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General Hong Beom-do (; August 27, 1868 – October 25, 1943) was a Korean independence activist and national hero. Hong served as commander of a guerrilla unit of the Justice Army "Yibyon" within the Righteous armies and the Korean Independence Army, which essentially gave rise to Korea's armed struggle against Japanese colonialists.
In 1962, he was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation by South Korea.
When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, Hong fled to Manchuria to train anti-Japanese freedom fighters. After the March First Movement in 1919, Hong became a Commander-in-Chief of the Korean Independence Army. In August 1919, Hong crossed the Tumen River with 400 soldiers. Once across the river and in Korea, Hong successfully attacked the Japanese troops in Hyesanjin, Jaseong, and Kapsan. Hong and his soldiers would cross the Tumen River twice more, each time carrying out successful attacks against the occupying Japanese forces.
In August 1919, Hong launched an advance operation into Korea. He succeeded in integrating the northern army in Jiandao with other forces. On May 28, 1920, Hong Beom-do's Korean Independence Army (), Cho An-Mu's National Army () and Choi Jin-dong's Military Affairs Command () were combined into the Korean Northern Army Command (). They assembled troops and were prepared for a significant military operation.
On June 4, 1920, troops of Korean Democratic Corps () attacked Japanese Army units in North Hamgyong Province Gangyang-dong (). The next day, a Japanese unit pursued the Korean Independence Army, and the Korean Northern Army Command trapped the Japanese in Samdunja (), defeating hundreds of them. This encounter became known as the Battle of Samdunja.
The conflict became known as the Battle of Bongo-dong, or the Battle of Fengwudong. It was the first large-scale battle between the Korean Independence Army and the Japanese Army in Manchuria. The Korean soldiers and the leadership of the Korean Northern Army Command were inspired by the victory, as were Koreans in China and Korea. The Korean resistance forces served as momentum for further independence battles in the 1920s.
In October of the same year, working together with Kim Jwa-jin, Hong legendary national hero again carried out an attack against Japanese troops at what is known as the Battle of Qingshanli.
The Japanese Army, having lost the battle in Cheongsang-ri and other locations, retaliated by carrying out a campaign of brutal scorched earth warfare that included the killing of Koreans and burning of villages. In response, the Korean Independence Army launched a military counter offensive. In December 1920, Hong's forces were integrated with other independence forces to organize the Korean Independence Corps.
In 1937, Stalin's deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union took place. Hong was among those 171,781 Koreans (almost the entire Soviet population of ethnic Koreans) forcibly relocated to Kazakhstan. Hong died in Kazakhstan in 1943.
On October 25, 1963, Hong was posthumously awarded the Republic of Korea Medal of Merit for National Foundation.
An agreement between the two governments was reached in 2020 to move Hong's remains from Kazakhstan to South Korea, but the date was pushed off due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August 2021, his remains were moved to South Korea via KC-330 Cygnus, ahead of an official state visit by Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to South Korea. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and the First Lady Kim Jung-sook received and honored the remains in person at Seoul Air Base near Seongnam, South Korea.
His remains were reinterred in the Daejeon National Cemetery.
Busts of Hong Beom-do and four other Korean independence fighters were added to the Korea Military Academy in 2018. In August 2023, the Ministry of National Defense, under the administration of conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol, announced that the bust of Hong would be removed because of his past ties to communism. The decision prompted criticism and a burst of outrage in the population, with some likening the removal to McCarthyism. Though the government's initial plan was to relocate all five busts, after some opposition, it was decided that only Hong's bust would be removed from the Academy. A senior member of the Presidential office cited Hong's membership in the Soviet Communist Party and his participation in the Free City Incident as reasons for the removal. The dispute is mirrored in the general political environment of South Korea, where Yoon's conservative People Power Party is seen as more concerned with anti-communism, while the liberal Democratic Party is seen as more intolerant of collaborationism during the Japanese colonial period.
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