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helped Park establish the Korea Development Institute in 1971, which was to have a profound impact on the trajectory of economic development with its research activities.85
However, it is important to emphasize that Park determined how these institutional legacies of U.S. assistance actually affected economic development. Once U.S.-trained technocrats and U.S.-aided research institutions formed an enclave of innovation, they became the vehicle for Park’s heavy and chemical industrialization, which was based on illiberal nationalist principles of control and mobilization. After some initial hesitation, the U.S.-trained technocrats turned into the advocates and agents of the state-led HCI drive in the 1970s, under Park’s leadership. It was only after Park’s death in 1979 that a new breed of U.S.-trained technocrats, armed with neoliberal economic ideas, joined Major General Chun Doo-Hwan in the search for a new formula for economic growth and political legitimization. Park maintained a complex love-hate relationship with the United States. He resented U.S. pressures for democratization, stabilization, and liberalization after he took power. After a brief interlude of collaboration post-1963, his relationship with the United States rapidly deteriorated with his declaration of the yushin constitution in 1972. Park opposed U.S.
interference in domestic affairs in the name of human rights and democracy throughout the 1970s. Nevertheless, he recognized the importance of harnessing America’s modern technology and organizational know-how for his illiberal goals. Additional considerations for Park were U.S. economic assistance, security guarantees, and policy ideas that were vital to South Korea’s economic reconstruction. This dependence on the United States set limits on Park’s dirigiste pathway to modernization. Park resented U.S. intervention, but it was precisely because the United States wielded stick and carrot to prevent the worst of Park’s inclinations that Park was able to—albeit unintentionally—fine-tune his rough navigation of economic growth.
The history of economic policy during Park’s political rule demonstrates that ideas matter. Although structure, behavior, and leadership choice are critical in explaining the dynamics of Park’s modernization, they cannot by themselves account for the mix of policy measures Park chose in order to accelerate South Korea’s modernization. To explain why he combined instrumental U.S. policy ideas with his Japanese-like ethos of control and mobilization despite the high risk of policy failure, it is necessary to explore the inner structure of Park’s ideational world. The ideological beliefs, images, and information that Park acquired through the process of political socialization offer valuable clues to the elucidation of his
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strategic choices, political maneuvers, and behavioral orientation. Equally critical, Park’s ideational world was not monolithic, but composed of multiple ideas and influences, some complementary and some conflicting.
Whereas the illiberal Japanese ethos of control and mobilization nurtured the foundations of his modernization strategy and framed it around the concepts of a commanding state, revolution from above, and “rich nation, strong army,” Park’s nationalist zeal shaped the direction of his political action, driving him to seize power through a military coup, construct an organic state corporatism, pursue mercantilistic economic policy, and mobilize civil society through indoctrination and top-down organization. The Japanese ethos and the nationalist zeal were complementary and mutually reinforcing in pushing Park to pursue the high-risk but high-yield modernization strategy of heavy and chemical industrialization. By contrast, the ideas of technocracy gained from the United States encouraged the risk taking by providing instrumental ideas. At the same time, the United States as an actor constantly counterbalanced the statist, mercantilist, and corporatist drive emerging from Park’s Japanese ethos and Korean nationalism, altering his policy ideas during the critical transition period of the mid-1960s.
In this sense, Park’s modernization strategy was an outcome of the dialectical interplay of his four ideas of statism, mercantilism, corporatism, and U.S. liberalism. It is misleading to give a monocausal explanation of the ideational background of Park’s modernization strategy. The Japanese ethos, Korean nationalism, and U.S. ideas jointly shaped his thinking.
Their dynamic interactions varied over time and across issues, making South Korean economic policy a hybrid mixture of ideas that defied the easy dichotomous classifications of state versus market, pluralism versus corporatism, and mercantilism versus laissez-faire. The longitudinal and cross-sectional variations of the way these ideas were mixed during Park’s political rule suggest that political leaders’ ideas and images are not fixed, sometimes complementing and other times contradicting each other as internal and external conditions alter. A recognition of the fluid and multidimensional nature of Park’s ideas leads to an appreciation of both the continuity and the discontinuity in the history of South Korean modernization processes. The memory, experience, and learning of the Meiji Restoration, the Showa period, militarism, and the Village Promotion Policy during the colonial era all contributed to Park’s modernization strategy. Even more important, he learned the ideas of industrial policy, export promotion, and administrative guidance from the postwar Japanese scene. The influence of the United States on Park was also powerful.
Finally, it should be noted that Park’s ideational structure was by and
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large a reflection of the South Korean people. He represented not only the mind-set of older South Koreans who experienced Japanese colonial teachings during the 1930s, but also that of young military officers who yearned for greater autonomy and independence during the postwar era. Park’s modernization can be seen as the crystallization of the aspirations of the South Korean populace, who struggled to overcome backwardness, poverty, and military vulnerability. However, as the widespread political opposition to Park’s yushin regime in the 1970s demonstrates, a new generation of more affluent, urban, and educated youth was also rapidly emerging on the political scene to challenge Park’s ideas and actions in that decade.
c h a p t e r
f i v e
The Labyrinth of Solitude:
Park and the Exercise of
Presidential Power
Byung-Kook Kim
The political leadership of Park Chung Hee is key to understanding his success in prolonging his rule and bringing economic growth. Yet most of the literature on South Korean politics and economics during his rule simply takes his leadership as a given. Or worse, looking at his leadership as based on his performance, observers assume that the historical achievement of growth necessarily conferred political leadership upon him. There are three problems with such an argument. First, the question is what kind of leadership Park had that enabled him to maximize the South Korean government’s policy performance and legitimize his rule. The issue is not that his legitimacy was defined in terms of his ability to deliver economic growth and military security, but how Park was able to bring about high performance in the first place.
Second, at the level of performance, the Park era was characterized by economic crises as much as by modernization miracles. In 1962, the currency conversion reform paralyzed financial markets precisely when Park was holding the line against rival military factions as well as Washington.
In 1972, his grip on power again seemed to be slipping away under the pressures of corporate and financial distress, on the one hand, and the escalation of his lieutenants’ and protégés’ struggle over succession within the Democratic Republican Party (DRP), on the other. And in 1979, the bubble created by heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI) burst, intensifying the political opposition’s challenge to Park’s power. Even during
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normal times, when the economy was not on the brink of collapse, the yushin regime brought double-digit growth but at the cost of severely escalated social conflict: inflation rose; income and wealth became more concentrated.
To focus on how Park nurtured, organized, and expanded his power, we must set aside the myth that he was “above” politics. To be sure, he encouraged society to believe in this myth, but he did so because that was the way he wanted others to see him. The image helped him defend his power from political rivals, foes, and protégés. The real Park had a natural instinct for power, creating new opportunities by making strategic moves a step or two ahead of others and casting them as heroes or villains in his carefully scripted political drama. Park’s manipulations were possible because he knew others’ strengths and weaknesses, and because he engaged actively but silently in everyday politics and reached far down into political parties and state ministries for vital information. Park looked like a captive and his praetorians sometimes seemed to be his prison guard, but in reality it was he who ruled. Park revealed his inner thoughts only through the drama that he had set up in which he would use others to achieve his goals.
Nor was Park plagued by a sense of illegitimacy, another myth that many observers—in particular, his critics—have perpetuated. Chapter 5
will argue that after his 1963 electoral victory, it was not his weaknesses but his strengths that explain his political moves, at least until the last months of his life. In his 1967 election campaign, he beat Yun Po-sôn by 10.5 percentage points. The gap narrowed in 1971 against Kim Dae-jung, but only to 7.6 points. The Democratic Republican Party’s control of the National Assembly was slightly more erratic, but even in its worst election, it retained its majority status. The party’s share in the National Assembly reached 62.8 percent in 1963, hit 73.7 in 1967, and fell to 55.4
in 1971. Even after 1972, when Park did away with direct presidential
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elections and filled a third of the National Assembly seats with handpicked “Yujônghoe” members, his party picked up 38.7 percent of votes in 1973—down 10.1 percentage points from 1971, but still 6.2 points higher than the New Democratic Party’s share. Only in 1978 did the DRP win fewer votes than the NDP in a National Assembly election; Park’s party lost by 0.5 percent. The alleged illegitimacy problem haunted Park before 1963 and after 1972, but it was in the period between these two years that he made his most risky political choices: normalization of diplomatic relations with Japan, military intervention in Vietnam, the constitutional amendment for a third presidential term, the Emergency Decree on Economic Stability and Growth, and heavy and chemical industrialization.
His decisions were hardly those of a weak and illegitimate leader. His risk taking bordered on recklessness, but he believed he could control situations. The problem with Park was overconfidence in his ability, not lack of confidence.1
What was Park’s political leadership made of? Park was an institution builder who nurtured his power by ruling through a two-pronged structure, with the Korea Central Intelligence Agency protecting him in the political realm and the Economic Planning Board working with the Blue House Secretariat to lead state ministries in a concerted program of resource mobilization. To steer the two-pronged state in a direction that augmented his power, Park built an intricate system of checks and balances, selective co-optation and repression, and division of labor within each of the two spheres, while at the same time empowering the KCIA and EPB to plan, execute, and monitor what was needed to control the state politically and mobilize resources to modernize the country. Park chose to work through the KCIA and the EPB, but he was also careful not to become a captive of his guards, although his ability to do so declined precipitously as he unintentionally undermined his system of checks and balances in an effort to concentrate power in the Blue House to an extreme degree during the last months of the yushin. His political rule had distinctive strengths, but also weaknesses: he depended too much on the praetorian guards and the military rather than on the political parties, which were to bring him down in 1979.
Agents, Guards, and Staff
“Never have I thought of myself as a politician,” Park once remarked.2
These words hide as much as reveal his complex personality. Park never hid his distaste for elections and his contempt for legislators. They were di-
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visive and costly, a luxury for South Korea.3 In a deeper sense, however, he was political: he knew how to acquire and use power. When he set up a military junta in May 1961, Park was already a seasoned politico from Syngman Rhee’s politicized military. He had seen how Rhee kept power not only by playing off Hamgyông and P’yôngan natives against each other but also by establishing a tightly knit military security and intelligence complex to serve as a watchdog on all factions.
Park was a victim, excluded from key army posts because of his Kyôngsang origins and at one time sentenced to life imprisonment for his leftist ideology. Park was Yi Yông-mun’s deputy director at army headquarters’
Intelligence Bureau and one of the brains behind Yi’s aborted 1952 coup attempt.4 As a witness, victim, and conspirator, his experience taught him three rules that served him well after he seized power in 1961: control the flow of information, divide and conquer, and use regionalist sentiments.
When Park chose artillery as his new field in 1952, he learned another rule: plan, execute, and monitor. “Unlike the infantry,” writes Park biographer Cho Kap-che, “an artilleryman aims for a target lying beyond his sight. To improve his hit ratio, he has to check on his shell’s location and correct his calculation of distance and direction. Working behind [the front lines], he is also trained to operate with a broad objective view. The artillery is multidimensional, systematic, and mathematical.”5 This discipline distinguished Park from Rhee. The two tried to put allies as well as foes under a tight watch by monopolizing intelligence services, breeding jealousy and distrust among factional leaders, and stirring up regionalist prejudices. But Park was more systematic and organized in pursuit of his goals and hence more successful. The centerpiece of Park’s power apparatus was the Korea Central Intelligence Agency, established by law only twenty-four days after the May 16 coup of 1961.
The KCIA
Establishing the KCIA represented Park’s first decision on what to do with his newly won power and how to guard it from allies and foes alike. Prepared by Lieutenant Colonel Kim Chong-p’il, whose life had been tightly intertwined with Park’s by marriage as well as by career since 1949, Law no. 619 had only nine articles. Article 1 made the KCIA more like a Soviet KGB than an American CIA by placing domestic as well as foreign intelligence within its legal jurisdiction; by adding a criminal investigatory power to its arsenal; and by empowering it to “coordinate and supervise state ministries’—including the armed forces’—intelligence and investigation activities on issues related to national security.” Through Article 3,
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the agency could “set up local branches when necessary.” Article 7 stipulated that its agents could “receive support and assistance from all state institutions when necessary for [their] work.”6 In one law with nine articles, Kim Chong-p’il had set up the KCIA as a planner, an executor, and a monitor for his boss.
Park did amend Law no. 619 when he restored electoral politics in 1963, but only to block democratization from obstructing the KCIA’s mandate. The amended law’s Article 9 empowered the KCIA director to employ sold
iers and bureaucrats for any given period on the agency’s payroll. By a new Article 11, the KCIA director could also refuse requests for reports for or testimony to and questioning by National Assembly members or by a newly formed Board of Audit and Inspection on matters pertaining to “national secrets.” With all rival coup leaders purged by 1963, Park also made it his presidential prerogative to appoint the KCIA director.7
From its inception, the KCIA was Park’s favorite instrument of power.
Unlike state ministries, it could ensure secrecy in both the formulation and the implementation of policy. By bringing people from line ministries and the armed forces into a working group, the KCIA could also rise above ministerial turf wars and devise policy solely from Park’s perspective. Law no. 619 permitted the KCIA to hide its budget in the expenditures of other state ministries for reasons of national security, which enabled the agency to act outside the supervision of the National Assembly. Nevertheless, though the KCIA provided Park many advantages, it also entailed grave political risks. The KCIA’s political intrigues, backed by terror and espionage, alienated party politicians and chaeya dissidents and stirred up anti-government protests.8 Worse, the KCIA might someday turn against Park and seize power itself.
To dodge popular fury, but also to keep the KCIA in line, Park always used it as a scapegoat and dismissed its director when public discontent increased and protests reached a dangerous level. For a surprisingly long time, his strategy worked. The ruling party, as well as the opposition, blamed three KCIA directors—a “showy” Kim Chong-p’il (1961–1963), an “illiterate” Kim Hyông-uk (1963–1969), and a “cunning” Yi Hu-rak (1970–1973)—for political excesses before turning against Park. Against such loyal praetorians, the ever suspicious Park built alternative information channels and put in place rival surveillance agents. The Presidential Security Service looked for any “irregular” activities. The Army Security Command joined in to keep the KCIA in check.9
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