Park Chung Hee Era
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Japanese ideas were equally profound for big business. The concept of a chaebol as a business organization, with a headquarters controlling a diverse array of subsidiaries through a system of cross shareholdings, and pulling resources together groupwide for common group interests, originated from interwar Japan’s zaibatsu. Emboldened by this idea of constructing a corporate empire, many of South Korea’s chaebol visionaries,
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including automakers (Chapter 10), licensed Japanese technology to enter new frontiers of industrial growth. Moreover, like state bureaucrats adapt-ing Japanese industrial policy to South Korea’s political soil of an imperial presidency, chaebol producers built up their technological capabilities through innovation. Even the crisis-ridden auto industry experienced a breakthrough when Hyundai Motors acquired the ability to assemble its own Pony model with technology licenses contracted separately from several foreign sources. The “car design,” Nae-Young Lee writes, “came from Italy; its internal combustion engine from England; and [its] engine block design, transmission, and axles from Japan.” South Korea’s sole integrated steel producer was under even greater Japanese influence. Financed by Japanese reparation funds and built with Japanese technology under the support of the “bureaucrats, bankers, big business, and Liberal Democratic Party bosses of ‘Japan, Inc.,’” Sang-young Rhyu and Seok-jin Lew report, the Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) strove to “catch up with Nippon Steel” by emulating its Japanese technology licensors’ “corporate strategy, managerial practices, and company unionism.” The way POSCO
did so was, however, profoundly un-Japanese—with Pak T’ae-jun, Park Chung Hee’s alter ego inside POSCO, getting POSCO to emulate the Japanese steel producers’ consensual management models in a top-down manner in his capacity as “political entrepreneur, mediator of interests, facilitator of dialogue, and business strategist” (Chapter 11).
These adaptations of liberal U.S. ideas and dirigiste Japanese practices into distinctively illiberal macro shock therapy and politically driven micro industrial policy had an amplifying effect on South Korea’s national energy for modernization, because of their timing. The world economic order was then creating a window of opportunity for late developers like South Korea in four critical ways. First, tariff barriers in developed countries were being dramatically lowered through the launching of the “Kennedy Round” of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lowered the costs of South Korea’s entry into world marketplaces.
Second, however, nontariff trade barriers, including financial subsidies, were left alone until the next Tokyo and Uruguay rounds of trade liberalization, which had the effect of giving South Korea two decades to build its comparative advantage through industrial policy. Third, an extensive expansion of international commercial banking also took place throughout the 1960s, without which South Korea’s strategy of financing growth through loans could not have worked. Fourth, Japan was then lining up its neighbors into a new regional division of labor after the image of “flying geese,” with its multinational corporations relocating their declining business operations throughout East Asia via technology licensing and di-
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rect investment.16 The normalization of diplomatic relations, followed by South Korea’s ideational and institutional innovations, helped Park Chung Hee achieve his strategy of carving out a second-tier position in this flying geese model of regional economic integration through technology licensing.
Unfortunately for Park, however, his coalition was not alone in learning from foreign ideas. As Myung-Lim Park writes in Chapter 13, chaeya activists began transforming into an intransigent opposition force after Chôn T’ae-il, a tailor and union organizer in one of Ch’ôn’gyech’ôn’s sweatshops, dramatically took his life in protest against repressive labor practices in 1970. Suddenly awakened to South Korea’s grim reality of social inequality by Chôn T’ae-il’s public suicide, chaeya dissidents took on the role of social reformers on top of their mid-1960s’ role of anti-Japanese nationalists and democratic activists forged during South Korea’s 1965
normalization of relations with Japan (Chapter 15) and its 1969 lifting of the two-term constitutional restriction on presidential terms, respectively.
These efforts to add a third, reformist identity spread Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist revolutionary writings throughout South Korea’s chaeya.
But because much of their transformation was driven by historical events rather than by some preconceived theoretical or ideological worldview, and because postwar anticommunist sentiments still had a strong grip on society, chaeya dissidents ended up innovating in the promotion of foreign ideas as actively as did their political opponents, Park and his ruling coalition. The outcome was minjungju¤i, which looked to the “people”
for leadership in the struggle against South Korea’s politically oppressive, economically exploitative, and internationally subservient “ruling clique”
(Chapter 13).
Among diverse chaeya groups, it was Christian activists that proved to be most threatening to Park and his ruling coalition. Myung-Lim Park calls their impact “transformative,” empowering chaeya activists with their
“Christian notion of ‘natural rights,’” which saw the “right to a minimum standard of living as an integral part of human rights.” The church supported chaeya activists in multiple ways—as a political “sanctuary” from security forces, as a “fund-raiser” for dissident activities, as a “counter-media” of radical ideas, as an agenda setter in social issues, as an organizer of militant trade unions, as a “force of conscience” pressuring National Democratic Party politicians into confrontation against Park Chung Hee, and as a mobilizer of U.S. religious groups into a transnational clergy-intelligentsia coalition behind human rights (Chapter 13). These transnational ties were instrumental in getting the U.S. Congress to hold hearings on South Korean human rights abuses in 1974 (Chapter 16).
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At the same time, it is important not to look at South Korea’s intelligentsia as a unitary actor, with chaeya activists in leadership roles. The intelligentsia was never united ideologically; its conservative members, serving as personal advisors, presidential staff, cabinet ministers, and party leaders, participated as proactively in Park Chung Hee’s modernization projects as others did in South Korea’s robust political opposition movements. The conservative wing of South Korea’s intelligentsia was present in most of its critical junctures of historical development, manning Kim Chong-p’il’s “brain-trust” to draw up shock therapy in 1961 (Chapter 3), assisting in Park’s rediscovery of traditional culture as a source of conservative modernization ideology in 1971 (Chapter 4), advocating price support for barley and rice between 1968 and 1971 (Chapter 12), joining Yi Hu-rak’s P’ungnyôn saôp (Good Harvest Project) to prepare for yushin in 1972 (Chapter 8), and envisioning South Korea’s development of an independently designed, assembled, and marketed small-size kukminch’a (citizen car) model in 1973 (Chapter 10). They were criticized by chaeya activists as a state-patronized and -controlled (ôyong) political force. The reality was, however, much more complicated. Rather than being the forces of good and evil, and conscience (yangsim) versus state patronization (ôyong), chaeya activists and their conservative rivals diverged in worldviews.
Civil Society
The existing literature based on developmental state and network theories deals with popular forces even more inadequately than South Korea’s bureaucracy, chaebol, and political parties. Typically, popular forces are seen as a mere objects of control sacrificed for economic growth and military security, as in the case of industrial workers and farmers; or as a brave voice of conscience, making democratization an inevitable outcome despite overwhelming state power, as in the case of the chaeya activists. The kind of hypergrowth South Korea achieved, with its prime impetus coming from exports and HCI, however, would have been impossible
had state bureaucrats only wielded sticks, as many researchers have argued. Nor does an ideologically charged dichotomization of Park’s supporters and opponents into passively mobilized parochial rural subjects and politically engaged urban citizen opponents help explain the many puzzles of Park Chung Hee’s political rule: how it lasted eighteen years despite a seemingly endless series of political, economic, and security crises; why he fought hard for rural subsidies and built costly Saema¤l Undong (New Village
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Movement) projects, if farmers were already available for manipulation; and what accounted for his charisma among rural voters.
To explain such conundrums, this book takes both top-down and bottom-up views, looking into Park’s use of carrots and sticks, organizations and symbols, as well as personal charisma and formal institutions for the political mobilization of popular forces. We strongly advise against assuming any zero-sum relationship between Park’s use of carrots and sticks.
The junta pledged in 1961 to liquidate “usurious debts” in the countryside, while disbanding all rural organizations by a decree (Chapter 3).
Likewise, the yushin era witnessed a dramatic increase in both carrots and sticks for South Korean farmers, as Park tried to keep them away from chaeya dissidents as well as from historically more contentious urban voters. Distinguishing carrots from sticks, in fact, was very problematic in many instances of political intervention, as in Park’s Saema¤l Undong, because carrots could instantly become sticks with their threat of being taken away. The Ministry of Home Affairs, presiding over 14,000 subcounty offices (myôn), the lowest and smallest administrative unit in South Korea, and the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF), boasting over 90 percent of South Korean farmers as its members, similarly constituted a double-edged institution that threatened with carrots (Chapter 12).
As argued by Young Jo Lee, in this game of rural mobilization, South Korean farmers were anything but parochial subjects, immersed in political conformism. Contrary to the prevailing views of yôch’onyado (the countryside for the government, the city for the opposition), he draws an image of South Korean farmers resembling James C. Scott’s “rational peasant,” voting for or against Park depending on his agricultural policy’s distributive implications, when there was no presidential aspirant from their native regions. Park Chung Hee also became a “rational mobilizer” after losing many Chôlla voters in his 1967 presidential campaign. Making a U-turn from his policy of agricultural squeeze, Park supported barley and rice prices with subsidies, and put his Saema¤l Undong on an entirely different scale by politically and economically supporting the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s Grain Management Fund, Fertilizer Fund, and high-yield rice development programs, in addition to rural public construction works in 1975.
This book also corrects South Korea’s dominant views on chaeya dissidents in three major ways. First, contrary to the radical, if not revolutionary, image built up through struggles against Chun Doo-hwan (1980–
1988) after the Kwangju massacre, the dissident intelligentsia championed anything but radical—let alone, immutable—ideas. The chaeya segment showed a particularly high level of ideological volatility, whereas its op-
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posing rivals, regime participants, continued identifying their role as instruments of dirigiste modernization. The chaeya progressively radicalized, shedding their originally conservative anticommunist identity under the multiple shocks of the normalization of relations with Japan (Chapter 15), military intervention in South Vietnam (Chapter 14), political crackdown, and yushin (Chapter 8). Their organizationally dispersed and clandestinely operated network strengthened too as an army of student activists led “street struggles” (kat’u) and religious groups organized workers into labor unions after Park launched his yushin regime (Chapter 13).
Second, there is the question of power. By any standard, chaeya activists, with or without the support of opposition politicians and journalists, were unambiguously dwarfed by Park’s ruling coalition in terms of power resources. Yet they were capable of dragging his yushin regime into a series of dangerous confrontations with the United States and, in the case of 1979, triggering a crisis, whose implosion into regime disintegration was kept at bay only through a regular, systematic, and coordinated exercise of emergency powers (Chapters 5, 6, and 16). At the same time, even in these instances of strong chaeya challenges, Park proved much stronger, putting down chaeya protests with a show of blunt force before the activists could incite other societal actors to join them. As events in 1979 show, it was a combination of radical opposition party protests, labor and urban unrest, United States hostility, unruly factional struggles among KCIA and PSS
praetorian guards, and, most critically, Park Chung Hee’s visible loss of political acumen and discipline in taming his opposition and controlling factionalism within his ruling coalition that brought about his sudden demise.
The chaeya were thus strong enough to block Park’s institutionalization of authoritarian rule, but not strong enough to bring down his patrimonial yet rationalized regime. Or, conversely, Park Chung Hee was strong enough to withstand chaeya protests, but not strong enough to weed out chaeya activists. On the contrary, the stronger his “hard power”
grew through changing South Korea’s constitutional rules of the game, the stronger his chaeya opponents became in “soft power,” by becoming flag bearers of justice, spokesmen for the popular forces, and martyrs of democratic struggles.17 The abilities of Park and chaeya dissidents jointly rose, albeit in an asymmetric way.
This asymmetric growth of state and chaeya powers in part explains the many twists and turns of South Korea’s developmental trajectory. Although South Korea boasted of its history of overthrowing Syngman Rhee (1948–1960) through a “student revolution” and launching a parliamentary system of democratic rule under Chang Myôn (1960–1961), at the
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time of Park’s military coup, civil society was still very weak, enabling Park to crack down on all forms of political opposition without any societal resistance in 1961 (Chapters 1, 2, and 3). The swift change toward what looked like the opposite direction of past trends or of the current situation continued into Park Chung Hee’s “civilian” Third Republic and yushin years. The normalization of relations with Japan triggered an explosion of student protests in 1965, but once martial law was declared and diplomatic normalization was presented as a fait accompli, political order was quickly reestablished (Chapter 15). The same was true with chaeya protests during Park’s yushin regime. They disappeared from sight as unexpectedly as they exploded without warning, making politics highly volatile, uncertain, and hence full of tension (Chapters 8 and 13). The spread of public hostility against Park also could be arrested and even reversed into a show of support in times of external shock, as with the assassination of his wife, Yuk Yông-su, in 1974 and South Vietnam’s fall in 1975 (Chapter 16). This same volatility implied Park’s political vulnerability, as well.
Even after a seemingly successful crackdown on opposition activities, he had to keep repressive measures in place because he knew chaeya activists would soon fight back again.
The asymmetric growth or vulnerability of both state and chaeya power still cannot fully explain South Korea’s political trajectory. On the contrary, at many critical points, there occurred perplexing policy choices that seemed to be politically hurting rather than serving Park, which makes his preferences an analytic issue in our book. The regime could have mixed sticks with carrots in its dealings with chaeya dissidents, as it did with labor and farmer organizations, but it did not. As Jorge I. Domínguez concludes (Chapter 20), more often it looked like the regime was pursuing a strategy of minimizing rather than maximizing its societal political base, triggering a sharp decline of real wages with painful shock therapy in 1964, 1965, 1972, and 1979 (Chapter 7); supporting industrial growth through economic
ally squeezing farmers in 1964–1968 (Chapter12); and causing a severe nationalist backlash with its normalization treaty with Japan in 1965 (Chapter 15). Apparently Park Chung Hee risked his political fortune for the high but uncertain benefits of policy reform. Why did he do so? This question leads to an analysis of Park the man.
Leadership
At each of South Korea’s critical junctures stood Park Chung Hee. Despite the profound lack of archival sources, our researchers discover deep traces
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of his presence in every aspect of South Korean politics. Trying to explain and understand South Korea’s choices in political, economic, and security realms causes most of the chapters here to raise questions regarding Park’s vision, interests, and personality, because it was Park who chose policy options. To make his leadership even more perplexing, he went against common sense in most of his moments of critical decision making, taking huge risks in the hope of what looked like an unlikely political and economic bonanza. As his risky strategy of modernization frequently made Park use shock therapy, from the arrest of chaebol owners under charges of illicit wealth accumulation in 1961 (Chapter 9), to the emergency decree freezing payments of interest on informal private curb-market loans in 1972