North Korean politician (1911?1967)
Pak Kum-chol
(
Korean
:
박금철
; 1911 ? May 1967) was a
North Korean
politician. Having been a guerrilla during the
anti-Japanese struggle
, he became a high-ranking politician after the
liberation of Korea
. Pak aligned himself with his former guerrilla brothers in arms from the
Kapsan Operation Committee
(
甲山工作委員會
;
甲山工作委員會
) to form a faction within the ruling
Workers' Party of Korea
(WPK) called the "Kapsan faction". This faction sought to replace
Kim Il Sung
with Pak. Kim retaliated by purging the faction in 1967 in what is known as the
Kapsan Faction Incident
. Pak was sent to work at a factory in the countryside and was either executed or died by suicide in May 1967.
Early life
[
edit
]
Pak Kum-chol was born in 1911 in
Kapsan
,
Kanky?hoku-d?
,
Korea, Empire of Japan
(now in
South Hamgyong Province
, North Korea). He participated in communist guerrilla activities in since the early 1930s. Pak encountered
Kim Il Sung
in 1936.
Pak became a founding member of the underground
Kapsan Operation Committee
,
which fought alongside Kim against the Japanese. After the
liberation of Korea
, members of the committee participated in North Korean politics as part of the
guerrilla faction
of Kim Il Sung. Political developments resulted in the Kapsan guerrillas being seen as a separate faction,
called the "Kapsan faction" after the original Kapsan committee.
Pak became the leader of this faction.
Kapsan Faction Incident
[
edit
]
The Kapsan faction sought to replace
Kim Il Sung
in a 1967 event that became known as the Kapsan Faction Incident.
[6]
Pak had risen in rank to become the
vice premier
of the state.
He was formally the fourth-highest-ranking member of the
Political Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea
(WPK), but in truth the second most influential.
Pak was annoyed by the ballooning
cult of personality of Kim Il-sung
and how it neglected the experiences of people like him who had sacrificed a lot to the country during the
liberation of Korea
.
Pak gathered many influential supporters around him, including
Yi Hyo-sun
[
ko
]
,
Kim To-man
,
Pak Yong-guk
[
zh
]
,
Ho Sok-son
[
zh
]
,
Ko Hyok
,
Ha Ang-chon
(
하앙천
;
河仰天
),
and
Rim Chun-chu
[
ko
]
.
The Kapsan faction sought to name Pak the successor of Kim Il Sung.
As an initial move, they helped Kim Il Sung purge
Kim Chang-nam
(
김창남
), a prominent political theorist, but only to make room for Pak.
The faction members started exalting Pak's words as "teachings" equal to those of Kim Il Sung.
[12]
An album from 1964 had
Pak Tal
[
ko
]
and Pak Kum-chol's photos printed next to that of Kim Il Sung. When Pak Kum-chol's wife Choe Chae-ryon died,
Kim To-man, who was the Director of the
Propaganda and Agitation Department
of the party, produced a work called
An Act of Sincerity
(
一片丹心
) ? described variously as either a film or a stage play ? that portrayed her devotion to her husband.
Kim Il Sung disapproved of it and implied that it exhibited misplaced loyalty.
Kim To-man also had Pak's birthplace rebuilt.
An
unauthorized biography
on Pak was apparently made while dissemination of propaganda materials on Kim Il Sung was neglected.
These actions were perceived of as ultimate acts of disloyalty toward Kim Il Sung.
Pak was soon condemned by
Choe Yong-gon
, chairman of the Standing Committee of the
Supreme People's Assembly
, of proliferating "feudal, Confucian ideas".
Pak was accused of not supporting the party's military line;
he openly ridiculed Kim Il Sung's slogan "one against a hundred" by concluding that a literal interpretation of it could not be true. Production plans that were his responsibility, it was said, were not met. Pak was accused of promoting the old Kapsan Operation Committee members into important posts.
At the fifteenth plenum of the fourth
Central Committee of the WPK
, on 4?8 April,
Kim had more than 100 faction members formally expelled from the party.
Pak was sent to work in a factory in the countryside and was either executed or committed suicide in May 1967.
[18]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
Works cited
[
edit
]
- Cha, John H.; Sohn, K. J. (2012).
Exit Emperor Kim Jong-Il: Notes from His Former Mentor
. Bloomington: Abbott Press.
ISBN
978-1-4582-0217-8
.
- Hamm, Taik-Young (2012).
Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital and Military Power
. London: Routledge.
ISBN
978-1-134-62066-1
.
- Hoare, James E. (2012).
"Kapsan Faction"
.
Historical Dictionary of Democratic People's Republic of Korea
. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. pp. 200?201.
ISBN
978-0-8108-7987-4
.
- Lee Jong-seok [이종석] (2001).
박금철(朴金喆)
[Pak Kum-chol].
한국민족문화대백과사전
[
Encyclopedia of Korean Culture
] (in Korean)
. Retrieved
3 October
2019
.
- Lim Jae-Cheon (2008).
Kim Jong-il's Leadership of North Korea
. New York: Routledge.
ISBN
978-1-134-01712-6
.
- Lynn, Hyung Gu (2007).
Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas since 1989
. London: Zed Books.
ISBN
978-1-84277-743-5
.
- Myers, B. R. (2015).
North Korea's Juche Myth
. Busan: Sthele Press.
ISBN
978-1-5087-9993-1
.
- Person, James F. (14 December 2013).
"The 1967 Purge of the Gapsan Faction and Establishment of the Monolithic Ideological System"
.
North Korea International Documentation Project
. Wilson Center
. Retrieved
11 October
2018
.
- Ra Jong-yil (2019).
Inside North Korea's Theocracy: The Rise and Sudden Fall of Jang Song-thaek
. Translated by Jinna Park. Albany: State University of New York Press.
ISBN
978-1-4384-7373-4
.
- "Review: A Quarterly Journal for the Study of Communism and Communist Countries [Issues 16?27]"
.
Review: A Quarterly Journal for the Study of Communism and Communist Countries
(16?27). 1968.
ISSN
0047-1747
.
- Tertitskiy, Fyodor (2017).
"1967: Transition to Absolute Autocracy in North Korea"
. In Cathcart, Adam; Winstanley-Chesters, Robert; Green, Christopher K. (eds.).
Change and Continuity in North Korean Politics
. New York: Routledge. pp. 82?94.
ISBN
978-1-138-68168-2
.