Soh Jaipil Lecture Series – GW Institute for Korean Studies

04/18/2024 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Sung Eun Kim

April 9, 2024April 22, 2024Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

Conscripted at “Freedom’s Frontier”:

Korean Augmentees, Racialized Masculinity, and U.S. Military Empire

Thursday, April 18, 2024

2:00 P.M – 3:30 P.M. EST

In-Person Event

Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505

1957 E ST NW, Washington DC

Event Program (PDF)

About the Event

In 2022, the Korean War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, was reopened with a new “Wall of Remembrance.” Emblazoned on the panels commemorating the war dead were over 7,000 Korean names. Hailed as a civil rights “victory” by then-President Barack Obama nearly a decade earlier, the Korean War, as enshrined in the Wall of Remembrance, now includes Korean Augmentation Troops to the U.S. Army, or KATUSAs, among America’s multiracial fallen sons. Who were these vaunted figures and what was their role at “freedom’s frontier”? As a term referring to an elite cadre of South Korean soldiers conscripted into the U.S. Army from the Korean War to the present, “KATUSA” is part of a military-imperial vocabulary in South Korea that has assigned value and status to the men who have served in this capacity. Yet what goes unseen in the celebration of KATUSAs in South Korea–and now, in U.S. official commemoration around the Korean War–is the centrality of their racialization and emasculation to the role they played under the U.S. military empire. The GW Institute for Korean Studies invites you to join us for this special lecture as Kim reconsiders the significance of “freedom’s frontier,” an epithet most commonly associated with the demilitarized zone (DMZ), by analyzing the ambivalent sovereignty of the KATUSA.

Speaker

SUNG EUN KIM is the Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). He is an interdisciplinary historian of modern Korea whose research focuses on U.S.–ROK relations, the intersections of transnational Korean militarism and U.S. imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region, and the racial and sexual politics of colonial soldiering. He earned his Ph.D. in modern Korean history from UCLA, his M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University, and his B.A. in Asian Studies and Political Science from Vassar College.

Moderator

portrait of Jisoo Kim in professional attire

JISOO M. KIM is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies (2020-Present). She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Adultery Law in Korea, 1469-2015. In 2023, she received a Distinguished Research Award from the Ministry of Education in South Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

04/04/2024 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Andre Schmid

March 27, 2024April 6, 2024Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

“North Korea’s Mundane Revolution:

Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953-1965″

Thursday, April 4, 2024

3:00 P.M – 4:30 P.M. EST

Hybrid Event

Elliott School of International Affairs, Room 505

1957 E ST NW, Washington DC

Virtual via Zoom

Event Program (PDF)

About the Event

When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in party-state projects to rebuild their lives and country after the devastation of the war. North Korea’s Mundane Revolution traces the origins of the country’s long-term durability in the questions that Korean women and men raised about the modern individual, housing, family life, and consumption. Using a wide range of overlooked sources, Andre Schmid examines the formation of a gendered socialist lifestyle in North Korea by focusing on the localized processes of socioeconomic and cultural change. This style of “New Living” replaced radical definitions of gender and class revolution with the politics of individual self-reform and cultural elevation, leading to a depoliticization of the country’s political culture in the very years that Kim Il Sung rose to power. The GW Institute for Korean Studies invites you to join us for this special lecture which will highlight aspects of North Korea’s origins that are often overlooked in history.

Speaker

ANDRE SCHMID has taught Korean and East Asian History at the University of Toronto for over 25 years. He is the author of Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 and, most recently, North Korea’s Mundane Revolution. Professor Schmid’s research and teaching focus on 19^th and 20^th century Korea and East Asia, as seen in the broader context of global, comparative history. He is interested in historiography and the uses of public memory, the relation between cultural practices and political economy, gendered social history and popular social movements. His book, Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 (Columbia University Press, 2002), received the John Whitney Hall Award of the Association of Asian Studies. He has published in various journals including the Journal of Asian Studies, American Historical Review, Yoksa Munje, South Atlantic Quarterly, International Journal of Korean Studies, and SAI among others. He has also served two terms as the Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.

Moderator

04/19/23 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Sandra Park

March 29, 2023April 27, 2023Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

Anointed Citizenship: Christianity and Border Crossers in Wartime South Korea

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EDT

Hybrid Event

In Person, Room 505, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University

Virtual via Zoom

Download Program (PDF)

Event Description

Who can become a good citizen? Why and how does religion determine the answer? These questions emerged with violent urgency in wartime South Korea at the height of American military and moral power on the peninsula. During the Korean War (1950–53), the moral politics of Christianity scripted an enduring pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers during their flight or defection to US-led “Free” South Korea. In this lecture, Park presents two wartime narratives of Christian border crossing from her book project: deliverance (refugees) and conversion (prisoners of war). She pivots from churches and revival tents to roadblocks and barbed wire guarded by the US military to show the intersection of war, religion, and empire, as the global Cold War engendered violent conditions of inclusion and exclusion across East Asia and beyond. By reexamining the “success” of Christianity in (South) Korea as a wartime story, Park’s research contributes to larger discussions of the role religion plays in the formation of modern nation-states and empires.

Speaker

Sandra Park is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). She is a historian of modern Korea, the US empire, and the global Cold War. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anointed Citizenship: The Politics of Christian Border Crossing in Cold War Korea. Drawing on extensive archival research across government, military, and missionary archives, her book project examines the coherence of Christian moral politics as a pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers petitioning for citizenship in “Free” South Korea under the US military empire. Her project traces the cross-border movements of Christians and transpacific circulations of Christian political claims during and immediately after the Korean War, contributing to existing literatures on North Korean migrants and citizenship, religion and the global Cold War, and US-Korean relations in the twentieth century.

Moderator

portrait of Gregg Brazinsky in professional attire

Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs and Deputy Director of GW Institute for Korean Studies. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multi-faceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester.

03/27/23 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Se-Mi Oh

March 16, 2023March 29, 2023Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism

Monday, March 27, 2023

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT

Hybrid Event

In Person, George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

And Virtual via Zoom

Download Program (PDF)

Event Description

Presenting from her forthcoming book, City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism, Dr. Oh will discuss how to read space and spatial practices as a writing of history. Focusing on Seoul of the 1920s under Japanese colonialism, this talk will demonstrate how the urban space became a site of discursive production for Japanese colonialism and how architecture brought about a new mode of visual experience through which a new notion of history and time was articulated. Because monumental architecture was built on top of the existing matrix of the former capital and Seoul was transformed into a living depository of heterogeneous discursive sediments, this presentation will excavate these sediments as a method of history writing and explore the material and immaterial layers of urbanity to reveal how colonial subjects engaged with, and frequently undermined, the visual regime of Japanese colonialism.

Speaker

Se-Mi Oh is Assistant Professor of Modern Korean History in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the architectural and urban practices of Seoul and explores the relationship between space and history writing. She is the author of City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), which examines the relationship between language, text, and media to trace the discursive formation of modernity and colonialism in the urban space of Seoul in the 1920s.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

10/05/2022 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Gi-Wook Shin

September 17, 2022November 2, 2022Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

From Anti-Japan to Anti-China: South Korean’s Changing Public Sentiments and Implications for the US-ROK Alliance

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT

Hybrid Event

In Person, George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

And Virtual via Zoom

Download Program (PDF)

Event Description

From resentment towards economic retaliation over THAAD deployment to culture wars over hanbok and kimchi, South Korean public sentiment towards China has drastically deteriorated over the past few years, becoming even worse than sentiment toward Japan. In this talk, Professor Gi-Wook Shin will illuminate factors that contribute to Koreans’ negative views of China, in comparison to Koreans’ historically negative sentiments of Japan and anti-American sentiments of past decades. He will discuss how these anti-China sentiments may play out in the Yoon Suk-Yeol administration’s policy towards China, as well as potential implications for the U.S.-ROK alliance.

Speaker

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in Sociology and a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He has been serving as the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center since 2005, as well as the founding director of the Korea Program since 2001. His research concentrates on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations, with focus on Korea and broader Asia. Shin is the author/editor of over twenty books and numerous articles, including South Korea’s Democracy in Crisis: The Threats of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization; The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security; Shifting Gears in Innovation Policy from Asia; Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War; One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era; Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia; and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea.

Moderator

event banner for Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Benjamin Young

5/4/2022 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Benjamin Young

April 20, 2022May 16, 2022Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

The Revolutionary People of Mount Baekdu: North Korea, Third World Liberation, and the Exportation of Mountain Insurgency

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT

Linder Family Commons, Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E ST NW Room 602

AND Virtual via Zoom

NOTE: All non-GW affiliated attendees attending the event IN-PERSON must comply with GW’s COVID-19 policy in order to attend this event, including showing proof of vaccination and masking indoors. For frequently asked questions, please refer to GW’s guidance.

See the Event Program

This talk examines the ways in which the North Korean regime exported its own theory of insurgency to the Third World during the Cold War era and used mountains as the primary source of inspiration and revolutionary struggle. Unlike the rural-oriented Maoists in China or the urban-focused Soviet Union, North Korea perceived its revolution to be mountain-based and derived the Kim family’s legitimacy from their historical closeness to Mount Baekdu, a sacred mountain to all Korean people.

This event is on the record and open to the public.

Speaker

Benjamin Young is an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. He is the author of Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World (Stanford University Press, 2021). He received his Ph.D. in history from The George Washington University in 2018. He has previously taught at the U.S Naval War College and Dakota State University. He has published peer-reviewed articles on North Korean history and politics in a number of scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to NKNews.org.

Moderator

Gregg A. Brazinsky is Professor of History and International Affairs, Deputy Director of the Institute for Korean Studies, and Interim Director for the Sigur Center at GW. He also serves as Director of the Asian Studies Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs. His research seeks to understand the diverse and multifaceted interactions among East Asian states and between Asia and the United States. He is the author of Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). He served as Interim Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies during the Spring 2017 semester. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University.

3/31/2022 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series with Darcie Draudt

March 2, 2022April 8, 2022Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

Making Migrants: Policy Community Dynamics in Immigration and Citizenship in South Korea

Thursday, March 31, 2022
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM EDT

Hybrid Event

Lindner Family Commons (Room 602)

Elliott School of International Affairs,

1957 E Street Northwest

Washington, DC 20052

**THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT. IN-PERSON TICKETS ARE RESERVED FOR GW STUDENTS, FACULTY, AND STAFF. For outside affiliations, there will be tickets available to attend virtually via Zoom.**

Event Program (PDF)

About the Event

In the early 2000s demographic decline pushed the South Korean national government to abandon its ethnonational citizenship policies and implement some of the most progressive immigration policies in East Asia. Yet closer scrutiny of the policies reveals differences in the rights, privileges, and duties extended to immigrants according to newly created migrant categories. In this lecture, Draudt draws two cases from her book project and compares the policymaking dynamics that produced two forms of “kinship migration” policies: diaspora return migrants and marriage migrants. Draudt shows how meso-level interactions among state and social actors categorize citizens and non-citizens according to extant membership frames—the laws, ideas, and institutions that historically situate a citizen within the nation. Based on original research from archival research, interviews, and immersive fieldwork in South Korea from 2017 to 2019, the research contributes to broader discussions of how policy community dynamics expand the rights and social benefits for some migrants and citizens while simultaneously excluding or restricting others.

Speaker

portrait of Darcie Draudt in professional attire posing with arms crossed

Darcie Draudt is a Postdoctoral Fellow for the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) and a Nonresident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. A political scientist and foreign policy analyst, Dr. Draudt publishes broadly on South and North Korean domestic politics and foreign policy, inter-Korean relations, and US-Korea policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in Korean Studies from the Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, and a B.A. with Honors in Anthropology from Davidson College. In 2021, Dr. Draudt was named one of the Next Generation Korea Peninsula Specialists at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. She previously was a visiting scholar at the Yonsei University Department of Political Science and a Korea Foundation dissertation fieldwork fellow. She was also a research associate for Korea Studies and the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonresident James A. Kelly Korean Studies fellow at Pacific Forum, and a field researcher for the International Organization for Migration Research and Training Center in South Korea.

Moderator

portrait of Celeste Arrington posing with arms crossed in black outfit

Celeste Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She specializes in comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. Her research and teaching focus on law and social movements, the media, lawyers, policy processes, historical justice, North Korean human rights, and qualitative methods. She is also interested in the international relations and security of Northeast Asia and transnational activism. She is the author of Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (2016) and has published in Comparative Political Studies, Law & Society Review, Journal of East Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and the Washington Post, among others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University. She is currently writing a book that analyzes the role of lawyers and legal activism in Japanese and Korean policies related to persons with disabilities and tobacco control.

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10/27/2021 | Soh Jaipil Lecture Series: Seeds of Control with David Fedman

October 19, 2021November 22, 2021Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

“Seeds of Control: Toward a Timberline View of Japanese Colonial Rule in Korea”

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM EDT

Zoom Event

See Event Program (PDF)

This talk will introduce the core arguments and interventions that animate Seeds of Control, one of the first English-language studies of the environmental impacts and legacies of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. By outlining some of the central themes of the book, the author hopes to stimulate a broader conversation about green governmentality and colonial power, as well as the growth of Korean environmental history as a field.

Registered guests will receive a following confirmation email with details for joining the Zoom event.

This event is on the record and open to the public.

Speaker

portrait of David Fedman in striped shirt

David Fedman is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea (University of Washington Press, 2020), which received the AHA Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and co-editor of Forces of Nature: New Approaches to Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2022). His other publications include The Ondol Problem and the Politics of Forest Conservation in Colonial Korea (Journal of Korean Studies, Vol. 23, 2018), an energy history of Japanese settler colonialism in Korea.

Moderator

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

09/27/2021 | Premodern Korea Lecture Series with Michael Pettid

August 31, 2021May 16, 2022Archived Events, Premodern Korea Lecture Series, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

“One Woman’s Take on Life in Chosŏn Korea”

Monday, September 27, 2021

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EDT

Zoom Event

The Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ [The Encyclopedia of Daily Life] was compiled by Lady Yi Pinhŏgak (1759-1824) in the early years of the nineteenth century. The work was meant to be a guide to knowledge that womenfolk needed to properly manage a household and was passed on to her daughters and daughters-in-law. This translation covers two of the five volumes of the work that cover food and drink, and prenatal care, medicine, and first aid. The work gives great insight into what upper status women held to be important during this period and how they sought to achieve their goals. Lady Yi used various sources for her work including those written in Literary Chinese, Korean, and also oral knowledge that must have circulated widely at the time. The result is a work unlike any other that gives readers a small glimpse into the lives of upper status women during this time.

Michael J. Pettid is a Professor of Korean Studies at Binghamton University where he has taught since 2003. Prior to that, he received his doctorate from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and taught in Korea at the Academy of Korean Studies and Ewha Women’s University. The focus of his research and teaching is premodern Korea’s history, literature, religion, and culture. His most recent books are the co-edited volumes of Premodern Korean Literary Prose (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: Critical Aspects of Death from Ancient to Contemporary Times (University of Hawaii Press, 2014); he also has monographs of Unyŏng-on: A Love Affair at the Royal Palace of Chosŏn Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley), and Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History (Reaktion Books, 2008) among numerous other publications. His most recent publication is a co-authored an annotated translation of a nineteenth century guidebook for women, the Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ [The Encyclopedia of Daily Life] (University of Hawaii Press, 2021).

The Lowest Ebb: China’s Policy toward North Korea during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969

July 23, 2021July 29, 2021Archived Events, Soh Jaipil Lecture SeriesLeave a Comment

GW Institute for Korean Studies presents

“The Lowest Ebb: China’s Policy toward North Korea during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1969”

featuring

Yafeng Xia

Professor of history at Long Island University, New York

Yafeng Xia is professor of history at Long Island University in New York and senior research fellow at Research Institute for Asian Neighborhood, East China Normal University in Shanghai. A formal research fellow and Public Policy fellow/scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, he is the author of Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949‒1972 (2006), coauthor of Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945‒1959: A New History, with Zhihua Shen (2015), and Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959‒1973: A New History, with Danhui Li (2017), as well as many articles on Cold War history. He has coauthored a new book, entitled, “A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung and the Myth of Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976,” which is under review for publication.

Friday, March 31st, 2017

4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Marvin Center Room 302

The George Washington University

800 21st St NW, Washington, DC 20052

Read more about the event.

China’s relations with North Korea, especially during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1969, have received relatively little scholarly attention. Making use of newly acquired Chinese and Russian sources, Eastern European Communist‒era documents, and CIA analytical reports, I argue that China’s relationship with North Korea had worsened substantially during the eighteen months prior to the May 1966 beginning of the Cultural Revolution. By that time China had already believed that the Korean Workers’ Party was carrying out a “revisionist” policy. I contend that the main reasons for the deterioration in Sino–North Korean relations were China’s radical and uncompromising foreign and domestic policies. However, it is important to distinguish the verbal attacks by the Red Guards on North Korean leaders from the position of the Chinese government. A review of North Korea’s relations with Beijing and Moscow between 1966 and 1969 reveals that Pyongyang did not have as much leverage over its two Communist allies as has generally been believed. Instead, Pyongyang was mainly reacting to policy changes in Beijing and Moscow, and it thereby adjusted its policies in order to better protect its own national security and interests.