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North Korea's Partisan Family State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Heonik Kwon  and
Byung-Ho Chung
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The decade after the Korean War (1950-1953) was a formative era for North Korea. Many of the striking features of the country's political and social system visible today took root during the postwar era, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.

The era was, above all, a time of proud achievements for North Korea. Socialist politics are often referred to as substantive economic democracy based on the principle of egalitarian access to and distribution of social goods, in contrast to the formal democracy of liberal states founded on ideas of universal suffrage and personal liberty to pursue greater access to social goods. In the early postwar years, North Korea achieved great success in building a state and economic system on the model of substantive democracy, rapidly transforming a war-torn, and previously highly stratified, primarily agrarian society into an energetic, industrial society enjoying distributive justice and universal literacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 28 , July 2012 , e1
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

References

Notes

[1] Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle,” Monthly Review 16, no. 8 (1965): 548.

[2] Helen-Louise Hunter, Kim Il-song's North Korea (Newport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 26.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 105.

[5] Ibid., 74, 83-105.

[6] Moon-Woong Lee, Bukhan jongch'imunhwaui hyongsonggwa gu t'ukjing (The formation and characteristics of North Korean political culture), (Seoul: Institute of National Unification, 1976), 43.

[7] Wada Haruki, Kita Chosen: Yugekitai kokka no genzai (North Korea's partisan state today), (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998).

[8] Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 123-36, 149-57.

[9] Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 13-37. Also Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

[10] Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 222-39.

[11] Wada Haruki, Kimuiruson to manshu konichisenso (Kim Il Sung and anti-Japanese war in Manchuria), (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992), 377. See also Suh, Ki[10]m Il Sung, 107-58; Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 202-10.

[12] Charles K. Armstrong, “Centering the Periphery: Manchurian Exile(s) and the North Korean State,” Korean Studies 19 (1995): 1-16.

[13] “Paekdusan nunbora (Paekdu mountain, snowstorm),” Rodong Sinmun, 21 March 2000.

[14] Heonik Kwon, “North Korea's Politics of Longing,” Critical Asian Studies 42 (2010): 3-24.

[15] See Hyun-Chol Oh, Son'gunryongjanggwa sarangui segye (The great general of militaryfirst politics and the world of love), (Pyongyang: Pyongyang Press, 2005). Also Sonia Ryang, “Biopolitics or the Logic of Sovereign Love: Love's Whereabouts in North Korea,” in North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding, ed. Sonia Ryang (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009), 57-84.