These protests against the Normalization Treaty with Japan represented both the confluence and conflicts of economic, political, and cultural forces that drove the spirited decade of the 1960s. While the strong state and big business moved the country in one focused direction, less powerful sectors of society, embodied especially in the students, pushed back, or at least demanded a reorientation of priorities, a reconsideration of consequences. This dynamic reappeared in 1969, as politicians and students rose up to block the prospective constitutional amendment that would allow Park Chung Hee to run for a third consecutive presidential term. Once again, universities were shut down and opposition political figures stifled as the constitutional amendment, like the Normalization Treaty, was railroaded through the National Assembly before being approved in a national referendum. With this, the turbulent 1960s came to a close, setting the stage for the somber 1970s.
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Culture and Politics in 1970s South Korea
CHRONOLOGY
1970 April Proclamation of the New Village Movement by Park Chung Hee
1970 May Publication of Kim Chiha’s narrative poem, “Five Bandits”; Kim’s arrest
1970 November Protest through self-immolation by young labor organizer Chn T’aeil
1971 Re-election of Park Chung Hee to third consecutive presidential term
1972 Summer Joint declaration of reconciliation by the two Koreas
1972 October Suspension of constitution; proclamation of the “Yusin” constitutional dictatorship
1973 Global oil shocks; kidnapping of opposition politician Kim Dae Jung
1974 April Roundup of dissident students and activists, sentencing of many to execution
1974 August Assassination of Park’s wife
1977 Achievement of $10 billion in value of South Korean exports
1979 October Assassination of Park Chung Hee; end of Yusin system
PUBLICATION OF KIM CHIHA’S “FIVE BANDITS,” MAY 1970
Kim Chiha, a budding poet laden with personal travails from the 1960s, published one of his earliest major works in 1970, and was promptly arrested. His alleged crime, and that of his publishers, was violation of the Anti-Communist Law, although the poem in question, “Five Bandits,” made no mention of support for North Korea or communism. It simply
satirized the gross inequalities in South Korean society due to corruption, though in an unmistakably condemnatory and mocking fashion. For continuing to protest the political and economic injustices of the increasingly autocratic and rapidly industrializing South Korean system, Kim Chiha spent most of the 1970s in jail, even receiving a death sentence in 1974. Kim was not alone in lobbing criticisms of the dramatic changes that Korean society was undergoing, for the primary thrust of cultural expression in this period carried a political undertone. But Kim Chiha, through his connections and impact, can be seen as the embodiment of the watershed decade of the 1970s, the memory of which continues to be colored predominantly by the term, “Yusin,” in reference to the constitutional dictatorship forcibly implemented in 1972.
Those who arose to counter and call attention to the abuses of the Yusin system included writers like Kim, artists, publishers, musicians, and religious leaders, in addition to the students and laborers who maintained their vanguard role. Indeed the 1970s witnessed the emergence of many major historical figures who would dominate lasting perceptions of South Korean history, and none more so than in the arenas of politics and culture. Whether explicitly or not, the most notable cultural developments of this decade, which reflected and affected broader historical currents to an extent unseen since the colonial period, were tinged with politics.
THE YUSIN DECADE
Not everything in 1970s South Korea was shaped by the Yusin system; it just seemed that way. Even the continuation of the remarkable economic growth through export-led industrialization and domination by conglomerate companies appeared to have been a handmaiden of politics. As is the case eventually with most dictators, Park Chung Hee became convinced of his indispensability and conflated his power with the people’s welfare, although the country—partly due to the success of his policies, ironically—was very different in the early 1970s than a decade earlier. The October 1972 imposition of the so-called Yusin (“revitalization”) constitution prohibited political dissent and in effect rendered Park president for life (which turned out to be true). The official justification for this move—which amounted to his second coup d’état, this time of a system that he was already heading—was to solidify the path toward reunification. Forced into a response to the Sino-American détente in 1972 that cast doubt on America’s security commitments, the two Koreas had achieved some stunning breakthroughs in reconciliation talks, at least publicly, earlier in the summer that year. But the dictatorship clearly came amidst signs of growing dissatisfaction with Park’s rule, as reflected in his less-than-convincing re-election in the 1971 presidential election. And soon after the inauguration of the Yusin system, the global oil shocks beginning in 1973 and the killing of his wife by an assassin in 1974 added further to Park’s growing siege mentality. By the fall of 1979, amidst unmistakable indications of widespread, impassioned opposition to the dictatorship, Yusin came to an end with that of Park’s own life at the hands of his own internal police apparatus. By then, the Yusin system had intensified the autocratic political approach of the 1960s and extended it to suppress all forms of dissent through a constitutional dictatorship that bordered on absolutism.
Such an ostensible comfort zone of total power provided Park the capacity to push through a state-led revamping of the countryside. The New Village Movement (Saemal undong), which in some ways emulated the North’s Ch’llima movement in the 1950s, began in 1970 through a personal directive from Park. The New Village Movement quickly became the general catch-phrase for all efforts to improve the countryside and even was applied to an overarching spirit of reform that the government encouraged in urban areas as well. The mobilization of state resources focused first on improving the rural communities’ basic infrastructure and appearance—removing, for example, the blight of thatched roofs, for which Park was said to have had a particular disdain. By the middle of the 1970s, the New Village Movement became a comprehensive effort, driven by a systematic, large bureaucracy that directed money, labor, and expertise to mechanization, irrigation, road construction, electricity, and the provision of consumer items. The goal was to improve agricultural output, to be sure, but also to close the gap in living standards between the city and countryside. Some historians view the New Village Movement, which continued in revised form into the 1990s, as having been more of a political ploy to divert excess materials, such as cement, and thereby tamp down any potential restiveness among the rural populace. But without a doubt the material welfare of rural Korea improved dramatically. The gains in agricultural efficiencies, however, did little to stem the steady stream of migration out of the countryside, and in fact might have accelerated it.
This movement of people to the cities and factories fueled the explosive growth of metropolitan areas, especially in and around Seoul, as well as of the major conglomerates, the family-controlled enterprises that expanded through the government-guided export drive. These companies propelled the industrialization of the South Korean economy to an emphasis on heavy industry and high technology, the products of which supplied the dramatic increases in the size of both the domestic and foreign markets. Companies like Samsung Electronics and LG (Lucky-Goldstar) produced a bevy of consumer products such as televisions and microwave ovens, while Hyundai and Daewoo manufactured big-ticket items such as automobiles and supertankers designed primarily for export. These and other enterprises also facilitated the remarkable mobilization of expertise and workers, in the tens of thousands, for large-scale construction projects overseas, especially the Middle East, to build power plants, water treatment facilities, roads, bridges, and big buildings. Such efforts resulted in the achievement, with great
fanfare, of the $10 billion mark in the annual value of South Korean exports in 1977, an extraordinarily feat given that, at the beginning of the decade, the figure was barely $1 billion.
Needless to say, the clearing of such economic benchmarks reflected and induced dramatic changes in the lives of South Koreans everywhere, especially in the urban areas. There, a robust consumer culture arose, spurred by the increasing supply of goods and buying power as well as by the extension of communications and transportation networks. In the first half of the decade alone, in fact, South Koreans witnessed the opening of the Seoul-Pusan Expressway and other major highways, the inauguration of the first subway line in Seoul, and the sizeable expansion of the capital city to many areas south of the Han River. Not everyone, however,
was benefiting equally from these advances. The agitation of the growing working class, which manned the factories that made these developments possible, in fact continued to remind everyone of the underbelly of rapid industrialization: gross inequality, poverty, and exploitative, even dangerous, working conditions. Tellingly, the Yusin decade had begun with one of the most memorable moments in South Korean history, one that compelled attention to the plight of laborers: in late 1970, a young man named Chn T’aeil, who had unsuccessfully attempted to improve the conditions of his fellow workers in a typical sweatshop, committed ritual suicide by setting himself on fire while clutching a book of labor laws that the government had failed to enforce.
LITERARY RESISTANCE
Kim Chiha proclaimed to speak for such downtrodden victims of Korean society, and in later works such as “Cry of the People,” he invoked the memory of Chn’s self-immolation in his calls for revolutionary action. As for the work that thrust Kim into the public spotlight, “Five Bandits” (Ojk) was published in the May 1970 issue of the journal Sasanggye (“Realm of Ideas”), then soon again in the organ of the main opposition political party. The government immediately shut down both publications and arrested their editors and publishers. Kim Chiha himself was booked on charges of violating the Anti-Communist Law, a generic tool for silencing political opposition. Kim likely knew what would happen—indeed, he even anticipated his arrest in the balladic poem’s preamble—for he bore the battle scars of struggle against the anti-communist system. As a college student he had participated in the demonstrations to overthrow Syngman Rhee in 1960, led the reunification efforts that had alarmed Major General Park Chung Hee into seizing power in 1961, and joined the huge student protests against the Normalization Treaty with Japan in 1964 (Chapter 23). He had spent most of the latter part of the 1960s trying to fend off both severe illness and government surveillance, a pattern that would also characterize his life in the 1970s. Indeed he spent most of the decade either in jail or under house arrest, and was briefly sentenced to death in 1974 after being nabbed in a sweep of activists and students on fabricated charges of sedition. He was fortunate to escape with his life, for eight others in this roundup were quickly executed following sentencing in a kangaroo court. His resilience in the face of hardship, including torture, inspired a persistent, concerted movement to win his freedom that became a cause célèbre in literary and intellectual circles far beyond Korea. Kim Chiha served, then, as the counterpart figure to Park Chung Hee as the symbol of 1970s South Korea, and it had all begun with a brilliant, biting poem.
“Five Bandits”—a title in unveiled reference to the “Five Traitors of 1905” (lsa ojk) who had signed the protectorate treaty leading to the Japanese takeover (Chapter 16)—is a narrative poem suffused with the lyrical elements of local dialect and the singing quality of shamanistic rituals. Its story revolves around a contest between five bandits—a contest in corruption, that is, among representatives of the five most privileged and powerful groups of people in South Korean society at the time: tycoons of conglomerates, national assemblymen, high-ranking bureaucrats, generals, and cabinet ministers. Each of these five bandits takes turns to outdo the other in debauchery, ostentatious wealth, and venality, and before the poem ends with heavenly retribution, a sixth class of miscreant emerges, a clueless public prosecutor who ends up joining rather than indicting the bandits. The message could not be clearer: the system itself suffered from a comprehensive miscarriage of social justice that divided the populace into the parasitic and exploited. And while Park Chung Hee himself escapes direct mention, “Five Bandits” unmistakably targets him. In the poem’s accounting of the five bandits’ contest, for example, they joyously recall that they had originally gathered “ten years ago” to begin their collective efforts to rob the people. The bandits’ affinity for Japanese ways and brutality, and the fact that one of the five bandits is actually a general, all point to Park. Kim also makes no attempt to hide his own personal connection: the poem’s poor, suffering peasant who makes an appeal to the prosecutor has come to Seoul from Kim’s home region of Chlla province.
While not so brazen in their condemnation of the South Korean system, other great writers of the 1970s, too, came to be marked by a pervasive social consciousness in their works. One was Ko n, who led a campaign in the literary world to bring about Kim Chiha’s release from jail and himself was arrested for his political activities. Like Kim originally from Chlla province, Ko n had spent his twenties as a Buddhist monk, and this Buddhist sensibility infused his perspective on social injustice and the means to overcome it. His breakthrough work came in 1974 with a narrative poem, “To Muni Village,” which described and decried the desolate winter landscape in a rural area, and took the snow as a cover for and of death. A social consciousness is only hinted at here, but in later poems Ko exuded a clearer anti-government voice. In “Arrows” (1977), for example, Ko calls on those fighting for democracy to let go of all of their possessions, accomplishments, and even “happiness” for the singular purpose of “becoming arrows and advancing with all our might” toward a bloody struggle. Ko would later establish himself as Korea’s most revered contemporary poet through his epic narrative verse, especially the “Genealogy of Ten Thousand Lives” (Maninbo) that recounts his encounters with people both contemporary and historical. His most stirring expressions, though, came in the cauldron of the 1970s.
Many of the great South Korean novelists also made their mark in this decade. Interestingly, three of the most renowned writers—and not only as authors of anti-establishment, social commentary fiction—all made their literary debuts in the same year, 1970, as the publication of “Five Bandits.” Hwang Sgyng, considered by some Korea’s greatest contemporary novelist, entered the literary scene in 1970 with a short story with the Korean War as the backdrop (Hwang had just returned from a tour of duty in the Vietnam War). But his big splash came the following year with “Kaekchi.” “Kaekchi,” roughly translated as “strange land far from home” in reference to the story’s focus on struggling factory laborers who had migrated from the countryside, established Hwang as the foremost practitioner of what came to be called “people’s literature,” or minjung munhak. In later works, Hwang would display a remarkable versatility in topics and settings, but always through a concern with the stifled voices of the oppressed. 1970 also was the year Cho Chngnae debuted with the first in a string of novels that discerned the impact of modern Koreans’ historical experiences on their current circumstances. Cho would later expand his literary canvas in the 1980s and 1990s as a prolific producer of the multi-volume historical novel. The best known such work was The T’aebaek Mountains, which featured the same connection between historical and contemporary conditions by reimagining the Korean War from a more balanced rather than the conventional anti-communist, Cold War perspective. Finally, the 1970s witnessed the flowering of literature by female novelists, and none more prominent than Pak Wans, who debuted with a novel published in 1970, The Naked Tree. In later works such as A Hobbling Afternoon, Pak combined a probing rumination on Korea’s historical experiences, especially that of national division, with a critique, through a distinctly female sensibility, of the emerging middle class existence.
MASS CULTURE UNDER THE YUSIN
During the darkest periods of the Yusin experience, beginning around 1974, free expression became suppressed to an extent that would be unfathomable to younger South Koreans today, and in fact was not far removed from the conditions up in North Korea. Indeed the Emergency Measures issued by the Park regime criminalized all manner of actions, and by the time Emergency Measure Number 9 came around in the spring of 1975, the government proclaimed a power to arrest people summarily for any expression or behavior deemed anti-state. The atmosphere of intimidation also stemmed from the regime’s mobilization measures to prevent any potential outbursts of anti-government sentiment in broadcasting, films, music, and publishing. But these areas also reflected the expanding connections of social life and access to information through the dissemination of technological advances. Television viewing, for example, became widespread, and while government censorship kept programming fairly tame, television’s capacity to act as a mirror of society kept it a potentially subversive element.
A History of Korea Page 27