South Korea: Crossroads capitalism
South Korea's consistent high economic growth rate is transforming the country into an important player in the world economy. To prepare for this new role, the regime has launched massive "globalization" and anti-corruption campaigns, to try to bring Korean business practice into line with that of its major partners (and competitors). Terry Lawless reports from Seoul on the political consequences of this transformation. THE MAIN RESULT OF THE PARTITION OF THE Korean nation in 1953 was what the Irish revolutionary James Connolly would have called a "carnival of reaction on both sides". The South has celebrated an authoritarian capitalist project of "modernization" in which protest and dissent were treated as the product of collaboration with the enemy communist regime to the north and harshly punished by long prison terms and even execution.
In April 1960, after obviously rigged elections, radical student protest forced the resignation of the corrupt, weak but American-supported government of Syngman Rhee, which had overseen a half-hearted period of reconstruction following the end of the Korean War. After a period of relative political openness, a military hardman, Park Chung-Hee emerged, consolidating his power in the aftermath of the military coup d'état of May 1961. Park dominated South Korean political life for many years, ruling in an increasingly arbitrary and personal manner, especially following the declaration of martial law in October 1972. From the mid-1960s, however, Park also presided over the beginnings of a belated project of economic expansion initiated, guided and financed by the state. He believed such state intervention was essential if the Republic was to continue to demonstrate itself as an important and viable bastion of anti- communism.
In October 1979, Park was assassinated by the head of the Korean CIA, an event which touched off a second political crisis resolved once again by the imposition of martial law, in December 1979, this time initiated by a group of top army men around Chun Doo-Hwan. The arrest of Kim DaeJung as part of the military's consolidation of power was the signal for widespread protest, particularly in Kim's south-eastern hometown of Kwangju, beginning on May 18 1980. Through the 1980s, the memory of the brutality of the Kwangju Massacre on May 27 1980, when soldiers finally retook the city, was the half-hidden shame of a bourgeoisie which wished increasingly to see itself as modern, democratic and technologically sophisticated.
This image was not a delusion. The Republic, with its vast administrative had succeeded fairly spectacularly in achieving its major economic goals. By the early 1980s, Park's project had come to fruition: the Republic now possessed a
South Korea * number of very large, internationally competitive chaebols, (Japanese style corporations) like Hyundai, Samsung and Daewoo. All had been nurtured under the watchful eye of the authoritarian state. The top five chaebols all predict annual turnovers of 100 trillion won (130 billion dollars) by the year 2000. Samsung and Hyundai have fixed a five year target of 160 trillion won per year.
Alongside this economic success story, a powerful student movement and a newly industrialized working class emerged, particularly during the 1980s. Student and labor radicalism were the inevitable bi-products of the bourgeoisie's authoritarian modernization. Together these two forces helped to prepare the critical social dynamite which blew up when Park began to organize for a handover of power to his classmate and crony, Roh Tae-Woo, in June 1987. Just months before the modernization campaign was to receive its crowning glory with the staging of the Seoul Olympics, the Republic was rocked by an unprecedented massive wave of student and working class protest. Roh and Park came within a hair's breadth of
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* South Korea touching off civil war. But they finally backed down and conceded most of the opposition's demands: free, direct, popular presidential elections; the release of political prisoners; freedom of the press; and greater rights for labor. The workers' movement used the crisis to assert some of its new-found strength, forcing new agreements in terms of wages and working conditions as the reluctant bourgeois regime stepped back from the brink. More strikes and labor actions took place in 1987-88 than at any other point in Korean history. But electoral opposition to Roh was still thoroughly bourgeois. And perhaps already complicit in the attempt to limit as much as possible the democratic impact of 1987-88. Kim Young-Sam and Kim Dae-Jung, the two main opposition leaders, who together commanded 55% of the popular vote, failed to unite their forces in the election of 1988 and Roh became President anyway, garnering 37% of the vote. Worse was to come: in 1990, Kim YoungSam joined with his former political opponents to form the new Democratic Liberal Party, uniting his Pusan-based political machine with that of the Teagu and Kyongsang-based one of Roh and Park. The US embassy in Seoul was particularly happy to see this union between bourgeois hard and bourgeois soft, believing that it represented the method by which the Republic could continue to function until well into the next century.
On December 18 1992, Kim Young-Sam defeated Kim Dae-Jung in an apparently straight-forward Presidential election campaign. In an effort to break with the corruption of the past, and also to begin preparations for taking a more active part in
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30 International Viewpoint the world economy, President Kim initiated a campaign of political openness. he revealed his own personal wealth - US $2.1 million, and called on others to make similar disclosures. He also pushed through the Real Name Financial Transaction Act which threw a sudden and glaring light on the gargantuan fortunes criminally accumulated by members of the governing elite, including, not surprisingly, Roh and Park.
The arrests of Roh and Park in late 1995 are open to interpretation. They were either the necessary upshot of the campaign of greater openness, or a stop-gap measure to prevent the uncovering of 1992 slush money given by Roh to help Kim Young-Sam finance his successful bid for the presidency.
The subsequent widening of the prosecution charges to include the whole series of events around the declaration of martial law and the Kwangju Massacre in 1979-80 is again open to interpretation. Is this evidence of the consolidation of the rule of law or merely, as North Western University Professor Bruce Cummings recently argued in a lecture given at Seoul National University on Democracy and Civil Society in Korea, an attempt to break the regional grip of the Teagu-Kyonsang elite which has ruled Korea since the days of President Park? The coming months may tell. April 1996 election
The parliamentary election on April 11th, 1996, took place amidst an atmosphere of growing disillusionment in the promises of anti-corruption which had carried Kim
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Young-Sam to power in 1992. Nevertheless, Kim Young-Sam's New Korea Party won 139 seats, just eleven seats away from an absolute majority in the 299 seat legislature. Kim Da-Jung's National Congress for New Politics received 79 seats, Kim Jong-Pil's United Liberal Democrats, formed after he split from Kim Young-Sam's ruling party in 1994, came in third with 50 seats. The Democratic Party won 15 seats, five short of the minimum necessary to form a floor negotiation bloc. Enough of them switched to the NKP to allow Kim Young-Sam to present an absolute majority in time for the reconvening of the National Assembly on May 21. For now the ruling party has called off its highly successful campaign of recruitment, and intends to try to appease the two main opposition parties, both of which are upset about this perversion of the democratic process.
Why wasn't the New Korea Party rejected by more voters? One reason may have been the incursions by North Korea into the DMZ and its declared intention not to recognize the Armistice Agreement signed at the end of the Korean War. A more fundamental reason, however, was a lack of real choice among the main candidates: Kim Dae-Jung, the leader of the National Congress for New Politics and Kim Jong-Pil, the leader of the conservative United Liberal Democrats, for example, have been around Korean politics since the 1960s. Jong-Pil likes to call Park's 1961 coup-d'état a "revolution" since he himself had a central hand in it. Judging by reports, he has not changed much. He most recently went on record during a post-election meeting with the President urging a more vigilant attitude on the part of the government toward student radicals. Kim Dae-Jung came a close second to President Park in the elections held in 1971 before that old soldier tired of the risks of even limited democracy and declared martial law in the following year. During the course
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of this campaign, it was revealed that Kim Dae-Jung requires big payments from those who run for his party when a disillusioned candidate broke with him and announced this to the press. Disillusionment, in other words, seemed to help the government rather than the opposition. A bribery scandal which erupted only days before the election involving a close personal friend of the President had little effect. The low voter turnout of 70% benefited the ruling party rather than the opposition.
Korean politics is heavily regionalized. Korean political commentators often bemoan the lack of a strong bourgeois party culture in Korea: the fortunes of political parties rise and fall with whatever central figure is responsible for creating them, a situation which leads to a certain fluidity in the institutional histories of the main political forces as well as to what appears to be a high level of opportunism. Political candidates swap party affiliation readily in order to take advantage of the current balance of power. Even the bourgeoisie, it would seem, must learn "proper" bourgeois parliamentary democracy, after such a long period of military rule.
Judging by the fact that more than 100, mainly opposition candidates are being investigated for election law violation, it appears that the bourgeoisie is not learning those lessons particularly well. The "era of the three Kims" is not over. Economic reform
On April 24 1996, less than three weeks after the election, President Kim announced "sweeping labor reforms". During a meeting held at Chong Wa Da, the Korean "White House", which involved representatives from business, labor and government, it was announced that a presidential commission for labor reform was to be established which will oversee the drafting of new labor laws. As the English-language daily Korea Times notes, the "labor reforms are closely related to
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Korea's move to get due and relevant recognition from the international community on the occasion of its joining the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). From the standpoint of the working class, the most significant of the laws that will be reviewed are those which prohibit third-party intervention in labor disputes, the participation of unions in politics and the presence of more than one union in a given workplace. More generally, the basic framework of Korean labor laws which still follows that of the 1930 US Wagner Act will be replaced by the decisions of the newly-established commission which is itself modelled after the 1993 Clinton Dunlop Commission. The Korea Times noted that the revised labor code, which is designed to bring Korea into line with the labor standards required by the OECD and the ILO, will probably lead to the legal recognition of the progressive labor alliance, Minchu Nochong, or the Korean Council of Trade Unions (KCTU). This organization, which was created by dissident unions last November, remains illegal because of what the Times coyly calls its "overly progressive" line and its direct defiance of the current labor laws. President Kim invited members of Minchu Nochong to an earlier meeting which helped to set the stage for the current commission, but its representatives declined since the government had neglected in the meantime to recognize it as a legal entity. A Minchu Nochong representative told the Times that the labor reform will also see greater leeway given to entrepreneurs in employing workers. The conservative Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) has since endorsed the idea of allowing more than one union in a given work place and looks set to recognize the legitimacy of Minchu Nochong May Day
On May Day 1996, the two main union organizations held separate rallies in Seoul. During a rally in the Gymnastic Gym in the Olympic Park, attended by Kim Dae-Jung and Prime Minister Lee See- Song, the FKTU chair, Park In-Saing, called for the right for teachers and public servants to form trade unions. He again endorsed the idea that unionized workers be allowed to engage in political activism, and he told the crowd of 4,500 that the FKTU would fight the recent move by the government to revise labor standards since they favored the employers. In contrast, the rally organized by MinchuNochong in Pomarae Park attracted some 30,000 workers and what the Korea Times
South Korea described as "thousands of college students" who declared their solidarity with the dissident union. The significant difference in the size of the two rallies may help prod President Kim into keeping up the momentum for labor code reform. On a related note, it was reported in a survey carried out by the Korea Labor Education Institute involving 1,500 respondents that 23.6% said that they would support a labor party, should unions decide to form one. The Republic officially recognized May Day as a national holiday last year, dropping its former preference for the arbitrarily selected date of March 10. Most companies were closed; however, government agencies, schools and other state-run institutions without labor unions remained open.
At the same time that President Kim is calling for the establishment of a "symbiotic relationship" between business and labor, the government is making plans to crack down on what it sees as the "dangerous level" of leftist activism on university campuses. During a meeting of senior government inspectors on April 25, Moon Choong-soo, the senior presidential secretary for civil petition and inspection, announced a "campaign against the propagation of communist ideology on the campuses". Moon claimed that the wording of a manifesto issued by Chonhanyon, an activist students' league, is a carbon copy of North Korean propaganda. The Korea Herald noted in an editorial on April 26 that the document issued by the Sogang University student council in Seoul contained quotations from the Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx's German Ideology. Seoul's Yonsei University was also identified as a campus at which student radicals were very active. While conceding that students are free to read Marxist literature individually if they choose to, the Korea Times editorial suggested that the presence of such quotations in a student handbook amounted to "collective indoctrination". Leaving aside the incongruity of this idea of "indoctrination" on the part of a newspaper that regularly provides its readers with liberal bon mots on its editorial page, this concession is still significant as an indicator of the new political culture in Korea. Until 1987, it was a crime to possess copies of Marx's Capital. *
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