A History of Korea (85 page)

The historical irony was inescapable, compelling, and, given North Korean history as a whole, tragic: this narrative stemmed from efforts to hide Kim’s dependence on, as much as to tout his resistance to, outside forces. The Soviet occupation put him in power in the first place, and then China’s intervention in the Korean War preserved the nascent state itself. The lofty
Juche
rhetoric of fierce autonomy and nativism that accompanied the North’s increasing isolationism in the early years, then, compensated for the fact that North Korea the country, and Kim Il Sung the leader, began with and were sustained by external assistance.

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1960s South Korea

CHRONOLOGY

DEMONSTRATIONS AGAINST THE NORMALIZATION OF RELATIONS WITH JAPAN, SPRING 1964

In the spring of 1964, as throngs of young people in Britain and the US were enraptured by Beatlemania, their counterparts in South Korea
also filled the streets for mass gatherings, but for a far less joyous occasion. With news that the South Korean government was close to reaching an agreement to formally reestablish diplomatic ties with Japan, Korean students exploded in protest. To them, the shameful period of Japanese colonial occupation, especially the horrors of wartime mobilization, remained a contemporary event. They could not fathom why the South Korean government, under the direction of President Park Chung Hee, would even consider such a thing. Their demonstrations reached a crescendo in June of 1964, when tens of thousands of students disrupted campus life throughout the country and invited a government crackdown as well as the imposition of a state of emergency. Such a back-and-forth between students and state power would act as defining moments for much of the 1960s, just as they did in other parts of the world.

It turned out that Park Chung Hee had authorized secret negotiations for this breakthrough agreement with Japan not long after he came to power through a military coup in 1961. Park considered the normalization of relations, in particular the capital investment and technology transfer that it would bring, a cornerstone of his plan to modernize the nation’s economy. Historical judgment has largely looked favorably upon the “miraculous” economic development that marked the second half of the twentieth century in South Korea, and the 1960s, under Park’s direction, is considered the take-off period for this stunning phenomenon. But as the student protests and other forms of resistance against governing authority indicated, the particular pattern of economic growth institutionalized in the 1960s—driven by the combination of a military government and big business—faced significant challenges. These challenges, too, would characterize the 1960s, and indeed, much of the subsequent history of South Korea.

DICTATORSHIP, DEMOCRACY, AND REVOLUTIONS

Student demonstrators, in fact, had acted as the catalyst behind the major event that opened this decade. When Syngman Rhee, whose presidency in the First Republic descended into despotism and corruption in the post-Korean War 1950s, attempted to steal another election in the spring of 1960, the unrest that followed led to his overthrow. The occasion this time was his government’s blatant rigging of the polls for vice president, with examples of massive
fraud such as ballot stuffing conducted in the open. Rhee was perhaps emboldened by the fact that his own electoral opponent for the presidency had died shortly before the election—interestingly, the second Rhee opponent to die under such circumstances (with the first being executed for treason in 1956). The anti-Rhee protests gained momentum initially in the southern coast, and with the discovery of the body of a student protestor killed by a tear gas canister in the city of Masan, students in Seoul rose up, only to be met with a brutal crackdown themselves. On April 19, 1961, this led to the explosion of student demonstrators hitting the streets throughout the country, with the most furious clashes with the police coming in Seoul and reaching a scale of mass protest not seen since the immediate post-liberation period. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed before Rhee, under pressure from a wide range of political and social sectors, including university professors, agreed to step down and go into exile in Hawaii (where he died in 1965). Even at the time, this series of events was referred to as a “revolution,” for it brought down a dictatorial system and displayed the power of collective action.

What followed the April Student Revolution was Korea’s first experiment in full-fledged democracy. The pronouncement in June 1960 of the Second Republic, a parliamentary system with the president merely serving as a figurehead, unleashed creative energies and accompanied a spike in civic cooperation and volunteerism, along with a dose of optimism. Chang My
n, selected as the prime minister, ruled through a coalition of mostly conservative elites who had grown weary of the Rhee dictatorship. In addition to the eradication of blatant corruption at the top of the government, some major policy shifts took place under Chang’s leadership. One of these reforms was the extension of electoral democracy in the provinces. In December 1960, for the first time in Korean local elections—which did not reappear until the 1990s—people went to the polls to directly elect provincial governors and the mayor of Seoul. This, too, constituted a revolutionary step.

Naturally, with the loosening of the state’s grip came the license also for people to protest their conditions more freely, which intensified a re-polarization of politics. Large-scale unrest starting in
late 1960 reflected a worsening economy, especially high unemployment, although the situation had actually improved compared to the end of the Rhee era. The Chang My
n government responded with the implementation of public works programs, including the construction of a nationwide transportation infrastructure. Such episodes represented the natural growing pains attendant to any such experiments in electoral democracy, and they did not necessarily constitute a threat to the nascent system. But what might have tipped the scales toward placing this democratic experiment in a precarious state were student demonstrations in early May 1961 calling for immediate reunification with North Korea. Such a step, the students claimed, represented the true spirit of the April Student Revolution. The military, ever sensitive to any softening regarding communism, responded swiftly. On May 16, 1961, troops under the command of Major General Park Chung Hee occupied government offices and immediately pronounced another revolution that emphasized first and foremost the need for anti-communist vigilance. It represented the third “revolution” in thirteen months, and another shift in the long historical arch of struggle between students and dictatorships in South Korea.

PARK CHUNG HEE

No person is more associated with South Korean history than Park Chung Hee. For good and bad, in the pervasive historical perspective on the second half of the twentieth century, he is inseparably linked to the combination of authoritarian state-making and rapid economic development. That he remained as the apex political figure for almost two decades, from 1961 to his assassination in 1979, naturally explains his historical prominence, but this endurance also reflects Park’s long-term approach to South Korea’s pressing needs. As with most dictators, he convinced himself of his continuing indispensability. Such a mindset began to appear with greater clarity toward the end of the 1960s, setting the stage for the descent into iron-fisted rule in the 1970s.

Park’s compelling background reveals much about his world view and actions once in power. Born into a poor rural family in the south-central part of the country in 1917, he experienced first hand the decay of the countryside, a theme that would preoccupy him in office. Gifted and ambitious—his hero as a boy was Napoleon—he took advantage of all the opportunities made available by Japanese colonialism to escape his conditions. Following a stint as a school teacher in his native region, in the early 1940s he became one of the few young Koreans selected to receive training in a Japanese military academy in Manchuria. There, and later in the metropole itself, he imbibed the lessons of the rapid modern transformation of Japan, in particular the military’s preeminence in the Japanese approach to governing. As with many of his compatriots who came of age in the late colonial period, his affinity for Japan, or at least the Japanese model, did not subside, even after liberation. He developed a fierce nationalistic streak as well, and that perhaps explains his brief participation, as an ROK officer, in the anti-American, anti-Rhee resistance in the late 1940s following liberation. He was captured and implicated, in fact, in the Y
su-Sunch’
n Rebellion of 1948, and only the intervention of an American officer on his behalf—Park had become entangled in his brother’s more explicitly leftist guerilla activities—spared his life. For the Korean War and the rest of the 1950s, Park retreated to the South Korean military, gradually ascending the ranks and cultivating a following among officers that would prove decisive later.