A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  The Kwangju Uprising that erupted the next day, on May 18, 1980, started in a conventional way, with students gathered at the gate of a university for a rally. But the shockingly brutal response by the government troops—in this case, paratroopers sent down to quell any such disturbances—sparked the intensification of the conflict from a student protest to a civil uprising involving a considerable portion of the region’s citizenry. Over the years scholars and observers have cited many factors that might have contributed to the stunning phenomenon of crack troops trained to fight North Koreans unleashing their fury on the very citizens whom they were supposed to protect: the suspicion fed by misinformation on the presence of North Korean elements; regional antipathy toward Chlla province, where Kwangju lay; and even the drugging of the paratroopers. Whatever the precise combination of causes, the result, after ten days of the uprising, was a total of more than 200 people killed, many more hundreds injured, and a deep wound in the national soul that would take decades to heal. The city of Kwangju itself functioned as an autonomous, almost pristinely primitive collectivity following the retreat by government troops from the city center on the fourth day. When the soldiers returned to re-take the Provincial Hall building at dawn on May 27, many of these citizens, knowing full well their fate, chose to take up arms against the troops in a final act of defiance.

  These victims of the Kwangju Uprising were not aiming for a hallowed place in the annals of Korean history, but rather expressing outrage and insisting on their dignity in the face of barbarity. The citizens of Kwangju, however, came largely to embrace the popular judgment that their sacrifices represented an indispensable element in the path toward democratization. In fact the Kwangju Uprising took on even greater historical significance: as the explosive climax of the buildup of wrenching divisions in South Korean society; and as the origin of many other defining features of South Korean politics and society thereafter, including radicalization, regionalism, anti-Americanism, and, of course, democracy. It was, then, truly a watershed event, and if popular culture was any indication, the Kwangju Uprising remained a source of fascination and contemplation. Novels, television dramas, documentaries, and feature films over the next three decades continued to explore its multi-faceted significance.

  THE DEMOCRACY GENERATION

  The greatest and most lasting impact of Kwangju, however, was felt by the first generation to come of age following the uprising. To these young Koreans, news about what happened in Kwangju came through the thriving underground networks of first-hand written accounts, art work, photos, and even video footage smuggled into the country from the foreign reporters who witnessed the event. Chun’s consolidation of power through the Kwangju bloodbath rendered the validity of his regime null and void, but it was enough to instill an atmosphere of official silence about what really happened during the so-called Kwangju Incident. Intellectuals, students, laborers, and other activists, however, maintained the memory of Kwangju, which they eventually used also as the chief rallying cry for the drive to overthrow the Chun regime in the 1980s.

  These activists also employed Kwangju as the springboard for further refinement of the minjung, or “people’s,” movement that pervaded the anti-government resistance circles in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a movement in the sense not of a coherent organization, but rather of a powerfully enveloping mood that framed the perspective on Korean politics, culture, foreign relations, and, in particular, history and national division. From the minjung perspective, the Korean people had been stripped of their primacy in recent Korean history by authoritarian and corrupt government, big business, and foreign powers that all conspired to divide the Korean masses and suppress their will. The minjung movement sought to regain the people’s autonomy and subjectivity by expressing itself not only in anti-government activity, but also in popular culture, patterns of public life, and academic inquiry. The primary practitioners, furthermore, were those who came of age in this era, mostly as university students.

  In the 1990s, when the minjung movement faded away, these people would be referred to as the “386 generation” (a play on the name of a well-known computer chip): those who were in their thirties, went to college in the 1980s, and were born in the 1960s. By the middle of the twentieth century’s final decade, they could look back on their formidable influence in the 1980s, when they represented

  the shock troops behind the democratization movement. By subsequently entering the workforce and the comforts of middle class domesticity, they had found themselves concerned with matters other than politics, but their intense experience in the struggles for democratization would maintain its grip on their outlook. Indeed, when many of them, in their late thirties and forties, reached the top circles of political power in the opening years of the new century, they showed that issues of historical justice remained uppermost in their concerns.

  THE 1987 DECLARATION AND ELECTION

  However essential this group of young people was to the democratization cause, the breakthrough of 1987 would have not occurred without the massive show of support from the growing middle class. To understand this phenomenon, we must return to the core problem of the Chun Doo Hwan dictatorship: its lack of legitimacy. Following his consolidation of power from late 1979 to late 1980, Chun instituted a rule that largely continued the 1970s Yusin patterns of state surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the encouragement of state-directed economic growth dominated by the family-run conglomerates. The US and other major governments recognized his regime soon after it began and, for a while at least, economic growth continued apace. While these developments might have helped in procuring the right to host the 1988 Summer Olympics, they could do little to garner recognition from the South Korean populace. When the economy started to slow down and an atmosphere of corruption and brutality emerged around the Chun junta, the bitter memories of 1980 brought forth an entrenchment of resistance to his rule. This sentiment went far beyond the semi-permanent base of anti-government activists. Indeed, when the long-reigning dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986, South Koreans felt emboldened to take steps that would ensure the imminent end to their own humiliating condition of chronic dictatorship.

  Unsurprisingly, then, protests erupted when, contrary to the expectations of most people, Chun Doo Hwan announced in June of 1987 that the end of his “term” later that year would be followed by a parliamentary, not popular, election of the next president. This blatant move would ensure that his hand-picked successor, Roh Tae-woo, would take office, but it also triggered an outpouring of anger that spilled into the streets and begat the largest mass protests, with upwards of a million demonstrators throughout the country, in South Korean history (see Image 26). The students who initiated these efforts had little idea that they would soon be joined by salary workers, managers, housewives, and others. Unlike in the past, when political dissent remained the purview of students and hard-core activists, this time the middle class flooded the streets and expressed their support for the protests in numerous other ways as well. The Chun regime had grossly miscalculated the degree to which the people would succumb to the latest machinations of dictatorship. As revealed later, the regime also overestimated its support from the military and bureaucracy for a potential crackdown on these demonstrations. A certain catastrophe would have ensued, and it would have marred the much-anticipated hosting of the Summer Olympics in Seoul the following year. So feared also the American ambassador to South Korea, who in a private meeting with Chun relayed his government’s strong warning that no violent moves be made to force the demonstrators off the streets.

  Image 26 Clash between protestors and police in the city of Kwangju, June 26, 1987. (Courtesy of Noonbit Publishers.)

  The final, major actor to intervene in order to avert disaster was the man picked to be Chun’s successor, Roh Tae-woo. Roh understood that any crackdown would severely stain his reign, just as Kwangju had marked Chun’s. With Chun’s grudging consent, R
oh issued a declaration on June 29, 1987, calling for a direct presidential election and a new constitutional system that would make permanent an entire range of democratic reforms. The Sixth Republic that this new constitution ushered in continues to this day. Even with this concession, however, Roh was not prepared to forego his political ambitions, and he placed himself as the presidential candidate from the ruling party in the direct presidential election to be held at the end of the year. Given the distaste of much of the public for Chun’s stewardship, Roh should not have anticipated electoral success, but the two leading politicians in the democratic resistance since the 1970s, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, failed to reach a compromise to select a single opposition candidate. The result, to the dismay of so many who had waged the democratization struggle, was the election of Roh with a plurality of less than 40 percent of the ballots, as the Kims split the opposition vote.

  Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung would eventually get their turn at the coveted prize of the presidency in the 1990s, with each new president, and each new peaceful transfer of power, further consolidating the democratic political culture. Notwithstanding, or perhaps due to, his historical baggage, Roh made no attempts to reverse the democratization process. He even overturned longstanding national imperatives through his “Nordpolitik” strategy of establishing diplomatic relations with China and the Soviet Union (soon Russia), which led to the further isolation of North Korea just as the Cold War came to a close. Kim Young Sam’s election in 1992, which came about after he joined hands with Roh in order to procure conservative support, represented the first civilian presidency since the early 1960s, following three decades of rule by military leaders. The election of his successor in 1997, Kim Dae Jung, constituted the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition candidate in South Korean history.

  Both Kim presidencies, while deeply wounded by the shroud of corruption surrounding the president’s confidants and family members, also advanced national healing of the battle scars from democratization. Kim Young Sam’s administration, in fact, revisited Kwangju, this time to officially vindicate the citizenry and launch a prosecutorial investigation into the circumstances, from October 1979 to May 1980, that led to the massacre. In the process the country stood transfixed at the stunning sight of the two main figures in these events, Chun and Roh, being tried and found guilty for their illegal grab for power over this period, as well as for the astronomical slush funds they had accumulated as presidents. Their respective sentences of death and life imprisonment were eventually commuted, and Kim Dae Jung, as the new president in 1998, formally pardoned them for the sake of achieving national reconciliation amidst an economic crisis. That the South Korean people successfully weathered this storm spoke volumes about the health and reparative capacity of their nascent democracy.

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  South Korea in the New Millennium

  CHRONOLOGY

  1997 Asian financial crisis in South Korea

  1997 December Election of President Kim Dae Jung

  1998 Inauguration of Kim’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea

  2000 Summit between Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il

  2002 Co-hosting of the World Cup Finals; election of Roh Moo-hyun as president

  2007 Election of President Lee Myung-bak

  2009 Suicide of former President Roh Moo-hyun amidst scandal; death of Kim Dae Jung

  QUARTERFINAL MATCH VERSUS SPAIN IN THE 2002 WORLD CUP FINALS

  As the South Korean people entered the new century they were still recovering from what they called the “IMF period,” when the economy fell into a foreign exchange crisis in 1997 and had to be rescued by a colossal loan from the International Monetary Fund. But following the election of longtime dissident Kim Dae Jung as president at the end of that year, citizens rallied to recover from this shock. Not only did the government repay the IMF loan ahead of schedule, but the weathering of this crisis, as well the 2000 summit between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il of North Korea, instilled a widespread sense of a new historical era: South Korea had matured past the growing pains of rapid

  industrialization, dictatorship and democratization, and even the Cold War. Behaviors and technologies, often devised by Korean companies, that exploited the endless possibilities of the Internet and the mobile phone turned South Korean society almost overnight into a futuristic urban space where identities could be readily mixed and reinvented. Mass culture also reflected this newfound confidence and determination, establishing the basis for the “Korean Wave” (Hallyu) in pop culture that swept through Asia in the first decade of the new millennium.

  The 2002 World Cup Finals, hosted jointly by South Korea and Japan, served as perhaps the most potent symbol of this new era. The unanticipated success of the national team on the field corresponded to the extraordinary energy of the citizenry in demonstrating its collective support, as seen in the throngs of people in the streets when the national team played a game. The peak in the mass euphoria might have come in the moments following the stunning victory, in an overtime shootout, by the national team over Spain in late June, 2002. This sent the upstart South Koreans to a wildly improbable birth in the semi-finals, an achievement never before reached by any World Cup team outside of Europe and Latin America. Indeed, the ecstasy of the entire World Cup month served as the emblem of the continuing “coming out party” of sorts for South Koreans. They reveled in their awareness of a new era epitomized by their national team, by the Korean Wave, and by their experience in overcoming the national emergency of just five years earlier. The new millennium allowed South Korea to start anew, and to enter a postindustrial age economically that coincided with rapid social and cultural changes.

  ECONOMIC GROWTH: A RECONSIDERATION

  Even before the crisis of 1997–8, throughout the 1990s South Koreans had a creeping sense that not all had gone well with the extraordinarily rapid economic growth they had traversed over the previous three decades. Perhaps the pace had been too quick, or that government oversight had not matched its policy ambitions, but whatever the causes, the construct of the economic miracle began to come apart at the seams. The roads were constantly clogged by too many cars on too little space, and even relatively simple structures seemed unstable. In 1993 a rail line collapsed over an illegal tunnel project in Pusan, killing scores of people, and the next year, a section of one of the major bridges spanning the Han River in Seoul gave way, plunging many to their deaths. In the spring and summer of 1995 came the biggest such disasters: an explosion at a subway construction site in the city of Taegu that killed hundreds, and the sudden collapse of an five-story luxury department store, which took the lives of over 500 innocent shoppers and workers. In the latter case, it turned out that the shoddy construction pursued on the cheap by yet another would-be tycoon had been permitted to pass, through bribes, by government inspectors, some of whom suspiciously failed to show up to work the day following the accident. Such unethical collusion led Koreans to wonder aloud whether, in the relentless pursuit of development, they had lost their soul. This type of national hand-wringing and reflection had a long history, and in fact had intensified following the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, but now it seemed as if the country was being bombarded with material evidence for this sense of malaise.

  The worsening mood continued through the final year of the Kim Young Sam presidency in 1997, and the revelations of corruption surrounding his son only magnified the unpopularity of his administration. The final blow to Kim’s reputation hit in late summer of 1997, just as the presidential election campaign for his successor started to intensify. What began as a precipitous depreciation of currencies through a speculative run in Southeast Asia soon hit South Korea, which suffered, like these other countries, from runaway growth and foreign debt that left it vulnerable to fluctuations in the currency markets. More ominously, the spreading financial crisis in Asia exposed a Korean economy with serious structural problems, such
as mountains of under-performing loans—many government-sponsored—to enormous conglomerates that had taken this unending supply of easy credit to expand without restraint. Like the roads, bridges, and buildings of the preceding years, the edifice of the Korean financial and economic system came down like a house of cards. This resulted in the rapid depreciation of the Korean won, a dive in the Korean stock markets, and worst of all for the populace, the bankruptcy of thousands of firms both big and small. The collapse and downsizing of companies and the massive wave of layoffs struck the country like a punch in the stomach, victimizing workers both blue and white collar alike. The social dislocation and deeply bitter despondency that ensued were exacerbated by the national humiliation suffered, from the Korean perspective, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF rescued the South Korean government from insolvency by arranging a $57 billion bailout, but only according to strict conditions for economic restructuring and reforms. Koreans still refer to this crisis as the “IMF period,” as if the lords of world capitalism were responsible for a problem that Koreans had brought on themselves.

  In licking their wounds, however, Koreans soon demonstrated that the worst of times could also bring out the best in people. They found the bitter medicine of restructuring and sacrifice in every major sector of the economy—the conglomerates and state-controlled banks as well as labor unions—a bit easier to swallow by a strong sense of national elan. This collective consciousness suffused the social fabric, made visible in everything from telethons to locally organized campaigns to help laid off workers and contribute to the repayment of the IMF loan. The stunning sight of Koreans bringing their jewelry, family heirlooms, and wads of cash to the collection centers pointed to the power of national identity, as well as perhaps to the thoughtful reflection on their recent history that began well before the financial collapse. In the midst of the most serious crisis to hit the South Korean economy since the Korean War, the people demonstrated a resolve that would lay the foundation for national rebirth.