Kapsan Faction Incident

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Kim Il Sung and his would-be successor Pak Kum-chol
Kapsan faction
Chosŏn'gŭl
갑산파
Hancha
甲山派
Revised Romanizationgapsan pa
McCune–Reischauerkapsan p'a
IPA[ɡapsan pʰa]

The Kapsan Faction Incident (

Kim Il-sung's cult of personality, and appoint its ringleader Pak Kum-chol
as his successor.

Kim Il Sung cracked down on the faction in a series of speeches made at party meetings. He called for a "monolithic ideological system" that centered on his personality and rallied party members against the Kapsan faction. By April 1967, the factionalists had disappeared from the public. They were expelled from the party and sent to the countryside or prison. Pak Kum-chol either committed suicide or was executed and other key members of the faction died as well. Kim Il Sung had his brother and heir apparent at that time,

Kim family
.

His son,

purges and took over the party's Propaganda and Agitation Department
(PAD) in what was the first political task delegated to him by his father, paving the way to his increasingly influential role in the politics of the country, eventually culminating in his succeeding his father upon his death in 1994.

Background

The Kapsan Faction Incident takes its name from the region of

purges in the 1950s,[2] most notably the August Faction Incident in 1956,[6] but the Kapsan faction remained.[2] In the aftermath of the 2nd Conference of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in 1966, the Kapsan faction started setting forth its grievances.[7]

The faction put forward economic policies that disagreed with Kim Il Sung's economic model.

semi-currency to give material incentives to workers.[11]

The main issue, however, was the question of who could succeed Kim Il Sung as the

Rim Chun-chu.[15]

The Kapsan faction sought to name Pak the successor of Kim Il Sung.[14] As an initial move, they helped Kim Il Sung purge Kim Chang-nam (김창남), a prominent political theorist, but only to make room for Pak.[16] The faction members started exalting Pak's words as "teachings" equal to those of Kim Il Sung.[17] Memoirs of members of the original Kapsan faction had been published since the early 1960s, starting with Pak Tal [ko] in 1963 and followed by Yi Je-sun (이제순; 李悌淳), brother of Yi Hyo-sun, in 1964. An album from 1964 had Pak Tal and Pak Kum-chol's photos printed next to that of Kim Il Sung. When Pak Kum-chol's wife Choe Chae-ryon died,[18] Kim To-man, who was the Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) of the party, produced a work called An Act of Sincerity (일편단심) – described variously as either a film or a stage play – that portrayed her devotion to her husband.[14][19] Kim Il Sung disapproved of it and implied that it exhibited misplaced loyalty.[18] Kim To-man also had Pak's birthplace rebuilt.[14] An unauthorized biography on Pak was apparently made while dissemination of propaganda materials on Kim Il Sung was neglected.[11] These actions were perceived of as ultimate acts of disloyalty toward Kim Il Sung.[14]

Pak was soon condemned by

Joseon dynasty.[11] These actions, without the approval of Kim Il Sung, were seen as serious acts of undermining his cult of personality and authority.[14] The faction was also seen as pro-Chinese, contrary to the pro-Moscow line of Kim.[16]

Incident

Kim Il Sung perceived the Kapsan faction's ideas and actions as existential threats to his rule and the state. In March 1967, Kim warned the Kapsan faction members in a speech entitled "

Central Committee of the WPK, on 4–8 April,[25] Kim had more than 100 faction members formally expelled from the party.[26] Pak Kum-chol was sent to work in a factory in the countryside.[7] He was either executed or committed suicide in May 1967.[27] Others were charged with crimes and disappeared from public or were sent to prison camps.[17] Yi Hyo-sun, Kim To-man, Pak Yong-guk, and Ho Sok-son were sentenced to death.[14]

On 25 May, Kim held a speech to party ideological apparatchiks entitled "

Secret Speech") to Soviet history.[31] Despite the importance of the speech, it has never been made public, access being limited to WPK members.[28] A laconic mention of the speech is given in the 1968 Korean Central Yearbook [ko]: "1967, May 25–Respected Comrade Kim Il-sung gave a speech to a group of the Party ideological workers named 'On the Immediate Tasks in the Directions of the Party's Propaganda Work.'" Thereafter, for decades – until the Kim Jong-il era – the speech was neither mentioned by name or quoted.[32] It is sometimes confused with another speech that has the same date and is widely available called "On the Problem of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat".[33] As for the unavailable May 25 Teaching speech, its contents can be accurately inferred from the following extract of a 2008 official biography of Kim, according to Tertitskiy:[28]

In the speech given on May 25th of the 56th year of Juche era (1967), the Great Leader said that the ideological poison of the bourgeois and revisionist elements are bourgeois ideology, revisionist ideology, ideology of flunkeyism, and the feudal Confucian ideas of Confucius and Mencius and showed that these ideas are the root of their core ideology. This ideological venom was left unattended for several years and thus the struggle to cleanse it off will also take a long time and must be conducted steadily and vigorously. The Leader taught that in this struggle we should be cautious about administrative methods and thoroughly accomplish the merging of the ideological education and of the ideological struggle.

The Great Leader divided the followers of the bourgeois and revisionist elements into several categories and set up the guideline that that since we had failed to properly establish monolithic ideological system of the Party and the revolutionary worldview, those who had thought that everything had commanded by the leadership was right and had been blindly following [the factionalists] must be thoroughly educated and those who were wavering ideologically and had been dancing to their fiddle should be reformed through ideological struggle.

The Great Leader instructed all the cadres and the Party members to learn well about the nature and the harmful consequences of the bourgeois and revisionist elements' criminal activity and their cunning tricks, and to fully understand the necessity, nature, assignments and methods of implementation of the monolithic ideological system of the Party.

Tertitskiy dates the selection of Kim Jong Il as the successor on the date of the speech.[33] Indeed, Kim Jong Il took part in investigating the faction. The task was delegated to him by Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il was only 26 at the time and it was the first official duty given to him by his father.[11] When Kim Jong Il gave a speech at the plenum, it was his first as a figure of authority. He possibly gave another one on 25 May – entitled "Let Us Firmly Establish the Monolithic Ideological System of the Party among the Officials Dealing with Foreign Affairs" – that closely echoed his father's 25 May Teaching. Kim Jong Il's name was mentioned in public documents, possibly for the first time, indicating that he was already on his way to being the heir-apparent to Kim Il Sung.[34] Six months after the purge, at an unscheduled meeting of the party, Kim Il Sung called for loyalty in the film industry that had betrayed him with An Act of Sincerity. Kim Jong Il himself announced that he was up to the task and thus begun his influential career in film-making.[35] Kim left the party's Organization and Guidance Department to take over PAD which had been tarnished in the incident.[36] He gave his support for establishing a monolithic ideology centered around his father alone.[11] Kim called a month-long conference of filmmakers to re-orient the country's film industry by cleansing it from the "poison" of the Kapsan faction.[37] By 1969, the purges were over.[38]

Aftermath and legacy

Kim Il-sung badge

The Kapsan Faction Incident was, in the words of scholar

Stalin, came to exclusively mean Kim Il Sung.[11]

Kim's 25 May speech had the effect of establishing his own theoretical position distinct from that of China or the Soviet Union, granting him political independence from the two socialist great powers.[14] His political ideology of Juche began to gradually gain momentum.[40] His Byungjin economic line took hold, although in reality it meant privileging the army over the economy.[41] Following personnel replacements, North Korea's policy toward South Korea became more hard-line, too.[20]

With the downfall of the Kapsan faction, Kim Il Sung became the singular focus of

Korean Democratic Women's Union. By 1968, the North Korean cult of personality was complete.[36]

As another family matter, Kim Il Sung was reluctant to allow his daughter Kim Kyong-hui to marry Jang Song-thaek, the son of a family with revolutionary traditions, whose credentials were now no longer seen as an advantage.[21] The two married in 1972,[43] but Jang's past could not be discussed publicly.[44] It was through Jang that the legacy of the Kapsan Faction Incident carried over to the Kim Jong Un era. In 2013, he had Jang purged and executed. Kim, like his grandfather Kim Il Sung, called his military-economic policy Byungjin, and the Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System were updated to refer to Kim Jong Un. Stephan Haggard concludes that while "Kim Jong Un's byungjin line is not exactly Kim Il Sung's and Jang Song Thaek is not the Kapsan faction ... the underlying dynamics do look somewhat similar: challenges to the leaderist system are met not only with purges but with important ideological justifications for unity and obedience."[45]

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ Hoare 2012, p. 200.
  2. ^ a b c d Lim 2008, p. 37.
  3. ^ Seth 2018, p. 113.
  4. ^ Armstrong 2013, p. 22.
  5. ^ Lim 2015, p. 47.
  6. ^ Sohn 2015.
  7. ^ a b c d e f Person 2013.
  8. ^ a b c d Lim 2008, p. 38.
  9. ^ Ahn 1975–1976, p. 20.
  10. ^ a b Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 26.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h Lim 2008, p. 40.
  12. ^ Lim 2008, p. 38; Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 26.
  13. ^ Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 26; Lim 2008, p. 39
  14. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Lim 2008, p. 39.
  15. ^ a b c d Tertitskiy 2017a, p. 84.
  16. ^ a b Myers 2015, p. 95.
  17. ^ a b Person 2013; Lim 2008, p. 39
  18. ^ a b Ra 2019, p. 35.
  19. ^ Myers 2015, p. 95n52.
  20. ^ a b c Hamm 2012, p. 143.
  21. ^ a b c Ra 2019, p. 34.
  22. ^ Daily Report 1993, p. 17.
  23. ^ Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 27.
  24. ^ Myers 2015, p. 97.
  25. ^ Tertitskiy 2017a, p. 83.
  26. ^ Review 1968, p. 32.
  27. ^ Ra 2019, p. 34; Ra 2019, p. 34; Lynn 2007, p. 100.
  28. ^ a b c Tertitskiy 2017b.
  29. ^ Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 27; Lim 2008, p. 39.
  30. ^ Tertitskiy 2017a, p. 85.
  31. ^ Tertitskiy 2017a, p. 82.
  32. ^ Tertitskiy 2017b; Tertitskiy 2014
  33. ^ a b Tertitskiy 2014.
  34. ^ Tertitskiy 2017a, p. 87.
  35. ^ Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 28.
  36. ^ a b c Lim 2015, p. 48.
  37. ^ Cha & Sohn 2012, p. 29.
  38. ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica 1973, p. 462A.
  39. ^ a b Seth 2018, p. 114.
  40. ^ Myers 2015, p. 96; Person 2013.
  41. ^ Myers 2015, p. 105.
  42. ^ Lim 2008, p. 44.
  43. ^ Ra 2019, p. 59.
  44. ^ Ra 2019, p. 36.
  45. ^ Haggard 2013.

Sources

Further reading

External links
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