Journal of Korean Studies

Finally, two historians beam searchlights on another buried history of the Korean War. Monica Kim's The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold [End Page 156] History and David Cheng Chang's The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War are welcome arrivals to Korean War studies. By centering on prisoners of war, both historians make the novel argument that the Korean War was fought over not only territory but also human terrain.¹ After the tactical war stalemated by mid-1951, a new war commenced during the armistice talks: the war over the repatriation of POWs (the Chinese POWs, specifically, for Chang). In telling this story, Kim magnifies interrogation sites as "intimate encounter[s]" (3) of a "longer twentieth-century story of American imperial expansionist ambitions in Asia" (34), while Chang locates the "seeds of conflict among the Chinese prisoners [in the Korean War POW camps]" in the 1945–49 Chinese Civil War (21). In allowing North Korean and Chinese POWs to speak—through "files that have never received systematic analytical treatment by scholars" (Kim, 21) and oral interviews—Kim and Chang rearrange several optics through which scholars can understand mid-twentieth-century Korea, East Asia, and the United States.

In structure and method, the two books offer readers two different modes of historical inquiry. Kim's Interrogation Rooms, neatly organized into two sections, applies a fresh conceptual approach to the Korean War. Part 1 lays down the "elements of war": the interrogation, the POW, and the interrogator. Engaging with theoretical tools of emergency politics, sovereignty, and racialized citizenship, this section particularly showcases Kim's incisive attention to the convergence of Koreans' longer bid for sovereign recognition and Japanese Americans' bid for equal citizenship in the political space of interrogation rooms. Kim also keenly captures microhistorical gestures—spitting, asides, and insults—by interrogators and POWs in their transient subversions of the logic of American liberal empire. Part 2, titled "Humanity Interrogated," holds together four chapters that zoom in on various sites of detention, interrogation, and protest—beginning with Compound 76's kidnapping of Brigadier General Francis Dodd in chapter 4. Chapters 5–7 take us below, on, and even above the thirty-eighth parallel. Reading together interrogation reports, incident reports, memoirs, oral histories, and prisoner-authored records (e.g., petitions written in POWs' blood), Kim presents a cutting-edge postcolonial history of the Korean War.

Hijacked War, in comparison, offers a sweeping narrative across sixteen chapters based on archival research and interviews in the United States, China, Taiwan, Argentina, and Brazil. Scaling up and down multiple vantage points, Chang deftly interweaves life histories and policy analysis to explain why the "surface of conformity in the newly established PRC . . . exploded into life-and-death struggles in the UN prison camps in Korea" (21). Turning to US policy, Chang then unmasks the colossal blunders—in respect to policy NSC-81/1, "United States Courses of Action with Respect to Korea" (92–94)—that arose from American arrogance toward the Chinese and ignorance of the Chinese Communists in the innermost corridors of Washington (372). NSC-81/1 is, of course, well known for rationalizing the UN march north of the thirty-eighth parallel to "roll back" [End Page 157] communism following the Inch'ŏn Landing. Chang, however, shifts our focus to the indoctrination program prescribed in paragraph 22 and argues that this policy (originally intended to be applied to North Korean POWs) was later haphazardly extended to Chinese prisoners in March 1951, with complete disregard for the political retaliation prisoners would face upon return to China. Inadvertently, these incongruous, half-baked policies exposed more than ten thousand Chinese POWs to "hijacking" by a core group of around "3,000 bona fide Chinese anti-Communist prisoners" (13, 204–7) and Chiang Kai-shek's agenda to resuscitate his "bankrupt and moribund" regime with the "defection" of Communist POWs (7, 14). After prolonging the war by another two years, the war over whether Chinese POWs would go to China or Taiwan, Chang argues, ended with Taiwan as the "main beneficiary of a war with no clear winners" (7). By unearthing these untold stories behind barbed wire and armistice tables, Interrogation Rooms and Hijacked Wars are the first monographs to explicitly privilege and theorize the Communist soldier's experience of the Korean War.²

In the broader scholarship on the Korean conflict, Kim and Chang join several others in allowing "enemies" of the US-ROK Cold War regime to speak back. In Seong Nae Kim's ethnographic work on the "shamanic theater of counterculture" on contemporary Cheju Island, mournful spirits of massacred ancestors who were killed as communist enemies of the South Korean state in 1948–49 tell their stories to the living through mediumship.³ More recently, Su-kyoung Hwang in Korea's Grievous War returns to the historical events of the April 3rd Cheju massacre and Korean War massacres to document the civilian experience (as well as their bereavement and activism) and American observation (and execution) of state violence. Heonik Kwon, in his monograph After the Korean War, finds interlocutors in survivors of massacres—through memoirs, local histories, and interviews—to remap the war's afterlife onto the intimate site of kinship. In this way, critical scholarship—from Bruce Cumings's two-volume Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990) to the recent literature—have all discarded the 1950–53 periodization to exhume the regime of bipolar violence dating before June 1950 and enduring beyond July 1953.⁴

In this vein, Interrogation Rooms sees the Korean War as what Cumings called a "denouement"—the final act of a war that was already being waged in South Korea.⁵ Yet, Monica Kim also delineates another relationship between the American occupation and the Korean War. By moving from the US military government (1945–48) to POW camps, Kim argues that the logic of violence wielded against the insurgent enemy on Cheju was redeployed against the uniformed enemy of North Korea. To make this crucial point, Kim reveals in chapter 5 that "the work of the CIC [US Counterintelligence Corps] generated a critical paper archive for the US occupation and also the US military during the Korean War" (231). The espionage activities of the occupation-era CIC, Kim compellingly argues, instructed Koreans on a "calculus between life and death," where marking oneself as an anti-Communist to evade suspicion and even death required marking [End Page 158] someone else as a Communist (233). This politics, Kim shows throughout the chapter, "continued temporally into the Korean War and spatially into the POW camps" (234). So, when US negotiators upheld voluntary repatriation in the armistice talks while the Psychological Strategy Board began to "persuade" POWs to choose the "free world," the POWs quickly learned that not even uniformed soldiers could avoid the violently overlapping claims of multiple sovereignties. The UN POW camps, in other words, quickly became a pedagogical space for persuasion (Kim) and reindoctrination, or "brainwashing Americanstyle" (Chang).

For Kim, the POWs confronted a litmus test that evoked the "loyalty questionnaire" for interned Japanese American men during World War II. In chapter 3 "The Interrogator," Kim converses with Takashi Fujitani to argue that the United States "exercised its sovereign power through its ability to manufacture statelessness" and rendered (re)gaining citizenship (for Japanese American men) conditional on soldiering for the American state (138). Confronted with this test, many Japanese Americans learned to perform a particular desire to reenter the political body. In the Korean War camps, anti-Communist North Korean POWs pledged, through tattoos and writings in their blood, "their willingness to die for their state [ROK]" in their urgent determination to render their petition for South Korean citizenship sincere (256). And so, the Japanese American POW interrogator in the Korean War translated not only between languages but between two interlocking imperial projects across the Pacific.

Rather than approach camp politics as a coherent project, Chang foregrounds precisely the inchoateness that created the explosive conditions in the camps. According to Chang, the defection of more than fourteen thousand Chinese POWs to Taiwan (with only around seven thousand choosing repatriation) was unintended and unplanned. The Truman-Acheson administration, Chang argues, "became hostage" to its own moralistic but inherently self-contradictory policies of prisoner reindoctrination and voluntary repatriation (11–12). As POWs realized their vulnerability to retaliation after participating in the reindoctrination initiatives under the instruction of Nationalist Chinese (Taiwanese) interpreters employed by UN Command, these anti-Communist Chinese POWs demanded to be killed rather than be sent back to Communist China through methods like blood petitions and tattooed slogans and violently sabotaged other POWs from choosing repatriation (204–6). In these camps, then, US policy blunders combusted with Chiang's covert operations and the anxieties and resentment from communist pacification and reeducation that many soldiers carried with them to Korea. Moreover, many anti-Communist POW leaders who underwent Communist reform "applied those same methods to control Communist prisoners [in the UN camps] to crippling effect" (57).

By moving beyond diplomatic history, Chang closes a major gap in the historiography on Chinese intervention in Korea by painstakingly unpacking the complex psyches of the Chinese POWs. Other scholars, including Chen Jian, have [End Page 159] primarily focused on explicating China's decision to enter the Korean War. As Ha Jin's 2004 novel War Trash brought to light through its fictional memoir, thousands of Chinese soldiers walked minefields of life-and-death choices from China to Korea, even after repatriation. With Chang's historical account, we can finally understand the myriad factors that led to Chinese POWs defecting from China to Taiwan at a two-to-one ratio (a stunning ratio compared to 7,826 non-repatriates and 75,823 repatriates among the North Korean POWs). In this twinned flipping of the script, Chang recasts Chinese POWs as the central actors of the Korean War to argue that "the brightest minds of the mightiest power on earth [United States] were taken captive by the [Chinese] captives" (12).

On their own and together, Interrogation Rooms and Hijacked War leave readers with a more profound understanding of the intimate and global forces that converged on the grounds of Korean War POW camps. No longer will the war behind barbed wire remain peripheral to the study of the Korean War. Nevertheless, each author left me with a lingering question. While Kim eloquently extends the arc from the prewar counterinsurgency to the POW camps, at times I wanted a thicker accounting of the communist revolutionary subjectivity between the postcolony and US liberal empire, which receives more sustained attention in Hijacked Wars. Kim discusses Suzy Kim's work on the autobiographical practices of revolutionary subject making in Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (2013) to analyze North Korean interrogations of American POWs (331), but I think this discussion would have also proved fascinating alongside the analytical work on North Korean prisoners' postcolonial subjectivity in the UN camps. In either chapter 2 or 4, Kim might have further discussed the subject-making practices in revolutionary North Korea and how North Korean POWs brought this multilayered subjectivity in front of their interrogators. I believe this would have added another interesting layer to an already rich history.

My question for Chang concerns historians and oral history. While oral histories buttress both works, Chang leans more heavily into oral sources, having conducted interviews with eighty-four former Chinese POWs. More impressive, Chang matched full interrogation reports from the US National Archives with eighteen interviewees. Yet, it is also here that I wished for a more critical engagement with his oral archive. The concise commentary on oral sources (16–17), for example, could have gone beyond the issue of reliability and corroboration by textual sources to address the interview as perhaps another social, political space for performing one's subjectivity and political claims, decades later. Additionally, what can we learn about the historian's positionality—perhaps, how it was informed by nationality, generational difference, and gendered norms—to the interviewees as these conversations took place in cities and villages in contemporary China, Taiwan, United States, and South America? Giving more voice to such analytics would have also placed Hijacked War in deeper conversation with oral historians.

These two questions, however, do nothing to detract from the remarkable scholarship presented in these two books. Kim and Chang map out for us the crisscrossing [End Page 160] of revolutionary state-building, anti-Communist state-building, and US empire in the East Asia–Pacific. As such, Kim's Interrogation Rooms will delight not only scholars of the Korean War but also scholars of US Empire, postcolonial studies, and transpacific history. Chang's Hijacked War, with its provocative thesis on Taiwan's founding story, will equally appeal to Korean War scholars as well as scholars of modern China, Taiwan, and US–East Asian relations. [End Page 161]