Korean Politics Midterm

Kang Relationship between state and buisiness

-Top-down corruption has best been explicated in the notion of a "predatory" state.18 The predatory state takes advantage of a dispersed and weak business sector. Political elites pursue outright expropriation; they solicit "donations" from businessmen, who in turn either are "shaken down" by the regime or volunteer bribes in return for favors; and they employ other means as well -In contrast, bottom-up corruption occurs when social actors have the power to overwhelm the state. When the concentration or strength of the business sector is enough to force concessions from the state, rent-seeking behavior results. -When a country has a coherent state and a dispersed business sector, the result is predatory behavior by the state (top-down behavior) where political elites can scrape off rents in a predatory manner. Political elites presiding over a coherent state will have the opportunity to take advantage of a fractured business sector. -Alternatively, when the business sector is concentrated and the state is fragmented, as in Cell II, rent seeking results (bottom-up behavior). Here rents created by the state flow to business, because the latter has colonized the former and transformed it into a sort of "executive committee." A business sector composed of strong interest groups may overwhelm the state with its various demands, leading to either policy incoherence or policy indecision. Many analyses of developing countries emphasize that the state is a relatively recent, and hence weak, addition to the political scene. Strong interest groups may be able to capture control of the state and use the power of the state for their own ends -When both state and business are weak, rents are all but eliminated. Neither state nor business is powerful enough to take advantage of the other, and so exploitation is difficult. Many of the advanced industrial democracies—at least when compared with less-developed countries—may approximate this situation. As bureaucrats compete with one another to offer policy, thus driving the cost of a bribe toward zero, numerous capitalists also compete with one another for the policy, also driving the price toward zero. Corruption is lowest in quadrant IV. -The final and most interesting case is quadrant I, where government and business are equally strong: there is a relatively coherent state but also a small number of powerful interest groups. In this case, the level of rents is limited and the division is relatively equitable. The result is "mutual hostages," where the state and powerful groups may collude with one another but neither has the advantage. In this mutual hostage situation both political and economic elites are powerful enough to harm each other, but the damage each can inflict on the other deters such actions. In quadrant I, rents can be had and corruption can occur, but the level of rents is constrained by the power of the other group -Thus, the least corruption would occur in situations where both state and business are weak and disorganized, for neither group could take advantage of the other, and all the groups would compete against each other, driving the price of corruption close to zero. The most corruption would occur when one side, either state or business, is coherent. A middle position exists when both state and business are strong and can take partial but not total advantage of each other

Kim the Pro-Democracy Movement

-Two events were particularly instrumental in bolstering the power of the pro-democracy coalition and maintaining the high level of mass mobilization. First, at the dawn of 1987, Pak Chong-ch'ol, a Seoul National University student, was tortured to death during a police interrogation. Pak Chong-ch'ol's torture death and the revelation of the regime's conspiracy to cover up the crime put the authoritarian regime and the ruling party on the defensive and dramatically augmented the position and power of the pro-democracy coalition. -Second, Chun Doo Hwan declared on April 13, 1987 that he could no longer tolerate wasteful discussions on constitutional revision. This unilateral decision to terminate the public discussions on constitutional revision intensified mass mobilization. University professors initiated a public statement campaign, criticizing and opposing Chun's decision. Artists, novelists, writers, and actors followed suit. Religious leaders and priests waged a series of hunger strikes. -Organizing and coordinating local branches throughout the country, the NMHDC mobilized a series of massive pro-democracy demonstrations against the authoritarian regime in June 1987. The mobilization escalated particularly after Yi Han-yol, a Yonsei University student, was hit by tear gas bomb fragments on June 9 and critically injured. Confronted with unprecedented mass protests and mobilization, on June 29, 1987, the authoritarian regime finally announced dramatic and unexpected concessions to the demands of civil society groups and the opposition party, including the adoption of a direct presidential election system -Perhaps ironically, the presidential elections in 1987 - the result of intense popular pressure - left civil society in South Korea marginalized and fragmented. First, once the authoritarian regime agreed to carry out a set of democratic reforms including direct presidential elections, the focus of the transitional politics rapidly shifted to the elections for the new regime: the presidential elections in December 1987 and the National Assembly elections in April 1988 -As these elections were nearing, South Korean politics increasingly revolved around party politics and electoral competitions in political society. Civil society and mass mobilization became incrementally marginal. Second, after trying in vain to remedy the fatal split between the two opposition leaders, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, civil society groups took different positions on whom to support for the election. -One of the most important reasons why civil society groups could resume their movement for democratic reform relatively quickly was the continuity of the Roh regime with the previous authoritarian regime. Roh himself did not appear to represent a clear break with the past. He could be seen as just another general-turned-president. Furthermore, the grand party merger in 1990 offered glaring evidence that the Roh Tae Woo regime was just a continuation of the past authoritarianism and that the opposition parties were unreliable As far as South Korea is concerned, the answer to the debate on elites vs. masses in the literature on democratization seems clear. As I have shown in this chapter, civil society and its mobilization were crucial in the democratic transition and consolidation of South Korea. Mass-ascendance characterized South Korea's democratic transition. During the transition, it was the resurrection and remobilization of various civil society groups and their grand pro-democracy coalition with the opposition party that ultimately induced the authoritarian ruling regime to agree on a set of democratic reforms. In this respect, during what Rustow calls "prolonged struggle," critical choices were made among the mass public and in its interaction withelites

Woo The Politics of Growth:

-Unlike Japan, the Korean variant of Confucianism long held the Man on Horseback in supercilious contempt and equated the ascendence of praetorians with national degeneration. Added to this was American success in seducing the Korean imagination with the idea of liberal democracy. The military had to reckon with this, and with those students and citizens still restless and confident of their mobilized power after the 1960 tour de force in ousting Rhee -For the military, then, the most immediate prerequisite of power was to sublimate the pent-up energy of a highly literate populace before it erupted again in political turmoil: hence, a high-pitched economic development -Legitimacy is, moreover, a matter of creating and reinforcing politically expedient myths. For economic growth to substitute for legitimacy, it has to be transmogrified into a symbol that appeals to some collective primordial sentiment—such as, for instance, nationalism. That symbol in Korea was a number: a talismanic doubledigit GNP growth figure that was the Korean score in the race to catch up with Japan and also to surpass the DPRK's economic performance -This developmental chutzpah became, by 1970, a cause of serious concern for officials of international economic agencies, as the Korean debt service ratio reached a dangerous level.72 But Korean "recklessness" was not an artifact of the late 1960s; from the early 1960s on, Americans spotted what they considered an excessive investment zeal on the part of the military leadership. -The type and level of investment the junta coveted—iron and steel projects, an industrial complex in Ulsan as a "symbol of national political commitment [sic] of the military junta,"73—worried Americans who thought that the future debt-servicing would surely translate into an American aid burden. Hence, the Americans pressed for caution and stability -But once the Third Republic was politically ensconced, USAID launched a massive assault to liberalize the trade regime and financial sector, in what Anne Krueger called "the most dramatic and vivid change in any developing country since World War II."81 The thrust of these reforms was to promote exports and create greater reliance on international prices. -In truth, the 1965 financial reform was a very simple measure to enact: interest rates were hiked to mobilize domestic savings. Interest rates on time deposits jumped from 15 percent to 30 percent overnight, not much below the curb rate, and interest on some types of loans to 26-30 percent. At the source of this quantum leap upward in financial price was a theory of economic development that placed central emphasis on finance -For a while, at least, it appeared that the reform achieved its intent: in three months, the level of time and savings deposits increased by 50 percent and grew at a compound annual rate of nearly 100 percent over the next four years. Detractors of the reform charged that the debt crisis—which, by the beginning of the 1970s, reached a foreign debt/GNP ratio of 30 percent up from 2.3 percent a decade earlier—stemmed directly from this financial reform, and further, that something was gravely wrong with the theoretical assumptions behind the reform -A flabbergasted Korean economist charged that the interest rate reform, instead of bringing about "financial deepening," opened a floodgate for foreign capital. As Cho Sun saw it, the reform not only created dependency on foreign resources, but bifurcated industrial structure and put heavy pressure on banking sector.

Prelude to Korean War

-A Korean War was inconceivable before the division of Korea in August 1945. But because of that division, it has been conceivable ever since—right down to the still-volatile present -Kim II Sung sensed the immense strategic blessing of a Chinese Communist victory (an impregnable "rear" unimaginable in 1945), and therefore in early 1947 he began dispatching tens of thousands of Koreans to fight with Mao. N. Koreans gained battle experience in China. From 1948 until the autumn of 1950, Korean units that had fought in China filtered back home. The total numbers were somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 --In early 1949 the CIA estimated that the total number of guerrillas in the South was somewhere between 3,500 and 6,000, not counting several thousand more on Cheju Island. Some were armed with rifles, mostly Japanese and American, but many just carried clubs and bamboo spears --There was little evidence of Soviet or North Korean support for the southern guerrillas. --American advisers were all over the war zones in the South, constantly shadowing their Korean counterparts and urging them on to greater effort -The war that came in June 1950 followed on the guerrilla fighting and nine months of battles along the thirty-eighth parallel in 1949. Border conflict lasted from early May until late December, taking hundreds of lives and embroiling thousands of troops. The reason that war did not come in 1949 is at once simple and essential to grasping the civil origins of the Korean conflict: the South wanted a war then, the North did not, and neither did the United States or the Soviet Union. -Thus the 1950 logic for both sides was to see who would be stupid enough to move first, with Kim itching to invade and hoping for a clear southern provocation, and hotheads in the South hoping to provoke an "unprovoked" assault, in order to get American help—for that was the only way the South could hope to win. Kim already had begun playing Moscow off against Beijing, too -Roberts went on to say that both North and South were "at fault" in the back-andforth "needling" along the parallel. But according to other documents, Roberts said, "Almost every incident has been provoked by the South Korean security forces," a stronger allegation. -Most accounts of the outbreak of fighting in June 1950 leave the impression that a North Korean attack began all along the parallel at dawn, against an enemy taken completely unawares. But the war began in the same, remote locus of much of the 1949 fighting, the Ongjin peninsula, and some hours later spread along the parallel eastward, to Kaesong, Ch'unch'on, and the east coast --The official American position has always been that the Soviets and the North Koreans stealthily prepared an attack that was completely unprovoked, one that constituted an all-out invasion.51 On June 26, Kim II Sung, on the contrary, accused the South of making "a general attack" across the parallel

Woo Soverign Risk and the Politics of Foreign Debt:

-By the 1970s, Korea was no longer a global mendicant, having taken off in the 1960s; moreover, the world was floating in petrodollars without political strings attached—just an incessant search for borrowers. The availability of private loans was truly critical and made all the difference for Korea. The money Korea needed for the Big Push was now handed them on a silver platter by the world's eager moneylenders, who delighted in Korea, the developmental wunderkind -The logic of this political economy is not difficult to plumb: there are some countries whose strategic importance to the United States makes them practically undefaultable (Mexico, Korea, Egypt, the Philippines), and some banks so huge that they can only go belly-up at great risk to the home economy (BankAmerica, Citibank, Chase, etc.). For such borrowers and lenders, America is the lender of last resort, and bankers do well by lending big, and to countries that are American-supported through and through. Korea benefited from this same logic -American private bankers took their cue from their government, and loaned to Korea because "the American government is," as one U.S. banker put it, "the guarantor of the whole South Korean government, lock, stock and barrel."17 They lent even at a time when Korea was widely considered by international banking circles as the most likely nation to default -Koreans knew from past experience in raising money abroad (and perhaps from their mercantilist instincts) that international finance and security were usually interlocked, that it was simply not good politics to fritter away "debtor leverage" by borrowing too little from too many countries that do not have significant security interests in Korea. As American bankers played brinkmanship with their home government over international debt, Koreans too had sought to play the debt game against the hegemon. Despite Korean preference for American leaders, the share of Japanese and European banks grew by leaps and bounds in the late 1970s. Given Japan's security stake in Korea, its loans posed no problem, but European money was none too useful politically.

Developments in Protest Actors Shin

-Comparing the 1970s with the 1980s, it is evident that there are both consistencies and differences. As expected, Table 2.2 shows that students and laborers were the most dominant groups in the democracy movement throughout the period of study. Relative to other groups, students consistently mobilized against authoritarianism. The student protestors of the 1970s and 1980s harked back to the golden age of political mobilization when they were at the forefront of the movement that brought down Syngman Rhee's autocratic government in April, 1960, and led the charge against the normalization of relations between Korea and Japan in 1965. -While the church played a critical role in the labor movement of the 1970s, college students began to aid workers in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s when they adopted labor praxis ( hyŏnjangnon ) as their major strategy. In the 1980s, thousands of students dropped out of universities to work in factories motivated by the socialist belief that workers are the fundamental base for social revolution. Students encouraged workers to situate their grievances in the larger socio-political context, rather than framing labor problems as local issues, and exhorted them to join political struggles against both their employers and the state. -With help from churches and students, workers became much more powerful and independent by the mid-to late 1980s. Laborers not only demanded basic workers' rights but also formed active democratic unions and participated in political protest. -christians became less active in the 80s than the 70s, as the radical left became more dominant and the Christians lost their leading role in the movement. -role of media also decreased int eh 80s because of increased repression under the Chun regime.

Diamond and Shin Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation

-During 1997, however, the Korean model was shaken to its foundations. The popularity of Kim Young Sam, the first civilian head of government in three decades who had entered as a political reformer with wide public support, collapsed in a series of corruption scandals. -Then, in the last two months of 1997, Korea was struck by its worst economic crisis in almost half a century. -Yet economic crisis helped pave the way for a political breakthrough. On December 18, 1997, in its third presidential election since the inauguration of the democratic Sixth Republic, Korea became the first third-wave democracy in East Asia to peacefully transfer power to an opposition party.3 -Koreans elected as their president the country's most determined opposition figure, Kim Dae Jung—a man who had campaigned for the presidency and fallen short three times and who was such an implacable foe of the military that he was nearly put to death by the Chun Doo Hwan regime following the May 1980 Kwangju rebellion

Japan Korea Normalization, Vietnam War, Reintegraton of East Asia:

-Even as American aid declined in the early 1960s, two things intruded to give Koreans a break: the rapprochement with Japan, and the Vietnam War. The latter was a true deus ex machina, bringing with it enhanced U.S. military assistance that allowed the Korean government to release scarce resources for economic development -Vietnam marked the coming of age for some of Korea's largest conglomerates. The first international contracts ever granted to Hyundai (today, one of the world's 50 largest corporations), were from the U.S. government for projects in Southeast Asia -Korean rapprochement with Japan was on the American agenda dating back to the late 1940s. But in the 1950s, governmental negotiations to effect realistic levels of trade and to restore diplomatic relations were exercises in futility. Rhee refused any figure lower than $2 billion as reparations from Japan, and even the malleable Chang Myón thought that $1.25 billion was the rock bottom price. The Japanese, for bargaining purpose, filibustered to the effect that it was they who needed compensation for properties left behind in Korea. -When Park Chung Hee, a former lieutenant in the Kwantung Army, became the chief of state in 1961, all of that changed: Ikeda, Japan's Prime Minister, assured Rusk that with Park in charge, normalization would only be a matter of time.39 By 1963, imports from Japan had leaped to $162 million, 30 percent of total imports to Korea, and four times the level under Rhee. -By 1963, Korean debt to Japan stood at $130 million, and its exports to Japan only 16 percent of its imports.40 The Korean leadership thus needed quick normalization in order to cover the trade deficit and debt, not to mention paving the road for further financial inflow from Japan to fuel the Five Year Plan. Korea was hooked to Japan -But the military regime bulldozed through all opposition and the normalization treaty was finally concluded in 1965. The final reparation figure was substantially lower than that sought by previous regimes: Korea was to receive from Japan $300 million in grants, $200 million in government loans, and $300 million in commercial credit. But the total—at $800 million—was no small sum for a country whose entire exports in 1964 amounted to $200 million. -Yet, in retrospect the amount of reparations ( Japan still refused to call it that, preferring the expression "grant") would seem less significant than the uses to which these new financial resources were put. Notwithstanding the provision in the 1965 settlement that $300 million in grants were to be paid out at a rate of $3 million each year for ten years and were to be utilized exclusively for agricultural development and importation of industrial materials -If Koreans insisted on using the money for industrial development, then the Japanese wanted it to be for light industries, like textiles and household electronic goods.49 But, the money quickly found its way into other types of industrial investment, and made possible, inter alia, Park's fervent dream of a steel complex. -The remaining $200 million in government loans, borrowed at a 3.5 percent interest rate and repayable over twenty years after a seven-year grace period, was invested for social infrastructure including power plants, railroads, irrigation networks, and communication facilities. $300 million in commercial loans went into financing plant exports from Japan, such as power facilities, textile production machinery, and transportation equipment. In other words, the Japan-Korea rapprochement might have been a neocolonial arrangement, but it was not ruled by an inexorable logic of underdevelopment -By 1966 Japanese capital accounted for a good half of total foreign loans to Korea, triggering an investment spree. But the loans were also dispensed with ruthless efficiency in the form of "suppliers' credit," prefiguring at the outset two tendencies that would mark the Korean economy for the next twenty years: increasing imports, hence deteriorating balance of payments vis-á-vis Japan, and an economy hooked on external financing to cover trade deficits. In this manner Korea came back, two decades after World War II, to join the Japanese orbit—although one that now allowed a significant degree of development -Korea sent to Vietnam 47,872 troops in the first year alone, and a total of more than 300,000 by the time the war was over; this was more men per capita than any nation in the world, including the United States64—something rarely mentioned, and even more rarely studied -American payments to Korea directly under the provisions of the Brown Memorandum from fiscal year 1965 to 1970 are said to have been more than one billion dollars, largely fueled by the Vietnam war.

Diamond and Shin Chronology of Reforms

-Formally, Korea began its transition to democracy on June 29, 1987, when Roh Tae Woo, the presidential candidate of the ruling Democratic Justice Party (DJP), announced an eight-point pledge, subsequently dubbed the June 29 Declaration of Democratic Reform. -Insitutional reforms to the constitution: (1) a constitutional amendment for direct election of the president by all Koreans aged twenty or older; (2) revising the presidential election law to ensure freedom of candidacy and fair competition; (3) amnesty for longtime democratic dissident Kim Dae Jung and other political prisoner -4) protecting human dignity and promotion of basic rights, including an unprecedented extension of the writ of habeas corpus; (5) restoring freedom of the press by abolishing the repressive Basic Press Law; (6) educational autonomy and local selfgovernment through the popular election of local assemblies and executive heads of local governments; -As in the past, the president of Korea represents the state and heads the executive branch of government. Under the democratic constitution, however, the president's authority and powers as the head of the government have been curtailed considerably, while those of the legislative and judicial branches have been expanded significantly -Although the constitution attempts to redress the historic imbalances among the branches of the government and forbids presidential reelection, the president still enjoys such enormous powers (especially over the national security apparatus) that some consider him to be a kind of civilian dictator. -Yet during the Roh Tae Woo administration, a variety of liberalizing reforms were adopted to safeguard political rights and civil liberties among individual citizens as well as civic and political associations. For example, new laws allowing assemblies and demonstrations were enacted in March 1989. A new Constitutional Court was created to prevent any branch of the national and local government from abusing the democratic constitution or human rights. The revised laws forced the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP)—formerly the Korean Central Intelligence Agency— and the Military Security Command, the two most powerful and oppressive institutions of military dictatorship, to "leave politics" and return to their original missions. - For the first time in more than three decades, these two and all other security agencies lost their status as "a reserved domain" of Korean politics with exclusive control over national security expenditures, defense strategies, personnel management (promotion), development and procurement of weaponry, and intelligence gathering Terminating the authoritarian practice by which the current party president nominated his successor opened a new age of intraparty democracy.

Democracy Increased the Role of Money Politics after 1987:

-However, the most significant change was the 1987 democratic transition.53 A country's shift from authoritarian institutions to democratic ones will have different results depending on the relationship between state and business (Figure 2). In Korea, where both the state and business were strong, a shift to democratic institutions benefited business more than the state—the state was weakened by the imposition of democratic processes -Korea's position moved from one of government and business as mutual hostages (quadrant I) to one of predominance by rent-seeking business (quadrant II). Democratization led to increased demands for political payoffs, as politicians began to genuinely compete for electoral support, and to a decrease in the state's ability to resist or contain the demands of the business sector. The small number of massive Korean firms, unrestrained by domestic market forces because of their size, made increasingly risky decisions. -The democratic transition had two major implications for the pattern of money politics in Korea. First, an increase in demand for political payoffs shifted the advantage to business. Second, Korea's legal and corporate institutions remained underdeveloped even in the 1990s and allowed a continued business focus on debt-led investment in overcapacity and overdiversification. -The scandals of the late Kim administration showed that the transition to democratic rule by no means reduced the ability of rent-seeking groups to exercise political influence; indeed, the demand for campaign funds and secret funds (songo-chagum and bi-chagum) has probably increased. One reason that Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam are no different from previous political elites in their manner of political fundraising and their appetite for it is that the costs of winning elections and running a party are immense -Political funds in Korea came from business. Tables 7 and 8 compare estimates for quasi-taxes paid by business for the periods 1980-87 and 1994-98. Although quasi-taxes are largely accountable, they are still imposed in a coercive manner and are part of the overall government-business relationship. To not make "voluntary" donations is to risk payback in the form of tax audits or rejected loan applications, -This exchange allowed greater business influence in policymaking, and the chaebol continued to expand at the expense of small and medium-sized industries. Although many assumed that globalization and liberalization would reduce rent seeking and the power of the chaebol, the opposite might very well be the case. Table 9 shows that although in 1986 the four largest chaebol added 5.7 percent to Korea's GNP, by 1995 their share had grown to 9.3 percent of value added to GNP.

Woo Heavy Industrialization in the 1970s:

-In 1973, six industries—steel, chemical, metal, machine-building, ship-building, and electronics—were officially targetted for rapid growth, as objects of intense government scrutiny and development. -The first conspicuous feature in the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization Plan was its ambition to create one large industrial complex with "state of the art" production facilities for each target industry; hence, the Yôsu-Yôchôn complex for petrochemicals, Ch'angwôn for Machine-building, P'ohang for steel, Okpo for shipbuilding -Once ensconced in these complexes, the enterprises were the first to receive available foreign capital (and the last to pay it back), with low interest to boot; first to receive financial help from the government when purchasing raw materials and machinery; first to be directed through administrative guidance, -In principle, the projected capital would come from within, primarily through a National Investment Fund garnered from pension funds and issuance of national investment bonds. As for external capital, the priority rested with foreign loans over direct investment or joint ventures. Should the direct participation of foreigners be unavoidable—due to, say, the need for stable supply of raw materials as well as advanced technologies, development of international markets, and supplements of necessary investment capitals unproduceable in Korea—the maximum foreign share would have to be kept under 50 percent -Just as the World Bank feared, Koreans achieved their goals by claiming a disproportionate share of resources for heavy industries and shoving aside small and medium industries -The Korean "industrial deepening" of the 1970s was unthinkable apart from the security threat, real and perceived, from outside. And the timing makes no sense without paying attention to the decline in American prowess that left Korea out in the cold. This was really what set Korea apart from the Latin American version of the "industrial deepening," the latter orchestrated in the absence of a massive security threat. It underlines our judgment that Korea should be classified as a late developer: industrialization amidst intense competition, but also with a perceived security threat.

Shin and Diamond The Notion of Democratic Consolidation

-In Korea today, there is general agreement that electoral politics has become the only possible game in town. The successful establishment of electoral democracy, however, cannot be equated with the consolidation of Korean democracy. -As many theorists point out,20 democratic consolidation involves more than a structure of governance featuring the periodic participation of the mass public in free and competitive elections. To become consolidated, democracy must achieve deep, broad, and lasting legitimacy at three levels: political elites, politically significant parties and organizations, and the mass public -Deep differences over political values and institutional preferences, however, typically remain among key elite groups. Democratic consolidation is advanced when all politically significant elites become "consensually unified" around the basic procedures and norms by which politics will be played -No such broad and definitive elite settlement has occurred in Korea, although the June 1987 agreement between the Chun regime and the democratic opposition on direct presidential elections and other reforms certainly counts as a partial elite settlement. Rather, elite consensual unity has emerged incrementally in Korea -In Korea, civil society organizations have clearly made important contributions to both the transition and the improvement and consolidation of democracy. But they have not as yet evolved the depth of organization or elicited the breadth of sustained popular involvement that could enable them to realize their full potential. -Consequently, during its first decade, Korea's Sixth Republic has oftentimes been plagued by a predicament that Mainwaring characterizes as "a difficult combination of presidentialism with multipartyism. -The separation of the presidency and the National Assembly, and the resultant legislative stalemates—known in Korea as yeoso yadae (small government party, large opposition party)—have often frustrated both politicians and citizen -Korea faces a distinctive challenge, for its economic "miracle" was forged under a pair of military authoritarian regimes, and survey evidence shows that the public continues to look back on the first of those rulers, Park Chung Hee, with considerable nostalgia. It is always dangerous in the social sciences to take the past as a guarantee of the future and, in this case, to assume that it is impossible for democracy to break down in a country as economically developed as Korea -Yet for all the reforms it has pursued and adopted during its first decade of democracy, Korea remains far from a consolidated, liberal democracy. Behaviorally, the mass public tends to shy away from democracy in action. Normatively, citizens are committed to the ideals of democracy but show some growing ambivalence about whether democracy is the best system for Korea in this troubled time. Elites remain more divided than united -At the level of elite behavior, governmental and nongovernmental forces alike often appear unwilling to abide by all the rules (written and unwritten) of the democratic game, including those of accountability and transparency

Woo Conclusions

-In the 1960s, Korea made a major transition. For economists, this transition was the turn outward, around 1964-1965; for political scientists, the 1961 coup d'etat and the installation of a reformist leadership was the turning point. In truth, the 1960s saw a more fundamental and broad transition than that: a resurgence of a state that was iron-fisted at home and, therefore, capable of restructuring domestic economy and supporting sustained growth. We focused on this phenomenon from three different angles—global, state, and class. Looked at this way, we found that the "transition" was perhaps about ten years in the making -we see again a back-andforth dialectic between international and domestic realms. Japan as a regional surrogate of America bolstered the military government by financing its politics and its industries; and America, grateful for Korean camaraderie in Vietnam, indulged and supported Park. Thus, the tableau in the mid-1960s showed the military in Korea as statebuilders par excellence, invincible: it succeeded in erecting not only a formidable state apparatus with enormous repressive power, but it also whipped civilian politicians at the ballot box—a feat never to be repeated after the early 1970s -In the critical years 1969-1972, Korean capitalists first had a show of strength, threatening a collective tax boycott to break the back of the regime should the state fail to devise some form of financial rescue package (in this case, a debt write-off.) They were no longer the subservient bureaucratic capitalists living off their "rents" in the economic maze of ISI, or the bourgeoisie of the 18th Brumaire, prostrate before the rifle butt, exchanging political rights for the right to make money. Rather, Korean business at the end of the 1960s was increasingly confident and politically savvy, and if it struck a Faustian bargain with Park in 1972, it was by choice, not through fear of rifle butts: business chose to remain in the economic grip of the state -Thus, by the end of the 1960s, the three indispensable conditions for development could be found in Korea: a global economic structure that accomodated and welcomed an upstart, a developmental state that could exploit its external conditions and harness its grip on domestic sectors, and finally a hardworking and increasingly confident bourgeoisie. This was a formidable mosaic for economic growth; for democracy, however, it was none too auspicious

Bad Loans to Good Friends: Money and Politics in the Developmental State in South Korea, Kang

-In this study I make two arguments. First, money politics was extensive in Korea both during and after the high-growth era. Second, political—not economic—considerations dominated policymaking. Focusing on the exchange of favors for bribes between state and business, I argue that politics drove policy choices even at the height of Park Chung-hee's rule, that bureaucrats were not independent of political interference in setting policy, and that business and political elites wrestled with each other over who would reap the rents to be had -The Korean state was developmental—it provided public goods, fostered investment, and created infrastructure. But this study shows that this was not necessarily intentional. Corruption was rampant, and the Korean state intervened in the way it did because doing so was in the interests of a small group of business and political elites. Producing public goods was often the fortunate by-product of actors competing to gain the private benefits of state resources -rents are created when an actor manipulates prices and causes them to diverge from competitive levels, and the existence of rents can lead to corruption by various actors attempting to gain access to the rents. By such manipulation, the actor itself, or some other actor on whose behalf the price manipulator is acting as an agent, is able to reap "excess profits -By intervening, the government creates incentives for business to attempt to influence policy decisions, and corruption occurs when businessmen use bribery, personal connections, or other means in an attempt to influence policy decisions. -If there were no government distributing rents, there would be no corruption,

Civil Society after Democracy

-It was ironically the election of Kim Young Sam in 1992, the first genuinely civilian South Korean president in more than three decades, that provided the most serious challenge to civil society and mass mobilization in South Korea. Kim designed and carried out a series of unprecedented political and socio-economic reforms, waging intensive anticorruption campaigns, introducing a "real name" bank system, legislating political reform bills, and consolidating the civilian control of the military -Most of all, the Kim government's effort to normalize relations with civil society was not only limited to pro-government or moderate groups but also radical groups in civil society. Kim's soaring popularity left civil society groups, which had been so good at criticizing unpopular governments and which had been so used to the repression by authoritarian regimes, bewildered, demobilized, and demoralized.17 In a word, civil society groups were no longer able to find a common target. Civil society and mass mobilization appeared largely irrelevant to South Korean politics. -The seeming irrelevance of civil society and mass mobilization to South Korean politics and democracy, however, did not continue very long. Civil society groups remobilized themselves and have played an extremely significant role in the politics of democratic consolidation in South Korea during the Kim Young Sam government, by pressuring the government to break with the authoritarian past, protesting the possible erosion of democracy, and pursuing new movement causes such as environmentalism -Nevertheless, the dramatic arrests and imprisonments of the two former generals-turned-presidents, which would not have been possible without the massive remobilization of civil society groups, immensely contributed to the consolidation of South Korean democracy by unequivocally demonstrating that a military coup would never be tolerated or justified as a viable option in South Korean politics. (example of civil society activism in the Kim Young Sam era) -Last, since the democratic transition in 1987, civil society groups in South Korea have explored and addressed new social issues. Particularly notable is the rapid expansion of the environmental movement in the 1990s. On April 2, 1993, the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM), the biggest environmental movement group in South Korean history, was created. The KFEM today has dozens of regional offices and more than 60,000 dues-paying members,

Woo Chapter 6 The Political Economy of Korea Inc

-Korea's GNP grew—on average—by 11 percent each year from 1973 to 1978, an outstanding achievement even in the annals of the twentieth century's most prodigious economic performances. Success, however, never begot popularity. For many, the Big Push was a big shove by a big government that bullied workers, coerced entrepreneurs, and distorted the market. -The era of financial reform, we recall, came to a grinding halt in 1972. The seven-year experiment—what Ronald McKinnon called "reform without tears"1—had fallen short of liberalization, whereby financial prices would be set at equilibrium in a unified market; rather, it had been a catch-as-catch-can compromise, a state attempt at efficient resource allocation by hiking interest rates, thereby mimicking the market price of money. Then came the August 3rd Decree that massively drove down the price of capital, and ended, once and for all, the "reform," which had been a travesty of market liberalization. -From that point on, bank loans became subsidies for the chosen —the entrepreneurs who had already proven their mettle through good export records, the risk-takers who entered into heavy and chemical industries, and the faithful who plunged into the untried sea of international competition with new products, relying on the state's good offices to rescue them. It was really these entrepreneurs who made the Big Push possible, the drive for heavy and chemical industrialization and industrial maturation. -To join the hallowed chosen few, enterprises had to be big; but to remain chosen, they had to be gigantic: size was an effective deterrent against default—something that would threaten not only the financial but the economic stability of the country—forcing government into the role of the lender of last resort -A chaebol is a family-owned and managed group of companies that exercises monopolistic or oligopolistic control in product lines and industries. -In lieu of a group-affiliated bank, then, the state mediates the flow of capital (domestic and foreign) to the chaebol and supervises its operations through a designated bank (the chukdrae unhaeng), whose role might be likened to that of German banks prior to World War I.3 The growth of the chaebol is predicated on state provision of industrial capital, and furthermore (as we will argue later) on the fungibility of this bank credit

Kang why money poltiics didn't swamp development

-Money politics did not swamp development for three reasons. First, the mutualhostage situation in Korea was a key factor in keeping corruption from spinning out of control. The bargain that the elites struck was collusive, not cooperative, and each group took as much advantage of the other as possible. Yet the balance of power meant that neither the political elite nor the bureaucratic elite was able to gain a decisive edge over the other. The process never spun out of control, because the elites were vulnerable with respect to each other, and they were thus limited in their ability to force their wishes on the other side -Second, bribes are transfers. As such, corruption does not necessarily imply any deadweight loss, and the political story I have told here does not necessarily affect the overall provision of public goods.72 Corruption may indeed consist of struggles over the distribution of state policy and goods rather than struggles over the absolute level -Finally, although the Korean state may have provided public goods and supported investment, that may not be why those goods were provided. The Korean state intervened in the way it did because to do so was in the interests of a small group of business and political elites. Building roads, apartment complexes, and power stations provides some public goods, but it also provides private goods. Access to the private benefits of state resources was often contingent upon production of public goods.75 Although Samsung and Daewoo accrued enormous private benefits from having privileged access to state capital and policies, society benefited as well from improved infrastructure, employment, and opportunities

Lee Minjung during Park

-Park Chung Hee's subsequent Five-Year Economic Plans presented South Koreans with hope. Few could reject Park's call for a modern, autonomous, and national economy -The negotiations on the treaty to normalize relations between South Korea and Japan, known as the Normalization Treaty, pulled students and intellectuals out of their brief coexistence and cooperation with the military regime.35 Once Koreans became aware of the negotiations in March 1964, many expressed the thought that normalization with Japan should be preceded by Japan's sincere apology for its past colonial rule of Korea. They said the treaty was against Korea's national interests, that it was another humiliating episode for Korea -Another generation was thus born bearing the name of the historical moment that marked its emerging political consciousness-the "6.3 generation." On June 3, 1964, (hence the name 6.3), the continuing protest against the treaty that began in March was brought to a brutal end with a declaration of martial law in the Seoul area and the occupation of universities and streets by the military. The signing of the treaty in June 1965 initiated another series of massive demonstrations that lasted for nearly six more months, with university students carrying out hunger strikes and even holding a funeral service for "nationalist demo~racy."~~ The protest was ended once again by brutal military intervention -Throughout the remainder of the 1960s, the memory of the anti-Treaty movement was relived repeatedly on streets and university campuses as the authoritarian regime's undemocratic behavior made students rush out of campuses, as in the case of the widely rigged National Assembly election in 1967 and Park Chung Hee's attempt to stay in power by revising the constitution in 1968.47 According to a former student, from June 1968 to December 1969, "not a day passed without demonstrations erupting in universities and high schools nati~nwide -In April 1971, Park Chung Hee managed to win the third and what proved to be the final direct presidential election of the Park regime (1961-79), narrowly defeating his opponent Kim Dae Jung through "fraud and voter intimidati~n."~~ Park then declared a national emergency on December 1971. In the same month, he had the National Assembly illegally and secretly pass the Law Concerning Special Measures for Safeguarding National Security, which gave him "the authority to ban public demonstrations, control wages, rents and prices, and 'mobilize any material or human resources for national purposes -On October 1972, in a single move that effectively wiped out any remnants of democracy in South Korea, Park declared martial law and the Yusin Constitution -The South Korean democratization movement of the 1970s was born out of an intense hatred of the Yusin era (1 972-79). The Yusin regime's harsh rule, combined with the rising human and ecological costs of rapid industrialization, deepened the existing sense among intellectuals and university students that modern Korean history was a "failure." The dissident intellectuals' discourse of lack was a narrative of failure. Korean history was the history of "absence and distortion," of darkness and negativity; the present regime was dictatorial and antinationalistic, and the society too steeped in a Western, specifically American, value system -The dissidents' narrative of failure accompanied a narrative of "rectification of history." To rectify the discredited history was to embrace the "shameful history" and to acknowledge their complicity in the making of this history as well as to seek their own redemption, as it were. South Korea's incipient but vibrant social movement in the 1970s galvanized those individual scholars who had begun to seek an alternative Korean history, and they became a distinct but integral group of the democratization movement, which came to be known as minjung history

Rise of the DPRK

-Republic of Korea (DPRK) was and is a divergent case among postwar Marxist-Leninist systems, representing a profound reassertion of native Korean political practice—from the superordinate role of the leader to his self-reliant ideology, to the Hermit Kingdom foreign policy -. Although Soviet-Korean power rose briefly in the early 1950s, according to this study the group was "virtually eliminated" by 1956. The leading authority on Soviet-Korean relations found that among Stalin's large grouping of international communists in Moscow, not a single Korean communist or nationalist existed who clearly "was a trusted Soviet man --From August 1945 until January 1946, the Soviets worked with a coalition of communists and nationalists, led by a Christian educator named Cho Man-sik. They did not set up a central administration, nor did they create an army. In retrospect their policy seems more tentative and reactive than American policy in the South, which did move forward with plans for a separate administration and an army in the South --Kim II Sung and his allies dominated all the political parties, ousting people who resisted them. The Korean People's Army (KPA) was the backbone of Kim's dominance; although not founded until February 8, 1948, it was in formation from mid-1946 onward and was led by one of his close allies, Ch'oe Yong-gon. Central agencies nationalized major industries (they had, of course, been owned mostly by the Japanese) and began a twoyear economic program on the Soviet model of central planning and the priority of heavy industry. -Through such means the North Koreans soon eliminated all nonleftist political opposition with a draconian thoroughness. A couple of unitedfront noncommunist parties were still allowed to exist, but they had no power. The North Korean security apparatus, judging by captured internal documentation, was an agency of revolutionary justice and a thorough, often total system of control and surveillance

Race to the Swift Woo The Turning Point

-Rhee's downfall was also the demise of his conception of state and economy, and of his vestigial HermitKingdom ideas about import-substituting industrialization, making Korea another Japan while keeping the real Japan at bay, -During this decade Korea would indeed take off, in the Rostovian sense, inundating the world market with textile goods, taking wing again in the "flying geese pattern" that Akamatsu described in the 1930s.5 It would also wrest away what one pundit called "a Texassized gratitude" from Johnson for partaking in the Vietnam War The contour of "development cooperation," when applied to East Asia, displayed three broad strokes. The first was of course the much celebrated insistence on the primacy of economic development, both in rhetoric and in realty -Secondly, whereas in Latin America development was now seen by liberal America as an antidote for popular mobilization —in East Asia a decade of the Mutual Security Act had done its job buttressing internal security (at least in the Northern corner of Asia). Hence, aid could become developmental and economizing at once -But, thirdly, there was still Southeast Asia, America's new and old problem; not only was there a specter of conflagration throughout the region but Socialist China's rapid economic progress was feared to have a Circe-like effect on its impoverished southern neighbors.7 Here, "development cooperation" had to be regional in scope, what William F. Bundy called an "Asian solution to Asia's problems."8 This meant, for example, that Japan had to find a way somehow to share the burden of Asian development. But each of these aspects had important application to Korea. -By 1960, all of that changed. NSC 6018 stressed the exigent need to dismantle the foreign exchange system—the lynchpin of Korea's import substitution industrialization—and "to stimulate domestic production for export and domestic use": in other words, export-led growth. Just as Rhee had insisted on ISI to exact more aid, Americans would now press the export agenda on Koreans, thus giving them less aid, and stalling the terrific drain on America's resources -This required reforms of bureaucracy and fiscal policies, so the Americans would supply generous technical and economic aid to bring the reforms to fruition. Other ways to buttress the new economic orientation were to normalize relations with Japan, and to reduce military expenditures so as to release greater resources for economic development. -US gave aid through advice, loans and help from the private sector and international agencies. In the early 60s the fourth prerequisite was the most problematic, and that which the Americans had to deal with first: the existence or quick emergence of a political leadership which could exploit the potential effect of a takeoff and give a sustained character to growth. Here, the efficacy of the Chang Myon regime (1960-1961) was quite suspect, corrupt and politically unstable. -the Gernal Park Chung Hee would end up being the solution, he had a sure sense of power, fine sense of timing, common sense.

Jung Kim The Current State of South Korea's Democracy

-South Korea's democratic authenticity survey value falls below average among OECD countries. -liberal quality of democracy is below average -below avarege in the participatory quality of democracy -below average in the deliberative equality of democracy -below aveage in democratic depth -all in all South korea's place among advanced industrial democracies fall short of expectations. Ranked close to the bottom among OECD countries in all categories within industrial democracies. -also there has been a consistent downward trend among every dimension of democracy in South Korea over the past ten years, decay of freedom of expression, decay of judicial restraints, decay of civil society participation, decay of engaged society and increasingly unequal distribution of resources.

The Rise of Rhee

-State Departmetn initially objected to favoring one political group over another, but later they worried that if they didn't Communists would seize the government. Thus they replaced the trusteeship approach with a "governing commission" that would quickly integrate with the military government of the U.S. If the Russians did not agree, then the plan would just be carried out south of the 38th parallel Just at the time Rhee returned, a political adviser to General MacArthur, George Atcheson, informed Hodge, "We should commence to use some progressive, popular and respected leader, or small group, to act as a nucleus of an organization which in cooperation with and under the direction of our military government could develop into an executive and administrative governmental agency All this meant bypassing not just cooperation with the Russians in seeking a unitary independent Korea but also trusteeship, as Langdon acknowledged. The trouble was, trusteeship was the existing American policy, urged upon the Allies since 1943 and then being discussed with the Russians at high levels. Had the Americans and the Russians quit Korea, a leftist regime would have taken over quickly, and it would have been a revolutionary nationalist government that, over time, would have moderated and rejoined the world community—as did Chinq The Americans would not turn Korea over to the Koreans, and so they got on with the "positive action" necessary to create an anticommunist South Korea. Korea thus became a harbinger of policies later followed throughout the world—in Greece, Indochina, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua—where Americans came to defend any group calling itself anticommunist,

Woo Chapter 5 The Search for Autonomy

-The Korean economy is an industrial curiosity: outward-leaning in the 1960s, it abruptly retreated under the changed circumstances of the 1970s. Internally, politics was dead and deadly, a recrudescence of the colonial war years that saw a thorough extirpation of liberal vestiges. In industrial policy, the emphasis on exports still remained, but otherwise the look was inward toward self-sufficiency: accelerating import-substitution,- an emphasis on heavy, chemical, and defense industries at the expense of light industries; money and credit that heeded, more than ever before, the siren call of the state and not of the market; and finally, a massive popular mobilization to reduce the urban/rural gap --In what were perceived to be the waning days of the Pax Americana, the first provision for survival was to purge all uncertainties from both the body politic and industry: elimination of electoral uncertainties and replacement of a self-regulating market by a regulated market. With the steering mechanisms thus made predictable, the nation then veered toward the Big Push: massive investments in steel, shipping, machine-building, metals, and chemicals. The ambition was to turn Korea, in the span of one decade, from the final processor of export goods to one of the world's major exporters of steel, ships, and other producer goods -Whereas the sustainability of fascist autarky was predicated upon, first, the existence of a national industrial base, and then upon aggression into, and acquisition of, markets abroad, Korea was unable perhaps even to defend itself, let alone launch an aggressive foreign policy. That, as it turned out, was what ultimately squelched, in scarcely a decade, the Korean aspiration for national capitalism: the lack of resources to go it alone -Money for industries had to be gotten through greater exports, and heavy industries had to be established and sustained through furious borrowing abroad. By 1978-1979, moreover, the future of defense-related and heavy industries, in which so much had been invested, seemed as parlous as ever; and the light industries, faithful earners of foreign exchange that had suffered from the state's benign neglect in the 1970s, were now badly threatened by global competition, rising wages, and U.S. protectionism

Kim Modern Elections

-The Korean presidential election o f 1997 deserves attention because a new party system had arrived. After three disappointing failed attempts for the presidency, Kim Dae-jung realized that he would not be able to win the presidency based only on his long-lasting political bastion in Cholla and some additional votes from Seoul and the Kyonggi region. The population of Cholla province was simply insufficient to win the presidency. -Knowing that the 1997 presidential election was going to be his last chance, Kim made a politically controversial decision: He aligned with Kim Jong-pil in order to draw in votes from the Ch'ungch'ong region.29 The formation of this coalition represented a sacrifice of principles on the part of Kim Dae-jung because Kim Jong-pil had been the right-hand man of his political nemesis Park Chung-hee and the founding director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency— the exact agency that had abducted Kim Dae-jung in 1971 --A turning point toward a party system based on policy-driven differences emerged during the Kim Dae-jung administration through the introduction of the Sunshine Policy.30 The Sunshine Policy of the Kim Dae-jung government was a bilateral engagement policy with North Korea, aimed at enticing North Korea to open up. The policy became the hallmark of Kim's administration. The GNP, representing mainstream conservatives, had to oppose it, thus predictably creating conflict between the M DP and the GNP.3 --In June 2002, two South Korean junior high school girls were accidentally killed by a U.S. armored vehicle. The soldiers who were driving the vehicle were tried in a South Korean court but acquitted because of the Status of Forces Agreement. The incident enraged the South Korean public. Large groups of civil organizations and Korean citizens organized massive candlelight vigils in protest. South Koreans became increasingly polarized over the incident, provoking heated disputes over nationalism and the presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula and widening the gap between conservatives and progressives -The 2002 elections were dominated by anti-Americanism, supported by the progressives but reverberating among the youth, the educated, and white-collar workers. --The most salient issue in the 2007 presidential election was the economy. Unification, policy toward North Korea, and anti-Americanism were all marginalized. In fact, the issue of anti-Americanism that had once carved great differences between the parties ostensibly retreated from the political 4 --While the economy was the main driving factor in the 2007 election of Lee Myung-bak, at that time economic issues did not create a fissure between conservatives and progressives as they do now. Then, the consensus of economic growth was shared by a large majority. It is safe to say that the issue of choice between economic growth and redistribution of wealth came to the fore over the free-lunch debate. --The 2012 presidential election was the continuation of the similar debate. Social welfare and resolving economic inequality emerged as top economic issues during the campaign. It should be noted, however, that the issues were not entirely owned by the progressives. In fact, it was the conservative Park Geun-hye who brought so-called economic democratization to the fore, which in essence requested reform of Korea's big businesses, known as chaebol. Apparently, her position on this came out of the calculation that it was a way to garner votes from moderates

Woo The Politics of Financial Allocation:

-The main goal of Korea's finance was to hemorrhage as much capital as possible into the heavy industrialization program. To that end, the financial policy of the yushin was this: the government set financial prices at an artificial low to subsidize import-substituting, heavy, chemical, and export industries, which inevitably led to a bifurcation of the financial market: business and government savings remained captives of the banking system to finance ¡along with foreign loans) major industries, and household savings by and large stayed in the "curb" to finance the rest of the economy -The political economy of this bifurcated financial system was illiberal, undemocratic, and statist. The ubiquitous curb, a vital part of the nation's economic life, was outside the protection, and at the mercy, of the state, which retained for itself the prerogative to shake up, freeze, and destroy the private money market so as to unclog business cash flow in times of recession -In an otherwise thriving capitalist nation of scrupulous entrepreneurs, the formal financial sector remained most backward. Every bank in the nation was owned and controled by the state,- bankers were bureaucrats and not entreprenuers, they thought in terms of GNP and not profit, and they loaned to those favored by the state. -The truth was graver and deeper than that, however, and the solution to the problem more intractable: the chaebol in Korea, for all practical purposes, was a private agency of public purpose. Park Chung Hee had eradicated the distinction between public and private when he pumped the chaebol, back in 1973, as the muscle of the Big Push -The extraordinary concentration of domestic credit in the chaebol might be gleaned from the following: 400 large firms belonging to 137 different chaebol claimed (in 1983) 69.6 percent of total bank and 47.6 percent of total financial institution loans outstanding -The chaebol leverage against bankruptcy is, very simply, its size and its impact on employment. Table 6.17 is an illustration of that point. The sales of the top 10 chaebol (which were among the 28 developing country firms listed in the Fortune- 500 list of largest non-U.S. industrial companies) were 30.2 percent of the total manufacturing, and the top 30 absorbed about one-fifth of the total workforce in manufacturing. -Given the state's inefficacy in correcting the abuses of the chaebol, it is tempting to conclude here that what we have in Korea is a case of private power circumventing the public purpose. That conclusion is ipso facto logical, but it flows from a false distinction between public and private. -We beg to differ: we posit that the private and the public in Korea is rolled into one, into what one might term "Korea Inc." As we have explained in this chapter, the mercantilist state raised industrial capital abroad and at home, and refracted it in ways commensurate with its purpose, in the process rewarding the chaebol, which it deemed the most fit agent to carry out the state's purpose -But then the state was forced to socialize the risk created by the chaebol's destabilizing presence in the financial system. The problem of the chaebol is a political one, too, a question of equity, as critics have pointed out. But in the overall scheme of things, the state saw the problems raised by the chaebol as a nefarious part of the beneficial whole in the long march toward industrial transformation. As the chaebol groups—the very spearhead of exports—soared, so did the state, and so did the economy. Such, for good or ill, is the makeup of Korea Inc.

Sunhyuk Kim Civil Society and Democratization

-The other interpretation, which I support and develop in this chapter, puts emphasis on mass mobilization by civil society groups. The central event, according to this interpretation, is not Roh Tae Woo's June 29 declaration but a series of nationwide anti-government protest demonstrations from approximately June 10 to June 29, 1987 - the "June Popular Uprising -The main purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that the masscentered approach, i.e., the "June Popular Uprising" interpretation, is a more appropriate explanation for the case of South Korean democratization. The mobilization of civil society was extremely important in South Korea's democratic transition. -This approach in essence argues that what was crucial for the democratic transition in South Korea in 1987 was the formation of a pro-democracy coalition and an unprecedented level of mass mobilization, which eventually pressured the ruling authoritarian regime to accommodate popular demand for democratic reform -Severe state repression of civil society characterized the first four years (1980-1983) of the Chun Doo Hwan regime. Following the violent suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Kwangju in May 1980, the authoritarian regime implemented a series of coercive campaigns to "cleanse (ichonghwa)" the entire society, purging or arresting thousands of public officials, politicians, professors, teachers, pastors, journalists, and students on various charges of corruption, instigation, and organization of anti-government demonstrations, and attempts at insurrection -)"Meanwhile, a legislature pro tempore, the Legislative Council for National Security, passed numerous anti-democratic laws, curtailing political competition, restricting basic democratic freedoms, establishing an elaborate system of press censorship, and suppressing the labor movement -resurrections of unions and organizations among unions -Starting in late 1983, however, Chun's suppression of civil society significantly abated. The authoritarian regime decided to liberalize the polity, allowing anti-government university professors and students to return to their schools, withdrawing the military police from university campuses, pardoning or rehabilitating political prisoners, and lifting the ban on political activities of hundreds of former politicians. -What the government intended through these liberalization measures was to make the ruling Democratic Justice Party popular and therefore electorally competitive. The consequence of the liberalization, however, was quite different from what the regime expected - it resulted, in fact, in "the resurrection of civil society. -While various pro-democracy movement groups re-emerged in civil society, a genuine opposition re-emerged in political society.10 Between 1980 and 1983 there was no real opposition in South Korean politics. Opposition parties such as the Democratic Korea Party (Minhandang) and Korean Nationalist Party (Kungmindang), created and controlled by the authoritarian regime, had been unable or unwilling to criticize and challenge the political legitimacy of the regime. liberalization resulted in the dramatic resuscitation and expansion of a real opposition. Many of the reinstated opposition politicians formed the New Korea Democratic Party (NKDP, Sinhan minjudang) in January 1985, immediately before the National Assembly elections in February.

Money Politics and the Developmental State:

-The series of institutional changes made under the Park Chung-hee regime (1961— 79) is often used as the starting point of the high-growth era. Yet the Park regime was hardly de-politicized, and in fact money politics was pervasive. Not only was there extensive corruption, but political connections overrode economic criteria and allowed for overcapacity and bail-outs of indebted and poorly managed firms. -The basic process was simple: Business and political elites exchanged bribes for political favors. Politicians used these political funds to buy votes and to serve basic greed. Businessmen used the rents from cheap capital to expand as rapidly as possible, thus ensuring their continued political and economic importance. Development and money politics proceeded hand in hand. -Under Park the need for funds for electoral and political purposes was extensive. The election laws themselves, imposed by the military junta, restricted political activities so severely that, as Alexander Kim notes, "no party could be effective unless it had many wealthy members, or unless it could secure bribes. The fact remained that if businessmen did not provide politicians with sufficient funds when asked, the Bank of Korea called in their loans, or they suffered a tax audit, or their subsidy application was denied. -Rents in the form of U.S. aid, allocation of foreign and domestic bank loans, import licenses, and other policy decisions were based on a political funds system Money politics remained constrained because Korean elites existed in a mutual hostage situation where neither political elites nor economic elites could take excessive advantage of the other. This balance of power allowed them to pursue corrupt activities, but it also limited the chances for excessive advantage. -To fund their operations, political elites took massive donations from the chaebol in return for loans and sweetheart deals. Under Park this financial system of exchanging policy for bribes became quasi-institutionalized. Leading members of the DRP were in charge of political fundraising, the two most important persons being Kim Sung-Kon and Kim Jin-man -However, political funds had another major "use": to satisfy greed. After Park's death, half a million dollars were found in his personal safe. Kim Jong-pil reportedly amassed more than $50 million (at 1979 prices), including a 5,000-acre ranch, a tangerine orchard, a 2,100-head dairy farm in Chungchong-do, a newspaper company in Seoul, and over 3.7 billion won ($36 million) in real estate -Given the Korean state's total control over the financial sector in the 1960s and 1970s, businesses were naturally interested in gaining access to the enormous rents that accrued to a chaebol if it received a low-interest-rate loan. The state's inability to control firms and their growth led to endemic overcapacity. Firms rushed willy-nilly to expand at all costs, whether or not it was economically feasible. The result was that in most major sectors of the economy there was excess capacity and overlapping and duplication of efforts as each chaebol tried to be the biggest. --Indeed, whether or not a market rationale existed for expansion of firms' activities, there certainly was a rationale for rent seeking when combined with the proper political connections. The Park era, far from limiting and controlling the expansion of chaebol, saw the opposite result. Firms rushed headlong into expansion, both to justify their continued receipt of cheap money and to make themselves so large that the government would have no choice but to keep supplying them with funds—a situation known as "moral hazard -Money politics remained constrained because Korean elites existed in a mutual hostage situation where neither political elites nor economic elites could take excessive advantage of the other. This balance of power allowed them to pursue corrupt activities, but it also limited the chances for excessive advantage. Government intervention was subject to political influence in a number of ways that reduced both rent-seeking by entrepreneurs and transaction costs for the politicians and bureaucrats involved in monitoring the policy process. By encouraging the formation of large conglomerates that accounted for large percentages of the Korean economy, the state and the chaebol in effect became mutual hostages (quadrant I of Figure 1)

Development in Protest Issues

-The two dominant ideals articulated by dissidents were democracy and human rights. But still, there were many other issues that came to the fore at different points in the movement. Over time, the family of issues raised in protest events became increasingly diversified as different social groups raised their own specific concerns about the transformations that were taking place in Korean society -In Table 2.3 we aggregate the issues raised in protest events into general categories. As the table shows, state repression was criticized in nearly 28 percent of all protest events. Repression became a main issue throughout the democracy movement and often times the public's awareness of state brutality prompted large-scaled demonstrations. -In addition to state repression, other general issues included politics, the economic situation, freedom of universities and media censorship. Outside of repression, the two largest issues were, predictably, the political and economic situation. Anti-dictatorship, recovery of democracy, and direct presidential elections were the hallmarks of the political critique raised by dissidents. Also, the prominence of economic issues was a reaction to the economic changes sweeping Korea at that time. The salience of economic issues reflects the role of government in Korea's economic transformation and the symbiotic relationship between government and business was not lost on those fighting for democracy. Often, the struggle for workers' rights was equated with the recovery of political democracy and civil rights. -Two other prominent issues were educational freedom and media censorship. Due to the large population of student participants, and more specifically, the repression of college students, the issue of educational freedom came to the forefront of the democracy movement. Often, demands for educational reform developed into anti-government protests. The state used different strategies to suppress student protestors including increasing the length of mandatory military training, drafting students into the military, closing down schools, and suspending classes. -Another interesting trend is the introduction of the reunification issue. Many in the democracy movement believed that a democratic Korea was unimaginable without a unified Korea and, after 1987, felt that it was time to push for this perennial goal. To be sure, reunification was an important concern in the 1970s and hotly debated in the 1980s but still, because of the power of anticommunist ideology, reunification remained a sensitive and relatively muted issue. -With political liberalization in 1987 activists were able to pursue reunification more openly. For example, in the spring of 1988, Kim Chung-ki, a candidate for the chair of the student association at Seoul National University, suggested a meeting between North and South Korean students. Although the meeting was aborted due to police suppression, the reunification movement became reinvigorated afterwards. Also, in March 1989, Pastor Mun Ik-hwan and two others visited North Korea without permission from the government.

Park Minjung in the 80s

-The wellknown historian Kang Man'gil traces this reluctance of historians to the colonial era, a time when contemporary Korean history was indeed the history of colonial subjugation and therefore "an obstacle to overcome" rather than an object of re~earch.~' Furthermore, by engaging in contemporary history, one risked unemployment and imprisonment, and this risk continued until the 1980s. -What distinguished minjung historians from other scholars in the 1980s was therefore not so much methodologies or approaches but rather their emphasis on "scientific" and "praxis-oriented'' scholarship, obtaining universality of Korean history and serving the nationalist and democratization movement.96 Minjung historians also believed that the intelligentsia was not a class that stood alone in society; overcoming their own "petit bourgeois" limitations was critical for developing a higher level of historical consciousness, which could only take place through a fusion with the minjung. -The end of the Yusin regime opened a floodgate of democratic yearnings in all sectors of society. Miners in Sabuk in Gangwon Province opened the door for the workers' movement by staging a demonstration and briefly occupying the city in April and May; Ch'iinggye Textile Union workers in Seoul rose up to demand their livelihood; and students nationwide began calling for campus democratization -By May 18, however, all the hopeful and euphoric voices were brutally silenced. Martial law was expanded to the rest of the country; state security agents picked up political and student leaders one by one; special airborne troops occupied university campuses and factories; and the streets fell silent and empty, left only with the scratching noise of the treads of armored vehicles. -The sense of despair and darkness that permeated university campuses and the minjung movement at large immediately after Gwangju was captured in the songs of the time. The folk singer lGm Min'gi pronounced post-Gwangju "the dark era of death" in which "history is calling, oozing out thick tears and red blood. -Given the privileged place of the United States on the cognitive map of South Koreans, not only the U.S. failure to intervene on behalf of the people but also its deep involvement in the suppression was a rude awakening.'~' From the perspective of the minjung movement, the Gwangju Uprising proved decisively that the United States had not only been deeply involved in Korea but also had shared responsibility for the ugliness of Korean history, for its authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and political terror -With the reevaluation of Gwangju as a starting point, minjung practitioners began to rearticulate major historical events from the end of the Chosun period to the present, focusing on key events in which the potential of the minjung seems to them to have emerged, bringing past events into the public arena to help reconfigure the present. Example: -April 3 Jeju Uprisign: Known until the late 1980s simply and ambiguously as the 4.3 satke (April 3 incident), this event took place on Jeju Island in 1948, when a group of leftists, protesting the U.S. military government's decision to uphold an election on May 10 to set up separate governments in Korea, attacked police and right-wing paramilitary groups. -While minjung scholars and activists were actively reexamining history, another kind of countermemory of Korea's colonial past was taking place surreptitiously. Kim San's Song of Arirun,"' an inspiring account of a Korean revolutionary during the colonial period, took the South Korean minjung movement by storm in the mid-1980s; it circulated among students, workers, white-collar professionals, soldiers in military barracks whoever could get hold of a copy before the state authority confiscated bookstore copies.

Namhee Lee The Construction of Minjung

-Their persistent and almost incantatory invocation of minjung, history, and subjectivity defined and constituted the South Korean democratization movement of the 1980s. Turning to Korean history and identifying "lessons," "tasks," and "obstacles," and reaching "conclusions" for the present and future, they constructed the notion of minjung as the true subject of historical development, capable of social change and therefore the rightful owner of a future democratic society. Minjung: people, the mass -I argue that the rise of the minjung movement in South Korea was intimately tied to the critical reevaluation of modern Korean history; giving alternative and new meanings to past events was key to developing the notion of minjung in the minjung movement. Reworking history was a process of discursive contestation between officially sanctioned memory and countermemory, between the state discourse of dominant nationalism and the minjung movement's oppositional nationalism. Korean history was thus a site of intense contestation between the state and the minjung movement, between established academic scholars and the newly rising independent "minjung-oriented" scholars. -Thus, the April 19 Student Uprising was an unfinished revolution. Within the minjung movement of the 1980s, post-1960s South Korea became redefined largely as a place of struggle "between those who pushed the goals of 4.19 forward and those who tried to stop it from moving forward. -No sooner had the students triumphantly returned to the campus when the interim government led by Hii Chiing, who came into power "through the blood of revolution," began to retreat from the goals and ideals of 4.19.'' A small number of students and intellectuals began to feel that their revolution had been handed over to power-hungry politicians who did not have a historical or popular mandate. -The students gradually began to point to the division of the country as the main cause for many of South Korea's problems, which included poverty, political oppression, and social demoralization. The blame for the division went to "self-seeking" foreign powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The students claimed that the way to "revolutionize our historical reality" was to achieve a reunification of a divided Korea based on "antifeudal, antiforeign, and anticomprador capital

Woo Debt Crisis

-Then something happened, with awesome velocity: the first debt crisis in Korean history. The cozy 1960s political economy fell of its own weight. When it rose again, Korea was in the grip of a bona fide bureaucratic authoritarian regime. The strain was palpable in 1969 when the government took over management of thirty firms, all foreign loan recipients, which had gone belly-up; another ninety such enterprises were found to be on the brink of bankruptcy. By 1971, the number of bankruptcies of enterprises receiving foreign loans climbed to a record two hundred, -The IMF imposed a set of tough stabilization policies, the first such ever to be imposed on Korea by the IMF. The IMF argued that there was a fundamental distortion in the Korean payment regime. The Korean government relied on expanded export subsidies, rather than currency depreciation, to bridge the gap between external and internal price movement, and so the won became increasingly overvalued. The order of the day, then, was a devaluation of the currency, abandonment of export subsidies and import restrictions, as well as a temporary ceiling on the influx of foreign loans -Two explanation may be given, one of which has to do with the makeup of "Korea Inc.," a particular form of capitalist state that traces its postwar origins to the 1961 compromise discussed earlier in the chapter. The truth is that, although the political economy of the 1950s was predicated on the state and business being Siamese twins, it was really the farcical "punishment" of illicit accumulators that revealed the real steering mechanisms of Korea Inc.: the state has its hand on the tiller but business provides the motive force. The state is strong in that it can—and does—give and take life away from individual firms; but it is also constrained by virtue of being a capitalist state whose survival is contingent on the health and contentment of the business class. -The lesson to members of the business community was clear; united they would stand, divided they would fall—by the hand of the state. In crisis, then, the capitalists of Korea united. In 1971, the head of the Federation of Korean Industrialists specifically requested President Park to freeze the curb, transfer outstanding curb loans to official financial intermediaries, reduce corporate tax, and then slash interest rates. When met with a pregnant silence from President Park, big business went for the state's jugular: the state should either do as it is told, or slash the government budget in half—in other words, no tax. Business was on the warpath -The bailout dropped like a bombshell in August of 1971: an immediate moratorium on all payment of corporate debt owed to the private, domestic financial market—the curb. The crushing burden of interest repayment on foreign loans was thus shifted to the small investors who had followed their entrepreneurial instincts and put their savings in the curb market that yielded higher interest on financial assets than banks. -They were ordinary citizens: female factory workers saving for marriage, parents preparing their children's college tuitions, would-be homeowners, senior citizens wanting higher yields on their retirement funds, maids and shoeshine boys scrimping for a better future.101 Many were blithely ignorant of where their money went, trusting benign judgments of acquaintances who served as intermediaries or those curb brokers who were deemed reputable -Korean business was thus resuscitated overnight

Shin Organizations

-Those participating in Korea's democracy movement instinctively understood the necessity to create organizations that could help sustain their movement over a long period of time. The social movement organizations (SMO) founded and active in that time period comprised a highly diversified and dynamic social movement sector. -One of the most significant developments in Korea's democracy movement was the emergence of coalitional SMOs. Movement activists were keenly aware of the necessity to present a unified front against the autocratic regime. The coalitional surge turned out to be one of the main catalysts for the massive protest cycle in June 1987 which in turn influenced the government's decision to implement democratic reforms. -The growth in number of coalitions accompanied the dramatic increase in the number of SMOs founded in 1987 and 1988. In this period 12 new coalitional SMOs were founded. This is a stark increase compared with the previous 17 years, during which only four or less coalitions were established in a given year. The creation of coalitions was essential in the fight for democracy as these organizations efficiently orchestrated protest activities that brought together different segments of the dissident community. -One of the most important coalitional organizations was the National Committee for a Democratic Constitution (NCDC: kungmin undong ponbu, kukpon) created in May 1987. This coalition brought together the People's Movement Coalition for Democracy and Reunification (PMCDR: minju tong'il minjung undong yŏnhap, mint'ongnyŏn) and 25 other social movement groups (Kim 2000a: 92). 7 The NCDC had 2,191 founding members, including prominent figures from diverse sectors of Korean society, and built regional branches throughout the country. -In addition to making declarations, the NCDC was able to coordinate nationwide protests by mobilizing millions of people in June 1987. Most social movement groups participated in creating and maintaining the NCDC as they collectively pursued the goal of "achieving direct presidential elections." -Korea's democracy movement culminated in the June uprising of 1987. After years of struggle against successive authoritarian regimes, democracy advocates achieved the goal of recovering some basic democratic principles and institutions in the country. With regained freedom of speech and assembly, Korea held its first direct presidential election in almost two decades and began the democratization process in earnest. Notwithstanding critical problems related to democratic consolidation and significant remnants of the authoritarian legacy, Korea has become an exemplary case of the "third wave" of democratization

Shin Tactics

-Those participating in Korea's democracy movement utilized a wide variety of protest tactics. Some were quite dramatic such as selfimmolation or committing suicide, while others were more moderate, such as the prayer-protest and dissemination of propaganda. -Public demonstrations and rallies were the most frequently used tactics. More than one in every five protest event took the form of a demonstration. The "demo" has come to be the archetypical protest tactic and continues today, with some variation, to be the most common form of collective action. In addition, and not mutually exclusive, protestors often made public declarations. Declarations criticizing the dictatorial regimes were often read by someone with a high profile and the spoken word, even when there were fewer participants relative to a large demonstration, carried much weight. -Other forms of protest tactics were unique to specific groups. For example, Christians popularized prayer meetings and appropriated religious ceremonies for political mobilization. -Other group-specific tactics were strikes and resignation by laborers, protest vis-à-vis legal channels by pro-democracy lawyers, symbolic or dramaturgical protest by students, and consciousness-raising or debates by intellectuals. In all, each participating group brought with them proclivities toward certain tactical forms which in turn contributed to the expansion of the tactical repertoire and the overall dynamic nature of the democracy movement. -Overall, non-disruptive and peaceful tactics such as declarations, meetings, requests, and propaganda were more popular in the 1970s. In the 1980s, we see a rise in disruptive and violent tactics, indicating the increasing radicalization of the movement.

The Politics of Debt and the Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in Korea: Woo

-We have argued that Korea's sustained growth is best understood as issuing from a fortuitous collocation of dynamism on three levels: global, regional, and national. This ensemble generated resources for Korean development in the form of war-related aid and foreign capital, but a back-and-forth dialectic also worked here, a process that increasingly fed corruption, secrecy, and centralization in the decision-making process, thereby nourishing the existing tendency toward authoritarianism in Korea -But when we trace the movement of foreign capital, particularly Japanese commercial loans, a different picture emerges: tight and surreptitious relations between the Korean leadership and Japanese big business, sealed with prewar ties and lubricated with bribery, subverting and bypassing what there was of democratic process in the Korea of the 1960s. -This was dubbed a relationship of yuchaku, a harmony of interest among the Liberal Democratic Party, the Park regime, Japanese big business, and Korean conglomerates as scalawags.88 Yuchaku—connoting thick political ties—was a direct offshoot of the mode of Japanese capital inflow to Korea: the Japanese MNCs' concentration on the sale of plants through commercial loans rather than production for domestic consumption -This capital influx from Japan did not require an understanding of the Korean market, but only the existence of fluid nonmarket channels—political connections and direct bribery. -Now, low cost foreign capital, approved and guaranteed by the government, became the most coveted prize for business, which was more than willing to deposit the "commission" for foreign loans in party coffers. Other and less significant sources of political contribution included quid pro quos for granting low-interest Industrial Bank of Korea loans and for procurement of government sponsored projects. -Some politicians, rather than relying on the kindness of strange businessmen, resorted to a more "direct" financing: they got foreign loans themselves. The three largest recipients of loans, for instance, were firms owned by the governing party politicians and/or their siblings: Ssangyong, whose founder Kim Song-kon was an influential assemblyman, was a recipient of more than $100 million in foreign loans in the late 1960s; Lucky-Goldstar received $62 million in loans; and Korea Explosives received $67 million.95 -Thus, one might say that a massive influx of foreign capital in the late 1960s financed half of the nation's total investment, and tumbling after it was an avalanche of a particular kind of corruption that presented the regime with electoral victories and impressive influence over the nation's business

The Party System in Korea and Identity Politics Jiyoon Kim

-Yet, even after the democratization in 1987, a comparable competitive party system arguably did not emerge in South Korea for many years. Instead, party competition in South Korean politics has long been based on perceived regional animosities and the power of a leading political figure in each region -Identity politics played a significant role during the 2002 presidential elections. During this dramatic election, Roh Moo-hyun's upset victory over Lee Hoi-chang was largely due to the strong nationalism present at the time, fostered in particular by South Korean youth. In addition to the accommodating sentiment toward North Korea, anti-American sentiment, reaching its peak during this period, created intense partisan cleavages. -Some political pundits and scholars assert that the wave of national identity politics subsided after the 2007 presidential elections. The victory of Lee Myung-bak, and the 2012 election of Park Geun-hye, was not attributable to nationalism, inter-Korean relations, or the alliance with the United States.3 In these two elections, the economy was the most salient issue -South Korea currently employs a mixed-member electoral system for the National Assembly. A number of electoral reforms took place over the years, but the current mixed-member system has been used since 2004. As an unlinked mixed-member system, about three-quarters of the assembly seats are filled by elected members via a single-member-district system. The remaining— approximately one-quarter— seats are filled by members elected through a party list -South Korean modern history reveals that a robust two-party system was never fully formed in the country. The party system in South Korea is actually a "two-major-party-plus" system.10 That is, in addition to two major competing parties, there have always been minor third parties that have often played a critical role in the decision-making process -The weakness of the party system in South Korea can be traced back to two sources: the personalization of the political parties and the notorious regionalism that emerged and was most strongly sustained after the democratization movement in 1987 South Korea, a so-called successful consolidated democracy, lacks a stable and institutionalized political party system. The South Korean party system traditionally has been viewed as weak because there are no clear ideological differences between the parties' platforms, institutional autonomy, and solid party identification by electorates.

Eckert the cause behind Yusin

-party politics were becoming time consuming and disruptive to park, opposition led by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam were gaining popular support -Nixon and U.S. retreat with aid, protectionism, military support -economic slowdown related in part to textile tarrifs -Citing domestic and international insecurity, Park abruptly declared a state of emergency in December 1971. Ten months later, on October 17, 1972, he proclaimed martial law and carried out what has been aptly described as a "coup in office." The constitution was suspended, and the National Assembly and all political parties were dissolved. Further political activity was forbidden, and restrictions were placed on other civil liberties, including free speech. The new Yusin Constitution, formally approved through public referendum by an intimidated populace in November 1972, transformed the presidency into a legal dictatorship. Under its terms the president was to be chosen indirectly by an easily manipulated elective body of several thousand nonparty members called the National Council for Unification (NCU), Even more important was a new force of regional and class dissent arising from the skewed character of Park's economic development. Economic growth had tended to follow a SeoulPusan axis, favoring the capital area and the southeast, the home base of many of the ruling elite, including Park himself, and grossly neglecting the two Cholla provinces of the southwest. -Finally, on June 29, Roh Tae Woo stunned the country by announcing an eight-point program of reform that began with an endorsement of direct presidential elections and included restoration of civil rights for Kim Dae Jung and other political prisoners, protection of human rights, the lifting of press restrictions, the encouragement of local and campus autonomy, the promotion of political parties, and a call for "bold social reforms. One was the fact that the Chun regime had made the holding of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul the centerpiece of both its domestic and international policies. For seven years the government and, indeed, the entire country, had been mobilized toward this overriding goal, whose attainment, the government hoped, would bring South Korea—and the government itself—a new international recognition and respect commensurate with the country's growing economic power Another factor the government could not ignore was the depth of support for the students from ordinary citizens. Much of the fighting took place in downtown areas, such as around Seoul's Myongdong Cathedral in the center of the city, and whitecollar workers, housewives, college professors, Christian ministers, .priests and nuns, and Buddhist monks actively joined in the demonstrations or cheered the students on from the sidelines. Even taxi drivers stopped and honked their support for the students in the midst of their struggles with the riot police Finally, the Chun government was under strong pressure from the United States to eschew a military solution to the problem of popular dissent. Gaston J. Sigur Jr., the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs visited South Korea only days before Roh's announcement and met with all the key political figures

Unrest under Rhee

-police cracked down on communist and left wing organizations, even though these organizatiosn were ostensibly legal during the American occupation. Younghill Kang, a New York novelist (see chapter 9) and an anticommunist, wrote to Wedemeyer that "Korea was one of the worst police states in the world" -American effots to resist the reform of colonial resistance was met with monumental opposition from South Korean masses. Massive rebellion was provoked, and the U.S. had to work to repress people's commitees and perceived radicals. -the structure of the southern bureaucracy was substantially the old Japanese machinery -Syngman Rhee and Kim Song-su embodied the old system in their concern for organizing the elite in Seoul and not worrying much about the masses. After 1945, however, Korea for the first time had a "modern" politics in which charismatic leaders of left and right developed huge mass constituencies --American policy, of course, never set out to create one of the worst police states in Asia. The Korean problem was what we would now call a Third World problem or a North-South problem, a conflict over how best to overcome the debilities of colonial rule and comparative backwardness. In the Cold War milieu of the time, however, it was always seen by Americans as an East-West problem. The Soviets, we might say, pushed the North-South angle as a way of besting the United States in the East-West conflict on the peninsula. That is, they stayed in the background and let Koreans run the government, they put anti-Japanese resistance leaders out front, and they supported radical reforms of the land system, labor conditions, and women's rights—all of which were pushed through by the end of 1946. -To the extent that there was an opposition to the Rhee regime, it came from the Korean Democratic Party. Behind the formal democratic façade of the First Republic, however, traditional politics motivated the political elite. The KDP was the organ of landed wealth and local power -By 1947 most leftists were members of the South Korean Labor Party (SKLP). This party was always indigenous to the South.It appears, however, that by mid-1948, if not earlier, the party was under northern guidance. Intercepted instructions from the North urged members to infiltrate into "all important bureaus" of the Rhee government, to secrete food and other supplies for guerrillas in the mountains -Rhee and his allies formed counterorganizations at the village level to fight the left. Roy Roberts of the Associated Press wrote in August 1947 that U.S. intelligence got an average of five police reports a day, "telling of fights in villages, fights between villages, beatings of rightists, beatings of leftists

Why was the struggle for democracy so protracted

-uneven economic growth, brutal repression, Chaebols as creations of the state not a counterveilling force, immature middle class, importance of economic nationalism, divided opposition among political elite, lack of pressure from the U.S., U.S. needed strong Korea in Cold War context

Origins of North and South (Cummings)

-within a few months in 1945, Korea was divided between Norht and South, as the Soviets let the Americans come into the south, Washington reinforced a move toward a democratic regime. -there was no historical justification for Korea's division. -Korean's were in fact the prime historical actors during this period, shaping American and Soviet power to their ends. The national division was not their doing though, this was mostly the fault of Washington. -decision to divide Korea started with U.S. government officials and was unilateral and hasty. -US had taken the intiative in great power deliberations on Korea during the war, suggesting a multilateral trusteeship on postwar Korea. Roosevelt hoped to work with the Soviets on this, knowing that they were going to want to have some say as they bordered parts of Korea. -Roosevelt wanted to embrace Russia in the management of Korea, giving them something while also containing their ambitions through the trusteeship. Division, which ended up occurring, was a much cruder device, abjuring diplomacy and simply drawing a line in the sand. , the atomic bombs had been dropped, the Soviet Red Army had entered the Pacific War, and American planners were rushing to arrange the Japanese surrender throughout the region. Given thirty minutes to do so, Rusk and Bonesteel looked at a map and chose the thirty-eighth parallel because it "would place the capital city in the American zone"; although the line was "further north than could be realistically reached .. . in the event of Soviet disagreement," the Soviets made no objections—which "somewhat surprised -however, de facto policies of the two Soviet and American occupations idenfitied the Soviets with Kim Il Sung and the people's commitees while the Americans backed Syngman Rhee and opposed the commitees and widespread demands for a through renovation of colonial legacies. --had the Americans and the Russians quit Korea, a leftist regime would have taken over quickly, and it would have been a revolutionary government that over time would have moderated and rejoined the world communist as did China, and Vietnam today. The Americans feared this revolution and thus instead worked to create an anti-communist south Korea. South Korea would quickly become a key bulwark in the strategy of containment

Kim Regionalism

-¬As Steinberg and Shin accurately denote, Korean parties were based on personal loyalty to a party boss. The authority of the party emanated from the party boss and the party existed to serve the boss's political ambitions. For example, if the party boss were unable to secure the nomination for president, or if he or she thought that the party should be refurbished to attract new constituents, the boss would break up the existing party and create a new one --Given the fact that one's political career is virtually at the mercy of a party leader who holds nomination power, strong party discipline was inevitable.21 Parties were not yet an institution, but party bosses were. For this reason, South Korean political parties have not enjoyed long lives but have experienced frequent ruptures and fragmentation. Since 1987 the average life span of a Korean political party has been five years --The regional voting behavior of South Koreans is widely known for creating a unique partisan divide. This trend intensified when regionalism was an unpredicted and unintended by-product of the democratization process in 1987. In general, those living in Kyongsang, the southeastern region of the Korean Peninsula that produced three presidents during the period of military rule, were traditional supporters of the authoritarian and conservative party --Deeply divided by the birthplaces of political leaders, Korean voters used the regional base of a political leader as a critical voting cue. When they went into a voting booth, there was no party platform, no party ideology, nor even any pork-barrel projects promised by the local politician. The most important consideration, especially for Kyongsang, Cholla, and Ch'ungch'ong voters, was which candidate the region's party had nominated -Aware that they were unable to win the majority if the division of votes in the Kyongsang region between the DJP and the RDP continued, in 1990 the DJP and RDP decided to merge. The merger also included Ch'ungch'ong's leading party, the New Democratic Republican Party led by Kim Jong-pil. Not only did the merger give birth to a new mega-ruling party, the Democratic Liberal Party (DLP), it also practically isolated the Cholla electorates from the rest of the country. -With severe regional divisions and the dominance of the party bosses over the parties, the political parties of South Korea were far from what one would expect in a well-functioning democratic system. Discernible differences in platforms, policies, and ideological positions were not observed, and it appeared that this would continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

Woo Retreat

: outward-leaning in the 1960s, it abruptly retreated under the changed circumstances of the 1970s. Internally, politics was dead and deadly, a recrudescence of the colonial war years that saw a thorough extirpation of liberal vestiges. In industrial policy, the emphasis on exports still remained, but otherwise the look was inward toward self-sufficiency: accelerating import-substitution,- an emphasis on heavy, chemical, and defense industries at the expense of light industries; money and credit that heeded, more than ever before, the siren call of the state and not of the market; and finally, a massive popular mobilization to reduce the urban/rural gap—a potpourri of rural self-help and basic needs. the Nixon Doctrine wrote off Indochina, and shoved off, through protectionism, economic parvenues like Korea. No longer could refuge be found in the indulgence of Mutual Security and the exuberance of the Development Decade. -President Park's simple equation: steel is national power (Ch'ol un kunggydk). This is what Stalin had said before, and also what the Japanese militarists in the 1930s meant when they equated steel with rice. Thus, steel was a metaphor for self-reliance and national security, and the push for heavy industrialization was a way of fortifying the frontier the Nixon Doctrine reduced the payments deficit via cuts in military spending abroad, and sharing the imperial burden with regional economic powers (in this case, Japan); the import surcharge and rising protectionism rectified the U.S. trade deficit, caused in part by Korean imports; and floating rates, followed by dollar devaluations, threw Korean planning off kilter The Nixon Doctrine terminated an epoch of rank clientelism whereby Korea was, from 1950-1972, one of the world's largest recipients of American military assistance; the burden of defense was partially transferred to Japan in the form of greater economic aid to Korea but without overall improvement in the Japan-Korean relations,- and all this forced Korea to search for autonomy in the world system. -TEXTILE WARS. U.S. protectionism, like the troop withdrawal, was not completely unexpected. Korean leadership knew that Richard Nixon was indebted to the cotton growers and textile interests in the South, and also that he had to do something about the balance of payments deficit -focus on steel, shipbuidling, machine building, chemicals Korea at the decade's end was capable of manufacturing, notwithstanding American protests, M-16 rifles, M-60 machine guns, M-48 tanks, model 500 helicopters, "fast boats," medium- and long-range land-to-land missiles and fighter aircraft.77 The period covered in this chapter is the distance between these two pronouncements. The Korean "industrial deepening" of the 1970s was unthinkable apart from the security threat, real and perceived, from outside

Import Substitute Industrialization

Import substitution industrialization (ISI) is a trade and economic policy which advocates replacing foreign imports with domestic production.[1] ISI is based on the premise that a country should attempt to reduce its foreign dependency through the local production of industrialized products. During the period from the end of the Korean War to the early 1960's South Korea pursued a policy of import substitution for economic development. Under Chung-Hee they pursued an export based strategy.

Fifth Republic

After the assassination of Park by Kim Jae-kyu in 1979, a vocal civil society emerged that led to strong protests against authoritarian rule. Composed primarily of university students and labor unions, protests reached a climax after Major General Chun Doo-hwan's 1979 Coup d'état of December Twelfth and declaration of martial law on May 17. The expanded martial law closed universities, banned political activities and further curtailed the press. The event of May 17 means the beginning of another military dictatorship. This period saw extensive efforts at reform. It laid the foundations for the relatively stable democratic system of the subsequent Sixth Republic in 1987.

The Korean War

After the first two months of the conflict, South Korean forces were on the point of defeat, forced back to the Pusan Perimeter. In September 1950, an amphibious UN counter-offensive was launched at Inchon, and cut off many of the North Korean troops. Those that escaped envelopment and capture were rapidly forced back north all the way to the border with China at the Yalu River, or into the mountainous interior. At this point, in October 1950, Chinese forces crossed the Yalu and entered the war.[40] Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces which continued until mid-1951. After these reversals of fortune, which saw Seoul change hands four times, the last two years of conflict became a war of attrition, with the front line close to the 38th parallel. The war in the air, however, was never a stalemate. North Korea was subject to a massive bombing campaign. Jet fighters confronted each other in air-to-air combat for the first time in history, and Soviet pilots covertly flew in defense of their communist allies. The fighting ended on 27 July 1953, when an armistice was signed. The agreement created the Korean Demilitarized Zone to separate North and South Korea, and allowed the return of prisoners. However, no peace treaty has been signed, and the two Koreas are technically still at war.[42][43] Periodic clashes, many of which are deadly, have continued to the present. -When the war finally ended on July 27, 1953, the North had been devastated by three years of bombing attacks that hardly left a modern building standing. Both Koreas had watched as a virtual holocaust ravaged their country and turned the vibrant expectations of 1945 into a nightmare

Woo Chaebols

By the 1970s, Korea was no longer a global mendicant, having taken off in the 1960s; moreover, the world was floating in petrodollars without political strings attached—just an incessant search for borrowers. The availability of private loans was truly critical and made all the difference for Korea. The money Korea needed for the Big Push was now handed them on a silver platter by the world's eager moneylenders Koreans thus wooed American multinational banks as the inter-connecting putty between nations and their financial systems, so that they may rise and fall, sink and swim together. Through the politics of foreign debt, Koreans sought to wrest autonomy through interdependence, to cleave into the international system so as to be freed from abject dependence. Whenever credit allocation shows a bias for size, it sets in motion a powerful tendency toward market concentration: chaebol firms can use their easy accessibility to bank loans to either keep small firms from entering the market (by making the cost of entry prohibitively high), or to squeeze out competitors through predatory pricing

June 29th 1987 Declaration of Democratic reform

Constitutional amendment for direct presidential elections Revision of presidential election law Amnesty for political dissidents and political prisoners Human rights protections Freedom of the press Popular election of local assemblies and executive heads of local governments Promotion of dialogue and compromise among competing political parties Commitment to enact bold social reforms -speech by Roh Tae Woo, Presidential candidate

Developmental State

Developmental State: a state that can create and regulate the economic and political relationships which can support sustained industrialization. Politically manages the economy to ease the conflict inevitable during the process of change. Charcterstics: State Autonomy: government autonomy from internal interests (economic elites) and external interests Institutional Adapatation and Innovation/flexility: Dominant Development Discourse: developmentalism, economic nationalism. GDP as important national symbol. Authoritarian Politics: political coordination of labor relations, political exclusion of majority of adult population. State Control of Finance: state owns and controls all commercial banks, economic elites had few options in acquiring capital, and were thus dependent on the state for capital. This gave the government the upper hand over the economic elites. Professional, Meritocratic Bureaucracy: people appointed on their merits, not on loyalty, familial ties. High achieving youth wanted to become a bureaucrat above all else. Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between Big Business and the State: multiconglomerates/chaebol. Embedness/corporatism, corruption/money politics. Administrative Guidance/ Industrial Policy: the state disciplines performance among private firms.

Facilitating Conditions for Democracy

Facilitating conditions: Accommodation among political elites Popular commitment to democracy Engagement in civic life Choice of political institutions Economic performance

Shin the Korean Democracy Movement

First, participants in protest are important as a movement's goals are based on the collective identity of actors involved (Taylor and Whittier 1992). For instance, college students tend to focus on problems relevant to their own interests such as mandatory military training and educational freedom while journalists are apt to defend the freedom of the press. -Second, people protest for the purpose of problematizing social, political, and economic issues. The issues raised during protest are expressed in slogans and statements and well-articulated issues provide a rallying point that brings together diverse people -Third, the tactics protestors employ are an essential component of a social movement (McAdam 1983). Those who organize protests choose various strategies to gain the attention of the media and public. -Lastly, social movement organizations are fundamental vehicles for successful mobilization (McCarthy and Zald 1977). One clear example is the National Committee for a Democratic Constitution (NCDC: kungmin undong ponbu, kukpon), the leading organization in the 1987 protest cycle. As detailed below, the organization's dense local networks and leadership were crucial in carrying out nationwide large-scale demonstrations for political reform

Jaeun Kim Engaging Colonial Subjects

From the mid-nineteenth through the first half o f the twentieth century, northeast Asia experienced the dissolution o f the historic Sinocentric regional order, the rapid rise and expansion o f the Japanese Empire, and an unprecedented level o f intrarégional population movement and ethnic mixing. --Over 3 million people migrated from the Japanese archipelago to Korea and Manchuria as colonial settlers whereas at least 30 million moved from the Chinese mainland (south o f the Great Wall) to Manchuria, sinicizing this historic frontier. These processes were further complicated by the migration o f more than 4 million colonial subjects from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese archipelago and Manchuria. By the end o f the Pacific War, the more than 2 million "Koreans" in each of these two destinations together comprised approximately 15 percent o f the entire "Korean" population --I argue that the state's efforts to control colonized populations moving beyond its territorial reach— often against the preference of migrants or the claims of rival states— provided an impetus for the growth of its infrastructural power. The ensuing development o f various legal, bureaucratic, and semantic infrastructures, in turn, further helped the colonial state to enumerate, identify, and penetrate its increasingly mobile population, if with varying degrees of success. -Moreover, such state efforts contributed to the construction, solidification, and naturalization of the category of "Koreans" by contributing to the development and circulation of various idioms of identification to designate people of peninsular origin. As migrants engaged with various state practices that regularly sorted, re-sorted, and treated them as "Koreans," they also came to experience their Korean identity as tangible and consequential. -Their chances for migration, education, or employment; their rights to property, subsidies, or protection; and their subjection to the state's extraction or violence all came increasingly to depend on how state agencies defined and identified them, not only inside but also outside the colony. -I argue, in summary, that the colonial state's engagement with migrants outside the peninsula provided, albeit unwittingly, a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community o f the Korean nation, eventually conceived as transcending the colony's geographical boundary. --In a nutshell, by perennially and compulsorily defining, identifying, and treating migrants of peninsular origin "as Koreans"— regardless o f the differences among them in class or cultural assimilation and irrespective of their birth or the duration o f their settlement in the Japanese archipelago— the control o f Korean migration to Japan made migrants' membership in the Korean minjok more consequential, tangible, and resonant than their membership in the Japanese Empire in toto, that is, their status as Japanese kokumin.

Key Problems of Korean Democracy

Key Problems of Korean Democracy: regionalism, cronysis, corruption -national security law -limited freedom of speech -too much mass participation? -Lack of Democratic values? Lack of public foncifence in democratic stability? -Lack of commitment to democracy among political elites? -Instrumental view of democracy among mass public? -Too much presidential power

Woo Reforms and Dependency:

Korea under Rhee was stuck in a vicious cycle of low income, low savings, low investment, low growth -To Americans, it all looked like a gigantic policy failure that could be traced to the lack of Korean resolve in raising tax revenue and savings to finance investment. Accordingly, the first step in solving this development bottleneck was to remake the tax structure and to mobilize savings through a financial reform that would establish proper market channels and offer attractive yields on financial assets. This was to be combined with a realistic valuation of the currency to promote exports -the 60s Korean Junta was mercantilist in many ways. The Korean monetary reform—the first big economic reform that the junta enacted without Americans being privy to it—offers a pristine glance at neo-mercantilism in action. If money was not finding its way into banks and investment, the junta reasoned, it must be under rich men's mattresses. Hence, the hunt for potential savings started with a sweeping currency reform -An abrupt change in currency denomination made ten old hwan into one new won, and a freeze was placed on all bank deposits. Conversion was limited to 500 new won, equal to less than four dollars, which was to meet current living expenses. Citizens were required to register all cash, checks, and money orders, and attempts were made to direct the "surplus" funds into a new Industrial Development Corporation that would finance industrial activities -Americans were horrified by this specter, especially since the policy measures that fed it eventuated in the absence of prior consultation or notification to the U.S. government.31 Never before, starting in 1945, did Koreans enact such sweeping economic reform without American approval. Faced with a severe rebuke from the Americans, the chagrined junta soon terminated freezing the bank accounts -Korean version of the German currency reform was not only highly confiscatory but sought the opposite or market liberalization: greater control over the economy and the business community. Also they arrested ilicit profiteers who profited from the poltiical economy of the Rhee regime, alienating buisiness. However under Park things took a different turn. General Park summoned the ten major business leaders and struck a deal with them. In exchange for exempting businessmen from criminal prosecution and respecting their properties whether ill or well gotten, business "paid" fines levied on them by establishing industrial firms and then donating shares to the government. In retrospect, this deal had the quality of an historical compromise,- in any case, it occasioned the launching of "Korea Inc." Henceforth, state and big business would share the same destiny: prosper or perish. -The banking sector was the only exception to the guarantee of nonconfiscation that the state had promised to businessmen. In fact, all commercial banks were swiftly nationalized, and all financial intermediaries were quickly lined up under the direction of the Ministry of Finance. The raison d'être of the banks became that of seconding and executing national macroeconomic goals, not profit-mongering through lucrative money lending -Along with the nationalization came a full revival of the specialized banking system that had developed during the colonial era. Agricultural credit institutions were strengthened, a bank specializing in commerce and small industry was founded, and the capital and functions of the Korean Development Bank were now enlarged to enable borrowing from abroad and the guaranteeing of foreign loans obtained by domestic enterprises -The last point, state guarantee of foreign loans, was to have a great impact in the nation's financial history. This, coupled with a series of reform measures (in 1964—1966) that displayed to potential lenders both developmental resolve and continence in Korea's domestic financial policies, opened the floodgates to foreign credit that financed rapid growth

Late Development

Late developers: "countries that began to grow from agricultural to industrial economies either just before or during the twentieth century at what are now considered to be rapid rates (Amsden 1989: 140).

Types of Democracies

Participatory Democracy: all citizens involved Liberal Democracy: individual rights repsected Deliberative democracy: not top down, common good is considered

Developmental Economy

Private Sector owns means of production, but state controls it, high level of state intervention

Gershenkron Rapid Industrialization

Problems facing late developers: critical disjunction between the scale of economic activity required for development and the capacity of the private sector to amass sufficient capital to "catch up" (Gerschenkron 1962) Scarce and diffuse capital Immature capitalist classes Limited industrial bases Late timing It predicts that the more "economically backward" a country is, the more we will see: More rapid rates of industrial growth A greater stress on producer or capital goods as compared to consumer goods More rapid growth spurts rather than gradual growth rates Larger scale of plants and firms and a greater emphasis on up-to-date technology: backward countries are able to purchase machinery from early producers, for example Russia (most backward country) would import Britain's (least backward economy) machinery and transportation equipment A greater emphasis on capital-intensive production rather than labor-intensive production A lower standard of living Less role played by agriculture A more active role by the government and large banks in supplying capital and entrepreneurship More "virulent" ideologies of growth".

Theories of Democracy

Relationship between Capitalism and Democracy: role of bourgeoisie and the middle class, leads to increased demands for right to private property, free enterprise, free contract. Role of the working class: capitalist industrial transformation mobilizes urban working class and weakens landed elites. Role of the Political Elite: political elites bring out democratic regime because they are commited to democracy values (potentially). External Pressure: other nations push for democracy. US and UN linking WTO membership for China with human rights concessions. --In South Korea, civil society played a big role in democratization. Civil society situated between the state and the private sphere, autonomous from the state and the market (ie: actors pursue neither power within the state nor profit within the market.)

Procedural Democracy

Series of institutional arrangements Competitive, regular elections Full suffrage Government responsiveness to preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals Effective guarantees of civil liberties Separation of powers Protection of individual and minority rights Substantive Democracy: how it really is on the ground

Command Economy

State owns and controls the means of production, level of state intervention is high

April Revolution

The April Revolution, sometimes called the April 19 Revolution or April 19 Movement, was a popular uprising in April 1960, led by labor and student groups, which overthrew the autocratic First Republic of South Korea under Syngman Rhee. It led to the resignation of Rhee and the transition to the Second Republic of South Korea. The events were touched off by the discovery in Masan Harbor of the body of a student killed by a tear-gas shell in demonstrations against the elections of March 1960. President Rhee had been in office since 1948, but faced increasing domestic discontent as his rule had delivered limited economic and social development, while being perceived as corrupt with Rhee amending the constitution to prolong his stay in power.[1] The U.S. had reduced its economic aid from a high of $382,893,000 in 1957 to $222,204,000 in 1959. Rhee was shocked and threatened by this reduced American support and he began taking increasingly desperate measures to ensure his political survival.[2] In December 1958 he forced through the National Assembly an amendment to the National Security Law giving the government broad new powers to curtail freedom of the press and prevent members of the opposition from voting. President Rhee had been in office since 1948, but faced increasing domestic discontent as his rule had delivered limited economic and social development, while being perceived as corrupt with Rhee amending the constitution to prolong his stay in power.[1] The U.S. had reduced its economic aid from a high of $382,893,000 in 1957 to $222,204,000 in 1959. Rhee was shocked and threatened by this reduced American support and he began taking increasingly desperate measures to ensure his political survival.[2] In December 1958 he forced through the National Assembly an amendment to the National Security Law giving the government broad new powers to curtail freedom of the press and prevent members of the opposition from voting. On March 15, 1960, a protest against electoral corruption took place in Masan. The protest, sparked by Democratic Party members' exposure of electoral corruption, led to about a thousand residents of Masan gathering in front of the Democratic Party Headquarters in Masan around 7:30 in the evening. As the citizens faced off against the police, the city was blacked out. The police started shooting at the people and the people responded by throwing rocks at the police. On April 11, Kim Ju-yul's body was found in the harbor at Masan by a fisherman. On April 18, students from Korea University launched a non-violent protest at the National Assembly against police violence and demanding new elections, however they were attacked by gangs funded by Rhee's supporters as they returned to their campus. On April 19 thousands of students marched from Korea University to the Blue House, as they marched past other high schools and universities, their numbers grew to over 100,000. Arriving at the Blue House, the protesters called for Rhee's resignation. Police opened fire on protestors killing approximately 180 and wounding thousands. That day the Rhee government proclaimed martial law in order to suppress the demonstrations.[6] On April 25, 1960, professors joined students and citizens in large-scale protests outnumbering soldiers and police who refused to attack the protestors

The First Republic

The First Republic of South Korea (Korean: 제1공화국, Jeil Gonghwaguk, literally "the first republic") was South Korea's first independent government, ruling the country from 1948 to 1960. It succeeded USAMGIK, the United States military government, which ruled the area from 1945 to 1948 -led by Syngman Rhee -The South Korean government continued many of the practices of the U.S. military government. This included the brutal repression of leftist activity. The Rhee government continued the harsh military action against the Jeju Uprising. It also crushed military uprisings in Suncheon and Yeosu, which were provoked by orders to sail to Jeju and participate in the crackdown. -After the armistice, South Korea experienced political turmoil under years of autocratic leadership of Syngman Rhee, which was ended by student revolt in 1960. -Throughout his rule, Rhee sought to take additional steps to cement his control of government. These began in 1952 (shortly after being elected to a second term), when the government was still based in Busan due to the ongoing war. In May of that year, Rhee pushed through constitutional amendments which made the presidency a directly-elected position. In order to do this, he declared martial law and jailed the members of parliament whom he expected to vote against it. Rhee was subsequently elected by a wide margin. He regained control of parliament in the 1954 elections, and thereupon pushed through an amendment to exempt himself from the eight-year term limit. -The events of 1960, known as the April Revolution, were touched off by the violent repression of a student demonstration in Masan on the day of the presidential election, March 15. Initially these protests were quelled by local police, but they broke out again after the body of a student was found floating in the harbor. Subsequently nonviolent protests spread to Seoul and throughout the country, and Rhee resigned on April 26.

Fourth Republic

The Fourth Republic (Korean: 제4공화국; Hanja:第四共和國; revised romanisation:je-sa gonghwaguk) was the government of South Korea between 1972 and 1981, regulated by the Yusin Constitution adopted in October 1972 and confirmed in a referendum on 21 November 1972. From 1972 to 1979, power was monopolized by Park Chung Hee and his Democratic Republican Party under the highly centralized authoritarian "Yusin System With the assassination of Park on 26 October 1979, the Republic entered a period of tumult and transition under the short-lived nominal presidency of Choi Kyu-hah, controlled under severe escalating martial law and witnessing the coup d'état of December Twelfth, the violent unfolding of the Gwangju Democratization Movement and its armed suppression, the coup d'état of May Seventeenth and presidency of Chun Doo-hwan, and finally the transition to the Fifth Republic under Chun in 1981. The Fourth Republic was governed under the Yusin Constitution, also spelled Yusin. The term Yusin (hangul: 유신) in Korean means "rejuvenation" or "renewal", but it is also the term used to translate the "restoration" component of the Japanese 明治維新, Meiji-ishin, meaning Meiji Restoration. The significance of this allusion is in the "imperial" role which scholars have seen attached to the presidency under the Yusin Constitution, which effectively concentrated all governing power in Park's hands The document was marked by the enormous powers granted to the president. He was elected for six years, with no limits on reelection. The people elected delegates to the National Conference for Unification, an electoral college that was charged with electing the president. The requirements for candidacy, however, were so stringent that only one candidate could be on the conference's ballot. He was vested with sweeping powers to suspend constitutional freedoms and rule by decree. He also had the right to appoint one-third of the National Assembly, effectively guaranteeing a parliamentary majority. For all intents and purposes, the Yusin Constitution turned Park's presidency into a legal dictatorship. The provisions of the Yusin Constitution were greeted with widespread but ineffective protest. Park was elected without opposition in 1972 and 1978. It remained in effect until after Park's assassination in 1979. The assassination of Park, on 26 October 1979, was a pivotal moment in South Korean history and a portentous one for the Yusin system. Park's Prime Minister, Choi Kyu-hah, assumed power as acting president but was almost immediately marginalized by competing factions in the military On 27 October, Chun unilaterally assumed control of the KCIA and the government intelligence apparatus. On 6 December, the National Council for Unification confirmed Choi Kyu-hah as President according to the framework of the Yusin Constitution, but six days later, Chun spearheaded a military coup, forcibly arresting and detaining General Jeong. Choi had lost any meaningful authority in government by then, and Chun installed himself as Director of the KCIA early in 1980.

Gwangju Massacre

The Gwangju Uprising , alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO,[3] and also known as Gwangju Democratization Movement[4] (Hangul: , 광주 민주화 운동; Hanja: 光州民主化運動; RR: Gwangju Minjuhwa Undong), was a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea, from May 18 to 27, 1980. Estimates suggest up to 606 people may have died.[5] During this period, Gwangju citizens took up arms (by robbing local armories and police stations) when local Jeonnam University students - who were demonstrating against the Chun Doo-hwan government - were fired upon, killed, and beaten in an unprecedented attack by government troops.[6][7] The uprising eventually ended in defeat on May 27, 1980. The nation's democratization movements, which had been suppressed during Park's tenure, were being revived. With the beginning of a new semester in March 1980, professors and students expelled for pro-democracy activities returned to their universities, and student unions were formed. These unions led nationwide demonstrations for reforms, including an end to martial law (declared after Park's assassination), democratization, minimum wage demands, and freedom of press.[13] These activities culminated in the anti-martial law demonstration at Seoul Station on May 15, 1980 in which about 100,000 students and citizens participated. In response, Chun Doo-hwan took several suppressive measures. On May 17, Chun Doo-hwan forced the Cabinet to extend martial law to the whole nation, which had previously not applied to Jeju Province. The extended martial law closed universities, banned political activities and further curtailed the press. To enforce martial law, troops were dispatched to various[which?] parts of the country. On the same day, The Defense Security Command raided a national conference of student union leaders from 55 universities, who were gathered to discuss their next moves in the wake of the May 15 demonstration. Twenty-six politicians, including South Jeolla Province native Kim Dae-jung, were also arrested on charges of instigating demonstrations. The Gwangju Uprising had a profound impact on South Korean politics and history. Chun Doo-hwan already had popularity problems because he took power through a military coup, but after authorizing the dispatch of Special Forces upon citizens, his legitimacy was further damaged. The movement also paved the way for later movements in the 1980s that eventually brought democracy to South Korea. The Gwangju Uprising has become a symbol of South Koreans' struggle against authoritarian regimes and their fight for democracy. -Reagan did not protest

Cheju Insurgency

The Jeju uprising or Jeju incident was an attempted insurgency on the Korean province of Jeju Island which was followed by an anticommunist suppression campaign that lasted from April 3, 1948 until May 1949.[3][4]:139, 193 The main cause for the rebellion was elections scheduled for May 10, 1948, designed by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to create a new government for all of Korea. The elections, however, were only planned for the south of the country, the half of the peninsula under UNTCOK control. Fearing the elections would further reinforce division, guerrilla fighters for the South Korean Labor party (SKLP) reacted violently, attacking local police and rightist youth groups stationed on Jeju Island Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel.[4]:171[5][6]:13-14 On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children

June Struggle

The June Struggle (Hangul: 6월 민주항쟁; Hanja: 六月民主抗爭), also known as the June Democracy Movement[1] and June Democratic Uprising was a nationwide democracy movement in South Korea that generated mass protests from June 10 to June 29, 1987. The demonstrations forced the ruling government to hold elections and institute other democratic reforms which led to the establishment of the Sixth Republic, the present day government of South Korea. On June 10th, the military regime of President Chun Doo-hwan announced its choice of Roh Tae Woo as the next president. The public designation of Chun's successor was seen as a final affront to a delayed and deferred process to revise the South Korean constitution to permit direct election of the President. Although pressure on the regime, in the form of demonstrations by students and other groups, had been building for some time, the announcement finally triggered massive and effective protests Unwilling to resort to violence before the 1988 Olympic Games, and (correctly) believing that Roh could win competitive elections anyway given divisions within the opposition,[2] Chun and Roh acceded to the key demands of direct presidential elections and restoration of civil liberties. Although Roh was duly elected as president that December with a bare plurality, the democratic consolidation of South Korean was fully underway. The election finally took place on December 16. In the end Roh Tae-woo was the winner, receiving 36.6% of the vote on turnout of 89.2%. The opposition vote was split in two, with Kim Young-sam receiving 28% and Kim Dae-jung 27% of the vote. This election marked the beginning of the Sixth Republic.

May 16th Coup

The May 16 coup (Hangul: 5.16 군사정변; Hanja: 五一六軍事政變; RR: O-illyuk gunsa-jeongbyeon) was a military coup d'état in South Korea in 1961, organized and carried out by Park Chung-hee and his allies who formed the Military Revolutionary Committee, nominally led by Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-yong after the latter's acquiescence on the day of the coup. The coup rendered powerless the democratically elected government of Yun Bo-seon and ended the Second Republic, installing a reformist military Supreme Council for National Reconstruction effectively led by Park, who took over as Chairman after General Chang's arrest in July. The coup was instrumental in bringing to power a new developmentalist elite and in laying the foundations for the rapid industrialization of South Korea under Park's leadership, but its legacy is controversial for the suppression of democracy and civil liberties it entailed, and the purges enacted in its wake. -The business of consolidating a new government began soon after the coup had been completed. Martial law was immediately put into force. On May 20, the Military Revolutionary Committee was renamed the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction (SCNR), and the following day a new cabinet was instituted.[35] General Chang, the chairman of the committee, remained Army Chief of Staff, but also took on the additional offices of Prime Minister and Defense Minister, becoming formal head of the administration.[36] The SCNR was formalized as a junta of the thirty highest-ranking military officers initially arranged in fourteen subcommittees, and assumed a wide-ranging responsibility that included the powers to promulgate laws, appoint cabinet posts, and oversee the functioning of the administration as a whole A significant development occurred soon after the coup with the planning and subsequent establishment of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). Members of the Military Revolutionary Committee were briefed on May 20 by Kim Jong-pil on the intended functions of this new agency. The KCIA was realized on June 10 with the enactment of Law No. 619, which brought the agency into being under the direction of Kim Jong-pil.

Mutual Security Act

The Mutual Security Act of 1951 launched a major American foreign aid program, 1951-61, of grants to numerous countries. It largely replaced the Marshall Plan. The main goal was to help poor countries develop and to contain the spread of communism. It was a signed on October 10, 1951 by President Harry S. Truman. Annual authorizations were about $7.5 billion

Second Republic

The Second Republic of South Korea was the government of South Korea for eight months in 1960 and 1961. It succeeded the First Republic, and was followed by a military government under the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction. It was the only government under a parliamentary system in the history of Korea. -The Second Republic operated under a parliamentary system. This was the first and the only instance South Korea turned to a cabinet system instead of a presidential system. The legislature was bicameral, with the National Assembly as the lower house and the House of Councilors as the upper house. The president was elected by both houses of the legislature and served as head of state. Due to the numerous abuses of power by South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee, the president's role was greatly reduced by the new constitution, to a point almost entirely ceremonial. Real power rested with the prime minister and cabinet, who were elected by the National Assembly. Yun Po Sun was elected as the President on 13 August 1960. The prime minister and head of government was Chang Myon.

Third Republic

The Third Republic of South Korea was the government of South Korea from 1963 to 1972. It was presented as a return to civilian rule after a period of rule by the military junta known as the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction which in 1961 had overthrown the Second Republic of South Korea. However, throughout this period the presidency was held by Park Chung-hee, who is the father of Park Geun-hye First Five Year Plan: The first plan sought to expand electrical/coal energy industry, emphasizing importance on the infrastructure for establishing a solid foundation, agricultural productivity, export, neutralize balance of payments, and promote technological advancements. Korean economy observed a 7.8% growth, exceeding expectations, while GNP per capita grew from 83 to 125 US dollars. The second five-year plan sought to shift the South Korean state into heavy industry by making South Korea more competitive in the world market, which was incorporated into all future five-year plans. The industry was based on steel and petrochemical industry. The major highways were built for easier transportation. U.S.-China's opening up in 1972 led to a greater competitive marketplace for South Korean goods and services. Fears also prevailed that the U.S. would no longer provide military defense for South Korea.

Kim Young Sam Reforms

To make political fund-raising and spending "more transparent," the same law required that all parties and candidates use only funds withdrawn from their bank accounts for campaigning and that they submit their account books to the Central Election Management Committee the maximum spending for presidential and parliamentary candidates was lowered from $35 million to $25 million and from $160,000 to $63,000, respectively

Woo Gershenkron

To place Korean heavy industrialization in perspective, it is worth recalling the following propositions on "late" industrialization, enunciated by Alexander Gerschenkron: 1. The more backward a country's economy, the more likely was its industrialization to start discontinuously as a sudden great spurt proceeding at a relatively high rate of growth of manufacturing output. 2. The more backward a country's economy, the more pronounced was the stress on bigness of both plants and enterprise. 3. The more backward a country's economy, the greater was the stress upon producer's goods as against consumer's goods. 4. The more backward a country's economy, the heavier was the pressure upon the levels of consumption of the population. 5. The more backward a country's economy, the greater was the part played by special institutional factors designed to increase the supply of capital to the nascent industries and, in addition, to provide them with less decentralized and better informed entrepreneurial guidance,- the more backward the country, the more pronounced was the coerciveness and comprehensiveness of those factors. 6. The more backward a country, the less likely was its agriculture to play any active role by offering to the growing industries the advantages of an expanding industrial market based in turn on the rising productivity of agricultural labor.29

National Security Act

e National Security Law (NSL), passed by the National Assembly in November 1948 in the wake of an allegedly communist-led sedition in Yosu and Sunch'on the previous month. Like similar laws enacted during the colonial period, the NSL defined sedition in so vague and broad a way that the law could easily be used as a political tool by the authorities to suppress virtually any kind of opposition. The National Security Act is a South Korean law enforced since 1948 with the avowed purpose "to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State." [1] However, the law now has a newly inserted article that limits its arbitrary application. "In the construction and application of this Act, it shall be limited at a minimum of construction and application for attaining the aforemetioned purpose, and shall not be permitted to construe extensively this Act, or to restrict unreasonably the fundamental human rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution The "anti-government organizations" the law aims to suppress have the character of "a domestic or foreign organization or group which uses fraudulently the title of the government or aims at a rebellion against the State, and which is provided with a command and leadership system."[1] In other words, the law made communism illegal. Some scholars and international organizations also have negative view towards the law. Some argue that National Security Act has been justifying the violation on human rights under the name of defense against the threat of North Korea and that it functions as an obstacle for peaceful reunification with North Korea To that end, all of the following were made illegal: recognition of North Korea as a political entity; organizations advocating the overthrow of the government; the printing, distributing, and ownership of "anti-government" material; and any failure to report such violations by others. It has been reformed and strengthened over the past few decades, with the Anti-communism Law being merged with it during the 1980s.[1][4] The National Security Law imposes significant restrictions on the freedom of South Koreans to create and join political associations, or even to meet with other people. The law imposes severe criminal penalties on anyone who joins or induces others to join an "anti-government organization."

Korea In the Nixon Era and After Woo

the Nixon Doctrine and abandonment of Bretton Woods reduced the payments deficit via cuts in military spending abroad, and sharing the imperial burden with regional economic powers (in this case, Japan); the import surcharge and rising protectionism rectified the U.S. trade deficit, caused in part by Korean imports; and floating rates, followed by dollar devaluations, threw Korean planning off kilter.4 It was these issues, along with the 1973 oil shock, that help us understand the external challenges to which the belabored economics of the 1970s was a response. -Warned of South Korean expendability in the American scheme, Park let it be known that Korea would have to "go it alone" to defend itself if Americans were reluctant to do the job. Park called for an armed militia of 2.5 million men, with units even in the smallest villages. To comply with the presidential decree that the men be armed with Korean-made weapons, the Economic Planning Board announced a joint-venture with an American company to produce small arms and ammunition -Nixon's new foreign policy design, first unveiled to the Congress in early 1970, revealed a switch from what was hitherto known as a two-and-a-half war strategy, to a one-and-a-half one, abandoning the need for a sustained defense against Chinese attack in Asia. -this also led to a decline in foreign investor/lender confindence in Korea. Korea in the early 1970s was such an investment risk that 10 percent of the world's total in political risk insurance covered through the OPIC since 1969 was issued for U.S. investors in Korea -The Nixon Doctrine terminated an epoch of rank clientelism whereby Korea was, from 1950-1972, one of the world's largest recipients of American military assistance; the burden of defense was partially transferred to Japan in the form of greater economic aid to Korea but without overall improvement in the Japan-Korean relations,- and all this forced Korea to search for autonomy in the world system

Market Economy

private sector owns and controls the means of production, low level of intervention