The answer revolves in part around the structures that were simply never altered in any fundamental way, and in part around conscious choices made by the leaders of South Korea. For example, Cumings has demonstrated with great care how and why the US occupying forces in Korea left the colonial state more or less intact; the alternative would have been to unleash a popular revolution of nationalist and radical forces. As a result, the bureaucracy, the police and the military that sovereign South Korea were initially colonial creations. In Cumings’s words, in spite of a prolonged American involvement in Korean affairs “it was Japanese impact that lasted,” and “whether it was in military, the bureaucracy or the polity, Americans during the occupation found themselves playing midwife to a Japanese gestation, rather than bringing forth their own Korean progeny.” Not only were state structures kept intact but the state’s capacity and willingness to direct economic change, as well as the economic instruments used by the state – e.g., control over credit – continued from colonial and postcolonial period.