Kapsan faction incident

The Kapsan faction incident (Korean: 갑산파 사건) was an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the power of Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, around the year 1967.

The "Kapsan faction" was a group of veterans of the anti-Japanese struggle of the 1930s and 1940s that was initially close to Kim Il Sung.

In the wake of the 2nd Conference of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in 1966, the faction sought to introduce economic reforms, challenge Kim Il-sung's cult of personality, and appoint its ringleader Pak Kum-chol as his successor.

[9] In particular, they favored light over heavy industry in order to funnel funds away from the military and improve people's standard of living.

[8] He was criticized for this by the leader of the Kapsan faction, Pak Kum-chol,[12] who had risen in rank to become the vice premier of the state and the fourth-highest-ranking member of the party.

[13] Pak was annoyed by the ballooning cult of personality of Kim Il-sung and how it neglected the experiences of people like him who had sacrificed a lot to the country during the liberation.

When Pak Kum-chol's wife Choe Chae-ryon died,[18] Kim To-man, who was the Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) of the party, produced a work called An Act of Sincerity – described variously as either a film or a stage play – that portrayed her devotion to her husband.

[14] An unauthorized biography on Pak was apparently made while dissemination of propaganda materials on Kim Il Sung was neglected.

[14] Pak was soon condemned by Choe Yong-gon, chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA), of proliferating "feudal, Confucian ideas".

[15] Pak was accused of not supporting the party's military line;[20] he openly ridiculed Kim Il Sung's slogan "one against a hundred" by concluding that a literal interpretation of it could not be true.

[16] Kim Il Sung perceived the Kapsan faction's ideas and actions as existential threats to his rule and the state.

[24] At the fifteenth plenum of the fourth Central Committee of the WPK, on 4–8 April,[25] Kim had more than 100 faction members formally expelled from the party.

The speech, possibly the most important one he ever gave,[28] became known as the "May 25 Teaching" and would become a political tool for Kim's supporters to expose factional elements in the party.

[29] So profound was its impact that Song Hye-rang, Kim Jong Il's sister-in-law, characterized 25 May as "the day everything changed" in North Korea.

This ideological venom was left unattended for several years and thus the struggle to cleanse it off will also take a long time and must be conducted steadily and vigorously.

The Great Leader instructed all the cadres and the Party members to learn well about the nature and the harmful consequences of the bourgeois and revisionist elements' criminal activity and their cunning tricks, and to fully understand the necessity, nature, assignments and methods of implementation of the monolithic ideological system of the Party.Tertitskiy dates the selection of Kim Jong Il as the successor on the date of the speech.

He possibly gave another one on 25 May – entitled "Let Us Firmly Establish the Monolithic Ideological System of the Party among the Officials Dealing with Foreign Affairs" (외교일군들속에서 당의 유일사상체계를 굳건히 세우자) – that closely echoed his father's 25 May Teaching.

[34] Six months after the purge, at an unscheduled meeting of the party, Kim Il Sung called for loyalty in the film industry that had betrayed him with An Act of Sincerity.

[11] Kim called a month-long conference of filmmakers to re-orient the country's film industry by cleansing it from the "poison" of the Kapsan faction.

[14] Kim Il Sung announced the principles to the public in a speech held at the SPA on 16 December 1967 entitled "Let Us Embody the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence, Self-Sustenance, and Self-Defense More Thoroughly in all Branches of State Activity" (국가활동의 모든 부문에서 자주, 자립, 자위의 혁명정신을 더욱 철저히 구현하자).

[11] Kim's 25 May speech had the effect of establishing his own theoretical position distinct from that of China or the Soviet Union, granting him political independence from the two socialist great powers.

[21] For instance, Kim Jong Il had the conspirators' war memoirs removed from a popular collection called Reminiscences of the Anti-Japanese Guerillas.

Stephan Haggard concludes that while "Kim Jong Un's byungjin line is not exactly Kim Il Sung's and Jang Song Thaek is not the Kapsan faction ... the underlying dynamics do look somewhat similar: challenges to the leaderist system are met not only with purges but with important ideological justifications for unity and obedience.