This article&#x27;s claims are true -- but only for South Korea.<p>Between the end of WW2 and the start of Korean war, the North has seen an exodus of landowners, former government officials, and other beneficiaries of the Japanese occupation: they left the North for the far more tolerant South. The new government, press and education cadres for the most part consisted of ethnic Koreans from China, Manchuria, and the Soviet Union, and relatively few came from Korean resistance fighters that stayed in the Korea proper. Kim Il Sung himself fought in Manchuria in 1930s and entered Korea in 1945 as a captain in the Red Army.<p>The politics and ideology were built on Soviet blueprints under Soviet supervision [1]. Soviet influence can still be seen in the Party jargon and the formal political language [2].<p>It wasn&#x27;t until the late 50s that Kim Il Sung won the political infighting and secured his hold on power, simultaneously breaking out from under Soviet and Chinese control and introducing the ideology of self-reliance and isolationism.<p>In South Korea, however, Rhee Syngman did not have the choice of importing unsullied cadres (e.g. a vanishingly small percentage of American Koreans in 1940s had higher education), and so did had not much choice but to rely on the Korean collaborators [3]:<p><i>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 &quot;contentious&quot;, but in the end an understanding was reached, whereas 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.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terentii_Shtykov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terentii_Shtykov</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nknews.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;north-korean-dialect-as-a-soviet-russian-translation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nknews.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;08&#x2F;north-korean-dialect-as-a-sovi...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Syngman_Rhee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Syngman_Rhee</a>