A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation
Belknap Press, 2025
Agent: Elise Capron
A poignant return to Korea’s forgotten “Asian Spring”—a moment ripe with possibility denied by the postwar US military occupation.
When Japanese imperial rule ended in August 1945, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes that had been bottled up for forty years. New mother Ch?n Sukh?i marveled at the news, envisioning her son growing up free in an independent Korea. Yi Ilchae, who only days before had been drafted into the Japanese army, threw himself into union activism. An electrifying excitement jolted Koreans into action everywhere. Peasants occupied Japanese-owned farmlands, workers seized control of factories, and women demanded political and economic equality.
A Fractured Liberation brings to vivid life the brief but intense moment in postwar Korea when anything seemed possible, but nothing was guaranteed. The country had been abruptly split into US and Soviet military occupation zones, but, as Kornel Chang shows, ordinary people threw themselves into achieving self-governance throughout a unified Korea. The mostly left-leaning efforts were bolstered by an eclectic group of American supporters, including New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists.
The Koreans’ greatest obstacle, however, proved to be the US military government in the south and its rigidly anti-communist leadership. Despite promising liberation from the hated Japanese-imposed institutions, the US occupation government under General John R. Hodge hired back Koreans who had worked for the Japanese to do the dirty work of curbing protests and muzzling reformers. As concern over the budding superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union overshadowed the Koreans’ democratic aspirations, the United States increasingly narrowed the possibilities for Korean independence, helping to cement the North-South divide and ensure decades of authoritarian rule on both sides.
Reviews:
“Drawing from diaries, military records, literary works, and his own family’s history, Chang ponders what could have become of ‘Korea’s Asian Spring.’” —New Yorker
“An engaging history in an approachable style for a wide audience.” —Stephen Mercado, Asian Review of Books
“Well-researched, compelling and unapologetic in its addressing of uncomfortable truths. Chang skillfully illustrates the ways in which the US government weaponised Korean people against themselves to further propel the US’s Cold War anti-Communist aspirations while, at the same time, horrifyingly employing Japanese colonial techniques of governance to weaponise the southern portion of the Korean peninsula as its own Eastern Hemisphere chess piece.” —Taeyeon Song, Mekong Review
“Shine[s]…a valuable light on a little-known but important piece of history.” —Kirkus Reviews
“The US military occupation of Korea after World War II lasted only a few years, but they were fateful ones, as Kornel Chang shows. A Fractured Liberation is an absorbing, poignant account of a political tragedy: how a newly freed country teeming with democratic movements was plunged into autocracy and permanently, painfully divided.” —Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
“As the child of a Korean catapulted from the chaos and the broad possibilities of post–WWII Korea into a future he never could have predicted, I've been fascinated by this period, and struggling to understand it, for years. The lack of deep-diving histories has slowed me down and frustrated me. Now Kornel Chang, with A Fractured Liberation, has changed all that. His book is indispensable.” —Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise
“Most Americans know nothing about the US occupation of southern Korea from 1945 to 1948, but it deeply shaped postwar Korean history and was a crucial antecedent to the origins of the Korean War. Kornel Chang has written a brilliant analysis of this episode that will be of equal value to the specialist and the general reader. Lively, very well written and researched, often funny, but also deadly serious, it deserves a wide audience.” —Bruce Cumings, author of The Korean War: A History
“A Fractured Liberation is a fascinating study of a moment in South Korean history that could have set the peninsula on a radically different course. Using new materials and written in a lively, engaging style, Chang’s work illuminates a host of hitherto neglected reformist figures, both Korean and American, and their heroic but tragically unsuccessful efforts to avoid a permanent division of Korea.” —Carter J. Eckert, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea