Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  (Chapter 7), to the use of garrison decrees and martial law to quell mounting political challenges from chaeya dissidents, opposition politicians, and new emerging social forces (Chapters 5, 6, and 15), not only his preference for a high risk, high payoff, and high cost strategy of modernization, but also his ability to remain on that track of modernization despite myriad political and economic crises—many of which he brought on himself by aggressively pursuing his high risk, high payoff, and high cost strategy—

  for eighteen years demand an explanation. These two questions of preference and ability ask many of our chapters to confront the issues of structure and agency.

  Arising from our analysis of Park Chung Hee is a man with a very complex personality, which can be grasped only by combining analytic opposites. First, a soldier of imperial Japan before 1945 and an artillery officer in South Korea’s rapidly modernizing armed forces after 1948, Park looked like another bureaucrat, colorless in style and pragmatic in outlook. Beneath this appearance, however, hid his revolutionary ideological vision of “rich nation, strong army” (Chapter 4). Second, as a son of a poor peasant, he also looked like a materialist only interested in kyông-chae chaeilju¤i (economy first) when presiding over monthly, weekly, and even daily meetings on industrial and construction projects. The way he commanded those meetings was, however, more Nietzschian, trying to instill in people his “can do” spirit (hamyôn tôenda) that idealized the power of the human will (Chapters 7, 9, and 10). Third, in a similarly paradoxical way, Park saw Meiji Japan’s genro s of low samurai class origins as his role models, but he ruled in most un-Japanese ways, preferring top-down rather than collective leadership and command rather than consensus building (Chapters 5 and 7). Fourth, Park was a populist with a deep contempt for South Korea’s traditional elites, whom he held responsible for the Chosôn dynasty’s colonial subjugation in 1910, but he was also an

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  elitist with a dirigiste vision of modernization, critical of his people’s alleged passivity, opportunism, indolence, and defeatism.18

  Ironies continued even in Park’s political projects. As a born-again conservative with a history of leftist activities in his early years, he had to prove his anticommunism, which he did by containing North Korean threats throughout his rule. Yet, in some crucial moments of political change, Park looked like a distant ideological cousin of his North Korean rival. Some observers have spoken of Park’s emulation of Kim Il Sung’s establishment of Red Guards and Red Young Guards among workers and peasants when Park launched an armed reserve force of 2.5 million men in 1968 after a failed North Korean commando attack on his Blue House.19

  Park also launched his yushin regime in a mirror image of Kim Il Sung’s yuil regime, with power centralized in his imperial presidency, in order to economically and militarily catch up with North Korea and negotiate inter-Korea reconciliation from a position of strength in a highly uncertain era of détente (Chapter 8). The Democratic Republican Party’s original vision of developing into a party driven by a professionally staffed central secretariat likewise originated from his right-hand man Kim Chong-p’il’s admiration of Taiwan’s “Leninist” Kuomintang.

  Such a complex juxtaposition of seemingly opposite political qualities results in what Ezra F. Vogel calls “transformative leadership” in Chapter 18. Vogel puts Park Chung Hee in the category of the twentieth century’s great modernizers, with the likes of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Many of Park Chung Hee’s personal qualities, from a spirit of “deep patriotism” to a “sense of direction,” to a keen understanding of geopolitics, to a strategic mind capable of nurturing political power, Vogel argues, constituted the ingredients of a great nation-builder. These qualities were also found in Atatürk, Lee, and Deng. However, in Vogel’s eyes, Park was also distinctive in two crucial ways. First, having seized power through a military coup rather than with the support of a mass political movement, Park was less prepared than Atatürk, Lee, and Deng for national leadership. The Democratic Republican Party, established top-down by Kim Chong-p’il’s intelligence agents in 1962, was institutionally too weak to protect Park during crises. The coup leader, moreover, was the opposite of a seasoned politician, unable to effectively communicate with forces outside of South Korea’s armed forces. Second, because South Korea had experienced a democratic system of governance before Park seized power, he was judged by much tougher political standards than Atatürk, Lee, and Deng and saw his legitimacy challenged even after ensuring growth and security.

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  Analysis at the level of agency, then, produces two contradictory images. On the one hand, Park appears as an individual with the qualities of a modernizer, a strategic thinker capable of transforming ideologically driven goals into a set of bureaucratically implementable action plans, with a keen understanding of how to grow power. On the other hand, his leadership looks more like that of a faction leader than of a political leader in command of a broad yet cohesive coalition. This shortcoming cannot be explained by his lack of constituency. Park was an authoritarian leader with a deep distaste for electoral politics, an open admiration of technocratic ideals, and an idealization of collective interests, but he did command loyal societal followers. When campaigning, Park spoke openly of weeding out messy, corrupt, and wasteful politics from policymaking processes under his vision of administrative democracy, and he triumphed in most of his campaigns by a sizable margin of votes. The exception was 1963, when Park transformed his military junta into a democratically elected regime by beating Yun Po-sôn in a tight race, and 1978, when the New Democratic Party polled 1.1 percent more votes in National Assembly elections. This usually large reservoir of societal support was what Park called his unorganized “silent majority” (see our concluding chapter).

  Why did Park Chung Hee fail to transform his “silent majority” into an institutionalized support base? The answer partly lies in Paul D. Hutchcroft’s analysis of “structure,” as opposed to Vogel’s focus on agency. Conceptualizing South Korea’s state-society relations as the “reverse image” of that prevailing in “kleptocratic” Ferdinand Marcos’s Philippines, where a

  “strikingly decentralized and porous state [was] continually raided by a hegemonic oligarchy” and “representative institutions [empowered] local caciques,” Hutchcroft zeroes in on the destruction of the Chosôn dynasty’s ruling yangban-landlord class under a series of sociopolitical shocks, including land reform followed immediately by the Korean War (1950–

  1953). The yangban destruction had the effect of eliminating the societal elite that could have acted as a countervailing force against the state.

  Moreover, that state was a more “institutionalized bureaucracy” with the potential for rationalization, whereas the Philippines’s was “thoroughly patrimonial.” As analyzed by Hutchcroft, it was these historical anteced-ents of a strong state and weak society that enabled Park to mobilize society in the direction of his modernization strategy.

  Such a structural analysis does not invalidate the centrality of agency.

  On the contrary, it speaks for the importance of agency. With South Korea’s lack of countervailing social forces, political authorities in charge of its patrimonial and yet rationalized state bureaucracy act as a swing factor,

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  triggering economic growth or decay depending on their leader’s preferences, interests, and strategies. The country suddenly geared for hypergrowth because there were no societal forces capable of stopping Park Chung Hee from imposing his high risk, high payoff, and high cost strategy of modernization. Conversely, had it been governed by a “Korean Marcos” with all the limitations of the Filipino Marcos, Hutchcroft counterfactually argues, such a leader would have raided institutions for his own advantage without any effective checks and balances from society (Chapter 19). From Hutchcroft’s perspective, then, any attempt at explaining Park’s failure to
institutionalize his “silent majority” by structural variables would lead back to the question of his political preferences, ideas, and strategies.

  Jorge I. Domínguez provides an insightful analytic framework for deciphering complex agency-structure relations. Comparing and contrasting Park Chung Hee’s rule with Latin America’s four major cases of authoritarian modernization, Domínguez explains Park’s strategy of rulership in terms of what is a classic dilemma confronting political leaders who seize power through an act of force: whether to remain a “single towering political leader” or to act as an institutional builder “diversifying the tool kit for ruling and policymaking” beyond politically counterproductive repression. Included in this wider tool kit are succession rules, an elite-sponsored political party, a regime-licensed state-corporatist interest representation system, and a co-optative political machine. With those tools emerges a more durable authoritarian regime. As seen by Domínguez, there were two Parks. The pre- yushin Park relied more on institutions than did his post-yushin successor. The single most critical variable Domínguez lists as responsible for this “political decay” is the South Korean leader who “cared more for [his] personal power than for the construction of a broader-based authoritarian regime.” Society’s low resistance to Park’s coup in 1961, coupled with his Third Republic’s dazzling economic success, which also became a spectacular political success in his 1967 landslide electoral victory, structurally made his authoritarian regime the “‘most likely to succeed’ politically” among Domínguez’s country cases, but it did not do so because of Park Chung Hee’s will to stay in power without constitutional restrictions on presidential terms. That will prompted the undoing of many of his more effective political-institutional mechanisms of rulership crafted during his Third Republic (Chapter 20), which had the effect of preempting much of his social supporters’ evolution into organized political actors, with restricted but still crucial institutional linkages to his ruling political party, state bureaucracy, and corporatist interest groups.

  The Domínguez thesis looks even more plausible when it is put against

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  the institutional and policy continuities the yushin era had with the three years immediately prior to Park Chung Hee’s formal inauguration of yushin. The ruling political party had already weakened dramatically when Park dethroned Kim Chong-p’il from his role of “crown prince” with the introduction of a third presidential term in 1969 and purged Kim Chong-p’il’s rival “Gang of Four” in control of political fund-raising and local party apparatus in 1971 (Chapter 8). By contrast, beginning in 1969, his Blue House presidential Secretariat sharply upgraded its economic policymaking capacity by recruiting Kim Chông-ryôm, Chang Tôk-chin, and O Wôn-ch’ôl from South Korea’s state bureaucracy (Chapter 5). The economic bureaucracy also began introducing tighter regulatory control on banks (Chapter 7), increased its practice of copying Japan’s special industrial laws with an eye to developing new industrial policy instruments for heavy and chemical industries (Chapter 4); further restricted labor rights through legally requiring state mediation of industrial disputes;20 and attempted to forge farmers into a stabilizing force against contentious urban groups through price support and Saema¤l Undong (Chapter 12). Structurally, in other words, South Korea’s political system was moving toward a yushin-like regime, with power concentrated in its top political leader and implemented through a rapidly growing bureaucracy, without legislative checks and balances, three years before a regime with the name of yushin actually emerged. That Park moved toward his yushin incrementally but consistently across a broad period of three years attests to his will to power.

  As a corollary of these agent-driven structural changes, Park also already possessed what were, in effect, if not in name, extralegal emergency powers even before his yushin formally established draconian emergency powers. The rescue of faltering chaebol industrialists with funds extracted from private curb-market lenders through an emergency decree in 1972 is a case in point. Also, even without the yushin, Park was capable of readily restructuring power relations within his ruling coalition. With his praetorian guards of the Korea Central Intelligence Agency, the Army Security Command, and the Presidential Security Service maintaining tight surveillance over second-tier political elites and his Blue House effectively controlling flows of political funds within the DRP, the Park of the 1969–1972

  period could freely break apart both the “mainstream” and the “anti-mainstream” factions of his party. Kim Chong-p’il was disgraced in 1969, Kim Hyông-uk discharged in 1969, and Kim Sông-gon purged in 1971. A few months after the promulgation of yushin, Park also forced Yi Hu-rak to retire and arrested Yun P’il-yong on the charge of plotting a military coup, thereby eliminating all second-tier leaders who might have had any

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  ambition to succeed him. The power structure that contained an extremely weak second-tier group of next-generation leaders, which many students of South Korean politics have claimed was a defining characteristic of Park Chung Hee’s yushin regime, actually emerged between 1969 and 1972

  rather than after 1972.

  By now, the reader should be aware of the limitations of “rationalist”

  theories. The decision to simultaneously launch the yushin regime and pursue an HCI drive ultimately made Park’s chances for lifelong rule very low, because in pursuit of these two goals he politically alienated much of South Korea’s general public. Moreover, he was fully aware of this danger, defiantly rejecting societal demands for liberalization with an ominous so-liloquy of “Spit on my grave!” (Naemudôme ch’im¤l paet’ôra) 21 and keeping his yushin regime afloat through a total of nine declarations of emergency measures during his last seven years of rule. His prior fixation with steel and petrochemical projects during his junta years, when per capita GNP barely surpassed one hundred dollars, also attests to his commitment to HCI projects, which cannot be explained merely in terms of a rationalist framework.

  For Park Chung Hee, the yushin regime and its HCI strategy constituted an instrument to realize his ideological vision of “rich nation, strong army” and his nationalist self-identity as a Meiji samurai taking personal risks so that his country could catch up with North Korea and then Japan and the West. Without taking seriously his “can do” rhetoric and his Meiji discourse of yushin (restoration), it is not possible to explain how a calculating man like Park could have taken highly risky decisions both politically and economically and ended up with his assorted “successes” and

  “failures.” In the chapters that follow, we consider not only the conflict and collaboration among the state, society, and foreign actors but also the interplay of Park’s idealism, realism, and passion to provide a more complete picture of Park and his era.

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  BORN IN A CRISIS

  c h a p t e r

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  The May Sixteenth Military Coup

  Yong-Sup Han

  The south korean armed forces’ intervention in politics on May 16, 1961, was historically “inevitable.” With the democratically elected Chang Myôn government (1960–1961) paralyzed by internal factional rivalries, society had been waiting for a new political elite that could pull it out of economic poverty, political instability, and social stagnation.

  The armed forces answered by launching a coup, and the military succeeded in seizing power because of this generalized public discontent. Or so it is thought in much of the literature on South Korean politics. However, upon a closer examination, nothing looks inevitable. On the contrary, if there were any powerful forces at work, they were working against, rather than for, Park’s ambition. Yet the outcome was his political triumph. History appears to be more open-ended than driven by some inexorable force to a predetermined course of events.

  First, Park was at best a second-tier leader within the South Korean armed forces, without the charisma to claim the loyalt
y of the military as an institution. Second, the coup coalition he led to power was a heterogeneous group of soldiers, internally fragmented along regional, generational, school, and service ties, which obstructed Park’s political tasks, ranging from those of coup planning, to the actual launching of military intervention, to the post-coup consolidation of power. Third, there were powerful forces outside the armed forces, especially the United States, which could exploit the internal divisions within the complex coup coali-

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  tion to oppose Park’s game plan at each stage. Fourth, the danger of hostile external forces teaming up with internal rivals within the coup coalition to obstruct Park was especially great during the first stage, when the planning for the coup proceeded almost openly despite his efforts to control the flow of information. To be sure, the success of the coup despite the information leaks shows the weakness of the civilian oversight of the military under Chang Myôn, thus creating the conditions that permitted military intervention, but it is also true that the coup attempt could have been defeated at that early stage if its potential opponents had taken the leaked information seriously and cracked down on the key coup leaders.

  Yet Park succeeded in launching the coup on May 16 and completing the first phase of power consolidation two months later with the purge of Chang To-yông and his followers in the armed forces. To explain Park’s rise to power against all odds, Chapter 1 looks at Park’s ability to make the best of what he had or did not have. His second-tier military leadership position became an asset when he chose the strategy of reaching down into the ranks of colonels and lieutenant colonels as a support base and then working up the ladders of the hierarchy within the coalition in two steps, first recruiting Chang To-yông and other senior generals to positions of top leadership to legitimize the coup, and then purging them, deeming them forces of counterrevolution, to clear the way to the top for himself.