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1987 direct presidential elections.32 Alarmed by the Chôlla voters’ rallying around Kim Dae-jung, the electorate of Pusan and South Kyôngsang Province sided with Kim Young-sam by 53.7 percent in 1987 and 72.8 percent in 1992. Until Roh Moo-hyun of the postwar generation was elected president in 2002, South Korean party politics came to be thoroughly dominated by the politicians, whose leadership was built up either by opposing Park as a leader of democratic struggles in the case of Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, or by crafting the image of a trusted lieutenant of a modernizer Park in the case of Kim Chong-p’il.
The tenacity of regionalist party politics turned into the enduring legacy of money politics as well. Because South Korea’s regionalism lacked any programmatic vision, both the Park and the post-Park era were prevented from building a strong political party system on the basis of balancing what Angelo Panebianco once argued are two necessary ingredients for strong party organization: “selective incentives” such as power, prestige, or money that lure the elite into becoming party careerists; and “collective” or ideological incentives that gain mass support for the political party from the rank and file as well as from the electoral constituency.33
As these collective incentives were in short supply with the constitutional revision to clear the way for a third presidential term in 1969 and for lifelong rule in 1972, and his anticommunist cold war ideologies failed to develop a proactive programmatic vision for the public, Park Chung Hee came to rely not only on regionalist agitation and McCarthyist Red scares but also on money politics to build a political machine. Without any real rank and file willing to pay annual dues for a commonly held political value, the DRP had to raise campaign funds from chaebol groups by promising subsidies and license privileges and using those funds to hire local brokers as campaign workers. To keep able local brokers on its side between elections, the DRP also had to maintain large district party chapters nationwide with some of the local brokers on its payroll. Thus formed a
“chain of prey” (môki sas¤l), with party leaders, chaebol groups, and local power brokers feeding on each other to buy influence. The use of “selective incentives” had negative consequences on South Korea’s moral fabric as well as on its economy,34 diverting scarce resources from productive activities precisely when the overexpansionary export machine ran into a liquidity problem.
In contrast to regionalist party politics that only worsened and ideological mobilization that evolved into progressive-conservative rivalries after the democratic breakthrough of 1987, money politics came to be incrementally but irreversibly foiled after 1995. Even during the presidency of Roh Tae-woo, the reformist National Assembly had tried to wage a moral
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crusade against money politics by holding assembly hearings on the human rights abuses and corruption committed during Chun Doo-hwan’s rule, but the hearings produced at best a mixed outcome. Wary of political paralysis and its impact on economic stagnation, but also satisfied with the political damage inflicted on Roh Tae-woo with the revelation of the human rights abuses and corruption committed by Chun Doo-hwan, Roh Tae-woo’s mentor, the opposition let Chun Doo-hwan go free—but on the condition that he turns over all remaining political funds and go into “exile” in a secluded Buddhist temple in Sôlak for two years. The two issues of human rights abuses and corruption, however, refused to go away, even after Kim Young-sam, in his capacity as the newly elected president, purged 11 National Assembly members with shady records of illicit wealth accumulation and abuse of human rights; arrested, retired, or dismissed 23 military generals on active service or in the reserves for questionable roles in Chun Doo-hwan’s 1979 military mutiny and 1980 coup d’état, bribery, or human rights abuses; indicted 7 business executives for shady deals; and brought a criminal charge against a public prosecutor who had hunted down dissidents since the time of the yushin. The turning point came in 1995, when the slush funds stashed away by Roh Tae-woo were discovered, forcing Kim Young-sam to order another round of investigation.
This time, the procurator general arrested Roh Tae-woo after interrogat-ing some forty chaebol owners as “references” and “accomplices” and also moved against Chun Doo-hwan for the 1980 military coup as well as for illicit wealth accumulation.
Despite the prosecution of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, however, progress came slowly because the political parties of the post-1987
democratic era still based their organization on regionalist agitation and the ill-articulated rhetoric of progressive and conservative ideologies, failing to develop beyond the stage of “cadre” parties. Possessing neither a coherent ideological vision nor a densely organized network of linkages to social forces, the post-1987 political parties turned to the old game of money politics, albeit in much more discreet ways, in order to maintain the dense network of local power brokers and to run the costly nonprogram-matic election campaigns. Consequently, in spite of the sporadic crackdowns on money politics, parties were shunned by the public as the cul-prits of money politics that eroded South Korea’s fragile moral fabric, weakened its once dynamic export machine, and obstructed the policymakers’ focus on policy by breeding regionalist prejudices and populist sentiments. However, because they were political parties that by definition assumed the role of articulating public sentiments into goals, agendas, and strategies of reform and developing the basic political language or dis-
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course with which to aggregate conflicting demands of society, the post-1987 political parties were constantly called on to break away from the politics of regionalist agitation, ideological rhetoric, and money politics that they themselves practiced and, in the process, became the targets of their own prosecutorial politics. Essentially, the post-1987 political parties lived in a transitional era, where careers were made through the old ways of regionalist agitation, ideological prejudices, and money politics, but were judged by the unsystematically imagined but electrifying new vision of transparent and responsive democracy. Until this gap between the reality and the ideal was bridged, many of the post-1987 party politicians were destined to fall, much like their pre-1987 predecessors, during the post-1987 democratic era.
The Coercive System
The system of selective coercion was the most dysfunctional of the three systems. In fact, it is uncertain whether the coercive system actually helped even Park, because with every act of coercion, he created one more enemy and weakened his own legitimacy. But what was important was that Park thought the KCIA to be the indispensable pillar of his political rule, and he acted on this belief. During the military junta years, Park had the KCIA orchestrate the purge of rival northern military factions, silence chaeya dissidents and opposition politicians with a show of force, and clandestinely organize the DRP in preparation for electoral politics. The KCIA’s role as a watchdog continued into the Third Republic (1963–1972). When Park prepared for his third term via a constitutional change in 1969, the KCIA bribed both ruling and opposition party legislators to do what Park wanted.35 The intelligence agency also did not shy away from terrorizing party leaders when it thought it necessary, as it did when some of Kim Chong-p’il’s mainstream faction stood in the way of Park’s desire for a third term in 1969, when DRP finance chairman Kim Sông-gon sided with opposition legislators in a vote of no confidence against cabinet ministers in 1971,36 or when Kim Dae-jung frontally challenged the legitimacy of the yushin regime from exile in 1973.37
However, it was the restraint rather than the actual use of force that showed the power of the KCIA. The intelligence agency kept extensive files on the everyday lives of South Korean party, military, business, and chaeya leaders, including their wealth, sexual habits, tax reports, and social circles, to keep opponents in line. Even Kim Chong-p’il had his house searched three times by KCIA agents, to be reminded of his vulnerability.38
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The impact of silent surveillance on the South Korean elite was powerful.
Aware of the watchdogs’ shadow over their lives, members of the elite thought twice before challenging Park and usually moderated their critique of his authoritarian rule on the assumption that he would correspondingly refrain from threatening their vital interests. It was only in 1976, three and a half years after the launching of the yushin regime, that the radical chaeya led by Kim Dae-jung publicly called for an end to Park’s authoritarian rule. The NDP, led by the centrist Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng and later the reformist Kim Young-sam, unambiguously sided with the chaeya position of dismantling the yushin only when Park threatened in 1979 to take away even the limited political pluralism he had granted since 1972. The implicit understanding of the “formally ill-defined . . . but actually quite predictable”39 limits on the exercise of power reached between Park and his rivals before 1978 had enabled Park to isolate the more intransigent chaeya from the moderate NDP opponents so that he could repress the chaeya in unforgiving ways. The breakdown of that implicit understanding, as demonstrated in the DRP’s 1979 expulsion of Kim Young-sam from the National Assembly, united NDP politicians with the chaeya in demanding the end of the yushin regime.
The KCIA was more brutal when the target of repression lay outside the political elite. In 1969, it rounded up over a hundred chaeya intellectuals on the charge of operating a P’yôngyang-funded underground communist cell with its headquarters in East Berlin,40 and tried their leaders under the draconian national security laws. The McCarthyist witch hunt broke out again in 1974, with over a thousand dissidents interrogated for their alleged organizing of a “People’s Revolutionary Party” to instigate student protests to overthrow the yushin regime. The 1974 crackdown ended in a particularly tragic way. The prosecutors demanded that the newly established Emergency Military Court issue 14 death penalties, 15 life imprisonments, and 18 twenty-year imprisonments in July 1974.41 The same day Park announced Presidential Emergency Decree no. 7 to close down a rebellious Korea University. On April 8, 1975, the Supreme Court confirmed 8 of the proposed 14 death penalties, which the state swiftly carried out within a day.42 By 1979, Park had had his security and legal apparatus imprison a total of 1,184 people for opposition activities.43 After the death of Chôn T’ae-il in 1970, the chaeya labor activists were also tracked down and repressed by the police forces. The church joined the list of victims when some of its progressive activists joined the elders of the opposition to call for the dismantlement of the yushin and the guarantee of labor rights in 1976.
The use of the KCIA as an instrument in power struggles hurt Park pro-
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foundly in the long run. Apart from getting Park stuck in an ideological war with both “progressive” Kim Dae-jung and “moderate conservative”
Kim Young-sam, who by 1979 had transformed into intransigent anti-yushin “radicals” with a regional power base from which to launch a sustained siege against Park, the use of the KCIA also entailed the danger of inadvertently breaking up the system of checks and balances that Park had nurtured within his inner circle of praetorian guards, technocratic aides, and party bosses during much of the Third Republic. The problem was that the watchdog could become the master itself by hoarding power while tightening the ropes of repression. Park was aware of this danger and tried to maintain the checks-and-balances system. Before the constitutional revision of 1969 that opened the way to Park’s third term, KCIA director Kim Hyông-uk was only one among equals in the president’s inner circle, typically flexing his muscle as the “operational man” in charge of doing the dirty work, for which he would later be “slandered” and “remain sleepless at night,” to quote his words.44 The idea man was the “clever” Yi Hu-rak who presided over the imperial Presidential Secretariat,45 whereas the soft talker Kim Sông-gon was a deal-maker in the National Assembly, coopting one or another opposition legislator by tapping the dense political network he had developed as a Liberal Party politician and a business tycoon before 1961, or by generously disbursing money from the DRP political funds.46 There was also the “elder,” Chông Ku-yông, who raised a critique of state policy or even urged power sharing with Kim Chong-p’il in front of Park, in his unique capacity as the president’s personal counsel (sang¤iyôk) between 1965 and 1974.47 In other words, before 1972 Park had channels to make deals with opposition party bosses, at the same time that he loosed KCIA agents to suppress more hostile forces.
Unfortunately for Park, not only the mechanism of limited political pluralism but also the system of checks and balances within the inner circle collapsed as he tried to counter the opposition’s assault on the yushin in 1979. By then, Kim Sông-gon had been purged, Yi Hu-rak had retired into oblivion, and Chông Ku-yông had died of old age, leaving only KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu and Presidential Security Service chief Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl as the top aides. The inner circle no longer had a strategist, a deal-maker, or a critic. Moreover, the two praetorian guards were deadlocked over how to deal with Kim Young-sam’s call for democratization, with a “quix-otic” Kim Chae-gyu advocating dialogue with the opposition and a “rugged” Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl calling for a war against the opposition party and chaeya leaders. The collapse of the checks and balances was Park’s own doing. Despite the repeated failures of both soft-line Kim Chae-gyu and hard-line Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl to prevent Kim Young-sam’s assault on the yu-
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shin regime, Park kept on calling on the two security heads to stop the opposition.48 When socioeconomic adversity, regionalist animosity, and ideological discontent converged to ignite mass protest in Pusan and Masan, Kim Chae-gyu snapped and became a most unlikely “revolutionary,” killing Park in October 1979 to “restore liberal democracy . . . with as little sacrifice as possible,” to quote Kim Chae-gyu’s testimony in his trial by a military court.49
Like the political system of regionalist elections based on money politics and supplemented by cold war ideology and the economic system of debt-financed growth, the coercive system did not die with the demise of Park.
On the contrary, it heavily influenced the political path of the post-Park era by providing the military heir to the yushin regime with an opportunity to strike back at the opposition and snatch power from the three Kims in May 1980. Certainly, the garrison state was shaken by Park’s death, but it also quickly recovered from its paralysis once Chun Doo-hwan’s Army Security Command, emerging out of the feud between the KCIA and the PSS
triggered by the regime crisis without any organizational damage of its own, took over the then-demoralized KCIA. The takeover enabled the ASC to supplement its brute force with the KCIA’s powerful arsenal of surveillance, which it used to lash out against the three Kims. And with it, Chun Doo-hwan resolved the problem of the politically dysfunctional KCIA-PSS power rivalry. Thereafter, power was centralized in the ASC.
The ASC led the way to the launching of the Fifth Republic by arresting army chief-of-staff Chông S¤ng-hwa and his moderate faction of senior military officers on the charge of conspiring with Kim Chae-gyu in December 1979 and by brutally repressing the Kwangju Democratic Uprising in May 1980. The “Spring of Seoul” abruptly ended, bringing the military back into power with Chun Doo-hwan as the heir to Park.
In spite of the direct lineage the Fifth Republic traced to the yushin regime, and the personal ties Chun Doo-hwan had with Park since his organization of a military parade by the Korea Military Academy cadets in support of Park in the early days of the 1961 coup d’état, Chun Doo-hwan knew that he could consolidate his rule only when he succeeded in differentiating himself from his patron. Consequently, Chun Doo-hwan attempted a U-turn across issue areas upon the inauguration of the Fifth Republic. He adopted a single seven-year term for the president, pledged to put the issues of social justice at the core of the national agenda, and embarked on a program of economic liberalization. Except for the promise of serving only one presidential ter
m, however, he failed to break away from the Park era. On the contrary, the Fifth Republic ended up being an extension of authoritarian developmentalism, perfecting rather than disman-
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tling Park’s model of economic growth by purging the financial excesses built into it through a tight control over the money supply. The rhetoric of social justice and financial liberalization dissipated too, because Chun Doo-hwan never was what he thought he was, a “neoliberal” with the mission to “dissolve” the developmental state even at the risk of confrontation with the chaebol. 50 Likewise, the garrison state remained intact, but this time with the balance of power tilted toward the ASC, as the university campuses turned into breeding grounds of radical ideas and chaeya organizations in the aftermath of the bloody repression of the 1980 Kwangju Democratic Uprising. Ironically, with an eye to giving the Fifth Republic a democratic face, Chun Doo-hwan restored the rights of some of the former NDP politicians to run for election in 1984, but this gesture of political opening resulted in a strong resurgence of the opposition in the 1985
National Assembly elections and only prompted Chun Doo-hwan to rely even more on the security apparatus to oppose his adversaries.
The coercive system was shaken up from the bottom only when middle-class groups openly, unambiguously, and decisively sided with the chaeya and the opposition political party to force direct presidential elections on Chun Doo-hwan and his successor, Roh Tae-woo, in June 1987. Protests spread to the industrial complexes in July and August. The intelligentsia of the “386 Generation”51 also increasingly radicalized, initially toying with dependency theory and liberation theology, then embracing Marxist ideas and Leninist organizations, and later landing in North Korea’s home-grown Chuch’e (or Juche) ideology. These intellectuals were searching for an ideology that negated not only Park and Chun but also the South Korean national identity of liberal democracy, market capitalism, and alliance with the United States.52 Certainly, most of the 386ers eventually grew out of their fixation with Marxist-Leninist ideas and Chuch’e beliefs after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its East European satellite states in 1991 and the paralysis of the North Korean economy in the mid-1990s.
Park Chung Hee Era Page 92
