When Allied victory in World War II freed the Koreans from almost 40 years of increasingly harsh control by Imperial Japan, they had anticipated finally winning the national self-determination that had been denied them after World War I through establishment of a free, independent, and united Korea. Instead, the country was sundered for the first time in a thousand years, and each of the truncated halves became in fact the ward of one of the two superpowers.
Wardship, however, is nothing new to Korea. The pattern of the "client-state" has prevailed throughout most of the peninsula's long history. China was the patron, and the relationship was specifically cast in Confucian terms of the mutual obligations of elder and younger brother. In practice, this usually meant a fairly flexible relationship and considerable autonomy for the Korean protege. Although the Korean kings received their authority at the hands of the Chinese emperor and followed his lead in foreign policy, Korea largely retained control of its internal affairs. At times, particularly early in the history of the Korean monarchy and near its end, when China was weak, efforts were made to assert full independence from foreign rule, but the most part Korea had to temper its course in deference to greater power on its frontiers.
This subservient role was forced on Korea by geography. In the history of East Asia, the Korean Peninsula has been a critical crossroads where larger and stronger powers have seesawed back and forth in centuries of struggle. The welfare and wishes of the Koreans, even after they had come to constitute a relatively sizable nation, were almost invariably ignored. The ambitions and quarrels of its larger neighbors have thus brought the unhappy peninsula more than its share of bridgeheads, battlefields, and buffer states.
Since prehistoric times nomads from Central Asia have collided with the more settled peoples on the eastern fringes of the Asian continent and invaded the Korean peninsula; some even pushed on and crossed the sea to Japan. Refugees from ancient dynastic struggles in China escaped to Korea, and were subsequently followed by invading Chinese armies. To hold the northern half of the peninsula, the Chinese planted a flourishing colony in northwestern Korea which introduced the civilization of China to the Koreans and served as a buffer against the northern barbarians from approximately 100 B.C. to A.D. 300. From then until the late 19th century, the rulers of China usually retained paramount influence in Korea without any direct presence there. Since early in the Christian era the Japanese also sought intermittently to exert control over part or all of the peninsula—on occasion as a bridgehead and base for operations against China. In the late 19th century colossal Tsarist Russia came into the contest in its search for warm-water ports in the Far East. In two short wars around the turn of the 20th century Japan defeated both China and Russia, with hapless Korea as a battleground and the eventual victim. The peninsula's pivotal position has brought little but suffering to its people, who have a proverb, "When whales fight, the shrimp suffers."
In one sense, however, geography has helped the Koreans by providing clear natural frontiers within which a remarkably homogenous population developed at an early date possessing a strong sense of separate identity. Deeply entrenched rivers and rough mountainous terrain along the peninsula's long northern base impede easy access from the Asian mainland. On the other three sides, Korea is separated from its neighbors by wide stretches of the Yellow and East China Seas and by the Sea of Japan. Except for sporadic raids from China and Japan in ancient and medieval times and a major Japanese invasion in the late 16th century, the encircling seas remained largely inviolate until the latter half of the 19th century, when French, U.S., and Japanese warships penetrated "Hermit Kingdom" waters.
Within the well-defined confines of their peninsula the ancient Koreans developed a distinct and remarkable uniformity of physique, language, and culture that clearly sets them apart from their neighbors. With few resident foreigners and no minorities, the Koreans, North and South, constitute perhaps the most homogenous of the major ethnic groups possessing independent (if divided) statehood today. Numbering almost 50 million, the Koreans are the 13th largest ethnic group in the world today. The
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