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Hwang Sok-yong (1943) is a South Korean author. In 1993, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for an unauthorised trip to North Korea to promote exchange between artists in the two Koreas. Five years later, he was released on a special pardon by the new president. The recipient of Korea’s highest literary prizes, he has been shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger and was awarded the Emile Guimet Prize for Asian Literature for his book At Dusk.

For issue #117 of The Internationalist, we publish his preface to the book Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea. In this extract, he recounts how the survivors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising took it upon themselves to document the truth of the massacre despite repression, surveillance, and imprisonment. 

When the dust finally settled on the city, the survivors of the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980 were seized by a sense of responsibility to fully record the facts of the uprising for the people of Korea and for posterity.

I was already a writer in the 1970s during the authoritarian Fourth Republic of Korea. I chose then to reside in South Jeolla Province, where Gwangju was located, for the purpose of writing and participating in democratization activism. I spent over a decade in the province, in the cities of Haenam and Gwangju, and befriended countless people. The tragedy at Gwangju transformed those relationships into a destiny to which I would always be bound. Most of those who attempted to record the events of the uprising were young intellectuals outside the established order, and in many cases they were subject to rigorous surveillance, oppression, and incarceration or became wanted criminals forced to compile their information while on the run. It was no easy task to undertake discreet journalistic research and interviews with firsthand witnesses under the oppressive authoritarian regime. But by 1985, facing the fifth anniversary of the uprising, we could no longer deny our calling. As Lee Jae-eui has stated, although only a select few may have participated in the compilation of information, the many citizens who agreed to be interviewed and gave us their testimony must be recognized. It is thanks to them that Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age may truly be called the testimony of the people.

At the request of my friends from Gwangju, I gladly accepted responsibility for the publication of a record of the uprising. Considering the political climate of South Korea at the time, the role came with the risk of imprisonment and persecution—but that, too, was part of my calling as a writer. The title of the compiled book was taken from the anguished poem by Moon Byung-ran titled “The Song of Revival.” It was an encapsulation of the modern history of Korea and its people, from Imperial Japanese occupation to democratization and the path to reunification. It was thanks to the book that the desperate final stand at the South Jeolla Province Hall was transformed into a rallying standard for the democratization movements of the 1980s and the June Struggle.

Humanity and the course of history are unique in their capacity for change. But the latter can only be changed by the actions of the former. The physical limitations of human life mean that new and old will always exist together; the world will not change for the better overnight. The era in South Korean history following the June Struggle was a time of compromise, when we failed to excise the political and cultural remnants of the authoritarian regime and were forced to guarantee freedoms even to the leaders of the old order. Though we were draped in the lavish robes of democracy, Korea remained a divided nation whose security was fundamentally compromised.

Following the elections of two successive right-wing presidents in South Korea in 2008 and 2013, right-wing groups that had supported the dictatorship immediately attempted to eliminate the democratic values of the Gwangju Uprising by resorting to the strategy that vested interests had used many times in the past—the invocation of North Korea and the clash of ideologies it would bring. Empowered by the revival of authoritarian era public security forces, they asserted that the Gwangju Uprising was a riot against the supposedly legitimate force known as the South Korean military, incited by communist special forces who had crossed the 38th parallel or by conspirators acting on orders from North Korea.

A national military is composed of the sons and daughters of the people, and their primary purpose is to protect the lives and properties of the country’s citizens. But the deployment of the Special Forces to Gwangju in 1980 was for the purpose of defending the authority of Chun Doo-hwan and his cronies, the Singunbu; in the 1990s the courts ruled it to be a coup d’état and an act of treason against the people of South Korea. By this definition, the military forces deployed during the uprising were essentially a private force with no legitimate authority. The actions of Gwangju citizens during the uprising were clearly sanctioned by the constitution, which outlines the people’s right of revolution. The people of Gwangju rose up in the name of democracy to protect their right to live and defend themselves against the indiscriminate killing of South Korean citizens. 

As firsthand accounts from Gwangju citizens and press both domestic and foreign will attest, right-wing groups’ claims of North Korean incitement are farcical. Recently declassified documents from the United States confirm that Chun and the Singunbu were fully aware that claims of North Korean involvement were fraudulent. Chun’s reassignment of regular military units from national defense to demonstrator suppression in Gwangju proves that there was no significant North Korean threat against the South at the time, as does the US’s implicit approval of Chun’s actions, which led to longstanding anti-American sentiments in South Korea. Claims of North Korean intervention were always the favored tactic of postdivision authoritarian regimes in South Korea and were attempted in Gwangju as well. Chun attempted to frame Gwangju’s citizen defenders as communists through ploys such as the so-called Poison Pin Incident, which was discovered and disclosed to the masses. The only real conspiracies involved in the uprising were the orders of Chun and the Singunbu, named Operation Loyalty. The citizens of Gwangju acted with no central authority. They simply stepped forward wherever they happened to be, helping, protecting, and fighting for those within reach, becoming comrades in arms and forming a community.

My life was never the same following the publication of Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age. I was compelled to dedicate my life to the truth of the uprising. When the book was published in 1985, Chun’s Department of National Security arrested publisher Na Byeong-sik and me for the minor crime of rumormongering as a form of harassment. Later, Na was arrested and indicted for the publication of the book Hanguk minjungsa (A people’s history of Korea). I was strongly advised by the government to accept a recent invitation to a cultural event in Berlin and handed a temporary passport. The Chun administration did not want the Gwangju Uprising to enter mainstream discourse.

For my part, the Berlin trip was my first time leaving the effective island that was South Korea, my first chance to objectively examine myself and the othered. I traveled to Europe, the Americas, and Japan to speak with foreign literary communities, civic groups, and the Korean diaspora and raised awareness about the Gwangju Uprising. In the United States, photocopied versions of the book were printed by Young Koreans United—an activist group founded by political exile Yoon Han Bong. Yang Gwan-su and fellow Koreans in Osaka translated the book into Japanese and published it under the supervision of the Japan Catholic Council for Justice and Peace. It was only after leaving South Korea that I realized that the limitations of our democracy were rooted in the precarious state of our national security.

In 1989, at the tail end of South Korea’s developmental dictatorship era, I made a highly publicized visit to North Korea alongside Reverend Moon Ik-hwan. It was a show of resistance against the South Korean government, which repeatedly attempted to suppress our democratization activities by accusing us of having connections to North Korea. Our visit was also an attempt to bring the issue of reunification into mainstream discourse among ordinary South Korean citizens. Unable to return to South Korea following the visit, I spent four years in exile and was incarcerated upon my return, spending five years in jail. In the thirteen years following 1985, I had been unable to write and was therefore more of an activist than a writer, but I console myself with the thought that my actions during the period were in and of themselves literature.

The overwhelming developmental superiority of South Korea over its twin in the north has been proven by social and economic metrics in the seventy years since the country’s division. South Korea is likely the only country liberated from colonial rule in the aftermath of World War II to have achieved the two pillars of modernization—industrialization and democracy—simultaneously. The security threat posed by North Korea is no longer sufficient excuse to put off democratic reforms. The 2008 and 2013 conservative administrations in South Korea, however, treated North Korea with open hostility and returned to Cold War–era politics, effectively handing over the reins of national security on the Korean Peninsula to foreign powers. Their actions reversed our efforts to transition into an era of peace, and instead plunged the country into the direct threat of war. This goes against the very spirit of the Gwangju Uprising, which was ultimately a struggle for democracy and a fight for a peninsula where the two Koreas could exist in peace.

In its regression into the ways of the authoritarian Fourth Republic, the 2013 Park Geun-hye administration heaped abuses on Gwangju’s history even more aggressively than her conservative predecessor Lee Myung-bak. The most glaring example was the Park administration’s attempt to cast aspersions on the song “Marching for Our Beloved,” which had been composed in remembrance of those killed in the uprising and sung as a symbol of resistance against government oppression. They accused the song of having been composed on the orders of Kim Il-sung, pointing to my 1989 trip to North Korea, on top of their ludicrous claims that Beyond Death had been copied from a North Korean book. This was, of course, impossible, because the song was composed in 1982 while my visit to North Korea was seven years later. The survivors and witnesses of Gwangju were already supported by the flood of evidence sent overseas in the immediate aftermath of the uprising by religious and secular organizations. At around the same time, articles, photographs, and video materials from foreign press also flooded into South Korea. Any hypothetical North Korean book that accusers claim served as the origin of Beyond Death would have been a copy—a copy of reality based on facts and material evidence. Shamefully, it was the South Korean press that was unable to report a single word about the truth of the Gwangju Uprising because of the Chun regime’s brutal censorship and oppression.

Talks on a revised edition of Beyond Death began in 2010, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising. But circumstances prevented us from properly pursuing the project until 2014, when Jeong Sang-yong, Jeong Yong-hwa, Lee Jae-eui, and Jeon Yong-ho came to Na Byeong-sik and me with renewed resolve. We were heartbroken when Na passed away of a chronic illness soon after the discussions, but we pressed on. While the South Korean government continued to make a mockery of the Gwangju Uprising, we grit our teeth and continued our work. It was in the midst of this process that the Candlelight Struggle for the removal of Park Geun-hye from presidential office began.

It was a season of unprecedented hope. Enkindled by the sorrows of Gwangju and the deaths of the many young souls on the Sewol Ferry, the people of South Korea displayed their potential to the fullest and changed their world. It is thanks to their efforts that this book will no longer be a record of blood and tears, but a guidepost for a society that upholds the values of justice and peace.

Excerpted with permission from Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea by Lee Jae-eui, Hwang Sok-yong and Jeon Yong-ho, published by Verso Books. 

The Internationalist Archive