People's Committee (postwar Korea)
The People's Committees (Korean: 인민위원회; Hanja: 人民委員會) were a type of largely local committee-government which appeared throughout Korea immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War.
To restore order in the power vacuum as well as to remedy historical grievances, many Korean cities and towns organized their own government counsels.
Seoul (CPKI) and Pyongyang People's Committees, for instance, had nationwide influence or formed the seed of the formation of a lasting government in the North respectively.
However, pro-US conservatives under Rhee Syngman and pro-Soviet communists under Kim Il Sung, caved into pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union respectively.
Afterwards, in North Korea, Cho was put under house arrest by Soviet authorities and opponents of the partition were removed from positions of power and replaced with pro-Soviet Koreans.
The People's Committees, once brought under heel by the Soviet occupation forces, were lumped into the state apparatus after being purged of potential reactionaries and subjected to Stalinist style one-candidate elections.
Since such taxes were one of the most hated aspects of the colonial administration, the trappings of which the PCs tried to erase, this activity on the part of the People's Committees would represent complete loss of popular control.
[citation needed] Before the appointment of Communists by the Soviet occupation, the committees, especially that of Cho's South P'yǒng'an province were mostly headed by conservative nationalists.
[citation needed] The people who created the committees didn't necessarily understand the ideology of the burgeoning Cold War.
Despite their conservative leanings, almost all People's Committees at least attempted to enact some form of land reform or redistribution to tenants or poorer peasants.
[11] The Southern Occupation Zone was initially home to perhaps the largest and most significant of the PCs, the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (Chosǒn kŏn'guk chunbi wiwǒnhoe, CPKI).
[citation needed] The People's Committees south of the 38th Parallel in 1945 found themselves abutting the fiercely anti-communist American occupation forces and the nascent Southern System.
[13] However, the People's Committees in the South were largely controlled by nationalists who were more interested in creating an independent Korea than they were in the political struggles of the emerging Cold War.
[10] In the South, the dissolution of the People's Committees was the beginning of a decades-long struggle on the part of Southern System elites to repress and discredit popular action which they viewed as being pro-communist.
[12] The suppression of the PCs therefore helped to establish a precedent of political censorship which would continue, in one form or another, in the South until the democratization movement in the 1980s.
The suppression of the PCs also kick-started the violent leftist uprising and the brutal repression which engulfed the South in the years before the Korean War.
