Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era, 1961-1979

Development, Political Thought, Democracy, and Cultural Influence

Hyung-A Kim,Clark W. Sorensen

• Editorial: University of Washington Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780295801797
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia coreana

The Republic of Korea achieved a double revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. In just over three decades, South Korea transformed itself from an underdeveloped, agrarian country into an affluent, industrialized one. At the same time, democracy replaced a long series of military authoritarian regimes. These historic changes began under President Park Chung Hee, who seized power through a military coup in 1961 and ruled South Korea until his assassination on October 26, 1979. While the state's dominant role in South Korea's rapid industrialization is widely accepted, the degree to which Park was personally responsible for changing the national character remains hotly debated. This book examines the rationale and ideals behind Park's philosophy of national development in order to evaluate the degree to which the national character and moral values were reconstructed.

PART ONE—Development

1

Heavy and Chemical Industrialization, 1973–1979: South Korea’s Homeland Security Measures

HYUNG-A KIM

The goals of developing an “independent economy” (charip kyŏngje) in the 1960s and an “independent defense” (chaju kukpang) in the 1970s were at the core of the political economy of the Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏnghŭi) era. These two phases of South Korea’s development are explained predominantly in terms of the impact of the cold war, particularly the change in U.S. foreign policy in the Northeast Asian region that led to the historic East-West détente when U.S. President Richard Nixon visited China in February 1972. What is not fully explained is South Korea’s response under President Park to national security as a countermeasure to North Korea’s intensified armed attacks on the South on the one hand, and U.S. reduction of troops in South Korea on the other.¹

In the aftermath of the North Korean commando attempt to assassinate Park in January 1968,² an unequivocal act of terrorism in today’s terms, Park sought to build weapons factories in order to arm a reserve force of 2.5 million, which he founded as the Homeland Guard (Hyangt’o Yebigun) on April 1, 1968. Park’s plan to build a defense industry in fact turned into the South Korean government’s Military Modernization Program when the United States initiated the normalization of relations with China. By then, Park’s confidence in the U.S. security commitment to the Korean peninsula had reduced to the extent that he became determined to build South Korea’s own defense posture by producing military weapons in response to North Korean armed aggression.

Park’s top development priority, in other words, was national security, especially through the implementation of the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization (HCI) Plan, officially declared on January 12, 1973. To carry out this forced-draft industrial revolution, Park had already introduced the controversial Yusin (Restoration) political reforms on October 17, 1972. A narrow core of power, a triumvirate of Park himself and two of his secretaries in the Blue House, Senior Economic Secretary O Wŏnch’ŏl (1971–79) and Chief of Staff Kim Chŏngnyŏm (1969–78), subsequently implemented the HCI Plan. In this context, the South Korean model of rapid industrialization, or what was dubbed “compressed modernization,” (apch’uk chŏk kundaehwa) during the Park era consisted of Park’s own ideas and plan for industrialization rather than some U.S.-inspired economic theory. Similarly, South Korea’s HCI Plan was inseparable from Park’s authoritarian Yusin reforms because the HCI Policy itself was designed and implemented within the Yusin system, like a double-edged sword.

With the power of the Yusin Constitution, Park imposed almost monolithic control over all governmental and non-governmental institutions: the army, private big business (chaebŏl), unions, workers, students, and the young and old without exception. Thus political oppression became the norm under the Yusin system (1972–80) while South Korea’s top-down military modernization through the HCI Program was in full gear, even at the risk of breaking up relations with the United States. Park’s pursuit of his “independent defense” policy, however, did not mean that South Korea found its own line of national security outside the ROK-U.S. alliance. To the contrary, Park and his key advisors, especially his two HCI triumvirs, had no illusions about the importance of the ROK-U.S. alliance to South Korea’s security. In this regard, their attitude toward the United States was cunningly realistic in the sense that they were eager to secure a U.S. security commitment to South Korea without compromising the ROK’s own national interest, particularly political and economic independence. Nevertheless, ROK-U.S. relations deteriorated to their worst when in December 1976 the U.S. learned about South Korea’s clandestine nuclear weapons and missile development program, officially unveiled as the Korean Nuclear Fuels Development Corporation (Han’guk Haegyŏllyo Kaebal Kongdan, KNFDC).³ This clandestine program, guarded especially against U.S. interference, was an important cause of the deterioration of relations with the United States. Ironically, President Jimmy Carter’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea further drove Park’s determination to build South Korea’s own solution for national security. In this light, the aspect of military modernization within the framework of HCI has not been sufficiently analyzed despite its profound impact on South Korea’s national defense capability building, not to mention economic modernization.

This chapter examines how South Korea’s defense industry development stood at the core of the HCI Program, and how that program provided the fundamental infrastructure for South Korea’s homeland security. I will first trace the connection between Park’s pursuit of defense industry construction and the HCI Program in South Korea, and then analyze Park’s Military Modernization Program, with particular attention to how Park and his technocrat advisers sought to overcome U.S. policymakers’ unilateralism and to exploit inconsistencies in the American policy of troop withdrawal from South Korea. With the view that national security essentially means the security of the state, especially within the “division system” of the Korean peninsula,⁴ this chapter argues that HCI was Park’s second phase of industrial revolution to build South Korea’s security posture and, as such, it became one of the most visible legacies of the Park era, defining the character of today’s South Korea as an industrialized nation.

PARK’S PLAN FOR A DEFENSE INDUSTRY

Park’s pursuit of constructing South Korea’s defense industry began in 1968 after he established the ROK Homeland Guard, following the North Korean attempt to assassinate Park at the Blue House presidential residence on January 21. A total of twenty-three South Korean soldiers were killed and fifty-two injured in this attack, while twenty-seven North Korean commandos were killed and one North Korean officer, Kim Sinjo, was captured. Park called for immediate retaliation and demanded U.S. support, which was flatly refused.⁵ The tension between the United States and South Korea over this incident quickly escalated when, on January 23, the North Koreans captured the U.S. military spy ship, Pueblo, and the U.S. decided not to retaliate against North Korea but instead unilaterally negotiated with North Korea for the eighty-one captured American crewmates. Park launched a raft of protests against the American containment policy towards North Korean terrorism, while simultaneously criticizing the United States for unilateralism in their negotiations with North Korea on the Pueblo incident.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal envoy, Cyrus B. Vance, flew to Seoul on February 12, 1968, to offer appeasement to Park, including financial support for the construction of a munitions factory to manufacture M-16 rifles, plus an extra $100 million in military aid. In spite of this offering, which South Korea accepted, Park’s doubts about the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea increased. In fact, just four days before Vance’s arrival in Seoul, Park publicly announced that he would create the South Korean Homeland Guard consisting of 2.5 million reserves. By then, the friendly alliance between the Johnson administration and the Park government had effectively ended as Park had cancelled his commitment to deploy South Korea’s Third “Light Division” to Vietnam,⁶ to which he had previously agreed with President Johnson in late December 1967 while visiting Canberra, Australia.⁷ This cancellation was far too expensive for Park to have taken lightly because in return for South Korea’s additional deployment, President Johnson, in a personal letter to Park, had promised hefty rewards, which included a mixture of military hardware, a special program to strengthen the ROK national police, and assistance in the construction of a modern highway between Seoul and Pusan, among other gifts.⁸

Park seemed to have already made up his mind that the United States had become less reliable in ensuring ROK’s security against North Korean armed attacks. By this time Park had, in fact, already anticipated the U.S. intention to withdraw its forces from Vietnam, following his meeting with President Johnson in Honolulu in April 1968.⁹ Not only did Park publicly declare a zero-tolerance policy against the North by declaring that “there is a limit to [our] patience and self-restraint,”¹⁰ but he also campaigned to build ROK’s “self-reliant” defense posture, especially by mobilizing the South Korean Homeland Guard. Park saw that the future of South Korea’s economic prosperity and security depended on the strength of its national security posture, and thus he was determined to arm every member of the Homeland Guard with “Korean-made” weapons, which they could use to guard their own homes, villages, towns, and cities. Park’s approach to national security, however, ironically resembled that of Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” of North Korea, who commanded a North Korean National Guard of almost 1.2 million workers and peasants, including the Red Young Guards with 700,000 members. Just as Kim called his National Guard a “flawless defense system,” Park defined the South Korean Homeland Guard as “the soldiers of homeland security who would work while fighting and also fight while working.”¹¹

Park’s skepticism about the U.S. containment policy on the Korean peninsula, as well as in Asia, turned out to be well founded. In July 1969, President Richard Nixon (1969–74) not only declared the new U.S. foreign policy, the Nixon Doctrine on Far East Asia, but also officially announced in July the same year the withdrawal of the Seventh Infantry Division’s 20,000 troops.¹² The U.S. made these decisions less than a month after North Korea had abducted a South Korean navy patrol boat on the west coast of the peninsula, which was followed by further North Korean terrorism—detonating a bomb at the main gate of the National Cemetery in an attempt to assassinate government members and officials, including President Park, who had been scheduled to attend the twentieth anniversary of the Korean War on June 25, 1970.

This string of North Korean provocations drove Park to order Kim Hangyŏl, deputy prime minister and minister of the Economic Planning Board (EPB, Kyŏngje Kihoegwŏn), to build what was initially known as the “Four Great Core Factories” (sa taehaek kongjang), comprised of cast iron, steel, heavy machinery, and shipbuilding plants.¹³ Needless to say, Park’s aim was to build the basic material factories necessary for producing weapons with which to arm the Homeland Guard of 2.5 million reserve soldiers. He also created the Agency for Defense Development (ADD, Kukpang Kwahak Yŏn’guso) in August the same year, which soon became the leading agency governing the production of Korean-made weapons. Park’s attempt to build the Four Great Core Factories, however, became bogged down with a lack of funds. Despite more than fifteen months of desperate searching for foreign loans from Japan and several European countries, Kim Hangyŏl’s EPB utterly failed to raise the necessary funds because the United States, with its suspicions about Park’s intent behind the construction of these four key factories, prevented South Korea from obtaining loans from these countries. When the EPB reported to Park about its failure to raise the funds at the cabinet meeting on November 10, 1971, he is known to have become exceedingly frustrated, demanding that Chief of Staff Kim Chŏngnyŏm find a solution. This desperate situation ironically led to a most extraordinary development when O Wŏnch’ŏl, then assistant vice minister in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) and member of the ROK defense industry’s “Four-Member Committee,”¹⁴ suggested to Kim Chŏngnyŏm his idea for solving this problem.¹⁵ Kim was so impressed with O’s idea that he, with O, instantly met with Park in Park’s study.

O’s idea was that South Korea could immediately manufacture weapons without spending extra funds by mobilizing South Korea’s existing resources and technological capability, available particularly among big business, the chaebŏl. O suggested that South Korea should develop independent defense industries by restructuring South Korea’s industries within the framework of heavy and chemical industrial development. O’s idea, which convinced both Park and Kim, was based on the engineering principle that, “all weapons can be disassembled into parts, and these parts can be separately produced, as long as they are manufactured in accordance with a plan and within strict specifications.”¹⁶ At this meeting, Park approved a five-point directive, which outlined the framework for the development of South Korea’s defense industry based on the existing production system of private chaebŏl. The building of Korean-made weapons factories to arm 2.5 million reserve soldiers was, of course, just one of many projects that were decided at this extraordinary meeting between Park, Kim, and O on that day.

Another extraordinary development that came out of this meeting was the appointment of O on the following day, November 11, 1971, as head of the newly created Second Economic Secretariat (SES; Kyŏngje Che-2 Pisŏsil) at the Blue House (Ch’ŏngwadae). O’s key responsibility of being in charge of defense industry development, however, was deliberately undisclosed for security reasons. Instead, his responsibility was officially stated to be the development of heavy and chemical industries. This development was the beginning of what was to become President Park’s HCI triumvirate consisting of himself, O Wŏnchŏl, and Kim Chŏngnyŏm.

Park and his HCI Triumvirs

Born to an impoverished tenant farming family in North Kyŏngsang Province on November 14, 1917, Park Chung Hee began his career as a primary school teacher before he miraculously transformed himself into an officer in the 8^th Corps of the Japanese Kwantung Army after graduation at the Manchukuo Military Academy (1942) and the Japanese Military Academy in Tokyo (1944). When Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 15, 1945, Park, at the age of twenty-nine, became a second lieutenant in the South Korean army, but in February 1949 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for his communist activities that implicated him in the Yŏsu Rebellion. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 brought Park a second chance by his being reinstated in the ROK ar...