Syngman Rhee
Syngman Rhee was the first president of South Korea and was driven from office by a student uprising. Born in 1875 in what is now North Korea to a poor branch of a royal clan, he was educated in the Confucian classics and then at an American Methodist school, where he learned English and converted to Christianity. He was imprisoned for seven years from 1899 for agitating against the monarchy, and was tortured. He went to the United States in 1904 and took degrees at George Washington, Harvard and Princeton, where he completed a doctorate under Woodrow Wilson — the first Korean to hold an American PhD. He spent decades in exile lobbying for Korean independence, heading the provisional government in Shanghai briefly before being impeached by it, and working largely alone in Hawaii and Washington. The American occupation authorities brought him back in 1945, and his anti-communism and English made him their preferred candidate. He was elected president of the new republic in 1948. He pressed repeatedly for an invasion of the north and was refused arms. When the North invaded in June 1950 his forces collapsed; he fled Seoul and had the Han River bridge blown with civilians and his own troops still crossing. His government executed a very large number of suspected leftists, including the Bodo League massacres of tens of thousands in 1950. He obstructed the armistice in 1953 by releasing twenty-five thousand prisoners unilaterally. He rigged elections repeatedly. After the March 1960 vote, protests followed the discovery of a student's body; police killed some 180 demonstrators, and he resigned in April and flew to Hawaii, dying there in 1965.
- Lived: 1875 CE – 1965 CE
- Nationality: South Korean
- Roles: head_of_state, politician, statesman
