Joseph Cho (1943 - ) is a Korean American journalist, entrepreneur, and a public servant. Born in Kyushu, Japan, he grew up in South Korea, and received a bachelor’s degree from Seoul National University in 1966. Prior to immigrating to America in 1974, he worked as a high school teacher, and served as an Air Force Officer during his compulsory military service.

He started his life in America working as a janitor and a gas station attendant. By 1975 he found a job as a computer programmer at the Los Angeles County Data Processing Department, where he was promoted to Assistant Manager within three years, a record career progression at the time. He founded his first business in 1978, a real estate company which was highly successful.

After the South Korean Military massacred up to 2000 civilians (exact numbers not known) during the May 1980 Kwangju Uprising in South Korea, he began in 1981 to publish a new magazine called The Korean Street Journal . The weekly publication, based in Los Angeles, served as a leading voice for the Korean Democracy Movement for ten years, all the while struggling to withstand the immense political repression that the Korean military regime employed against Cho and his publication. The publication's goal came to fruition with the Korean Civil Revolution of 1987, which ushered a new era of democracy in South Korea.

For his next venture, he founded a printing business, which was also very successful. Selling the business allowed him to comfortably retire in 2002, before reaching the age of 60. Retirement allowed him to pursue his lifelong dream of going back to school to earn a Ph.D. degree. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Yanbian University in China in 2006. His dissertation is titled 朝鮮半島核問題硏究 [The Nuclear Problem on the Korean Peninsula]. After completing his Ph.D. degree, he and his wife, Lucy, founded the Lucy and Joseph Cho Foundation to give scholarships to promising young students in the Cerritos area.

Joseph Cho then began a career in public service by running for the City Council in his hometown of Cerritos, CA. After two unsuccessful attempts, he won an election in March 2007 for the Cerritos City Council Member. In 2009, his council colleagues voted to appoint him as Mayor Pro Tem, and in 2010 they voted to appoint him Mayor of Cerritos. In 2017, after his retirement from the Cerritos city council, Joseph Cho founded the nonprofit organization KUSPI (Korea-US Peace Institute). The organization’s mission is to educate the American and Korean public about the root cause of the conflict on the Korean Penin¬sula and offer solution to resolve the nuclear crisis and bring peace to the Korean peninsula.

Joseph Cho is the author of numerous books on the crisis in the Korean Peninsula: 북한은 변하고 있는가 [Has North Korea been changing?] (삼민사, 1990); 한반도 핵문제와 통일 [The Nuclear issue and reunification in the Korean Peninsula] (삼민사, 1994); 통일로 가는 길이 달라진다 [Reunification in the Korean Peninsula] (오름, 1998); 북핵 위기와 한반도 평화의 길 [Nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula: A study of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and a road map for peace] (한울아카데미, 2006); and 평화가 먼저다 [Peace first] (한울아카데미, 2013). In 2010 he published his autobiography소명 [My Calling], a condensed version of which appeared as a chapter in a 2013 book containing biographies of several prominent Korean Americans that was published by Queens College in New York. He and his wife have two sons and one daughter and three grandchildren.