Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  The alliance of Park and the Gang of Four, however, masked their irrec-oncilable interests. For Park, the 1969 constitutional revision was only one of the many hurdles he had to overcome in order to realize his ultimate goal of lifelong rule and “revitalizing reform.”10 The Gang of Four also thought that the 1969 revision was not the end but the beginning of regime change, but the change it envisioned was vastly different. Like Kim Chong-p’il, the Gang of Four assumed that Park would retire after his third term and it planned to take power at that point. Lacking the charisma and mass support base of Kim Chong-p’il, the Gang of Four hoped to institute a par-

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  liamentary or semi-presidential system at the end of Park’s third term, with presidential power drastically weakened and most of the rights, duties, and functions of governance entrusted to the cabinet, led by the prime minister.11 Such a power scheme had no place in Park’s plans for South Korea. Park was determined to stay on even after 1975 and worked to centralize his power, whereas the Gang of Four preferred to share power through the strengthening of legislative powers.

  Park moved swiftly to keep the Gang of Four in check after the 1969

  constitutional revision. His two most powerful praetorian guards—chief of staff Yi Hu-rak and KCIA director Kim Hyông-uk––were forced to step down as Park’s gesture of accommodating the public’s demand to weed out corruption and abuses of power. At the same time, though, Park must have also welcomed the effects of their dismissal on the balance of power within the DRP. Because Yi Hu-rak and Kim Hyông-uk were allies of the Gang of Four, their dismissal helped put the brakes on the rise of the Gang of Four. In a twist of political irony, Park appointed the much weakened Kim Chong-p’il as prime minister. Kim was no longer the charismatic leader he had been before 1969, with his will to power broken and his faction in disarray, but even with his political decline, he was the closest thing to a crown prince that Park had ever had. Now his role was to give what remained of his mass popularity to strengthen Park’s cabinet and check the Gang of Four. What remained of Kim Chong-p’il’s faction spearheaded a counterattack against the new mainstream in 1971. Minister of home affairs O Ch’i-sông embarked on a campaign to break up the power base of the Gang of Four in the central and provincial governments. The Gang retaliated by joining the opposition political parties’ vote of no confidence against O Ch’i-sông in October 1971, against Park’s explicit order to vote the motion down. In particular, Kim Sông-gon wanted to show his newly enhanced power not only to his mainstream faction but also to Park. The vote of no confidence turned out to be a disaster for the Gang of Four. Tortured and humiliated by KCIA agents, Kim Sông-gon and his men stepped down in disgrace. Kim Sông-gon had forgotten that revolt was never an option, given his personal vulnerabilities. Once the owner-manager of the Ssangyong Group and the main fund-raiser for the DRP during the 1960s, Kim Sông-gon had too many weaknesses to survive any public assault on his integrity. He had joined the no-confidence vote on the assumption that Park had to step down in 1975 as he had pledged in the 1971 presidential campaign. Had he known of Park’s true intentions to stay on even after 1975 with the help of the military, which was to be unveiled only a year later, Kim Sông-gon would not have dared to challenge Park in October 1971.

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  The 1969 constitutional revision was, then, the first and the most critical of the steps to Park’s road to the yushin. It paved the way for him to run for a third presidential term, which in turn provided a setting that led to the weakening of all potential power contenders within the DRP, including Kim Chong-p’il and the Gang of Four. The ruling DRP was transformed from a coalition of loyalist party bosses to a system of one-man rule without independent bosses by October 1971. Moreover, once the second-tier next-generation DRP bosses were either disgraced, co-opted, or purged, Park did not return to the pre-1971 practice of raising a group of party bosses with an eye to divide-and-rule. After the purge of the Gang of Four, Park made sure that no one stood between himself and the National Assembly. He took charge of party affairs directly from the Blue House. In undermining the power bases of all major DRP leaders, Park cleared the road toward his lifelong presidency. Or, to put it another way, the extreme personalization of power in the coming yushin political order was already visible in its early preparatory stages of 1969–1972.

  To be sure, the power vacuum was promptly filled by the KCIA, PSS, and ASC, but the rise of military praetorian guards did not threaten Park because it did not mean the rise of potential alternative centers of mass-based or faction-driven power. On the contrary, influencing party politics mainly through political coercion, bribery, and surveillance, the heads of the KCIA, PSS, and ASC came to depend more on Park for their political survival the more they succeeded in their role as praetorian guards, because they became the targets of public discontent and distrust.

  It was in this context of the dismantlement of alternative centers of political power that Park ordered a clandestine preparation for the yushin.

  According to the testimony of chief-of-staff Kim Chông-ryôm, Park began secretly preparing for the yushin constitution from April 1971, when he ran for his third presidential term.12 Park’s support came from three forces: (1) Yi Hu-rak and the KCIA’s agents; (2) Kim Chông-ryôm and the Blue House presidential Secretariat; and (3) Sin Chik-su and bureaucrats from the Ministry of Justice. These three lieutenants of Park shared the common vision of establishing one-party rule after the model of Kuomintang-ruled Taiwan. In particular, Taiwan’s National Congress became their benchmark when designing the National Congress for Unification, whose members, hand-picked by Park, were to occupy one third of the seats in the National Assembly. The yushin planners also looked to the emergency powers that the French Fifth Republic had conferred on its president as a model.

  In May 1972, the support group assembled in one of Park’s security-cleared houses (an’ga) in Kungjôngdong to plot regime change in earnest.

  In August 1972, they organized a team to work on the specifics of consti-

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  tutional revision under the name P’ungnyôn saôp (Good Harvest Project).

  As the team worked on constitutional revision, Yi Hu-rak visited P’yôngyang to discuss inter-Korea reconciliation in May 1972 to create a political environment favorable to the regime change. The key members in the constitutional revision group included KCIA deputy director Kim Ch’i-yôl, minister of justice Sin Chik-su, and senior secretary for political affairs Hong Sông-ch’ôl. Legal scholars were also brought in to give advice, but their role was minor. Two professors, Han T’ae-yôn and Kal Pong-g¤n, only modified phrases of the yushin constitution drafted by the justice ministry. Kal Pong-g¤n was also dispatched to France on a fact-finding mission, but this came after, not before, the promulgation of the new constitution. Park kept a very low profile throughout the Good Harvest Project, but the yushin constitution was essentially his work, with Sin Chik-su serving as an expert on the legal issues of constitutional revision.

  Ironically, when Park geared up to launch the yushin in October 1972, all that remained in the way of his permanent rule was the 1969 constitutional revision that he had pushed to allow him a third term. To remove this constraint was to break his 1971 election pledge not to seek another re-election. Park knew that to go back to the public with another proposal for a one-term extension was bound to be received with cynicism, if not intense political resistance. Park needed a political vision on a broader scale to justify a second constitutional revision, and 1972 was marked by his search for this grand vision. Eventually he landed on the idea of yushin, but before he implemented it, he had to tame the opposition.

  Confronting the Opposition

  In the late 1960s, the NDP remained thoroughly demoralized by its 1967

  electoral defeat. But this did not imply that Park faced no opposition forces outside of his own ruling party. The opposition political pa
rty was in disarray, but there emerged a loose but contentious coalition of student activists, dissident chaeya intellectuals, and religious leaders that joined NDP politicians in raising a serious moral critique of Park’s way of doing politics and economics. It took the constitutional revision of 1969 to unite the opposition movements from their internal disunity and anomie.13 The constitutional revision rekindled the dissident intelligentsia’s distrust of Park and revived their criticism of his abuse of democratic procedures.The economy helped the opposition, too. Under the impact of a global recession and the pressures of the bubble that had developed in the domestic economy through the 1960s, the South Korean economy began to

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  slow down after 1969, which quickly spread fears of a stagflation and strengthened the latent popular discontent over Park’s trickle-down policy of “growth first and distribution later.” Labor issues were also thrust onto central stage as student activists, dissident intellectuals, and religious leaders began to focus on labor rights and urban poverty as much as on Park’s violations of liberal political ideas in an attempt to fundamentally reorient the intelligentsia-centered chaeya into a broader mass-based dissident movement, with or without the support of conservative NDP politicians.

  Student activists tried to organize the workers on the basis of their “right to survival.” Christian groups began to demand social justice, speaking on behalf of workers and the urban poor.14 Their social activism worked, because Park’s decade-long strategy of export-led industrialization had transformed what once was a homogeneous society, living in a condition of

  “equality-in-poverty,” into a heterogeneous class society, with a rising income gap between capital and labor, urban and countryside areas, and Chôlla and Kyôngsang provinces.

  The spread of social protests soon began affecting the NDP. Conservative in its broad ideological stance since its inception, but also in competition with the DRP for votes in elections, the NDP began to take on labor issues as part of its strategy to make an electoral comeback from its 1967

  defeat. Increasingly, its leadership pledged to support the struggle of the poor in alliance with middle-class intellectuals, setting up investigatory teams to monitor working conditions and initiating legislative programs to deal with distributive issues. The NDP called for an increase in the government’s purchasing price for agricultural products, a ban on foreign rice imports, the establishment of a minimum wage system, and the improvement of labor conditions.15 In April 1971, student activists, religious leaders, and NDP politicians jointly established the People’s Council for the Preservation of Democracy as an umbrella organization to coordinate all anti-government struggles on political, economic, and social issues.

  In the midst of the NDP’s gradual redefinition of party identity and its incremental expansion of its legislative agendas and electoral strategies, Park confronted the challenger of his lifetime—Kim Dae-jung of South Chôlla Province, who became the NDP’s presidential candidate in 1971 on a progressive platform. The candidacy of Kim Dae-jung opposed Park in a comprehensive manner. The young opposition leader sided with the cause of human rights against Park’s “dictatorship,” cultivated the image of a labor rights activist in direct opposition to Park’s “crony capitalism” with the chaebol, and formulated the doctrine of “mass (participatory) economics” in contrast to Park’s “unjust” and “unworkable” growth-first strategy. Kim Dae-jung’s formula for sustainable and just growth consisted of

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  better welfare for the people, fairer distribution of wealth, heavier taxes on the rich, joint management by employers and workers, and an “agricultural revolution” to increase rural income.

  In a brave break with anti-communist cold war political orthodoxy, Kim Dae-jung even advocated a three-stage peaceful unification with the North in direct opposition to Park’s myôlgong t’ongil (destroy communism, unify the nation). In the early 1970s, when the tragic memory of the Korean War was still alive and strong, and when the emerging global security order of détente was causing an intense sense of insecurity and vulnerability, these were revolutionary policy proposals—and in the eyes of the conservative mainstream of society, heresy. To the discomfort of Park, during the 1971

  presidential campaign, a year before the launching of yushin, Kim Dae-jung also claimed that “there [was] proof of Park’s attempt to rule for life as a Generalissimo,” forcing Park to pledge that “1971 [would] be the last time [he would] be asking [the public] to vote for [him].”16

  Unfortunately for Park, Kim Dae-jung’s mix of new policy ideas delivered votes in 1971.17 Park played on the public fear of military insecurity by accusing Kim Dae-jung of being a communist sympathizer and isolated his Chôlla constituency by strengthening the Kyôngsang-Ch’ungch’ông regionalist alliance forged since the 1961 military coup. The regionalist electoral strategy exploited the retirement of Yun Po-sôn, the previous favorite son of Ch’ungch’ông provinces, from the leadership of NDP after his second defeat at the polls in 1967. In the absence of Yun Po-sôn, Kim Chong-p’il—now resigned to the position of an anti-mainstream leader—seemed to be mobilizing Ch’ungch’ông voters on behalf of Park. Although Kim Dae-jung was defeated by 946,928 votes, many saw him as the real winner because he campaigned under very unfavorable conditions: a McCarthyist Red scare, regionalist mobilization, bureaucratic dominance, and money politics. And under these conditions, Kim Dae-jung came to symbolize anti-Park political forces.

  A greater setback for Park came in the National Assembly elections that followed a month after the presidential contest of 1971. Despite the NDP’s internal split into “radical” Kim Dae-jung–led Chôlla and “moderate” Kim Young-sam–led South Kyôngsang natives, the opposition did extremely well in the urban sector. In large cities, the NDP took 33 seats and the DRP, 7 seats. In medium- and small-sized cities, the National Assembly seats were distributed by a ratio of 44:19, again in favor of the NDP. The DRP was able to maintain a majority over the NDP by a ratio of 113:89 in the National Assembly only because of its victories in the overrepresented rural sector. The countryside chose the DRP over the NDP by a ratio of 67:19.

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  Consequently, the DRP felt the results of the 1971 National Assembly elections as a major blow. The elections showed a clear urban-rural cleavage, with the cities supporting the NDP and the countryside siding with the DRP. This was not good news for the ruling coalition. As industrialization accelerated the migration of the rural population to the urban sector, the electoral future for Park and the DRP looked increasingly uncertain in the long run. Moreover, the opposition party’s share of National Assembly seats hit 43.6 percent in 1971, which was the best it had done in the history of South Korean politics. To Park’s alarm, the NDP had 20 more seats than the minimum (69) required to stop another attempt at constitutional revision,18 so he could not again seek to prolong his rule through constitutional procedures. Under the circumstances, Park could only resort to extra-constitutional measures to stay in power after his third term expired in 1975.

  The electoral success of 1971 emboldened the NDP and its social allies, and they raised their voices throughout the early 1970s. University students protested against the Student Corps for National Defense (SCND), which Park introduced with the goal of operating military training programs on campuses. When the residents of urban slum areas were driven out of their homes to clear the way for city remodeling, they broke out in violent protests to resist Park’s forced migration policy. Some of the workers at Hanjin Company set its headquarters on fire in protest against a delay in the payment of wages, signaling the emergence of a more contentious labor force. The middle class, especially its intellectual component, also joined the opposition movement in greater numbers. Professors at Seoul National University announced their “declaration of independence”

  from the powerful. The Korean Journalist Committee declared it would defend the fr
eedom of the press, while young judges called for judicial independence.

  At the same time, it is important to note that, as of late 1971, the opposition movements had not gained enough force to change Park’s course of political action. Having weeded out the next-generation aspirants for power from the DRP, still marshaling a legislative majority in the National Assembly, and commanding the loyalty of the KCIA, ASC, PSS, and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in control of the police, Park had the means to suppress any serious challenge to his rule. Contrary to the intentions of the opposition movements, in fact, the opposition’s persistence in protests even after the 1971 elections more strengthened his distrust of the dissident intelligentsia as an irresponsible, if not dangerous, force of the Left and confirmed his belief in the need to bring about a revitalizing re-

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  form to restore order, maintain prosperity, and enhance military security, than weakened his sense of historical mission, his will to power, and his confidence in his abilities to steer the course of South Korean politics and economics. Rather than retreating to accommodate societal pressures, Park moved forward—this time, seeking a change of regime rather than a change within the regime.

  First, Park lost no time in repressing protests. The Army Security Command cracked down on students protesting against the SCND. In October 1971, Commander Yun P’il-yong ordered his Capital Garrison Command soldiers to quash student protestors at Korea University. Ten days later, Seoul was placed under a garrison decree. Second, in December 1971, Park crossed the bridge of no return with the declaration of a state of emergency and the enactment of the Special Law for National Security.19