Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  The September and October issues of Chosun Ilbo carried reports of irregularities every day. Some village heads forced farmers to apply for DRP membership under the threat of abruptly ending their grain rations.32

  County officials and policemen were transferred to their hometowns before the election to persuade relatives and friends, apparently in accordance with an MHA directive.33 The Seoul City police department was found to be asking its officers to submit a list of relatives and local notables with the power to influence the vote in their hometowns.34 The MHA itself was accused of setting up coordination committees at every level of public administration to facilitate cooperation among and between state ministries and parastatal organizations on behalf of Park’s candidacy.35

  The mayors of Pusan and other cities threw feasts in honor of the elderly to campaign for Park.36 In the special classes the schools organized for par-

  Economy and Society

  354

  ents and students to learn civic duties,37 various pro-Park nongovernmental organizations came to give lectures on “current affairs,” and to hold exhibitions on past corruption.38 The regional chapters of the PMNR also ran educational programs on election procedures for schoolteachers, families of public officials, and local notables.39

  The Comrades of May, an organization of retired army officers, joined in this flurry of propaganda, organizing a series of “nonpolitical” lecture tours across the country.40 Forty-four military officers on active duty were also put on a nationwide tour to give “educational” lectures at 1,115 high schools and colleges.41 Through these and many other efforts, Park managed to register a total of 1,568,006 men and women as DRP members.

  The DRP additionally held 629 rallies with an alleged participation of some 2.64 million people by the time of the election.42 Considering the organizational advantage Park enjoyed through his control over the state bureaucracy and parastatal agencies, many critics claimed that the 4.7 million votes cast for Park were “much too few” to claim electoral victory.

  In the end, it was the countryside that came to Park’s rescue. The DRP

  candidate carried 50.8 percent of the rural vote, whereas Yun Po-sôn garnered 57.1 percent of the urban vote. Put differently, the rural votes accounted for 74.2 percent of the total votes cast for Park and only 59.2 percent of Yun Po-sôn’s.43 The strategy of bringing about a Green Uprising with two carrots, one stick, and the modern-day politics of image making apparently worked in 1963, except in the two predominantly rural Kangwôn and Ch’ungch’ông provinces. The voters in Kangwôn, known for political conservatism stemming from their province’s role as a frontline military post, were judged to have opposed Park for his earlier leftist political activities. The electorate in Ch’ungch’ông, by contrast, cast a regional vote, siding with Yun Po-sôn, a native of Asan, a village in South Ch’ungch’ông Province.

  Park’s successful Green Uprising strategy, however, does not necessarily validate the yôch’onyado thesis that portrays the farmers as voting for Park out of their political conformism on the basis of traditional culture.

  First, of the rural electorate, 50.8 percent sided with him, but an almost equally large bloc of 49.2 percent of the rural electorate did not. Second, those who backed Park might have chosen to do so after a rational calculation of benefits arising from his Green Uprising strategy, or simply because they were hopelessly trapped in South Korea’s allegedly conformist culture that made them follow the wishes of local elders and state bureaucrats.

  Lacking extensive public survey data, we need to defer judgment until we analyze the electoral consequences of Park’s switch to the policy of agricultural squeeze in 1964.

  The Countryside

  355

  The interviews I conducted in February 2001 reveal not only the potential but also the limitations of Park’s Green Uprising strategy, as well as the complexity of South Korean farmers’ political psyche. “The state told us to report our debts,” a farmer in North Kyôngsang Province recollected.

  “They told us they would write off usurious debts. They thought they were doing us a favor, but wasn’t it their responsibility? I reported, but for nothing. I still had usurious debts. Worse, it became even more difficult for me to borrow money,” because there were no longer lenders willing to lend even at usurious interest rates.44 The issuance of a new currency in June 1962 with the goal of unearthing the supposed underground economy’s illicit wealth also failed to secure wide support from farmers. A peasant from South Ch’ungch’ông Province complained in a newspaper interview that replacing the hwan with the won at the ratio of 10:1 “was bad. Now it is even harder to make a living because the money is reduced while expenses remain the same.”45 The image of the farmer emerging from these interviews is of a rather sophisticated economic actor aware of the unin-tended adverse consequences of Park’s 1961 chungnong strategy of debt relief as well as his 1962 radical currency reform. How that awareness of the boomerang effects of Park’s policy was translated into farmers’ electoral decisions is far from obvious.

  Equally interesting, many of the farmers interviewed did not identify themselves with Park despite his carefully cultivated image of a “son of the soil.” Some mistrusted his intentions. “Park might have been a peasant’s son,” a farmer said. “Still, he was different from us wretches. He attended the Normal School and the Japanese Military Academy in Manchuria. At the time we did not believe him that much. The state always says it is working for us. It was so under Japanese rule. So was Syngman Rhee. Just wait and see. That was what we thought about Park, until much later.”46

  Whether Park was able to overcome such sentiments during the three years of junta rule is unclear. The existence of political mistrust, however, cautions against the portrayal of South Korean farmers as political conform-ers, readily available for top-down mobilization regardless of the distributive character of state policy. On the contrary, the interviews show that even a genuinely chungnong state elite would have had difficulty in being accepted as an ally of the farmers in the countryside. To achieve such an alliance, the state elite would need to side consistently with the farmers in economic policy.

  The National Assembly elections held on November 26, 1963, soon after the presidential election, also showed both the potential and the limitations of Park’s Green Uprising strategy. For the DRP, the stakes were as high as in the presidential election. To ratify the highly contested treaty

  Economy and Society

  356

  normalizing relations with Japan, the DRP needed a comfortable legislative majority, and it campaigned vigorously. Throughout the campaign, the press reported many irregularities. The National Assembly election looked even more like a politics of vote buying and bureaucratic mobilization than had the presidential election. The DRP’s post-election report did not shy away from what had occurred, and cited a “timely emission of campaign funds” that “reached to the farthest end through efficient transmission channels” as one of the factors that brought its victory at the polls.47 This time, Ch’ungch’ông and Kangwôn provinces switched sides to give more votes to DRP candidates. Apparently, the strategy of Green Uprising, backed with carrots, surpassed the power of Ch’ungch’ông regionalism and Kangwôn security ideology in shaping the farmers’ voting behavior in what was a more clientelistic National Assembly election.

  The most critical cause of the DRP’s landslide victory in the 1963 National Assembly election, however, stemmed from South Korea’s new electoral system that privileged the political party with the largest vote and severely punished the remaining fragmented political bloc. In 1963, it was the DRP who received the largest vote, and the opposition bloc that fragmented. The votes the DRP won amounted to only 32.4 percent of the total, far less than Park’s 42.6 percent in the presidential race a month earlier, but the DRP nonetheless won 88 seats, which represented two thirds of the directly contested single-member plurality National Assembly seats, due to the splintering of the opposition into ele
ven political parties. The DRP on average faced five opposition candidates per electoral district.

  And because the electoral system allotted 50 percent of the 44 “listed”

  seats to the political party with the largest number of National Assembly seats, Park came to enjoy the luxury of winning 22 additional listed seats.48 The total of district and listed seats added up to 110, giving the DRP a stable majority in the 175-member National Assembly.

  Agricultural Squeeze, 1964–1968

  Even before civilian rule was restored in 1963, Park and his bureaucrats were busy redrawing their strategy of economic development. The turn away from the policy of chungnong began silently but unmistakably when Park ordered the EPB to review economic policy in December 1962, and the changes became explicit by May 1964. The policy reorientation had much to do with the mounting economic problems Park faced in implementing his “catch-all” first Five-Year Economic Development Plan (FYEDP). The most serious issue was the shortage of investment capital,

  The Countryside

  357

  which Park had to cover with budget deficits, which in turn aggravated inflation and, through it, social instability. In the course of preparing for the historic presidential and National Assembly elections of 1963 and also laying the groundwork for economic takeoff, the military junta had formulated overambitious and even contradictory goals for its first FYEDP

  (see Chapters 3 and 7).

  Not surprisingly, the first FYEDP failed to produce the expected results.

  The investment targets were more or less met, but only at the expense of a ballooning fiscal deficit. Rampant inflation broke out in late 1962, triggered by a poor harvest. Between December 1962 and May 1964, the consumer price index rose by 58 percent and the wholesale price index by 66

  percent,49 reducing the real income of the majority of households. There was no easy way out of the inflation. Government revenues proved to be extremely inelastic to the rise in prices and nominal income. U.S. aid and public enterprise profits were declining in real terms as well. The private savings rate also fell, because individuals shifted from the accumulation of liquid assets and productive investment to the acquisition of a broad range of real goods and commodities in order to protect themselves from inflation. Eating up the real interest rate, high inflation frustrated Park’s hope of accumulating investment capital through higher domestic savings. The economy suffered from a decline in the level of productive investment during the latter days of military rule in real terms.

  Facing a budget deficit, Park gave the green light to the EPB’s search for a new strategy of modernization. From the policy failures of 1961 and 1962, Park learned an elementary economic principle: raise revenue, reduce consumption, and increase investment. In May 1963, the EPB began preparing for a move toward a balanced budget. Reflecting Park’s obsession with growth, the pilot agency intended to bring about a balanced budget not by any slackening in the effort to keep up a high level of investment, but by a new political drive to raise the tax burden and reduce “secondary” expenditures, including budget support for agricultural products.

  After the 1963 elections consolidated Park’s power, Park began to put in place the EPB’s newly formulated economic policy. And with it began the politics of agricultural squeeze.

  A Double Squeeze

  The search for investment capital for South Korea’s burgeoning export manufacturers pitted the EPB against the MAF over the 1964 budget.

  Whereas the MAF proposed that the state increase its purchasing price of grain by 35 percent,50 the EPB, which held the budgetary powers, insisted

  Economy and Society

  358

  on placing as tight a ceiling on such budget increases as possible. Twelve days before the 1963 National Assembly elections, the MAF announced a 27 percent raise, a moderate increase given South Korea’s two-digit inflation rate.51 After the election, economic logic began to get the better of political moves, and the policymakers’ mantra changed from “balanced” to

  “unbalanced” growth,52 with resources transferred from the rural to the urban sector for the benefit of export industries. At the center of this policy U-turn was the state’s low purchasing price for grain. By maintaining the MAF’s grain purchases at below-market prices, the EPB weeded out one source of inflationary pressure and increased its chances of balancing the budget. The policy also ensured a steady supply of workers for light industries, then the mainstay of South Korea’s exports, by encouraging the hard-pressed farmers to flee the stagnant countryside for jobs in the urban sector. The MAF’s purchasing price for grain from the farmers was to remain lower than market prices throughout the 1961–1975 period except in 1972. To keep grain prices artificially low, the MAF set quotas for grain delivery for the farmers.53 The farmers were indirectly taxed by the state in the input market, too. In the early 1960s, Park pushed to develop a fertilizer industry not only for domestic consumption but also for export promotion. To this end, nine companies were created. Three were joint ventures with U.S. fertilizer firms producing compound fertilizer. To persuade the foreign companies to enter into the joint ventures, the EPB guaranteed each of the three an annual minimum return of 20 percent by promising to purchase a set quantity of fertilizer. The rigid guarantee on profits, coupled with South Korea’s comparative disadvantage in the production of ammo-nia from naphtha, made the locally produced fertilizers much more expensive than foreign ones, effectively closing off export as an option for the industry. The producers, in effect, came to live off the domestic fertilizer market, which became saturated by 1970.54 To pass the high costs of production on to the farmers, the MAF erected stiff trade barriers against cheaper foreign products and handled all domestic demand for fertilizers through its parastatal organization, the NACF.55 The state monopoly over the supply of fertilizers kept the price up, forcing the farmers to de facto subsidize South Korea’s uncompetitive fertilizer industry.

  The increasingly high price of fertilizer greatly contributed to the worsening terms of trade for the rural households. The price of fertilizers jumped 80 percent in 1964 alone, followed by another 44.4 percent increase in 1965.56 A small farmer reportedly spent 55 percent of farming costs on fertilizer in 1966.57 Nor did high prices mean timely delivery; farmers complained of a constant delay. The companies also forced the farmers to buy unpopular potash fertilizer along with more popular ones.

  The Countryside

  359

  The press reported that the farmers were getting rid of the potash fertilizer at the fire-sale price of 200 won per bag or less, far below the NACF’s price of 500 won.58

  Elections, 1967

  The 1967 presidential and National Assembly elections were held at the height of the agricultural squeeze. As in 1963, Park fully mobilized not only the DRP but also the MHA and other support institutions in the countryside to win votes. The presidential election was held on May 11, again between Park and Yun Po-sôn. Yun Po-sôn ran as the candidate of a newly established New Democratic Party (NDP), which had united the opposition only three months earlier through a merger of two parties. Despite the merger, Park managed to win a decisive victory, garnering 51.4

  percent of the total vote, up 8.8 percent from 1963. By contrast, Yun Po-sôn saw his level of popular support remain virtually the same at 41 percent. Minor candidates took 7.6 percent of the votes.

  Major changes in voting patterns were apparent. Whereas Park won the southern provinces and lost the northern ones in 1963, he won the east coast region and lost the west coast four years later. The east coast included not only the predominantly rural Kangwôn and North Ch’ungch’ông provinces he had lost in 1963, but also Pusan City, South Korea’s second largest city after Seoul. The split, however, was far from being urban versus rural. Along the west coast, where Park performed dismally, lay South Korea’s “rice bowl,” North and South Chôlla provinces, which had voted for him in 1963. Whereas Park had won all of the 34 counties in the Chôlla provinces while losing 6 of
their 7 cities in 1963, he lost 23 of the 34 counties and 6 of the 7 cities in 1967.

  The swing of Chôlla voters constitutes a better barometer of rural sentiment, because their vote was less influenced by regionalist sentiments. In contrast to South Ch’ungch’ông Province that had its favorite son (Yun Po-sôn) running as the NDP presidential candidate and North and South Kyôngsang provinces theirs (Park Chung Hee) as the DRP presidential candidate, North and South Chôlla provinces had neither of their favorite sons (Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng and Kim Dae-jung) vying for national leadership. The South Ch’ungch’ông and Kyôngsang voters whose favorite son was bidding for presidential power followed their regionalist instinct, whether they were from the rural or the urban sector. By contrast, without a regionalist option, the Chôlla voters could be presumably more faithful to their agricultural interests than to any identity-based sentiments, beliefs, or images. The dramatic decrease in the farmers’ support for Park in North and

  Economy and Society

  360

  South Chôlla provinces showed that he could hardly take rural support for granted. The farmers’ support for him was neither automatic nor unchanging outside his home provinces. The image of a “son of the soil” that he had carefully cultivated during the military junta years could still positively influence farmers’ voting decisions when Park zigzagged between budgetary support and cuts as in 1962 and 1963, but not when he unambiguously turned to a policy of agricultural squeeze after 1964.