Embattled Korea: The Rivalry for International Support (review)

76BOOK REVIEWS preserved and refined (p. 124), a concept not included in his comparable list of virtues to be assimilated from the West. Kim suggests that the roots of a more humane (and possibly nonviolent?) indigenous Korean morality has roots in pre-Buddhist and pre-Confucian times (pp. 120-121). Although by 1982 Kim seems not to have developed his understanding and commitment to nonviolent politics to the extent of his Catholic democratic counterpart in the Philippines, Benigno Aquino, he has clearly laid the basis for it in more than five years of prison reflections. Another reading list would be required to explore its possibilities . Some technical and editorial problems of this book need the attention of the editorial board and staff of the University of California Press. The problems begin with the dust jacket, which promises "several poems he also wrote in prison, a few letters he received from his wife, and a talk he gave in the United States after his release," none of which are included in the book. Most subsequent problems can be traced to the lack of an editor who could supplement the able translators and locate Kim and his letters in the Korean studies perspective while at the same time making them more accessible to nonspecialists. Surely a biographical essay was needed to help interpret his writings and to make him understandable both before and after the 1980-82 prison experience. The brief chronology on pp. viii-xi is inadequate. An index and a bibliography of works by and about Kim, including references to the Japanese and Korean translations of these letters, are to be expected in a scholarly publication, in order to facilitate research. Within the text there are many references to Korean historical figures, dates, and events that are unintelligible to the nonspecialist. A glossary of principal persons and concepts would greatly assist in understanding Kim's interpretations and judgments. There are also technical errors (on pages 75, 135, 140, 186, 200, 213, 224, and 272) of the kind that all authors, editors, proofreaders , and printers seek with rare success entirely to eliminate. Glenn D. Paige University of Hawaii Embattled Korea: The Rivalryfor International Support, by Ralph N. Clough. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1987. 401 pp. Of the world's three remaining divided nations, Korea may well be the most embattled. To be sure, China too has experienced a fratricidal civil war, but the level of hostility that lingers on between those two erstwhile belligerents pales before what one finds on the Korean peninsula. The two Germanys, on the other hand, have managed to keep peace throughout their separate existence, notwithstanding the infamous Berlin Wall. The frequency and magnitude of contacts between them, in fact, are the envy of the divided peoples in Asia. With recent changes in Taiwan's policy which have cleared the way for visits by the people of Taiwan to China, the anomaly of the Korean situaton becomes more apparent than ever before. BOOK REVIEWS77 The cessation of the full-scale war between the two Korean states in 1953 has banished neither the specter of renewed conflict nor the use of violence. The continuing tensions on the peninsula have spawned and are sustained by a spiraling arms race that has turned it into one of the most heavily armed areas in the world. The Korean people are paying a staggering price for all this, of which the most incalculable is the pain and agony of an estimated ten million separated family members. With the passage of thirty-five years since separation, the hopes of most of them are rapidly fading. Many of them may not live long enough to see their loved ones again. But there is another dimension to this tragedy. Ever since their formation four decades ago, the two Korean states, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the North and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South, have been locked in a fierce competition in the international arena, expending prodigious amounts of effort and resources to generate support for their respective governments at the expense of their adversaries. The patterns and outcomes of competition and conflict between the DPRK and the ROK...