Syngman Rhee
On July 20, 1948, Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea in the South Korean presidential election, 1948 with 92.3% of the vote; the second candidate, Kim Gu, received 6.7% of the vote. On August 15, the Republic of Korea was formally established in South Korea and Rhee was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Korea. The next month, on September 9, the north also proclaimed statehood as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Rhee himself had been an independence activist, and his relations with the "chinilpa" Korean elites who had collaborated with the Japanese were, in the words of the South Korean historian Kyung Moon Hwang, often "contentious," but in the end an understanding was reached in which, in exchange for their support, Rhee would not purge the elites. In particular, the Koreans who had served in the colonial-era National Police, whom the Americans had retained after August 1945, were promised by Rhee that their jobs would not be threatened by him. Upon independence in 1948, 53% of South Korean police officers were men who had served in the National Police during the Japanese occupation.
Sin Chaeho
In South Korea, after the emancipation from Japan, Shin was not considered an important author. The term "minjok" was decried as politically unacceptable by Shin's old acquaintance from the Provisional Government, and now the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee. The new South Korean government favoured the term "kukka", which implied loyalty to the Republic of Korea, over Shin's "minjok". In the 1960s, Rhee's political regime ended and anti-imperialism sentiments redoubled, followed by scholars pursuing a new autonomous history of Korea, and revived the term "minjok". By 1908, Shin Chae-ho had become a powerful figure in Korean historiography, but concepts like "minjok", among others, are interpreted in ways that favour the South Korean Government over the North's.