When one looks back at the various Park regimes—the military junta (Supreme Council for National Reconstruction 1961–3), the semi-democratic Third Republic1 (1963–72), and the authoritarian Yusin Republic2 (1972–9)—from our vantage point in the early twenty-first century, the various periods tend to blur together. One tends to think of Five-Year Plans, the turn to export orientation with labor-intensive light industrialization, the development of vocational high schools, or perhaps the toxic combination of the Yusin Constitution, labor repression, and the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization Program of the 1970s. As we all know, South Korea emerged into the eighties as an urban industrial economy, participating more and more in international chains of production and transfers of capital and technology. Educated, urban residents demanded, and eventually got (though not during the lifetime of President Park) democratic reforms, the right to travel, and a relatively free press, so as to build a vibrant, modern, and, even to an extent, a cosmopolitan society.
Such “collective memories” of the Park regime are popular today in certain sectors of Korean society,3 but these memories tend to be anachronistic and teleological. They are teleological of course, because they interpret the past in terms of its “purpose” in creating the present. These memories are anachronistic because they neither correspond to the consciousness of Park and his associates during the sixties and seventies when they were active, nor to the consciousness of most Koreans during those times. The basic problem is that these collective memories generally ignore the rural sector, and the importance of the rural sector in the thinking of Park and the economic and social planners of his time.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE RURAL SECTOR TO PARK
Today the rural sector in South Korea contributes a bare 4 percent of GDP, and rural workers are less than 14 percent of the workforce.4 Park and his planners, of course, had looked forward to the day when the Republic of Korea would be an industrial society. (This is hardly unique to Park’s era: even Yi Kwangsu in 1916 could imagine Korea becoming industrial and commercial).5 The reality of the 1960s and 1970s, however, was that South Korea was still largely a rural country with most labor in the agricultural sector. At the time of the May 16, 1961 coup that brought Park to power, South Korea’s population was 56.5 percent rural. This rural population would continue to grow for almost a decade to peak in 1968 at 15.9 million people. The rural population began to decline rapidly after that, but as late as 1975 nearly two in five South Korean residents were still rural, and there were more agricultural than industrial workers in South Korea.
For most of the Park regime, then, the rural agricultural sector absorbed the largest portion of the South Korean labor force, and supported the largest number of families. Being able to provide economic stability, even prosperity, to this huge peasant sector6 was a critical need for a developmental state like South Korea under Park because the authoritarian regime could prove its legitimacy only through the ability to promote economic growth and well-being. Park’s electoral support, moreover, continued to be heavily dependent on the rural sector until the end of his life. During the Third Republic (1963–72), when the president was directly elected, Park was able to win handily in 1963 and 1967 but barely squeaked by against Kim Dae Jung (Kim Taejung) in 1971.
As the burgeoning industrial cities created by successful industrialization filled with laborers who were exposed to new ideas, the cities became more demographically important and voted against the Park regime in greater numbers. Park and his Democratic Justice Party (DJP) became more and more dependent upon the dwindling number of rural voters the longer he was in power. The DJP polled a majority of Seoul and Pusan dwellers in 1963. By 1971 the DJP had lost all cities and could poll majorities only in rural areas.7 The move to indirect elections for president, and to more heavy-handed repression in 1971–2, thus was, at least in part, a response to the declining importance of the rural sector—the bedrock of Park’s political support.
The New Village movement, begun in 1971, was designed in part to shore up Park’s rural support, and was central to Yusin development strategy. The New Village movement, in fact, can be paired with the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization Program as one of the two legs of Park’s Yusin Period development strategy. Park was personally and deeply involved in the drafting and implementation of both programs. A meeting on the New Village Movement (saemaŭl kwallyŏn hoeŭi) was held at the vice ministerial level once a week, the Blue House Secretariat directly participated through the Dynamic Village Development Committee (idong maŭl ŭl kaebal wiwŏnhoe). Park paid personal attention to the movement, both by making personal decisions about the use of resources, and by making many speeches to New Village organizations.8 We need only recall the gleeful way that Park offered rice to North Korea in his New Year’s press conference of 1977, the year South Korea first achieved self-sufficiency in rice production, to realize this. The importance of rural development for legitimizing the Park regime, moreover, can be seen in the way the regime trumpeted at home and abroad the successes of the Saemaŭl movement, probably even more than the successes of the various export drives and industrialization movements. Just before Park’s assassination in October 1979, a bureaucrat writing the preface for an English-language collection of Park’s speeches on agricultural development, for example, gushed:
The Saemaŭl (or New Community) movement which President Park Chung Hee personally initiated and has led is spreading rapidly throughout our land; it is a spiritual revolution which has achieved the immense task of modernizing the rural community in Korea, and is the chief driving force behind the bold bid to accomplish national regeneration for Korea.9
Foreign scholars and dignitaries, indeed, frequently showed an interest in Park’s rural development efforts. Foreign politicians and scholars were regularly led to the Saemaŭl movement training center established in the early seventies near Suwŏn, and then returned home to write articles in their home press about the Park regime’s successful community development program. The Saemaŭl movement was even one of South Korea’s first political exports: experienced movement leaders were sent to Africa to teach villagers there how to modernize, renew themselves spiritually, and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. An example of a foreign reporter who became impressed by the rural development efforts of the Park Regime is Richard Critchfield. Chapter 20 of his 1981 bestselling book, Villages, was devoted to the Korean village of the “Valley of the Swallows,” (Cho Dong Kok), which he visited for five weeks in April and May, 1980.
In Toynbeean fashion, Critchfield had divided his world of villages into six major “cultures”: Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Malay-Javanese, African tribal, and post-Confucian. Critchfield used Cho Dong Kok to evoke post-Confucian culture as he wove together stories about village life in each of the six cultures. The term post-Confucian, which Critchfield appropriated from a Roderick MacFarquhar article in The Economist (1980), was supposed to refer to villages where Confucian ideals of “individual perfection and a harmonious social order” are still relevant. He noted that by 1980, farm labor was being done largely by women and older men, but he praised the rise in rural standards of living in the seventies, the disappearance of spring hunger (porikkogae), the advent of television, and the appearance of motor tillers. Park, he observed, was generally respected in the village. (This was a period just a few months after the president’s assassination).10 Critchfield attributes most of the improvement in rural standards of living to Green Revolution technological innovation by U.S.-trained South Korean PhD scientists who developed dwarf, high-yield varieties of rice, but he also praises the Park regime’s integrated rural development efforts.
The government likes to give credit also to its Saemaŭl movement, launched by Park in 1970. Villagers were exhorted with a Confucian-style slogan—”self-help, cooperation and diligence”11—to build roads, bridges and wells, and, most spectacularly, to replace their old thatched roofs with brightly painted tile or metal ones, completely changing the appearance of the countryside. At first there was some coercion from over-zealous local officials—laggards might come back to find their home open to the sky. Today, however, the Saemaŭl movement is generally praised—even by the student dissidents—for showing that once villagers get capital, technology, and access to markets, a government drive to get local officials to work better can do wonders.12
RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN MEASURING THE PARK REGIME
Given the importance of the rural sector in the Park regime’s developmental programs, an assessment of these programs must be an essential aspect of evaluating the Park regime as a whole. As one who had contact with Korea’s students during the eighties, however, I would not agree with Critchfield’s notion mentioned above that “dissident students” generally praised Park’s rural development efforts. On the contrary, there was a great deal of criticism of coercive methods that did not take into account the peasants own needs and desires, and of initiatives that exposed peasants to the vagaries of the market and drove peasants deeper and deeper into debt. (The new roofs that Critchfield praised are an example of debt-inducing change that did little to change people’s standard of living, though it did enrich the suppliers of roof material). And the years following Critchfield’s upbeat report about Korean rural development did not bear the fruit he expected. The villages continued to “hollow out”13 as able-bodied young and middle-aged workers migrated to the cities. Already by the late seventies, moreover, the new varieties of rice were proving susceptible to disease. In the fall of 1980, just after Critchfield left Cho Dong Kok, cool weather forced yields of rice down by 30 percent.14
The oil shocks of the seventies raised the price of fertilizer, squeezing the Green Revolution cultivators who had become increasingly dependent on industrial inputs, and the Chun government that followed Park after his assassination was not able to keep crop prices rising fast enough to maintain standards of living in rural areas comparable to those in the rapidly growing urban areas. Although the South Korean agricultural authorities have continued year after year to plug away at finding new technical and marketing opportunities for South Korea’s farmers, these farmers are today less than 13 percent of the South Korean labor force, and are substantially poorer than urban workers. The villages have continued to age as young people move out for better opportunities elsewhere, and the vibrant social and ritual life that used to characterize Korea’s villages at a time when life there was otherwise impoverished is a thing of the past. For these reasons, other scholars such as Boyer and Ahn (1991) evaluate Park-era agricultural policies, particularly the New Village movement, as failures.
Park-era agricultural development programs, then, were important to the regime, and were used by the regime as important evidence of developmental success. This rural development has been evaluated both as a great accomplishment and as a dismal failure. In hindsight, it seems clear that Park-era agricultural development policies never really managed to create the foundations for a truly vibrant, rural economy. Perhaps this would have been an impossible task, since most industrial economies have had declining rural sectors. In evaluating Park regime efforts at rural development, however, one should recognize that the goals of the Park regime were broader than simply raising the rural standard of living. The political goals of the Park regime have already been alluded to, but Park was also of peasant origin and able to connect with people in the rural sector.
In a 1967 campaign speech for example, Park was able to truthfully say, “I was born as a son of the peasantry, as a poor peasant. From when I was small I experienced, until it penetrated into my bones, the hardships our peasants have, and the fact that there are such difficult problems in our villages, so coming into the government I determined that more than anything else I must speed the revitalization of our villages.”15 The writer of the preface to Park’s speeches on rural development quoted above, moreover, does not speak of standards of living, but rather primarily of three things: “spiritual revolution,” “modernizing the rural community,” and “accomplishing national regeneration.” Economic and rural well-being, though undoubtedly goals of the government, may be too narrow a lens through which to view the rural regeneration efforts of the Park regime. Perhaps it would be valuable to review rural development programs from a wider perspective. Since I happened to be doing fieldwork in a village in Kangwŏn-do during the height of the New Village movement in 1976 and 1977, I feel well-placed to do so.16 In this paper, however, I will not concentrate on the New Village movement of the Yusin Period, which has been widely written about,17 but on the sixties. I am interested here particularly in origins of the ideas and institutions of integrated community development in South Korea, and of the ideas about the deficiencies of Korean peasant mentalité.
TO COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Rural development in South Korea did not begin with President Park, and land reform preceded the advent of programs of integrated rural development. High tenancy rates had been a legacy of the Japanese colonial period, and were especially prevalent in the rice-growing areas of South Korea. At liberation in 1945, tenant farmers cultivated more than 60 percent of the agricultural land of South Korea.18 Although the agricultural lands that had once been owned by Japanese, had been confiscated, managed, and eventually sold to tenants in 1947 by the American occupation authorities, these lands were only about 12 percent of South Korea’s agricultural land. This left about half of the land still tenanted. North Korea, though it had a less serious tenancy problem than the South,19 performed thorough land reform in the spring of 1946 through uncompensated expropriation from landlords and free distribution to cultivators.20
South Korea did not pass its land reform based on compensated expropriation from landlords and sale to cultivating tenants until 1949, and it was not carried out until 1950. Much has been made of the deficiencies of the 1950 land reform: the Korean War broke out just as the land reform was about to be implemented; the authorities were not able to prevent private sales of land during the land reform period; the redemption price for land was too high; the government was tardy in paying former landowners; the administration of the land reform was corrupt; farm size after land reform was too small to provide an adequate living standard; land reform was not accompanied by the improved provision of farm inputs; and many small-scale farmers were not able to make a go of it and sold their land.
However, the fact remains that at the end of the land reform period in 1955, tenancy rates declined from over 60 percent to less than 5 percent. Farmland was now mostly in the hands of those who cultivated it, giving farmers more incentive to work, invest, and improve their techniques. Former tenant farmers, relieved of the need to pay 50 percent of the crop to landlords, experienced a modest rise in their standards of living. Limited access to agricultural inputs, both because of lack of availability and because of farmer poverty due to low grain prices—created partly because of cheap imports of PL480 grain21 from the US—kept productivity gains in the 1950s and early 1960s modest. Nevertheless, from this time forward, rural, social, and political power remained in the hands of owner-cultivators, rather than non-cultivating landlords and educated yuji who avoided manual labor.22
The slow growth of the agricultural sector in the 1950s made it clear, at least to outside economic planners, that land reform had not been a panacea. The “balanced growth” theories current at the time suggested that if South Korea was to wean itself from the high levels of foreign assistance it required after the Korean War, the rural sector would require drastic improvement. Accordingly, international aid and development circles promoted the benefits of “integrated rural development.” Beginning in 1953, the Ministry of Education, with the help of UNESCO and UNKRA,23 initiated a rural school project, and the Ministry of Education began emphasizing the construction of rural schools from 1960. The Agricultural Cooperative Law (Nongŏp hyŏptong chohap pŏp) and the Agricultural Bank Law (Nongŏp ŭnhaeng pŏp) passed in 1957. The former provided improved production factors (such as fertilizer) to the peasantry, while the latter provided rural credit. The Department of Reconstruction formed in 1958 and created the Agency for Rural Revitalization (Nongch’on chinhŭng ch’ŏng) in the same year.
The Agency for Rural Revitalization (ARR) organized demonstration development projects in hundreds of villages from 1959 and eventually reached thousands of villages nationwide by 1963. As with economic planning in general, which began in the late 1950s before the advent of the Park regime,24 agricultural developmental planning did not have to wait for the military coup of 1961 to begin. However, under the First Five-Year Plan (1961–6), a substantial plan created before the Park Regime took power, the Park regime introduced administrative changes that increased the effectiveness of rural development and structured rural development throughout the 1960s and 1970s: (1) efforts to straighten fields and improve irrigation were strengthened and left within the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (Nongnimbu); (2) the old Agricultural Cooperative Law that had not been implemented as an obligation was replaced by a new Agricultural Cooperative Law on July 29, 1961, that combined the Agricultural Cooperative with the Agricultural Bank. This reorganization commenced the Park regime’s emphasis on self-help as it called for “autonomous self-help agricultural cooperative tasks based on the peasants themselves” (nongmin chasin e ŭihaesŏ chajujŏk imyŏ chajojŏgin hyŏptong chohap saŏp).25 It also made the parastatal26 Agricultural Cooperative (Nongŏp hyŏptong chohap) the main source of agricultural inputs and agricultural credit, and one of the main sources of agricultural marketing in South Korea; and (3) the Agricultural Extension Office (Nongŏp chidoso) continued to be active.
These reforms created the basic framework within which rural development took place during the Park regime. A couple of characteristics of this framework are noteworthy at this point: (1) as was characteristic of the South Korean governmental structure at that time no single agency was assigned primary responsibility for rural development in the sixties, but rather a variety of agencies competed among each other to promote rural development: the Agricultural Cooperative, the Agricultural Extension Office, and the Agency for Village Revival. These agencies had overlapping responsibilities and competed for influence and resources within the bureaucracy and among planning agencies. Straightening of fields and extending irrigation works was the responsibility of agencies within the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, as was agricultural extension work. In addition, by the mid-sixties, three different general rural development projects to improve village life and attitudes were the responsibility of three different agencies. The Ministry of Education had a program to create “rural development districts” centered on primary schools. The Agency for Rural Revitalization had a separate Rural Development Project (chiyŏk sahoe kaebal saŏp). Concrete activities to provide agricultural input, credit, and assistance in the marketing of agricultural products were the responsibility of the Agricultural Cooperative. (2) The language of self-help and autonomy was present from the start of these programs. A declaration of this sort was Park’s famous speech on Agriculture Day (Kwŏnnongil), June 6, 1970, “Heaven helps those who help themselves” (hanŭl ŭn sŭsŭro tomnŭn cha rŭl tomnŭnda).27…“The peasant who tries to make a living for himself, who works diligently, is usually helped by heaven as well. But heaven cannot help the peasant who doesn’t have a strong spirit of self-help (chajo chŏngsin), and the government and neighbors can’t help him either.”28
In spite of this rhetoric of self-help, however, Park-era development programs always operated largely from the top down. Straightening fields and irrigation construction projects were determined at provincial and county levels. Township level bureaucrats primarily participated in these projects in order to solve problems of land exchange and compensation among peasants getting new straightened fields or irrigation. At the Agricultural Extension (Nongŏp chidoso), priorities were set nationally, and implementation was done by “persuasion” of reluctant farmers through local field workers—what Burmeister (1987) called “directed innovation,” rather than the “induced” innovation that would be indirectly motivated through manipulating pricing and marketing structures. The Agricultural Cooperative, during the period in question, was indeed a membership organization (not all peasant farmers belonged, though the most substantial two-thirds did), but it often used coercive techniques to implement policy set by government higher-ups. Many crops (such as tobacco, ginseng, and silk cocoons) were government monopolies in which the peasants got their seed (eggs, in the case of silkworms) from the Agricultural Cooperative and were required to sell their crops to the co-op as well.
During the later Yusin Period (which will not be dealt with in detail in this chapter), villagers were often told by the Agricultural Co-op the quota of fertilizer that they were “required” to buy, and since rural credit was also controlled by the Agricultural Cooperative, the peasants were in no a position to say no.29 My one experience of a program of the Office of Rural Revitalization was a lecture by an urban professor in 1976 to an audience of peasant men, women, and unruly children. The professor passed out an impressively scientific pamphlet (that I still have) filled with Chinese characters that explained why certain agricultural practices are better than others (though the lecture had been on modern family and child rearing). As we left the village hall one old villager, noticing the pamphlet in my hand, asked me incredulously, “Can you read that?” I said I could (not mentioning that I would need the help of a dictionary). He shook his head, “Well I can’t!”30 and walked off.
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF PARK-ERA RURAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
The characteristics of the rural development bureaucracy of the 1960s and 1970s confirm the corporatist character of the government at the time: decisions were made at the highest level, and the role of local government was primarily to feed information to the central authorities (so they could make policy) and to mobilize the peasantry to participate in approved ways with government priorities. Although there were concrete programs to invest in rural areas—particularly during the Yusin era that is not dealt with in detail in this paper—there was a palpable emphasis on “spiritual revitalization” and “self-help.” These characteristics, in fact, were not unique to the Park regime, but rather have roots in colonial-era rural development programs, right down to the name of the agencies involved and the developmental slogans that were used.
As has been shown elsewhere,31 rural development had already been a preoccupation of the Japanese colonial authorities from the early twenties. From 1920 until 1934 (when they discontinued the program in the wake of the world-wide agricultural depression) the Government-General promoted several rice production plans (that mostly involved reclamation of new land, and improving irrigation facilities). These were initially done in cooperation with large-scale landlords, particularly those large-scale Japanese and Korean landlords who were rationalizing and increasing their production. As agricultural prices deteriorated in the late twenties, and rural unrest became more and more serious, however, the Government-General began retooling its agricultural policies to address a wider range of problems.
The Decree on Korean Agricultural Associations (Chōsen nōkai rei) was published in 1927, and from 1928 these associations (dominated by Japanese and Korean landlords) mediated and settled tenancy disputes. A credit union (kinnyū kumiai) was set up to provide rural credit, but soon developed a bad reputation among Korean peasants for lending money to landlords which they re-lent at higher interest to tenants, and for foreclosing on debts and confiscating land (a process that became acute in the early thirties when the agricultural depression was most severe).32 Thus, by the early thirties, rural Koreans were already familiar with government efforts to penetrate and mobilize the villages for economic and political reasons. The movement that shows the most parallels with Park-era agricultural development efforts is the Government-General’s Rural Revitalization Movement of the early thirties. As Shin and Han point out, this movement shows classical corporatist tendencies in which “government sanctioned intermediary associations that link colonial subjects more effectively to the regime”33 were created. These kinds of associations by their nature do not represent the economic interests of their members, but are created by the state for purposes of control and mobilization.
The rural revitalization movement began under Governor-General Ugaki34 in November 1932, when the second rice production program was winding down. According to Shin and Han, the term “Korean Rural Revitalization Movement” (Chōsen nōson kōkō undō) was chosen under the influence of the Korean Peasant Society (Chosŏn nongminsa).35 Unlike the previous rice production movements, however, Ugaki was convinced that spiritual, in addition to material considerations must be brought to the fore. This notion fit in with the growing emphasis on kokutai and military spiritualism in Japan, but it also reflected notions of the need for spiritual revitalization in rural Korea, as well. The program was organized with Councils for Rural Revitalization (Nōson kōkō iinkai) at all administrative levels with the top Government-General administrators’ ex officio members at each level.
The Financial Cooperative (Kinnyū kumiai) and Mutual Aid Associations to Increase Production (Siksan kye) were also included in the councils. Notably, the government tried to bypass existing local leadership (yuji, local landlords, et cetera) to focus on “educated youth” who would have more “modern” notions.36 During the colonial period (1910–45), of course, educated Korean youth would have been educated in Japanese-medium schools where they would have been subjected to Imperial Japan’s assimilationist pressures and pejorative discourses about Korea, as well as modern, scientific knowledge. The slogans of the movement focused on self-help and cooperation: “rebirth through one’s own efforts” (charyŏk kaengsaeng); “cultivate healthy beliefs” (kŏnjŏnhan sinangsim); “mutual help between rich and poor, wise and stupid” (pinbu chiu sangbo ŭi midŏk).37
Self-help in the Rural Revitalization campaign of the thirties was basically a method to promote rural development without asking for capital investment from the center.38 During the movement, moral exhortation was used to discourage peasants from “wasting” their money on consumption so that they could save it for investment. Sumptuary regulations—encouraging peasants to wear straw sandals rather than rubber ones (rubber was needed for the war effort), and white (or black) rather than luxurious dyed clothes—were important parts of the program. Peasants were discouraged from taking out loans (for a wedding, say) so they did not get caught up in cycles of indebtedness. For political reasons, of course, the colonial regime discouraged peasants from becoming agitated by the “tendencies of cultural life” (that is, of course, left-wing thought).
In addition to discouraging consumption, the movement emphasized intensifying labor. More efficient use of labor in the village might free peasants for mobilization into war industries elsewhere. Thus, women were encouraged to engage in field labor.39 A second form of intensification was the mobilization of the entire village into gangs (ture) rather than using more informal networks of labor exchange (p’umasi) to cultivate fields.
COLONIAL RURAL REVITALIZATION, POST-WAR RURAL DEVELOPMENT
One of the most striking aspects of community development strategies of the fifties and sixties in South Korea are the continuities with the colonial period. South Korea’s first integrated rural development ministry, the Rural Revitalization Agency (Nongch’on chinhŭng ch’ŏng), followed the name of Governor-General Ugaki’s program. While I cannot prove that it was modeled on Ugaki’s program, activities reiterated many of the same sayings and ideologies of the Ugaki program: rebirth through self-help, frugality in consumption, avoidance of waste on extravagant ceremonies, success through village cooperation, and living a clean, modern life. Park’s speeches in the sixties on agricultural development are also full of this kind of rhetoric. To give just one example:
Where there is faith there is a future; where there is [a] will there is a way. Our firm faith that through our own strength (uri him ŭro) we will try to live better, our will to build our locality into a rich and good-living paradise will convert dried up wilderness into fertile soil; and making denuded mountainsides into fertile parks we shall without fail end up opening the autonomous, self-reliant (charip chajon) road of national revival (minjok chunghŭng).40
These are the themes that echo throughout the speeches of Park and the literature of rural development: self-help and autonomy. Sometimes these are expressed through the Sino-Korean terms “self-help” (chajo), “self-done” (charip), “self-surviving”41 (chajon), “own strength” (charyŏk)—simple Koreanizations of the pronunciation of the Chinese characters of originally Japanese terms. More often Park uses both these and native Korean expressions such as “through our own strength” (uri him ŭro), “by our own efforts” (uri sŭsŭro), and so forth.
PEASANT MENTAUTÉ
Along with the self-help talk, a striking characteristic of Park’s rural development rhetoric is the emphasis on changing attitudes. “Heaven helps those who help themselves,”42 has already been mentioned. He was even more explicit when speaking to cabinet secretaries, mayors, and governors: “Whether rural people live well, or live poorly, that is whether the income of peasants and fisher folk grows, depends upon whether the peasants discard their traditional consciousness and agricultural management, and how they pick up and make part of their life (saenghwalhwa) new agricultural management and technology that leads to development.”43 Note here that the “problem” of rural development is not defined in material terms—lack of access to factors of production, too little investment, distorted material incentives—but in spiritual terms. More than anything else, he emphasizes “traditional peasant consciousness” as an impediment to development.
This attitude is not one that was held by Park alone during this period. One could turn to innumerable treatises on rural development published in South Korea during this period that proceed on the same assumptions. A typical example culled from my personal collection of such books is Hwang Kapson’s Theory of Rural Development (1973). Pride of place is featured in his chapter titled “Factors Inhibiting Agricultural Growth” in the section on Korean Peasants’ Consciousness and Values. Korean peasants, he says, have a pre-modern consciousness that is based on affectivity rather than rationality. Citing Western authorities as far-ranging as Spengler, Hwang continues that spiritual values—ideology, values, and consciousness—are more important than material conditions. Hwang cites traditionalism and conservatism (familism, blindly following officials), belief in fate and destiny, and dependency as the main problems, while listing material conditions (such as fragmentation of farms) and technology well down on the list.
We find similar rhetoric about peasant fatalism in the speeches of Park. For example, in a speech to regional officials in 1970, Park complained that, “…the majority of peasants and civil servants, too, have done farming complaining about drought saying it has to rain, and if rain doesn’t come have fatalistic conceptions that there is nothing human strength can do, and because of having this vice they cannot overcome, this year the government has had to hurry up to set up policies.”44 The belief in the deleterious mentalité of the peasantry is so widespread in the East and West that it would be futile, I think, to try to trace these ideas to specific sources. Although there is a certain element of plausibility in some of them, over all they do not correspond particularly well with the mentalité of the peasants I knew in the seventies and eighties, making me think that these ideas about the peasantry are discursively constructed. However, the main point I want to make here is that if one assumes peasant poverty is caused by peasant consciousness rather than material conditions, successful rural development must depend on an educated intelligentsia to provide “modern knowledge,” and on leadership to inspire the peasantry to change their traditional ways. This was indeed the emphasis of the New Village movement of the 1970s.
Rural development in the sixties was not so one-sided as one might assume given the remarks mentioned above. There were important programs dealing with material conditions—above all, the Agricultural Extension that concentrated on developing new crops and seed types and the Agricultural Cooperative that focused on providing modern factors of production, capital, and marketing facilities to South Korea’s peasants. There were also rural electrification and road building programs. These programs, combined with the price supports relied more heavily on by the Park regime in the seventies, provided the main material support to raising rural productivity and standards of living. Nevertheless, the amount of capital introduced to rural areas was minimal compared to the amount that went into industrialization. Park really did expect the peasants to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” just as Governor Ugaki had, and for similar reasons. Capital was just too short for the government to want to spend very much on low-return rural investment—in the case of Ugaki because of the depression of the thirties and Japan’s military buildup for the invasion of China, in the case of Park because of the urgent need to build industrial capacity and military strength.
THE ROOTS OF PARK’S RURAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
The parallels in rhetoric, assumptions about peasant mentalité, and emphasis on self-help in the Rural Revitalization movement of the 1930s and the Rural Development projects under the Park regime is quite striking and shows the way that Park’s programs were embedded in Korean history. I am not arguing, however, that because President Park was educated by the Japanese military in Manchuria he favored Japanese-style development movements. Nor am I arguing that agricultural revitalization originating in Japan was applied to Korea in the colonial period, and then revived after liberation by South Koreans. If anything, in fact, the direction of influence seems to flow the opposite way, from Korea to Japan. If this seems surprising, we should remember that colonial governments do not have to deal with countervailing sources of power to nearly the same degree that domestic governments do. India often served as a laboratory for government action that was then applied to England, and it would not be surprising if a similar kind of process was at work in the Japanese Empire. The governor-generals of Korea, who ruled by decree and had to deal only with a few prominent Koreans and Japanese settlers, had much more autonomous authority to experiment with government programs than even prime ministers in Japan, who had to deal with a variety of centers of power including the military, the bureaucracy, industrialists, party politicians, and local elites. Korea, thus, could well have been a laboratory for Japanese social experiments.
There is some evidence that this was the case. The name and many of the slogans of the colonial Rural Revitalization movement seem to have Korean sources, particularly the agrarians organized around the Society of Korean Peasants (Chosŏn Nongminsa). Secondly, Korea’s Rural Revitalization movement seems to precede similar movements in Japan by at least half a decade, and when these movements were introduced into Japan the introducer was a former governor-general of Korea. While the Rural Revitalization movement of Korea got off the ground in 1932, it was really only after 1936 that these intensely controversial mobilization tactics that bypassed local elites and were used in Ugaki’s Rural Revitalization movement in Korea could be applied to Japan. It is interesting to note that two governor-generals of Korea, Saitō Makoto and Ugaki Kazushige, both became prime ministers of Japan during the period of military cabinets, and in both cases after their stints as governor-generals of Korea. Saitō, after serving more than ten years as governor-general of Korea, became prime minister of Japan from 1932 to 1934, during which period he introduced some elements of rural revitalization, including the slogan “rebirth through our own efforts” (charyŏk kaengsaeng).
Ugaki, under whose administration Korea’s Rural Revitalization movement was initiated, after serving as governor-general of Korea from 1931 to 1936, became prime minister of Japan in the same year he relinquished his position of governor-general of Korea. Was this just in time to apply what he learned in Korea to rural Japan? Further research should clarify this point. What interests me most about these problems, however, is the conception of the peasantry that lies behind them. Again and again, whether one is reading about the colonial-period Rural Revitalization movement, or the New Village movement of the seventies, one comes across the same images: peasants as conservative and averse to innovation, peasants as prodigal people who do not think of the future, peasants as members of an Urgemeinschaft who traditionally cooperate with one another, peasants who waste their money on unnecessary rituals, and peasants as backward people holding the country from progress. These images do not correspond to what I saw of peasants in the seventies and eighties. Did the peasants change, or were these images fantasies of the urbanites? Above all, why would some bureaucrat in 1979 still think that a spiritual revolution among the peasantry would achieve the task of modernizing the rural community, and that this would accomplish national regeneration for Korea?45
The emphasis on spiritual regeneration of the peasantry, present from the beginning of South Korea’s rural development efforts in the 1950s, was taken up by Park and extended systematically as he consolidated his power. What was a rhetorical tendency during the sixties when Park and the EPB emphasized “balanced development” (meaning balance between industrialization and rural development), was even more systematically incorporated into the New Village movement of the authoritarian Yusin period (1972–9). This rhetoric that is so characteristic of Park, and so abundantly found in his speeches, however, does not seem to originate with Park himself. Rather it seems to have been “common knowledge” among Korean developmental elites that Park was able to harness to politically mobilize the rural sector. The approach to development that combines this rhetoric with systematic attempts to mobilize “young modern leadership” in the villages to induce social change has its origin in colonial Korea. It seems to be neither a totally Japanese-imposed movement without Korean input, nor an indigenous Korean movement free of Japanese influence and coercion. Rather, the Rural Revitalization movement of the thirties and South Korea’s post-liberation rural development efforts both seem to show typical colonial and post-colonial hybridity.
The colonial movement combined Japanese governing structures with Japanese and Korean intellectual input that was also influenced by existing Western notions of the rural backwardness of peasants. By the time South Korea began creating its own rural development programs in the 1950s, this originally “hybrid” thinking about rural problems seems to have become indigenized. It no longer seemed new: it just seemed to be common sense. In the 1950s, even North Korea used the slogan “Rebirth through our own efforts” (charyŏk kaengsaeng), pioneered by the colonial Rural Revitalization movement, for the Ch’ŏllima movement, its mass mobilization effort.46 Thus, although much of Park’s rhetoric and programs seem on the surface to have a “Japanese” flavor, rather than call it Japanese I would rather simply call it post-colonial.
CONCLUSION
The success of the Heavy and Chemical Industrialization Program in the seventies during the heyday of the New Village movement helped contemporary rural development in some respects by providing domestic inputs—for example, fertilizers to help Korean peasants raise their productivity. Its success also undermined rural revitalization, however, because urban living standards constantly grew more rapidly than their rural counterparts, so that the young—including the leaders trained by the New Village movement training center—kept leaving the countryside rather than providing the rural leadership that would create prosperous rural villages. For a short time in the seventies, high crop price supports kept rural incomes comparable with those of the urban areas. South Korea had, however, an export-dependent economy so that pressures of GATT—especially the Uruguay Round—made it impossible for Park’s epigone to withstand the pressure to loosen the restrictions on agricultural imports necessary to keep domestic prices high.
The excessive concentration of industry in Seoul and the southeast, and the poor development of rural transportation infrastructure made it difficult for rural people to move into part-time farming as has been the tendency in Japan. In spite of Park’s best efforts then, rural living standards in South Korea have fallen way behind those of urban areas. As the young and mobile move out, the rural work force has gotten older and older. Now, even those young men who remain in rural areas are finding it increasingly difficult to even find brides—rural life is hard and poor—so much so that progressively more rural men are turning to the internet and seeking marriage partners in places like Vietnam and the Philippines.
NOTES
1. In the constitution of the Third Republic, the president was directly elected to four-year terms, and could appoint his cabinet without the advice and consent of the unicameral legislature. The 173-seat legislature could not revise the junta’s previous legislation, political independents were not allowed to run, and incumbents who changed parties, or whose parties dissolved, lost their membership in the assembly. Gregory Henderson, “Constitutional Changes,” 32.
2. In the Yusin Constitution, the president was indirectly elected by the National Council for Reunification, a 2,359-person electoral board. One-third of the legislature was appointed by the president, and the rest was elected in multi-seat constituencies. Emergency measures were enacted to allow suppression of most dissent. Gregory Henderson, “Constitutional Changes,” 33.
3. The 1999 publication of The Sayings of Park Chung Hee under the title “We, too, can do it,” (Uri to hal su itta) is only one example of this phenomenon.
4. Han’guk kyŏngje kihoegwŏn, 2000, Han’guk t’onggye yŏn’gam. Year 2000 Census figures.
5. See, for example, Yi Kwangsu, “Nongch’on kyebal” [Rural enlightenment and development]. In Maeil sinbo November 26, 1916–February 18, 1917.
6. By calling Korea’s rural population at the time “peasants” I do not intend to disparage them. I simply mean that they were small-holding farmers for whom “agriculture is a livelihood and a way of life,” who produce both for home use, and for market sale on small family farms. See Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture, 18.
7. Hong Nack Kim and Sunki Choe, “Urbanization and Changing Voting Patterns.”
8. Park’s collected speeches are available in several formats. Some on the New Village movement in English can be found in Park Chung Hee, Saemaul: Korea’s New Community Movement or in Korean in Saemaŭl undong: Pak Chŏnghŭi Taet’ongnyŏng yŏnsŏlmun sŏnjip both published in 1978. Less well-known speeches are also available in Korean in his collected speeches published by the Presidential Press Secretary’s Office starting in 1965. All of these sources organize Park’s speeches by date, so I have generally cited the date and title of the speech, rather than specific editions. In most cases the translations are mine.
9. Ibid., i.
10. It is ironic to think that the period in which Critchfield was investigating his Korean village corresponds almost precisely with the few weeks of demonstrations leading up to Chun Doo Hwan’s declaration of martial law and the Kwangju Uprising. None of this is mentioned in Critchfield’s book.
11. Chajo, hyŏptong, kŭnmyŏn.
12. Richard Critchfield, Villages, 269.
13. Critchfield’s observation of the aging and feminization of the agricultural work force was evidence for this phenomenon, though he did not interpret it this way.
14. Larry Burmeister, “The South Korean Green Revolution.”
15. Park Chung Hee, “Chŏnju yuse yŏnsŏl” [Chŏnju campaign speech] 1967. 4.18.
16. I have many field notes about New Village movement activities that I have never analyzed.
17. Vincent S.R. Brandt and Man-gap Lee, “Community Development,” for example.
18. Tenancy rates in North Korea, which has a smaller proportion of irrigated riceland than South Korea, were only about two-thirds of that of South Korea at the time of liberation.
19. In 1931, for example, most southern provinces had tenancy rates greater than 60 percent while northern provinces mostly had tenancy rates lower than 60 percent, with North Hamgyŏng coming in at 20.6 percent. Rents also tended to be lower in the north. See Hoon K. Lee, Land Utilization and Rural Economy in Korea, Table 67, 155, passim.
20. Much of the benefit to peasants of the North Korean land reform was appropriate by the North Korean state through a 25 percent tax-in-kind levied in the fall of 1946.
21. U.S. Public Law 480 provided for the cheap sale of surplus U.S. grain to countries with food shortages.
22. Many former landlord families, traumatized by the “shame” of having their land confiscated (even if they were eventually compensated) migrated to urban areas or gradually sold their land to finance education for their children who then made urban rather than rural careers. Field interviews Kyōngnam Haman County 1985–6.
23. UNKRA, the United Nations Korea Reconstruction Agency was a UN agency set up after the Korean War to assist the rebuilding of the devastated South Korean economy.
24. David H. Satterwhite, The Politics of Economic Development.
25. No Chang-sŏp, et al, A Study of Rural Society.
26. The term “parastatal” comes from Larry Burmeister, “The South Korean Green Revolution.” Koreans usually say “half civilian, half official” (panmin pan’gwan).
27. By replacing “hanŭl” (heaven) with “hanŭnim” (God) —a term derived from an honorific for heaven—one can easily turn this phrase into, “God helps those who help themselves.” “Hanŭl ŭn sŭsŭro tomnŭn cha rŭl tomnŭnda” June 10, 1970. Many of the slogans of Park are reminiscent of Weber’s Protestant ethic.
28. Park Chung Hee, “God Helps Those who Help Themselves,” Saemaul, June 10, 1970.
29. I know this from my own field notes, and this is also confirmed by Brandt and Lee, Community Development.
30. I took this to mean that he did not know the difficult scientific vocabulary, rather than to mean that he was totally illiterate—something that was uncommon among even rural males by the seventies, though many of the oldest women were still illiterate. To be fair, the pamphlet actually provides well grounded scientific information adjusted to the needs of the farmers of this region. However, a peasant would probably have required at least a high school education before being able to read and understand the pamphlet. In the late seventies and early eighties, however, there were no high school graduates in this fairly poor and remote village. Those villagers who had been able to complete high school had all migrated to the cities where there was more economic opportunity. It was only in the late 1980s that a few graduates of agricultural high schools (nonggo) whose fathers owned substantial tracts of land settled back in the village. A sample from the pamphlet is translated below:
If one considers the status of absorption of nutrition in Poiodeae [grasses like wheat and barley] according to their growth cycle, much Nitrogen is absorbed over the early and middle growth periods, and although the rate of absorption of Phosphoric Acid is low in the early growth period it rises rapidly from the middle growth period and displays its highest absorption rate at the time of ripening. Potassium shows a comparatively even rate of increase in its rate of absorption spanning the entire growth period. Republic of Korea, Nongŏp chidoso, 1976–77 Tonggye maul ŭl yŏngnong, 50.
31. Andrew Grajdanzev, Modern Korea; Sangch’ul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes; Gi-wook Shin and To-hyon Han, “Colonial Corporatism.”
32. Han Toyhyŏn, “1930-yŏndae nongch’on.”
33. Gi-wook Shin and To-hyon Han, “Colonial Corporatism.”
34. Ugaki Kazushige was governor-general from 1931 to 1936.
35. Shin and Han give no reference for this statement, and I have not yet been able to document it.
36. Gi-wook Shin and To-hyon Han, “Colonial Corporatism.”
37. Han Tohyŏn. “1930-yŏndae nongch’on.”
38. Ibid.
39. My field experience leads me to believe that traditionally middle and upper class women refrained from field labor (except for vegetable patches). This was the pattern in San’gongni that I observed in the seventies. However, in other parts of the country more exposed to modernization, female labor was already common for transplanting, even in the seventies. Rural interviews in Haman-gun (near Masan) in the eighties led me to believe that in South Kyŏngsang Province, so many males had migrated to Japan by the late thirties that female labor was common in rice cultivation there by that time.
40. Pak Chŏng-hŭi, “Che 12 hoe chungang 4H kurakpu kyŏngjin taehoe ch’isa,” [Welcoming remarks to the twelfth central 4-h club competitive congress] November 29, 1966.
41. The term chajon is difficult to translate into a pithy English phrase. It implies reliance on the self in the struggle for survival (charyŏk saengjon).
42. Park Chung Hee, Saemaul: Korea’s New Community Movement, June 10, 1965. “Che 17 hoe kwŏnnongil ch’isa” [Welcoming remarks for the seventeenth farmer’s day]
43. Ibid., December 5, 1968. “Kungmin kyoyuk hyŏnjang sŏnp’o tamhwamun” [On the spot proclaimed statement on the people’s education].
44. Pak Chŏng-hŭi, “Chidoja rŭl chungsim ŭro mungch’in saemaŭl kakkugi undong” [The new village decoration movement united centering on leaders], a speech given to a regional officials’ meeting on drought policy on April 22, 1970.
45. Ibid., i.
46. See its use, for example, in Kim Il-sŏng’s speech “Modŭn him ŭl yŏsŏkkae koji ŭi chŏmnyŏng ŭl wihayŏ,” 424.