Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

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  school. When he and fellow students in their last year of primary school took the examination for future study, he passed with the highest scores.

  Along with some 150 other top students in Singapore, Lee was accepted into Raffles Institution, the outstanding secondary school in Singapore.

  Raffles was modeled on English public schools and many teachers were English. Many graduates went off to the leading universities of England.

  Like other students in the British colonies, Lee studied English literature, the history of the British Empire, mathematics, and geography, but he decided he wanted to become a lawyer. In the Senior Cambridge University entrance examinations held in Singapore, Lee scored the best in all Malaya. In 1940, because of the war in Europe, Lee chose to remain in Singapore and attend Raffles College.

  Immediately after the war, Lee went to England for further study. At Cambridge he concentrated in law but also acquired a strong background in history and comparative politics. Like many students in Britain from the colonies, he was influenced by Harold Laski and his socialist agenda, in which governments accepted responsibility for helping to provide housing, employment, social security, and medical care. While still in England, however, Lee came to realize that governments that accepted social responsibility without a secure competitive economic base were in trouble.

  Cambridge provided excellent training in writing, public speaking, and reasoning. Lee took a special interest in Great Britain’s empire. At the time, colonialism in South and Southeast Asia was already under siege. Lee, like many students from the colonies, took an active role in debates about independence struggles.

  In China, leftists then classified their country as “semi-colonial,” but Deng, born in 1904, grew up in a village in the southwest, remote from the coastal areas where colonialists were concentrated. At age five, he began attending a private school to study the Confucian classics, and two years later, he entered the public lower primary school in a nearby market town.

  The Qing dynasty had fallen shortly before he started, and the school was experimenting with new educational materials that included math, science, and business as well as history and literature. After four years there, he passed exams to enter a school equivalent to a junior high school, from which he graduated at fourteen. Along with about one percent of his age group, he passed the examination to the Guang’an County Middle School, the only such school in his county of some 200,000 people.2 After scarcely a year there, Deng’s father sent him to a school in Chongqing preparing students for a work-study program in France. In July 1920, after a year of study, Deng was the youngest of those who passed the written and oral examinations given by the French consulate. A month after graduation, at

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  age sixteen, Deng and eighty-two other students from Sichuan left by boat for France.3

  On the way, the boat stopped in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, and Sri Lanka, where Deng had a chance to observe the cruel, conde-scending way in which whites mistreated locals and rich local businessmen mistreated their workers. Later, when he learned what Marxists said about imperialism and capitalism, their words resonated with what he had seen.

  Deng’s funds to study in France proved inadequate, so that except for a few months studying French language and customs,4 he received no training and had to settle for factory jobs with low pay and poor working and living conditions. His education in France came primarily from analyzing what he saw or experienced in Paris, Lyons, and other cities, and what he saw was rich capitalists exploiting the labor of poorly paid workers. Unlike Atatürk, Deng did not master French.

  Park Chung Hee, unlike Deng who grew up in a landlord family and Lee and Atatürk who grew up in middle-class families, grew up in a poor tenant farm family and suffered as a child from malnutrition. Like the other three, however, Park had roots in traditional society yet also excelled in schools that provided modern Western training. He grew up in rural North Kyôngsang Province, near the rail line between Pusan and Seoul that had recently been built by the Japanese. He was a top student at the Manchurian Military Academy in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and while still a student was recognized as a person destined to rise to high positions.

  In Atatürk’s youth, foreign powers invaded Turkey, but his education was still directed by Turks. In Deng Xiaoping’s youth, imperial powers had nibbled at the periphery of China, but until he went to France all his teachers were Chinese. Lee Kuan Yew grew up in schools controlled by Great Britain, but in his youth, the occupation by Britain was far less pervasive and far less humiliating than the massive Japanese presence in Korea, during which Koreans spoke only Japanese in schools, took Japanese names, and knew that any signs of Korean loyalty would be brutally punished.

  Though thoroughly indoctrinated with the occupier’s worldview in Japanese-run schools, Park felt a sense of national shame that he could not hold his head up as a Korean in his own country. He was sufficiently imbued with the Confucian respect for authority he learned as a child that throughout his life, he aimed to build a modern Confucian state whose authority would also be respected. He greatly admired the industrial modernization Japan had achieved through the Meiji Restoration. During his service in the Japanese-led Manchurian military, he had to keep his national identity as a Korean under control until, when he was twenty-eight,

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  Japan was defeated and he left the Japanese military. Because of his deep involvement with Japan’s forces, Park, like many Koreans of his generation, had more difficulty defining his national identity than Atatürk, Lee, or Deng. Even though he later received great help from the United States militarily and economically, Park remained less comfortable with West-erners than with Japanese. He began working with the American military after 1945, and had more direct contact with Americans than Atatürk, Lee, or Deng. But because his elder brother, shot by rightists during the Taegu uprising of 1946, took part in leftist activities, Park was suspected of communist leanings and was alienated from the U.S. military.5

  Young Adulthood: Anticolonialism and

  Breaking with the Colonial Powers

  During the childhood of the four leaders, colonialism around the world was strong, but they came to power after its strength had peaked. The growing attacks on colonial powers with the rise of nationalism and the thirst of countries for independence gave them hope that the trend of history was on their side. China had never been fully colonized, but foreigners had enclaves along the coast. Turkey was colonized only in the years immediately after World War I, but foreign businesspeople had dominated the economy before that. Although Atatürk and Deng did not live in colonies, they came to share Lee and Park’s passion against outside domination. All four fervently wanted to establish governments that served the interests of their people, not those of the outside powers. They all had confidence that they understood and served the needs of their country better than the outside powers and, given those needs, could rule more effectively than outsiders. They did not believe that the American vision of Western-style democracy was appropriate for their country, at least in their time.

  In their youth their personal relations with individual colonialists were complex. All had been selected for advancement by representatives of imperial powers, who gave them opportunities because their talent had been recognized through examinations. They were all befriended by individual imperialists. And yet their observations of the injustice and suffering that their fellow countrymen endured at the hands of colonialists turned them into ardent nationalists. Their lives became totally consumed in the effort to build a strong independent nation.

  Ironically, Atatürk, who fought European imperialism, was himself from a former empire, the Ottoman, which in the sixteenth century was one of

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  the great powers in the world. But the Ottoman empire had begun to fall apa
rt far earlier than the European empires which, with industrialization, were able to extend the life and the reach of imperialism. From the late nineteenth century until World War I, the Ottoman empire was under continuous strain as local areas within the empire demanded more autonomy and European powers expanded their influence into the remains of the empire.

  Turkey, the remaining core of the old Ottoman empire, successfully defended itself against the Greeks in the thirty-day war of 1897, but just before World War I it lost most of its territory in the Balkans and North Africa. Turkey’s effort to defend itself against the more powerful European powers by modernizing its army without a strong industrial base strained its financial resources, forcing it to go into debt to Europeans, mostly Germans, who lent it money. The Turkish investment in its military was not enough to stem the tide of the advancing European powers, and Turkey became known as the “sick man of Europe.”

  Atatürk, in his early twenties, had become aware that Turkey would never regain control over the Balkans or its North African territories, and he believed that Turkey should defend its core territorial base, where it would build a strong modern nation. In 1907 he cast his lot with other

  “Young Turks” in the CUP (Committee for Union and Progress Party). In 1908 the Young Turks seized power from Sultan Abdul Hamid II and took over the leadership of Turkey. But Atatürk, who was not given a high position by the Young Turk leaders, came to realize that the new power holders were merely replacing one group of leaders with another without making the institutional changes needed to strengthen the country. Atatürk was shocked and dismayed when he learned that Young Turk leaders, desperate to be on the good side of the winners in World War I, had allied with Germany. When the gamble failed, Turkey was confronted by the predatory Allied powers of Europe, which sent in occupation troops.

  Lee Kuan Yew, before going to England to study, had enjoyed the benefits given to talented youth in Singapore, and was not a passionate anti-colonialist. His grandfather was an Anglophile and Lee attended English schools while some 90 percent of the children of Singapore’s ethnic Chinese community attended Chinese schools. Lee later wrote that he first questioned whether the British had the ability to rule Singapore for the good of the local people when the Japanese captured Singapore in 1942.

  The Japanese conquest of Western colonies in Southeast Asia destroyed the myth that Western powers were invulnerable. Lee’s doubts about colonialism grew stronger while he was in England, because he could see that the British elite he met were more concerned with advancing their own financial interests in the colonies than with benefiting the local population. He

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  observed British who did not rent to non-Caucasians or welcome them on sports teams.6

  Lee’s anti-colonialism intensified after he returned to Singapore from England in 1950. He became increasingly upset at the concentration of power in the hands of British officials. He legally dropped “Harry” from his given name, “Harry Kuan Yew Lee,” and thereafter used the name

  “Lee Kuan Yew.” As a lawyer he took on clients disadvantaged under British rule. His experience defending postal workers and other union members and students reinforced his conviction that the government leaders were not dealing fairly with the local populace, that the government was vulnerable to well-organized legal protests, and that by giving legal advice, issuing carefully worded public statements, and taking part in political groups, he could contribute to independence for Singapore.7 In November 1954, he and others formed the Political Action Party to show the rottenness of colonial rule and gather public support for ending it.8

  Deng Xiaoping and his fellow Chinese who went to France had the confidence that came from being selected as a promising young elite, but in France they were poverty-stricken workers and identified with the down-trodden. They started study groups, in which fellow students reported on the Russian Revolution that had occurred three years before Deng arrived in France and on Marx’s and Lenin’s writings.

  One year before Deng went to France, he had taken part as a fifteen-year-old in the explosive May 4, 1919, patriotic demonstrations in China.

  To Deng and his comrades in France, the rich exploitative capitalists and warlords in China were not capable of bringing order to their nation or looking out for the benefit of the common people. Like Atatürk, Deng came from an ancient civilization that was being dismembered and whose leadership was not up to the task of defending the country. A revolution along the lines of the Russian one seemed to Deng and others to be the only way to build a strong China that could improve the lives of ordinary people. In June 1922, only a year after the Communist Party was founded in China, Zhou Enlai and others in France helped to found a communist organization of youth in Europe. Deng Xiaoping joined the communist-led Youth League that year, and in June 1923 he went to Paris to become a professional worker in the league. He worked part time in factories to earn money for survival. In July 1924, one month before his twentieth birthday, Deng joined the Communist Party.9

  In early 1925, after Deng joined other Chinese students in demonstrating against the French government’s cooperation with the Chinese government, French police began searching for him. Deng escaped to Moscow and studied for a year at the newly established Sun Yat-Sen University there to train workers for the Communist International. Deng studied So-

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  viet views on economics, history, the contemporary world, the theory and practice of the Russian Revolution, nationality and colonialism, and social development in China. He also took part in military training.

  Although his experiences in France and Moscow radicalized Deng, he still felt China could learn a great deal from Western countries. Deng and others who became communists in France later became among the more cosmopolitan leaders of the Chinese Communist Party leadership. After returning to China some died in the revolutionary struggle, but many others, including Zhou Enlai, Li Fuchun, Nie Rongzhen, Li Weihan, Chen Yi, and Deng became revolutionary leaders and, after 1949, important officials.10

  Park Chung Hee was one of the small number of talented Koreans admitted to the Manchurian Military Academy and later spent two years at the Japanese Military Academy in Zama. Like other Korean youth in the Manchurian (Manchukuo) army, Park served throughout World War II.

  As an officer under the Japanese military, Park had to assist in keeping control over Koreans, but he and his fellow Koreans in the Manchurian army were acutely aware that they lacked the full privileges and opportunities that Japanese of comparable ability were given. Nonetheless, the model of dedicated Japanese patriots in the Japanese army serving their emperor stayed with Park when he later sought to build a strong Korea.

  In 1946 Park became a student in the second class of the Korea Military Academy. In the immediate period after World War II, before the sharp lines of the cold war were drawn, he cooperated with people who were communists. For this he was condemned to death, saved only by former superiors who knew him well. Before the Korean War began, however, he had cast his lot with the anticommunists. During the war, he served as an official in military intelligence and was considered an outstanding young officer. But like other soldiers of his age who had served in the Manchukuo army, Park lacked the unblemished patriotic credentials of the other three leaders considered in this chapter who fought for independence in their countries and of Koreans young enough to have escaped service under the Japanese. Many Koreans who suffered under Japanese colonialism found it difficult to give Park and his generation who cooperated with the Japanese the undivided respect accorded to those with a purer patriotic history.

  Rise to Power

  Long before they rose to power, all four leaders began considering how to rebuild their countries. They had sufficient confidence in their own ability

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  that they were prepared at the appropriate time to break with superiors who held different views. To
ughened through conflict, they did not shy away from confrontation, but they were shrewd enough not to take on battles without purpose or prospects for success. They were ambitious, with no hesitation about taking leadership roles, but power was to be used for a cause, to strengthen their country, firm up its borders, and enrich their people.

  Atatürk rose to prominence through his heroism and success as a military leader. In 1915 he distinguished himself as one of the most outstanding front-line commanders in the defense of the Gallipoli peninsula, where he played a major role in stopping the French and British troops from storming the peninsula and marching on to Istanbul. At the peak of the fighting, with a fever, he heroically led his troops for four days with virtually no sleep to stop the advance. In 1917–1918 on the Caucasus front, Atatürk again distinguished himself in leading troops into battle, becoming a national hero. Through careful study of enemy strategy he was unusually successful in anticipating what the other side might do. In a crunch, if his superiors asked him to move in ways not in keeping with his analysis, he would disobey orders so he could defeat the enemy. His intensity and determination helped inspire his troops, who were willing to engage in pitched battles even when facing almost certain death, sometimes without adequate ammunition or supplies.

  After the loss in World War I, the senior leaders of the CUP were discredited both for having allied with Germany and for being ready to sign a humiliating treaty that would have divided Turkey among the victors.

  Atatürk did not rank high enough in the CUP to take part in the decision to ally with Germany, and he was convinced from the beginning that it was a mistake. After the Germans lost, he was distraught that the CUP

  leaders and the sultan wanted to accept the terms dictated by the victorious Allies.

  Long interested in political issues, Atatürk in 1919, as a highly regarded military hero, split with the capitulationist sultan and emerged as the leader of high-level military officers determined to maintain an independent Turkey. Before taking the bold step of splitting with the sultan, Atatürk secretly recruited key military commanders to his cause without first announcing that he intended to get rid of the sultan. Taking advantage of people’s fury over the Allied occupation, over incidents like the Greek military’s killing of several hundred Turks in Smyrna, and over the Allied powers’ plans to dominate Istanbul, he gained popular support for his aim of driving out the foreigners. In 1919 after issuing a Declaration of Independence, he formed his own Nationalist Congress, and in April 1920