A History of Korea (93 page)

Unsurprisingly, then, protests erupted when, contrary to the expectations of most people, Chun Doo Hwan announced in June of 1987 that the end of his “term” later that year would be followed by a parliamentary, not popular, election of the next president. This blatant move would ensure that his hand-picked successor, Roh Tae-woo, would take office, but it also triggered an outpouring of anger that spilled into the streets and begat the largest mass protests, with upwards of a million demonstrators throughout the country, in South Korean history (see Image 26). The students who initiated these efforts had little idea that they would soon be joined by salary workers, managers, housewives, and others. Unlike in the past, when political dissent remained the purview of students and hard-core activists, this time the middle class flooded the streets and expressed their support for the protests in numerous other ways as well. The Chun regime had grossly miscalculated the degree to which the people would succumb to the latest machinations of dictatorship. As revealed later, the regime also overestimated its support from the military and bureaucracy for a potential crackdown
on these demonstrations. A certain catastrophe would have ensued, and it would have marred the much-anticipated hosting of the Summer Olympics in Seoul the following year. So feared also the American ambassador to South Korea, who in a private meeting with Chun relayed his government’s strong warning that no violent moves be made to force the demonstrators off the streets.

Image 26
   Clash between protestors and police in the city of Kwangju, June 26, 1987. (Courtesy of Noonbit Publishers.)

The final, major actor to intervene in order to avert disaster was the man picked to be Chun’s successor, Roh Tae-woo. Roh understood that any crackdown would severely stain his reign, just as Kwangju had marked Chun’s. With Chun’s grudging consent, Roh issued a declaration on June 29, 1987, calling for a direct presidential election and a new constitutional system that would make permanent an entire range of democratic reforms. The Sixth Republic that this new constitution ushered in continues to this day. Even with this concession, however, Roh was not prepared to forego his political ambitions, and he placed himself as the presidential candidate from the ruling party in the direct presidential election to be held at the end of the year. Given the distaste of much of the public for Chun’s stewardship, Roh should not have anticipated electoral success, but the two leading politicians in the democratic resistance since the 1970s, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, failed to reach a compromise to select a single opposition candidate. The result, to the dismay of so many who had waged the democratization struggle, was the election of Roh with a plurality of less than 40 percent of the ballots, as the Kims split the opposition vote.

Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung would eventually get their turn at the coveted prize of the presidency in the 1990s, with each new president, and each new peaceful transfer of power, further consolidating the democratic political culture. Notwithstanding, or perhaps due to, his historical baggage, Roh made no attempts to reverse the democratization process. He even overturned longstanding national imperatives through his “Nordpolitik” strategy of establishing diplomatic relations with China and the Soviet Union (soon Russia), which led to the further isolation of North Korea just as the Cold War came to a close. Kim Young Sam’s election in 1992, which came about after he joined hands with Roh in order to procure conservative support, represented the first civilian
presidency since the early 1960s, following three decades of rule by military leaders. The election of his successor in 1997, Kim Dae Jung, constituted the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition candidate in South Korean history.

Both Kim presidencies, while deeply wounded by the shroud of corruption surrounding the president’s confidants and family members, also advanced national healing of the battle scars from democratization. Kim Young Sam’s administration, in fact, revisited Kwangju, this time to officially vindicate the citizenry and launch a prosecutorial investigation into the circumstances, from October 1979 to May 1980, that led to the massacre. In the process the country stood transfixed at the stunning sight of the two main figures in these events, Chun and Roh, being tried and found guilty for their illegal grab for power over this period, as well as for the astronomical slush funds they had accumulated as presidents. Their respective sentences of death and life imprisonment were eventually commuted, and Kim Dae Jung, as the new president in 1998, formally pardoned them for the sake of achieving national reconciliation amidst an economic crisis. That the South Korean people successfully weathered this storm spoke volumes about the health and reparative capacity of their nascent democracy.

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South Korea in the New Millennium

CHRONOLOGY

QUARTERFINAL MATCH VERSUS SPAIN IN THE 2002 WORLD CUP FINALS

As the South Korean people entered the new century they were still recovering from what they called the “IMF period,” when the economy fell into a foreign exchange crisis in 1997 and had to be rescued by a colossal loan from the International Monetary Fund. But following the election of longtime dissident Kim Dae Jung as president at the end of that year, citizens rallied to recover from this shock. Not only did the government repay the IMF loan ahead of schedule, but the weathering of this crisis, as well the 2000 summit between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il of North Korea, instilled a widespread sense of a new historical era: South Korea had matured past the growing pains of rapid
industrialization, dictatorship and democratization, and even the Cold War. Behaviors and technologies, often devised by Korean companies, that exploited the endless possibilities of the Internet and the mobile phone turned South Korean society almost overnight into a futuristic urban space where identities could be readily mixed and reinvented. Mass culture also reflected this newfound confidence and determination, establishing the basis for the “Korean Wave” (
Hallyu
) in pop culture that swept through Asia in the first decade of the new millennium.

The 2002 World Cup Finals, hosted jointly by South Korea and Japan, served as perhaps the most potent symbol of this new era. The unanticipated success of the national team on the field corresponded to the extraordinary energy of the citizenry in demonstrating its collective support, as seen in the throngs of people in the streets when the national team played a game. The peak in the mass euphoria might have come in the moments following the stunning victory, in an overtime shootout, by the national team over Spain in late June, 2002. This sent the upstart South Koreans to a wildly improbable birth in the semi-finals, an achievement never before reached by any World Cup team outside of Europe and Latin America. Indeed, the ecstasy of the entire World Cup month served as the emblem of the continuing “coming out party” of sorts for South Koreans. They reveled in their awareness of a new era epitomized by their national team, by the Korean Wave, and by their experience in overcoming the national emergency of just five years earlier. The new millennium allowed South Korea to start anew, and to enter a postindustrial age economically that coincided with rapid social and cultural changes.

ECONOMIC GROWTH: A RECONSIDERATION

Even before the crisis of 1997–8, throughout the 1990s South Koreans had a creeping sense that not all had gone well with the extraordinarily rapid economic growth they had traversed over the previous three decades. Perhaps the pace had been too quick, or that government oversight had not matched its policy ambitions, but whatever the causes, the construct of the economic miracle began to come apart at the seams. The roads were constantly clogged by too many cars on too little space, and even relatively simple structures seemed unstable. In 1993 a rail line collapsed
over an illegal tunnel project in Pusan, killing scores of people, and the next year, a section of one of the major bridges spanning the Han River in Seoul gave way, plunging many to their deaths. In the spring and summer of 1995 came the biggest such disasters: an explosion at a subway construction site in the city of Taegu that killed hundreds, and the sudden collapse of an five-story luxury department store, which took the lives of over 500 innocent shoppers and workers. In the latter case, it turned out that the shoddy construction pursued on the cheap by yet another would-be tycoon had been permitted to pass, through bribes, by government inspectors, some of whom suspiciously failed to show up to work the day following the accident. Such unethical collusion led Koreans to wonder aloud whether, in the relentless pursuit of development, they had lost their soul. This type of national hand-wringing and reflection had a long history, and in fact had intensified following the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, but now it seemed as if the country was being bombarded with material evidence for this sense of malaise.

The worsening mood continued through the final year of the Kim Young Sam presidency in 1997, and the revelations of corruption surrounding his son only magnified the unpopularity of his administration. The final blow to Kim’s reputation hit in late summer of 1997, just as the presidential election campaign for his successor started to intensify. What began as a precipitous depreciation of currencies through a speculative run in Southeast Asia soon hit South Korea, which suffered, like these other countries, from runaway growth and foreign debt that left it vulnerable to fluctuations in the currency markets. More ominously, the spreading financial crisis in Asia exposed a Korean economy with serious structural problems, such as mountains of under-performing loans—many government-sponsored—to enormous conglomerates that had taken this unending supply of easy credit to expand without restraint. Like the roads, bridges, and buildings of the preceding years, the edifice of the Korean financial and economic system came down like a house of cards. This resulted in the rapid depreciation of the Korean
won
, a dive in the Korean stock markets, and worst of all for the populace, the bankruptcy of thousands of
firms both big and small. The collapse and downsizing of companies and the massive wave of layoffs struck the country like a punch in the stomach, victimizing workers both blue and white collar alike. The social dislocation and deeply bitter despondency that ensued were exacerbated by the national humiliation suffered, from the Korean perspective, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF rescued the South Korean government from insolvency by arranging a $57 billion bailout, but only according to strict conditions for economic restructuring and reforms. Koreans still refer to this crisis as the “IMF period,” as if the lords of world capitalism were responsible for a problem that Koreans had brought on themselves.

In licking their wounds, however, Koreans soon demonstrated that the worst of times could also bring out the best in people. They found the bitter medicine of restructuring and sacrifice in every major sector of the economy—the conglomerates and state-controlled banks as well as labor unions—a bit easier to swallow by a strong sense of national elan. This collective consciousness suffused the social fabric, made visible in everything from telethons to locally organized campaigns to help laid off workers and contribute to the repayment of the IMF loan. The stunning sight of Koreans bringing their jewelry, family heirlooms, and wads of cash to the collection centers pointed to the power of national identity, as well as perhaps to the thoughtful reflection on their recent history that began well before the financial collapse. In the midst of the most serious crisis to hit the South Korean economy since the Korean War, the people demonstrated a resolve that would lay the foundation for national rebirth.

The IMF loan was repaid far ahead of schedule, and the reforms demanded by the IMF, while not going so far as to permanently shake the influence of the major conglomerates, cleared the slate for the construction of a postindustrial economy. This economy would be built largely on information technologies that turned South Korea into the most wired country in the world. Some of the same technological, social, and cultural factors converged to transform South Korea quickly into one of the most wire-
less
countries as well, as much of social interaction came to be centered
on the mobile phone. Such a revival corresponded, in the political arena, also to a fundamentally different approach to the relationship with North Korea. The famed “Sunshine Policy” of President Kim Dae Jung, who won election in late 1997 with the slimmest of victory margins and promptly shepherded the country through the economic crisis, sought to engage the North through a focus on reconciliation and assistance. This shift led to the historical summit meeting in Pyongyang in the summer of 2000 between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il. It was discovered later that this agreement had included a massive, secret payment of direct aid to the Northern regime. This revelation tainted the historical judgment on these efforts as well as on Kim Dae Jung’s Nobel Peace Prize, which he won later that year partly as a result of the Sunshine Policy. But despite these setbacks, symbolically the summit signaled an array of changes in South Korea as the country reemerged from the financial crisis to face the new millennium.