The Korean Historiography Wars: From Minjung Nationalism to New Right Revisionism

By the late 1970s, academic debates about Korea's ‘two paths to modernity’ fueled more urgent narratives by dissident intellectuals reimagining the present. The seminal 1979 series ‘Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi insik’ (Understanding Liberation History, ULH) marked a pivotal turn. In its lead chapter, Song Kon-ho presented an ethical critique, arguing that 1945 Liberation, instead of empowering the oppressed minjung (people) as history's subject (chuch’e), was hijacked by collaborators and foreign powers. This diverted Korea onto a tragic path defined by division and repression, framing the post-liberation era as the nation's most horrific chapter.

Song's primary target was Rhee Syngman, South Korea's first president, accusing him of shielding Japanese collaborators, sabotaging unification efforts, and manipulating anti-communism to establish a illegitimate separate state. ULH constructed powerful binaries—genuine nationalism versus mindless anti-communism, minjung democracy versus formal democracy—that became central to opposition discourse. This narrative explicitly validated the boycott of the 1948 UN-sponsored elections, challenging the South Korean state's foundational legitimacy and positing the minjung as an autonomous national subject against both Cold War regimes.

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and its brutal suppression shattered the state's ideological control, pushing intellectuals to seek deeper structural explanations. By the mid-1980s, taboos on discussing communism faded. In the 1985 second volume of ULH, historian Kang Man-gil called for a ‘reunification-oriented historiography’ unfettered by the ‘structure of division’. This perspective recentered Korean agency, highlighting post-1945 efforts to build a left-right united front and validating resistance to the creation of separate states, thereby directly challenging Cold War narratives.

This ‘revisionist’ historiography reached its zenith in the 1989 fourth volume of ULH. Scholars Choi Jang-jip and Chong Hae-gu analyzed the Korean War’s structural origins, depicting post-liberation as a revolutionary situation where popular People’s Committees sought an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal revolution. They aligned with historian Bruce Cumings, arguing the U.S. Army Military Government (USAMGIK) used coercion to reverse this tide in the South. They also analyzed North Korea's ‘minju kijiron’ (democratic base area strategy), which evolved into a military rationale for war, framing the conflict as a ‘war of national liberation’.

The conservative New Right emerged in response, gaining traction after the 1989 fall of European communism. It strategically welcomed postmodern and postcolonial theory’s critique of nationalist grand narratives. In 2006, New Right scholars published ‘Haebang chŏnhusa ŭi chae-insik’ (Reconsideration of Liberation History, RHL), a direct rebuttal to ULH. They attacked 1980s leftist-nationalist historiography for dominating discourse, undermining South Korea's legitimacy, and ignoring evidence of Soviet early plans for a northern separate state.

This New Right alignment with postcolonial theory was tactical, united by antipathy toward nationalist historiography now associated with the left. For the New Right, this critique aimed to restore legitimacy to South Korea's anti-communist legacy and capitalist development, recentering the ‘individual’ over class or nation. However, this accommodation remains tenuous, as many postcolonial scholars reject the New Right's uncritical ‘universalism’ of progress, which obscures histories of violence, exploitation, and patriarchy under colonialism and authoritarianism.

Thus, Korean historiography remains a fiercely contested battlefield. The clash between minjung-centric liberation historiography and New Right revisionism is not merely academic but a fundamental struggle over national identity, state legitimacy, and the memory of violence and collaboration that continues to shape Korea's political present.