Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  However, by 1966, if not earlier, Park began to realign his view. In his 1966 state of the union speech, Park argued that “in order to establish a firm national identity and to overcome social apathy, [South Korea] should reaffirm the superior legacies of [its] culture and tradition and foster the creation of a new culture on the basis of these legacies.”35 In his 1971 book The Potential Power of Our Nation, Park claimed that South Korea was different from other newly independent countries because it possessed rich historical and cultural legacies. “I am proud that for two thousand years prior to the late nineteenth century,” Park wrote, “our history was the history of endless resistance to foreign invasion and the history of originality and creativity.”36

  With his rediscovery of Korea’s national identity, Park began large public works programs to preserve and restore cultural relics and historical sites, and also sought to revive and re-create national myths, symbols, and ritual through the glorification of national heroes, including Admiral Yi Sun-sin (1545–1598) and King Sejong (1397–1450).37 In 1968 Park issued the National Educational Charter, which defined “national revival” as the historical mission of his time. “Fostering national spirit” became the goal of modernization. The earlier defeatism disappeared. In its place was now the conservative version of an assertive nationalism that aimed to mobilize society to put forth the necessary effort to build up heavy and chemical in-

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  dustries. Park’s plans derived not only from confidence built up during his country’s recent high economic growth but also from a sense of crisis precipitated by the U.S. desire for military disengagement from East Asia and the erosion of alliance ties with the United States amid disputes over human rights in South Korea and its KCIA-orchestrated illegal lobbying in Washington. Park’s political ambition to prepare for and then consolidate his authoritarian yushin regime also factored into his decision to invoke nationalism.

  In the mid-1970s Park’s ideological position underwent another meta-morphosis. Throughout the 1960s, he had persistently condemned the Confucian tradition as the root cause of factionalism, formalism, flunkeyism, and impractical discourse, all of which he believed “deformed” political development, caused social stagnation, and retarded progress in science and technology.38 In 1969, to weed out the Confucian tradition, he had even promulgated new family ritual codes that severely restricted South Koreans’ practice of Confucian rituals. Reversing himself in 1977, Park asserted that the “tradition of loyalty and filial piety [was] rooted in love of, and dedication to, the community to which one belongs. The state

  [was] a larger community and, the family [was] a smaller community of people’s life. Love toward [the] two communities was identical in substance.”39 To put the tradition on a legitimate footing, moreover, he negated the then prevalent dichotomous view of tradition and modernity as opposites and argued that “traditional thoughts and attitudes, mistakenly viewed as barriers to modernization, not only [serve] as the catalyst of modernization, but also [are] the source of national power that [propel]

  the process of modernization in the direction we desire.”40

  Park thus became a born-again Confucian, instructing the Ministry of Education to incorporate the traditions of loyalty and filial piety into the school curricula in 1977. The Academy of Korean Studies, modeled after the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, was established in 1978 to serve as the intellectual infrastructure for research in Korean studies and the dissemination of traditional values and historical ideas throughout society. The turn to Confucian values contradicted Park’s past actions in 1961, but that past was now distant in the public’s memory. To people of the late 1970s, Park was not a rebel with a vision of change, but the leader of mainstream society, his power successfully consolidated and secure in his role as the conservative guard of the yushin regime. To the dissident intelligentsia, he was the author of a repressive regime, to be overthrown by sporadic but intense popular protests. To radical religious activists and union organizers, he was in addition responsible for breaking up South Korea’s homogeneity through the reproduction of class tensions and contradictions in the pro-

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  cess of dependent development. Park wished to tame this unruly political and social terrain by invoking the traditional values of loyalty and filial piety as the Japanese military had in the 1930s.

  Park’s nationalist template therefore varied over time, changing as the domestic and external environments altered. Nevertheless, nationalism remained a consistent ideological theme that wove his different periods of rule into one integrated whole of top-down modernization. The nationalist ethos was what drove his modernization drive and shaped the nature and scope of his strategy. Given the concentration of power in the imperial presidency and the lack of countervailing power in society, Park’s personality, value system, and leadership style had a visible impact in the political arena. For Park, U.S.-style liberal democracy encouraged social fragmentation and political strife. He sought a political system where unity, harmony, and sacrifice would prevail. The yushin system, established in defiance of democratic procedures, emulated the ideal of an institutionalized organic state corporatism and embodied Park’s conservative nationalist political vision of single-mindedly pursuing economic growth.

  The vision of corporatist governance became one of the major themes in Park’s speeches and writings in the late 1970s: “We are different from the West that pits the individual against the state. For us, the individual and the country [as a whole] are integral parts of a harmonious order . . . Our history is littered with good examples of national heroes who sacrificed personal interests for national interests . . . This is the potential power of our nation that has led our history.”41

  It is this conception of the “individual” and the “nation” that inspired the construction of Park’s corporatist political template. The nation was greater than the mere sum of the individuals that constituted it. The individual’s existence derived its raison d’être from its relationship to others and to the nation. To borrow an Aristotelian analogy, Park saw the nation as the “matter,” and the state as the “form.” “The nation is forever,”

  Park declared, “[but] the life of the nation can be developed and grown only through the state. The ultimate goal of the [state], as the nurturer of our nation, is national unification and national renaissance.”42 With these words, Park embraced the Hegelian-like ethos that championed the virtues of the absolute state. It was this statist orientation with which Park organized, co-opted, and controlled civil society. In the name of the state and the nation, the yushin regime created tight corporatist networks of capital, labor, and farmers for a top-down mobilization led by the state that excluded and penalized any social forces that resisted. The dissident intelligentsia, coupled with religious activists, labor organizers, and opposition politicians, were the targets of exclusion, while Park formed a develop-

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  mentalist coalition by co-opting and rewarding state bureaucrats, big business, small farmers, and mainstream intelligentsia in the 1970s.43

  Nationalist ideology was also pronounced in the economic domain.

  Park conceived modernization mainly in terms of economic development, to be achieved on the basis of self-reliance and self-help.44 With economic self-help, South Korea could reduce its dependence on the United States, catch up with North Korea and eventually even Japan, and enhance national power. Park intended to achieve this prerequisite of national survival, prosperity, and prestige by engineering the mercantilist strategy of export promotion and the economic nationalist path to heavy and chemical industrialization. As Alice H. Amsden and Robert Wade have correctly observed, even South Korea’s transition to an outward-looking export strategy on the basis of economic stabilization and market liberalization between 1963 and 196645 was driven by Park’s mercantile ethos, goals, and practices.46 In 1967, South Korea took critical measures to libera
lize its trade regime by changing its trade protectionist system from the “positive list system” to the “negative list system.” Nonetheless, its protectionist barriers remained high, so that its import-liberalization ratio stood at 61.3 percent in 1978, far below that of Japan, which rose from 40 percent in 1960 to 90 percent in 1969, and even lower than the import-liberalization ratio of Taiwan, which hit 90 percent by the mid-1970s.47

  The persistence of protectionism in spite of stabilization, liberalization, and export promotion was attributed in part to the continuing practice of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). Contrary to orthodox economic theory, the turn to export promotion did not end ISI in South Korea. On the contrary, Park saw the two as complementary, because given the lack of domestic demand and the underdevelopment of forwardly- and backwardly-linked industries, any ISI project had to be pursued as a project of export promotion and vice versa from the very start. The yushin regime allocated credit first to the heavy and chemical industries as targets of both export promotion and import substitution. While the average rate of real protection stood at 2.3 percent for all industries in 1978, the heavy and chemical industries enjoyed a protection ratio of 16.4 percent. For the six industries designated as strategic sectors—steel, nonferrous metals, machinery, chemical, shipbuilding, and electronics—the real market protection ratio reached 35 percent.48

  Park’s pursuit of ISI was visible even in the heyday of liberalization. As the Ministry of Commerce and Industry prepared to move to the negative list system to get South Korea into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Economic Planning Board seized the South Korean–Japanese talks on normalization as an opportunity to construct an integrated steel

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  mill. Resisting Japan’s insistence that South Korea use reparation funds for the importation of Japanese consumer goods, the EPB succeeded in allocating the funds to the construction of the Pohang Iron & Steel Company.49 When the opportunity to pursue heavy and chemical industrialization outside the market arose, as it did in the case of the normalization talks, Park did not hesitate to seize it, regardless of the risks and costs.

  Economic nationalism and mercantilism were alive and well even as an export-led development strategy was launched in the mid-1960s.

  Park’s export-led growth strategy was driven by economic nationalism.

  What looked like a liberal turn to the global market was in essence illiberal in nature, conceptualized as South Korea’s only way to ensure national survival and wealth, implemented from the top down by the state, and mixing protectionist and liberalization measures to trigger an economic takeoff. The export sectors were the primary beneficiaries of a wide range of policy incentives, including preferential allocation of subsidized credits; exemption of tariffs on raw materials, intermediate goods, and capital goods; and a variety of tax incentives, license privileges, technological aid, and infrastructural benefits such as the provision of information and industrial complexes.50 In other words, except for the labor-intensive light manufacturing industries, the export competitiveness of many South Korean goods was an artificial construct of the dirigiste state, not a product of comparative advantage. The letter and spirit of reciprocity, one of the major underlying norms and principles of the liberal global trading regime of the postwar era, were more often violated than upheld in South Korea’s pursuit of national wealth and strength, even in the case of export industries.

  The success of state-led export growth depended critically on the availability of foreign capital. Even before the Foreign Capital Inducement Act was introduced in 1966, Park saw access to foreign capital and technology as the key to fostering economic development in a resource-poor country like South Korea. On the issue of foreign capital, Park was a pragmatist: “I don’t care [what] the national origin of capital [is]. I welcome capital from the United States, West Germany, Italy, and other European countries.

  Even if it is Japanese capital, I don’t care as long as it is used for the economic development of our country.”51 Nonetheless, welcoming foreign capital did not mean lifting regulatory measures. On the contrary, Park put in place a diverse array of restrictions and regulations, particularly on foreign direct investment, in order to nurture the chaebol into national champions and harness foreign capital for Park’s goals of economic independence. A great chunk of industries was off limits to foreign direct investment under the positive list system until the early 1980s, and the

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  local operation of foreign business was closely restricted. In addition to the restrictive laws, protectionist institutions, bureaucratic red tape, and the chaebol conglomerates’ opposition to foreign competition, public hostility to foreign investment prevented foreign investors from even owning land.

  Several factors accounted for the heavy regulation. First, Park personally preferred foreign loans to foreign direct investment, because of his emphasis on greater autonomy and independence in the management of the national economy.52 He thought he could strategically allocate foreign loans to target sectors for the realization of his developmental objectives if the state underwrote foreign loans. At the same time, it was difficult to secure foreign manufacturers who were willing to invest directly in joint ventures that could someday become their competitors. Second, even if Park were receptive to the hosting of foreign direct investment, the inflow of foreign direct investment would have remained small, because of South Korea’s poor resource endowment, limited domestic market, unstable domestic politics, and security vulnerability. Consequently much of the foreign direct investment South Korea had was confined to the relatively competitive light industries located in special free export zones. The enclave nature of foreign direct investment saved South Korea from overhauling its legal system and institutional infrastructure to accommodate the needs of outside investors, which would have obstructed the state from developing national champions. Finally, Park’s pursuit of heavy and chemical industrialization through ISI created myriad infant industries that had an interest in preventing the economic bureaucracy from undertaking more assertive liberalization measures regarding foreign direct investment.

  The political and social domains were deeply affected by Park’s nationalism as well. To establish a system of mobilization that could back his economic strategy, Park constantly invoked nationalist ideology and organized mass organizations from the National Construction Corps to the Movement for National Reconstruction and the New Community Movement to the home reserve forces in a classic top-down fashion with the help of the powerful state bureaucracy. For Park, nationalism was both a consummate ideal, valued for itself, and an instrumental means of legitimization.53 To separate the two and identify Park as either a true believer or a manipulator of nationalism fails to capture the spirit of his regime. Park was both, resulting in the deep penetration of the nationalist ethos into every aspect of his modernization strategy. Park’s nationalist ideology proved to be very effective in expediting the process of industrialization. If the Japanese ethos helped him shape the contours of modernization, nationalism provided Park with the locomotive of socioeconomic mobiliza-

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  tion and depoliticization for his authoritarian ways of modernization and industrialization.

  Administrative Democracy

  Park also identified the goal of modernization as “the reconstruction of sound democracy.” By this, he meant building a system of political rule that fit in with South Korea’s historical conditions: The history of the importation of [Western] democracy has been a failure.

  The failure was an unavoidable result of the ‘direct import’ of exogenous democracy without filtering [it] through reflections on our history and the context of our life. The ‘closed morality’ of the kinship-based family community has bred political factionalism centered on local, familial, and religious ties, leading to the failure of democratic politics. We can import a form of democracy, but not its contents . .
. [It] is fortunate that we have come to realize the relevance of the ‘Koreanization’ of democracy. Democracy is predicated not on irresponsible liberty, but on self-regulating and disciplined liberty, and, therefore, it is necessary to include leadership and guidance in our concept of democracy.54

  Identifying more with populism or corporatism than with pluralist, procedural democracy, Park thought any idea of democracy had to embrace three political concepts. The first of the three prerequisites was “administrative democracy,” which set the ideal of political order and efficiency over democratic procedures and the rule of law.55 Instead of going through due legislative processes, administrative democracy relied heavily on the state bureaucracy to steer the process of modernization. The bureaucratic state was the coordinator that disciplined, mobilized, and directed civil society to implement the goals and visions of the executive leadership. This guidance depended not only on bureaucratic competence and institutional inertia but also on bureaucratic loyalty to the national leadership.

  Consequently, in order to ensure the uninterrupted and effective guidance of social forces, Park sought to insulate state bureaucrats from contending political and social legislative pressures and to provide them with wide discretionary powers. He believed it was acceptable to transcend, cir-cumvent, and even break legal procedures—if necessary—to achieve collective goals. The readiness to compromise the law was most evident when he dealt with corruption and organized crime. While having lunch with his staff on June 8, 1972, Park quipped: “If you rely on the rule of law too much, you cannot get things done. Wiping out gangsters is a case in point.

  If you have important tasks to implement, don’t be constrained by the

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  law!” The yushin regime was the epitome of administrative democracy, eliminating the time-honored but also time-consuming, conflict-ridden, and legally cumbersome processes of liberal democracy in favor of quick administrative “fixes.”56