a growing civil society to excessive repression (Chang 2015), or
the inevitable political evolution of an increasingly prosperous and Western-aligned

•
44
Hanguk minjuhwa undongsa, Minjuhwa undong kinyŏm saŏbhui yŏnguso, Dolbegae,
2008)
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society (Johnson 1989). By studying the process from the standpoint of conflicting
cultural priorities, this case study contributes a more nuanced view of the reasons it
unfolded the way it did and why it took so long. The South Korean cultural movement
known as minjung has already been detailed by a number of existing studies, most
prominently Wells (1996), Lee (2007) and Kim (2017). However, these works approach
minjung primarily from a sociological perspective as a mechanism of collective identity
formation, and do not address how the heavy cultural restrictions of the Yushin system
contributed to minjung’s evolution. To the extent that these works do invoke Yushin
cultural policies, they depict minjung cultural activism emerging largely in spite of, rather
than in response to, cultural repression. Additionally, as far as I know, no existing work
has presented cultural performance as a means of overcoming the collective action
problem in the context of autocratic South Korea.
Background Conditions
At this point it is necessary to set the stage with just a few important notes about
the political context and historical ancestry of South Korea’s democracy movement.
Colonial-era Legacy of Cultural Protest
South Korea’s dissident movement was shaped and informed by the experiences
of independence activists in the colonial period (1910-1945), when the entire peninsula
fell under the absolute political, cultural and economic control of the Japanese empire.
Throughout this period, Korea’s traditional culture – particularly high intellectual culture
– became intertwined with political dissidence in various ways. In the early years of
Japanese rule, Koreans saw heavy restrictions upon their religious and cultural practices
as traditional Korean life was upended under the colonial policy of cultural
homogenization. The colonial authorities enacted new laws to restrict Korean-language
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publications, cracked down on patriotic education in Korean village schools, and forced
Koreans to pay reverence to the Japanese state religion of Shinto (Song 1982: 152-6).
After Korean independence activists staged major nation-wide protests in 1919, these
policies were softened somewhat; state-approved Korean literary journals and
newspapers were permitted as a display of cultural tolerance, but their contents were
strictly censored and limited to praise of the Japanese system. Korean intellectuals and
cultural leaders had to make a choice: work within the system to do what they could to
preserve Korean identity while obeying Japanese mandates, or resist powerlessly from
outside.
The Declaration of Korean Revolution, authored by exiled independence leader
Shin Chae-ho in 1923, explicitly criticized those complicit in state-led cultural policies
under Japanese occupation:
“Those who carry on cultural movement under Japanese imposed rule - Who
are these people? ‘Culture’ is a noun indicating the fruits of industry and
civilization; under a system of economic pillaging where the nation is
deprived of the right to exist, is cultural development possible? Amid
censorship, confiscation, and all sorts of oppression, those who beat the
drums of a cultural movement through various magazines and newspapers,
unable to voice any type of opinion contrary to the tastes of the oppressor,
any such cultural development is on the contrary the misfortune of Korea…
Those who act as parasites [meaning the cultural movement] of the
oppressor government are our enemies.” (Shin Chae-ho, Chosŏn hyŏkmyŏng
sŏn’ŏn Article 2)
As much of the leadership of the Korean independence movement was populated by
writers, artists and Confucian scholars, it is unsurprising that cultural debates played a
large part in shaping their internal dynamics and factions. With overt political resistance
impossible inside the country, noted Korean independence activists like Shin Chae-ho,
Chang Chi-yŏn and Yi Kwang-su busied themselves with more subtle means of
undermining Japanese cultural control - founding clubs to preserve traditional dance (Cho
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1969: 206-7), supporting practitioners of Korean native shamanism and Chŏndogyo (ibid
41-3), and sponsoring subversive forms of theatre (ibid 59-60). Given our contemporary
understanding of collective action by subordinate groups, this behavior should be
puzzling; why would resistance leaders risk exposure and expend their severely limited
resources to fund things like literary journals and theatre troupes, when they could be
bombing government offices or funding guerrillas?
Meanwhile, the Japanese authorities took pains to nurture collaboration-minded
cultural leaders while promoting their own vision of Korea’s place in Asian history and
culture. Amid numerous economic and political transformations, they found time to
implement a bureaucracy for finding, designating and preserving Korean cultural
treasures. It was this Japanese bureaucracy that unearthed and publicized such finds as
the Sŏkkuram Buddha near Kyŏngju, which remains one of Korea’s greatest
archaeological treasures today (Em 2013: 87-90). They also funded so-called hōkokukai,
delegations to Japan by young Korean intellectuals to study Japan’s modernizing reforms
in various fields and report on their observations to domestic audiences (Kang 1979: 34-
8). Ironically many leaders of Korea’s independence movement and the postwar order
benefited from these early study trips. Why would Japan, a colonial authority faced with
the daunting task of modernizing Korea’s entire infrastructure and mobilizing its labor
force to maximize resource extraction, spend time and energy working to develop Korean
cultural identity? And why, in the wake of the massive popular revolt of March 1, 1919,
did Japan specifically target cultural policy as the key area for reform?
Another effect of these formative experiences in political protest was the
emergence of young intellectuals in the role Korea’s political conscience. Charles Kim
144
has documented how the twin schemas of “wholesome modernization” and “the student
vanguard” informed Koreans’ socialization into political action and government reform
movements in the early postcolonial period. These schemas “positioned educated youths,
as the core protagonists of the nation, to serve as the loyal mainstay of state-led national
development and to rise up in protest against political injustice.“ (Kim 2017: 4) Through
the struggles of the colonial era Koreans had developed a deeply ingrained respect for
young intellectual activists and an expectation that it was they who would lead the
Korean nation into some form of dignified modernity. Kim notes that the postcolonial
idolization of the “youth vanguard” schema ironically opened the door for later student-
led activism “by equipping students with an eminently familiar model for collective
action.” (Kim 2017: 5) The unique cultural role of students and young intellectuals in
Korean dissident history is often overlooked by general democratization and
modernization theorists, who seek to fit South Korea into Western models based on the
experiences of Eastern Europe or Latin America (Johnson 1989, Diamond 1999).
Uniquely Korean Obstacles to Mass Social Movements
Under conditions of repressive autocracy, any protest movement – particularly
those aimed at regime change – faces daunting obstacles which have been well-
documented elsewhere. But the South Korean context included a number of additional
complications that hindered successful collective action on the sort of mass scale needed
to effect real change. What is particularly exciting about this case is the way in which
culture-encoded signaling helped overcome each of these obstacles.
First, Korean political movements of the early 20th century had been historically
plagued by elitism and factionalism. Korean intellectuals had a long tradition of advising
the ruling class through philosophical debate and writing, but stood well apart from
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workers and peasants. This worked well in the past when intellectuals had a sheltered
status at court, but in the modern era of mass social movements, it meant that Korea’s
intellectual leaders lacked lines of communication with workers and peasants. Elitism
was an old problem that had hindered collective action and national identity formation in
Korea since the days of the Tonghak (Eastern learning) movement in the 1860s and the
Independence Club in the 1890s.
Although elite Confucian tradition had seeped down into Korean society and
regulated family ritual, most notably with regard to ancestor worship,
peasant society remained strongly influenced by coexistent indigenous folk
beliefs and norms. Korean folk culture, with its shamanistic tradition, was a
rich mixture of customs and beliefs tied together with ritual, dance, music,
and art. Although this folk tradition provided a rich repository of unique
symbols of national identity, modern nationalists attacked its elements of
superstition and fatalism as antiscientific and fatalistic. [Robinson 2014: 35]
Korea had a cultural tradition of looking to Confucian scholars for moral and
political leadership in times of political turmoil. But since the educated class had
historically stood a world apart from the unwashed masses, in the post-liberation era this
made it all the more difficult to form strong inter-class coalitions. In addition to lacking
solid lines of communication and common information sources, there were issues of trust.
In the 1950s and 1960s many leading intellectuals were from the generation that had been
educated in Japan and were associated with colonialist collaboration.
Another persistent obstacle was factionalism among activists. Korean intellectuals
had traditionally thrived in an atmosphere of feuding factions bidding for the currency of
official recognition, and thus were particularly vulnerable to fragmentation and co-
optation by the state. In many ways, the postwar South Korean state essentially picked up
where the Japanese colonial authorities left off and used many of the same institutional
mechanisms to co-opt intellectual and cultural elites. This would have succeeded, had the
146
Yushin state not fallen prey to the inevitable temptation of autocratic leaders with
absolute cultural control: to bend that culture to match its own priorities. We will learn
more about this in the following section.
The other remarkable thing about the movement is that it was essentially a labor
movement, but carried out under some of the most aggressively anti-labor conditions in
modern times. One would be hard-pressed to find a country more staunchly
anticommunist than 1970s South Korea. The terrible legacy of the war caused most
Koreans to have a knee-jerk reaction against any sort of rhetoric that had the barest whiff
of socialism. In terms of language, after about 1950 South Korean progressives had to
stop using their preferred word for the people, “inmin,” because it was too associated
with Marxism and the new northern regime; it was replaced with the neologism
“minjung.” Yet the youth leaders of the democracy movement in the 1970s and 1980s
relied heavily on the language of the socialist classics in their efforts to mobilize the
working people [conversation with Henry Em 01/18/2017]. Many South Korean students
joined reading clubs that secretly read banned books by E.H. Carr and Karl Marx much
like their Western counterparts [interviews with Shin DH and Kim HJ, confiscated book
collection in Korea Democracy Archives]. However, student book club leaders and their
associates were vulnerable to police harassment and arrest, and even factory workers
weren’t particularly sympathetic to such blatantly leftist rhetoric early on. The
government’s argument, that a strong modernized state was needed to prevent another
war, held sway with many people. This made it relatively easy for the Park regime to
demonize youth activists as North Korean infiltrators. Student groups had to find another
language through which to reach out to the working classes.
147
Korean traditional culture memes were critical in overcoming all of these
obstacles. Youthful students took a new interest in peasant traditions and folk arts of the
Korean hinterland – samulnori (theatric folk music), p’ungmul’pae (drum band),
t’alch’um (mask dance) and gut (shamanistic rite) – as symbols of national
distinctiveness and sources of pride. This helped them to overcome the traditional elitist
distaste and find something valuable in interaction with the illiterate farmer or factory
worker. With the anti-communist drive making the language of labor mobilization taboo,
the language of culture and nationalism became essential to forging a bond between elites
and workers. If student leaders could not rally workers by calling for an international
workers’ coalition, they could rally them with calls for the preservation of national
distinctiveness and traditional ways of life.
The shadow of the colonial past hung over Korean politics on both sides of the
ideological spectrum. For the Park government and its supporters, a key task was
establishing their credentials as an authentic Korean government while promulgating the
idea that only rapid industrialization and military rule could prevent the nation from
being subjugated once again. For South Korean democracy activists in the 1970s and
1980s, by contrast, the task was to establish a perception of continuity between Park’s
conservative military dictatorship and the reviled Japanese colonial regime. No less than
the North Korean state, South Korea inherited many institutions, practices, character and
even personnel of the Japanese colonial regime. Indeed, President Park himself and key
officials were former military officers or bureaucrats of the Japanese colonial
government. For the opposition, the challenge lay in communicating these historical
continuities to the public at large via simple, abbreviated, easily understood code. The
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many cultural regulations and symbolically charged edifices of the Yushin era provided a
generous context for this code.
The great strength of the South Korean democracy movement was the coalition it
achieved between intellectuals, the urban poor, farmers and Christians (Lee 2007, Chang
2015). In the broader context of Korean history, the fact that these four groups were able
to unite is by itself somewhat miraculous. As stated, the intellectual class in Korea had a
long tradition of keeping itself firmly removed from the dirty realities of peasant life. In
the colonial era the Christian church had historically been an ally of the independence
movement and many intellectuals had converted to Christianity, but this only served to
deepen the divide between intellectuals and the peasantry, who remained committed to
Buddhism and shamanism. To overcome the challenge of bringing these disparate groups
together, activists had to first find a common language and set of symbols that Koreans of
different classes and generations could all agree on.
Instruments of Yushin Cultural Policy and Soviet Similarities
This section provides a brief overview of the Yushin government’s main
mechanisms of cultural control. The Yushin state had three main instruments of cultural
control: the Ministry of Culture and Information (Mungongbu), the Committee for Ethical
Art and Culture and the Office of Cultural Properties. The MCI was formed in 1968 and
played a huge role in setting cultural policy and disbursing state funds for cultural
projects. The Committee for Ethical Art and Culture was in charge of censorship of
music and films. The OCP was responsible for “all processes related to heritage
management from selection, investigation and designation to protection, restoration,
conservation, and the promotion of heritage” [Sîntionean 254]; it was founded in October
1961 as an agency within the Ministry of Education and exercised “monopolistic” control
149
of cultural heritage. The institutional structure and system of heritage designation were
largely inherited from the Japanese period [Sîntionean 257]. In the Yushin period, as in
the colonial era, the OCP was a useful tool for co-opting Korean artists and cultural
leaders.
For such a vehemently anti-Communist state, the Yushin government borrowed a
surprising amount of the language and legal underpinning of Soviet cultural institutions.
State organs with names like “Committee for Social Purification” (sahoe chŏnghwa
uiwonhoe) popped up in the 1960s, charged with censorship and pop culture propaganda.
Ryu (2016) observed that Park Chung-hee’s Republic, “with its censorship and
propaganda, with its show trials, with its overgrown KCIA and its judicial murders, was
more akin to the Soviet state during the era of Brezhnevian stagnation than to any
government that was supposed to exist in the Free World.” (Ryu 2016, 28) Ryu also
pointed out structural similarities between President Park’s Emergency Decree Number 9,
which prohibited any criticism of the president or government, and Article 70-1 of the
Soviet penal code concerning agitprop.
South Korea was unique among non-communist regimes (excepting Taiwan) in
favoring the creation of “five-year-plans” – with a twist. In addition to seven consecutive
Five-Year Plans for Economic Development (1962-1996) and one Five-Year Plan for
Technology Promotion (1962-66), it also enacted the 1
st
Five-Year Plan for the
Promotion of Arts & Culture (1974-78). The latter is of particular interest to this study, as
it represents a bold-faced effort by a non-communist government to take charge of the
direction of the national culture. The plan’s stated goals were 1) to establish a “correct
view of national history”; 2) to raise the cultural level of citizens by making art more
150
commonplace and popular; and 3) to promote Korea’s cultural standing in the world
through cultural exchange. But the real purpose of this plan was to promote the ideals of
the Yushin system to a skeptical public, which had seen the hopes of the 1960 revolution
crushed by Park’s coup. (Kim Chang-nam 1995, 125). The bulk of the plan’s funding was
directed at preservation of cultural assets, which were seen as vital to building a unified
sense of national identity. Institutionally, the Five-Year Plan established two powerful
new bodies headed by the Prime Minister: the Committee for the Promotion of Culture
and Arts (Munye Jinhŭng Ŭiwonhoe) and the Foundation for the Promotion of Korean
Culture and Arts (Chaedanbŏbin Hanguk Munhwayesul Jinhŭngwon).
Cultural Policy in Yushin South Korea
A “Correct” View of History
As a nation once famously subjected to a warped version of history at the hands
of a foreign occupier, Koreans have long engaged in the study and re-evaluation of their
“historical consciousness.” If today’s Korean historiography seems to put laser-sharp
focus on the crimes of the Japanese colonial authorities and their Korean accomplices, it
was not always so. As Han writes, “The Park regime devoted little attention to
commemorating places or individuals related to independence movements or anti-
colonial activities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – preferring to cast a
discreet veil over the more sensitive and potentially divisive memories stirred by this
period.“ (Han 6) Instead, they focused on deifying more distant historical figures and
events. The greatest attention was dedicated to the promotion of historic military heroes
and “golden eras” (hwanggŭm shidae) such as the unified Shilla period, which produced
many of premodern Korea’s greatest scientific innovations and architectural marvels. The
policy favored “military figures over literary figures, ancient history over early modern
151
history, elite culture over folk culture, and national treasures over regional treasures” (Oh
1998, 131).
From the mid-1960s, Yi Sun-shin became one of the most oft-invoked historical
figures in cultural production. As Park Sae-young summarizes, “there has been a steady
stream of films, fictional works, television dramas, statues, postcards, museums,
children’s books, self-help works, postage stamps, business leadership texts, and various
souvenirs dedicated to bringing people closer to Admiral Yi.” (Park 2010: 1). President
Park took great care to associate himself with Yi Sun-shin’s image. In addition to the
famous statue mentioned in the introduction, Yi’s ancestral home was transformed into a
grand national monument and shrine, and the president gave an archery demonstration
there every year on Yi’s birthday – an important visual reminder of his own martial
abilities and respect for the admiral.
Yi Sun-shin’s image was useful to Park in several ways. First, he was a great
military hero who had saved Korea at a time of crisis when its legitimate rulers were
hiding, bickering and doing nothing. “The parallels between Yi Sunsin—a sixteenth
century general poorly understood by his civilian contemporaries—and Park Chung Hee,
a general who had overthrown a civilian government in the name of national salvation,
were not difficult to miss” (Park 2010: 9). Park drew a parallel between Yi, who saved
the country from the Japanese invasion, and himself, who was defending the country
from North Korean invasion. In short, Park sought to justify his military coup by
promoting a vision of a highly militarized, regimented Korean past that had been “lost”
by the time of Chosŏn’s demise.
Second, Park compared the factional struggles of Yi’s time with the intra-party
152
struggles that he was currently dealing with, which he saw as weakening the country. He
trash-talked officers who had not joined in his coup by equating them with Yi Sun-shin’s
political rivals. Attending a birthday celebration for Admiral Yi Sun-shin in 1962, then-
Chairman Park gave remarks explicitly connecting Admiral Yi’s enemies with his own
factional foes within the government: “Admiral Yi Sun-shin experienced many trials due
to the factional strife (p’ajeng) of his time… If in the future certain elements continue to
create party factional fights, no administrative measures will be able to stop the
corruption."
45

Finally, as a former lieutenant of the Japanese imperial army, Park needed to
make an ostentatious display of his anti-Japanese credentials – and Admiral Yi provided
a convenient symbol. Since the admiral was best known for presiding over a famously
humiliating defeat of the Japanese in the comfortably distant past, any praise for Yi could
translate as giving insult to Japan, without getting into more recent and sensitive colonial-
era offenses in which Park may have been complicit.
In addition to Admiral Yi Sun-shin, Park also elevated other pre-modern military
figures like Jang Bo-go (a Shilla admiral known as the “King of the Seas” who had class
of submarines named after him in 1976), Kang Gam-chan (an early Koryeo-era general
who defeated Khitan tribes, featured in a 1974 KBS TV series), and Jang Mun-gyu (an
8
th
-century hero who launched a successful naval battle against Tang Dynasty forces).
Military heroes featured prominently in Yushin-era yinmul hanguksa series (educational
compendiums of Korean historical figures) and high-budget feature films.

45
“Minjok pokji kukka ui kŏnsŏl gwa yochŏng duinŭn minjokjŏk dangyŏl,”
[Construction of a national welfare state and the need for national unity], editorial,
Kyŏnghyang Shinmun, April 30, 1962.
153
[The film genre] was co-opted to serve the interests of Park Chung Hee’s
authoritarian regime (1961-1979) and thus transformed into a vehicle for
coercing the citizenry into personal sacrifices for the sake of state-initiated
modernization and development. Accordingly, historical biopics focusing on
strong male leaders, such as Sacred Hero Yi Sun-sin (Sŏngung Yi Sun-sin,
1971), A War Diary (Najung ilgi, 1977), and Great King Sejong (Sejong
taewang, 1978), were produced in line with the government’s cultural policies.
[Chung and Diffrient 2015]

At the time, heavy government support was needed for big-budget blockbusters of
this sort. For the battle scenes they enlisted the support of the Korean Navy, the Marines,
and the Underwater Demolition Team (UDT). These films were often compulsory
viewing for military units as well as school field trips. There was also a TV series, a
theatrical play at the National Theater, serial novels, and countless events. For one
birthday celebration the government organized a grand spectacle in the port of Yi’s
hometown with 1500 boats and over 50,000 people participating (Kang et al 2016, 125-
7).
Yushin education policy in the 1970s focused on promoting ”self-reliant
nationalist history,” promulgated through the nationalization of history textbook
publishing. Park-era textbooks discussed the “exploitation and oppression” of the
colonial period but de-emphasized major figures in the anti-Japanese resistance and
independence movements (Han 2014: 6). Park famously disparaged the “yangban”
(gentry) class of pre-colonial Korea as weak and overly intellectual; this is suspected to
be an artifact of the fascist ideals he ingested as a youth in Japan and his personal
philosophy of national survival through military strength. As president he led a cultural
campaign that cherry-picked particularly useful aspects of Korean culture, such as
uniformity and filial loyalty to one’s nation and one’s parents (interview with Professor
Chŏng Yong-wook, Nov 22, 2016).
154
Fashion Police
For Korean youths during the Yushin period, a key source of tension was the very
strict dress code enforced at the time -- especially the restrictions against long hair, blue
jeans and miniskirts (Kang et al 2016, 137-144). Korean middle and high school
students had it worst, as they had to wear uniforms and face intense inspections every day
at the school gates. These were conducted by the dreaded sŏndobu, the regiment of
student enforcers who could single students out and inflict punishments like standing on
one’s head or running laps. In interviews, older Koreans recalled sŏndobu members
waiting at the school gates each morning to judge student appearance, or even entering
classrooms in the middle of lecture and pulling students out for punishment for failing to
keep their uniforms up to code. The exacting regulations on school uniforms were
enforced as part of the Yushin system’s overarching cultural dictate toward uniformity,
military discipline and obedience. Schools also held weapons training and grenade drills
as part of general physical education. It pleased the military bureaucracy to have Korea’s
youths prepared for regimentation at an early age, and it shored up the Park government’s
credentials as a regime that championed the military ethic. Some in the older generation
felt a certain affinity for the regimented style of the colonial era, which they remembered
as a more disciplined and orderly time, when young people had more respect for
authority. Those who were most inclined to complain – the students – were too young to
have any political voice. But they were growing up. After years of such regimentation,
the relative sartorial freedom of college came as a revelation, giving young people their
first taste of individuality and a sense of rebelliousness, leaving them craving more
[interviews with Shin DH, Nov 2016 and Lee JM, Sept 2016].
155
For young adults, one of the most visibly enforced fashion regulations of the
Yushin era was the restriction on male hair length. Koreans who came of age in the 1970s
and 1980s recall the “hair-cutting stations” set up outside of police offices, where police
could dragoon any man with overly long hair and cut it at a moments’ notice, a regulation
known as changbal dansok. Hair-length has long had significance for Koreans beyond
mere fashion, and forced hair cutting has deep historical roots in some of the most
unpleasant parts of Korean history. Japanese authorities forced Kojong to issue royal
decree ordering all adult men to cut off topknots in 1885; as historian Henry Em notes,
“In the decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, one’s hair and clothes
became intensely visible signs of political and cultural allegiance.” (Em 2013: 4) Anti-
regime activists were quick to make the connection between top-knot cutting and the
modern changbal dansok measures.
The latent resentment that these restrictions produced was a gift to the early
democratic movement. When the student-labor coalition was forming in the 1970s, the
“anti-Japanese” theme was the only protest theme strong enough to counteract the
public’s instinctive anti-communist aversion to labor activism. Pro-democracy protestors
gleefully referred to Park Chung-hee by his Japanese name, Takagi Masao, and his
Japanese military rank, sojang (lieutenant). Critics of the Park legacy persistently apply
these appellations to this day
46
as a way of emphasizing his otherness and collaborationist
history. The Park government’s insistence on maintaining the military-style school

46
In November 2016, a proposal for erecting a statue of President Park Chung Hee in
Gwanghwamun Square was immediately met with the protest “Lieutenant Takagi Masao
does not represent the Korean people!” from the opposition. (CBS Radio, Kim Hyun
Jung News Show, FM 98.1 07:30~09:00, 2016-11-04)
156
uniforms and buzz-cuts of the Japanese colonial era only seemed to underscore such
associations.

Healthy Songs and Banned Songs
A key feature of the Yushin era was the official list of “banned songs” (kŭmjigok)
and their antithesis, “healthy songs” (kŏnjŏn kayo). The latter were commissioned by the
government and emphasized themes of a happy, safe and prosperous nation; by
government mandate every album produced throughout the 1970s and 80s included one
“healthy song” on the reverse side. The “healthy songs” generally resembled strident
military marches or bouncy children’s songs and had no musical correlation to the rest of
the album; Koreans remember being “startled awake” when the kŏnjŏn kayo started
playing at the end of a record. One of the most well-remembered of these was “Ah!
Korea.” Some sample lyrics:
Scattered clouds float in the sky
Cruise ships float on the river
The happiness each one feels
In a place always free
There are four distinct seasons
Mountains and fields precious to gaze at
The ideal in our hearts
Spreads endlessly
Whatever you want
You can get it
Whatever you dream of
157
You can become it
-“Ah! Korea!” Chŏng Su-ra, 1983
The “healthy song” system was initially kicked off in March 1970, when the Ministry of
Culture held a contest calling on songwriters to produce “healthy national songs to be
distributed in schools to promote national feeling,” offering financial rewards to the
winners. The MoC guidelines stated that ideal entries should be “light and pleasant, and
improve public goodwill toward productivity and construction.”
47
Subsequently, healthy
songs were generally commissioned and approved by the Social Purification Committee
(sahoe chŏnghwa uiwonhoe).
Banned songs included many of the most popular folk songs pervading college
campuses at the time. Some had clearly subversive themes, but others seemed strictly a-
political. Indeed some artists seemed to fall victim to political vendettas, such as Shin
Jung-hyŏn whose entire discography was banned after he refused to compose a song of
praise for President Park.
48
The flimsy rationales for banning many of these songs are
indicative of a regime that simply felt deeply nervous about youth culture in general:

47
“Ilgunga daejung gayo pisuthan kukmingayo malssŏng,” Dong-a Ilbo, Saturday, June
6, 1970, News p6.
48
“Kwangbok 70 junyŏn kirokŭro bon ‘kŭmjigokdŭl,” Kirokin vol. 32, Autumn 2015.
158
Figure 11: Notable Banned Songs of the Yushin Era
(Sources: “Song Ch’angshik ui ‘Oe bullŏ dung 5gok yŏnhyŏb, chayul kŭmjigokŭro
kyŏljŏng,” Kyŏnghyang Shinmun, Dec 11, 1975, p8; “Kwangbok 70 junyŏn kirokŭro bon
‘kŭmjigokdŭl,” Kirokin vol. 32, Autumn 2015; “Kŭmjigok iyagi: Nae ch’ŏnchun ui 30
il,” http://archives.kdemo.or.kr/contents/view/57)

Eventually the regime grew wary of folk music altogether and banned the playing of
acoustic guitars in public, condemning it as part of “hippy culture” that was eroding
public ethics. In a speech to the National Assembly in May 1975, Prime Minister Kim
Jong Pil warned that trains, parks and amusement parks were becoming gathering places
for under-aged drinking and other “degenerate activities,” and recommended a police
presence to enforce discipline in such areas [Kang 2016, 141]. Aware that Korean young
intellectuals had traditionally played a vanguard role in protest movements through
Year
Produced
Year
Banned
Song Reason Banned

1975 1975 “Korae Sanyang”
(Whale Hunting)
Deemed ‘degenerate’ on the grounds that the title
could be a euphemism for male circumcision;
probably a bigger reason was that it was featured
in the subversive film Babodŭl ui Haengjin
(Parade of Idiots)
1971 1975 “Kŏjitmaliya” (Lies)
by Kim Chu-ja
Lyrics incite distrust in the government; also
songwriter was accused of being a communist spy
1974 “K’idari Mister Kim”
by Kim Sang-hui
Makes fun of President Park’s height
1974 “Haengbok han
Nara” (A Happy
Country) by Han
Dae-su
Cynically implies that South Korea is not already a
“happy country”
1974 “Mul Chom Chuso”
(Give Me Some
Water) by Han Dae-
su
Thought to be veiled reference to water torture
1977 “Sangroksu”
(Evergreen Tree) by
Kim Min-gi
Subversive lyrics romanticize struggle and protest
1975 1975 “Oe Bullŏ” Part of soundtrack of film “Babodŭl ui haengjin”
played during scene when students are running
from haircut police (film was also banned)
1970 1975 “Ach’im ui Yisŭl”
(Morning Dew) by
Kim Min-gi
Lyric about “walking uphill toward the sun” said
to be reference to Kim Il Sung; the true reason was
probably the songwriter’s liberal political leanings
159
Korea’s modern history (Kim 2017), the Yushin government seemed bent on restricting
anything that brought young people together or elicited untoward enthusiasm.
“In the city of Kwangju just being young is a crime.” -Statement by the
Chosun University Committee for Democratic Struggle dated May 22, 1980
[from Shin and Hwang 2003, xix]
It is difficult to accurately measure how much these cultural measures
contributed to protest action, but their frequent mention in dissident memoirs often
surpasses discussions of more fundamental political-economic issues. Author and former
youth activist Ahn Jae-sŏng explains his motives thusly: “I chose to become a labor
activist, lead strikes and participate in street demonstrations. Why? For a world where I
could sing the songs I liked, grow my hair as long as I wanted, and live as a human
being.”
49
Ahn became a youth activist after being jailed for 30 days for carrying an
acoustic guitar and playing a banned song on a train.
Opposition Impact: Traditional Culture as Protest Medium

Conscious of the need to gain broad public support, democratic activists in the
1970s and 80s took various steps to draw a direct line between their actions and
resistance acts of past generations. In this they effectively pitted their cultural fidelity
credentials against those of the ruling regime. As the Yushin government had already
established monopolistic control of Korean martial and elite cultural traditions, the
opposition came to embrace an alternative cultural tradition rooted in pastoralism,
mysticism and peasant entertainments.
The public’s faith in a Korean tradition of protest was particularly strong in the
contentious Chŏlla region, the site of the infamous Kwangju uprising of 1980. “The well-

49
Testimony by Ahn Jae-seong, posted in http://archives.kdemo.or.kr/contents/view/57.
160
known Tonghak peasant wars of 1894, the anti-Japanese student movements of 1929, and
the Yŏsu-Sunch’ŏn armed resistance of 1948 all occurred in the region… During the
uprisings such a tradition of protest was frequently invoked to stimulate the spirit and
morale of the citizens” (Shin and Hwang 2003: xxi). Chŏlla would eventually be the site
of some of the most massive and violent protests of the democratization struggle.
Student activists’ interest in the traditions of rural life was piqued by the Saemaŭl
Undong (new village campaign), Park’s campaign for the rapid modernization of Korean
agriculture, a controversial program that was disruptive of traditional farming
communities. Certain progressive-minded student clubs organized “country work tours”
during the summer breaks in which they traveled to rural areas to experience farming
firsthand; some of these students became inspired to study and pass on the dances, music
and rituals of the Korean peasant life. When relatively privileged students from Seoul
visited the already restive Chŏlla region, they developed a heightened awareness of
growing inequality and the erosion of rural traditions. They also forged links with a
critical disaffected section of the country, one already steeped in a tradition of civil
disobedience.
Talchum and P’ungmulp’ae: Bringing back the rhythms of our ancestors

“[D]uring the 1980s, improvised explosives of Molotov cocktails were often
accompanied by the clashing sounds of drums and gongs on South Korean
university campuses and on the streets.” (Katherine Lee 2012:180)
In the 1970s a new craze swept South Korean colleges: student groups performing
t’alch’um (mask dance), along with nongak (village dance), pansori (festival music), and
even gut (shamanistic rituals) (Ch’ae 1982: 68).

This sudden revival in the college setting
was somewhat ironic, considering that these rural traditions had for centuries been reviled
161
by Korea’s intellectual class as “peasant superstition,” but reflected an urgent societal
need of the time: to connect with Korea’s ancestral rural lifestyle.
We can get some sense of what these traditional arts signified through a look at
how the students introduced and narrated their performances. In 1982 a South Korean
sociologist accumulated the scripts of old t’alch’um performances from the 1970s and
analyzed recurrent themes. Some selective quotes are translated as follows:
If we learn the movements of our people - of commoners, farmers - we
become them. No, we rediscover ourselves. The blood of our ancestors
flowing in our bodies responds naturally to these rhythms and movements.
It’s not artificial, not something made by other people, it is our pulse and
beat. (Ch’ae 1982: 173)
Tum-tum-de-dum, doesn’t it sound more unfamiliar and foreign to
us now than the rhythms of go-go and disco? Mask dancers lived and
breathed alongside our ancestors on a big square patch of earth. (174)
Let’s release our bitterness through the rhythm of the dance. (178)
From the beginning, the open dance square (madang) suited our people.
Together they stood and cried out as a people who refused to be shut in or
enclosed. (178)
With a cool awareness of history and the present reality, using our bodies
we are expressing social problems through our physical movements. (189)
From these quotes we can see how students explicitly tied t’alch’um to political activism,
for instance characterizing traditional mask dance as a way in which poor farmers
expressed their angst against an oppressive feudal system in the distant past. Clearly it
was important to them that their actions be seen as a continuation of a native tradition of
resistance, not something learned or imported from the West. There is also a clear sense
of recovering something that has been taken away or sacrificed in the march to
modernity, a collective sense of self and an innate responsiveness to certain rhythms
transcending generations. There are frequent references to ancestors and speculation of
162
what they might have felt and thought as they performed these same mask dances
centuries ago.
The essentially pastoral image of t’alch’um as a peasant protest tradition tied it
closely with the recurrent political unrest in the Chŏlla region. Shin and Hwang note that
Chŏlla’s agrarian structure left intertwining legacies of “egalitarian and communitarian
political practices and ideology” with “populist folk culture in which politics is expressed
through performative elements and oral traditions such as p’ansori (narrative operatic
performance), t’alch’um (masked dance), and minjung munhak (populist literature). In
both political ideology and cultural practice the overriding themes of usurping authority,
reasserting the popular, reclaiming culture, and achieving social justice evince these
origins in agrarian class struggles" (Shin and Hwang 2003: 115). For Koreans watching
the crisis unfold on their televisions in May 1980, Kwangju cemented the connections
between t’alch’um, the student movement, and opposition to Yushin cultural rule. The
adoption of t’alch’um and other forms of Chŏlla peasant culture by student clubs
throughout the country helped bridge the urban-rural divide and avoid the pitfalls of
Korean regional chauvinism, which had always been particularly potent in regard to the
Chŏlla region.
A related tradition is p’ungmulp’ae, or drum bands, which were also extremely
popular on college campuses in the late 1970s and more so in the 80s. This sort of
performance is still popular at protest rallies today. Indeed, several groups that originally
formed on campuses the 1980s are still active and could be seen performing at the mass
protests in Seoul in the fall of 2016. From the early days the Yushin regime was aware
and suspicious of these groups as potential outlets for radical activism.
163
The overwhelmingly activist and progressive character of these performance
clubs prompts a chicken-and-egg type of inquiry: did students join these groups because
they were radicalized, or did they become radicalized after they joined? In interviews
with older members of the Taeullim p’ungmulp’ae band conducted in Seoul in 2017,
some indicated that they were inspired by the destruction of rural traditions they saw
happening under the Saemaŭl Undong policy; others said that they had joined simply out
of curiosity about traditional culture, but quickly became politically aware after listening
to more senior group members. One woman who joined in 1984 said that the group
“opened her eyes” to the political oppression happening around her.
50

Throughout the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s, organizations promoting
traditional dance and performance art proliferated. Many of these were new, but some –
such as Hŭngsadan – had their origins in the colonial-era independence movement, and
traditional performance had long been linked with expressions of national self-
determination. Hŭngsadan was founded by independence activist Ahn Chang-ho in the
1920s, originally as a way of teaching traditional arts to Korean exiles living in
California, and was transplanted to the Korean homeland after liberation. It is telling that
this storied institution of Korean traditional art was disbanded by the Park Chung-hee
government in 1961 (it was reinstated two years later under pressure from Ahn’s family
foundation).
51
Such organizations served as a key link between youth culture and Korean

50
Interviews with Taeullim Band members, Seoul, March 2017.
51
“5.16 k’udet’a wa tan hwaldong chŏngch’i” [5.16 coup d’etat and cessation of group
activities] by Pak Hwa-man, Aug 30, 2017 on Hŭngsadan’s website
(https://www.yka.or.kr/html/communication/freeboard.asp?skey=&sword=&category=&
size=10&page=1&no=14814)
164
cultural nationalism; “It is no understatement to write that the mass culture movement
served as a major catalyst for the renewed interest in Korean Folklore” (Howard 75-6).
Some of the more active cultural forums were explicitly targeted by Park regime
thugs. On the night of August 18, 1988, four men broke into the headquarters of Uri
Madang, a civic group that hosted public performances of traditional dance and music; a
university student was brutally clubbed and a woman was raped. In 2004 a former
military operative revealed that the attackers had been agents of the army’s HID anti-
communist task force.
52

Madanggŭk: Dramatic Traditions of Korean Peasantry
Another fixture of the cultural resistance toolbox was madanggŭk, a form of
comedic village theater identified with Korean peasant tradition, which was adapted by
democratic activists as an easy way to communicate veiled progressive ideas and political
criticism to a skeptical and semi-literate workforce.
Madanggŭk were an amalgam of Western-style drama and traditional peasant
performance arts like t’alch’um and puppet theater. Like t’alch’um, it became popular on
college campuses in the 1970s as a way of recovering the essence of Korean culture,
which students felt was being trampled in the drive for rapid development. The Korean
state was initially complicit in encouraging the development of madanggŭk by
designating practitioners as living cultural treasures and sponsoring folk contests (Lee
2007: 188), but students quickly discovered that the traditional style of the plays could be
reworked in innovative ways to poke fun at the powers that be. The police were initially
at a loss to crack down on these displays, because madanggŭk had been designated as

52
Jŏng Hŭi-sang, “Bukp’a Kongjakwon ŭl dongwŏnhae chŏngch’i t’erŏ chŏjillŏtta,”
Shisa Journal, Nov 24, 2004.
165
living cultural heritage, and political messages were so cleverly encoded that it was hard
to pinpoint exactly how they were subversive.
53

Dramatist Lim Jin-tae was a college student in the 1970s and describes in his
memoirs how modern-day activist madanggŭk evolved. In the early 1970s, when college
drama clubs mainly staged translated productions of foreign plays, the drama club of
Seoul National University’s liberal arts department started creating its own original plays,
arguing “There’s not much point telling other country’s stories; if we’re going to the
effort, we might as well tell our own stories.” (Lim 1990: 316) Many of these early
student plays were criticized as “petit bourgeois” and overly ideological in content and
form, and there was a dearth of acceptable scripts to perform each semester. Around this
time, student dramas began taking influences from the political events of the day: the
migration of poor peasants to the cities, the intense labor struggles, and the various
government crackdowns and emergency measures. In response to these social conditions,
a new format called “Minjunggŭk” was created; less expressionistic and more
transparently ideological than Western-style dramas, with topics more relevant to
people’s daily life struggles. Minjunggŭk written around this time were based on such
current events as garment cutter Chŏn Tae-il’s self-immolation protest in 1970, the riots
by displaced shantytown residents in Gwangju in 1971, and the protests by female
workers at Dongil Spinning in 1971. These student plays were often staged in urban
evangelist churches, particularly the First Seoul Church (Seoul Chaeil Kyohŭi), where
members of the youth group had connections with Seoul National University’s drama
club; thus began a tradition of urban churches staging activist minjunggŭk. Madanggŭk

53
Testimony recorded for “Yijae nŭn mal hal su itta,” MBC Documentary, April 10,
2005.
166
was the combination of minjunggŭk and t’alch’um; the first modern madanggŭk was
created when the SNU drama club collaborated with the t’alch’um club to create an
original mask dance for their play “Jin'ogui,” written by none other than Kim Chi-ha.
(Lim 1990: 319-20)
Chŏng Ji-ch’ang, another early madanggŭk writer turned chronicler of the
democratic movement, penned an articulate screed on the relative value of madanggŭk
compared to the more revered medium of resistance literature:
While poems are written behind the scenes of the fight, madanggŭk
performances often took place right in the midst of the fight. Poems and
novels help explain the validity of resistance, but performing madanggŭk is
itself an act of resistance. Poems are for civilians in the rear, madanggŭk is
for soldiers on the front lines of the struggle…. Madanggŭk didn’t have time
for the self-absorption and guilt shown by poets and writers especially after
Kwangju; for madanggŭk performers survivor’s guilt was a “bourgeois
luxury.” They had a single-minded focus on broadly exposing truths that
had been hidden and waking people up to the resistance. (Chŏng 1988: 30)
Chŏng’s paean to the movement illuminates how, even at the height of Korea’s ultimately
successful fight for democracy, intellectuals and artists struggled among themselves with
the question of which arts were most worthy of respect.
Literary protest traditions
Korea’s Confucian tradition carried into the modern era an expectation that
intellectuals and writers should be at the forefront of any influential political movement.
Even as physical battles were breaking out in the streets of Kwangju and Seoul,
intellectual battles were being fought in South Korea’s university halls and on the pages
of its literary journals.
The bard of the Korean democracy movement was the poet Kim Chi-ha. Kim’s
poetry broke from Korean artistic tradition in many ways, exhibiting an arrhythmic style
with many onomatopoeia, more reminiscent of shamanistic narrative style than traditional
167
aristocratic poetry. Kim’s most well-known poem, Five Bandits, tells the story of five
bandits gathered in their lair boasting to each other about how much they’ve stolen. The
five bandits represent the president, the cabinet, industrial tycoons, civil servants, and the
police. For Koreans, the title also evokes a reference to the “Five Ŭlsa Traitors” who
signed 1905 Eulsa treaty ceding Korea to Japan. In this sense, the poem can be seen as
drawing a direct line between the current bureaucracy and the late Chosŏn-era elites who
handed the country to the Japanese in 1905. The poem was published in the literary
magazine Sasanggye in 1970, and got both the editors and the author thrown in prison.
The following excerpt describes the bandit’s lair:
A Korean tiled roof perches lightly on top of a western-style marble house,
the pillars are Corinthian-style, the cross-beams Ionian,..
Above the tiles a second floor built, on top of that a roof terrace laid out, the
lattice-work of the sliding doors designed to form the character for ‘thief’;
the lofty inner and outer gates imitate Persian models, the bathroom’s like a
Turkish bath, the pigsty’s splendid in Japanese mode…
Chosŏn celadon, white porcelain from Koryŏ, Picassos hanging upside
down, Chagalls hung sideways, orchid paintings by Sŏkpa glossily mounted
in gold-lacquered frames, four hundred scroll paintings hanging up, eight
thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight paintings of mountains, rivers,
flowers, birds, butterflies, people, all crammed together, pewter
earthenware, Tang vases, Japanese vases, American vases, French vases,
Italian vases, a television sheathed in a tiger-skin rug, a Sony recorder in a
marquetry chest, a Mitchell camera on a tortoiseshell table, an RCA
projector beside a coral book case, a Parker fountain pen in an amber
writing-brush holder, chandeliers with candles lit, castor-oil-burning
standing lamps, indirect-direct, straight-curving, ceiling-floor-wall lighting,
bright-dark, gorgeous-discreet.
54

In the above excerpt, the narrator seems to take particular offense at the fact that
the bandits not only live in splendor, but they assemble so many eclectic elements from
foreign cultures and crass simulacra of Korean culture. This is a recurrent theme of the

54
Kim Chi-ha, “Five Bandits.” Translation by Brother Anthony.
168
democracy movement particularly in the late 1970s, as people learned more about the
decadent lifestyle that President Park was enjoying behind the scenes. The allegedly pro-
Japanese and pro-American cultural proclivities of key government officials were a
frequent target in student manifestoes and protest leaflets.
Aftermath: Cultural Reclamation and Victory Demolitions in the Democratic
Era
The Yushin government preserved many of the structures and institutions
associated with the fascist Japanese colonial state, a fact that is somewhat surprising
given Park’s already problematic early history as a Japanese colonial era collaborator.
This bestowed upon the opposition movement a number of very visible fascist symbols of
the hated colonial past which could be destroyed. For instance, until 1987 the Korean
government maintained the infamous Sŏdaemun Prison where many renowned
independence fighters had been tortured and killed by the Japanese. Now many famous
anti-regime dissidents and intellectual leaders, including Kim Chi-ha and his editors,
were detained in the same physical buildings that had once held the heroes of Korea’s
independence struggle. Park also kept the National Assembly in the same imposing
neoclassical structure that had once housed the Japanese Government General
headquarters, a big fat fascist symbol right in the heart of the capital. The Japanese had
infamously placed this building in front of Kyŏngbukgung palace over the site of the
Gwanghwamun Gate, symbolically supplanting Korea’s royal court and cutting off the
old dynastic seat of power from the people.
In the democratic transition period, “correcting” historical consciousness meant
revising textbooks and tearing down some of the most prominent symbols of past
oppression. In 1995, on the 50
th
anniversary of Korean independence, the government of
169
President Kim Young-sam arranged the demolition of the dome on the old Japanese
government-general building (Han 2014). Sŏdaemun Prison was finally shuttered in 1987
and reopened in 1992 as a museum and memorial. The destruction of these symbols
provided a satisfying sort of victory lap for the democracy movement. By demolishing
the Government General building and turning Sŏdaemun Prison into a museum, the
democratic government of Kim Young-sam was able to establish a clear and final break
with Korea’s colonial past. The psychological effect of such demolitions is comparable
with the tearing down of Lenin and Stalin statues in the Soviet bloc, as part of the class of
“victory demolitions” that mass movements rely on to demonstrate visible and immediate
progress after taking power. The fact that Park Chung-hee did not take advantage of such
a symbolic victory by demolishing the buildings himself, which he could have done at
any time during his twenty-year reign, reflects clearly his ideological priorities and his
own uncomfortable personal history with Japanese fascism.
Another space of great symbolic importance to the victorious democratic
movement was Kwangju, site of the 1980 mass protest and brutal crackdown that has
retroactively come to be seen as a turning point in Korea’s democratization. In 1997 the
Kim Young-sam government was the first to devote finances to memorializing Kwangju,
through three measures: 1) establishing May 18 as a public holiday, National
Commemoration Day, 2) enacting the Kwangju Uprising Special Law, which exonerated
the protest leaders, and 3) reconstructing important sites from the uprising to serve as
memorials (Mangwŏldong cemetery, the Toch’ong provincial capital building, and the
Sangmudae martial law branch headquarters). At around that time, Kwangju’s central
square was renamed “May 18 Democracy Square” (Shin and Hwang 2003: 123).
170
Meanwhile, in 1999 the Seoul City government began a “Memorials to the Heroes of
Democracy” (Minjuyŏlsa kinyŏnpyosŏk yujŏkji saŏb) project which erected new
monuments in the capital, notably a memorial to youth labor activist Chŏn T’ae-il at the
site of his 1970 self-immolation near the Pyŏnghwa Market. Thus while the symbolic
spaces and monuments of the old regime were torn down, new ones with a distinctly
democratic and oppositional flavor were erected.
In the new democratic era, the Korean public’s long-repressed resentment of
Yushin era policies and their awareness of President Park’s pro-Japanese history
combined to stoke a virulent anti-collaborationist movement. Civic groups published lists
of chinilpa (pro-Japanese collaborators, often including anyone employed in the civil
service during the colonial era) and their descendants. Prosecution of chinilpa, which had
tentatively begun under the Syngman Rhee administration and was halted entirely
throughout Pak’s tenure as president, returned with a vengeance in the 1990s and early
2000s. By naming and shaming the descendants of Japan-era collaborators, many of
whom had held protected positions of wealth and prominence in the Yushin era, the
Korean public seemed to be experiencing a cathartic release of decades of resentment that
conflated the injustices of the colonial era with the pernicious wealth gap of the high-
growth era.
This complex relationship between anti-Japan sentiment and the achievement of a
successful liberal democracy is critical to understanding the modern South Korea-Japan
relationship. It is not a simple matter of hating Japan for something that happened in
another era in the distant past. The free expression of anti-Japanese sentiment is
inexorably linked with the rejection of the Yushin system, the dissemination of
171
democratic norms of free speech and civil rights, and all that South Korea has achieved
politically since 1987. The pro-Japanese reputation of Park Chung-hee – and, by
extension, the current conservative party that inherited his legacy – puts liberal parties in
a powerful position in recurrent debates on education reform, history textbook revisions,
and labor rights. Park’s cultural affinity for Japan, his early education and military
training, his admiration for fascist architecture and the culture of militant uniformity, his
continued use of the institutions of cultural promotion and control first put in place by the
Japanese, all are tied to an autocratic past that liberal Koreans have fought hard to reject.
The process of identifying and punishing collaborators is not merely a way of poking
Japan in the eye; at one time it was the best tool available for disrupting the entrenched
class of economic and political elites whose power originated in the Japanese era and
who had been protected by the Yushin system. And behind the angry demands over the
comfort women issue and the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute is an implicit criticism of one of
the signature achievements of Park’s presidency, the 1965 normalization treaty with
Japan. To reject the terms of this treaty is to reject Park as the legitimate leader of his era.

Conclusion
In sum, we can say that the Yushin era was a time when South Korea was
wrestling with how to define the best parts of its culture, and at the same time trying to
figure out who or what was to blame for the nation’s defeat and colonial subjugation.
We see two major camps emerging in this debate. First there was the official line,
which held that Korea had a grand martial tradition that had been interrupted by the
slothful and entitled yangban (gentry) class, who sold the country to the Japanese. This
was a fundamentally anti-intellectual stance that championed military might, uniformity,
172
and social order. But this camp also emphasized the scientific achievements of Korea’s
ancient past, as a way of encouraging development in science and industry in service of
rapid growth. The Yushin government was also careful to co-opt cultural elites by
sponsoring massive cultural events like the Gukp’ung ‘81 folk festival and honoring
traditional craftsmen with national heritage status. Above all else they abhorred youth
culture and the satirical and creative reinterpretation of folk art that was going on on
college campuses.
Standing in opposition to this was a growing coalition of artists, youths and
workers who were building an alternative vision of Korean culture as dynamic,
disorderly, creative, close to nature, open to innovation, satirical and irreverent toward
authority. This was a time when young student activists left prestigious colleges and went
to work among textile factory workers and dock hands, opening lines of communication
with the lower classes through a mutual respect for Korea’s peasant traditions. As the list
of banned songs and fashion restrictions lengthened, this provided a series of ready-made
symbols of rebellion for protestors.
The remarkable legacy of this movement is that, to this day in South Korean
politics, callbacks to traditional culture are more the province of the political left wing. It
is the liberal party representatives who sometimes appear at the National Assembly
wearing traditional hanbok and quoting old Confucian proverbs in their speeches,
whereas Korea’s conservative parties are more commonly associated with a focus on
national defense, global competitiveness and economic development. This is in marked
contrast to most of the rest of the world, where traditional values and old ancestral
symbols are usually the province of political conservatives.
173

The South Korean case illustrates how common cultural interests may play a role
in spurring coalitions in social movements, particularly in the absence of a common
political language between coalition groups. For Korea’s young intellectuals and skilled
workers, these movements were about promoting economic equality, judicial fairness,
democratic accountability and civil rights. But for the impoverished lower classes
dislocated and confused by the breakneck economic and social development of the
Yushin era, these were abstract and unreliable goals. It was hard for the rank and file to
clearly understand how such reforms would improve their lives, even if they could be
achieved. What was clear was that Yushin policies were rapidly eroding traditional ways
of life, discarding sacred practices and peasant traditions that had once given comfort in
times of uncertainty and change.
This case supplements the previous cases by showing a more nuanced
combination of our key variables. Yushin cultural policies overall can be classified as
severe (although not quite as severe as the Mongolian case) and moving in a modernizing
direction (while also championing selective aspects of traditional culture, particularly
martial stoicism and filial piety). There was a fairly low sense of ownership of the ruling
ideology (Western capitalism and nominal democracy), although again not quite as low
as in communist Mongolia or Korea during the Japanese colonial period. South Koreans
had at least some sense of reclaimed sovereignty, although the Park regime was
constantly dogged by accusations of flunkeyism and subordination to U.S. policy
prerogatives. The effect of these inputs on the revolutionary potential of South Korean
society can be seen through the persistent acts of cultural rebellion, particularly among
174
Korean youth and factory workers, and the diverse inter-class opposition coalition that
grew stronger over time.
This case also introduces a new element into our analysis: the role of national
trauma in shaping the direction of cultural policies and the public’s reaction to them.
Throughout this account of the political struggles of Yushin-era South Korea, we can
sense a ghostly presence that has haunted political discourse from liberation to the
present day: the specter of Korea’s colonial subjugation, accompanied by the unanswered
questions of who was to blame for it and how it might have been prevented. Unlike in
North Korea, in the South the public is uncomfortably aware that they did not achieve
their national liberation through their own efforts alone. Because of this, Koreans can
never be quite sure whether or not they would ever have liberated themselves without
foreign help, and therefore they can never be certain that the tragedy will not happen
again. This uncertainty should have been appeased after 1987, when South Koreans
achieved their own democratization in spite of U.S. efforts to prop up the dictatorship;
and yet the ghost remains unquiet. Time and again, in times of crisis or tragedy, South
Koreans look critically at their own culture and values, questioning what need to be
changed.
55

55
A good example is the soul-searching after the tragic sinking of the Sewŏl ferry in
2014, in which many intellectuals penned articles blaming various aspects of Korean
culture such as lack of precision, preference for speed or negligence toward regulations.
In these cultural critiques Korea was often unfavorably compared to Japan, as a Japanese
company had originally built the ferry and operated it for 18 years without incident. See
for example Pak Sŏng-jin et al, “Sewol-ho baek-il: Taehanminguk anjŏn 7kaji cheŏn,”
[The Sewol 100 days: 7 proposals for a safe Korea] Donga Ilbo, July 24, 2014
(http://news.donga.com/InfoGraphics/View/3/all/20140724/65400630/9); Kim Hun,
“Sewol-ho nŭn kwiroun chahwasanida” [The Sewol is a tragic self-portrait], Hangyoreh,
April 13, 2017 (http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/culture/culture_general/790531.html).
175
This somewhat complicates the calculus of the basic model elaborated in the
previous three chapters, which implied that modernizing policies are generally foreign-
imposed and nationalistic leaders should naturally prefer traditionalizing policies. With
the South Korea case, we begin to understand why even highly nationalistic groups might
be motivated to accept modernizing cultural reforms or emulation of specific aspects of
foreign culture. When faced with a genuine existential threat to the nation, people are
more willing to contemplate the idea that there might be something wrong with their
culture. This helps us to understand why some South Koreans (particularly the older
generation and the military) initially accepted or even supported the Yushin cultural
reforms, and why it took so long for the student cultural movement to grow into a force
capable of toppling the dictatorship.
Unlike Mongolia and colonial Korea, where cultural change was something
imposed by an influential foreign power, Yushin’s cultural interventions were done to
Koreans by Koreans. And yet they were no less destructive and no less passionately
pursued, in their own way. Even as they grew more materially prosperous, Koreans
struggled to find a satisfying explanation for their past subjugation. Had they been
defeated because their culture was too “backward” and isolated? Or because had they had
betrayed older, better values that had served their ancestors well in the past? Was the
answer embracing modernity and cosmopolitanism, or doubling down on ancestral
values? For the people who had lived that history, finding the right answer was more than
an academic pursuit; it was a question of national survival. This notion of national trauma
will play a big role in explaining the direction of cultural policy in another key case –
postwar Japan – which we will explore in the next chapter.
176

177
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Chapter 5: Postwar Japan’s Cultural Democracy

Introduction: Japan as a Problematic Anomaly Case
20
th
century history has shown that new regimes imposed by or heavily dependent
on foreign powers are prone to instability and popular unrest, particularly when their
inception is accompanied by imposed cultural change. In previous chapters I have shown
how rapid, state-imposed cultural modernization in Mongolia under Soviet influence and
in South Korea under military rule weakened state legitimacy in the eyes of the people
and sowed the seeds for later unrest. We also saw how similarly intrusive state-imposed
cultural controls actually helped shore up popular support when done in the service of
preserving “traditional” culture, in the case of North Korea. We saw how the North
Korean regime’s appearance of ideological independence was crucial to maintaining the
myth of its cultural legitimacy, while the South Korean regime’s uncritical absorption of
foreign influence and selective appropriation of traditional culture made the public much
more skeptical of its cultural policies.
In light of this evidence, the case of post-WWII Japan appears to be an anomaly. An
occupied and defeated nation-state watching helplessly as a foreign power dismantles and
rewrites its constitution, postwar Japan is about as close as one gets to a state with zero
national ownership of its ruling ideology. It also saw considerable cultural changes
through the postwar period, most of them moving in a modernizing direction and
imposed - or at least encouraged - by an overbearing foreign power with little knowledge
of or sympathy for Japanese traditional culture. And yet, the Japanese people appear to
have absorbed this imposition with surprisingly good grace. Indeed, Japan’s democracy
seems remarkably complacent; its public activism has remained small-scale and
180
cooperative, and the same political party has held power with few interruptions since
1955. Japan thus represents a problematic challenge to my theoretical model, and the
purpose of this final case study is to figure out what “went wrong” that has allowed Japan
to remain so stable for so many years under an imported ideology. The chapter will begin
by exploring the history of state-imposed cultural change in Japan, first under the Meiji
reforms and later during the US occupation and postwar. It will then examine “critical
junctures” in Japan’s postwar history when high-visibility protest acts occurred, focusing
on how the general populace responded to these protests and why activist leaders were
unable to use cultural affinities to expand their base of support among the broader
population, as seen in 1987 South Korea or 1990 Mongolia.
Understanding the apparent success of US state-building efforts in Japan is
important, particularly in light of the spectacular failures of later US efforts in South
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In each of those cases, popular resentment at externally
imposed cultural norms served as a major motivating factor for popular resistance. Yet
cultural change and ideological imposition were equally potent features of US
involvement in early postwar Japan. Few academic treatments have endeavored to
compare these occupations, and those that have done so focus mainly on differences in
the initial level of political institutions and infrastructure (Monten 2014) and the strategic
environment for guerrilla warfare (Bridoux 2011), while ignoring the role of imposed
cultural change. Therefore it is worthwhile to take a fresh look at the cultural
transformations that took place in postwar Japan, with a focus on how these were
received by the population at large.
181
Background Condition: The Meiji and Showa Restorations
Part of the answer seems to lie in the timing and scale of Japan’s prewar
modernization. Japan overcame many of the most dramatic aspects of modernization
(universal education, labor specialization, industrialization, transportation, changes in diet
and lifestyle, exposure to foreign products and ideas) in a period when the Japanese
people still had a strong sense of ownership of their ruling ideology - that is, from the
Meiji Reformation (1968~) up to August 1945. The Meiji period in particular was
marked by rapid imposed transformations in all aspects of life. Storry (1960) wrote of the
early Meiji period: “Banks, railways, harbors, lighthouses, dockyards, telegraph offices,
printing presses and newspapers, post offices, cigars and cigarettes — the entire
apparatus of Western material civilization seemed to find some reproduction, some kind
of echo, in Japan.” In 1875, just seven years after the Meiji era dawned, the noted scholar
and writer Fukuzawa Yukichi wrote: “[N]owadays the somewhat better educated people
of the middle class and above – those who are called ‘teachers of enlightenment’ – are
constantly declaiming the excellence of Western civilization” (Yukichi 1872, 112). We
may take note here that Fukuzawa explicitly identified the “better educated middle class
and above” as the admirers of Western civilization, leaving us to speculate whether he
had perhaps observed some less fervent opinions among the lower classes.
The first two decades of Meiji saw many firsts. Japan imposed its first compulsory
education system and issued its first national standardized textbook in 1886; the mission
of this system was explicitly stated as “a core of ethical and national education providing
the knowledge and training necessary for daily life.” (Iriye 4). Japan’s first modern
university, Tokyo University, was founded in 1877. The first Japanese daily newspaper
covering foreign and domestic news, the Yokohama Mainichi Shinbun, was published in
182
1871 (Duke 2009, 230). Subsequent decades saw the proliferation of regional newspapers
and targeted magazines, creating communities of readers and “enhancing individual
awareness of the common space shared by an invisible public of companion readers”
(Sand 2003, 4).
The Meiji era also saw the formation of the zaibatsu conglomerates, enabling rapid
industrialization and consequent urbanization of the populace. Sand (2003) describes how
the rapid modernization of Japanese living spaces, precipitated by the legal reforms and
infrastructural development of the Meiji period, led to a dramatic transformation of class
relations as well as notions of domesticity, property, family life and connections to the
land. The Meiji regime not only “broke with native building traditions by introducing
Western architecture,” but introduced an entire system of “new architectural typologies
such as the schoolhouse, the military barracks, the train station, the office building, and
the hospital,” fundamentally transforming the citizens’ notions of public spaces, buildings,
and urban landscapes (Sand 2003, 4). Industrialization, urbanization, mass media, and
educational processes have long been linked in the comparative politics literature to the
growth of political activism and transformation of a democratic culture (Lipset); as such,
it can be argued that Japan went through some of the most potentially destabilizing
aspects of modernization while still safely under the umbrella of a highly nationalized
ruling ideology.
Language was one of the key targets of modernizing reform. Beginning in the
1870s, Meiji authorities and intellectuals embarked upon a long, contentious and
ultimately fruitless attempt at script reform. The purpose of this was to rapidly generate a
literate and highly specialized workforce. For instance, it was proposed that simplifying
183
kanji would shorten the length of elementary schooling and help to build the literate
workforce needed for rapid modernization: “Beyond doubt, it will be and in measurable
advantage if they use the time thus gained in scholarship or industry, each according to
his own inclination.” (Maejima, quoted in Seeley 1991, 139) Consequently, in the late
1800s, Meiji technocrats and intellectuals proposed various methods of script
simplification, from reducing the number of Kanji to standardizing kana usage or even
creating an all-kana script. Imperial loyalists opposed the script reform because “to
abolish characters would mean changing the form of imperial rescripts, an act which,
they argued, would be disrespectful towards the Emperor and would have a negative
effect on the Japanese spirit because writing and thought were, in their view, inseparable.”
(Ibid, 148) The military was also a prominent opponent of script reform, due to the
strategic need to write Chinese place names and military tradition that “favored a written
style which featured heavy use of Sino-Japanese items and difficult characters.” (Seeley
1991, 147) Thus, after a period of struggle, early script reform efforts were shelved until
after the war.
A feature of the early Meiji period was the extensive edicts issued in the emperor’s
name many of which targeted traditional samurai culture. For instance, the Danpatsurei
Edict of 1971 mandated the cutting of topknots, and the Haitŏrei Edict of 1876 prohibited
people from wearing swords in public. Even earlier, the Tenpō reforms of the 1840s had
produced “a constant stream of edicts regulating food and dress, hair styles, the giving of
presents, all the expensive habits of the world of theaters and brothels into which the
samurai seemed to be so easily lured” (Beasley 1972, 64). Thus early modern Japan
184
already had a long-established system of top-down imposed cultural change even before
the 20
th
Century.
Some Meiji cultural changes seem almost fetishistically pro-Western – for instance,
the changes in diet that followed Japan’s opening. Government propaganda promoted
beef-eating and milk-drinking as ways to add strength to the Japanese physique, hoping
that a Western diet would make its military forces more formidable. Many cookbooks
published in the 1870s and 80s introduced Western cuisine and table manners. A popular
1871 novel, Sitting around the Stewpot, declared that beef-eating was the true mark of a
civilized society (Rath and Assmann 2010, 131). In the Taishō era, the growing need for
an efficient workforce led the government to promote innovations in fast food –
introducing food stalls, “one-meal stands” (ichizen meshiya), portable noodle stalls
(sobaya), and Western-style bread as time-savers (ibid p149). Bread in particular was
slow to catch on, as white rice was such an important staple in Japanese culture and
citizens reportedly disliked the texture of bread, which reminded them of human flesh. In
1869, the retired samurai Kimura Yasubei encountered Western-style bread in the foreign
traders’ district in Yokohama and became convinced that bread was essential to modern
civilization; his endeavors to make the stuff palatable to Japanese consumers ultimately
led to the invention of anpan (sweet bean stuffed rolls) (Hatakenaka 2013). All of these
represented voluntary cultural changes imposed by a highly nationalistic regime in the
name of “catching up” with the West, and would have been received by the populace as
non-trivial transformations of traditional living.
Folk tales and beliefs were also a target of Meiji’s modernization campaign. Figal
(1999) describes how the Meiji state worked to suppress, denigrate, manipulate, or
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reincorporate folk beliefs as part of an effort toward the consolidation of a modern
national culture. While urging the people to throw away “peasant superstitions,” the state
also understood how certain folk beliefs could be coopted to ensure an obedient
population. “Representation of the magical and mysterious played an integral part in the
production of modernity beginning in Meiji Japan.” (Figal 1999). Intellectuals like
Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) promoted Western civilization as a guide for Japan’s
future growth and development.
The most significant challenge to the Meiji modernization program came in the
1920s with the so-called Taisho democracy, a pushback against the oligarchic and
increasingly militaristic politics that had come to dominate since Japan’s military
victories against China and Russia. Set in motion by massive rioting over rice prices in
1918, the Taishō period saw liberal reforms that elevated political parties ruling through
the parliament and the cabinet while diminishing the emperor’s direct role in governance.
One Western observer at the time wrote that “Liberalism is in the air” and predicted that
“Japan will move steadily toward democracy” (John Dewey quoted in McClain 2002,
328). Historians are divided on the causes and significance of the Taishō democracy’s
rise and fall; indeed, there are nearly as many competing explanations for this episode as
there are for the American Civil War and WWI. But the role of resurgent ethno-
nationalism in reaction to Meiji’s imposed modernization and internationalism cannot be
denied. As Doak broadly describes it, “[T]his broad eclectic challenge to the elitist Meiji
state was fundamentally an attempt to reassert the prerogatives of a collectivized view of
‘the social’ against an elite... Whether or not the label of fascism best captures their
political views, there can be no doubt that nationalism, especially the popular and ethnic
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version, was a central… ingredient in what has become known as ‘Taishō democracy’”
(Doak 1998, 194). Thus, contrary though it may seem to our accustomed notion of
liberalizing reforms, the Taishō period was marked by the most significant attempted
reversals of the earlier modernizing reforms. At the same time, it saw the brief rise of
left-leaning intellectual elites at the expense of the military bureaucracy and a new
assertion of populist democratic politics (McClain 2002, 328-334). These liberal civilian
bureaucrats and intellectuals pushed back on some of the more problematic Meiji-era
reforms, particularly in education and language reform. For instance, the new kana
system proposed by Meiji met with newly energized resistance from civilian bureaucrats
and intellectuals such as the novelist Mori Ogai, who argued that the “historical kana
usage represented the essential form of the Japanese language and so should be preserved
in perpetuity” (Seeley 1991, 144). Ultimately, the cultural program of the Taishō period
cannot be neatly categorized as “traditionalizing” or “modernizing,” but was something
of a mélange. Referred to as Japan’s “Jazz Age,” Taishō was a period when the ideals of
liberal democracy and ethno-nationalism were championed side-by-side, and the
population chafed against some of Meiji’s harsher and more arbitrary edicts while
voraciously consuming many forms of Western popular culture. In terms of our
theoretical model, this period was the closest that pre-1945 Japan came to a “Free Market”
cultural system, and thus it should be unsurprising to us that the domestic population
pursued parallel tracks of cosmopolitan culture and reclaimed traditions.
The promising idealism of the Taishō era stumbled under the chaotic burst of
xenophobia following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, which was framed by
religious elites as a heavenly judgment against the encroaching foreign values and
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evidence of the fragility of Western technology. “Commentators were freed to stress the
connection between the earthquake and the perception of Tokyo as a center of decadence
and moral decay… The fact that the devastation in Tokyo centered on the entertainment
districts in the east of the city reinforced the argument that it was divine punishment for
impropriety” (Samuels 2013, 56). Rightist intellectuals led by Kita Ikki saw the disaster
as a punishment upon the people for electing corrupt bureaucrats and allowing them to
weaken the country. Kita and his followers “equated the convergent natural, political,
economic, and diplomatic crises of this period with the Buddhist eschatology known
as mappō, and called for the Japanese people to ‘regenerate’ the world by restoring direct
imperial rule,” drawing upon a centuries-old Buddhist prophesy that predicted that after
these crises "a great war, unprecedented in prior ages, shall break out in the world"
(Orihara and Clancey 2012). Thus the circumstances were ripe for a crackdown on
cultural freedoms. In addition, the earthquake was an opportunity for the military to
regain public support its participation in the rebuilding and relief effort, raising its public
profile.
The renewed militarization drive following the Manchurian Incident of 1931
brought the Taishō democracy period to its final, ignominious end, reversing the liberal
reforms and elevating the young Shōwa emperor to a position of unprecedented power.
The subsequent period, known as the Shōwa restoration, saw a drastic cultural restrictions
(McClain 2002, 464-5) and economic transformations as the country ramped up its civil
capacity for waging total war under the rule of the resurgent military elites.
As the above history illustrates, by the time of WWII Japan had already gone
through its own entirely self-directed cycle of imposed modernization, traditionalist
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retrenchment, and imposed modernization again. Intriguingly, regardless of the political
ideology of the key players at each step in this cycle, the underlying rebellion at the
popular level was propelled by some sort of throwback to a real or imagined ancient
tradition. The Meiji restorationists drew upon the glory days of Heian period emperors;
the Taishō liberal reforms were undergirded by populist ethno-nationalism in rebellion
against capitalist globalism; and even the Shōwa restoration leaders drew upon ancient
millenarian prophecies of doom and gloom to scare people into accepting a renewed
drive for rapid, military-led modernization.
In sum, the Meiji, Taishō, and early Showa approaches to culture interacted with
historical reality and the ideal of the modern in complex ways, making it difficult to
position these regimes along the continuum from “traditionalizing” to “modernizing.” It
appears to have contained elements of both directions. It may be confidently stated,
however, that Meiji Japan measures quite high on the scale of national ownership of
ruling ideology, particularly when compared with the other key cases in this study. Meiji
Japan was almost unique in its ability to selectively adopt the best aspects of various
foreign societies and to present this imitation as a uniquely Japanese achievement and
point of pride. While swiftly adopting various Western systems of banking, commerce,
and domestic institutions, Meiji rulers astutely maintained a firewall separating their
ruling ideology from foreign intellectual contamination; this firewall was known as kōdō,
or the “imperial way.” As Bix explains, “the term denoted a kind of ideological warfare
but also, on the other hand, an action plan. It was designed to make Japan free of all
externally derived isms, such as western democracy, liberalism, individualism, and
communism. Free to be itself only, the nation would regain self esteem and be able to
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wage a holy war of ideas against Western political doctrines.” (Bix 2001, 10) This policy
of incorporating the essential spirit of foreign reforms under a mask of native-born
ideology bears a striking resemblance to North Korean efforts to erase all mention of
“communism” “socialism” and “Marx” from texts, or the PRC’s invention of “socialism
with Chinese characteristics.”
Cultural Policies in Postwar Japan
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
(SCAP)
56
in charge of the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan, made his opinion of his
subjects clear during Senate hearings in 1951. This was the infamous statement in which
he likened Japanese civilization to a twelve-year-old boy in comparison to the mature
civilizations of the German and Anglo-Saxon races. As wrong and offensive as this
statement was, if one looks at the larger context of the quote, it appears that MacArthur
was referring not so much to Japan’s cultural immaturity as to its cultural malleability:
The German people were a mature race. If the Anglo-Saxon was say 45 years
of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the
Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their
antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by
the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of 12 as
compared with our development of 45 years. Like any tuitionary period, they
were susceptible to following new models, new ideas. You can implant basic
concepts there. They were still close enough to origin to be elastic and
acceptable to new concepts. (quoted in Dower 1993, 303)
According to this peculiar MacArthurian logic, the analogy was almost
complimentary, implying that the Japanese had the sponge-like quality of youth to absorb
new cultural ideas and values, unlike more mature civilizations that were ossified and set
in their ways. This single quote is the clearest indication of how MacArthur and the U.S.

56
Following standard practice, throughout this text SCAP refers to either MacArthur
himself or to the entire occupation forces in Japan.
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occupation authorities interpreted their mission in Japan: not merely to disarm it and
impose an institutional transformation from dictatorship to pacifist democratic state, but
essentially to give it a cultural makeover in the mold of American and Western
civilization.
Since we know, prima facie, that MacArthur’s assessment of Japan’s civilizational
progress has no basis in historical reality, we must ask: what other factors could account
for the cultural acquisitiveness and malleability that MacArthur apparently observed
during his tenure? One answer may be that the Japanese population had arguably already
been exposed to decades of culturally transformative programs under an autocratic state
bureaucracy bent on rapid modernization, programs which were disruptive and disturbing
to a great many people, and SCAP’s cultural reforms were relatively tame by
comparison. As we have already seen, the period from the Meiji restoration up to 1945
saw diverse changes in Japanese culture and lifestyle, many associated with
modernization and the West, even before SCAP became involved. But while these
changes did meet with resistance, this was muted by the high degree of national
ownership of the ruling ideology and the emperor’s authority.
Partly as a consequence of this earlier cultural transformation, the changes
accompanying the new post-1945 system seem less severe, particularly in comparison to
other foreign-imposed regimes such as the Soviet satellites. Although the U.S. occupying
authorities dismantled Japan’s fascist political system and forced the Emperor to
renounce his deity status, Hirohito was nonetheless allowed to remain emperor and
perform many of his traditional duties as a national symbol. Whereas Mongolia saw its
religious authorities brutally purged and the very practice of Buddhism outlawed, in
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postwar Japan Shinto remained a revered (although politically irrelevant) national
religion, and Shinto priests were allowed to carry on their traditional duties unmolested.
While the U.S. authorities showed uncharacteristic respect for Japanese religious beliefs,
they clearly made little effort to understand them. Norma Field recalls how huge torii
gates were erected to mark the entrance to an American military base in Okinawa: “Some
military mind had come up with the idea of identifying this intelligence base with what it
presumed were the symbols of the native religion.” (Field 1991, 80)
What did the US occupation actually do in terms of imposed cultural change? Gluck
notes that swords and topknots were “discouraged,” but not outlawed, by the occupation,
and the popular samurai-themed kabuki play 47 Rōnin was briefly banned (Gluck 1993).
To the extent that dress was changed, it actually moved in a more traditional direction:
whereas Meiji-era government officials and military personnel were required by law to
wear Western clothing for official functions, the postwar revival of the silk and textile
industries prompted the government to promote wearing kimono, yukata, and hakama on
festive occasions (Dalby 2001).
Nevertheless, the cultural transformations that occurred under the US occupation
were non-negligible. Significant changes were imposed particularly in terms of
education, women’s roles, and writing system. Land reform upended the feudal landlord-
peasant structure and largely consigned Japan’s nobility to irrelevance. The U.S.
authorities reorganized the national police, remodeled the public education system along
Western lines, voided repressive labor codes, and encouraged the growth of trade unions
(Schaller 1997, 11). In a telling precursor to the gender equality reforms that the U.S.
would attempt to impose in Afghanistan six decades later, the U.S. authorities included
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Japanese women’s liberation as part of their mission of building a pacifistic modern
society, and American women’s groups descended upon occupied Japan armed with
“pamphlets, brochures, and radio programs for educating Japanese women with such
‘foreign’ concepts as democracy and gender equality” (Koikari 2002). Unknown to them,
a burgeoning feminist movement had already emerged in the late Meiji period amid
lively debate over the ideal qualities of the “New Woman” in a modern society, while
drawing connections to ancient mythology through references to the nation’s mythical
progenitor, the Sun Goddess Amiterasu (McClain 2002, 380).
SCAP particularly seized upon popular cinema as a tool for the cultural renovation
of the nation, and the rebuilding of the film industry was one of its early priorities. As
early as September 1945, SCAP held a meeting with Japan’s top studio representatives to
offer “suggestions” on the new objectives of cinema, namely “the eradication of
militarism, the promotion of liberal freedoms… and the reconstruction of Japan as a
peaceful nation” (Kitamura 2010). Shōwa-era regulations on film content were repealed,
although U.S. censorship was perhaps equally extreme (Andrews 2016, 15). Censorship
was absolute throughout the arts, targeting cultural nationalism as well as imperialist
symbols: “Right-wing or nationalist symbols were expunged, such as images of Mount
Fuji, and the ancient text Kojiki; notoriously, a Kabuki performance was even halted
midway through by zealous authorities” (Andrews 2016, 15).
Japan’s defeat brought new urgency to the script reform movement; not only was
kanji simplification demanded by occupation officials, in the minds of many Japanese
leaders the complexity of the language was directly associated with Japan’s
underdevelopment and its defeat in the war. For instance, later in the war, semi-literate
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recruits “were unable to read certain of the characters used to write the names of weapons
and related terms. This, it is reported, was the cause of a number of accidents involving
weapons.” (Seeley 1991, 150) Also, because the military had been one of the prominent
factions opposing script reform, the demonization of the military bureaucracy after the
war made it that much easier to for public to embrace script reform. Post-1945, popular
support for script reform “appears to have stemmed from a general reaction against the
ultra-nationalism and militarism of the war period, movements which for most people
had close associations with the use of a variety of written Japanese which was
characterized by very extensive use of Sino-Japanese items and difficult characters.”
(Seeley 1991, 152) SCAP had their own reasons for urging a simplification and
standardization of the Japanese script, but their reforms built upon these earlier efforts
and utilized the expertise of Meiji era script reform. At one stage an advisor in the SCAP
administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji; however this was not
endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed (Unger 1996). In addition, the practice
of writing horizontally in a right-to-left direction was replaced by left-to-right writing.
Overall, these linguistic changes can be seen as a continuation of decades of efforts
at simplification prior to the US occupation, with US influence providing a helpful push
for long-sought changes. And at any rate, the changes were not nearly as severe or
culturally disruptive as the extensive script transformations in Mongolia under the
Soviets and in Vietnam under the French. While the simplified script greatly improved
the literacy problem, it did not completely cut the Japanese people off from their literary
heritage as the Vietnamese and Mongolian script changes did.
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Language changed in other ways as well. Key terms were eliminated or replaced,
even those that seemed unrelated to militarism – kokumin (state people) became minzoku
(ethnic people), kokumin gakkō (people’s school) became shōgakkō (elementary school)
(Irie 2001, 8). Previously little-used terms became buzzwords for the new order – words
like seikatsu (living) and bunka (culture) (Gluck 1993, 69).
The content of education was also dramatically transformed, particularly in the
subjects of morals and history. “The Americans immediately forbade ‘false history,’
ordering children to ink out passages about sacred emperors and sacrificing samurai from
their textbooks” (Gluck 1993, 66). The US authorities felt that as part of the de-
militarization of Japanese society it was necessary for Japanese to renounce "hero-
worship” and to reinterpret the past ruling system as “feudalistic" (Caiger). This enforced
desecration of old heroes by outsiders echoes back to the Soviet vilification of Chinghis
Khan in 1930s Mongolia, and we might expect this policy to have created in Japan a
latent resentment and secret hero-worship similar to what was seen in the Mongolian
case. Yet whatever efforts were made to debase the memory of emperors and samurai,
they seem to have been half-hearted; Japanese today seem to feel abundant reverence for
both emperors and samurai, as evidenced from the popularity of historical dramas and
movies, and they are certainly not imprisoned for revering such figures. In another
postwar textbook change, the story of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, the mythological
ancestress of the emperor, was labeled a “myth” – notably, however, the story remained
in textbooks (Gluck 1993, 68). The historical record indicates that some SCAP officials
had the foresight to be wary of visibly manipulating cherished beliefs or notions of
heritage; Kennan feared SCAP’s efforts at social engineering under Christian
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foundational principles “would wreck Japan or be rejected as an alien creed after the
Americans left, leaving Communism to fill the void” (Schaller 1997, 16).
How did the Japanese people receive these postwar cultural policies, and why was
there not significant resistance to them? To answer this we must consider the
psychological impact of the war loss. As the defeated nation looked inward to try to
explain its loss, many came to the conclusion that Japanese culture was somehow at fault.
After all, the nation had poured everything it had into the war, and was still roundly
defeated. Many key aspects of the Allied victory reflected the importance of science and
technology – the development of the atomic bomb, the code-breaking Enigma Machine,
the rapid advances in airplane and radar technology. It is unsurprising that a nation in this
situation would prioritize rapid modernization, even at the expense of cherished
traditional cultural forms. For Japanese intellectuals, in particular, this presented a critical
dilemma.
The essential crux of the intellectual dilemma was the conflict between
rejecting what had gone ‘wrong’ in Japan and embracing democracy and
Western liberalism, while also staying clear of American influence: to adopt
the ideas and scholarship from the West, and simultaneously research into
‘true’ Japanese folk values and cultural roots in order to build the new Japan.
(Andrews 2016, 14)
The postwar cultural transformations continued long after the U.S. handed
sovereignty back to the Japanese government in 1952. As the defeated nation passed
through an extended period of retrospection, it imposed many cultural changes upon
itself. Vlastos’ edited volume (1998) provides fascinating evidence of reconstruction of
Japanese ancient culture and tradition after war, as part of a process of national identity
(re)construction. This includes the state-funded effort from the 1970s to create furusato-
mura (literally hometown villages), kitschy tourist destinations where the
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overwhelmingly urban modern population can experience a Disnified version their
ancestral roots. “The tourist industry today constitutes, in part, an anodyne realm in
which gratification is offered in compensation for the disturbing consequences of postwar
industrial growth and urban sprawl, including environmental pollution, a dearth of decent
affordable housing, and the increasing visibility of foreign guestworkers.” (Robertson
1998, 120). In the same volume, Ito Kimiko describes how classical figures from the
Nihon Shoki, particularly the semi-legendary figure of Prince Shotoku, were elevated
through textbooks and state-funded research projects from the 1960s (Ito 1998, 37-47).
Prince Shotoku’s role in the popular Japanese imagination today is comparable in many
ways to that of King Kojong in South Korea, as a leading royal patron of arts, letters and
culture as well as the establishment of Buddhism. Shotoku is also known for his famous
missive addressed to the emperor of China which began “From the sovereign of the land
of the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting sun.” In this way, the
reconstructed Prince Shotoku legend represents the ideal of cultured, independent-minded
but pacifistic sovereign, an appropriate forebear to admire in the new era of cultured
nationalism.
Postwar Japanese political leaders made deliberate efforts to cultivate a new image
of Japan as a “nation of culture” signifying a return to earlier, pre-Showa values. In 1949
the Emperor’s birthday was reinstated as a national holiday, called “culture day.” Gluck
offers an explanation for the rationale behind postwar authorities’ emphasis on building a
“cultural nation”: “the litany of culture worked both to displace politics and to create
pride in a long cultural tradition, precisely the role the prewar imperial institution had
played.” (Gluck 1993, 69) As postwar Japan reconstructed its collective memory through
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fiction, memoirs, and films, three major themes emerged: a radical break from the past,
clearly identifiable heroes and villains, and the possibility of “rebirth.”
Through previous case studies I have shown how national ownership of the ruling
ideology is also vital to regime stability. The transformed Japanese state could hardly
take ideological ownership of its own formal institutions after 1945. After all, the
constitution was written by American occupation advisors and had to be translated into
Japanese. However, postwar semantic struggles and historical revisionism testify to the
effort to maintain ambiguity about what exactly the ruling ideology was and where it
came from. In the imperial rescript denying his divinity, Hirohito explicitly linked the
Meiji past with the new postwar democracy. “In effect Emperor Meiji, dead since 1912,
was made the founding father of the political system about to be born in 1946.” This
attempt to retroactively integrate the concept of democracy with earlier Japanese history
was aimed at “avoiding a break with the past that the Japanese enemies of democracy
could seize on and later use to argue that democracy was a foreign importation.” (Bix
2001, 562)
Overall, the changes imposed by SCAP and later under the newly reconstituted
Japanese government primarily attacked Showa-era militant culture, which was
fundamentally a different animal than “traditional” Japanese culture as it was popularly
understood. The cultural symbols that were transformed during this period were by and
large closely associated with militarism or the mystical god-emperor cult that many
Japanese already felt considerable skepticism toward. Any subsequent attempt by a
protest group to coopt such symbols or to use them as rallying signs would have
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provoked an instant mental connection with wartime Japanese imperialism, and any such
movement would find few sympathizers outside of the far-right hyper-nationalists.
Opposition Impact: Critical Junctures in Postwar Protest
This section will examine certain critical junctures in the postwar era when political
protest did occur, and thus had the potential to expand into a mass regime-change
movement, but did not. If cultural change played a role in post-1945 unrest, we should
expect to see protestors coopting cultural symbols altered by the US occupation – prime
candidates for this would be references to the emperor’s divinity, the original hi-no-maru
flag, revival of traditional right-to-left script, etc. Did any of the activist leaders at these
critical junctures draw upon traditional culture to attract followers to their cause, and if
not, why not?
Contrary to the popular portrayal, postwar Japanese society has not always been
quiescent or reluctant to challenge authority. At several critical moments in the postwar
period, Japanese have participated en mass in disruptive, sometimes violent, protests and
acts of civil disobedience. Unlike in the South Korean case, in Japan significant
opposition to the ruling authority has come from both the Left and the Right. At several
points, particularly in the first two postwar decades, protests gathered enough momentum
and visibility to overcome the collective action problem and allow citizens to feel
relatively safe participating in civil action without fear of repression. Yet while many
different groups challenged the dominant Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) grip on
power, none of the dominant opposition groups seriously sought a revolutionary change
in the fundamental structure of the postwar political order. Those who did – such as
Yukio Mishima’s militant Tate no Kai and the Japanese Red Army – have been widely
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dismissed as fringe, extreme characters who elicited little public sympathy. This section
will summarize the major actions of the Left and Right wing through the postwar period.
On the Left, the combination of new civil freedoms and extreme economic privation
in the immediate postwar period facilitated a proliferation of labor activism that rapidly
escalated into major strike actions, before being crushed by SCAP in 1947. The
subsequent “reverse course,” in which the U.S. authorities abruptly shifted priorities from
punishing the wartime conservative elite to preventing the spread of communism, quickly
put the Left on the outside of the new political order taking shape. From the beginning,
liberal opposition was fragmented between the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), the
Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and the student coalition known as Zengakuren. The
major themes uniting the movement were labor rights, pacifism and anti-Americanism;
however, differences in priorities ensured that the Left would continuously get entangled
in factional struggles.
The bloodiest leftist protest act of postwar occurred in Tokyo on May Day 1952,
when a demonstration of over 400,000 workers and students demanding better working
conditions turned violent, in an incident that came to be known as Bloody May Day.
Significantly, though the event was planned as a May Day labor rally, many participants
seemed more motivated by anti-American sentiment in this crucial year of the return of
sovereignty; “Yankee Go Home” placards written in English mixed with more standard
labor demands. “As opposed to the previous … labor disputes, Bloody May Day is
clearly a case of the Japanese turning against American influence” (Andrews 2016, 19).
This would prove to be a significant precursor to a new era linking labor activism with
anti-Americanism, culminating in the mass protests against US-Japan Security Treaty
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(the ‘Anpo’ Treaty) in 1960. By this time it had become abundantly clear that Japan
would subordinate itself to U.S. foreign policy, and the Japanese public had developed a
healthy concern about the potential of getting sucked into a U.S.-led proxy war or other
U.S. foreign policy action detrimental to Japanese interests, such as the economic
containment of China. There was also growing anger over the permanent U.S. military
bases and continued ownership of Okinawa, and this anger was not limited to the far Left.
Bolstered by broad public opposition to the Anpo Treaty, the weak and fragmented
liberal opposition was able to briefly unite and organize massive protests in 1960. The
Anpo protests were massive, drawing millions into the streets throughout the country
calling for the ouster of Prime Minister Kishi and trying to prevent the signing of the
treaty. Although the movement failed to accomplish its objectives, it was a watershed
moment for the liberal opposition. “All subsequent citizens’ movements, residents’
movements and victim’s movements were legacies of the 1959-60 street demonstrations
against the security treaty” (Dower 1993, 21) Despite their strong anti-American
character, however, there is little evidence that the activists made any significant efforts
to draw upon traditional culture in their signs, slogans and activities. They were far more
dominated by the spirit of socialist internationalism and solidarity with the global
movements of labor and civil rights. “Even exhortations such as the popular post-
surrender slogan ‘Construction of a nation of culture” (Bunka kokka no kensetsu) were
understood to be synonymous with the paired ideals of peace and democracy” (Dower
1993, 3).
The downfall of the Anpo protests came not from public complacency but from the
excessively destructive actions of certain groups, such as the gang of student radicals who
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mobbed the National Diet grounds at the height of the riots. The ensuing scenes of
lawlessness and violence alienated the general population and cemented the impression
that leftist student radicalism was dangerous and extreme. By the time the treaty was
finally signed, the coalition had become fragmented and its participants discouraged.
The last great protest movement was the 1968 student movement, an echo of
student radicalism that was occurring worldwide at that time. The movement actually
stretched over several years and But the 1968 protests were primarily fueled by foreign
affairs, notably opposition to the war in Vietnam and Japan’s treaty obligations forcing it
to support U.S. proxy wars. Cultural nationalist symbols would have made little sense in
that context. At any rate, within a few years the tide of public sentiment turned against
student radicalism, as a few highly-televised incidents like the Asama Sansō hostage
incident of 1972 and the Japanese Red Army hijacking incident of 1977 deepened the
public’s association of liberal activists with radical communism. The political Left was
weakened further as the sources of their major complaints eroded: Okinawa reverted to
Japanese control, the U.S. policy of collective containment of China ended, and the
Japanese economy grew beyond a point where activists could credibly complain of gross
inequality. “By 1972 the Left thus had lost hold of its most evocative piece issues… the
average citizen turned inward, to bask in Japan's new international influence as an
economic power and become consumed by material pursuits, exemplified in such mass
media slogans as 'My Home-ism' and 'My Car-ism’” (Dower 1993, 27).
In terms of cultural activism, the activities of the Zengakuren in the 1960s bore
some resemblance to those of South Korea’s student activists. It appears that they too
came together around popular folk music and radical literature. Andrews (2016, 28-9)
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writes that “Zengakuren was ersatz entertainment for the young scholars unable to buy
tickets to the cinemas or clubs. From 1954, Zengakuren also adopted group singing
activities, which proved very popular with students, not least perhaps because many of
the songs were apolitical and actually pretty good too.” However, there is no evidence of
the kind of widespread pilfering of pastoral cultural traditions and peasant performance
arts that we saw in the South Korean case. Furthermore, on the government side there
was not nearly the same degree of rabid, ban-first-and-ask-questions-later censorship
seen in Yushin era South Korea.
On the political Far Right, the opposition was less fragmented but smaller in scale,
and often defeated by its own exaggerated sense of drama and tragic sacrifice. The
conservative LDP-led government naturally captured the lion’s share of the conservative-
leaning public, and the symbolic support of the Emperor created an uphill climb for any
Far Right nationalists bent on subverting the existing order. Nevertheless, at the extreme
Right there were some early disruptive acts that might have been intended to rally
popular support for a broader conservative challenge to the postwar regime.
Conservative extremists opposed the postwar order from the very beginning. Even
as the emperor’s surrender was being broadcast, young officers attempted to break into
the studio to stop the broadcast and, failing that, committed ritual suicide before the
palace (Andrews 2016, 9). The emperor’s decree brought the rebellions to a temporary
halt, but rebellious feelings still simmered not far under the surface throughout the
occupation. An early critical juncture may have occurred in 1952 when, according to CIA
files declassified in 2005, ultranationalists with ties to U.S. military intelligence plotted to
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assassinate Prime Minister Yoshida and replace him with a government led by Hatoyama
Ichiro.
Another potential turning point was the 1970 ritual suicide of the famous novelist
Yukio Mishima at the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Force (SDF).
Everything about this event points to a strenuous attempt to use traditional cultural
references to rally the people against the postwar political order – from the highly
nationalistic character of Mishima’s writings, to the elaborate quasi-military uniform he
wore, to the agonizing recreation of the ancient seppuku ritual. Immediately prior to his
suicide, Mishima lectured an assembled crowd of 800 SDF troops on what he considered
the spineless postwar democracy and the noble samurai spirit of ancient Japan.
Mishima was no random fanatic; at the time of his death he was considered a
contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, and he remains one of Japan’s most celebrated
novelists. Drawing upon his obsession with the many failed heroes of Japanese history,
his later writings romanticized famous acts of patriotic resistance to Western intrusions,
such as the suicidal last stand of the samurai class against the Westernized Meiji
government in 1876 (Andrews 2016, 58). His speech harkened upon a feeling that had
great resonance for 1970 Japanese society: the idea that the more Japan prospered after
World War II, the more the spirit of the Japanese people degenerated. The act was well
scripted and publicized, as Mishima clearly hoped his act would spark a revolution in
Japanese thought and conduct. Yet his planned half-hour speech did not go over well;
after just seven minutes he was jeered and shouted down by the angry troops. Even
among cadets and officers at a top military academy, typically the most fertile ground for
rightist and nationalistic sentiment, Mishima’s call to arms found no takers.
204
With the exception of Mishima’s mini-rebellion, the postwar history of Japanese
protest shows a surprising dearth of appeals to “bring back” traditional culture. Upon
further reflection, it could be that Japan’s protest movements had difficulty securing their
voice as cultural representatives because both left and right ideological camps share
elements of nationalism. Whereas nationalist cultural appeals are associated with the
political left in South Korea and the political right in most Western countries, in Japan
such appeals seem to have equal resonance across ideological lines. As Dower writes,
“While pro-American conservatives nursed many resentments against the US... the liberal
and leftist ‘internationalists’ were susceptible to nationalist appeals” (Dower 1993, 6).
With neither side claiming a monopoly on cultural fidelity, traditional-minded citizen
activists may have struggled to coalesce under a single banner.
Conclusion
Despite some disruptive episodes of mass protest, Japan’s postwar political order
showed remarkable stability, and its main opposition groups seemed unable to pose a
genuine challenge to the status quo order. Though there were political complaints about
the LDP-led system, social complaints about labor injustices, and a widely shared unease
with Japan’s subservient position to U.S. foreign policy, with regards to cultural policy
the population appeared remarkably complacent, despite living under a foreign-imposed
ideology dripping with American paternalism. Three key factors appear significant: 1) the
dramatic modernization and cultural change that Japan had already voluntarily undergone
through the Meiji and early Showa periods; 2) the postwar government’s ability to
circumvent cultural objections due to its support for traditional culture restoration
projects and the wise decision to retain the emperor as a figurehead; 3) the post-war
mentality that framed cultural modernization as necessary to national survival.
205
It is difficult to position Japan’s postwar cultural policies upon our direction and
severity scales without taking into account prewar conditions. By themselves, the postwar
cultural transformations seem moderate and modernizing, particularly considering the
element of foreign imposition and low national ownership of the ruling ideology.
However, by comparison with the earlier cultural transformations, they seem rather mild
and in some cases moved in a traditionalizing direction, reversing some of the more
aggressive modernizing policies of the Meiji and Showa restorations and “resurrecting”
some invented traditions in the name of building a new “nation of culture.” Also, it must
be observed that the postwar Japanese government, while imperfect, was considerably
more democratic in character than Yushin South Korea and lacked the capacity to enforce
the kind of severe cultural restrictions seen in that case.
The outcome for our dependent variable is likewise difficult to place. While Japan
never experienced a true challenge to the postwar political order, the mass protests at
several critical points in the postwar era suggests that the revolutionary potential of its
society was far from negligible. Opposition came from both left and right of the ruling
LDP, but neither side could effectively claim an absolute monopoly on cultural
nationalism. If liberals found fault with the conservative side’s forced pro-American
policies, the conservatives could fight back with charges of Marxist internationalism.
Without a clear “pro-traditional” side to choose from, and already enjoying a degree of
cultural freedom under quasi-democracy anyway, the general public did not seem
particularly susceptible to cultural protest appeals.
Alternatively, it may be reasonably argued that the reason for Japanese passivity
towards postwar cultural transformation was that its society was physically and
206
emotionally exhausted from the experience of total war and defeat, and incapable of
fighting back. If this is the case, however, we might still expect latent resentment of
cultural loss to play a role in mass mobilization later on, after the population had time to
recover. After all, popular resentment against the Mongolian communist regime
simmered under the surface for nearly six decades before the first opportunity for protest
presented itself, and yet its virulence was undiminished by time. Looking at the historical
record, however, the opposite seems to be true: by far the most disruptive and violent
opposition actions occurred early on in the postwar period and waned over time,
particularly from the mid-1970s.
This case further underscores the importance of looking at cultural policies over
time and considering them against the background of what came before. For Japanese
citizens in the postwar period, there were at least two different traditional Japanese
cultures to choose from: the pre-Meiji culture of kimonos, katanas, kabuki and top-knots,
and the post-Meiji culture of militarized Shinto, the emperor cult, selective modernization
and cultural borrowing from the West. Many aspects of the former had been subverted or
warped by the latter, or indeed never existed at all the way they emerged in the post-1945
popular imagination, but this provided an alternative which enabled the Japanese public
to be less attached to (and sensitive about) those cultural elements that were transformed
during the post-war period.
Finally, the spirit of Marxist internationalism once again comes creeping in to
disrupt the political effectiveness of the leftist opposition. As in South Korea, Japanese
liberal protests were often led by student radicals, and their activities were pervaded by
the same sort of “hippie culture” so despised by the Yushin regime. However, there is
207
little sign that the Japanese students made much use of traditional culture and peasant
rituals as protest symbols. Japanese student activists seemed far more inclined to borrow
from the protest blueprint of global socialism which, as we learned in Chapter 4, was
untenable in the ferociously anti-communist environment of South Korea. In retrospect,
the South Korean student radicals may owe a debt of gratitude to their nation’s pervasive
anti-communism, as it forced them to look outside of the socialist radical playbook and
explore nativist cultural symbols which in the end proved far more effective at drawing a
mass following. Japanese student radicals might have been wiser to follow their lead.
208
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210
Conclusion

In the introduction, I stated two key questions to guide this inquiry into cultural politics:
1) Why do governments expend limited resources to impose unpopular cultural
interventions on their people?
2) How do the various forms of cultural policies affect regime stability? More
specifically, how do opposition movements make use of unpopular cultural
policies to achieve their political goals?

Each of the four case studies has added nuance to our answers to these two questions. In
the process, they have revealed some commonalities of cultural politics across different
regime types and ruling ideologies.
The motives behind cultural interventions
There seems to be no strong generalizable answer to the “why” question above, but
from the case studies we can at least conclude that the motives behind cultural policies
are quite contingent upon recent historical experiences and the respective autocrats’
perceptions of their own greatest weaknesses. In Mongolia, the early Soviet advisors saw
economic dysfunction as the greatest potential weakness to the young satellite regime,
and so they pushed for rapid modernization following the Russian cultural model to
rapidly build a productive workforce. Along the way, they gave little thought to the
traditions they were trampling and the rising demands of Mongolian nationalism. They
were also motivated by a misguided sense that Mongolians would welcome the gift of
Russian high culture and civilization.
211
In North Korea, the Kim Il Sung regime saw cultural competition with the South
as the major threat to its own legitimacy, particularly in the early period when it relied
heavily on Soviet support. This led it to pursue an extremely nationalistic cultural policy,
isolating themselves from foreign influence to an extent that outside observers have
considered extreme or even crazy. And yet, the nationalistic drive to prove the superiority
of their home-grown Juche ideology has kept the domestic public rallied around the
regime leadership long after other personalist communist dictatorships fell to reform or
popular revolutions.
In South Korea, the Yushin regime of Park Chung-hee felt a similar urge to shore
up its reputation as the legitimate defender of Korean traditional culture on the peninsula,
but it also felt keenly the need for rapid industrialization and modernization to raise the
standard of living in the formerly agrarian economy of the South after the devastation of
war. Having chosen the path of capitalist export-driven development, it did not have the
same option of isolating itself from global cultural trends as the North did. Consequently,
over time the Pak regime’s increasingly regimented and militaristic vision of Korean
cultural came in conflict with grass-roots social forces that championed a more dynamic,
pastoral, creative and rebellious cultural tradition. President Park’s problematic personal
history within the Japanese colonial order further motivated him to champion a martial
ethic and regimented culture that he perceived to be part of Korea’s premodern tradition.
His personal distaste for the corruption and fecklessness of the late Chosŏn nobility
informed his personal vision of how Korean culture needed to be reformed from within.
In Japan, the immediate and total loss of the war left a deep sense of national crisis
and an unusual willingness to accept foreign cultural interference. From this sense of
212
crisis and the subsequent soul-searching, the new democratic state embarked on a
complicated process of rejecting the imperialist/military culture of the immediate past
while recovering or inventing a gentler vision of traditional Japanese culture and the arts,
championing the more artistic, effeminate and pastoral elements of the distant Heian
period. While maintaining the emperor as the symbolic head of state, the new Japan
transformed the militaristic state Shinto of the war years into a more mystical,
individualistic and animistic hybrid from the real and imagined Shinto of the ancient past.
From each of these cases we can observe that states choose cultural policies largely
in response to their own flawed perceptions of what the domestic population wants or
needs. Ceteris paribus, we can expect that a state will choose modernizing policies when
it thinks the people desire prosperity most (as in Mongolia and South Korea), and
traditionalizing policies when it fears they doubt its cultural legitimacy (as in North
Korea). But given the long and complex cultural history of any given nation, many
background conditions can alter this equation: a recent painful experience of colonialism,
or a traumatic loss in a war, or any number of other historical contingencies.
National Pride and Ideological Evangelism
Each of the case studies has shown how citizens take pride in their ruling ideology
and government system when they have a high sense of national ownership of them. A
great irony is that the more a people associate their ruling ideology with their own unique
ancestral values and cultural traditions, the more eager they seem to export that ideology
and make it work on foreign soil. This can be seen in the Russian cultural chauvinism
that sought to reshape Mongolian political and social culture in the Russian mold, and
also in MacArthur’s almost evangelical sense of mission to instill Western cultural values
213
among the Japanese people. As MacArthur wrote in his famous “Fourth of July Message”
of 1947,
Our experience in the Philippines and in the more recent reformation of
Japanese life, where in reshaping the lives of others we have been guided by
the same pattern from which is taken the design of our own lives, offers
unmistakable proof that while American in origin and American in concept,
these tenets underlying a truly free society are no less designed to secure,
preserve and advance the well-being of one race than another – and given the
opportunity to take root in one society they will flourish and grow as surely
as they will in any other society. The lesson from past and contemporary
events is that they are no longer peculiarly American but now belong to the
entire human race.
57

Reading this, we cannot help but hear echoes in Mongolian politicians’ frequently stated
intentions to uphold Mongolia a beacon of democracy to the region:
We feel an obligation to reach out and share our democratic experiences, and
this is where Mongolia is playing a leading regional role. With Kyrgyzstan
we are sharing our experiences in building an effective parliamentary
democracy and enacting legal reforms. We are training Afghan public
servants and diplomats; hosting exchanges with journalists and civil-society
members in Burma; and opening a window on the world for North Korean
academics and government officials to facilitate dialogue on security and
economic issues. All these initiatives are designed to increase the flow of
information, discussion and experiences….
We must, and will, continue to build on the foundation that has been laid to
protect our freedoms. I hope that by our collective actions on behalf of
democracy in Mongolia we can serve as an example that inspires those
outside our country on a similar journey—and make their way a bit easier.
58

Democracy is not the only system that people take pride in and seek to proliferate. North
Korea famously has established Juche Study Groups throughout the world and proudly

57
“A Fourth of July Message from General Douglas MacArthur,” Life, July 7, 1947,
p34.
58
“Honoring 25 Years of Mongolian Democracy,” Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, The Wall
Street Journal, July 28, 2015.
214
reports on the activities of these groups in its state newspapers. Since the 1970s North
Korea has championed its Juche ideology as an alternative for developing countries torn
between the communist and capitalist poles of the Cold War and sought to play a leading
role in the Non-Aligned Movement as a way of asserting its independence.
The tragedy of such ideological evangelism is that no one seems to recognize how
much the success of their ruling ideologies owes to their domestic population’s sense of
pride in ownership and determination to ensure its success. As the saying goes, “the
secret ingredient is love,” and nobody loves any ideology as much as the people who
created it (or believe that they did). Hence time and again, political scientists puzzle over
why various implementations of democracy that worked so well in America and Europe
just cannot seem to get off the ground in places like Africa and the Middle East.
Commonalities of Cultural Policy
Despite wildly different regime types, our four case studies have revealed
surprisingly similar targets and tools of cultural policy. We have seen how culturally
interventionist regimes commonly impose rules on how people dress, how they spend
their leisure time, what sort of art and music they should appreciate, how they educate
their children, and how they remember their history. They funnel considerable
government resources into domestic propaganda apparatuses to produce regime-friendly
cultural products, chiefly movies, literature, art, theater and television.
In the two Stalinist cases, Mongolia and North Korea, we saw how the Soviet
cultural policy of Zhdanovism left a legacy of state-controlled cultural production in the
Asian satellites long after the original system had been purged from the Soviet Union
itself. This cultural production apparatus effectively co-opted prospective cultural talent
into approved state productions in all aspects of the arts, but most notably theater, art,
215
music and film. Some aspects of the North Korean cultural production system can be
dated back even further to the Japanese colonial era. The provenance of these aspects
became apparent when we began to look at the South Korean system of state-funded
cultural production in the Yushin era, and saw many parallels to the North Korean
system. Since South Korea was never under Soviet control, such similarities can only be
explained as legacies of the Japanese colonial system that held sway over both sides of
the peninsula from 1910 to 1945 or as artifacts of the more distant Chosŏn era. Finally, in
the last case study we saw how the postwar Japanese government, despite lacking true
autocratic authority to impose cultural change, used the tools of bureaucratic management
and state-funded enterprises in education and the arts to promote the concept of a “nation
of culture” after the war.
The autocracies, whether communist or capitalist, all employed the tools of
authoritarianism in some aspect of enforcement of their cultural policies. South Korea
and Mongolia both have museums today in the buildings where their former political
prisons stood, documenting incarcerations for political activity as well as seemingly
minor cultural infractions. South Korea’s police were mobilized for such inane activities
as cutting hair and confiscating acoustic guitars. We cannot know how many cultural
offenders are detained in the prisons of North Korea, but defectors have regularly
testified to the harsh punishments against those who consume banned cultural products
from South Korea and foreign countries. Japan, as a more democratic system in the
postwar period, did not have the same harsh enforcement methods at its disposal
(although perhaps the memory of earlier cultural policing encouraged a degree of self-
censorship). Still, it was able to practice heavy censorship particularly in the early
216
postwar decades, and co-opted cultural leaders through programs of government
recognition and funding. Japan’s cultural transformation was less heavily imposed but
still keenly felt by the postwar population.
Commonalities of Cultural Resistance
The four case studies have offered many examples of the creativity of protest
activists in devising “weapons of the weak” to oppose their governments, even in the face
of harsh oppression. Whether targeting soviet cultural homogenization or a fast-paced
modernization drive by a pro-Western dictator, protesters in different cases have made
use of traditional cultural performances, lost language, forbidden fashions and banned
music and art to make themselves known to a wider audience.
In particular, the cultural themes adopted by the South Korean democracy
movement showed a surprising degree of similarity to those of late communist Mongolia.
Both made use of traditional performance art, dress, and ancestral legends to rally people,
though their overarching objective was political democratization. Mongolian student
activists with their heads filled with the political ideals of perestroika found the most
effective way to appeal to the masses was by singing songs of Chinggis Khan and
wearing traditional clothes to protest marches. South Korea’s youth activists traveled to
the countryside and added boisterous folk performances to their protest rituals, borrowed
or invented from Korean pastoral traditions. This helped make older and rural Koreans
more sympathetic to their cause and partially allowed them to escape the label of
communist sympathizers. Through the skillful deployment of cultural memes such as
samulnori, gut and talchum, student activists were able to forge vital links with the rural
poor and peasant classes. Their practices of liberal borrowing from, and sometimes
217
inventing, historic traditions of peasant protest carry echoes of the protests going on in
Mongolia at around the same time.
The commonalities were less clear in the Japanese case, as the ruling government
did not have the same level of autocratic power to forcibly manipulate and control
culture. We see Japanese activists, particularly on the Right, making some protests
against excessive government censorship, foreign influence and cultural decadence. But
these appeals seem to have attracted little sympathy from a population at large.

Limits and Scope of Theoretical Model

This model of cultural contention in politics began with an assumption that
cultural policies are imposed by all varieties of polities regardless of the underlying
ideology and regime type. We did specify that the model would not work well in states
with significant ethno-linguistic or cultural divisions, as cultural policies favoring one
group would inevitably elicit anxiety for the others. Further, it was argued that the theory
would have little weight in democracies as they are unable to impose the sort of heavy-
handed cultural controls under discussion. Nevertheless, this leaves a substantial field of
potential cases with theoretical relevance. The combination of case studies were carefully
selected to better illuminate the potential scope of the model.
First, I took advantage of the similar origin stories of North Korea and Mongolia
and their sharp divergence on cultural policies from the 1950s to make the case that
cultural loss was a great source of instability in Soviet bloc states with high homogeneity
and repressed nationalism, like Mongolia. The similar levels of cultural homogeneity and
nationalism in each of these two Asian cases allowed us to identify a different pattern of
218
cultural politics from what had been previously observed by scholars of the more
culturally contentious Eastern European cases.
Second, I benefited from the historical circumstances of the Korean peninsula,
which made it possible to directly compare fascist, communist and capitalist autocracies
ruling over the same ethno-cultural nation. From Japan’s colonial “assimilation policy”
through the Yushin government’s Cultural Five-Year Plan and North Korea’s “uri-sik”
cultural isolation, 20
th
-Century Koreans saw diverse state-led attempts to control and
direct the national culture in the face of modernization and various upheavals. Some of
these initiatives proved more popular than others, and the public’s distaste for certain
cultural policies often found expression during the numerous mass protest movements
throughout Korea’s modern history.
Under the Japanese colonial government, heavy-handed Japanese cultural
chauvinism enabled Korea’s disparate classes – intellectuals, laborers, artists and farmers
– to find common cause in demanding national self-determination. Post-division, the two
Koreas engaged in a fierce struggle for ownership of Korean traditional culture. In the
North, the Kim regime departed from the standard practice of other Stalinist states by
embracing a muscular, culture-based nationalism. In the South, particularly during the
Yushin period, the state struggled to defend its cultural legitimacy and bring youth
“hippie” culture under control.
By comparing the colonial, North and South Korean cases, we were thus able to
highlight different complicating aspects of cultural rule that cannot be understood in
isolation. The same Korean people responded differently to similarly militaristic,
modernizing cultural change when it came from the hands of an invading foreign power
219
than when it was self-inflicted by the Pak dictatorship. In the latter case, cultural
opposition was more fractious and slow to coalesce into a determined social force,
although it did eventually succeed in overthrowing the military dictatorship through an
impressively diverse mass movement. In the North, what outsiders have long understood
to be an extraordinarily oppressive totalitarian system still maintains an enviable degree
of domestic political stability. This stability cannot be explained away by repression
alone; the same Korean people offered continuous and determined resistance under
Japanese repression for decades. Its uniquely nationalistic traditionalizing cultural policy
offers the best clue as to why the North Korean regime remains the most successful
autocracy to preside over the Korean people.
The addition of the Japanese case was an attempt to partially extend the model to
see if it would be equally relevant in more democratic circumstances. Also, the basic
premise of my model faced a challenge from the postwar Japan case which needed to be
addressed. At this point I must say that I am not terribly satisfied with the extensibility of
the model to cases like postwar Japan where cultural change is merely encouraged, not
imposed. The immense social pressures seen in the Mongolia and South Korea cases
under cultural control seem to have found an escape valve in the relatively freer
circumstances of postwar Japan, particularly after consumer culture took off and average
citizens could satisfy their cultural priorities through the free market. However, it may be
useful to attempt extending the model to more recent cases of cultural reform in U.S.-
imposed “democracies” like postwar Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some cultural policies are more successful than others

Wedeen argues in Ambiguities of Domination that the personality cult of Syrian
220
President Hafis al-Asad worked because its insinuation of formulaic slogans and cult
practices into the daily lives of the people constituted a subtle but ever-present
manifestation of power. But if all it takes is formulaic repetition of self-evident lies, why
do some personality cults work better than others? Why did the cult of Park Chung-hee as
modern militant statesman fail, while the cult of Kim Il-Sung as nationalist father figure
survives to this day? This is especially puzzling since both cults held sway over the same
ethnicity with the same culture and history prior to 1945, including the learned
experience of resistance to fascist oppression under the Japanese. They even used many
of the same tools, learned from the Japanese era: the elaborate state propaganda
bureaucracy, the ritual obeisance to monuments and portraits of the leaders, the
militaristic schoolyard kitsch, the manufacture of mythic historical figures, etc.
The key difference, in the case of the Koreas, seems to be that cultural politics
succeed when they propose ideals that the people (or certain critical subgroups) want to
believe. Koreans want to believe that their traditional culture is intrinsic to their national
success, and thus a leader who champions national distinctiveness and self-reliance will
do better than a leader who champions foreign-assisted modernization and the military
ethic of the former occupying power. Mongolians want to believe that their democracy is
successful because it draws upon the traditional values first developed by their ancestor
Genghis Khan. They want to believe that the failures of the soviet era were due to a failed
foreign ideology, and that their lives are better now in large part due to the return of their
ancestral values and practices.

221
What have we learned? When states impose such heavy transformations on their
people’s culture, they tend to produce latent resentment in particular sectors of society
that can heavily impact the potential for opposition movements to gain steam. By forcibly
modernizing the nation’s culture, the regime not only weakens its own legitimacy, it also
unwittingly provides its opposition with an array of cultural symbols that are easily
recognizable and carry emotional resonance across diverse sectors and classes of society.
But a regime that forcibly engineers the “restoration” of a real or imagined past culture
can win the support of key constituent groups and make it more difficult for opponents to
garner sympathy. This strategy is particularly effective when a nation has only recently
emerged from a foreign occupation or colonial domination, as in the case of North Korea,
or has some other reason to fear foreign intervention.
The case studies also illustrated how transitional governments work to undo the
cultural interventions of the preceding autocrat, and this helps them retain support
through the inevitable crises of the early consolidation period. The Mongolian and
Japanese case studies are particularly illuminating in this regard. It is impossible to
understand the popularity and stability of Mongolia’s current democracy without an
understanding of the long-simmering domestic resentment of the preceding communist
regime’s cultural policies. Certainly nothing in its economic performance or corruption
record would suggest that this would be one of the most successful post-soviet
democracies. Likewise, the Japanese public’s overall complacency with its foreign-
installed democratic system cannot properly be understood without a background
knowledge of the self-inflicted cultural wounds that the imperial government dealt in the
Meiji and post-Taisho periods.
222
While the cases covered here are all East Asian mono-ethnic autocracies, imposed
cultural change can be found across the entire spectrum of regions and polity types, from
the early modern era of nation-states to the present day. Its effects have impacted the
success of US statebuilding efforts in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan. It is my hope
that this project contributes to a better understanding of those effects.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This research explores the phenomenon of state imposed cultural transformation and its impact on regime stability through a series of case studies from 20th Century East Asia: Mongolia, North Korea, Yushin-era South Korea, and post-war Japan. In the process, I develop a new typology of state-imposed cultural policies and construct a theoretical framework for predicting the likely impact of different cultural policies on the popularity and effectiveness of anti-regime social movements. In brief, my theory is that governments will be inherently more prone to encounter recurrent, grass-roots, regime-change-seeking popular opposition if: A) they are perceived to be foreign-imposed or based upon foreign ideologies, and B) the ruling regime pursues policies that impose rapid cultural transformation in a modernizing/Westernizing direction. By incorporating the element of state-imposed cultural change, this model adds new depth to existing theories connecting cultural modernization with democratic transition.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shaw, Meredith (author)

Core Title Forced march to modernity: State-imposed cultural change and regime stability in 20th-century east Asia

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science and International Relations

Publication Date 07/26/2018

Defense Date 04/12/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag contentious politics,cultural policy,Japan,modernization theory,Mongolia,North Korea,OAI-PMH Harvest,South Korea

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kang, David (committee chair), James, Patrick (committee member), Kurashige, Lon (committee member), Leheny, David (committee member)

Creator Email meredirs@usc.edu,mshaw@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-34635

Unique identifier UC11672156

Identifier etd-ShawMeredi-6526.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-34635 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ShawMeredi-6526.pdf

Dmrecord 34635

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Shaw, Meredith

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA