elsewhere was no worse than that among the Communists. Japanese suppression was severe; large-scale arrests in 1925 and 1926 deprived the party of top leaders such as Pak Hun-young and Choi Chang-ik. Only two years after recognizing the Korean Communist Party the Comintern lamented:
“The ranks of the Communist Party in Korea have in the past consisted almost exclusively of intellectuals and students. A Communist Party built on such foundations cannot be a consistently bolshevik and organizationally sound Party. The first task of the communist movement of Korea is therefore to strengthen its own ranks. . . . The petty-bourgeois intellectual composition of the Party, and the lack of contact with the workers, have hitherto constituted one of the main causes of the permanent crisis in the communist movement of Korea. The frequent failures of the Korean communists show that the Party was unable to organize its conspiratorial work properly.”2
5. Syngman Rhee (second row, seventh from left) pictured with members of the Shanghai Provisional Government at a New Year celebration in 1922. This documentary photograph carries black arrows indicating Rhee and Kim Koo (front row, third from left), the latter of whom was killed in 1949 by a Korean Army lieutenant, reportedly a member of Kim’s own Korean Independence Party. (Pacific Stars and Stripes Photo)
Korea’s domestic Communists were so nationalistic in outlook that Moscow may never have reposed much confidence in them. But for Korea, unlike China, the Soviets were able to develop leadership from among Russian-raised nationalists who in time would make North Korea the most responsive and submissive of Soviet satellites.
Also susceptible to Communist indoctrination were Koreans who had migrated to China and Manchuria. But these areas became a haven for Koreans of all extremes, whether right or left, and the facts of geography made them less susceptible to Soviet influence than to Chinese. China-oriented Koreans were particularly successful in harassing the Japanese during the 1930’s. A Japanese account described how these operations were carried out:
“Korean outlaws formed themselves into a band, four hundred strong, and, aided by Chinese bandits and Russian Bolsheviks, attacked Hunchun in September and October, 1920, during which months they set fire to and destroyed the Japanese consulate and some Japanese houses, looted valuable articles, and killed many Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese, including women and children. At the same time, refractory Koreans in North Chientao began to move, menacing the safety of Japanese and law-abiding Koreans there. Under the circumstances, the government dispatched a military expedition. . . . After a campaign of a few weeks the expedition succeeded in supressing the Korean outlaws. About five thousand of them surrendered.”3
Even though the account is distorted, it is obvious that Korean guerrillas were a major source of annoyance to the Japanese. Their successes increased the influence of leftists within the Provisional Government, and prompted some defections. A Korean Revolutionary Party, led by Kim Won-bong, drew some leftists from the Provisional Government.
The Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 brought renewed activity on the part of the government-in-exile. The Provisional Government was reorganized with Kim Koo as president, while Rhee was sent to Geneva to plead Korea’s case there. In April 1932, a Korean nationalist hurled a bomb in Shanghai which killed General Shirakawa, commander of the Japanese armies in China, and wounded Mamoru Shigemitsu, later foreign minister, and Admiral Nomura, Japan’s ambassador in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor. Among those arrested in the wake of the assassination was Ahn Chang-ho, and tortures suffered while in prison hastened his death in 1938.
In Geneva, Rhee was unsuccessful in his attempts to present Korea’s case before the League of Nations. His failure prompted him to try a new tactic: encouraged by the Chinese ambassador to Switzerland, Rhee applied for a visa to Moscow. With Japanese expansion posing a threat to the Soviet Union as well as to China, he hoped for a more friendly reception than he had found in the West. The Soviets, however, had so adequate a foothold among Koreans in the U.S.S.R. and Manchuria that they felt no compunction to aid that exile faction least amenable to Soviet control. In any case, the U.S.S.R. was by then more concerned with Nazi Germany than with imperial Japan.
Rhee’s visit to Moscow was not unlike his unsuccessful representations elsewhere, except that it showed him willing to solicit even Communist aid on behalf of the Provisional Government. His visit to Switzerland was a turning point in his personal life, however, for there he met Francesca Donner, whom he married the following year. Rhee returned to the United States to make arrangements for Miss Donner to enter the country. He was fifty-nine and she thirty-six when they were married on October 8, 1933. It would be the lot of Francesca Rhee, the daughter of an Austrian nobleman, to become the first lady of an Asian nation which she had never seen.
The following year was largely taken up with a speaking tour of the United States. Rhee had become increasingly isolated from the Provisional Government, as a result of personality clashes, geographic separation, and the fact that the Provisional Government had its hands full with internal troubles. In 1936, however, a number of hitherto rival factions in China merged into a conservative Korean National Front with its headquarters in Hangchow, thus maintaining a semblance of unity under rightist leadership.
In 1939, with friction among Koreans in Hawaii making his church and school endeavors increasingly difficult, Rhee moved to Washington. There he took advantage of the growing popular concern over Japan to publish his own indictment of the Japanese, Japan Inside Out. As was to be expected, the book was a long resume of Japanese encroachments in Korea. But in addition it contained early symptoms that Rhee had come to view himself as a Korean Moses. His description of the abortive independence movement of the 1890’s left little doubt as to whom Rhee regarded as its driving force:
“The conservative Korean government, having a childlike faith in [its treaties with foreign powers] opened everything to the Japanese without preparing for national defense. It was in 1895, soon after the close of the Sino-Japanese war, that I came to realize the danger and undertook to inform the nation of the imminent danger to our national existence. I started the first daily newspaper in Korea, through the columns of which I did all I could to cause our people to know what the Japanese and the Russians, the two rival forces, were trying to do. In cooperation with many patriotic leaders, we [sic] succeeded in arousing a sufficient number of people to join with us in inaugurating a national defense program.”4
Moreover, for all of Rhee’s studies in international law at Harvard and Princeton, he continued to regard the old treaty of amity between the United States and Korea as a guarantee of American protection:
“If [the Korean emperor’s appeal for U.S. protection against Japan] was really foolish, the Koreans were not alone responsible for it. The United States Senate and the President of the United States, as well as the State Department, all gave their approval and affixed their signatures to the treaty, thus making it a law of the United States. . . . This is, indeed, a blemish on the glorious pages of American history. Korea paid heavily for being a peace-loving nation and putting her trust in the sanctity of international treaties.”5
Finally, although Rhee provided some documentation for his charges of a Japanese blueprint for world conquest, he offered only generalities when it came to the question of how to meet the Japanese threat. While denying that he espoused preventive war, Rhee called upon the United States to check Japan “before it is too late.” But how Japan was to be checked in 1939 short of war is never made clear, and when it came to Japan’s exact intentions, Rhee’s crystal ball was no better than that of the average American. “The open Japanese threats of war against the United States are only a bluff,” he wrote. “They know too well that it would be suicidal for them to plunge into war with the United States while Great Britain and China are menacing the Axis lineup from both ends.”6
The
