Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  Thus were born the modern chaeya. The chaeya in their own eyes were a force of conscience in a struggle against the unjust and malign Park Chung Hee. Chaeya activists were the “practical” scholars, not the ôyông (government-patronized unprincipled scholars). Driven by a sense of moral

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  superiority, the chaeya helped NDP politicians in launching a frontal attack on state authority on June 3, 1964. Approximately ten thousand students took to the streets of Seoul and other major cities to force Park’s resignation. The police reported that the protestors burned down a police station. Angry students even marched toward the Blue House, making political authorities nervously recollect the public outcry that had toppled Syngman Rhee only four years earlier. Park responded immediately. He declared martial law to prohibit political assemblies and demonstrations in Seoul. He also imposed censorship on the press, closed down all schools, permitted the arrest of protest leaders and organizers without warrants, and established a military court to judge violations of martial law. The swift crackdown broke the momentum of the student protests and drove the opposition political parties into silence—only for a while, but long enough to let the DRP-majority National Assembly enact the treaty bills in 1965.

  The turmoil over the treaty irreversibly transformed the Sasanggye and the progressive parts of South Korea’s vocal intelligentsia into members of the anti-Park forces. “Having come to resemble the last days of Syngman Rhee’s Liberal Party rule,” the Sasanggye declared, “the three years of military rule have put the [South] Korean people in the worst chaos and hardship since the days of the Tan’gun [founding father of ancient Korea].”15 Labeling the gap between its ideal of independence and Park’s

  “subservience” toward foreign powers unbridgeable, the Sasanggye saw the emergence of a polarized political landscape pitting the minjung (people) against the “ruling clique” over the issues of national pride and democratic values.16 Thus began the political competition between the chaeya and Park to control, command, and represent or personify the forces of Korean nationalism, democratic ideals, and egalitarian ethos. The chaeya capitalized on anti-Japanese Korean nationalism to build an independent base of power from which to challenge Park and the DRP. Moreover, because it was the United States who aggressively pushed for the normalization treaty in the hope of constructing trilateral regional ties between the United States, South Korea, and Japan to repel and contain the expansion of communism, the chaeya’s opposition to the treaty had the potential to develop into an anti-American movement. But that was only a potential, left for future chaeya leaders to bring to life.

  Constitutional Revision and Democracy, 1969

  A second transformation occurred in 1969, when the DRP, with the help of the KCIA, prepared for a constitutional revision to enable Park’s bid for

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  a third presidential term. The initiative moved the issue of democracy to the core of the chaeya agenda. By prompting the hitherto fragmented and isolated chaeya forces to join the opposition political party in one unified but still loose national organization, Park’s 1969 campaign for constitutional revision also marked a turning point for the chaeya as an organization. In July 1969, the New Democratic Party partnered with chaeya leaders of diverse backgrounds to establish the National Committee to Oppose the Constitutional Revision (NCOCR) under the leadership of Reverend Kim Chae-jun.

  The NCOCR issued what amounted to be a declaration of just war.

  “The Park regime,” its manifesto stated, “[is using] the threat of North Korean military invasion for the purpose of political propaganda. However, the real threat that [could] encourage the North to invade the South

  [is] the destruction of national consensus and the spread of social unrest triggered by Park’s dogged effort to bring about a constitutional revision.”

  With these words the NCOCR used Park’s doctrine of national security to delegitimize Park himself. The committee went on to warn that Park might institute lifelong dictatorship if he were permitted to prolong his political rule for four more years. The chaeya leaders also harshly criticized his proudest accomplishment, economic development, by accusing him of leading South Korea into “bankruptcy” and “obstructing efforts to democratize the economy.”17 The inability of many of the chaebol producers to pay back the interest on state-guaranteed foreign loans in the late 1960s made this accusation credible. The NCOCR, furthermore, distinguishing between the “regime” and the “state,” warned Park not to confuse his fate with that of the state. “Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party thought of themselves as the state,” Reverend Kim Chae-jun asserted. To guard South Korean democracy, “it [is] necessary to remember that the fascists justified their existence in terms of the need to stem communism.”18

  However, while trying to obstruct Park from using South Korea’s cold war ideologies to crack down on opposition forces, the chaeya also kept their distance from the “far left,” not only because of their staunchly anticommunist stand, but also because of the need not to give Park an excuse for cracking down. When the underground Unification Revolution Party (URP) formed in 1969 with North Korean communist ideology as its guiding principle, no chaeya activists sought membership. Not only was the URP ideologically pro–North Korea; it also had organizational links with Pyôngyang.19 Although the founding generation of chaeya leaders were anti-Park, pro-unification, and egalitarian, North Korean attempts to generate a support base among chaeya activists failed dismally.

  To the disappointment of NCOCR leaders, their plea to the literati, art-

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  ists, professors, and religious leaders not to be bought off by the DRP and the KCIA did not win broad support within society. The chaeya turned to its proven strategy of mobilizing students by organizing a series of lectures, but this too failed to trigger a mass protest against the constitutional revision. Student activists issued public statements of opposition, took to the streets for demonstrations, and staged a hunger strike, but none of these provoked anything that resembled the anti-treaty protest of June 3, 1964.

  When the constitutional revision was approved by 65.1 percent in a national plebiscite with 77.1 percent voter participation in October 1969, student protests declined rapidly, forcing the chaeya to wait until the 1971

  presidential election to reenter politics with some force.

  Despite the defeat in 1969, however, the chaeya grew as a political entity in both organizational capabilities and ideological identity. Particularly crucial was the entry of South Korea’s Christian community into politics in support of antisystem protests. Christian minister and NCOCR president Kim Chae-jun personified religion-driven reform efforts, calling on the Christian community to “fulfill the holy duty, show the resolve [to fight injustice], and organize popular movements of resistance.”20 To be sure, the Christian community was not a unitary actor united against Park and his regime. On the contrary, the religious activists’ entry into politics split South Korean Christians into “progressives” and “conservatives,” a division that was to have a lasting impact. The vocal progressive minority was destined to serve as a sanctuary for dissident chaeya activists, while the conservative majority became unswervingly loyal supporters of Park’s staunchly anticommunist stand during the 1970s.

  As Park’s victories in 1964 and 1969 demonstrate, it is important not to exaggerate the chaeya’s power during the pre- yushin era (1961–1972). The dissident intelligentsia’s ability to produce a persuasive discourse of radical political resistance had noticeably weakened since Park’s reestablishment of competitive elections in 1963. In spite of the selective use of political repression to preempt the rise of political rivals and to stabilize his regime, Park regularly held competitive elections and won by sizable margins. The DRP even won two thirds of the seats in the National Assembly in 1967, enabling it to set into motion the 1969 revision to the constitution without violating const
itutional procedures. Moreover, despite the rising income gap between classes and regions, it was undeniable that Park had lifted even the most underprivileged sectors of South Korean society out of absolute poverty. The people’s national pride had been damaged by Park’s “humiliating diplomacy” in 1964 and their democratic aspirations scarred by his extension of his rule in 1969, but they also knew that the country was on the path to modernization.

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  Against the reality of economic growth, military modernization, and regular elections, the chaeya’s rhetoric of economic bankruptcy and fascist threat backfired, making the chaeya look too radical for the public to place the nation in its hands. Mainstream journalists, academics, and writers remained strikingly indifferent to the chaeya’s political agenda. Disenchanted, student activists accused the press of having lost the spirit of resistance it once possessed as a force of national independence during Japanese colonial rule and as an advocate of democracy against Syngman Rhee a decade earlier. Some student leaders even claimed that the press was propping up Park’s political rule.21 The mainstream academic community was targeted for criticism as well, depicted as betraying the ideals of the student revolution it had led in April 1960.22

  Moreover, the chaeya of 1969, despite their split from the conservative mainstream of South Korea’s intelligentsia, were primarily an intelligentsia-based opposition movement centered around a few spiritual leaders of national stature. The National Committee to Oppose the Constitutional Revision, then applauded as a turning point in chaeya organization, was led by a small group of notables with an agenda focused mainly on the ideological issues of nationalism and democracy. The unity it boasted of was one of ideological outlook rather than of organizational cohesion. When the chaeya ventured into economic areas, its critiques were more on moral than on policy grounds. Activists deplored social alienation and economic injustice, but their discourse was devoid of class ideologies. Consequently the chaeya of 1969 did not qualitatively differ from the opposition NDP in political orientation. Its members were largely conservative.

  The Expansion of Chaeya Agendas

  Minjung Issues, 1970

  The year 1970 brought change of another order of magnitude for the chaeya. On November 13, Chôn T’ae-il—a twenty-two-year-old tailor and union organizer employed in one of the clothing sweatshops in downtown Seoul—poured gasoline over his body and died by suicide. The news of his death shocked society, because while engaging in the usual chaeya discourse of reform and distributive justice, he also demanded that the political authorities abide by the existing labor laws. The suicide exposed the grim reality of labor exploitation hidden beneath South Korea’s modern-looking legal system. As seen by Chôn T’ae-il, the problem was not the lack of legal provisions for the protection of workers’ rights. On the con-

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  trary, South Korean labor laws looked very “modern,” having been literally copied from the labor laws of industrial democracies. The state, however, chose not to implement key provisions, in effect depriving workers of their legally guaranteed rights.

  The death of Chôn T’ae-il became a watershed in the history of chaeya activism, labor movements, and party politics.23 Seoul National University students immediately organized a Student Committee for Preparing the Safeguard of Civil Rights. Other universities held memorial services in honor of Chôn T’ae-il. Still others formed a fact-finding commission with the goal of bringing about “the improvement of working conditions and the guarantee of the workers’ rights to form labor unions.” The Christian community was also shaken, and prayers were said for Chôn T’ae-il nationwide. Young activists like Chang Ki-p’yo—a dissident later identified by Reverend Mun Ik-hwan as “the sharpest of all knives that cut through the turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s”24—chose to join the chaeya and become professional revolutionaries out of their anger and frustration over the death of Chôn T’ae-il. The transformed life of Chang Ki-p’yo signaled the emergence of a new breed of chaeya activists, who were more sensitive to the issues of the people (minjung) and more aware of the need to build a broad social alliance to bring about fundamental changes in the system. From their organizational experiments would emerge the nohak yôndae, or the worker-student alliance that served as the bastion of radical opposition against what the chaeya then called Chun Doo-hwan’s “new colonial state monopoly capitalism” (1980–1988).25

  Korea University’s Institute of Labor, established in 1965, also began reaching out to scholar-activists to teach trade union leaders, labor administrators, clergymen, and student leaders on the issues of labor-management relations, labor laws, and labor movements. At the same time, the Institute of Labor periodically conducted surveys of working conditions to raise public awareness of labor issues, as well as holding a series of lectures for rank-and-file members of the unions to transform their political consciousness.26 Among the scholar-activists at the Institute of Labor were Cho Ki-jun, Cho Tong-p’il, Kim Yun-hwan, Kim Nak-jung, Yi Mun-yông, Kim K¤n-su, and Kwôn Tu-yông.

  The impact on the Christian community was equally transformative.

  Since the late 1960s, its progressive sector had been trying to replace the dominant conservative theology with liberal doctrines, including liberation theology. It was the death of Chôn T’ae-il that enabled these Christians to take an unequivocal stance on the issue of social justice and not only side with but also go beyond the NDP politicians in their struggle against Park. Their political activism led to the spread of the liberal Urban

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  Industrial Christian Missionaries throughout the 1970s. The missionaries constructed a web of religion-labor linkages that sought to redress labor and poverty issues from a progressive theological stand.27 Their spokesman was Reverend Kim Chae-jun, who had led chaeya struggles against the 1969 constitutional revision in the belief that “the Christians and the Church [had to seek salvation] by waging the struggle for justice.”28 The progressives believed their movement was a “Missio Dei,” or Mission of God.29

  The radicalization of the chaeya was nowhere more visible than in the concept of the minjung that permeated all the writings of dissident intellectuals. As defined by chaeya activists, the minjung were agents with the will to act, whereas the taejung (masses) were not. Possessing independent minds that they could use to resolve issues on their own terms, the minjung could become a force of change if the intelligentsia made them realize their revolutionary potential and organized them. Once the passive taejung were transformed into self-conscious and self-willing minjung, the chaeya argued, they would take hold of their own lives and fight to bring down the structures of injustice. Reflecting the revolutionary spirit that swept university campuses during the early 1970s is this excerpt from an activist study group at Seoul National University: “The minjung have finally overcome the sense of hopelessness and frustration and begun to create a new history. They have come to reject the unjust social order hitherto imposed upon them and demand a humane order . . . The minjung will seize history only when their struggle is guided [by student activists] along the right path.”30

  The chaeya radicalized even more when the Park regime forcibly relocated three thousand squatters from Seoul to the “Kwangju relocation complex” (present-day Sôngnam) as part of its effort to “clean up” the capital city. Uprooted from their base of life overnight, the angry squatters raided public buildings and set a police station on fire on August 10, 1971, demanding the establishment of poverty-assistance measures. The violent explosion of mass discontent, the first of its kind under Park’s rule, exposed South Korea’s lack of a welfare safety net and the accompanying danger of political instability in many of its rapidly growing cities.31

  Together with Chôn T’ae-il’s suicide, the squatters’ revolt visibly demonstrated that Park’s strategy of export-led industrialization had failed to answer the needs of many of the urban poor despite the hype
rgrowth it had generated for a decade. With the exception of the issues of anti-Americanism, national unification, and socialism that dominated the chaeya movements of the 1980s, then, all major political, economic, and

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  social agendas of today’s South Korea made their emergence during the early 1970s.

  It is important to note that student activists still remained the core of the resistance after 1970 although, unlike in the 1960s, they were complemented by and fused with protest movements based in other societal groups. While reaching out to labor and the urban poor for support, the chaeya also kept up their activities aimed at strictly student-related political issues, because it was from the university campuses that the chaeya recruited their future leaders as well as their rank-and-file members. In 1971

  alone, over two thousand university students demonstrated every day against the military education program newly instituted by Park; they believed that the program had been established to incapacitate their resistance movements by creating a Red scare on the campuses.

  Presidential Election, 1971

  The 1971 presidential election was an important opportunity for the chaeya to test their dramatically strengthened organizational capabilities.

  They plunged into electoral contests to support NDP candidates because, even with Park’s tightening of authoritarian political rule, elections mattered. Given Park and his DRP-KCIA power elite’s superior capabilities to mobilize society from the top, elections were unlikely to bring about a change in South Korea’s top political leadership. Nor did they adequately express the hopes and fears of societal groups, because South Korean political parties, including the NDP, lacked organizational linkages to society and because interest groups were preempted by the Park regime from developing their own distinctive agendas, strategies, and organizations of collective political action. Elections were more a plebiscite vote on his leadership than an occasion to articulate and organize the country’s top policy agendas. Ironically, however, because elections were plebiscites, they did matter. They indicated the public mood and, in doing so, influenced more than the dynamics of political confrontation between the Park regime and the NDP- chaeya opposition. To use the NDP’s electoral performance as leverage over Park, the chaeya sought to strengthen solidarity with the NDP in 1971.