Kim Ku

Kim Ku: The Ordinary Man Who Would Not Yield

At an inn at Ch'ihap'o in February 1896, a young traveller noticed that a fellow guest claiming to be from Changyon spoke with a Seoul accent and carried a concealed sword. Convinced the man was Japanese and connected to the murder of Queen Myeongseong the previous autumn, he knocked him down, took the sword and killed him with it. Then he posted a signed proclamation announcing what he had done, and waited. He was twenty, and had just begun a life that would end with bullets fired by another Korean.

A Peasant's Son and the Inn at Ch'ihap'o

Kim Ku was born Kim Ch'angam on 29 August 1876 in T'otkol village near Haeju, in Hwanghae Province. His parents were poor farmers; his father's Andong Kim line had lost its yangban status in 1651, and schools refused the boy on grounds of class until a tutor took him at twelve. Smallpox at two left his face scarred. At sixteen he sat the gwageo civil service examination, failed, and came away convinced the apparatus was rotten with bribery. In January 1893 he joined the Donghak movement, and within a year was a district leader commanding some seven hundred men against government and Japanese troops.

For the killing at Ch'ihap'o he was arrested, tortured at Haeju, and moved to Incheon. Japanese officials pressed for beheading; local merchants petitioned for mercy; King Gojong refused to approve the death sentence in October 1896. In jail Kim read translated Western histories and abandoned his isolationism outright. He escaped in March 1898 and walked more than five hundred miles.

The Name He Chose

He spent a season as a Buddhist monk called Wŏnjong at Magoksa, disliked it, slipped away, buried his father, and became a Protestant Christian, baptised in 1903. He married Ch'oe Chunrye in 1904, taught mathematics, ran schools, and joined the New People's Association in 1907. In January 1911, after the colonial state alleged a plot to kill Governor-General Terauchi, he was swept up in the 105-Man Incident and sentenced to fifteen years. Seodaemun Prison permanently disfigured his left ear and drove him to attempt suicide.

It also gave him his name. In 1912 he took the name Kim Ku — "nine" — chosen for its plainness, and the art name Baekbeom, ordinary person, because he had decided the most ordinary Korean alive could and must fight for independence. Imperial amnesties cut his sentence twice and he was paroled in 1915 at thirty-nine.

Shanghai

After the March First Movement of 1919 was crushed, Kim left for Shanghai in April and did not leave the city for thirteen years. He joined the Korean Provisional Government as police commissioner, became chief of staff, and cycled through offices — acting prime minister, internal affairs, labour — in a body that moved constantly between the French, British and Kuomintang concessions to stay ahead of Japanese agents, financed largely by some seven thousand Korean-Americans. After Syngman Rhee's impeachment in 1925 it churned through seven heads of state in twenty months. Kim held the office from December 1926 to August 1927, then restructured it into a council chairmanship in which he was first among equals.

The cost was private. His wife died in January 1924 and he could not visit the hospital because he was wanted; he put his infant son in an orphanage. When a comrade sold his own clothes to buy him a birthday present in 1925, Kim, remembering that he had been too poor to mark his mother's sixtieth, resolved never to celebrate a birthday again.

Two Bombs and a Bounty

In 1931 he founded the Korean Patriotic Organization, dedicated to killing Japanese imperial and colonial officials, and gave it roughly half the government's budget. On 8 January 1932 Lee Bong-chang threw a grenade at Emperor Hirohito's carriage in Tokyo and missed. On 29 April Yun Bong-gil detonated a bomb in Shanghai's Hongkou Park, killing several senior Japanese figures including General Yoshinori Shirakawa. Kim publicly claimed sole responsibility, hoping to spare other Koreans reprisal. Japan put bounties totalling 60,000 dayang on him.

There followed years of flight. An American missionary, George Ashmore Fitch, hid him for thirty-one days; when police closed in Kim escaped disguised as half of an American couple with Fitch's wife. He lived in Jiaxing under a false Cantonese identity, in a house fitted with hidden doors and an underground boat dock. The bombs also bought the one thing the movement lacked: a patron. Around September 1932 he met Chiang Kai-shek and offered, for a million yuan, to create two years of chaos across Japan, Korea and Manchuria. Chiang replied that assassination had limits — personnel could be replaced. They settled on 5,000 yuan a month, protection, forty horses, and a place at the Luoyang military academy, where Kim trained ninety-two Korean cadets from 1934.

Chongqing and the Liberation Army

The movement's chronic disease was factionalism, and it nearly killed him. At a dinner in Changsha on 7 May 1938 a disaffected Korean named Yi Unhwan fired four shots; one man died and Kim took a bullet in the left chest that stayed there for life. His mother's verdict was characteristic: being shot by a Korean and living, she said, was worse than being shot by a Japanese and dying.

He rebuilt in Chongqing under bombardment, in offices destroyed four times, in a damp unplumbed room the government occupied for four years, where between seventy and eighty Koreans died of pneumonia, among them his eldest son. On 17 September 1940 he announced the founding of the Korean Liberation Army at a hotel ceremony held at six in the morning to avoid air raids, foreign diplomats present; that autumn he became Chairperson of the State Affairs Commission, with veto power and command of the army. The Kuomintang withheld recognition until May 1941 and money longer; Washington ignored his letters to Roosevelt. When the Cairo Declaration of 1943 promised Korea independence "in due course," Kim read the phrase as trusteeship and told the Associated Press that if Korea were not free the moment Japan surrendered, "we will continue our historic war for independence, regardless of who our opponent is."

Why Kim Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on strategic imagination and endurance, not on scholarship — he failed the civil service exam and never held a university post. What he grasped, earlier than his rivals, was that a stateless movement with no army and almost no money could still buy leverage with a very small number of precisely aimed acts. The Hongkou bombing of April 1932 did what a decade of memoranda had not: it made Chiang Kai-shek willing to fund, hide and train Koreans, converting the Provisional Government from a debating society in exile into a client with a payroll. His restructuring of the presidency into a council chairmanship in 1927 was a similarly cool piece of institutional engineering, ending two years of collapse. And in choosing the names Ku and Baekbeom — nine, and ordinary person — he performed an act of political imagination that outlived him: he made the independence struggle the property of anyone.

The counter-case was written down at the time. A Kuomintang assessment weighing him against his rival Kim Won-bong found Kim Ku possessed of "strong morals," hardworking and well-regarded, but judged that he "lacks in ingenuity." He never unified the movement; talks collapsed repeatedly and a fellow Korean shot him. He also ran a campaign of killings whose victims included Korean collaborators. And his last political bet — the 1948 journey to Pyongyang to talk Kim Il Sung out of partition — failed completely.

Legacy

Kim returned to Korea in late 1945 as head of the provisional government, opposed trusteeship and separate elections, and lost both the argument and the presidency to Syngman Rhee. On 26 June 1949 an army officer named Ahn Doo-hee shot him dead at Gyeonggyojang in Seoul. He was seventy-two. He lies at Hyochang Park, and is honoured today as one of the greatest figures in Korean history — a reputation his anti-communism has kept unwelcome in the North.