Session 9: The Park Era as History

Organizer: Hyung-A Kim, University of Wollongong

Chair and Discussant: Carter J. Eckert, Harvard University

Keywords: Korea, Park, modernization, industrialization, assessment.

2004 marked the 25th year since Park’s assassination. Yet, the task of reassessing the Park era is far from simple. As much as it marks the turning point in Korea’s modernization, the legacy of Park’s rule continues to affect, for better or worse, the character of many Korean people and their society which has been inextricably interwoven with the socio-political and economic system that the Park regime developed. Economically, the Republic of Korea today is one of the most successful nations in the world, with the world’s eleventh largest economy. Politically, Korea holds the most impressive record in the region for its democratic transformation following the Park era. In the course of this extraordinary phenomenon, Park’s reputation elevated from "dictator" to "National Leader," which appears to have become established indefinitely, especially among ordinary citizens. This change in the Korean people’s view of Park demands a deeper understanding of the importance of the Park era to Korea’s modern experience. The need for a new understanding is given added importance by the rapidly changing global environment driven by the war on terrorism, the threat of nuclear proliferation, the globalization of industry, and the ever watchful eye of the world on Korean economic and security matters. This panel assesses four key issues:

• The rise of the Park regime through reform, 1961–63;

• The characteristics of the Park era in the 1960s;

• The Park Administration’s rural modernization initiatives in the 1970s; and

• Defence industry building in heavy and chemical industrialization.

Reshaping the Korean State through the "Middle Course," 1961–1963

Tae Gyun Park, Seoul National University

Park Chung Hee and the military coup in 1961 are two of the most crucial issues in modern Korean history. A great deal of attention has been given to the fact that Park led effective and rapid economic growth since the early 1960s. Existing works stress two things: (1) the roles of Park and economic bureaucrats in the 1960s and 1970s, and (2) the specific relationship between the U.S. and South Korea. However, these analyses are not enough to fully explain the secret of the Park’s regime’s longevity especially when one considers that it was originally established via a coup in which only 3,400 soldiers participated. In order to better illuminate the characteristic and structure of the Park regime, more attention needs to be focused on the processes in the junta era when the regime was initially formed. There were major staffing changes in the regime and considerable tensions between the junta and the U.S. government. Had Park depended strictly on U.S. aid or catered solely to domestic interests, Park and other key officers in the military government would not have retained political power. Through major revisions of the economic development plan and the purge of several rival groups, Park engineered his election as president and gained power in the new civilian government. The process of constant comprise and navigation between the two poles of power, what I call the "middle course," was the key to Park’s long-term survival.

Sasanggye and the Limits of the Intellectual Resistance to the Developmental State in the 1960s

Michael Kim, Seoul National University

Sasanggye (1953–1970) was one of the leading journals of post-liberation South Korea. During its seventeen years of existence, the journal consistently opposed authoritarian rule. From the moment Park Chung Hee seized power through his military coup in May 1961 until its forced closure in May 1970, Sasanggye remained one of the staunchest critics of the Park regime. Yet even though Sasanggye was highly critical of Park’s authoritarian policies and published some memorable critiques of the Park regime, the journal ultimately shared many of the goals and assumptions that provided the ideological foundations for South Korea’s developmental state. Sasanggye was an important conduit for the introduction of modernization theory from the West to South Korea, and the intellectuals who wrote for the journal often diagnosed the problems of the country with a similar modernist paradigm as the Park regime. Thus, a close reading of Sasanggye’s articles written during the first nine years of the Park regime can reveal some important features of the public sphere of the 1960s. Critics of the developmental state often shared the same worldview as the government technocrats who held the reigns of power, and their critiques rarely challenged the hegemonic modernist discourse and the development-first policies of the Park regime. This study will examine how the critics of the developmental state in the 1960s articulated their resistance to authoritarian rule in the pages of Sasanggye and discuss some of the major intellectual constraints that limited the scope of their political opposition.

Rural Modernization and Development during the Park Administration

Clark W. Sorensen, University of Washington

Current writing on the development and modernization programs of the Park administration has tended to focus on government economic planning, export-led development, and the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization Program of the seventies. South Korea continued to be predominantly rural and agricultural until almost the end of the Park administration (until 1975), however. The Park administration thus placed heavy emphasis on rural development and modernization. In fact, the New Village Movement was trumpeted by the Park administration internationally as a new model of successful rural development and modernization long before the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization program became an item of widespread scholarly attention. The New Village Movement, designed to spiritually transform village leadership and introduce modern attitudes of science and rationality into Korea’s tradition-bound villages, has been called both one of the greatest successes of the Park administration, and one of its greatest failures. There is a great deal of field-based research on rural Korea published in English and in Korean that has been insufficiently considered in assessing rural modernization and development during the Park administration, however. In addition, an overly exclusive focus on the New Village Movement obscures the importance of geographical variations, and the contribution of other governmental programs—the Agricultural Cooperative Federation, the Office of Rural Development, the Agricultural Guidance Bureau—to rural development. This paper proposes a broad-based assessment of Park administration rural modernization and development initiatives using in addition to published field research on rural Korea, the authors’ original field notes from the late seventies.

Heavy and Chemical Industrialization: South Korea’s Homeland Security Measure

Hyung-A Kim, University of Wollongong

The goals of developing a "self-reliant economy" (in the 1960s) and a "self-reliant national defence" (in the 1970s) were at the core of the political economy of the Park era. The two phases of Korea’s development are often explained in terms of the impact of the cold war, particularly in terms of the implications of the Nixon Doctrine for the Northeast Asian region. In regard to the latter, and in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China, however, Park believed that South Korea needed to be able to compete with North Korea, especially in terms of weapons production capacity and to make South Korea more autonomous from the U.S. Park’s agenda, therefore, was not primarily an economic one, but rather had a national security objective. HCI was first and foremost a homeland security measure, designed to give South Korea the capacity and capability to defend itself against the North, without necessarily relying on the U.S. This aspect of South Korea’s economic development has not been sufficiently researched and analyzed. This paper aims to explain how South Korea’s defence program stood at the core of HCI. It also explains the connection between political repression and Korea’s national security priority, particularly in the course of Heavy and Chemical Industrialization.