UC San Diego

This dissertation explores the mountain engineering projects in South Korea from 1948 to 1972, focusing on how the state and grassroots efforts reshaped South Korean highlands into the national resource interior and natural reserves. The study situates South Korea's mountain management within the broader context of U.S. postwar strategies in East Asia, highlighting the interplay between American imperial interests and South Korean state-building efforts. By examining key projects in tungsten mining, coal extraction, forestry, and national park development, this dissertation illuminates the multifaceted objectives and outcomes of these endeavors, ranging from energy transition and industrialization to environmental conservation and national development. In doing so, this dissertation argues that the Cold War (and hot wars) and authoritarian (and populist) developmentalism transformed South Korean highlands from an organic commons of mountain communities into the nation’s reserve of energy, soil, water, and labor.This dissertation contextualizes South Korea’s mountain engineering within the global history of American efforts to engineer nature as part of anti-communist state-building and containment of subversive uplands. In this context, this dissertation illuminates post-World War II U.S. decolonization (and neocolonial) mission and containment policy, but also prewar U.S mining colonialism and environmental engineering of its western frontier as a background. In so doing, this dissertation highlights how American and South Korean engineers, economic planners, and highland society viewed the resource-rich mountains as pivotal space for South Korea’s economic recovery and anti-communist state-building, emulating how the U.S. engineered its highlands as its resource interior. To illuminate this, each chapter of this dissertation envisions various development, preservation, and labor mobilization projects, and how they facilitated South Korea’s anti-communist state-building. By suggesting how such projects contributed to the industrialization of South Korea and high carbon emissions today, this dissertation points to the Cold War and anti-communist origins of carbon-consuming energy regime of South Korea today. This dissertation illuminates three actors as the main agents of the mountain engineering projects: American engineers, South Korean state agencies, and local communities. Each group brought distinct priorities and visions, leading to complex negotiations and collaborations over the ways in which how highland’s resources and nature should be exploited and preserved. Each chapter of this dissertation, in this context, analyzed how local grassroots initiatives, national development plans, and international geopolitical strategies converged in the building of South Korea’s highland frontier. By illuminating three actors of South Korean and the United States, this dissertation highlights the trans-Pacific nature of the South Korean mountains engineering, positing its mountains as a dynamic site where global, national, and local forces intersected. Finally, the dissertation addresses the broader implications of South Korea’s mountain engineering for understanding post-Korean War development in South Korea, and by extension, non-communist part of Asia-Pacific regions in (post) Cold War period. This dissertation challenges the conventional focus on the lowland-centered development in South Korean historiography, by showing how environmental crises, labor mobilization, and energy development in the highlands shaped the trajectory of the state-building and statecraft in South Korea, and even beyond the Korean Peninsula. By integrating environmental history with political and economic analyses, the study offers a nuanced account of how the highlands were transformed from marginalized hinterlands of South Korea and other Asian highlands into the nation’s internal frontier.