The Suppression and Recall of Colonial Memory: Manchukuo and the Cold War in the Two Koreas

Abstract

After liberation in 1945, a number of candidates in the general or gubernatorial elections in South Korea solemnly wrote on their election posters that they had spent their whole lives fighting for the liberation movement in Manchuria (the region which the PRC now calls ‘Northeast’, Dongbei) during the colonial period. Politicians in the 1950s and 1960s would claim they were exiled anti-Japanese fighters in Manchuria, just as those in the 1970s and 1980s posed as ex-ringleaders of the April 19 student movement that toppled the Syngman Rhee regime in 1960.