Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

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  justment in its strategic doctrine. Consequently North Korea began to look to the option of dialogue with the South as a strategy of national survival.34

  With the North searching for a new strategy of national survival, and himself in need of a forward-looking vision on the Korean Peninsula for domestic political reasons, Park seized upon the first signs of North Korea’s receptivity to the idea of inter-Korea dialogue to develop a two-track strategy of military build-up and national reconciliation with an eye to strengthening the garrison state created by the Special Law for National Security. The second track of dialogue had been in the making since August 15, 1970, when Park delivered an Independence Day celebration speech that announced his intention to bring about inter-Korea dialogue under the principle of “fair competition based on good will.” A year later, Park followed up with the proposal to bring about a reunion of the families separated from each other by the national division through the offices of the Red Cross in the two Koreas. The initiative was supported by the United States, which was then concerned about the danger of military instability following the staged reduction of U.S. troops in South Korea.35

  Under rising security dilemmas of its own, North Korea promptly agreed to Park’s proposal of North-South Red Cross talks. Inter-Korea dialogue could provide the North with an opportunity to secure foreign investment and find relief from the pressure to build up its military capability at an economically dysfunctional rate. The subsequent dialogues resulted in the Joint Declaration of July 4, 1972, which ameliorated many of the security dilemmas confronting Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung. First, the joint declaration reduced military tensions by getting the North to tone down the “Four Military Principles.” By recognizing each other as de facto, if not de jure, sovereign states, the two Koreas progressed, however cautiously, toward a state of peaceful coexistence. Second, by conferring on Park and Kim the legitimacy of working together in the interest of establishing a new peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, the joint declaration enabled the two leaders to reorganize their respective systems of political rule to better fit in with the requirements of the emerging world order of détente. Park was to launch the yushin within four months, whereas Kim had completed the ongoing consolidation of his yuil regime whereby the Workers’ Party, the military, and the state were under the sole (yuil) command of and with the suryông (Leader) in body and spirit. Third, the joint declaration created an opportunity for Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung to muster popular support by playing to the mass desire for national reunification.

  It was from this joint declaration that Park found the positive, forward-

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  looking vision he needed to supplement the negatively defined cold war doctrine of anticommunism to simultaneously muster popular support and military deterrence. Arguing that the establishment of a “Koreanized administrative democracy” (see Chapter 4) or an authoritarian regime would be far more effective in negotiating the issues of peace, coexistence, and unification with North Korea’s monolithic Stalinist regime, Park proposed to launch the yushin. Interestingly, a similar idea was being parlayed by Kim Il Sung in the North. Ten days after Park promulgated the yushin constitution on December 17, 1972, Kim Il Sung revised his constitution, which completed North Korea’s long process of centralization of power in Kim Il Sung and the construction of a uniquely North Korean–style socialist system based on the Juch’e ideology. By declaring P’yôngyang rather than Seoul to be the capital of his Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung also appeared to recognize national division as a permanent, not temporary, state of politics.36

  For Park, however, inter-Korea dialogue was a double-edged sword, rallying popular support for the yushin regime for its alleged effectiveness in bringing about a peaceful reunification, on the one hand, but potentially weakening the South Korean people’s perception of the North as a military threat, on the other. Once the public perception of North Korean threats subsided, it would be inevitable that Park’s rationale for legitimizing the yushin on the basis of fear of the North would also weaken. Having an enemy state only forty miles north of Seoul helped Park’s political rule by providing a rationale for social and political repression. Park knew he had to engage in the strategy of inter-Korea dialogue without undermining his other strategy of legitimating the yushin regime on the basis of perpetual ideological rivalry and confrontation with those across the border. Presumably, a similar political dilemma haunted Kim Il Sung too, dampen-ing the two leaders’ enthusiasm to engage in a negotiation for unification once they completed the consolidation of their own power. By the mid-1970s, the two Koreas were to return to the old pattern of military tension and conflict. In contrast to the relatively brief inter-Korea dialogue, the developmental strategy of heavy and chemical industrialization, which Park launched to demonstrate the yushin regime’s superior capabilities in problem-solving, continued to the end of his rule.

  To be sure, the early 1970s were not the first time Park had spoken of HCI. On the contrary, he was obsessed with it from the very moment of taking power in 1961. In spite of such continuity in his personal infatua-tion with HCI, however, the HCI drive of the yushin period differed from his earlier HCI attempts in two fundamental ways. First, whereas Park of the 1960s concentrated on HCI projects as separate investment projects to

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  be planned and implemented individually on a case-by-case basis without systematic links between the projects, Park of the post-1973 period took HCI as a macroeconomic strategy, simultaneously pursuing a wide range of investment projects on multiple fronts, with an integrated view of their forward and backward linkages to each other and to other sectors in the economy. The HCI drive of the yushin era differed from the HCI projects in priority, scope, scale, and style.

  Second, in the post-1973 period, Park was prepared to pay the extremely high costs of the HCI drive, including the cost of political alienation and discontent that arose from the authoritarian ways the HCI drive was pursued. Given South Korea’s low per capita income, small economy, and lack of industrial linkages, Park had to resort to forced savings, fiscal and financial subsidies, and labor repression to mobilize resources to the scale required for his ambitious HCI goals. Consequently, the top-down HCI drive proceeded in tandem with society’s deepening sense of alienation. Nevertheless, Park stuck to his goal of HCI rather than downscaling his economic program to fit with the only slowly changing national capabilities. By contrast, in the 1960s, with the exception of building an integrated steel mill (see Chapter 11), Park was ready to back down in the face of market pressures.

  The question is why Park adopted the HCI drive as the macroeconomic strategy in 1973. Most critics argue that he chose the HCI drive because the politically illegitimate yushin needed a justification. The HCI drive is looked upon as a defensive measure adopted against the powerful rise of societal resistance against authoritarian rule. Essentially, the critics view the Park of 1972 as having been in an acute political crisis where his legitimacy was denied by societal forces, and identify the yushin as the only option left for him to survive and the HCI drive as the instrument to justify the promulgation of authoritarianism. Upon a closer inspection, however, the reality looks much more complex.

  First, it is not clear whether the turn to HCI—and, for that matter, the promulgation of the yushin regime itself—actually helped to strengthen Park’s political rule.37 On the contrary, even before the launch of HCI in 1973, Park was firmly in control of domestic politics and in possession of the power to enact what he thought was required for modernization, as the adoption of the Emergency Decree for Economic Stability and Growth in August 1972 demonstrates. Moreover, Park was capable of ruling over South Korean society through his emergency powers even before the launching of the yushin and the HCI drive, as the declaration of a state of emergency and the enactment of the Special Law for National Security in Dece
mber 1971 show. In other words, apart from removing all constitu-

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  tional constraints on his reelection, it is not clear what added value the yushin and the HCI drive had for his political power. More specifically, in sharp contrast to the critics’ argument that Park promulgated the yushin to strengthen his regime’s capacity to suppress the resistance of workers, students, and dissident intellectuals against authoritarian rule, Park of the pre-1972 period already possessed a powerful security state with such capabilities. To undermine the critics’ argument even more, Park could also suppress societal resistance legally with the enactment of security laws in 1971. If Park was solely concerned with the need to suppress societal resistance, he did not need the yushin. Nor did he have to pursue the HCI drive.

  The EDESG of 1972 had already resolved the financial crisis.

  Second, the focus on HCI was nothing new.38 On the contrary, among the six heavy and chemical industries identified by Park in January 1973 as the strategic sectors for export-led development, the nonferrous metal and petrochemical industries had been the target of import-substituting industrialization through the end of the 1960s. Also, the other four industries had been designated as future export industries because of their labor- and capital-intensive character. Although some analysts have argued that Park instituted the yushin regime in order to preempt workers from demanding wage increases and labor rights in the strategic heavy and chemical industries,39 Park already had a powerful labor control mechanism in place before he launched the yushin regime.

  This is not to argue that economics and politics had nothing to do with the promulgation of the yushin and its HCI drive. On the contrary, they both originated as a distinctive political and economic strategy, but the political and economic prime drivers were not Park’s crisis of legitimacy and capabilities. Economics and politics of a different sort were at play. It was the removal of constitutional restrictions on the number of presidential terms more than any threats of societal resistance, domestic political instability, industrial conflict, and economic crisis that appears to have motivated Park’s move to the yushin regime in October 1972. That is, it was more Park’s political strengths than his weaknesses that explain the timing and character of regime change. In fact, the political and economic crises many analysts speak of occurred first in 1971–1972, which Park put to rest through the EDESG, and then in 1978–1979 as a result of the repressive politics of the yushin and the too premature, too expansionary HCI drive. That is, economic and political crisis was more the outcome than the cause of the yushin and the HCI drive. The HCI drive was extremely ambitious. In January 1973, three months after the declaration of yushin, Park announced a plan to raise exports to the level of $10 billion and per capita GNP to $1,000 by 1981 on the assumption that his HCI drive would suc-

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  cessfully upgrade the South Korean industrial structure. Rather than the HCI drive requiring the regime change to the yushin, it is more likely that the yushin regime, instituted as a remedy to the political problem of constitutional restraints on presidential terms, needed the HCI drive to justify itself.40

  Ironically, the security crisis precipitated by Nixon’s Guam Doctrine and the ensuing U.S. military disengagement itself removed what could have been the most challenging obstacle to the launching of the yushin—potential U.S. opposition. Because South Korea remained a client state of the United States despite this U.S. doctrine, it was important that Park not weaken South Korea’s military alliance with the United States in his pursuit of the yushin. Having learned the advantages of presenting his political choice as a fait accompli to the United States when that choice affected his vital political interest of staying in power during the junta years (see Chapters 1 and 2), Park was careful not to reveal his plan for regime change until the very last minute of regime transition. At the same time, Park understood that the U.S. interest in maintaining South Korea’s political stability to keep up military deterrence against the North would prevent the United States from outright opposing the launching of the yushin. Besides, the Guam Doctrine had set into motion U.S. military disengagement from the Korean Peninsula, which Park thought undermined what political leverage the United States had over him. Consequently, Park secretly prepared for the regime change without consulting the United States. When he notified the United States of the regime change at the last minute, the State Department’s immediate response was to cautiously distance itself from the newly promulgated authoritarian government, lest the United States become hopelessly caught between the ideologically polarized pro- and anti- yushin forces.41

  At the same time, the timing of Park’s move worked in his favor. The United States was then preoccupied with the task of implementing the Guam Doctrine, and as part of its effort to pull back from its overseas military commitments, it withdrew 20,000 troops from South Korea in the early 1970s. In the context of military withdrawal, the United States was not in a position to proactively engage in South Korea’s domestic political developments, certainly not to the extent that it did during the 1961–1963

  period of military rule.42 Moreover, as noted earlier, Park was qualitatively different from the man he had been in the junta years. Having won his third presidential bid less than a year earlier, the Park of October 1972

  commanded sizable popular support. Moreover, unlike the unstable military junta, whose incessant internal power struggles prevented Park from dominating the political scene and opened an opportunity for the United

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  States to penetrate and influence the core coup leadership, in 1972 no politicians could claim to be Park’s rival. The DRP was under his direct control, with the second-tier next-generation bosses either tamed, purged, or publicly discredited (see Chapter 5), the state bureaucracy had been transformed into a patrimonial but rationalized instrument of economic modernization (Chapter 7), the opposition was struggling to unify the rival forces of Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam, and the dissident chaeya was still in the making (Chapter 13). Without credible forces of opposition within both the DRP and the NDP to ally with, and recognizing Park’s strong hold over South Korean political society, the United States adopted the strategy of wait-and-see when Park rammed through the yushin constitution in 1972.

  U.S. domestic politics also helped Park’s cause. Unlike John F. Kennedy, who scarcely hid his contempt for authoritarian rule during the junta years, Nixon was willing to tolerate Park’s turn to repressive politics.

  Moreover, Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, was a realist, taking the shifting balance of power as the main driver of foreign policymaking. Kissinger focused on the task of bringing about Sino-American rapprochement to end the Vietnam War and build a new global order of détente. The issue of South Korea’s democratization was judged in terms of its relationship with this overriding issue of military security. Besides, Kissinger was a conservative, valuing Park for his ability to rule with effectiveness. As defined by Nixon and Kissinger, the first priority of the United States was to promote détente, stability, and deterrence on the Korean Peninsula rather than to push for the development of South Korea as a showcase of democracy in East Asia. The United States tried not to destabilize what was an already volatile political situation by intervening in South Korean domestic affairs against Park. To discourage Nixon and Kissinger from confronting Park on the issue of democracy even more, the United States needed Park’s cooperation in bringing about its “honorable”

  exit from the Vietnam War. At the United States’ request, Park agreed to postpone South Korea’s second stage of military withdrawal from South Vietnam from the end of 1972 to June 1973, making South Korean troops the largest force among the foreign military forces aiding South Vietnam at the time of the promulgation of the yushin. For the United States, which was then negotiating a peace treaty with North Vietnam in Paris, Park’s postponement of military withdrawal by a half
year was crucial in maintaining the pressure on North Vietnam to speed up the negotiation process. To make the military and political value of South Korea’s ground troops even more important in Nixon’s strategic calculations, the United States itself had withdrawn its ground troops. The promulgation of the

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  yushin constitution came in October 1972, in the middle of Kissinger’s negotiations with North Vietnam, which most likely prevented Nixon from opposing Park in a clear way in the critical early days of regime change, even if Nixon had been interested in doing so.

  Park Chung Hee’s Virtù and Fortuna

  In many respects, Park would have made Niccolò Machiavelli very proud.

  For Machiavelli, the “new” prince, destined to uplift society to glory, was a person with the ruler’s virtù. The new prince envisioned by Machiavelli

  “continuously [made] subjects passive but content, rule[d] over them with

  [a] lion’s strength but with the slyness of [a] fox, receive[d] respect from his supporters but [was] a figure of fear, brutal but generous, and . . . able to avoid flatterers.” Above all, the new “prudent prince [did] not keep his word when to do so would [have gone] against his interest, or when the reasons that made him to pledge it [were] no longer valid . . . [The new]

  prince never lack[ed] for legitimate excuses to explain away his breaches of faith.”43 The foremost virtù of the ruler was, in other words, the quest for power and the ability to grow it continuously.

  In the transition to the yushin regime, Park amply demonstrated his Machiavellian virtues. The president had the ability to turn political, economic, and international challenges into an opportunity for power aggran-dizement, to successively eliminate the alternative options to his leadership within the DRP, to make people accept his terms of governance, to provide the right structure of incentives to the guardians of power to get them to work on behalf of his political interests, and to be feared enough to exact the acquiescence of many of the opposition. Park was “sly as a fox” in using the public fear of security threats, social discord, and political instability to build the institutional infrastructure of a security state. He was also a