Transforming Korean Politics

Democracy, Reform, and Culture

Young Whan Kihl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765614285
• eBook ISBN: 9781317453314
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Manufacturing
• Index: Business

Over the past fifteen years, South Korea has transformed itself from an authoritarian government into a new democracy with a vibrant capitalist economy. Modernization, democratization, and globalization have played important roles in this transformation, and have greatly influenced the programs and policies of Korea's Sixth Republic. Covering developments through the 2003 elections, this book shows how the South Korean government and society have been shaped not only by the dynamics of these forces, but also by their interaction with the cultural norms of a post-Confucian society. The author provides a conceptual framework and baseline for examining political developments in Korea, and offers an analysis of the factors that are transforming Korean institutions, society, and politics. He discusses the forces shaping Korea's political economy and the performance of successive ROK governments, and also highlights the challenges faced by the newly elected administration of Roh Moo Huan, the North Korean issue, and more.

1

Introduction

Ideas Matter in Korean Politics

While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, in the general climate of world opinion, democratic governance has now achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.¹

Amartya Sen, 1999 Winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Advancing human development requires governance that is democratic in both form and substance. [These include:] representation, fair elections, checks and balances, and freedom of expression.²

U.N. Human Development Report 2002

“Ideas matter in politics” because they are often a determinant of public policies (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 3). Historically, a certain set of ideas have led to “new thinking” which, in turn, acted as a catalyst for initiating drastic socioeconomic and political changes for a community of people, nation, and the world at-large.³ Ideas are “transformative” when they become provocative by enticing leaders and elites to seek for a change in institutions, as happened in Korea’s recent history. Several key ideas, like modernization, democratization, and globalization, have come to shape the system of beliefs and attitudes of the people in Korea, as the present chapter will show. Ideas can also become proactive by giving an alternative scenario that the people come to desire for the future. This book is about how and why several key ideas have come to play in transforming Korean politics in recent decades.

The Korean people have lived under the authoritarian rule of government in relative poverty for many centuries. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the new notions of democracy and prosperity arose to capture the national imagination and to become the primary concern of the government leadership. The idea of modernization inspired the soldiers-turned-politicians during the authoritarian phase of Korean politics in the 1970s to initiate a program of socio-economic development through industrialization. The democracy movement launched first by university students in the early 1960s, and then by opposition leaders in the 1970s, came to fruition in South Korean politics in the late 1980s.

The emergence of democratization and modernization has thus played an important role in the transformation of the socioeconomic and political life of modern-day Korea. The forces and ideas that underlie these processes have been key factors in shaping the government policies. The ways these ideas and forces have helped to influence the political dynamics and outcomes in South Korea, since its democratic opening in 1987, are the primary focus for analysis in this book. Both democratization and modernization emerged first as powerful ideas that, in turn, worked both intentionally and unintentionally to shape the actions and beliefs of political actors and the sequence of implementing government programs. Each of South Korea’s Sixth Republic administrations since 1988 has played a significant part in the creation of the modern state of South Korea that is committed to both liberal democracy and a market-oriented economy.

In 1987, the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) experienced what Samuel P. Huntington calls the “third wave” (1991). While the first wave of democratization began in Europe in the nineteenth century, the second began after World War II, and the third started in Portugal and Spain in 1974. This idea of democratization spread into the Mediterranean and beyond to Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region in the 1980s.

As Max Weber wrote almost a hundred years ago, “ideas and interests” play a major role in social life.⁴ Ideas also shape politics, much as culture shapes economic and political developments (Gerth and Mills, 1958; Harrison and Huntington, 2000; Weber, 1946a). The program of Harvard University’s Academy for International and Area Studies organized a symposium in 1999 and published its proceedings as Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Harrison and Huntington, 2000). This line of inquiry on whether and how “culture matters” is both timely and promising in advancing the knowledge base of the socioeconomic transformation of the third wave of new democracies.

This book builds on this theme by exploring the transformation of Korea in terms of movement toward democratization and modernization. This is undertaken against the backdrop, first, of traditional Korean culture and, second, of the pressures of the world economy. The complex interweaving of these forces and the ideas that shape them have been evident in each of the recent administrations; yet, an overall pattern of uneven progression and movement by fits and starts has emerged. While modernization was the driving force for the autocratic regimes that governed South Korea in the period following the internecine war, democratization gradually came to the fore in the period immediately preceding and following the assassination of President Park Chung-Hee in 1979. The impacts of the world economy and the forces of globalization overtook the country by 1997.

Interplay of Ideas, Values, and Policy in the Era of Transition

A hundred years before the democratic opening of Korea, traditional Korean society was engulfed in an acute political conflict over the issue of whether to preserve or reformulate the Confucian social order and political system. The failures of the Choson dynasty (1392–1910) to confront the challenges within and outside the country in the age of imperialism led to the decline and eventual demise of the kingdom in 1910 (Kim and Kim, 1967; K. Kim, 1980). Modernization of Confucian social order and an open door policy, as advocated by the progressive reformist camp, was defeated by the conservative reactionary wing of the aristocratic Yangban elite, which were entrenched in court politics as advisers to the throne (Deuchler, 1993; Eckert et al., 1990; Palais, 1975).

Social Origins of Class Formation Before 1945

Traditional Korea was predominantly an agrarian society with “family-sized tenancy” as the social unit of agricultural production. Tenancy was a major feature of village life during the Choson dynasty and continued to persist throughout the colonial period (1910–1945). This system of tenancy was only abolished after World War II by an enactment of land reform bills in 1949.

Agrarian discontent and peasant activism played a major role in shaping Korea’s recent history. The Tonghak movement begun in 1894, for instance, contributed to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) over the control of Korea. Peasant radicalism in the post-World War II years in Korea was also a contributing factor in the origin of the Korean War (1950–1953), according to Bruce Cumings (1981). But, as a recent study shows, tracing the social origins of traditional Korea’s path toward modernity requires studying earlier history, including “colonial modernity” and its socioeconomic consequences and political dynamics (Shin and Robinson, 1999).

The Japanese colonial government carried out a cadastral survey from 1910 to 1918 and promulgated a land tax to raise revenue in 1914. According to this survey, 77.2 percent of the rural population was reportedly tied to the tenancy system by leasing all or part of its cultivated land. Tenant-related disputes escalated over time and across regions in colonial Korea. The twenty years from 1920 to 1939, for instance, witnessed 140,969 disputes involving 397,254 tenants, landlords, and agents (Shin, 1996: 54).

Tenancy-related disputes ranged from a simple controversy over tenancy rights to more serious disputes over the interpretations of rent, land taxes, and others. The question of how to manage agrarian disputes became a major policy issue for the Japanese colonial government. This was also true for the subsequent U.S. military government (1945–1948) and for the early phase of the First Republic administration of Syngman Rhee (1948–1960).

The social class structure in rural Korea was diverse and complex, but it consisted primarily of landlords, owner-cultivators, semitenants, and landless tenants. There were some absentee landowners, like the Japanese during the colonial era, but most of the Korean landowners were involved in self-cultivation or management of the land. At least two types of landlords were recognized in the classification scheme of the colonial government: (A) those who rented all of their land and (B) those who rented out most of their land but cultivated a small portion for themselves. Type A landlords have larger land holdings, but they were absentee landlords living in cities (Shin, 1996: 46). Yet, as anthropologist Clark Sorensen notes, “the majority of landlords, in fact, were small village residents,” or Type B (Sorensen, 1991: 43).

Commercialization of agriculture took place during the 1920s as Korean farm products gained comparative advantage in trade. This primarily took the form of increased rice production in southern Korea and the export of rice from the colony to the metropolis in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s. Two distinct phases of peasant protest existed in preliberation Korea. They were, as Shin Gi-Wook (1996) notes, land-tenant disputes (1920–1932, 1932–1945) and the Red Peasant Union movement (1930–1939).

The colonial legacy of peasant protests, in short, was crucial in determining the rural political environment in Korea after World War II. It was responsible for agrarian reform in the South and for a somewhat more radical revolution in the North (Shin, 1996: 196). As Shin notes, “the constant challenge of landlords by tenants in the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for dissolution of the landlord class, and the 1930s red peasant union movements produced many key leaders” who were subsequently active in the post–World War II era (1996: 143).

The landlords and the landed gentry were destroyed by the land reform introduced into South Korea in 1949 and the subsequent devastating effects of the Korean War. Some Korean landlords were induced, in the face of increasing tenancy-related disputes and the peasant protest movement, to divert capital from land to industry in preliberation Korea. Some of the former landlords were also able to switch from agrarian into commercial and business entrepreneurship, following the 1949 land reform. They became the new social class of capitalists in the post-Korean War years (Eckert et al., 1990).

The origins of the Korean working-class formation can be traced back to the colonial era, when Korea was made an integral part of the Japanese imperial scheme of building an empire in Northeast Asia through industrial mobilization. Korea provided a stepping stone to the Japanese expansion into Manchuria in the early 1930s and into northern China following the start of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937. A large-scale rural exodus took place in colonial Korea with a significant segment of the rural population leaving villages in search of nonagricultural employment elsewhere in Korea and even overseas in Manchuria and Japan. A large number of rural farmers in the southern provinces moved north to the central provinces near Seoul and to the northern provinces.

Many of the migrant farmers flowed mainly into the industrial centers of big cities like Seoul, Pusan, Pyongyang, and Hungnam (S. Park, 1999: 132–133). Beginning in the early 1930s, industrial growth in colonial Korea changed the labor structure drastically. The change in employment from the agricultural sector to the nonagricultural sector was rapidly shifting, from 80.6 percent employed in agriculture in 1930, to 74.8 percent in 1940, to 71 percent in 1945. This shift was due to a rural exodus with two destinations: one domestic and the other foreign. Within Korea, the shift concentrated on factory, mining, and construction work sites in the fast-rising industrial centers near the major cities of Seoul, Inchon, Pusan, Pyongyang, Chinanpo, Hungnam, and Chongjin.

This led to rapid urbanization from 7 percent of the total population in 1935 to 13.2 percent by 1944. The Korean rural exodus and migration also extended to a larger labor market in Manchuria and Japan. From 1930 to 1940, according to one study, approximately 1.3 million workers found industrial employment abroad: 700,000 in Japan and 600,000 in Manchuria, which often paid more than the Korean labor market (S. Park, 1999: 135). As part of imperial Japan’s war-time plan of forced labor mobilization, another 1 million Korean workers were compulsorily mobilized after 1939: 720,000 for industrial labor and 240,000 as civilian personnel in the Japanese military.

The emergence of entrepreneurs and industrialists in Korean society has colonia...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction Ideas Matter in Korean Politics
• 1 Historical Context
• 2 Policy Patterns and Processes
• 3 Future Prospects
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• List of Contributors