A Fractured Liberation revises the political history of the U.S. occupation in South Korea (1945–1948) by foregrounding the voices of American political advisers and their tensions with the occupation commander, John R. Hodge. Kornel Chang investigates the profiles of these advisers, dispatched from the State Department, and identifies them as “liberal reformists,” including New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists (p. 8). These liberal reformers included Stewart Meacham, the labor adviser; Richard D. Robinson, chief of the public opinion section in the military government’s Department of Information; Roger Nash Baldwin, a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union and SCAP legal adviser; Arthur C. Bunce, an agrarian reformer and the senior economic adviser; Leonard Bertsch, a political adviser to Hodge; and Charles Pergler and Ernst Fraenkel, legal advisors to the committee responsible for drafting the South Korean constitution. Drawing on their reports and policy proposals, Chang argues that the U.S. occupation in Korea was more flexible and reform-minded, rather than being persistently driven by anti-communism and the imperative to contain Soviet influence.
According to Chang, these advisers criticized Korea’s repressive conditions and proposed reform initiatives in land redistribution, labor relations, and police reorganization. Some even described the Korean People’s Republic, led by Korean leftists, in positive terms (pp. 68 and 70). Although Hodge initially resisted these proposals from a conservative stance, he changed his tune following State Department instructions after the Moscow Conference in December 1945 and promoted a political coalition between moderate Korean leftists and rightists in preparation for the U.S.–USSR Joint Commission. Hodge selected Yŏ Un-hyŏng, a moderate leftist, and Kim Kyu-sik, a moderate rightist, as coalition leaders, while sidelining uncompromising nationalists like Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku.
Although Korean-language scholarship has addressed this left-right coalition, A Fractured Liberation offers a more streamlined account of the U.S. decisions behind its formation and the subsequent transfer of the Korean question to the United Nations. Chang clarifies the chronology of U.S. occupation politics by noting the State Department’s mid-1946 instruction for the coalition among Korean leaders. He also details the efforts of Hodge and his political adviser Bertsch in facilitating the coalition and their negative assessments of Korean political leaders such as Rhee and Kim Ku. The coalition ultimately collapsed—first with the assassination of Yŏ Un-hyŏng in July 1947, and finally with the failure of the U.S.–USSR Joint Commission in October 1947 to reach an agreement on building a unified, independent Korean government.
Chang argues that, after these failures, U.S. policymakers sought an exit strategy that would allow them to retain American influence in South Korea “without the liabilities of a military occupation” (p. 10). The liberal advisers to the occupation eventually endorsed Rhee’s plan for a separate South Korean government. The U.S. government transferred the Korean issue to the United Nations, which then supervised general elections in the South. North Korea boycotted the elections under the UN supervision, resulting in the establishment of a separate regime in the South. Paradoxically, Chang argues, it was only after committing to this path of division that the U.S. occupation began implementing reformist policies—such as land redistribution, labor protections, and democratization—to lend legitimacy to the upcoming elections. At this stage, he writes, “reformers worked toward both progressive and separatist objectives” (pp. 10 and 198).
Chang’s findings subtly revise the dominant narrative of the U.S. occupation in Korea, as most notably presented in Bruce Cumings’s two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1980 and 1991). That account emphasizes how the U.S. occupation was driven from the outset by the Cold War mindsets of the U.S. commanders and the nationalist interests of the United States. The U.S. occupation suppressed revolutionary Korean movements and dismantled the Korean People’s Republic under the leftist leadership, instead allying with conservative elites, including the Korean Democratic Party and Syngman Rhee. The occupation also restored colonial institutions, including the police, by recruiting pro-Japanese collaborators. A Fractured Liberation, in contrast, presents a more contingent and fluid picture, contending that the occupation remained open to coalition-building with moderate leftists and to negotiation with Soviet leaders until mid- to late-1947.
Despite this contribution, Chang does not explore the full implications of his findings or extend his archival research to challenge the revisionist account of the U.S. occupation in Korea. Several questions arise with respect to Chang’s narrative and to his use of sources. Throughout the book, Chang overemphasizes selected reports from liberal American advisers and privileges their critiques without sufficiently contextualizing them against other historical records, including Korean records, U.S. military intelligence reports, or field documents from local U.S. troops that the commanders such as Hodge had regular access to. For instance, on the Korean uprisings in October 1946, Chang cites Richard Robinson’s report stating that Hodge’s “charge that North Korean agitators engineered the whole thing seemed to be unfounded” (p. 129). Robinson’s comments should not be overestimated because there are other communist reports, court records, and the communist leader Pak Hǒn-yǒng’s own writing about the Communist Party’s involvement in the uprising and its decision to use violence for a “defensive objective.” In his assessment of critical Korean events and Korean leaders, Chang does not sufficiently acknowledge that both the liberal advisers and the occupation commanders shared certain prejudices about Koreans, often characterizing them through the lens of American visions and goals. American reports on Korean leaders or groups are largely overshadowed by U.S. criteria for determining whether those leaders aligned with the occupation’s goals, including those linked to the political coalition. Given his focus on American advisers and U.S. decision-making, Chang tends to replicate the judgments of the Americans—especially the liberal advisers—which makes it difficult for readers to fully grasp the political complexity of Korea during this period.
Finally, A Fractured Liberation rests on an unproven assumption that most Koreans favored a “social democratic” reformist path distinct from North Korean–style revolution (p. 48). Based on such an assumption about Koreans’ grassroots orientation and his analysis of liberal American reformers and the flexibility they introduced into the U.S. occupation, Chang asks what course the Americans did not take and how they ended up supporting an authoritarian regime led by Syngman Rhee. In exploring these important questions, Chang’s approach is modest rather than bold. To explore Koreans’ attitudes and sentiments, Chang turns to works of fiction, a small number of oral histories, and secondary literature, rather than substantiating his claim with Korean-language archival sources. While literary accounts can add nuance and human detail, using them to assess the political consciousness of workers and peasants (e.g., pp. 32, 42, 113) risks conflating fictional representations with historical evidence. The idea that most Koreans supported social democratic reform remains speculative in A Fractured Liberation. In exploring the reasons for the path not taken, Chang focuses primarily on John Hodge’s decisions—asking, for example, what might have happened if Hodge had chosen to work with the people’s committees or had removed the police chiefs Cho Pyŏng-ok and Chang T’aek-sang in response to the coalition leaders’ demands for police reform (pp. 214–215). In this historical speculation, Chang treats the Soviet occupation largely as background and does not seriously engage with Korean concerns about Soviet policies.
In sum, although Chang presents important documents and offers fresh reinterpretations of U.S. policy during the occupation, his reliance on selective liberal voices and revisionist frameworks limits the scope of his contribution. Rather than fundamentally challenging the dominant framework, A Fractured Liberation offers a nuanced but modest revision of the established historiography.
