Equally critical, the presidential election of 1967 warned the NDP not to assume that the urban sector would automatically support the opposition candidate. Park carried 50.4 percent of the total urban vote, as opposed to only 37.7 percent in 1963. To be sure, he lost Seoul City, South Korea’s breeding ground of urban opposition. Even here, however, his performance improved markedly from 1963, trailing behind Yun Po-sôn’s 49
percent by only three percentage points. The distribution of Seoul votes in 1963 had been 30:65 in favor of Yun Po-sôn. Park’s enhanced ability to get urban votes was attributable to South Korea’s economic hypergrowth since 1964, the first fruits of which were enjoyed by the city dwellers. Park had succeeded in transforming “economic development [into] the ideology of the day,”59 which helped legitimize his presidency and won him an unprecedented level of urban votes. As a 1966 survey of 1,515 professionals and journalists revealed, even South Korea’s highly contentious and moralistic intelligentsia came to place economic development as the highest priority of the country. Many even thought individual freedom could be sacrificed for economic development,60 thus forgiving much of Park’s authoritarian excesses committed in the 1963–1967 period in the name of economic growth and military security.
As a matter of course, Park played up his leadership in economic development for electoral purposes. The EPB published its second FYEDP in the summer of 1966, providing Park with a year of propaganda before the 1967 elections. Under the slogan of “Uninterrupted Progress,” the DRP
portrayed Park as the architect of the “Miracle of Han River,” orchestrating a concerted program of modernization through tapping the innovative spirit of the military, state bureaucracy, business community, and people.
The ruling party sold his reelection as necessary to the successful implementation of the second FYEDP, which formalized the policy U-turn that had been taking place since 1964. The DRP spoke of the chungnong, but as revealed in the second FYEDP, it had replaced the strategy of Green Uprising with that of industrial revolution to appeal to the electorate in 1967.
And it worked.
The next month, on June 8, 1967, South Korea held National Assembly elections. Although eleven political parties put up candidates, the race was
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between the two major parties, the DRP and the NDP. They campaigned fiercely, fully recognizing what was at stake. The DRP aimed to win two thirds of the National Assembly seats, which would enable it to push through a constitutional revision to allow a third term for Park in 1971.
The NDP fought an uphill battle to prevent the constitutional revision.
Unfortunately for the NDP, the outcome was an even more decisive triumph for the DRP than in the presidential election of May 11. The ruling DRP won 129 legislative seats; the NDP, 45; and a newly formed splinter force (Mass Party), 1. Unlike in the presidential election, the DRP swept both rural areas and small cities. Even in North and South Chôlla provinces, 20 of the 22 rural districts and 6 of the 8 urban districts sided with DRP candidates. The election saw the residents of small cities ally with the rural electorate against South Korea’s NDP-led largest urban centers. The NDP successes were concentrated in major cities, including Seoul and Pusan. The opposition party carried only 3 electoral districts outside of the major cities.
The dramatic change in rural political sentiments, especially those of the two Chôlla provinces, in just a month cautions against facile generalizations, including that of yôch’onyado. To be sure, widespread irregularities contributed to the DRP’s landslide victory in the 1967 National Assembly election. As the opposition party reported, vote buying, intimidation, and ballot stuffing were common in many of the districts.61 The court even ordered one DRP member to turn over his National Assembly seat to the NDP opponent after the election in a rare moment of judicial independence. In order to ameliorate public discontent, the DRP also had to expel six members after the election for engaging in electoral irregularities.
Nonetheless, the large margin by which the DRP won the National Assembly election showed that there was more to its victory than simply the effect of the irregularities.
The fundamental cause of the DRP’s ability to turn the tide of Chôlla’s rural opposition and South Ch’ungch’ông’s regionalist resistance in a mere month after the presidential elections was specific to the nature of National Assembly elections. Unlike the presidential contests, where national agendas dominated electoral contests and society polarized around the leadership of Park, the National Assembly elections were predominantly
“local,” with the rural electorate voting on criteria that were different from the ones they used during the presidential elections. Too far from the center in both the psychological and the physical senses of the term, and too weak to have a meaningful influence on the outcome, farmers were likely to see the presidential elections more as a plebiscite to express discontent regarding the national political leadership than as an opportunity
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to make a choice about their future. By contrast, in the National Assembly elections, the farmers sided with the candidate who could deliver particular economic and social benefits, that is, the candidate who could build a bridge, develop schools, empower the NACF and other collective village organizations with bigger budgets, and, more generally, open the door to the local centers of power including the MHA, the MAF, and the police.
What farmers looked for in their national assemblyman was the ability to link the village with the state bureaucracy located in distant Seoul. That ability of intermediation was best secured by voting for the DRP, not the NDP, which was mostly excluded from the national and local centers of power. DRP candidates knew how to twist the arms of EPB and MoF bureaucrats to get money for village projects.
Accordingly, it is possible to explain the DRP’s retake of Chôlla and other rural provinces in the 1967 National Assembly election without assuming the conformist culture of South Korean farmers. Given the extreme centralization of power in the state bureaucracy and the insulation of state ministries from all outside forces except the Blue House, the DRP, and the chaebol, voting for the DRP in clientelistic National Assembly elections was what could be expected of a “rational peasant” constantly calculating benefits and costs of his political choices and weighing the pros and cons of backing an opposition candidate.
The Second Green Uprising, 1968–1979
Important as it was for Park’s ability to fund export-led industrialization, the agricultural squeeze was creating serious political problems by the late 1960s. During the 1962–1971 period, the primary sector, which included agriculture and the relatively small fishery and forestry concerns, grew annually by 4 percent on average, 14.2 percentage points below the growth of the manufacturing sector.62 On a per household basis, rural income stood at 55.8 percent of the urban sector’s income level in 1967, a drop of 47.5 percentage points since 1963 when the ELI strategy was beginning to take shape.63 And this worsening of the urban-rural income gap occurred when the poorest of rural households continually migrated to the burgeoning cities. According to MAF data, the share of the poorest rural households with less than 0.5 hectares of farmland declined from 42.9 percent in 1960 to 35.9 percent in 1965 and to 31.6 percent in 1970 due to migration.64 A total of 1.5 million people, or 10 percent of the total farming population, left the countryside between 1968 and 1970.65
By the late 1960s, migration came to be seen as a source of concern rather than a blessing in disguise to be welcomed by the state for its role in
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keeping low the reproductive costs of industrial labor. First, the size of the rural population began to decrease even in absolute terms after 1967, shrinking the p’yobat, or “field of votes,” for the DRP in clientelistic National Assembly elections. Second, the increase of unemployed squatters in the urban sector became in itself a cause of social unrest, as a 1971 riot
on the outskirts of Seoul demonstrated.66 Migration threatened the political stability of the city by flooding it with an army of urban poor without a stable source of employment. Third, the low-grain-price policy unexpectedly but inevitably discouraged grain production and encouraged food consumption precisely when the United States began to end its PL480 assistance. As a result, South Korea had to draw on its scarce foreign exchange to import grain. Available statistics show that from 1969 through 1972, grain imports alone accounted for more than 10 percent of total imports, taking resources away from the strategic manufacturing sector.67
Both politically and economically, agricultural policy was in need of adjustment. Park’s second U-turn came in 1968.
A Two-Tier Price System,
New Seeds, and Saema¤l Undong
The year 1968 saw Park’s initiation of a two-tier price system for barley.68
Under the scheme, the MAF purchased barley at above-market prices and sold it to urban dwellers at below-market prices through NACF-monopolized distribution networks. The goal was to encourage the consumption of barley over rice, which the MAF thought would raise rural income, help the urban poor to reduce their dependence on costly imported rice, and reduce the trade deficit. The catalyst for introducing the new system was the scheduled termination of PL480 aid from the United States, but the new policy was also politically motivated. The MAF announced it as part of Park’s program to drum up rural support for a national referendum on the constitutional revision to permit a third presidential term. Between Park’s victory in the 1969 national referendum and the 1971 presidential elections, the MAF expanded the two-tier price system to include rice. The move signaled a fundamental reorientation of Park’s political strategy and economic policy. The inclusion of rice was bound to cost the government much more money, thus necessitating a change in resource allocation.
Fertilizer policy was altered, as well. Mindful that the state guarantee of high profits for the three largest joint venture producers hurt the farmers by raising fertilizer prices, the MAF collaborated with the MoF in establishing a public fund to supply fertilizer to farmers at prices below what the state had paid. The deficits arising from the Grain Management Fund
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for price support and the Fertilizer Fund for fertilizer support were to be financed in an inflationary manner with credits from the Bank of Korea.
At the same time, Park embarked on an overly ambitious program of heavy and chemical industrialization (HCI). Park was designing his own Bismarckian alliance of “rye and steel” to withstand the opposition he expected from his turn to authoritarian rule in October 1972. Park aggressively courted big business with large investment projects in the heavy and chemical industries, while luring the farmers with the state’s support of grain and fertilizer prices. Yet the Park-style rye-steel alliance suffered from internal dissension from the start. The business community was unhappy with the tight monetary policy that aimed to dampen the inflationary pressures caused by the simultaneous pursuit of HCI and the second Green Uprising. For the chaebol, South Korea’s small-size farmers exploiting their families’ manpower just to survive could not be the
“Junkers” of Bismarckian Germany deserving a status of junior partnership in Park’s yushin coalition. Rather than working with the farmers to back Park’s conservative path to modernity, the chaebol frequently tried to pass the burden of adjustment to the countryside by lobbying to scale down Park’s policy of high grain and low fertilizer prices.69
The conflict between big business and the rural sector surfaced in the form of interministerial disputes. In 1972, the EPB proposed to raise the purchase price for rice by only 5 percent over the previous year in order to hold down inflation at 3 percent. The MAF balked and eventually succeeded in increasing the purchase price by 8 percent. Then, twelve days prior to the national referendum on the newly promulgated authoritarian yushin constitution, Park abrogated the EPB-MAF compromise and ordered a 13 percent raise. In addition, Park ordered the MAF to pay the same price for the less popular high-yield rice (HYR) as for more popular types and to purchase as much as the farmers were willing to sell.70 Politics got the better of economics. At the same time, Park knew that relying on subsidies alone was not tenable in the long run, and he had the MAF undertake research and development to help the farmers’ competitiveness and lessen the pressure on the state budget. In 1971, the MAF proudly introduced a new HYR under the name t’ongilbyô, or Unification Rice. The new seed helped to boost rural income, given the MAF’s policy of purchasing t’ongilbyô at high prices and in large amounts despite its unpopularity due to its poor taste.
Parallel to these efforts at price support, Park launched the Saema¤l Undong, or New Village Movement, in 1970, which was to symbolize the turnaround in his rural political and economic strategy. In spite of its modest and almost chance beginnings, the Saema¤l Undong would soon develop into a full-fledged integrated rural development program. The ori-
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gins of the New Village Movement are found in the NACF’s distribution of 335 bags of unmarketable surplus cement to the countryside, to be used
“for village projects [that met] the villagers’ common needs” and to be chosen on the basis of “general consensus.”71 Initially, the Saema¤l Undong failed to produce much in the way of positive results because, in the words of Park’s advisor on agricultural affairs, it was conceived as a “spiritual revolution” based on the principles of “self-reliance, self-help, and cooperation.”72 In other words, Park initially did not plan to commit much money to the Saema¤l Undong. At most he was thinking about financing public projects that “beautified” the villages. Thus in its early stages, the farmers looked at it cynically as another pretext for the state to meddle in village affairs and tighten the grip of administrative control in return for cosmetic changes to their material life.73
Despite its inauspicious start, however, it is wrong to brush aside Park’s pledge of rural development as only rhetoric. Many of the ideas Park set forth in his speeches on the Saema¤l Undong traced their origin to the ideas of balanced growth that Park espoused in his earlier writings of the junta years and that he reluctantly renounced in favor of export-led industrialization under the pressures of inflation in 1964. “Our industry,” he solemnly declared, “can develop only when our farmers become well-to-do and the rural communities develop rapidly. Well-to-do farmers generate a great deal of purchasing power, providing one of the basic conditions for industrial development. When industries develop rapidly, the resources thus generated are made available . . . for reinvestment in the agricultural sector. Viewed in this way, agriculture and industry are inseparable.”74
These words began acquiring political credibility when Park rejected pressures to scale down, if not scrap altogether, the two-tier price system for barley and rice in 1973 and 1974 when a profound stagflationary crisis was sweeping over South Korea in the aftermath of the oil shock stemming from the Middle East. As soon as South Korea got out of the recession in 1975 with the help of a construction boom in cash-rich Middle Eastern countries (see Chapter 9), Park earnestly launched the Saema¤l Undong by securing budgetary support for the MAF’s Grain Management Fund, Fertilizer Fund, and HYR development programs, in addition to rural public construction works. The net flow of resources into the countryside climbed dramatically in 1975 and stayed high through the end of the yushin regime.
Elections
As Park prepared for the simultaneous pursuit of HCI and agricultural development in the late 1960s, the opposition readied for an electoral re-
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match. Lacking power to shape economic policy, the New Democratic Party focused instead on putting its house in order. The opposition forces were determined not to repeat the 1963 and 1967 mistake of agreeing on their unified candidate too late in the presidential race. In September 1970, the NDP held its national con
vention and nominated a young politician, Kim Dae-jung, as its presidential candidate. A native of South Chôlla Province and a political entrepreneur with progressive ideas, Kim Dae-jung proved to be an unflagging election campaigner. By the middle of the 1971 presidential campaign, Park’s team felt the pressure. Even in Taegu, North Kyôngsang Province, the native home of Park Chung Hee, Kim Dae-jung drew a crowd of 300,000. There he warned that Park would become South Korea’s “Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek” if elected for a third term in 1971. In response, Park tearfully announced in unequivocal terms that this would be his final electoral bid for presidential power.
In the end, Park won with 53.2 percent of the total votes against Kim Dae-jung’s 45.3 percent. Charges of electoral irregularities were again brought up. At the aggregate level, the rural-urban cleavage line reemerged too—this time, in favor of Park for attempting a second Green Uprising since 1968. Park carried 58 percent of the rural votes, an increase of 5.8
percentage points over the 1967 presidential contest.
However, it is also important to note that with the favorite sons of Kyôngsang and Chôlla provinces respectively heading the DRP and the NDP, rural votes there served as regional imprimaturs rather than as a plebiscite on Park’s agricultural policy. The Kyôngsang provinces backed Park with 74.7 percent of their total votes, whereas the Chôlla provinces lined up behind Kim Dae-jung with 62.3 percent of their votes. The urban areas of the two regions, which included Pusan City, in South Kyôngsang Province, also split along regionalist lines rather than rural-urban cleavages. Unlike in 1967, when the Chôlla voters took the role of “rational voters,” punishing Park for his 1964–1968 policy of agricultural squeeze, they sided against Park in spite of his second attempt at a Green Uprising since 1968. The 1971 presidential election was a thoroughly regionalist contest where the outcome was largely shaped by Kyôngsang and Chôlla provinces. Unfortunately for Kim Dae-jung, not only were there more voters in the Kyôngsang provinces, but also the turnout was higher.
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