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The Cheju-do Rebellion JOHN MERRILL INTRODUCTION Cjheju-do is known today mostly for its booming tourism, its hardy diving women, and its lush orange groves. Located some fifty miles below the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, and about twice that from the nearest landfall in Japan, the 700-square-mile island is dominated by the extinct volcanic crater of Halla-san, at 6,000 feet the highest peak in South Korea. Cheju-do is now an easy hour's flight from Seoul. Visitors come and go, soaking up the local color and enjoying the spectacular scenery. Few of them know anything of its history, other than romantic guidebook tales of its founding in the union of three island men spewn from an underground spring and three women washed up from the sea.1 The story has a particular appeal to the many newlywed couples who have made the island the most popular honeymoon spot in South Korea. Yet discordant notes occasionally intrude: the ruins of wrecked temples on the slopes of the mountain, clusters of memorial tablets enclosed by stone walls, the foundations of an upland village now overgrown with brambles. I would like to acknowledge here the suggestions of Gregory Henderson, Vincent Brandt, and Edward Wagner on the original version of this article, written as an M.A. paper at Harvard University in 1975. 1.Fredrick H. Dustin, An Introduction to Cheju-do: Korea's Island Province (n.p., 1975), is one such account. Published with a special grant from the Asia Foundation to Cheju National University, the book makes no mention at all of the rebellion. The introduction does note, though, that "as time goes on it may be revised and somewhat expanded," perhaps in reference to this omission. 2.Yang Sang-ick, Echoes of Mt. Halla (Cheju: Cheju National University, 1977), pp. 4-5. Yang's book does have a short section on the "Guerrilla Uprising," 139 140Journal ofKorean Studies For beneath the island's natural beauty and new-found prosperity lies a tragic and bloody past. The most appalling chapter in its history occurred little more than thirty years ago. Led by Communist guerrilla bands rushing down from Halla mountain, the people of the island rose up on April 3, 1948, in opposition to elections scheduled for the southern zone. Before it was over, a year later, the rebellion had claimed tens of thousands of persons as its victims. Whole villages in the interior of the island were laid waste, their inhabitants cruelly massacred or forcibly relocated to refugee camps along the coast. Only fragmentary accounts of this slaughter ever reached the outside world. Few relief efforts were undertaken. And for years the island languished in poverty and obscurity, ignored by the Rhee government. It was only in the 1960s that it finally began to recover. Despite its importance, the Cheju-do rebellion has been little studied. No more than a few paragraphs have been published on it in English, and no definitive treatment has yet been done in any language .3 Information on the rebellion is available mostly in scattered Korean accounts and in a large number of recently declassified American archival documents.4 pp. 54-57, that seems to be reprinted from an account written at the time of the rebellion. 3.David I. Steinberg, Korea: Nexus of East Asia (New York: American-Asian Educational Exchange, 1968), p. 18. 4.Since these written sources vary greatly' in their reliability and coverage, it may be well to say a few words about them before beginning this account. There are three main sources: South Korean, Communist, and American. The South Korean materials consist of both military histories and studies of the South Korean Labor party (SKLP). While these sources provide a basic record of events, they also have many problems. The rebellion usually receives only a limited treatment, a chapter or two at most, and is generally not the main concern of these books. The military histories suffer from too narrow a focus on the personalities of successive ROK commanders and the tactics they adopted on the island. Details on the actual conduct of operations are usually lacking. Studies of the SKLP, on the...

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