A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  It turned out that Park Chung Hee had authorized secret negotiations for this breakthrough agreement with Japan not long after he came to power through a military coup in 1961. Park considered the normalization of relations, in particular the capital investment and technology transfer that it would bring, a cornerstone of his plan to modernize the nation’s economy. Historical judgment has largely looked favorably upon the “miraculous” economic development that marked the second half of the twentieth century in South Korea, and the 1960s, under Park’s direction, is considered the take-off period for this stunning phenomenon. But as the student protests and other forms of resistance against governing authority indicated, the particular pattern of economic growth institutionalized in the 1960s—driven by the combination of a military government and big business—faced significant challenges. These challenges, too, would characterize the 1960s, and indeed, much of the subsequent history of South Korea.

  DICTATORSHIP, DEMOCRACY, AND REVOLUTIONS

  Student demonstrators, in fact, had acted as the catalyst behind the major event that opened this decade. When Syngman Rhee, whose presidency in the First Republic descended into despotism and corruption in the post-Korean War 1950s, attempted to steal another election in the spring of 1960, the unrest that followed led to his overthrow. The occasion this time was his government’s blatant rigging of the polls for vice president, with examples of massive fraud such as ballot stuffing conducted in the open. Rhee was perhaps emboldened by the fact that his own electoral opponent for the presidency had died shortly before the election—interestingly, the second Rhee opponent to die under such circumstances (with the first being executed for treason in 1956). The anti-Rhee protests gained momentum initially in the southern coast, and with the discovery of the body of a student protestor killed by a tear gas canister in the city of Masan, students in Seoul rose up, only to be met with a brutal crackdown themselves. On April 19, 1961, this led to the explosion of student demonstrators hitting the streets throughout the country, with the most furious clashes with the police coming in Seoul and reaching a scale of mass protest not seen since the immediate post-liberation period. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed before Rhee, under pressure from a wide range of political and social sectors, including university professors, agreed to step down and go into exile in Hawaii (where he died in 1965). Even at the time, this series of events was referred to as a “revolution,” for it brought down a dictatorial system and displayed the power of collective action.

  What followed the April Student Revolution was Korea’s first experiment in full-fledged democracy. The pronouncement in June 1960 of the Second Republic, a parliamentary system with the president merely serving as a figurehead, unleashed creative energies and accompanied a spike in civic cooperation and volunteerism, along with a dose of optimism. Chang Myn, selected as the prime minister, ruled through a coalition of mostly conservative elites who had grown weary of the Rhee dictatorship. In addition to the eradication of blatant corruption at the top of the government, some major policy shifts took place under Chang’s leadership. One of these reforms was the extension of electoral democracy in the provinces. In December 1960, for the first time in Korean local elections—which did not reappear until the 1990s—people went to the polls to directly elect provincial governors and the mayor of Seoul. This, too, constituted a revolutionary step.

  Naturally, with the loosening of the state’s grip came the license also for people to protest their conditions more freely, which intensified a re-polarization of politics. Large-scale unrest starting in

  late 1960 reflected a worsening economy, especially high unemployment, although the situation had actually improved compared to the end of the Rhee era. The Chang Myn government responded with the implementation of public works programs, including the construction of a nationwide transportation infrastructure. Such episodes represented the natural growing pains attendant to any such experiments in electoral democracy, and they did not necessarily constitute a threat to the nascent system. But what might have tipped the scales toward placing this democratic experiment in a precarious state were student demonstrations in early May 1961 calling for immediate reunification with North Korea. Such a step, the students claimed, represented the true spirit of the April Student Revolution. The military, ever sensitive to any softening regarding communism, responded swiftly. On May 16, 1961, troops under the command of Major General Park Chung Hee occupied government offices and immediately pronounced another revolution that emphasized first and foremost the need for anti-communist vigilance. It represented the third “revolution” in thirteen months, and another shift in the long historical arch of struggle between students and dictatorships in South Korea.

  PARK CHUNG HEE

  No person is more associated with South Korean history than Park Chung Hee. For good and bad, in the pervasive historical perspective on the second half of the twentieth century, he is inseparably linked to the combination of authoritarian state-making and rapid economic development. That he remained as the apex political figure for almost two decades, from 1961 to his assassination in 1979, naturally explains his historical prominence, but this endurance also reflects Park’s long-term approach to South Korea’s pressing needs. As with most dictators, he convinced himself of his continuing indispensability. Such a mindset began to appear with greater clarity toward the end of the 1960s, setting the stage for the descent into iron-fisted rule in the 1970s.

  Park’s compelling background reveals much about his world view and actions once in power. Born into a poor rural family in the south-central part of the country in 1917, he experienced first hand the decay of the countryside, a theme that would preoccupy him in office. Gifted and ambitious—his hero as a boy was Napoleon—he took advantage of all the opportunities made available by Japanese colonialism to escape his conditions. Following a stint as a school teacher in his native region, in the early 1940s he became one of the few young Koreans selected to receive training in a Japanese military academy in Manchuria. There, and later in the metropole itself, he imbibed the lessons of the rapid modern transformation of Japan, in particular the military’s preeminence in the Japanese approach to governing. As with many of his compatriots who came of age in the late colonial period, his affinity for Japan, or at least the Japanese model, did not subside, even after liberation. He developed a fierce nationalistic streak as well, and that perhaps explains his brief participation, as an ROK officer, in the anti-American, anti-Rhee resistance in the late 1940s following liberation. He was captured and implicated, in fact, in the Ysu-Sunch’n Rebellion of 1948, and only the intervention of an American officer on his behalf—Park had become entangled in his brother’s more explicitly leftist guerilla activities—spared his life. For the Korean War and the rest of the 1950s, Park retreated to the South Korean military, gradually ascending the ranks and cultivating a following among officers that would prove decisive later.

  Although he spent most of the 1960s as a civilian president, his approach to rule throughout the decade was militaristic, from the way he gained power through a coup to the regimentation of politics, society, and economy that his reign implemented. The Military Revolutionary Council and then the Supreme National Reconstruction Committee through which Park ruled the country from 1961 to 1963 set in motion the mobilization of society along militaristically disciplined lines. His “revolutionary” government in 1961 immediately set out to clean up the streets by eliminating blight and seedy social elements—rounding up and putting to work street kids, vagrants, and even gangsters, for example. To maintain

  surveillance and control over such unsavory elements and, later, opposition political figures, the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), the internal security apparatus of the military government, was also established in 1961. For most of the public, however, “reconstruction” became the all-encompassing word on people’s lips, a shorthand for the comprehensive changes that would require destruction as much as construction: destruc
tion of the old ways of thinking that led to corruption and decay, of the legacy of Korea’s sad history that produced weakness and tragedy, and of the impoverishment that made the country an easy target for communism. As it did under Syngman Rhee’s regime, anti-communism became a mainstay of Park’s claims to legitimacy and method of rule. In the latter part of the 1960s, sensationalistic incursions by North Korean commandos and spies further stoked the government’s anti-communist campaign.

  Such a heavily military bent to the polity and society, and even to the economy and culture, actually complicates any general assessment of politics in the 1960s. Although it is common simply to label the entirety of Park’s rule from 1961 to 1979 as an era of “military dictatorship,” in the 1960s, at least, the military facet of rule outstripped the dictatorship. On the occasion of the formal transition to civilian government in 1963, Park shed his officer’s uniform to run in the presidential election, which he narrowly won, but much of the cabinet and Park’s top advisors came from the military. His re-election in 1967 was a more comfortable affair (over the same opponent, coincidentally) but, throughout the 1960s, Park had to deal with constraints imposed by the formalities of republicanism, including opposition from national assembly members, activists, workers, and especially students.

  ECONOMIC TAKEOFF

  Park made it clear that his highest priority throughout his first decade of rule was to lift the country out of poverty and set it on the path to economic modernization through industrialization. For the most part, he accomplished both of these goals, although it took the entirety of the decade, and the economy encountered problems with rice shortages. Borrowing an approach found in communist systems, Park deployed the model of the “Five-Year Plan” for national economic development, with clear-cut goals and blueprints for pursuing a growth strategy managed by skilled bureaucrats. Park’s government promulgated the First Five-Year Plan in 1962, the same year that it also designated the city of Ulsan on the southeastern coast a special industrial development zone. Ulsan would become the home region for the Hyundai Corporation’s manufacturing juggernaut. By the end of 1966, the final year of the plan, there were indeed signs of major infrastructural and urban growth, as well as of the drive for exports gaining full force. One of the most visible transformations had taken place in 1964, when some areas in the country were the first to experience twenty-four-hour electricity provision, engendering a dramatic lifestyle change by expanding the scope of night time activity. Indeed, materially and otherwise, especially in the urban areas, conditions continued to improve, and the people’s perspectives on the world, especially those of the youth, widened with greater exposure to foreign cultural and material products.

  The Second Five-Year Plan, beginning in 1967, more explicitly targeted export-oriented growth as the primary goal, which would lay the foundation, in turn, for a shift toward heavy industry. That year the government finalized plans to establish a nationally-owned steel venture, the Pohang Iron and Steel Company, or POSCO. POSCO became incorporated the next year and went on to supply the major industries of shipbuilding, auto manufacturing, and construction through which South Korea became an industrial power. 1967 also witnessed the creation of a special export manufacturing zone in southwestern Seoul, the famed Kuro Industrial Park. With its concentration of toiling workers producing everything from shoes and clothes to machinery, the Kuro Industrial Park eventually turned into a symbol of the sacrifices and lives of the South Korean labor force. Korean workers, the economic miracle’s backbone that the state and big business exploited for the comparative advantage of cheap labor, suffered conditions not unlike their counterparts throughout the modern world. Many South Korean workers fiercely resisted this heavy-handed state control and even won significant legal concessions through union actions, but prodded by calls for national sacrifice and the promises of material gain, they too mostly fell in line with the larger industrialization drive. This inclination, together with a dedication to education and training, made the work force the most indispensable element of the South Korean success story.

  The biggest beneficiaries of the state-led, export-oriented industrialization drive, however, were the family-owned conglomerate companies, the so-called chaebol, a mostly pejorative term meaning “financial clique.” Some of the best-known of these conglomerates today, such as Samsung and LG, began as small enterprises in the colonial period, while others, such as Hyundai, began shortly after liberation. By the 1960s, the government selected well-performing companies for targeted export-oriented production, rewarding them with cheap and big loans, easy licenses, tax benefits, and government guidance. The result was the astonishing growth of many of these companies into the “octopus”-like entities that came to dominate the South Korean economy. The families that controlled the conglomerates came to be followed as national celebrities, though not always flatteringly, and the tycoons who began these enterprises won listings in the pantheon of national heroes. Hyundai presented a prime example. Begun by Chung Ju Yung, a man from the east coast of what is now North Korea, as a transport service supplying the American military, Hyundai became perhaps the most celebrated beneficiary of government largesse in the 1960s. Hyundai’s first major industry, construction, jump-started its rise through foreign building contracts in southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, while at home it won major infrastructural projects, including construction of the main national artery, the Seoul-Pusan Expressway, completed in 1970. Its second major industry, automobile manufacturing, began in 1967 with an agreement to build a Ford model in its plant in Ulsan. By the 1970s, Hyundai would produce and export its own car, the Pony, and by the 1980s it would penetrate the largest car market in the world, the US. Hyundai eventually expanded into shipbuilding, for which it became a global leader, as well as cement, chemicals, and even electronics. Today, like the other well-known chaebol, Hyundai is commonly seen as a standard-bearer for Korean industrial prowess, and even for Korea itself.

  A final major factor in the 1960s economic takeoff, though one not easily discerned, can be deemed “association with America.” The US affected the South Korean economy in several ways. Its dozens of military bases and tens of thousands of soldiers stationed around the country injected capital into the consumer economy. The American government’s direct aid in the form of grants and loans provided the South Korean regime great leverage, through its control of the lending practices of major banks, in getting industry and labor to fall in line behind state-directed planning. There was also the considerable impact of American “soft power”—the widespread influence of American popular music, fashion, movies, and entertainers, some of whom, like Louis Armstrong, actually performed in Korea. These examples of soft power helped set trends and increase demand for American items, both cultural and material.

  A more pronounced impact came from South Korea’s troops sent to the Vietnam War, which, beginning with over 17,000 soldiers sent in 1965, came to comprise the second largest foreign contingent in Vietnam after the Americans. South Korea’s participation stemmed from its service as a dutiful American ally, but the economic benefits also were enormous: in addition to gaining favorable treatment from the US government, South Korea became a major supplier of American military provisions, which added further to the national coffers supporting export-oriented industrial growth. Korean entrepreneurs, many as soldiers, flooded Vietnam, some making a fortune, with others sending smaller amounts back home, and still others using their Vietnam entrepreneurial experience as the basis for businesses and careers after their return. The total economic impact of South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, as with the Japanese investment of capital and technology, is difficult to measure, but proportionally it was far more significant than it was for the US. To the Korean youth, in fact, the image of Vietnam as a great opportunity for adventure and money making tended to overshadow any anxiety.

  YOUTH AND ANGST

  Although both the participation in Vietnam and the normalization of relations wi
th Japan played significant roles in South Korea’s economic push in the 1960s, the youth culture displayed a starkly contrasting response to the two ventures. While many of the South Korean elite who had come of age in and benefited from the colonial period, like Park Chung Hee, might have viewed the prospect of reestablishing Japanese ties pragmatically, university students and other younger Koreans fiercely resisted this as a betrayal of the nation. Park himself made his first official visit to Japan in November of 1961, just half a year after seizing power, and his advisors engaged shortly thereafter in secret negotiations to reestablish formal diplomatic ties and attract an infusion of Japanese capital and know-how. When these quiet maneuvers were revealed and word spread in March of 1964 that the two governments were on the verge of an agreement, thousands of students spilled into the streets, engaging in clashes with riot police and even entering into mass protest fasts. By June, over ten thousand student demonstrators had risen up, inviting the promulgation of a state of emergency in Seoul. The spirit of rebellion was further fueled by a hit film released that year, Barefooted Youth—Korea’s answer to Rebel Without a Cause—which portrayed the anxious and directionless existence of a younger generation falling victim to the constraints of customs and authority. Whether so intended or not by the filmmaker, Kim Kidk, this movie was taken as tacit support for the students protesting the prospective treaty with Japan. Alas, the delay in finalizing this treaty caused by the protests did not last long, and by June of 1965 the treaty was signed, followed by easy ratification in the government-controlled National Assembly later in the fall. The heavy-handed ratification process compelled the mass resignation of opposition politicians and the eruption of more student protests, which the government suppressed through a military occupation of college campuses.