In 1956, a politician named Cho Bong-amran for president in South Korea. His opponent, South Korea’s first President Syngman Rhee, not only won handily but would even have Cho executed three years later. Cho, however, remains important in the story of the South Korean left’s ideas about what to do with North Korea. Just three years after the armistice agreement had been signed, Cho ran for president on a set of ideas about North Korea that were truly heretical. He argued that unification should be achieved through peaceful competition with the North. Rhee, president of South Korea from 1945-60,