Rusk documents

The Rusk documents (also known as the Rusk–Yang correspondence) are the official diplomatic correspondence sent by Dean Rusk, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, to Yang You Chan (양유찬, 梁裕燦), the South Korean ambassador to the U.S at the August 10, 1951.

The Rusk documents show the negotiating position of the U.S. State Department.

The correspondence states the negotiating position as:

The Rusk documents are part of a series of documents exchanged between Korea, the United States, and Japan, prior to the completion of the Treaty of San Francisco. Draft treaties began to appear as early as 1949 (see ). Over the next several years, Korea made a number of requests to the United States, and the United States sent a number of diplomatic responses as well, of which the Rusk documents are one. The final treaty was concluded in April, 1952.

Three demands from the South Korean government to the U.S. government were as follows:

Korea had sought an amendment formalizing the date Japan had ceded control of Korea, including several disputed islands as Korean territory, at the point of Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, but this was rejected: "The United States Government does not feel that the Treaty should adopt the theory that Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on August 9, 1945 constituted a formal or final renunciation of sovereignty by Japan over the areas dealt with in the Declaration."

"As regards the island of Dokdo, otherwise known as Takeshima or Liancourt Rocks, this normally uninhabited rock formation was according to our information never treated as part of Korea and, since about 1905, has been under the jurisdiction of the Oki Islands Branch Office of Shimane Prefecture of Japan. The island does not appear ever before to have been claimed by Korea." (The original document)

The MacArthur line was to stand only until the conclusion of the Treaty of San Francisco: "the so-called MacArthur line will stand until the treaty comes into force."

However, South Korean President Syngman Rhee disregard it and declared the Syngman Rhee line and the sovereignty over Dokdo on January 18, 1952, just before the Treaty of San Francisco came into force on April 28, 1952.

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