A History of Korea (87 page)

PUBLICATION OF KIM CHIHA’S “FIVE BANDITS,” MAY 1970

Kim Chiha, a budding poet laden with personal travails from the 1960s, published one of his earliest major works in 1970, and was promptly arrested. His alleged crime, and that of his publishers, was violation of the Anti-Communist Law, although the poem in question, “Five Bandits,” made no mention of support for North Korea or communism. It simply
satirized the gross inequalities in South Korean society due to corruption, though in an unmistakably condemnatory and mocking fashion. For continuing to protest the political and economic injustices of the increasingly autocratic and rapidly industrializing South Korean system, Kim Chiha spent most of the 1970s in jail, even receiving a death sentence in 1974. Kim was not alone in lobbing criticisms of the dramatic changes that Korean society was undergoing, for the primary thrust of cultural expression in this period carried a political undertone. But Kim Chiha, through his connections and impact, can be seen as the embodiment of the watershed decade of the 1970s, the memory of which continues to be colored predominantly by the term, “Yusin,” in reference to the constitutional dictatorship forcibly implemented in 1972.

Those who arose to counter and call attention to the abuses of the Yusin system included writers like Kim, artists, publishers, musicians, and religious leaders, in addition to the students and laborers who maintained their vanguard role. Indeed the 1970s witnessed the emergence of many major historical figures who would dominate lasting perceptions of South Korean history, and none more so than in the arenas of politics and culture. Whether explicitly or not, the most notable cultural developments of this decade, which reflected and affected broader historical currents to an extent unseen since the colonial period, were tinged with politics.

THE YUSIN DECADE

Not everything in 1970s South Korea was shaped by the Yusin system; it just seemed that way. Even the continuation of the remarkable economic growth through export-led industrialization and domination by conglomerate companies appeared to have been a handmaiden of politics. As is the case eventually with most dictators, Park Chung Hee became convinced of his indispensability and conflated his power with the people’s welfare, although the country—partly due to the success of his policies, ironically—was very different in the early 1970s than a decade earlier. The October 1972 imposition of the so-called
Yusin
(“revitalization”) constitution prohibited political dissent and in effect rendered Park president for life (which turned out to be true). The official justification for this move—which amounted to his second
coup d’état
, this time of a system that he was already heading—was to solidify the path toward reunification. Forced into a response to the Sino-American
détente
in 1972 that cast doubt on America’s security commitments, the two Koreas had achieved some stunning breakthroughs in reconciliation talks, at least publicly, earlier in the summer that year. But the dictatorship clearly came amidst signs of growing dissatisfaction with Park’s rule, as reflected in his less-than-convincing re-election in the 1971 presidential election. And soon after the inauguration of the Yusin system, the global oil shocks beginning in 1973 and the killing of his wife by an assassin in 1974 added further to Park’s growing siege mentality. By the fall of 1979, amidst unmistakable indications of widespread, impassioned opposition to the dictatorship, Yusin came to an end with that of Park’s own life at the hands of his own internal police apparatus. By then, the Yusin system had intensified the autocratic political approach of the 1960s and extended it to suppress all forms of dissent through a constitutional dictatorship that bordered on absolutism.

Such an ostensible comfort zone of total power provided Park the capacity to push through a state-led revamping of the countryside. The New Village Movement (
Saema
l undong
), which in some ways emulated the North’s
Ch’
llima
movement in the 1950s, began in 1970 through a personal directive from Park. The New Village Movement quickly became the general catch-phrase for all efforts to improve the countryside and even was applied to an overarching spirit of reform that the government encouraged in urban areas as well. The mobilization of state resources focused first on improving the rural communities’ basic infrastructure and appearance—removing, for example, the blight of thatched roofs, for which Park was said to have had a particular disdain. By the middle of the 1970s, the New Village Movement became a comprehensive effort, driven by a systematic, large bureaucracy that directed money, labor, and expertise to mechanization, irrigation, road construction, electricity, and the provision of consumer items. The goal was to improve agricultural output, to be sure, but also to close the gap in living standards between the city and countryside. Some historians view the New Village Movement, which continued
in revised form into the 1990s, as having been more of a political ploy to divert excess materials, such as cement, and thereby tamp down any potential restiveness among the rural populace. But without a doubt the material welfare of rural Korea improved dramatically. The gains in agricultural efficiencies, however, did little to stem the steady stream of migration out of the countryside, and in fact might have accelerated it.

This movement of people to the cities and factories fueled the explosive growth of metropolitan areas, especially in and around Seoul, as well as of the major conglomerates, the family-controlled enterprises that expanded through the government-guided export drive. These companies propelled the industrialization of the South Korean economy to an emphasis on heavy industry and high technology, the products of which supplied the dramatic increases in the size of both the domestic and foreign markets. Companies like Samsung Electronics and LG (Lucky-Goldstar) produced a bevy of consumer products such as televisions and microwave ovens, while Hyundai and Daewoo manufactured big-ticket items such as automobiles and supertankers designed primarily for export. These and other enterprises also facilitated the remarkable mobilization of expertise and workers, in the tens of thousands, for large-scale construction projects overseas, especially the Middle East, to build power plants, water treatment facilities, roads, bridges, and big buildings. Such efforts resulted in the achievement, with great fanfare, of the $10 billion mark in the annual value of South Korean exports in 1977, an extraordinarily feat given that, at the beginning of the decade, the figure was barely $1 billion.

Needless to say, the clearing of such economic benchmarks reflected and induced dramatic changes in the lives of South Koreans everywhere, especially in the urban areas. There, a robust consumer culture arose, spurred by the increasing supply of goods and buying power as well as by the extension of communications and transportation networks. In the first half of the decade alone, in fact, South Koreans witnessed the opening of the Seoul-Pusan Expressway and other major highways, the inauguration of the first subway line in Seoul, and the sizeable expansion of the capital city to many areas south of the Han River. Not everyone, however,
was benefiting equally from these advances. The agitation of the growing working class, which manned the factories that made these developments possible, in fact continued to remind everyone of the underbelly of rapid industrialization: gross inequality, poverty, and exploitative, even dangerous, working conditions. Tellingly, the Yusin decade had begun with one of the most memorable moments in South Korean history, one that compelled attention to the plight of laborers: in late 1970, a young man named Ch
n T’aeil, who had unsuccessfully attempted to improve the conditions of his fellow workers in a typical sweatshop, committed ritual suicide by setting himself on fire while clutching a book of labor laws that the government had failed to enforce.

LITERARY RESISTANCE

Kim Chiha proclaimed to speak for such downtrodden victims of Korean society, and in later works such as “Cry of the People,” he invoked the memory of Ch
n’s self-immolation in his calls for revolutionary action. As for the work that thrust Kim into the public spotlight, “Five Bandits” (
Oj
k
) was published in the May 1970 issue of the journal
Sasanggye
(“Realm of Ideas”), then soon again in the organ of the main opposition political party. The government immediately shut down both publications and arrested their editors and publishers. Kim Chiha himself was booked on charges of violating the Anti-Communist Law, a generic tool for silencing political opposition. Kim likely knew what would happen—indeed, he even anticipated his arrest in the balladic poem’s preamble—for he bore the battle scars of struggle against the anti-communist system. As a college student he had participated in the demonstrations to overthrow Syngman Rhee in 1960, led the reunification efforts that had alarmed Major General Park Chung Hee into seizing power in 1961, and joined the huge student protests against the Normalization Treaty with Japan in 1964 (
Chapter 23
). He had spent most of the latter part of the 1960s trying to fend off both severe illness and government surveillance, a pattern that would also characterize his life in the 1970s. Indeed
he spent most of the decade either in jail or under house arrest, and was briefly sentenced to death in 1974 after being nabbed in a sweep of activists and students on fabricated charges of sedition. He was fortunate to escape with his life, for eight others in this roundup were quickly executed following sentencing in a kangaroo court. His resilience in the face of hardship, including torture, inspired a persistent, concerted movement to win his freedom that became a
cause
célèbre
in literary and intellectual circles far beyond Korea. Kim Chiha served, then, as the counterpart figure to Park Chung Hee as the symbol of 1970s South Korea, and it had all begun with a brilliant, biting poem.