Minwoo Kong
Minwoo Kong (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Columbia, whose research focuses on the history of political economy, labor, business, and economic discourse in the 20th century United States. He is primarily interested in reinterpreting the transformation of American capitalism from the 1970s to the 1990s, from global and transnational perspectives. In particular, his research examines the way labor, business, and policymakers sought to recast the U.S. industrial order in its relationship with the emerging realities of global interdependence and the "post-Fordist" alternatives of Japan and FRG. He is also interested in the American state, Cold War, imperialism and World-systems, developmental state, and computerization.
Prior to pursuing doctoral studies at Columbia, Minwoo completed a MA in Western History and a BA in Western History (double major in sociology) at Seoul National University in South Korea. His Master's thesis was a reinterpretation of the financialization of U.S. pension funds in the early 1970s, viewing it as a part of an industrial program that traded economic security for the securities market. His writing has been published in the Korean Journal of Western History, Gwanak Historical Studies, and Korean Journal of Local History and Culture. Besides, he is a cinephile, critic, hiker, and singer.
Columbia University
Session
This paper examines the unfolding of US Community Development Program in South Korea as a transnational struggle between American agrarian communitarianism and Korean grassroots developmentalism. Initiated in 1956 by the US aid officials, the program sought less to promote state-led industrialization than to foster community-based democracy. The officials’ mantra was what US historians have termed communitarianism, or “low-modern” development—an alternative vision of modernity grounded in communal democracy and agrarian economy rather than the “high-modern” developmentalism associated with modernization theory. Accordingly, the program funded the construction of rural town halls, promoted democratic ethics among Korean peasants, and introduced agricultural techniques suited to non-mechanized farming. Through communal cooperation—celebrated by communitarians as the “trunk of democracy”—peasants were expected to build democracy from below.
Previous historiography has interpreted the program dichotomously, either as an instrument of Cold War psychological warfare in the Asian countryside or as a lost opportunity for egalitarian and bottom-up development. Both perspectives, preoccupied with Cold War geopolitics or teleology of democratization, overlook the transnational interactions between American aid officials and Korean peasantry. Drawing upon the US National Archives records alongside Korean public debates published in contemporary periodicals, this paper reconceptualizes the program’s rise and decline as an episode of developmental politics in a postcolonial context. It argues that the initiative was a contentious encounter between American reformers seeking to transplant their lofty ideal and Korean elites and peasants who prioritized material advancement. Contrary to American communitarians’ orientalist assumptions that romanticized underdeveloped Asia as an “untarnished” site for agrarian democratic experimentation, Korean peasants increasingly questioned low-modern projects and forged developmentalist alliances with state elites. Thus I conclude that the failure of low-modernism stemmed from a “romantic hubris” that proved as deeply colonial as the “technocratic hubris” underlying high-modernism.