Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  At the same time, however, the yushin regime retained the Third Republic’s (1963–1972) features of technocracy. The revitalizing reform was not

  “sultanic.” Rather, it was a modern form of authoritarian rule.3 Even during the Third Republic, much of “politics” had been replaced by administration, with former military officers and bureaucratic technocrats taking over many of the roles and functions of interest group representation and intermediation previously held by legislators of the pre-1961 period, but this trend toward the bureaucratization of politics strengthened during the yushin. For these technocrats with the self-proclaimed mission of pursuing state-directed industrialization and military build-up, the paramount concerns were effectiveness and performance. The yushin regime stunted what potential the Third Republic had for democratization, but it was at the same time one of the factors that contributed to South Korea’s transformation into a model East Asian developmental state.

  That the yushin was a garrison state is clear. The continuity it had with the formally democratic but technocratic and frequently authoritarian Third Republic, however, has made it a historical as well as a theoretical controversy. At the center of the issue is whether the yushin represented a change of regime, or merely a change within a regime. Depending on how the yushin and its relationship with the past are viewed, the Third Republic also assumes a different status in South Korean political history, either as a brief democratic interlude abruptly terminated by Park or as a period of soft authoritarianism that was a cousin to both the pre-1960 dictatorial rule of Syngman Rhee and the post-1972 yushin regime. Complexly intermingled with this question of historical continuity is the issue of motives. The die-hard loyalists of Park take seriously his discourse of revitalization, portraying him as a “Meiji revolutionary” who launched the yushin to catch up economically with the West, modernize the armed forces in deterrence against the North, and ensure national survival in the hazardous era of détente. The Park they imagine is a Nietzschian super-hero tackling the impossible task of transforming South Korea into a second Japan in his lifetime, albeit through an authoritarian route.

  In contrast to his supporters who follow a voluntarist line of thought, positing Park to have chosen the path of yushin out of his own will to power and his ambition to leave a permanent mark on South Korean political history as a modernizer, the critics of Park usually take a structuralist

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  perspective.4 The advocates of structural determinism fall into two groups.

  Privileging economic forces as the prime driver of political change, some have argued that Park was structurally bound to impose the yushin regime in order to overcome the economic challenges inherent in the stage of heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI). Faced with a profound lack of capital and technology needed to enter the next developmental stage of HCI, Park is portrayed as launching the yushin to mobilize and concentrate resources through the centralized and concentrated power of the state. As such, the yushin is presented as a political institution that achieved what the market was unable to achieve.

  Others have identified the structural prime driver as more sociopolitical than economic, arguing that Park chose the yushin in order to silence social tensions inherent in his trickle-down hypergrowth strategy and to repress political discontent emanating from his strategy of rule based on Kyôngsang regionalism, money politics, and selective coercion. Whether the economic or sociopolitical variant, the structuralists are alike in that they look at Park’s justification of the yushin in terms of the need to ward off external security challenges and telescope stages of industrialization in a single generation’s time only as a pretext to prolong his political rule in the face of economic and sociopolitical crises.

  Consequently, beneath the debates surrounding the questions of regime continuity or change, political motives, and structural forces stands the issue of agent and structure. The voluntarist privileges the role of Park the person, zeroing in on his vision, strategy, and leadership to explain why he chose the politically and economically challenging path of yushin in 1972, whereas the structuralist conceptualizes Park as a captive of structures, driven into the launching of yushin by the political, economic, and social contradictions of his earlier modernization strategy of hypergrowth cum authoritarian rule. Despite the vastly diverging ways the voluntarist and structuralist portray the relationships between the agent and structures, political institutions and economic development, and intentions and strategies, they agree that the yushin constituted a clear instance of historical discontinuity separating the post-1972 period from the pre-1972 period in terms of political regime, developmental stage, and economic strategy.

  Chapter 8 takes a third view. First, it will argue that the journey toward the yushin regime needs to be conceptualized in terms of evolution, not discontinuity. The seeds of Park’s shift toward authoritarian rule and HCI—the two essential traits of the yushin—were sowed when Park pushed for a constitutional revision to allow a third presidential term in 1969 and brought in O Wôn-ch’ôl of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) to the Blue House as a newly established senior secretary on

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  industrial affairs in 1971 to develop the heavy and chemical industries as the infrastructure of military security. Once this seed was sowed, Park helped the forces of authoritarian rule and HCI to sprout by clearing away both political and economic obstacles, including next-generation second-tier party and military bosses of the ruling coalition and financial vulnerabilities of the chaebol, through purges and emergency measures in 1971

  and 1972. In other words, Park moved incrementally toward the yushin over a period of three years. The inauguration of the yushin in October 1972, followed by the announcement of HCI in January 1973, was more the outcome of his three-year-long preparation for lifelong rule than the beginning of his scheme to put in place a garrison state with the mission to aggressively pursue HCI.

  Second, Chapter 8 recognizes that the launching of yushin brought a qualitatively different type of politics by making presidential elections a de facto rubber-stamp process of perpetuating Park Chung Hee’s political rule, but at the same time it echoes the findings of Chapters 5, 6, and 7 that the 1972 enactment of indirect presidential elections masks the continuity of the extreme centralization of power in the presidency throughout the Park era. Strong control mechanisms were already in place during the Third Republic, making its “democracy” a bureaucratically driven “administrative democracy,” to quote Park. Many of the political and economic policies required to put South Korea onto the track of hypergrowth during the 1960s, from the risky normalization of relations with Japan, to the potentially contentious dispatch of military troops to South Vietnam, to the launching of an extremely regressive “reverse margin system”

  of interest rates, were chosen without any effective legislative checks-and-balances. The imperial presidential system was not the outcome of the yushin. On the contrary, it was already in place during the Third Republic and became progressively strengthened through the politics of purges and rule-by-emergency power during the 1969–1972 period. At best, the Third Republic was soft authoritarianism with the potential to turn into liberal democracy through competitive presidential elections. The significance of the yushin lay in weeding out this potential rather than in destroying democracy.

  Third, in analyzing Park’s gradual dual-track preparation for the yushin through political purges and economic emergency measures, Chapter 8

  hopes to put the agent and structures on an ontologically equal footing.

  The Third Republic found itself under severe pressures on financial, military-security, and social fronts beginning in the late 1960s, partly as a result of the tensions and contradictions built into its trickle-down grow-at-all-cost strategy of modernization and partly as an unexpected outcome

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  of global recession and regional détente. How
ever, in contrast to the structuralist portrayal of these triple pressures as crises that constrained Park’s room for maneuver and maybe even determined his choice of options, Chapter 8 argues that the political meaning of those pressures was open-ended, decisively shaped by what Park could make out of them. That is, structural constraints certainly tightened and deepened beginning in the late 1960s, but they were challenges rather than crises, turning into an opportunity once the Machiavelli in Park enabled him to see those pressures as a lever to further his vision of nation building and, with it, his will to power. In fact, if the structural pressures engendered a crisis, it turned out to be a crisis of anti-Park rather than pro-Park forces, democracy rather than soft authoritarianism, market mechanisms rather than the dirigiste developmental state, after Park harnessed the triple structural pressures to advance his vision of puguk kangbyông (rich nation, strong army).

  Fourth, by putting Park the agent on an equal footing with structural pressures, Chapter 8 complements Chapters 5, 6, and 7 in identifying his leadership as the missing link in the explanation of South Korea’s politics of modernization, but it strives to do so through focusing on the Machiavellian virtù of Park at play in the transition years of 1969–1972. Park started early in 1969 to prepare for the yushin and moved incrementally through a carefully synchronized and sequenced series of political purges, institutional changes, economic emergency measures, and inter-Korea dialogue with a strategic mind. Each of the steps Park took looked like a marginal change, but their cumulative consequences were profound—in effect, clearing the way to the promulgation of yushin in October 1972. In explaining how Park was able to move from one critical juncture to another in his journey to the yushin without much sustained political resistance during the 1969–1972 period, it will be argued that it was Park’s strategic choice to perpetuate himself in power more than any structural necessities that moved him to the launching of the yushin regime. Although elected for a third term only a year earlier, Park felt limited by the existing constitution in extending his rule. The yushin was then a political act through which he removed the structural obstacles that constrained his will to power and that obstructed the realization of his vision for modernization.

  He could have retired after serving his third presidential term in 1975 and become a hero, but he did not.

  As his promulgation of yushin demonstrated, Park was never a faithful believer in democracy. After three years of military rule, he returned to electoral democracy in 1963 under pressure from both the United States and his domestic political opposition. What Park truly desired was to emulate Meiji Japan’s spirit of top-down modernization. Even during the Third

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  Republic, Park did not shy away from compromising democratic principles and norms when he thought it necessary to bring about economic modernization.5 Park even named his new bureaucratic-authoritarian regime after the Meiji ishin ( “yushin” in Korean). Meiji Japan was governed by a system of political rule emphasizing absolute loyalty to the state, with the emperor at the top, but managed by former samurai bureaucrats in alliance with conservative party politicians and big business. They were united by the common vision of rapid industrialization. Park saw in Meiji ishin a model for good governance and built his own yushin regime after the century-old Japanese idea of state-led modernization.

  Purging and Taming the Praetorian Guards

  Park won the presidential election of 1967 by a landslide. He could have celebrated his victory, but he did not. Rather, Park immediately focused on the upcoming National Assembly elections to make preparations for lifelong rule. To do so, he had to revise the constitution to allow for a third presidential term. That required the Democratic Republican Party’s control of two thirds of the National Assembly seats. Only after the passage of a constitutional amendment in the legislature could he put the amendment to a public referendum for approval. In the National Assembly elections held one month after the presidential election, Park was accused by the press of resorting to money politics (k¤mgwôn chôngch’i) and bureaucratically driven politics (kwan’gwôn chôngch’i) even when it was certain that the DRP would win a majority. The press reports of vote buying alienated some urban voters, but did not bring about a change in campaign strategy.

  Soon the critics began charging that Park had a hidden agenda in winning two thirds of the National Assembly seats: to remove the constitutional restriction that permitted only two consecutive presidential terms. The anxiety of the opposition was only aggravated when some of the DRP leaders began openly appealing to the electorate to give the DRP a two-thirds majority in order to enable Park to run for a third term in1971.6 The Kim Chong-p’il–led mainstream faction within the DRP was on guard too, lest the constitutional revision irreparably damage the crown-prince status of its boss, but they could not politicize the issue of constitutional revision on the basis of the isolated instances of talks on it.

  The National Assembly election of 1967 gave the DRP two thirds of the seats. However, the struggle for constitutional revision had to wait until the first half of Park’s second term passed. In this struggle to introduce a third term for the president, Park had an unquestionable upper hand. In

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  control of a powerful security apparatus, a colossal economic bureaucracy, and two thirds of the National Assembly seats, Park could co-opt, silence, and even destroy potential foes. Moreover, having delivered his election promise of economic growth, military security, and political stability since 1963, Park could also claim that he had the public with him in introducing a third presidential term. The extremely favorable economic conditions of 1969 also strengthened his political hand. At the time of the constitutional revision in 1969, the GNP grew in double digits (15 percent), the harvest was good (7,737,000 rice bags), rural income climbed by 21 percent, the unemployment rate decreased to 4.8 percent, and the inflation rate fell from 11 percent in 1968 to 9 percent. This was the first time price levels had dropped since 1962, stabilizing voters’ economic life.7

  In fact, the most serious challenge to the constitutional revision came from within the ruling DRP, not from the opposition. Kim Chong-p’il’s mainstream faction preferred to maintain the constitutional limitation of two presidential terms, with an eye to the presidential succession and a possible generational change of leadership in 1971. Against such a political challenge, Park was to use intra-DRP factional struggles to steer the issue of constitutional revision in the direction he preferred. His strategy was the time-tested policy of divide and rule. For this he found a willing instrument in the anti-mainstream faction. Without a leader who could match Kim Chong-p’il in charisma, mass support, and organizational prowess, the anti-mainstream faction looked at the constitutional revision as an opportunity to not only consolidate the power of Park—their patron in intra-DRP factional struggles against Kim Chong-p’il—but also defer the question of presidential succession to a more favorable time. The first political leader to bring up the issue of constitutional revision publicly was acting DRP chairman Yun Ch’i-yông of the anti-mainstream faction. On January 7, 1969, Yun called for a constitutional revision to clear the way for a third term for Park, “the greatest leader since the founding of the Korean nation by Tan’gun 5,000 years ago.”8 As usual, Park maintained a low profile on the issue of constitutional revision until he thought his proxies had succeeded in establishing the subject’s legitimacy.

  The mainstream faction’s initial reaction was negative, believing that with Park prohibited from entering the 1971 race, power would go to its boss, Kim Chong-p’il. To show its discontent over the talk within the DRP

  regarding constitutional revision, the mainstream faction went against the party line in joining the opposition’s no-confidence vote against minister of education Kwôn O-pyông in April 1969, thus demonstrating the faction’s voting power when aligned with that of the opposition. Concerned about the escalation of factional struggles and determined
to reestablish party

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  discipline, Park took the matter into his own hands, purging Yang Sun-jik, Ye Ch’un-ho, Chông T’ae-sông, and Kim Tal-su of the mainstream faction from the DRP. That Park was willing to give up the hard-won DRP control of two thirds of the National Assembly seats to crack down on the opponents of constitutional revision revealed how much he wanted to extend his political rule and how much he distrusted Kim Chong-p’il. The purge brought a further shift in the balance of power within the DRP toward the anti-mainstream faction—to the effect of raising the status of the “Gang of Four”(Kim Sông-gon, Paek Nam-ôk, Kil Chae-ho, and Kim Chin-man) to the new mainstream. By contrast, Kim Chong-p’il began losing credibility even among his faction members because of his failure to stand up to Park on the issue of presidential succession. In their eyes, Kim Chong-p’il was letting his men be crushed by Park for looking after Kim Chong-p’il’s interests. The reality, however, was more complex. Having been forced to

  “retire from public service” and “go into exile” twice in 1963 and 1965

  for his role in political fund-raising and normalization of relations with Japan, Kim Chong-p’il knew his political vulnerabilities. With the anti-mainstream in control of the key institutions of power, from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) to the Army Security Command (ASC) to the Blue House presidential Secretariat, Kim Chong-p’il did not dare to oppose Park on the issue of constitutional revision. Besides, Park hinted to Kim Chong-p’il that he would be the heir in 1975.

  Once Park secured Kim Chong-p’il’s reluctant support for the constitutional revision, the Gang of Four swiftly led the passage of the bill for the revision in the National Assembly, where the DRP made up for its losses of seats with defectors from the opposition to obtain the votes required for putting into motion the constitutional revision. Then followed the national referendum, which Park claimed was a vote of confidence for his government. The strategy was to mobilize public support by heighten-ing people’s fear of the disorder that could result from Park’s defeat in the referendum.9 As expected, the referendum was approved by a huge margin.