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영어

This article analyzes the effects of the socialist camp’s peace discourses and peace movements on the four nations of South Korea, North Korea, China and Japan in East Asia between 1948 and 1950. From the perspective of a polar Cold War system centering around the United States and the Soviet Union, the pacifism of the socialist camp should be strongly rejected in South Korea and Japan, and seemed to be uncritically accepted in China and North Korea. But the reality was very different. The only country where such an order was projected was actually South Korea. Republic of Korea has thoroughly rejected the peace discourses of socialist camps in the process of establishing a right-wing anti-communism system. On the other hand, Japan, under the US military rule, could spread peace discourses and peace movements quite broadly, and successfully obtain the signing of 6.45 million signatures in the anti-nuclear peace signing movement in 1950. This situation was closely related to the occupation policy of the US military, which forced ‘peace’ on the Japanese people as their national policy. About the same time, the Chinese Communist Party strongly rejected the peace discourses of the socialist camp in the context of their Chinese Civil War (1946-1949). However, when the US military actively intervened the Korean War, Chinese government started to transform and spread the peace discourses centering on the ‘anti-invasion’. North Korea had also embraced the peace discourses of the socialist camp since 1948, but in the preparations for war in 1950, it pursued peace movements centered on the discourse of “unification” rather than “anti-war” or “anti-nuclear”.