Korean War - Aftermath

Aftermath

Mao Zedong's decision to involve China in the Korean War was a conscientious effort to confront the most powerful country in the world, undertaken at a time when the regime was still consolidating its own power after winning the Chinese Civil War. Mao primarily supported intervention not to save North Korea or to appease the Soviet Union, but because he believed that a military conflict with the United States was inevitable after UN forces crossed the 38th parallel. Mao's secondary motive was to improve his own prestige inside the communist international community by demonstrating that his Marxist concerns were international. In his later years Mao believed that Stalin only gained a positive opinion of him after China's entrance into the Korean War. Inside China, the war improved the long-term prestige of Mao, Zhou, and Peng.

China emerged from the Korean War united by a sense of national pride, despite the war's enormous costs. The Chinese people were educated to believe that the war was initiated by the United States and Korea, and not by a fraternal communist state in the north. In Chinese propaganda, the Chinese war effort was portrayed and accepted as an example of China's engaging the strongest power in the world with an under-equipped army, forcing it to retreat, and fighting it to a military stalemate. These successes were contrasted with China's historical humiliations by Japan and by Western powers over the previous hundred years in order to promote the image of the PLA and the CCP. The most significant negative long-term consequence of the war (for China) was that it led the United States to guarantee the safety of Chiang Kai-shek's regime in Taiwan, effectively ensuring that Taiwan would remain outside of PRC control until the present day.

The Korean War affected other participant combatants. Turkey, for example, entered NATO in 1952 and the foundation for bilateral diplomatic and trade relations was laid.

The beginning of racial integration efforts in the U.S. military began during the Korean War, where African Americans fought in integrated units for the first time. Among the 1.8 million American soldiers who fought in the Korean War there were more than 100,000 African Americans.

Post-war recovery was different in the two Koreas. South Korea stagnated in the first post-war decade, but later industrialized and modernized. Contemporary North Korea remains underdeveloped. South Korea had one of the world's fastest growing economies from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. By 2010 it was ranked thirteenth in the world.

Post-war, about 100,000 North Koreans were executed in internal communist party purges. According to Rummel, forced labor and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in North Korea; others have estimated 400,000 deaths in concentration camps alone. In the 1990s famine killed between 900,000 and 3.5 million North Koreans. A study by South Korean anthropologists of North Korean children who had defected to China found that 18-year-old males were 5 inches shorter than South Koreans their age due to malnutrition. The North Korean Won is worth more than South Korean Won, though it is not freely convertible. The external debt of North Korea is 30 times lower than that of South Korea.

Korean anti-Americanism after the war was fueled by the presence and behavior of American military personnel (USFK) and U.S. support for the authoritarian regime, a fact still evident during the country's democratic transition in the 1980s. In a February 2002 Gallup-Korea poll, one-third of South Koreans viewed the United States favorably.

In addition a large number of mixed race 'G.I. babies' (offspring of U.S. and other western soldiers and Korean women) were filling up the country's orphanages. Korean traditional society places significant weight on paternal family ties, bloodlines, and purity of race. Children of mixed race or those without fathers are not easily accepted in Korean society. Thousands were adopted by American families in the years following the war, when their plight was covered on television. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1952 removed race as a limiting factor in immigration, and made possible the entry of military spouses and children from South Korea after the Korean War. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which substantially changed U.S. immigration policy toward non-Europeans, Koreans became one of the fastest growing Asian groups in the United States.

In 2011, some former members of Chinese People's Volunteer Army, who had battled there, revisited North Korea. Afterwards they said that they were "very sad", unsatisfied with the post-war development of North Korea. "(We) liberated them, but they're still struggling for freedom", said Qu Yingkui.