Big Troubles in Little Hong Kong: Unrepresentative Government and Civil Unrest in a British Colony in the Shadow of Communist China

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History
Rioting in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon, 1956 (source: simtang / gwulo.com)

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Social unrest has been the norm in Hong Kong over the last decade as we’ve witnessed the clash between the centre and the the periphery, between mainland China and the people (or at least a very significant chunk of the people) of its regained territory. Such polarisation and disharmony is hardly without precedence in Hong Kong however as a cursory glance at the postwar history of this long-existing Pacific colonial outpost of the British Empire reveals. Confrontation between the state as represented by the colonial government and its unrepresented Chinese citizens has erupted and spilt over into violent rioting and conflict on several occasions.

Double-10th riots (photo: scmp.com)

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“Double Tenth” Riots, 1956
In the 1950s tensions developed between right wing pro-Kuomintang settlers (many of which had fled to the British colony(𝒶) following the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949) and pro-CCP inhabitants of Hong Kong. What triggered the riots that erupted in 1956 was to observers an act of “petty officialdom”. In the middle of National Day celebrations, an official tore down a Republic of China flag and decorations in a resettlement estate in the city. Enraged Nationalists railed against the police trying to defuse the tense situation but this eventually escalated into widespread rioting by the pro-KMT protesters with gang members joining in…attacks on property, arson attempts, looting, violence against the local police and against leftist workers and trade unionists across North Kowloon and Tsuen Wan. With the HK Police overwhelmed by the rioting the colonial secretary Edgeworth B David (acting on behalf of the governor Alexander Grantham) responded by bringing in a British army unit which eventually quelled the disturbances using force. Although brief in duration the riots resulted in 59 dead (including the wife of the Swiss vice consul) and around 500 injured. Although the Nationalist agents in the riots were politically motivated in their actions, another dynamic in the riots represented protests from the anti-communist refugees forced into overcrowded living conditions and blaming Chinese politics for “forcing them into Hong Kong in the first place”. (Wordie).

(photo: toursbylocals.com)

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Star Ferry Riots, 1966
The Star Ferry riots in 1966 started innocuously enough with a peaceful protest by commuters against the government’s decision to allow the company to increase fares for the cross-harbour journey by 25%(𝒷). As with what occurred ten years earlier, a heavy-handed reaction by the authorities to a minor kerfuffle provoked many Hong Kongers, especially its youth, to protest en mass which led in turn to widescale rioting and looting in Kowloon with police stations and other public facilities attacked and fire-bombed. The police fired tear gas into the crowds. Again, British forces were parachuted in to forcibly impose and maintain a curfew in the city. As a consequence of the disorder and rioting one rioter was shot and killed by police, dozens were injured and over 200 imprisoned.

Hill-side squatter huts, Tai Hang, 1965 (photo: Ko Tim-keung)

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1966, beginning of civic activism
The 1966 riots lacked the involvement of Chinese Triad gangs and rightist KMT malcontents that had been part of the 1956 troubles. Underlying its eruption was a widening disaffection of residents with the status quo in 1960s Hong Kong…in part it can be seen as a protest against the widening discrepancy in HK society between rich and poor and the appalling living and working conditions the masses had to contend with (overcrowding, ongoing housing dilemma, etc.), and a manifestation of the public distrust engendered by the corruption of officialdom and police.

Protesting tram workers clash with HK police, 1967

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The 1967 Riots
The 1966 riots produced perhaps the colony’s first large-scale social movement, however they were a prelude for a much more serious disturbance to Hong Kong society just one year later. What started as a minor industrial dispute involving workers at a plastic flowers factory in San Po Kong, striking over unreasonable work conditions, escalated into full-blown demonstrations, protests and violence by the Chinese inhabitants against the “iniquities” of British colonial rule with the HK governor David Trench taking a hard line with the malcontents.

Military patrol streets after Macau riots, Dec 1966 (Video, Papa Osmubal Archive)

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Spillover from the Cultural Revolution and the Macau disturbances
The political climate in Communist China at the time—Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was very much on the upswing—played its part in stirring the pot of discontent among left-leaning Hong Kongers and emboldening them to defy their imperial masters. Another source of inspiration for the leftist rioters was the recent success of their counterparts in nearby Macau (themselves encouraged by the energy of the Cultural Revolution) in what became known as the 12-3 Incident. Conflict between the Chinese and the Portuguese authorities, brewing since July 1966, exploded at the end of the year…a dispute over a school building project triggered a series of Macau Chinese protests and rioting with the active participation of Mao’s Red Guards against corruption and colonialism in Macau. The Portuguese colonial police’s violent response to the Chinese protestors resulted in eight deaths and over 200 injuries. Under pressure from Chinese business owners and Beijing Macau’s Portuguese governor was forced into a humiliating public apology for the police crackdown and had to accede to the protestors’ demands. Consequently the balance of power in Macau was altered totally and irrevocably: Red China now had de facto suzerainty over the colony, reducing Portugal’s role in its governance to a nominal one only(𝒸).

Riot police using tear gas against 1967 protestors (photo: scmp.com)

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Smouldering Pearl
As the Hong Kong riots gathered momentum the demonstrators resorted first to strikes and property damage, then to the indiscriminate use of home-made bombs (branded by the government as “urban terrorism”). Governor Trench took a hardline in retailiation, imposing martial law in the colony, responding with tear gas and raiding the pro-CCP protestors’ strongholds like North Point. Whitehall took a laissez-faire approach to the 1967 riots leaving its management to the HK administration and the local police. The terrorist strategy adopted by leftist protestors—random bomb attacks coupled with some targeted assassinations—had the effect of alienating them from the majority of Hong Kong Chinese. By October 1967 Beijing had had enough, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the Communist protestors to halt the bombing campaign, and by the end of the year things were quiet again in the colony. The riots resulted in 51 dead, 832 injured, numerous arrests and some provocateurs deported to China.

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Trampling the seeds of democratisation
1967 witnessed the bloodiest, most violent riots in Hong Kong’s colonial history. The trauma of a succession of riots in the 1950s and 60s demonstrated one thing, the desperate need for reform of the political system and institutions in Hong Kong. While there was some labour reform and social improvements in the colony as a consequence of the 1967 unrest, overall HK governors overall contributed very little to this cause. One exception to this was Mark Young (governor in the 1940s) whose Young Plan called for wider political participation by creating a new Municipal Council to give the populace a greater stake in the colony. However Young’s plan was sabotaged when his successor Grantham opposed its implementation and it was blocked by the Legislative Council, never getting off the drawing board. Instead, it wasn’t until after 1984 with Hong Kong’s fate post-1997 firmly settled that HK governments made any overtures at all in that direction, by that time the horse has bolted!(𝒹).

Endnote: Chinese takeover of Hong Kong?
At the height of the 1967 riots rumours were circulating in the colony that China was planning to seize Hong Kong, to which the current hostilities were a prequel. There had been such a plan however the top echelons of the Chinese regime had never seriously countenanced it. Beijing was content with adding to the HK authorities’ internal troubles by despatching Chinese villagers over the border into the New Territories to launch attacks on police stations…for Beijing it was not the time for anything more. Perhaps it was as one observer noted, “the Chinese had no desire to take over Hong Kong at that time in their history…their proxy intervention had been no more than a demonstration” (Jan Morris, Hong Kong). And a test! It’s plausible that Beijing through its proxies was testing the HK regime to see if it would bow to pressure as the Portuguese Macau authorities did six months earlier. Ironically, at the height of the riots, Whitehall investigated evacuating Hong Kong altogether but the idea was strongly opposed by Governor Trench and the British Army command in Hong Kong on the grounds that it was deemed logistically too hard to pull off. A further objection was the danger to British citizens in the crown colony if a full-on evacuation was attempted (Yep).

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(𝒶) along with a criminal element affiliated with the KMT

(𝒷) the actual trigger for the riots was the spontaneous action of one HK vicenarian—inspired by urban councillor Elsie Elliott who dissented from the price hike decision and organised a petition against it—to stage a hunger strike at the TST terminal of the Star Ferry

(𝒸) the Chinese Communists subsequently moved to eliminate all pockets of Kuomintang influence from Macau

(𝒹) Governor Murray MacLehose was also of a reforming bent but he focused more on eradicating police corruption (establishing an ICAC) than on institutional reform

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Articles consulted:

‘What sparked Hong Kong’s Double Tenth riots’, Jason Wordie, South China Morning Post, 07-Aug-2016, www.amp.scmp.com

‘Fifty years on: The riots that shook Hong Kong in 1967’, Foreign Correspondents Club, 18-May-2017, www.fcchk.org

‘Whose Sound and Fury? The 1967 Riots of Hong Kong through The Times, Haipeng Zhou, global media journal.com

Yep, Ray. “The 1967 Riots in Hong Kong: The Diplomatic and Domestic Fronts of the Colonial Governor.” The China Quarterly, no. 193 (2008): 122–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20192167.

Common Prosperity Redux: Socialism “with Chinese Characteristics” Xi-Style

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Economic policy, Economics and society,, International Relations
Deng prosperity (Wikiwand)

The latest buzz phrases in economic policy in PRC under Xi Jinping are “common prosperity” and “dual circulation” (see Postscript). Actually, common prosperity (Gongtong fuyu) is not new at all to communist China, there has had two previous iterations, the expression originating with Chairman Mao as far back as 1953. Then in the late 1970s leader Deng Xiaoping co-opted the term, flipping it to help spearhead an economic reorientation from the ideologically adherent socialism of Mao to an opening towards market capitalism and private enterprise. Deng proposed a different route to common prosperity, one that allowed some peasants to get rich, which would provide the catalyst to drag the others towards the stated objective.

(Source: addicted2success.com)

First generation billionaires and millionaires; social cohesion imperilled
Beijing tell us the purpose of the Xi-led common prosperity initiative is to reverse the growing trend of the wealth gap which has dramatically increased since Deng’s day. China’s rapid economic growth made it possible to lift millions of Chinese out of poverty, but has also led to a situation where the top 1% holding 30.6% of the country’s wealth. Estimates put the number of Chinese (USD) billionaires as high as 1.1 million (second to the US) (East Asia Forum 20-Sep-2021)⁼ᵃ⁼. According to Elizabeth Economy, China’s Gini coefficient ranks it in the camp of the world’s most unequal states (quoted in Andrew Collier, ’China’s ‘Common Prosperity Campaign Is Going to Be Tough’, The Diplomat, 18-Sep-2021, www.thediplomat.com). Many middle class Chinese citizens are flaunting thbeir nouvelles richesses with luxury acquisitions, which doesn’t go unnoticed by those lower down the socio-economic strata.

Xi in Mao’s shadow? (Photo: denverpost.com)

A pivot to the left?
The Asia Society’s Kevin Rudd described common prosperity as a strategy to re-establish the prominence of the state and the party over the market. Many China-watchers don’t necessarily attribute the new move by the Xi government to the communist party having suddenly rediscovered its 1949 socialist roots. With the situation calling for change, Xi is acting also with an eye to bolstering up his leadership and legitimacy to secure a third term as president next year.

Jack Ma (Source: las2orillas.co)

Cracking down on Alibaba and Tencent
Xi and the party looked round for targets, pressure has been exerted on China’s high profile business elite, mega-billionaires such as Jack Ma and Pony Ma. In genuflect-like fashion their respective companies Alibaba and Tencent quickly came forward to pledge billions of dollars to charities (‘Chinese tech giants pledge billions to support President Xi Jinping’s ‘ common prosperity goal’, Dong Xing, ABC News, 07-Sep-2021, www.abc.net.au). Others to find themselves in the cross-hairs of the new reform agenda include private tutoring, online gaming and the entertainment industry. Critics say that leaning on big tech companies and taxing high and ‘unreasonable’ incomes won’t fix China’s structural inequality in income. What is required is a fundamental change in tax structure and state system which addresses the core problem of a lack of tax revenue. China’s share of revenue is 28.% of GDP cf. 40.3% for OECD countries, its personal income taxes loiter at just 1.2% of GDP cf. the OECD’s 8.2%. PRC’s “Achilles Heel” in tax is the paucity of its compliance, the present system results in a low number of personal tax payers in China relative to workforce size (Collier).

(Source: Brunswick Group)

No “Robin Hood” scenario at work
The Chinese government has moved quickly to reassure concerned business heavyweights (and international investors) about its motives…senior economic official Han Wenxiu’s pitch: common prosperity was “not about killing the rich to help the poor”, rather, he said, it is geared to “doing a proper job of expanding the pie and dividing the pie” (‘Assessing China’s “common prosperity” campaign’, Ryan Haas, Brookings, 09-Sep-2021, www.brookings.edu).

The outcome of such a transformation as the reforms may bring about, some fear may be a “top down Utopian China” with, as K Rudd suggested earlier, even more power and control devolving to the party (‘Changing China: How Xi’s ‘common prosperity’ may impact the world’, Kaishma Vaswani, BBC News, 07-Oct-2021, www.bbc.com).

Little appetite for property and inheritance taxes
One source of redistributing wealth on a national level is taxation on property and inheritance (and a more progressive income tax). But there appears little enthusiasm to upturn this apple cart as it steps uncomfortably on the toes of communist party elites and their vested interests (Haas).

Image: radiichina.com

Endnote: Millennial “have-nots“, in dire need of a share of the common prosperity
The effects of the free market’s dislocation of Chinese society in the early 21st century falls heaviest on the young. Young Chinese face enormous pressures on the highly competitive road to success, starting with the pressure cooker of trying to excel in the gaokao (higher education entrance exam). Even with tertiary qualifications under their belt, so many find themselves chasing the same plum jobs. with nine million-a-year university graduates, with the exception of a fortunate few “a whole generation” miss out on the Chinese good life promised by the capitalist success story (‘China’s ‘common prosperity’ goal won’t mean Robin Hood style redistribution’, Andrew Leung, South China Morning Post, 23–Sep-2021, www.scmp.com). Signs of growing millennial dissatisfaction with the uber-demanding drudgery of the “996”⁼ᵇ⁼ work culture in large Chinese companies manifest themselves—largely via Weibo the Chinese social media network—in the “lying flat” movement (píng tâng) … more twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings opting to drop-out of the competitive rat race, thus earning the state‘s opprobrium (‘The buzzwords reflecting the frustration of China’s young generation’, Fan Wang & Yitsing Wang, BBC, 14-Jun-2021, www.bbc.com). Then there’s the elusive dream of home ownership, wealthy property investors and speculators have pushed the cost of owning a home out of the reach of many millennials…squeezed out of the property market, feeling burn-out from “996”, more young Chinese are forgoing (or at least postponing) starting a family.

(Photo.thestar.com.my)

Postscript: A new economic model to narrow the income gap
“Dual circulation” dovetails neatly into the objective of common prosperity. Beijing has signalled its intent to re-gig the economic model, moving away from over-dependence on exports and capital investment favouring large enterprises, and tapping into the potential of its huge domestic market. This could lead to a refocus on services, domestic consumption and the environment, and a reliance on “indigenous innovation to fuel growth” (Leung; ‘What is China’s dual circulation economic strategy and why is it important?’, Frank Tang, South China Morning Post, 19-Nov-2020, www.scmp.com).

𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪
⁼ᵃ⁼ conversely some 600 million workers live on the equivalent of US$154 or less a month (East Asia Forum)

⁼ᵇ⁼ 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week

GANEFO 1963, the Newly Emerging and Transient Alternative ‘Olympics’

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Politics, Regional History, Regional politics, Sports history

Currently we are watching, from a distance on television, the Olympics from Tokyo. This is the second time Tokyo has held the Olympic Games, although it is the third time that city has been awarded the Games{a}. The previous time Tokyo hosted the Olympics, 1964, Indonesia, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China, all boycotted the world’s premier sporting event{b}. This disharmonious development within the Olympic community had its origin in the 1962 Asian Games, host Indonesia refused entry to Taiwan (in deference to mainland China) and Israel (to appease Muslim Arab states).

GANEFO opening ceremony, 1963 (Photo from Amanda Shuman’s collection, published in Journal of Sport History) ⇩

Mixing sport and politics
The IOC criticised Indonesia for politicising the 1962 Asian Games, but it’s president, Sukarno, far from contrite, was emboldened to go further in his defiance of the IOC. Sukarno, determined that Indonesia plays a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement, enlisted sport in the task of furthering “the politics of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism”. Sukarno set up GANEFO or the Games of the New Emerging Forces…an alternative Olympics-style event held in 1963 in Djakarta, complete with opening ceremony, giant torch, etc. Like his PRC counterpart Mao Zedong, Sukarno deliberately used sports “to display international prowess” which in turn was meant “to enhance global stature”{c}(Webster, David. “Sports as Third World Nationalism: The Games of the New Emerging Forces and Indonesia’s Systemic Challenge under Sukarno.” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations 23, no. 4 (2016): 395-406. Accessed August 1, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26549192). GANEFO represented “a Sino-Indonesian-sponsored challenge to the International Olympic Committee’s dominance in sport that also attempted to solidify China’s geopolitical position as a Third World leader“, Shuman, Amanda. “Elite Competitive Sport in the People’s Republic of China 1958–1966: The Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).” Journal of Sport History 40, no. 2 (2013): 258-283. muse.jhu.edu/article/525098.

Pres. Sukarno (Image: globalsecurity.org)

The IOC was hostile to what it viewed as a challenge to its rules and authority, Djakarta’s breach of the Olympic ideal that sport and politics should remain separate. Sukarno responded by calling out the IOC for hypocrisy, pointing out that the IOC by ejecting the Asian communist countries of PR China and North Korea from the Olympics fold, itself was playing politics. In the prevailing Cold War climate Sukarno characterised Brundage’s organisation as “a tool of imperialists and colonialists”. Predictably, the US and the Western media labelled GANEFO as a ‘Red’ event, citing Sukarno’s links to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and communist China’s weighty involvement in the games as well as the USSR and Eastern Bloc’s participation (‘A Third World Olympics: Sport, Politics and the Developing World in the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), Russell Field, Verso, 09-Aug-2016, www.versobooks.com).

⇩ “Onward, no retreat”, GANEFO motto

The establishment strikes back
In IOC chief Avery Brundage’s mind it was more than just a case of defending the ‘official’ games as the IOC’s proprietorial brand, his purpose in trying to deflect the challenge from emerging Third World leaders like Sukarno has been seen as an attempt to “buttress the Olympic movement as a First World institution in a rapidly decolonising world” (Field). The IOC’s retaliatory response was quick: the Indonesian Olympic Committee was turfed from the Games (communist China had already withdrawn from the IOC). Later, in 1964, the IOC readmitted Indonesia for Tokyo but decreed that individual athletes who participated in GANEFO 1963 were barred from selection for Tokyo. Sukarno rejected these conditions, demanding that “all or none” of the country’s athletes be eligible for the 1964 Games. Consequently, with the IOC and Indonesia at loggerheads, Djakarta unilaterally withdrew from Tokyo in protest (‘GANEFO I: Sports and Politics in Djakarta’, Ewa T. Pauker, Rand Paper, July 1964, www.rand.org).

Who went to GANEFO 63 and who ‘won’?
Around 2,700 athletes participated representing about 50 countries – mostly from Asia but many from Africa and the Middle East (including a team representing “Arab Palestine”, whereas Israel was again excluded); the communist eastern bloc states; South America; and curiously for an event comprising “New Emerging Powers” there were contingents from France, Italy, Finland and Netherlands (the presence of Dutch athletes in Djakarta from the ex-colonial power in the East Indies seemed baffling!). China had the biggest team and easily won the ‘unofficial’ gold medal count with 68. ⇧ Olympic stadium, Djakarta (antaranews.com)

Almost all of the delegations of attending athletes were not sanctioned by their countries’ Olympics committees for fear of reprisal from the IOC. Accordingly, most of the athletes participating were “not of Olympic calibre”. It was especially tricky for the vacillating Méxicans whose participation it was feared might jeopardise México City’s bid for the 1968 Olympics. As soon as México City got the nod from the IOC, a Méxican team was hastily cobbled together to attend{d}.

Beyond GANEFO
Sukarno saw the realisation of GANEFO and the forging of close ties between Third World countries in sporting and cultural endeavours, as a pathway to something bigger than sport, an institution that might challenge the existing international order. GANEFO was meant to foreshadow the creation of CONEFO (Confederation of the New Emerging Forces), a new world body which would appeal to left-nationalist and neutralist states emerging out of colonialism. CONEFO Sukarno hoped might come to stand as an alternative, Third World-focused United Nations (Webster){e}.

Chinese ‘MO’
China played a key supporting role in getting GANEFO up in 1963. It was the principal financial backer for the event and the Djakarta games got great coverage from the Chinese state media. Like Indonesia, PRC saw good propaganda value in the games, its participation in ‘goodwill’ games purported to foster solidarity and understanding between Third World countries across the globe was intended to show it in a good light vis-á-vis the Capitalist West. Beijing was eyeing off the prospect of becoming rivals with both Washington and Moscow, it was looking for avenues to exert influence with Indonesia and the Afro-Asian world and the GANEFO opportunity nicely suited its purposes (Pauker).

 End-note: GANEFO 66 and finis
The GANEFO games were intended to be an ongoing affair but the impetus could not be maintained. A second GANEFO games had been scheduled to be held in Cairo in 1967 but were subsequently cancelled due to rising Middle East tensions. Instead, the follow-up games (“Asian GANEFO”) took place in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1966, which tried with less success to replicate the original sporting event in Djakarta. Subsequently GANEFO quickly faded away. The main factors for the GANEFO games’ demise were the overthrow of its driving force President Sukarno and the steep costs of hosting the event (Russell).

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{a} Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Olympics but was stripped of its hosting rights after Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria

{b} in addition South Africa was banned from competing due to its racialist Apartheid policy

{c} now even more important to China as their stand-out performance in the current Games in Tokyo indicates

{d} many of the European participants were from leftist student organisations and workers’ sporting clubs. Military personnel were a component of several nation‘s teams

{e} in 1965 Sukarno pulled Indonesia out of the UN

Remembering the “Forgotten War”: The Korean War, 70 Years On

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

This week marked the 70th anniversary of the first shots fired in anger of probably the most consequential of the numerous forgotten wars in modern history – the Korean War (25th June 1950).

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Prelude to the conflict
Tensions between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula can be traced back to the 1930s and the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan’s dominance prompted a resistance movement which included future communist leader and dynasty patriarch of North Korea Kim Il-sung. Some Koreans willingly collaborated with the Japanese invaders including fighting for it against the Korean guerrillas trying to liberate the country (one such agent of the Japanese was a former South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979) [‘Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea’, Taipei Times, 08-Mar-2019, www.taipeitimes.com].

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(Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images)

At the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two zones of military occupation, north (with Kim as leader under the tutelage of the Soviet Union) and south (under US control☼ but eventually with right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee installed as president), with the demarcation line quite arbitrarily defined at the 38th Parallel (38° N) by two American officers . The leaders of both Koreas held ambitions for reunification of the peninsula but with very different kinds of political outcomes in mind. The US’ withdrawal of almost all its military forces from the South in the late 1940s decided Kim on putting the communist reunification plan into action. With USSR and China agreeing to support it, North Korean forces attacked the South in June 1950✧. The ensuing three years saw the opposing forces push each other back and forth along the peninsula (the South’s capital Seoul was captured on four separate occasions) resulting in a stalemate.

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⇧ Chinese Volunteer Army crossing the Yalu River (Source: www.goodfreephotos.com)

The Korean War was both a Korean civil war and a proxy superpower war militarily pitting the US v Communist China – as well as an early chapter of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and America wrestling for influence over strategically-positioned Korea. The response to North Korea’s invasion was a UN-sanctioned “police action” comprising sixteen nations including Britain and Commonwealth countries but led by the US. After initial defeats and a re-consolidation of its position, the US army drove the North Korean forces back into the northern border with China—at one point the US army captured and held the communists’ capital Pyongyang for eight weeks—this prompted China to enter the conflict with a massive manpower commitment, throwing over 250,000 troops against the Americans and allies and forcing them back deep into South Korea [‘The US Army once ruled Pyongyang and 5 other things you might not know about the Korean War’, (Brad Lendon), CNN, 24-Jun-2020, www.amp.cnn.com].

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⇧ MiG-15 fighter: the Korean War saw the first appearance of  jet vs jet ‘dogfights’—American F-80s & F-86s fought Russian MiG-15s (manned, first by Russian, and later Chinese and North Korean pilots) with aerial combat taking place in a section of North Korea and the Yalu River that became known as “MiG Alley”

A heavy toll including civilians and MIAs
All together, somewhere between three and four million people died in the conflict. The US army lost nearly 37,000, the South Koreans nearly 138,000. The North Koreans lost up to 400,000 soldiers and the Chinese forces, over 180,000. The MIA tally (missing in action) was very high, over 300,000 from both sides combined. The toll on the civilian population was greatest – the US military unleashed a relentless bombing campaign on North Korea resulting in excess of 280,000 casualties. Virtually all of the modern buildings in North Korea were levelled by the 635,000 tons of US bombs dropped (Lendon).

⇩ Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951)

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A Cold Warrior blueprint from the Pentagon
The US’ involvement in Korea was a key plank in the overall strategy of containing communism in Asia – known in the Pentagon as “Forward Defence”. With the postwar map of Eastern Europe encompassed within the Soviet empire and China under communist rule, Washington saw intervention in the peninsula as fundamental and essential to prevent South Korea from becoming another fallen ‘domino’ to communist infiltration of Eurasia…the same logic that held sway a decade later when America stumbled into an infinitely harder regional conflict to disentangle itself from in Vietnam.

A “limited war”
Mindful of the risk that the Korean War might escalate into a wider Asia conflict or even into “World War III”, US president, Harry S Truman, ordered the US military not to extend it’s aircraft raids into Manchuria and Chinese territory, even though the Chinese were using its north-east provinces to amass its forces to enter the Korean war-zone. This also ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict, Washington’s reticence to do this was sharpened by awareness of the Soviet Union’s recent demonstration of its own nuclear weapons capability [’Never Truly Forgotten: The Lethal Legacy of the Korean War’, (Rebecca Lissner), War on the Rocks, 25-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com].

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Korea’s Cold War reverberations for America 
An armistice in 1953 brought an end to the hostilities on the peninsula but left the issue unresolved. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up between the two Koreas – a ‘contained’ hotspot which threatens periodically to spill over and reignite hostilities. The conflict in Korea prompted a radical transformation in US defence thinking. To secure its regional forward defence perimeters the US in the early Fifties forged defence alliances with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And with this came a diverse mushrooming of US overseas military postings and bases in the Asia-Pacific region. Most significantly, the war reversed an earlier contraction of US defence spending, by 1951 it’s spending skyrocketed to $48.2 Bn, setting a pattern for future US military expenditure, including a large standing army in peacetime and an increasingly-funded CIA which expanded its surveillance activities across the globe (Lissner; Cummings).

⇩ a US M-24 tank crew, Nakdong River, 1950

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Out of sight …
Why was the Korean War consigned to history’s back pages so swiftly? Timing is part of the answer. WWII ended less than five years earlier, it was still fresh in people’s minds and they had had enough of war. The Korean War, when it came, was an unpleasant reminder of that world-shattering, traumatic episode [Eric McGeer, quoted in Toronto Sun, 21-Jun-2020]. Korea was “overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it” (Lissner). But the Korean War’s unresolved conclusion has “kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs” [Shiela Miyoshi Jager, “5 US Wars Rarely Found in History Books’, ( Jessica Pearce Rotondi), History, 11-May-2020, www.history.com]. Since the ceasefire in 1953 the peninsula has remained a potential world hotspot, a state of tension persisting to the present thanks largely to the periodical bellicose threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un to use nuclear warfare against South Korea and the US.

End-note: Perpetual state of war

Though hostilities ceased on July 27, 1953, technically the Korean War has never ended as no peace treaty between the combatants was ever signed.

PostScript: A reprieve for Taiwan 🇹🇼 
The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula presaged a change of fate for Taiwan. In 1949, Mao Zedong, having emerged triumphant from the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, had amassed a force of troops on the mainland ready to invade and “take back” Taiwan. Korea turned that seeming fait accompli on its head! With fighting starting, Truman, fearful of the war spreading across east Asia, positioned the US 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Stymied, Peking jettisoned its plans to invade Taiwan and relocated the formation of soldiers to the Korean front (Lendon).

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☼ during the three years of direct US military administration of South Korea to 1948, the US injudiciously misread the political situation and employed despised Korean officers of the former Japanese colonial police to impose security – leading to an open revolt in the country (Cumings).
✧ although the conventional view is that Pyongyang was the aggressor and initiated the fighting by invading the South, some observers have noted that in earlier encounters on the border in 1949, South Korea arguably initiated the bulk of the fighting (Cumings)