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South Korea The Demise of the Chun Regime
Even though Chun Doo Hwan's government had attained
considerable results in economy and diplomacy, his government
failed to win public trust or support. In spite of Chun's lofty
pronouncements, the public basically regarded Chun as a usurper
of power who had deprived South Korea of its opportunity to
restore democracy. Chun lacked political credentials; his access
to power derived from his position as the head of the Defense
Security Command--the army's nerve center of political
intelligence--and his ability to bring together his generals in
the front lines.
Chun and his military followers failed to overcome the stigma
of the Kwangju incident, and the new "just society" that he
promised did not materialize. In fact, between 1982 and 1983, at
least two of the major financial scandals in South Korea involved
Chun's in-laws. The Chun government's slogans became hollow.
While Park had gained respect and popularity through the
record-breaking pace of economic development, Chun could not
repeat such a feat. In the 1985 National Assembly elections,
opposition parties together won more votes than the government
party, clearly indicating that the public wanted a change.
Moreover, increasing numbers of people became more sympathetic to
the students, who presented increasingly radical demands.
One of the most serious problems the government faced was
that the argument for restricting democracy became less and less
credible. The people had long been tolerant of various
restrictions imposed by succeeding governments because of the
perceived threat from the north, but the consensus eroded as the
international environment moderated. More and more people became
cynical about repeated government pronouncements, viewing them as
self-serving propaganda by those in power. This tendency was
particularly pronounced among the post-Korean War generation that
constituted a majority of the South Korean population.
The unpopular Chun regime and its constitutional framework
was brought down in 1987 largely by the student agitation that
beset the regime. Student activists set the tone and agenda of
the society as a whole because the government and the
government-controlled press had lost their credibility. The
opposition parties worked with the students, although they
disagreed on the ultimate aim--the politicians wanted reform,
while the students demanded revolution. The opposition
politicians wanted constitutional reform to replace the existing
system of electing the president through the handpicked electoral
college with direct popular election. The students attacked not
only the military leaders in power, but also the entire
socio-political and economic establishment.
A small number of confirmed radicals led the student
movement. They argued that the basic cause for the political and
social malaise in South Korea was "American imperialism," which
they believed had dominated South Korea ever since it was
liberated from Japan in 1945. In their view, "American
imperialism" buttressed the military dictatorship and the
exploitative capitalist system; the struggle against the military
dictatorship and American imperialism was inseparable. This
position was the same argument that North Korea had been
advancing since 1946, but a more important source of intellectual
persuasion came from the revisionist school of historiography
that swept United States academia during the 1970s.
The revisionist argument was very similar to that of Lenin on
imperialism. The Cold War was seen as the inevitable outcome of
the United States capitalist system's need for continuous
economic expansion abroad. United States participation in the
Korean War and the subsequent stationing of United States forces
in South Korea satisfied such a need, according to this
perspective. For the revisionists, it was irrelevant that the
United States had decided to abandon Korea in September-October
1947, or that the United States had withdrawn its occupation
forces from South Korea in 1949. The communist countries, whether
the Soviet Union or North Korea, were seen as passive entities
reacting against the aggressive actions of "American
imperialists" rather than pursuing their own goals. The fact that
the United States had interjected itself into the Korean War in
1950, and that it continued to station its troops in South Korea
after the war, was evidence enough.
The revisionist arguments found a fertile soil among the
university students. The inquisitive students had long viewed the
one-sided anticommunist propaganda emanating from official and
established sources as stifling and as leaving too many questions
unanswered. The new arguments sounded logical and convincing,
particularly when some of the revisionists took liberty with
historical evidence. Increasing numbers of students took to the
streets to denounce the military dictatorship and American
imperialism.
Initially, the public was apathetic to the confrontation
between the student demonstrators and government, but the daily
fracas on the streets and the never-ending smell of tear gas
aroused their ire. The news about the torture and death of a
student, Pak Chong-ch'ol, by the police touched the sore nerves
of the people. President Chun attempted to squash the opposition
by issuing a declaration on April 13, 1987, to suspend the
"wasteful debate" about constitutional reform until a new
government was installed at the end of his seven-year term. The
declaration was, instead, his regime's swan song. Chun wanted to
have his successor "elected" by his handpicked supporters; the
public greeted the declaration with universal outrage. Even the
Reagan administration, which had been taciturn about South
Korea's internal politics, urged the Chun government not to
ignore the outrage. Finally, on June 29, 1987, Roh Tae Woo, the
government party's choice as Chun's successor, made a dramatic
announcement in favor of a new democratic constitution that
embodied all the opposition's demands.
* * *
Extensive literature is available in English on all the
subjects covered in this chapter. Ki-baik Lee's, A New History
of Korea is the best account of Korean history available in
English. The following sources are also helpful: Han Woo-kuen's
The History of Korea; William Henthorn's A History of
Korea; The History of Korea by Sohn Pow-key, Kim Chol-
choon, and Hong Yi-sup; and East Asia: Tradition and
Transformation, coauthored by John K. Fairbank, Edwin O.
Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig.
Aspects of the Choson Dynasty are dealt with in JaHyun Kim
Haboush's A Heritage of Kings, William Shaw's Legal
Norms in a Confucian State, and Young-ho Ch'oe's The Civil
Examinations and the Social Structure in Early Yi Dynasty
Korea. Late nineteenth-century developments are covered in
Vipan Chandra's Imperialism, Resistance, and Reform in Late
Nineteenth-Century Korea, James B. Palais's Politics and
Policy in Traditional Korea, and C.I. Eugene Kim and Han-Kyo
Kim's Korea and the Politics of Imperialism, 1876-1910.
Various aspects of Japanese rule are detailed in Andrew J.
Grajdanzev's Modern Korea and Chong-Sik Lee's Japan and
Korea: The Political Dimension. Korea's reaction to Japanese
colonialism is recounted in Chong-Sik Lee's The Politics of
Korean Nationalism. George McAfee McCune's Korea Today
is particularly valuable for the period between 1945 and 1948.
The period of Japanese colonial rule is also treated in Dennis L.
McNamara's The Colonial Origins of Korean Enterprise and
Michael Edson Robinson's Cultural Nationalism in Colonial
Korea, 1920-1925.
Among the numerous works that have taken advantage of
declassified documents concerning the period leading up the
Korean War are James Irving Matray's The Reluctant
Crusade, the second volume of Bruce Cuming's work on that
period, The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-50, and Peter
Lowe's The Origins of the Korea War.
Information about Korea under Syngman Rhee can be found in
Gregory Henderson's book, in Joungwon Alexander Kim's Divided
Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945-1972, and in Chi-
young Pak's, Political Opposition in Korea, 1945-1960.
Robert T. Oliver, a close associate of Rhee, explains Rhee's
actions in Syngman Rhee and American Involvement in Korea,
1942-1960. Lee Hahn-Been's Korea: Time, Change, and
Administration analyzes governmental performance under Rhee
and subsequent regimes. Han Sung-Joo's The Failure of
Democracy in South Korea provides an incisive analysis of
both the Rhee regime and the Chang Myon government.
A number of books treat Korea in the modern era, although
most of them emphasize the political aspect of the society.
Gregory Henderson's Korea: The Politics of the Vortex is
particularly valuable for its treatment of modern and
contemporary periods through the late 1960s. The 1961 coup d'état
and the government under Park Chung Hee are discussed in Kim Se-
Jin's The Politics of Military Revolution in Korea, John
Kie-Chiang Oh's Korea: Democracy on Trial, David C. Cole
and Princeton N. Lyman's Korean Development: The Interplay of
Politics and Economics, Young Whan Kihl's, Politics and
Policies in Divided Korea, Sung Chul Yang's, Korea and Two
Regimes, and The Economic and Social Modernization of the
Republic of Korea by Edward S. Mason and others. For the
government under Chun Doo Hwan, see Harold C. Hinton's Korea
Under New Leadership; for South Korea's foreign policy, see
Youngnok Koo and Sung-joo Han's Foreign Policy of the Republic
of Korea and Byung Chul Koh's The Foreign Policy Systems
of North and South Korea. South Korea's relations with North
Korea are treated in detail by Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-Sik
Lee's Communism in Korea and Ralph N. Clough's
Embattled Korea.
Studies on Korea: A Scholar's Guide, edited by Kim
Han-Kyo, lists numerous books and articles; many items are
annotated. Far Eastern Economic Review [Hong Kong],
Journal of Northeast Asian Studies, Asian Wall Street
Journal, and Asian Survey regularly provide analyses
of South Korea's politics and economy. A comprehensive source of
publications dealing with Korean history is the Association for
Asian Studies' Annual Bibliography of Asian Studies. (For
further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of June 1990
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