Workers' Party of South Korea

With the Communist Party of Korea almost paralysed by affairs such as the Chŏngp'ansa counterfeiting case, the left in the south sought to regroup by merging the Communist Party, the People's Party and the South Korean New People's Party. The merger was announced on 3 September 1946 and the first congress, held on 22–23 November, elected Ho Hon chairman and Pak Hon-yong vice chairman. The English-language source says only a faction of the People's Party, the so-called "forty-eighters", joined. Lyuh Woon-hyung split from Pak after a struggle over leadership and later founded the Working People's Party, and opponents of the merger formed a separate Socialist Workers' Party. The clandestine labour movement of the All Korea Labor Union (Chŏnp'yŏng) was connected to the party.

Outlawed by the US occupation authorities, the party organised a network of clandestine cells and, according to the English-language source, had around 360,000 members. At first it combined legal activity with strikes by workers and peasants, most notably the Daegu October incident. As the campaign for a separate southern government gathered pace it began armed guerrilla struggle in 1947 and on 7 February 1948 launched a general strike against a separate state. On 3 April it led an armed uprising on Jeju Island under Kim Dal-sam and others, in the suppression of which tens of thousands of islanders were killed.

In October 1948 Ji Chang-su, a party member in the army's 14th Regiment, refused orders to suppress Jeju and led the regiment in a revolt that seized Yeosu and Suncheon (the Yeosu–Suncheon incident). The Korean-language source sees the revolt as unplanned and only belatedly approved by the party centre, and says the government's sweeping crackdown afterwards killed thousands of civilians accused of complicity and left the party all but destroyed. The National Security Act passed in 1948 outlawed the party, and much of its leadership moved to Pyongyang.

In August 1948 the two Workers' Parties set up a joint central committee, and on 24 June 1949 they merged into the Workers' Party of Korea. The merger was kept secret even from ordinary members, so documents in the south went on using the name of the Workers' Party of South Korea until the Korean War. Kim Il Sung became chairman of the merged party and Pak Hon-yong deputy chairman, and former WPSK members became known as the domestic faction. During the war 60,000 to 200,000 party members and suspected sympathisers were killed by the South Korean army in the Bodo League massacre. In the north, the arrest of Yi Sung-yop and Pak Hon-yong as "American spies" in 1953 began the purge of the former WPSK leaders.