Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  Second, however, rationality had a competitor—not from traditional culture and political conformism, as suggested in the yôch’onyado thesis,

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  but from volatile regionalist sentiments that continually redefined their object of loyalty and their target of opposition through electoral struggles.

  This power of regionalism was also variable, surfacing in a most decisive way in a region with its favorite son bidding for presidential power and authority. Kyôngsang voters, whether rural or urban dwellers, sided with Park across presidential elections. In a similar spirit, South Ch’ungch’ông rallied behind Yun Po-sôn of the opposition in 1963 and 1967, and Chôlla around Kim Dae-jung in 1971. The rural areas without a presidential candidate from their region, like those in Chôlla in 1967 and Ch’ungch’ông in 1971, were ready to give greater weight to economic interests in their electoral calculations. By contrast, in National Assembly elections, clientelism became the primary mode of political mediation as rural voters responded most immediately to economic incentives. To mete out individual rewards and sanctions, the state developed into a political machine, with the power to affect almost all facets of everyday life in the countryside.

  The “Green Uprising,” 1961–1963

  Having toppled Chang Myôn’s democratically elected government (1960–

  1961), Park knew that his best chance of political survival rested in his ability to take advantage of public discontent over Chang Myôn’s ineptitude. To differentiate himself from Chang Myôn, he zeroed in on delivering economic growth and national security.6 During the junta years Park believed that an improved rural standard of living was a prerequisite of economic development, with the raised purchasing power of the farmers inducing expanded industrial production. The export-led industrialization (ELI) strategy, often regarded as a hallmark of Park’s economic development scheme, was not yet in his “toolbox.”

  In addition to his belief in the rural sector’s potential to back up, if not lead, hypergrowth, Park also sought a political cushion in the countryside.

  Economically vulnerable, socially deprived, and politically unorganized, South Korean farmers constituted a natural target for political mobilization. With a few carrots, they could be won over as a pillar of political order. Most South Korean farmers were small but independent “owner-farmers,”7 living at or below subsistence level.8 The state had also, since 1950, plundered farmers’ livelihoods, forcing them to sell grain at below-market prices with an eye to stabilizing the price of grain sold in the urban sector.9 The state even ended up purchasing grain at below the farmers’

  production cost.10 Abetting this policy was massive agricultural aid provided by the United States under Public Law 480. The easy availability of

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  U.S. grain aid undoubtedly provided a disincentive for the state to increase domestic production through higher grain prices. In lieu of price incentives for farmers, the state had to secure its stock of grain by relying on local administrative channels, including the agricultural cooperatives. The purchase was made mainly as part of a rice–fertilizer barter or as an in-kind farmland tax.11

  To make the farmers an even more attractive target for political mobilization, they made up 58.3 percent of South Korea’s total population in 1961. Moreover, unlike the urban political scene, dominated by opposition politicians and activists who thought their Student Revolution of April 19, 1960, had been thwarted by Park’s military coup, the countryside not only lacked their own horizontal organization, but also was in the tight control of the state bureaucracy, especially the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). Once the leftist forces were rooted out by the end of the Korean War in 1953, the state ceased to place much political value on even the rightist Korean Farmers’ Association (KFA), which largely fell into oblivion after 1955. In the absence of autonomous rural forces, Park could cultivate rural support through bureaucratically driven political mobilization that amounted to what Samuel P. Huntington once called the “Green Uprising,” in which “one segment of the urban elite develop[s] an appeal to or [makes] an alliance with the crucial rural voters and mobilize[s] them into politics so as to overwhelm at the polls the more narrowly urban-based parties.”12 But in contrast to Huntington’s party-led Green Uprising, the top-down mobilization of farmers during Park’s junta years began as a bureaucratic enterprise propelled by the military and state ministries.

  The State as a Political Machine

  The tools for mobilizing the rural population were extensive. The most critical was the MHA, with its organization of control, regulation, and mobilization reaching all the way down to the village level.13 During the 1960s, its Bureau of Local Administration presided over 14,000 subcounty offices of the myôn, the lowest and smallest administrative unit in South Korea, with the authority to administer some 36,000 villagers. The myôn office placed village heads on its payroll, having appointed them to their posts itself.14 Each of the myôn also had a chisô, or police substation, directly under the MHA’s other, more coercive, bureau, the Bureau of Public Safety. The MHA therefore had the power to affect almost all facets of everyday life in the countryside, from issuing birth certificates and death reports to the administration of curfew rules to criminal investigations.

  The National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF) constituted

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  another powerful instrument in Park’s efforts to shape the farmers’ political preferences and behaviors. Over 90 percent of South Korean farmers belonged to local branches of the NACF. More a centrally controlled and directed bureaucracy than a voluntary association of farmers, the NACF

  was an arm of the state with the mission of implementing national economic policy at the local level. “The only thing cooperative about the organization,” S. H. Ban and his colleagues write, “is the fact that farmers must buy one or more shares in their primary cooperatives” in order to be cooperative members.15 The real location of power was the Ministry of Finance (MoF) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF), whose representatives intervened at all levels of NACF activities with the power accrued from their control over the supply of low-interest credit, the marketing channels for grain, and critical agricultural inputs like fertilizer. Because the NACF was the only source of credit, marketing, and fertilizer for most farmers, the MoF and MAF bureaucrats could readily influence the farmers’ economic decisions. Needless to say, these powers of the MoF and MAF secured through the NACF became a source of leverage for MHA bureaucrats in mobilizing votes for Park and Democratic Republican Party (DRP) candidates in the upcoming elections of 1963.

  Park constructed a dense machinery for political propaganda in the countryside as well. During the junta years he launched the People’s Movement for National Reconstruction (PMNR), with the goal of instilling in farmers the spirit of hard work, frugality, perseverance, and self-help. Park envisioned that the PMNR would take charge of the old and new organizations of political socialization and propaganda at the village level to remold the farmers into model citizens. These organizations ranged from Youth for National Reconstruction to Women for National Reconstruction to 4-H clubs. The military junta also began constructing a wired broadcasting system to facilitate propaganda work. Even villagers in the remotest area were provided with loudspeakers that were connected to an amplifier-equipped “wired broadcast station,” which was run privately but under the tight control of the myôn office. It is estimated that some 400,000 loudspeakers were distributed and installed in rural villages during the junta years. Even sparsely populated mountainous Kangwôn Province reportedly supplied 3,000 loudspeakers to each of its counties.16

  Through these broadcasting networks, local MHA officials played propaganda songs, announced state policy guidelines, and disseminated Park’s public speeches every day to the villagers. The villagers had no choice in the selection of stations.

  The Min
istry of Education (MoE) also put the schools to work in the project of political socialization. Every morning the loudspeakers at the

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  schools blared out propaganda songs like “This Is a Year for Work.”

  Schoolmasters joined in this concerted program of “reeducation,” delivering scarcely disguised propaganda regarding the junta’s policies and achievements at weekly all-school meetings.

  As an additional means of cultivating rural support, Park publicly portrayed himself as a “son of the soil.” During the seasons of rice planting and harvesting, newspapers carried photographs of Park working in the rice paddies and drinking rice wine (makkôlli) with the farmers in order to project the image of a commoner, or sômin. To a significant degree, he saw himself as a commoner. This enduring image had a potentially powerful effect in the mobilization of rural support for Park. Many ousted Democratic Party leaders, including President Yun Po-sôn, had been from the traditional elite, who saw their power as stemming in part from their gen-try lineage and schooling abroad. By contrast, Park came from a modest social background, and he was proud of it.

  Economic Carrots

  Park Chung Hee’s strategy of rural mobilization would have been far less effective had he only constructed a dense web of control mechanisms and propped up his image with modern propaganda techniques. The sticks were more effective if they were mixed with the lure of carrots. The image of “a son of the soil” Park tried to create for himself could acquire public credibility only if it was backed by incentives. The junta leader knew of the importance of carrots, and he liberally dispensed them when he seized power. Park did not need much political imagination to know where to focus to win the farmers’ trust and support. In most peasant homes, expenditures were larger than incomes, resulting in debt accumulation in 92 percent of rural households by September 1960. The average size of the debt per rural household stood at 66,932 hwan, almost twice its liquid assets.

  Most of the loans carried usuriously high interest rates of 5 to 10 percent a month. Since rural households typically did not earn enough income to pay back the principal and interest, rural debt accumulated at an alarming annual rate of 19.3 percent between 1958 and 1960.17

  After servicing their debts once the harvest was over, about one third of rural households ran out of food by the spring and were forced to borrow money or grain again from loan sharks, relatives, or neighbors. Another 10 percent, deprived of even this option, survived by subsisting on grass roots and tree bark (ch’og¤nmokp’i). To make the situation worse, the spring of 1961 was extremely lean due to a bad harvest in the previous fall.

  According to the conservative estimate of Chang Myôn’s government,

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  342,147 rural households, making up 14 percent of the total population, harvested only half the annual average.18 According to field reports, in some areas as many as two thirds of the households ran out of food.19

  On May 25, 1961, nine days after he ousted Chang Myôn, Park pledged to free the farmers of any legal obligations to pay back high-interest debts.

  By the end of October, out of the total rural debt of 79.4 billion hwan, 48

  billion hwan was reported to the MAF for review, 26.7 billion hwan of which was found to be usurious.20 In contrast, the military junta threatened to crack down on the chaebol with fines on their “illicit wealth accumulation” during the rule of Syngman Rhee and Chang Myôn, and also to strengthen regulatory efforts to weed out tax delinquency and noncom-pliance by the rich. The crackdown on usurious rural loans, coupled with an agricultural price support law enacted in June 1961, reflected Park’s populism. Not yet tamed by the harsh realities of the South Korean economic situation, Park at that time viewed agricultural development as a prerequisite of industrialization. Moreover, industrialization was to be led by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), focusing on import substitution and drawing funds from domestic savings, rather than by foreign loans. The fruits of industrialization should be evenly shared, not left to the market’s trickle-down mechanism alone. In this 1961 scheme of economic change, agricultural development mattered, because it would raise the purchasing power of the rural population, thus providing an expanded market for manufactured goods. Without a thriving agricultural sector, Park repeatedly declared, any talk of national development was bound to be an “empty promise.”21

  In August 1961, the military junta merged the Agricultural Bank with the Farm Cooperatives Association into the newly formed NACF, with the effect of instantly transforming 17,000 local cooperative units into de facto bank branches.22 In addition to the revitalization of the dormant rural cooperatives by enabling them to provide farmers with a full range of services, including credit provision, common purchases, common sales, and debt extension, the merger sought to further tighten the junta’s grip on the countryside. Two days later, the Financial and Monetary Committee raised the money allocated for the state to make advance payments for the rice it was purchasing in the third quarter. The bill totaled 11.1 billion hwan, 1.7 billion hwan more than the original plan.23 In December 1961, Park ordered the provincial governors to devise measures to eradicate the problem of grain shortage in the countryside during the lean months of the spring.24 The next month, he provided in-kind loans of half a million sôk (1 sôk = 180 liters) of grain to some 310,000 grain-depleted rural households.25 The MHA vigorously carried out Park’s instructions, even dismiss-

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  ing the head of the Puyô county office in South Ch’ungch’ông Province for his failure to “earnestly” investigate the conditions of the grain shortage in February 1962.26

  The junta also implemented agricultural restructuring and farmland development policies, enacting a Farmland Improvement Law in 1961 and a Land Clearing Promotion Law a year later. Then followed the establishment of a Council on the Improvement of Agricultural Structure. Although this project ultimately ended in failure, the junta later experimented with a collective farm project in 1963.27 To back the restructuring program with a concrete incentive structure, Park raised the state’s purchase price of rice by 46 percent over the previous year amid a strong show of approval by the mass media and the farmers.28 The very next year, however, under the pressures of price instability, the powerful Economic Planning Board (EPB) allied with the MoF to keep the purchase price of rice under the rate of inflation. The EPB-MoF reversal of the price support program for grains in 1962 was a harbinger of things to come. In 1964, Park was to make a fundamental change of direction in his macroeconomic policy that put agricultural development at the lower end of national priorities. Until then, Park zigzagged between the junta-initiated

  “populist” programs of agricultural development and the EPB- and MoF-recommended budget cuts. Fortunately for Park, the zigzags did not alter the public perception of his economic strategy as fundamentally “favoring agriculture,” or chungnong, to quote the catchphrase of his junta years.

  The images that formed during the early period of Park’s leadership were powerful. Once the anti-elite, pro-commoner image of Park took root in the public mind during 1961 and 1962, the image came to acquire a life of its own, surviving future policy zigzags.

  Park thus devised a strategy of bringing about a Green Uprising with two carrots of rural debt relief and grain price support, one stick of the threat of repression, and the modern-day politics of image making. The instrument for channeling the carrots, wielding the stick, and creating the image of a “son of the soil” was South Korea’s powerful state bureaucracy, not its ideologically shallow and organizationally thin political party system. What clientelistic networks the political parties possessed were thoroughly captured by ousted LP and DP politicians at that time. Making Park rely on the state bureaucracy even more, the Young Turks, led by Kim Chong-p’il, were not able to complete their clandestine organization of the DRP until December 1962.29 Before then, Park had
to choose a bureaucratic, rather than a political, path to his Green Uprising out of not only his distaste for politics but also his lack of a party. The question was

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  whether, why, and how the farmers of South Korea would respond to Park’s political overtures.

  Elections, 1963

  The presidential election that the military junta promised in 1961 as a way to “return power to the civilians” was finally held on October 15, 1963.

  Although seven candidates entered the race, the real contest was between the DRP’s Park Chung Hee and the hurriedly assembled Civil Rule Party’s Yun Po-sôn, who had served as president in Chang Myôn’s government.

  Park won the election by the slimmest of margins, winning 42.6 percent of the votes against Yun Po-sôn’s 41.2 percent.

  Park enjoyed a clear advantage over the opposition in terms of organization and campaign funds. He used the state bureaucracy, including the police, extensively to mobilize votes. The myriad parastatal organizations like the NACF and the PMNR also actively joined his election campaign, enabling the DRP to reach deep down into the villages for support. Although it was called “the freest and fairest election in [South] Korean history,”30 the 1963 presidential election was marred by irregularities. By ruling that the MHA-appointed head of a rural village or an urban bloc was not a civil servant, and thus was free to join political parties and conduct campaign activities,31 the Central Election Management Committee opened a way for the state bureaucracy to marshal its power behind Park in the election without breaking the law that barred civil servants from getting involved in political activities. The heads of rural villages and urban blocs were on the public payroll, but freely canvassed households to solicit support for Park.