North Korea
Korea is a peninsular country in the northeastern corner of the Asian continent. Its territory, which is now divided into North and South Korea, occupies 220,911 square kilometers, or 84,500 square miles. Its size is comparable to the state of Minnesota in the United States, or to the combined area of England, Scotland and Wales. The present population of both North and South Korea is approximately 68 million, about 10 million less than that of Germany. With about 45 million people, South Korea ranks as the 26th most populated country in the world. Korea is bounded to the north by two giant neighbors, China and Russia, and to the east and south it faces the islands of Japan across a 120-mile strait. The United States, another Pacific power, maintains significant strategic and economic stakes in South Korea, and both North and South Korea remain a fulcrum of power politics among the great powers of the world Korea belongs to the temperate zone. Its continental climate is determined by the winds that sweep southward from Siberia and eastward from China across the Yellow Sea. There are four distinct seasons: a hot and humid summer, a very cold winter, a warm spring and a cool autumn. Nearly all of Korea is mountainous, and only a fifth of the land is arable. Its craggy but beautiful mountains, crisscrossed by rivulets, have provided native artists with an enduring source of inspiration throughout the ages.
Koreans are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the (Han) Chinese. The Korean people belong to the Tungusic branch of the Mongoloid race. Their polysyllabic, agglutinative language is a branch of the Altaic language family, which includes other tongues such as Turkish, Mongolian and Japanese. The Chinese culture has had a profound impact on Korea; Chinese elements found in today's Korean culture are a result of the Korean people's conscious and deliberate emulation of Chinese culture from mainly the second century BCE to 1895 CE. Various artifacts of Paleolithic provenance unearthed in Korea indicate that human beings inhabited the peninsula from at least 500,000 BCE. It is premature to assume that these Paleolithic inhabitants of the peninsula were the ancestors of the present-day Koreans. Most archaeologists agree, however, that the semi-nomadic people who fashioned comb-marked and plain-brown pottery under the influence of a Shamanistic culture during the Neolithic Age from about 3,000 to the eleventh century BCE, constitutes the main branch of the race identified today as Korean
From the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, Korea along with China was tyrannized and terrorized by Japanese occupation. Koreans were told they could not even speak their own language at home, women were forced into prostitution and men into slave labor (even today there are towns in northern China that are predominately Korean and a source of much tourism, especially between South Korea and China). The best know Korean guerrilla fighter against Japan's empire from the 1930s on, was Kim Il Sung. After the Japanese unconditional surrender to the Americans following the first and only use to date of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became the popular, defacto leader of North Korea with the help of Russian military support. No sooner than the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the American and Russian allies began a "proxy fight" for control of the Korean peninsula through their Korean friends in the north and south, respectively. The Russians wished to prevent an American military presence on continental Asia which could pose a future threat, so they refused to cooperate with an American-backed UN team sent to Korea to set up an election for the Korean
people to elect a government in 1948. The election was held in the south, and quickly followed by the Russians and Kim Il Sung in the north, thus creating the two governments we have to this day. To understand what happened next--the Korean War of 1950-53--and why that set the path of both North and South Korea to the present day, we must broaden the context past even China, Japan and the USA. The first half of the 20th century was racked by two world wars, both begun by Germany. Germany was the last of the great European military and economic powers to try to carve out a world empire for themselves. For centuries European technological progress, fueled by the great innovations of science and the wedding of military and industrial might, enabled their governments to expand their control over other cultures and their governments. The UK, French, and Russian empires had managed to reach a rough equilibrium with each other and lesser European colonizers such as the Dutch (the Netherlands) and the Belgians. But they had not with the Germans. Doing what came habitually to Europeans in general, the Germans twice proceeded to expand through intimidation and conquest into territories controlled by other empires. Similarly, the Japanese, adopting German constitutional structure, law, and military strategy, proceeded to do in China more forcefully what had already been started by the Europeans half a century earlier, effectively exercising suzerainty over large areas of China.
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