Foreign Things No Longer Foreign How South Koreans Ate U.S. Food Dajeong Chung Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 @ 2015 Dajeong Chung All rights reserved CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES / ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / iii Introduction / 1 1. IMPERIAL SURPLUS: POLITICIZED GRAIN, 1945-1950 Receiving food was one thing, politics was another / 29 2. THE KOREAN WAR AND THE INVASION OF AMERICAN FOODSTUFFS, 1950-1953 Free milk stations and the diversion of foodstuffs from U.S. military provisions to the black market / 89 3. THE INVENTION OF HUMANITARIAN FOOD RELIEF, 1953-1955 UNICEF milk-feeding programs / 116 4. C.A.R.E. AND THE NEW COLD WAR POLICY, 1955-1962 When U.S. voluntary agencies donated, when the U.S. citizens donated… / 142 5. FEEDING CORRUPTION Failed Naturalization of Wheat and the April Revolution of 1960 / 182 6. FROM DEPENDENCY TO SELF-HELP: AMERICAN FOOD RELIEF TO THE KOREAN PERIPHERIES, 1962-1972 Food for development programs without technology and capital / 219 Conclusion / 259 Bibliography / 266 !i ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES FIGURES 1.1 [Hyŏngmaeng’a] in the Chayu Sinmun on December 17, 1945 / 46 1.2 Elimination of women who shame (our) nation (Kukch’irang ŭi ilso) in the Chayu Sinmun on October 23, 1945 / 47 1.3 [Chayu Manhwa] “Now, give (me) food rather than medicine” in the Chayu Sinmun on March 11, 1946 / 51 1.4 [Sisa Manhwa] “Is the fair rice price the 38th degree, or 38 wŏn?” in the Chayu Sinmun on February 23, 1946 / 52 TABLES 2.1 CRIK Civilian Relief Two Parts Programs (SFO Program and SUN Program) from 1951 to 1954 from the CRIK Reports / 93 3.1 Importation of Aid Milk (Kuho Uyu) from 1955 to 1964 from the Yearbooks of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, Republic of Korea / 130 3.2 Relief Milk Imports by Month from 1955 to 1964 from the Yearbooks of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, Republic of Korea / 131 !ii Acknowledgements I am grateful for the help given by numerous people who read and commented on my work. Charles Armstrong’s remarkable works on North Korea provided constant reference points throughout my work. As an advisor, his chill attitude has helped me stay sane and humorous throughout my graduate training at Columbia. With an advisor like him, graduate school could not have been easier. Victoria de Grazia shared her perspectives from European and North American experiences. I remember the afternoons spent in her office in Fayerweather with much fondness and appreciation. Ted Hughes bore with me through my rough ideas and drafts, and I thank him for his generosity and patience. Eugenia Lean and Jungwon Kim gave insightful comments upon reviewing my manuscript. Lastly, I thank late JaHyun Haboush, whose scholarship on premodern Korean history had led me to dabble in the field years ago. In addition, I am grateful to Jina Nam, Jon Kief, and Kyoungjin Bae for lending their eyes to read through my drafts. I thank the professional staff at the National Archives, Maryland. Going through from SCAP documents and to Food for Peace programs box after boxes, having friendly and helpful staff was of great help. I was also helped by generous help of people in Korea. I extend my thanks to the libraries and staffs of Koryŏ University, Yŏnsei University, Seoul National University, and the National Central Library in Seoul, where I was able to view extensive collection of local newspapers and magazines of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. International Center for Korean Studies at Minjok Munhwa Yŏnkuso, Koryŏ University, housed me as a visiting scholar in the summer of 2014, and this was a very !iii pleasant and productive stay. Korean National Archives was good at mailing hardcopies of the documents that I requested. I thank close friends, especially, Ksenia Chizhova with her gentle presence for many days passed and to come. Lastly, I thank my mother, father, brother and Banya the dog for their love and support throughout my years at Columbia. They were all too happy to see me finish. Dajeong Chung !iv For My Mother !v Introduction Introduction: The U.S. Empire Brings Globalization This is a story of appropriation, making unfamiliar foodstuffs familiar. The diverse pro- cesses and phases of the familiarization of foreign foodstuffs in South Korea provide insights into equally various processes and meanings of globalization at the intersection of the local and the global. For the period from 1945 to 1972, South Korea changed from receiving for- eign foodstuffs as emergency aid in the immediate postwar era, to purchasing them in the global market, and finally to achieving domestic production of the foodstuffs, now national- ized in the process of being appropriated. My work investigates multifarious processes of globalization through the foodstuffs’ distribution channels, which reflected particular politi- cal and historical situations of their times and the places. While foodstuffs as commodities retained their traceable national-geographical and political origins, the content of the mean- ings of the origins were produced by interacting with the social and cultural meanings of the commodities’ distribution and consumption on the ground in the locality. I argue that the cultural and social contexts of the distribution channels of foreign food- stuffs such as general rationing, free feeding stations, school-lunch programs and work-relief (kuho kŭllo) self-help programs, shaped the ways in which local recipients experienced the foodstuffs. The local experiences changed and newly imparted the meanings attached to the foodstuffs. Thus, the meanings associated with U.S. wheat flour and powdered milk given as foreign aid could not be separable with the historical contexts in South Korean and the mean- ing of U.S. hegemony in post-1945 Korea that instigated the supply, distribution and con- "1 Introduction sumption of the foodstuffs. Over time, the meanings attached to foodstuffs changed with the changes in distribution channels, which served varied purposes from military-administered emergency relief from 1945 to 1955, to humanitarian assistance from 1955 to 1961, and to economic development from 1961 to 1972. By the mid-1970s, the meanings of foodstuffs were overlapped with very different messages over time, and the earlier messages were not erased, but they were re-interpreted as overcoming of the past. My study of the meanings imparted by foodstuff’s distribution channels contribute to the field by establishing the period from 1945 to 1961 as a crucial period in the history of South Korea’s development. It does so by demonstrating the significance of the period from the perspectives of distribution and consumption of foreign foodstuffs. I argue that the processes of distribution and consumption prior to industrialization and mass consumer market are equally important to the story of development as the story after the instigation of industrial- ization. South Korea has long been cited as the case of successful economic development un- der American auspices. However, this story we are told about begins in 1961 with Park Chung Hee regime’s state-led industrialization, which only emphasizes export-led production (Woo 1991; Janelli 1993). In this, 1950s in the history of South Korea has largely been disre- garded as a politically corrupt and economically stagnant period ruled by an idiosyncratic and authoritarian Rhee Syngman. Recently, however, scholars such as Brazinsky and DeMoia produced much needed works that highlight the important developments of the 1950s before industrialization (Brazinsky 2007; DiMoia 2013). Brazinsky emphasizes the transfer of ideas of democracy "2 Introduction while DiMoia focuses on the transfer of the concept of hygiene and health through local edu- cation, and exchanges of experts and students. On the other hand, I approach the field differently by following the movements of food materials through multiple distribution channels. True, U.S. givers of food had the transfer of democracy and science looming at the back of their minds as the ultimate goal that Koreans should aspire to with the help of U.S. food. However, each of U.S. food programs had more immediate and concrete goals for action such as preventing starvation and social unrest by feeding (1945-1955), educating about nutritional science and hygiene (1955-1961), and pro- viding work for unskilled unemployed workers (1961-1972). By examining the contacts that new foodstuffs made with the locals in the space provided by particular distribution methods, my work reveals the ways in which the holders of ration or relief cards, and forestal and fish- ing villagers at the peripheries of the Korean peninsula interacted with the intermediaries such as foreign voluntary agencies and Korean local government officials. In doing so, I am also able to show how the local meanings of democracy, science, and economic development were produced in association with particular context of each distribution channel. By returning to 1945 and investigating the processes of familiarization of foreign food- stuffs, I maintain that South Korea’s industrialization in the late 1960s and the 1970s was not built on the ingenuity of Park Chung Hee’s regime and the voluntarist zeal of the Korean people alone, as had been the official interpretation widely espoused. I argue that South Ko- rea’s industrialization in the 1960s and the 1970s should be seen as a continuation of the de- velopments that began during the colonial period and the period from in 1945 to 1972 that "3 Introduction depended on the supply of U.S. surplus foodstuffs.1 Thus, by focusing on the period 1945 to 1972, my work provides a missing piece thus far between colonial modernity (1910-1945) and Third World Developmentalism after 1960.