Paik Nak-chung

Paik Nak-chung (白楽晴, born 10 January 1938) is a South Korean English literature scholar, literary critic, and social activist.

Life

His paternal family was from Jeongju County, South Pyongan Province, but he was born and raised in Daegu, where his maternal family lived. His father, Paik Bong-je, served as a county governor and bureaucrat in North Gyeongsang Province during the Japanese colonial period; he is listed in the Dictionary of Pro-Japanese Collaborators and was taken to North Korea during the Korean War. In 1955, upon graduating from Gyeonggi High School, he left for the United States to study, graduated from Brown University, returned to Korea temporarily and completed his military service, and then went abroad again, receiving a doctorate in English literature from Harvard University in 1972.

From 1962 he taught in the English Department of Seoul National University, and from 1966 he served as editor of the quarterly magazine Creation and Criticism. In 1974 he was dismissed after issuing a statement opposing the Yushin system, but he was reinstated in 1980. He retired from his professorship in 2003 and is now professor emeritus. Afterward he continued working at the forefront of unification movements; in 2005 he became chairman of the 6.15 Joint Declaration Implementation South Side Committee, and in 2007 he took part in efforts to unify the progressive candidates in the presidential election.

Division System Theory

Division system theory is a concept proposed by Paik Nak-chung that views the division of the Korean Peninsula not simply as a separation of states but as a single structural system. He argued that North and South Korea, while antagonistic, contribute to maintaining the division system, and that unification is possible only by dismantling it. Theoretically, he was influenced by dependency theory, world-systems theory, and structural Marxism. However, he has been criticized for not criticizing the hereditary dictatorship and human rights problems of North Korea and for emphasizing only an idealized discourse on unification, which lacks realism. Ultimately, division system theory has been said to result in tolerating the North Korean regime and to have the limitation of being difficult to serve as a practical solution. Division system theory was strongly influenced by and by 's .