Democracy: Beyond Asian Values
The phrase “miracle on the Han River” describes the feverish economic development that took place in South Korea from the 1960s onwards, yet this country has achieved two miracles. The second is the political transformation that occurred in the past quarter-century. In a very short time, South Korea has graduated from military dictatorship to the twentieth most democratic country in the world, and the most democratic in Asia, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Overshadowed by the North Korean problem, Chinese growth, and Japan’s cultural power, South Korea never gets the credit it deserves. However, in a political sense, this country is becoming a model for Asia. Around the region, there are countries with successful economies but authoritarian politics, such as Singapore and China. Only Japan presents a serious challenge to South Korea in terms of democratic development, but Japan’s free and fair elections belie a rigid, bureaucratic system in which genuine change is very difficult to achieve.
During the 1990s, a debate took place over so-called Asian values, in which Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew argued that democracy is a Western concept not suited to Asian people, who have grown up in Confucian-influenced, authoritarian cultures. The idea of Asian values has its origin in Lee’s Singapore and Mahatir Mohamad’s Malaysia, where it was seen as an approach that could unite the ethnic Chinese and the Muslim Malays as well as justify continued one-party rule. One of their opponents in the debate was Kim Dae-jung, the long-time democratization campaigner and eventual president of South Korea, who lost no time in replying that “culture is not our destiny. Democracy is.”
Given the general lack of democracy in Asia, it is appropriate to ask why South Korea has embraced democracy so strongly. A number of factors in the Korean character and Korean history may provide the explanation. Among them are Koreans’ desire for education; the creation of the Korean Hangul alphabet, which dramatically improved literacy, giving ordinary people the opportunity to express themselves; and the country’s deep tradition of revolt and protest.
Education and Literacy
Following the creation of South Korea, there was a great push towards expanding education for all. In 1945, only 5 percent of people had graduated with secondary school or higher-level qualifications; by the early 1990s, this figure stood at above 90 percent. Successive governments saw education as key to national development and pursued a policy of educational egalitarianism, dramatically increasing the number of schools throughout the country. Parents were only too happy to sign on. Korean society is in some ways very elitist, with well-established “old-boy” networks that run business and politics. However, it also despises ignorance and prizes literacy and basic knowledge among the general population.
Respect for learning goes back to Confucianism, of course, but literacy in Korea has a founding hero. In the early Joseon period, King Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450) mandated the creation of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, thereby committing one of the most empowering acts of egalitarianism in Korean history. Sejong is considered the greatest Korean ruler and was a man of many achievements, but none was more significant than this.
Foreign visitors are always surprised by how easy it is to learn to read Korean words. The reason for this is that Sejong deliberately made it so. Prior to Hangul, Koreans used Chinese characters (hanja), which were so complex and numerous that only the yangban, who lived a “gentleman-scholar” existence on the back of peasant labor, had the opportunity to properly learn them. Sejong, against the wishes of many of the elite, wanted to create a writing system that enabled ordinary people to become literate. The characters his scholars came up with were so straightforward that it was said at the time, “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.”
Hangul was such a powerful tool that a subsequent king, Yeonsangun, tried to ban its use when propaganda posters against his rule began to appear in the invented script. Crucially, he couldn’t; the cat was already out of the bag. Later on, the use of Hangul to produce religious texts helped spread Christianity, which proclaimed that all were equal in the eyes of God—unlike Confucianism, which required everyone to know their rightful place. Nowadays, the level of illiteracy in Korea is virtually zero. Unlike many other places in the world, all people with an interest in politics have the ability to communicate their views. They also benefit from access to an open educational system that can provide them with knowledge of the fundamentals of civics as well as political theory, political history, and public administration, for instance.
Culture of Protest
Korea has a vibrant tradition of protest. Sometimes this can go too far, as when farmers in the town of Icheon, protesting against the location of a military base in their area, ripped the limbs off a live pig and beheaded it outside the Ministry of Defense in May 2007. Such excesses aside, it remains true that people in Korea express their views more openly, more noisily, and in greater number, than in most other Asian countries. Park Won-soon, the mayor of Seoul, a former human rights lawyer, and the founder of Beautiful Store (Areumdaun Gagye), Korea’s first chain of charity thrift shops, proudly points out that, in years gone by, scholars angry with the king would throw caution to the wind and engage in “ax protests,” so named because taking part in one was a guaranteed way to have one’s head removed with said implement. “And if you look at Chinese protestors after Tiananmen Square,” he notes, “they just gave up... Korean democracy campaigners kept on going” until the military government threw in the towel.
The American writer P. J. O’Rourke visited Korea in 1987 to report on the democratization movement. After witnessing various protests first hand, he expressed shock at the sheer persistence and resilience of Korean protestors. In his essay, “Seoul Brothers,” he writes that during the Guro-gu district office building riot, police “were firing salvos of gas grenades, twenty at a time, into the fifth floor windows... That the students could even stand in this maelstrom was a testament of Korean-ness. But they were not only standing; they were fighting like sons of bitches.”
Even today, this tradition is as strong as ever. Though South Koreans have relatively much less to complain about, you can go to Gwanghwamun or Yeouido (the center of government and the parliament, respectively) now and see people protesting against or advocating for just about anything. From trade unionists to anti–North Korea army veterans, they will be out in force, holding banners, shouting, and singing oddly cheerful songs. Though many people complain about this culture of protest, South Korea’s young democracy benefits from having citizens who make whoever is in government realize that they cannot act with impunity.
The Rebels of Later Joseon
The stereoptypical characterization of Joseon dynasty Korea is as “the land of the morning calm.” By the nineteenth century, it was anything but. Persistent infighting between various powerful families and palace insiders rendered Korea restive and vulnerable. The state grew weak and divided, and ordinary citizens were wearying of the rigors of Confucian hierarchy. While Europe was undergoing its own period of revolutionary changes, Korea contended with a series of peasant uprisings, brought on by the excessive taxation of poor farmers and popular rejection the yangban class’s entitlement to live well off peasant labor.
As early as 1811, Hong Gyeong-nae, a poor man from Pyeongan Province (in today’s North Korea) believed to have been either a “fallen yangban” or a common soldier, gathered a peasant army and took control of much of the north of the country. The Joseon forces were not able to kill him and put down his revolt until April of the following year, by which time he had inspired similar movements in other areas of the country. In 1862, farmers led by a scholar named Yu Gye-chun from Jinju, Gyeongsang Province, rebelled in response to the rule of Baek Nak-shin, the military commander who held jurisdiction over their region. Baek had stolen farmers’ incomes with the help of corrupt civil servants. The rebels burned government buildings to the ground and killed local officials. The authorities in Seoul were forced to make reforms to military, land, and grain policy, to reduce the fraud by local civil servants that so angered the peasantry.
Towards the end of the century, similar small-scale rebellions occurred throughout the country, in the provinces of Jeolla, Gyeongsang, Jeju, Hamgyeong, and Pyeongan. Then, in 1894, came the Donghak Peasant Revolution. Donghak means “Eastern learning,” and was a movement that began in the 1860s as a kind of indigenous semi-religion preached by Choi Je-woo. Choi promulgated a mixture of Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, combined with what today might be termed democratic socialism; he advocated the equality of all human beings, democracy, and human rights. Unlike socialism in Europe though, it was not a matter of political theory. Choi believed in a god, or state of perfection, but it was one that exists within all people rather than in some unearthly realm. Since all humans possessed this, all men and women were equal, whether farmer or yangban. Choi was also extremely nationalistic and anti-foreign. He had become alarmed with the spread of Christianity in Asia, and wanted to restrict outside influence to stop this Western religion from taking over Korea.
Choi’s philosophy was not necessarily consistent, but his movement was popular among farmers, who saw him as offering a message of hope. Though Choi was apprehended and executed in 1864, Donghak lived on as an underground movement through the efforts of his successor, Choi Si-hyeong. By 1892, its followers had grouped themselves into a guerrilla army, and its fighters began to conduct raids on traders, landlords, government officials, and foreigners, seizing their assets and distributing them to the poor.
Throughout the first half of 1894, this force, comprised mostly of farmers, grew in power. By May, Donghak fighters had taken control of Jeonju, the capital of the historically rebellious Jeolla Province in the southwest of the country, provoked initially by the actions of a corrupt local official. They also had designs on Seoul, overrunning garrisons on the road to the capital and setting as one of their main objectives to “march to Seoul and clean the government.”
One faction of the Joseon government appealed to China for help, since the government itself was too weak to handle the rebels. The three thousand troops sent by Qing authorities were enough to halt the Donghak army’s progress and bring about a ceasefire and negotiations, but this Chinese incursion angered the Japanese, who were already asserting their influence in Korea with the intention of eventual annexation. Japan sent 8,000 troops to Korea in retaliation, seized the royal palace, and replaced top government officials with pro-Japanese Koreans. The resulting standoff between China and Japan in Korea was a major cause of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.
By October 1894, the Donghak army again began to march northwards from its base in Jeolla towards Seoul and was met at Ugeumchi, near the city of Gongju (around 80 miles from the capital), by Japanese troops. The foreign force had cannons, giving them a great advantage over Donghak fighters, who possessed swords, bows and arrows, and occasionally, muskets. By November 10, 1894, the Donghak forces had suffered a resounding defeat.
The Donghak army had not fought entirely in vain, though. The government, which had by then fallen under Japanese influence, began instituting the Gabo Reforms (1894–1896), which ended the class system, mandated the appointment of government officials on the basis of merit alone, and allowed widows to remarry, among other reforms. The extent to which Donghak influenced these reforms is a matter of debate but that it had some impact is certain.
In 1905, under the direction of its third leader, Son Byeong-hui—who would later become a hero of the Korean people for his involvement in the March 1, 1919, declaration of independence from Japan—Donghak evolved into a proper religion, called Cheondogyo. Cheondogyo is even more philosophically diverse than Donghak, for it is influenced by Christianity on top of Donghak’s traditional influences. At its heart, though, is the fundamental belief that all human beings are equal. Cheondogyo still exists today and is believed to have around one million adherents. The story of Korean religion is one of syncretism, and Cheondogyo is probably the most syncretic of all religions practiced in Korea.
Early South Korea
With the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945, Korea recovered its independence. However, by 1948, it also found itself divided, into a pro-Soviet Union north and a pro-U.S. south. The regimes that coalesced in both were authoritarian but different in important ways. In the North, Kim Il-sung became a dictator in all senses, aided by Joseph Stalin. In the South, which was under U.S. military administration until 1948, democratic institutions were established and elections were held, and the first authoritarian South Korean presidents had to maintain the trappings of democracy. Even in the darkest days of South Korean dictatorship, there were always strong, identifiable opposition figures. Democracy-era presidents Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung were themselves former opposition leaders. In North Korea, by contrast, no dissent has ever been tolerated, and no figure outside of the Kim family has been allowed to build a support base.
Syngman Rhee, a descendent of the royal Yi clan, had been a leader of the provisional government of Korea based in Shanghai, from 1919 to 1925. In the immediate postwar period, he was the most powerful of a number of figures competing to lead the South. As a Harvard graduate who wrote his name in the Western manner (family name last, rather than first) and who detested Communism, he attracted the support of the U.S. military administration. He won a seat as a member of parliament in elections held under UN supervision in May of that year. Parliament in turn elected him first president of the new republic. On August 15, Rhee formally assumed executive powers from the U.S. military in a handover ceremony.
The parliament elected in 1948 drafted and ratified a new constitution, which combined the American system (including the separation of executive and legislative powers, an independent judiciary, and the vesting of the executive power in a president, albeit a president elected by parliament rather than through direct elections) with a unicameral legislature, which featured a cabinet and prime minister. The legislature, the National Assembly, was to be elected by the people, who enjoyed universal suffrage. This system was new to Koreans: they had grown up under either absolute monarchy, or rule by Japanese governor-generals. However, the initial openness of the period and the gap left by the pullout of Japan resulted in a political awakening. By 1947, ahead of elections, there were more than 340 registered political parties.
Nevertheless, President Rhee managed to subvert South Korea’s untested democratic system and eventually rule as a de facto dictator. His National Security Law of 1948 made praise for Communism or North Korea illegal and was used to execute, imprison, or simply deter, political opponents. By 1949, 30,000 people had been arrested under the new law. North Korea’s decision to invade the South on June 25, 1950, which precipitated the Korean War of 1950–1953, firmly entrenched anti-Communism as a defining ideology of South Korea. Rhee’s forces also indiscriminately massacred thousands of people on Jeju island, including women and children, in the name of anti-Communism. Both Rhee and later presidents like Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan were able to use the threat of Communism as a justification for clamping down on political opponents.
In 1952, President Rhee lost the support of parliament over his proposal to have the president elected by popular vote rather than by parliament. Members voted 143 to 19 to block his move, and with the end of his four-year term approaching, Rhee’s days as leader looked numbered. He responded by declaring martial law and threatening to execute those who did not support him. Unsurprisingly, his proposal then passed. He used bullying tactics again in 1954 to remove the limit on the number of terms a president could serve, effectively allowing him to be president for life.
Throughout the 1950s, President Rhee’s Liberal Party was able to win successive parliamentary elections through vote buying and the use of hired thugs to coerce voters. This activity was funded by the proceeds of corruption. Any businessman hoping to prosper had to pay off the party. Having navigated the confusion of the immediate post-colonial period as well as the Korean War, the president firmly entrenched his autocratic rule. Yet the parliamentary system—and the need to avoid alienating the United States, which provided most of the South Korean government’s budget in the form of aid—forced him to play the part of a quasi-democrat, allowing opposition, albeit in small doses.
Some of Rhee’s opponents were to pay the ultimate price. In 1949, former presidential candidate Kim Gu—a man considered a hero for his long opposition to Japanese rule—was assassinated by military officer Ahn Doo-hee. Ahn stated in court that he acted alone, but the fact that he only served one year in jail and rejoined the army after his release, later becoming a colonel, suggests rather strongly that he acted on orders from above. It is suspected that the killing was ordered by Kim Chang-ryong, President Rhee’s chief enforcer.
Cho Bong-am, Rhee’s rival in the mid- and late 1950s, was another victim. Though Rhee needed opponents in order to maintain the pretense of being a democratic politician, Cho had become too popular: he received 30 percent of votes cast in the 1956 presidential election on a platform reminiscent of European-style social democracy. Put on trial in 1958 for allegedly being in league with North Korea, he was acquitted but, following governmental pressure on the judiciary, was retried and found guilty, then executed in July 1959.
Democracy Denied: The April Revolution and Park Chung-hee
President Rhee’s rule was not to last much longer. Following the obvious vote rigging of the March 1960 presidential election, students began to protest. After a demonstration in the southern city of Masan, a young protestor named Kim Ju-yeol was found dead, his head split open by a tear gas canister. This event shocked the nation and served as the spark for the April Revolution: on April 19, students marched from Korea University to Cheong Wa Dae, the presidential mansion. Soldiers opened fire, killing two hundred of them. The ranks of protestors grew in response, and by April 25, the police and military began disobeying orders to shoot. Rhee fled to Hawaii, where he died five years later.
The era of dictatorship was not over, though. There followed a brief flirtation with democracy under the elected government of Prime Minister Chang Myon, but in May 1961, General Park Chung-hee took power via a coup. General Park, like President Rhee, was subject to American restrictions: the Kennedy administration pressured him to renounce his military role and become a civilian leader. This he did, and in 1963 he won his first presidential election. This was believed to have been a reasonably fair vote, and due to his highly successful economic policies, Park was able to narrowly win another in 1967.
In 1969, President Park managed to push through a constitutional amendment to allow himself to serve a third term. By this point, however, his popularity was declining, and in the 1971 election, he was able to defeat rival Kim Dae-jung by a margin of only 8 percent, 53 to 45 percent, with the aid of vote fraud. No doubt fearful of losing control, he decided to suspend the constitution, dissolve parliament, and declare martial law in October 1972. He promulgated a new constitution, the so-called Yushin Constitution, which gave the president theoretically unlimited six-year terms; replaced presidential elections with an electoral college fixed in his favor; and awarded the president the power to appoint one-third of members of parliament, which allowed him to virtually guarantee a majority in the assembly. These reforms were approved via a rigged public referendum.
In response to this, a protest movement began to build, particularly among students at the elite Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei Universities. According to former protestor and current mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, anti-regime students formed cells or “under-circles,” which used elaborate code-word systems to communicate with similar groups in order to arrange flash protests in which they would make their point and beat a hasty retreat.
Between 1974 and 1975, President Park issued a series of extremely repressive decrees that targeted students in particular. Criticizing the Yushin Constitution was made illegal; the army was given the power to enter universities; and political activity by students was banned. Those found to be involved in political activity—like Park Won-soon—were thrown in jail and stripped of their university places. Those who attended Korean universities or worked on Korean campuses at the time will talk of becoming accustomed to the smell of tear gas or the sight of tanks by the university gates.
Unlike in the case of President Rhee, it was not students who brought down President Park. Park was shot at a private drinking session by trusted comrade and former military academy classmate Kim Jae-gyu, the head of the Korean equivalent of the CIA, on October 26, 1979. There is some debate as to whether Kim had planned this act or not. Some claim it was a spur-of-the-moment reaction to criticism from Park and chief presidential bodyguard Cha Ji-cheol over his lack of willingness to crack down on protestors. Others claim that it was a premeditated act with the intention of bringing an end to dictatorship in South Korea. In 2011, a tape recording of a conversation between Kim and a lawyer at a military prison after his arrest came to light; the recording appeared to confirm that Kim had been planning the assassination for some time, for he had been disillusioned with President Park ever since the Yushin Constitution had been installed.
From Dictatorship to Democracy
In testimony during the trial that saw him sentenced to death, Kim stated that he shot Park “for the democracy of this country.” If instituting democracy was his intention, he would have been disappointed with what came next. Following the assassination of Park Chung-hee, Prime Minister Choi Kyu-ha became acting president. However, Chun Doo-hwan, an ambitious and opportunistic army officer, maneuvered himself into a position of de facto command. He forced the most senior officers of the Korean CIA to report to him twice daily, effectively putting himself in control of intelligence, and then on December 12, 1979, with the aid of Hanahoe, a secret group of elite officers that he led, he began putting into place a coup. He arrested the army’s chief of staff without President Choi’s approval. In early 1980, he had himself promoted to lieutenant general, and formally took over the Korean CIA. He declared martial law in May and dissolved parliament in June, effectively becoming leader of the country in the process. Choi resigned, and Chun, via the electoral-college method, had himself declared president on September 1. As president, he replaced Park’s constitution with a new one, which, although less authoritarian, still gave him broad powers.
Lacking any legitimacy, Chun Doo-hwan maintained his rule initially through violence. In May 1980, he declared martial law. Citizens of Gwangju, the largest city in Jeolla Province, revolted, and he responded by sending in the army and killing hundreds. Later, his attempts at control were more subtle. Through the “3S policy”—the s’s relating to “sex, screen, and sports”—he reduced the censorship of sexual content in films, introduced nationwide color TV broadcasts, and attempted to focus the nation’s attention on the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Unlike Park Chung-hee, he was extremely corrupt, and he enriched himself to the tune of many hundreds of millions of dollars. For the Gwangju massacre and his unrivaled graft, he stands out as the president people love to hate. During the course of interviews, one businessman who described Park Chung-hee as “the best leader we ever had” referred to Chun simply as “that bastard.”
Parliamentary elections in 1985 saw Chun’s party receive only 35 percent of the vote but claim a majority of seats. The blatant electoral fraud increased demands for genuine democracy, but it became apparent that Chun, who had constitutionally given himself just one presidential term of seven years, wanted to hand over power to a chosen successor, fellow Hanahoe member, Roh Tae-woo, rather than hold a fair presidential election in 1987. During this period, opposition to President Chun’s rule widened. Chun could handle continuing protests by university students, but, when the students were joined by church members and ordinary workers, the tide started to turn.
In May 1987, it was revealed that Park Jong-chul, a student activist, had been tortured to death four months previously. This revelation inflamed public sentiment, and by June, demonstrations against Chun’s rule were attracting millions of people. On June 19, the president issued orders to mobilize the army but apparently changed his mind three hours later. On the 29th, his protégé Roh Tae-woo made the historic declaration that free and fair elections, and a new constitution, would be instituted. As Park Won-soon states, “the best thing they [Chun and Roh] ever did was to know when their time was up.” The promise of democracy was finally to be realized.
A Happy Ending
Anticlimactically, the winner of the presidential election of December 1987 was Roh Tae-woo, Chun Doo-hwan’s friend and military comrade. Long-time democracy campaigners Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam both ran, splitting the pro-reform vote with 27 and 28 percent respectively, enabling Roh to triumph with just 36 percent. It was a fair vote, with no electoral college or other manipulation: Roh’s win was simply a reflection of the choice of the people between three main candidates. Roh himself respected the new system during his period in office, and when Kim Young-sam won in December 1992, power was handed over without incident. Five years later, when Kim Dae-jung won, the transfer from one civilian president to another was seen as a defining moment by former activists. This precedent has remained in place, with all subsequent transfers of power taking place smoothly, and all sides respecting the process.
Showing just how far democracy had come, both Roh and Chun Doo-hwan were convicted of treason, mutiny, and corruption in August 1996. They were fined hundreds of millions of dollars, and sentenced to death. Following consultation between President Kim Young-sam and by-then president-elect Kim Dae-jung in December 1997, both military men were pardoned as a gesture of national unity. Chun and Roh are living out their remaining days in heavily guarded seclusion, close by each other in the Yeonhee-dong area of Seoul. Ironically, they live just a short distance from the place chosen by Kim Dae-jung—the man whom Chun once sentenced to death—as the site of his retirement home in nearby Donggyo-dong. The idea of Kim Dae-jung having been their neighbor seems strange, but it is somehow fitting for the era of peaceful politics that he helped to usher in.