The Park Chung Hee Era
THE PARK CHUNG HEE ERA
The Transformation of South Korea
Edited by
BYUNG-KOOK KIM
EZRA F. VOGEL
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2011
Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Park Chung Hee era : the transformation of South Korea / edited by Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-05820-0 (alk. paper)
1. Korea (South)—Politics and government—1960–1988.
2. Park, Chung Hee, 1917–1979.
3. Comparative government—Case studies.
I. Kim, Pyong-guk, 1959 Mar. 18–
II. Vogel, Ezra F.
DS922.35.P336
2011
951.9504′3092—dc22
2010038046
Contents
Introduction: The Case for Political History 1
Byung-Kook Kim
part one
Born in a Crisis
1
The May Sixteenth Military Coup
35
Yong-Sup Han
2
Taming and Tamed by the United States
58
Taehyun Kim and Chang Jae Baik
3
State Building: The Military Junta’s Path
to Modernity through Administrative Reforms 85
Hyung-A Kim
part two
Politics
4
Modernization Strategy: Ideas and Influences 115
Chung-in Moon and Byung-joon Jun
5
The Labyrinth of Solitude: Park and the
Exercise of Presidential Power
140
Byung-Kook Kim
6
The Armed Forces
168
Joo-Hong Kim
7
The Leviathan: Economic Bureaucracy
under Park
200
Byung-Kook Kim
8
The Origins of the Yushin Regime:
Machiavelli Unveiled
233
Hyug Baeg Im
Contents
vi
part three
Economy and Society
9
The Chaebol
265
Eun Mee Kim and Gil-Sung Park
10
The Automobile Industry
295
Nae-Young Lee
11
Pohang Iron & Steel Company
322
Sang-young Rhyu and Seok-jin Lew
12
The Countryside
345
Young Jo Lee
13
The Chaeya
373
Myung-Lim Park
part four
International Relations
14
The Vietnam War: South Korea’s Search
for National Security
403
Min Yong Lee
15
Normalization of Relations with Japan:
Toward a New Partnership
430
Jung-Hoon Lee
16
The Security, Political, and Human Rights
Conundrum, 1974–1979
457
Yong-Jick Kim
17
The Search for Deterrence:
Park’s Nuclear Option
483
Sung Gul Hong
part five
Comparative Perspective
18
Nation Rebuilders: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,
Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, and
Park Chung Hee
513
Ezra F. Vogel
19
Reflections on a Reverse Image:
South Korea under Park Chung Hee and
the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos
542
Paul D. Hutchcroft
Contents
vii
20
The Perfect Dictatorship? South Korea
versus Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico 573
Jorge I. Domínguez
21
Industrial Policy in Key Developmental Sectors: South Korea versus Japan and Taiwan
603
Gregory W. Noble
Conclusion: The Post-Park Era
629
Byung-Kook Kim
Notes
651
Acknowledgments
737
List of Contributors
739
Index of Persons
741
Introduction:
The Case for Political History
Byung-Kook Kim
Few periods have changed South Korean history more than the Park era that began in May 1961 with a military coup d’état. The nature of leadership, the political parties and political opposition, the bureaucracy, the armed forces, relations between workers and farmers and their government, the chaebol industrial conglomerates, foreign policy—
all were transformed. Meanwhile, economically South Korea grew out of poverty into an industrial powerhouse in one generation, albeit with massive political, social, and economic costs. And after the Park era suddenly ended in 1979, the reactions to what had taken place transformed the country once more.
The eighteen-year Park era has proved to be one of the most, if not the most, controversial topics for the Korean public, politicians, and scholars both at home and abroad. How much was the economic takeoff fueled by changes in the political and social fabric? To what degree was Park Chung Hee personally responsible for the transformation—both political and economic—across multiple sectors? Why did South Korea’s political regime drift toward “hard” authoritarianism while its economy modernized at a hyper pace? Were these changes causally related? Why was his era marked by both dazzling policy successes and spectacular failures? How much were South Korea’s successes and failures explained by its historically antecedent conditions? As one of a handful of newly industrializing countries (NICs) that succeeded in economically catching up with early de-
Introduction
2
velopers and militarily building up a system of deterrence, but at huge costs, South Korea is a crucial case in understanding the politics of modernization.
This volume revisits South Korea’s developmental era, but it distinguishes itself from other works on the nation’s rebirth after 1961 by placing its analytic focus on political history. We have chosen political history for three reasons. First, although South Korea’s macroeconomic indicators show a country continually undergoing a spectacular industrial transformation, its trajectory of modernization was anything but stable. The macroeconomic indicators covered up a deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability pervading South Korea. The high-payoff, high-risk strategy of subsidizing growth through bureaucratically distributed policy loans burdened banks with huge nonperforming loans, thus entrapping the economy in a cycle of boom and bust and presenting the South Korean leadership with hard policy choices in 1972 and 1979. The volatile swings in this U.S. ally’s global, regional, and peninsular strategy aggravated or ameliorated South Korea’s security dilemmas in 1961, 1964, 1969, and 1976, which triggered its policymakers’ need to reassess competing budgetary priorities between military and economic programs. Most critical, Park C
hung Hee was at first supposed to step down in 1971 and, after a constitutional revision to allow his third presidential term, in 1975. Whether he would do so was to have profound impacts on South Korea’s regime character and, hence, its strategy of modernization. The choice made at each of these critical junctures, determining South Korea’s subsequent path of economic growth, was heavily shaped by politics.
Second, we focus on political history because at many of the critical junctures, for South Korea to succeed at the state building, military security improvements, and market formation upon which its prospect for hypergrowth depended, the resolution of problems and issues could only come from its top political authorities’ attempt at juggling the competing claims of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and domestic politics. To explain South Korea’s power realignments between state ministries away from its intrinsically conservative Ministry of Finance (MoF) in 1962, 1965, and 1973, or toward the MoF in 1969, 1972, and 1979, we must examine how political leaders controlled state bureaucrats. State ministries, if left alone, only produce a deadlock of interests or a gradual adjustment of interests.1
To explain the chaebol conglomerates’ risk-taking behavior, one must look into what kind of incentives they had that made taking risks a rational strategy from their perspective and why those incentives were dangled in front of them in the first place. Such inquiries require an analysis of Park Chung Hee and his top aides’ political goals, calculations, and strategies.
The primacy of politics is shown even more directly in the social and
Introduction
3
political realms. To explain the farmers’ zigzagging behavior between
“pro-Park” and “anti-Park” votes in 1963, 1967, 1971, and 1978, we must analyze Park’s similarly zigzagging strategy of modernization between the Green Revolution and the agricultural squeeze, his transformation of rural state institutions into a political machine, and his awakening of politically contagious regionalist sentiments in all corners of South Korea. Likewise, explaining why labor failed to challenge his strategy of trickle-down growth requires an analysis of the top-down reorganization of labor unions in 1961, as well as Park’s massive and persistent crackdown on dissident chaeya activists, which prevented leftists from establishing an enduring base of support in society. The decision to normalize relations with Japan and dispatch combat troops to South Vietnam in 1965
with an eye to securing the seed money for strategic industrial projects also constituted a political act of risk taking.
Third, we go back to political history because both economic theories and developmental state literatures are less effective in explaining the motives behind, as opposed to the outcomes of, Park’s policy decisions.
To begin with, many of his policy choices collided head on with prevailing economic ideas. Responding to a slowdown in growth rates in 1969, 1972, 1974, and 1979, South Korea adopted unorthodox measures, relieving stagflationary pressures quickly by imposing shock therapy—interest hikes, debt rescheduling, “industrial rationalization,” devaluation, wage cuts, and, in 1972, even freezing payments of private sach’ae (curb-market) loans—on society, but then using this relief of market pressures only as grounds for another massive injection of government-subsidized bank loans to finance a new round of hypergrowth. This obsession with economic growth and the leadership’s ability to carry out its shock therapy despite political risks and economic dangers can only be understood by turning to an analysis of Park’s vision of puguk kangbyông (rich nation, strong army) and his strategy to leverage structural pressures to achieve that vision and, with it, satisfy his will to power.
Obviously, using political history does not require us to reject efforts at theory building. On the contrary, theories help us identify analytic and historical puzzles and issues, as well as map out our line of inquiry. However, it is also true that many of the complexities, ambiguities, and uncertainties in South Korea’s historical trajectory of modernization have been lost in efforts at theory building. The chapters in this volume restore those lost stories and, in the process, provide us with an opportunity to assess both the strengths and the weaknesses of prevailing views and discover ways to modify those ideas. Placing theories in the context of political history, our chapters agree on three crucial analytic points.
First, South Korea’s political actors defy any easy typology and tran-
Introduction
4
scend many dichotomous conceptualizations of prevailing theories. The chapters will argue that, for us to understand the role of these actors in the politics of modernization, we frequently need to combine what theories originally conceptualized as mutually exclusive concepts. The state was predatory and yet technocratic. The chaebol did receive special favors as “cronies” of Park and his ruling coalition but also, with dedication and entrepreneurial skill, pioneered new growth industries at immense risks. The military was politicized, defending its political master during crisis, but was also a professionalized actor successfully deterring Pyôngyang’s invasion. Both the ruling and the opposition political parties were internally pulled apart by factional struggle and externally constrained by police surveillance, and yet their struggles for presidential succession seriously constrained Park’s political options. The dissident chaeya was organizationally weak, but contentious—and sometime even capable of reshaping national agendas. The Park regime also boasted resilience, only to be shaken up by spontaneously organized political protests from below, to which it responded with increased repression. The “hegemonic” United States usually could not bring its weaker South Korean client-state to its knees when the two nations’ interests diverged. Even in the realm of security, U.S. deterrence assumed dual political meanings, one against Pyôngyang’s threats of war and another against South Korea’s demand for retaliation after North Korean guerrilla attacks or against Park’s nuclear ambitions. The chapters in this volume urge us to imagine actors that lie in between the opposite concepts of predatory and technocratic states, politicized and professionalized armed forces, weak and strong political parties, resilient and fragile regimes, and hegemonic and client powers.
Second, many of the variables identified as major drivers of South Korea’s modernization—from its “Weberian developmental state”2 to state-business “networks,”3 to “Asian values” and U.S. aid policy, even to Park Chung Hee’s leadership—were continually evolving entities, with many of their elements newly created, nurtured, and/or readjusted as part of a series of policy learning and institutional experiments during Park’s political rule. The institutions as described by theorists of developmental states and networks were more an idealized end product of the eighteen years of Park’s political rule than the actual state of political and economic relations at any one point in his era. The “Weberian” developmental state, the
“radical” chaeya, the “modern” military, the “regionalist” political parties, the “ideologically contentious” labor forces, and the authoritarian
“garrison state” we encounter in prevailing theories on South Korea’s politics of modernization were more products of Park’s political rule than a set of structures enabling or constraining his role as a modernizer during
Introduction
5
much of his developmental era. The chapters in this volume urge us to look at these actors as existing in a relationship of co-evolution, continually reshaping each other’s political roles, identities, and strategies through their actions and counteractions.
Third, as a corollary of our evolutionary perspective, the chapters argue that intentions look more complex, options more numerous, and consequences more uncertain than what has been argued by other theorists.
Many of Park’s decisions at critical junctures of South Korea’s trajectory of modernization could have gone very differently, given certain costs and uncertain benefits. He did not decide out of ignorance. On the contrary, Park knew the domestic political costs, economic obstacles, and fo
reign policy risks and yet he stuck with many of the decisions he made in the name of puguk kangbyông, with varying outcomes. The modernizer put South Korea on a path to hypergrowth by 1965 and kept it on that track through economic crises in 1969, 1972, and 1974 with a mix of shock therapy and subsidies. In the last year of his rule, however, Park saw his growth machine become paralyzed under the weight of its internal contradictions. He had successfully managed political crises in 1965, 1969, 1972, and 1975 with a combination of threats and appeasements, but in 1979 Park looked like a different man, no longer mixing carrots and sticks in his dealings with the opposition, which only aggravated regime instability. Similarly, Park dexterously brought the United States and Japan into a transnational coalition in support of his program of economic growth and military build-up in 1965 by normalizing relations with Japan and dispatching combat troops to South Vietnam, but after Richard M. Nixon’s Guam Doctrine of 1969, his attempts at slowing down, if not reversing, U.S. military withdrawal only hurt national, regime, and personal interests by developing into a triple foreign policy crisis around human rights abuses, “Koreagate,” and military withdrawal. These varying outcomes of his strategy of state building, market formation, and military security urge us to put Park and his intentions at the center of analysis.
Political Regime
Building a typology of political regimes, a central task in political science research, at first appears simple. South Korea under Park Chung Hee showed traits of what Juan J. Linz once identified as those of an authoritarian regime: “[a] political syste[m] with limited, not responsible, political pluralism; without elaborate and guiding ideology (but with distinctive mentalities); without intensive nor extensive political mobilization (except
Introduction
6
[at] some points in their developments); and in which a leader (or occasionally a small group) exercises power within formally ill defined limits but actually quite predictable ones.”4
By this definition, South Korea’s developmental era qualifies as a period of authoritarian rule. Even before Park Chung Hee launched his yushin constitution in 1972 in order to prolong his rule indefinitely, South Korea’s legislative and judiciary branches had too few constitutional prerogatives to ensure political pluralism; political parties and factions lacked not only vision and programs but also dense grassroots organizations for mobilization; and dissident activists (chaeya), labor organizers, and rural village leaders were still struggling to put their houses in order through much of his rule after having been torn apart under his military junta (1961–1963).
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