Korea: Kwangju after one year
David I. Steinberg wrote the following article in May, 1981, one year after the outbreak of the Gwangju pro-democracy movement. He recently found the article in his album and sent it to The Korea Times for publication. Steinberg is currently the distinguished professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University. ― ED.
David I. Steinberg
By a correspondent recently in Korea
A sense of quiet officially pervades Korea. Under a controlled media purged of liberal sentiments critical of the government and with the elimination of many publications officially considered unfriendly, the usual entrepreneurial business of both urban and rural Korea continues unabated without reported protest or challenge. There is, in fact, an intensification of these business efforts with a new broadening of foreign investment opportunities to attempt to reverse the downward economic indicators. But if normalcy seemed prescribed and omnipresent, it is in a significant sense misleading.
Student demonstrations continued in May. Although sporadic and confined to individual campuses, their news spreads rapidly, causing both apprehension and hope at least in intellectual circles if not among the public at large. Their volume is not generally known, and rumors may explode their magnitude, but even so occasional hints of their existence sometimes appear in the press, as when a student fell to his death from the top of the Seoul National University library after speaking to a group of demonstrators. The public has not responded to these events in any overt way, and the literati only speak of them in small, friendly circles. There is among the latter a sense of despair.
Of critical importance, but naturally inchoate in overt expression, are the activities of the new government to establish its legitimacy as well as the efforts to take the minds of the population off of the Kwangju insurrection of May 1980. In the Korean context it might be termed, rice and circuses.
President Park Chung-hee came to power in 1961 through a military coup. Such events have been rare in the history of Korea, and derided by a society that traditionally was dominated by the literati. Syngman Rhee could claim legitimacy through his long and arduous nationalistic struggle against the Japanese.
Kim Il-sung has tried to do the same. Park, however, was trained in the Japanese army and has no such standing and was furthermore implicated in the Yosu-Sunchon uprisings of 1948 that had communist origins. His claim to legitimate power came not from the various elections held since 1963 that were widely regarded in intellectual circles in Korea as of dubious validity, but rather through the real economic progress that pervaded Korean society, first among the middle and upper classes in the urban sector in the 1960s and then, as a result of a deliberate policy shift, in the rural communities in the 1970s.
President Chun Doo-hwan was also an usurper, having seized control of government on Dec. 12, 1979 following the assassination of President Park in September of that year. Plagued by the taint of illegitimate rule, and further badly scared by the Kwangju insurrection that officially resulted in 179 deaths although rumors place the total as high as 2,000, it was ruthlessly crushed by the military in May 1980. Chun currently has less claimed to legitimacy than Park. The aftermath of Kwangju, the home province of the imprisoned Kim Dae-jung, split Korea further along provincial lines, as Chun and his coterie of generals and officers as well as the troops that suppressed Kwangju came from the neighboring but rival Kyongsang provinces, further reinforcing differences between them that have existed with varying degrees of intensity for some 1,500 years.
Chun’s legitimacy, as Park’s, must also depend on his economic performance and success. The election of 1981 has little meaning in these terms. He has, however, inherited a different Korea in a vastly changed world. Korean growth, averaging 10 percent per year since about 1965, was severely hit by the oil crisis of 1978, a worldwide recession that both slowed exports and export potential, inflation that officially was over 3 percent per month but may be higher, and falling level of real income for the population as a whole. Korea was also badly hit by the rice crop failure of 1980 due to the cold weather that affected specifically the high-yielding varieties of rice that the government had pushed upon the farmers. Rice production dropped by one third, eliminating the rice self-sufficiency that was first established in 1975. It stopped the expansion of the GNP, dropping it to minus 6 percent, the first negative year since Korean growth really began. Rural incomes that year fell by 24 percent.
If Chun’s legitimacy depends over time on economic performance, he will be hard pressed to prove it. This year, plagued by early cold weather in the north and a drought in the south, the government made an all-out effort to mobilize its resources and personnel to mitigate these problems. Some $20 million was allocated to speed drought relief. Many consider that this effort was too precipitous in terms of apparent economic need, especially as the government had been reporting that about 100 percent of paddy land was irrigated to some degree, but this attempt indicated to many more of a political concern with crop failure than one directed solely to economic causes. A failure two years in a row would be a bad omen. There are still many in Korea who feel that the virtue of the ruler determines economic success amid the fertility of the land.
The United States support to Chun, inviting him to Washington before the Korean election of 1981, the results of which were never in doubt, was regarded by many as a mistake, for it ratified an election that had not yet taken place. Chun, in their eyes, visited President Reagan as an illegitimate ruler without the mantle, however spurious, of an election. Elections under both Park and Chun are treated by Korean intellectuals with more cynicism than they may be abroad. American support helped Chun’s legitimacy in Korean eyes, as it seemed intended to do, for in Korea American approval still carries some weight. In the longer run it may prove to be marginally useful, but it is likely also to generate additional anti-American feeling, especially among the young.
The Chun government has also carefully attempted to turn the public’s attention away from the tragedy of Kwangju. In Seoul, the state organized the largest national cultural festival the country has ever seen, spending large amounts of money (over $1 million officially but rumors place the costs at many times that figure) and using all organs of popular appeal to publicize the event. Both traditional folk troupes and audiences were brought from all over the country to Seoul. The site of the festival was Yoido, the island in the middle of the Han River running through the center of the city, where security could easily be maintained. It was not well attended. There were unofficial reports that some of the traditional masked dance groups that performed, and this was one of the most popular forms of rural entertainment, had served its traditional purpose. Under the Yi Dynasty, it was an outlet for the common people to criticize the government and the gentry. This year they repeated their traditional roles and criticized the Chun regime, much to the chagrin of those in power. By attempting to mobilize the traditional arts, the government has neglected that those urbanized youth interested in these art forms are among the most intensively nationalistic in outlook, and more apt to be critical of the military in its role of the source of political power.
In Kwangju itself, there was a national primary and middle school athletic meet and competition. It was also widely publicized, expensive, but also poorly attended.
The city was festooned with flowers, every rotary with heaped pyramids of color. It seemed to have little effect in ameliorating the resentment against the government in that city and in the neighboring countryside. It may take a decade for it to ease.
The legitimacy of the Chun government is actively encouraged by the extensive publicity in Korea attached to President Chun’s trip to the ASEAN nations that began or June 25, the anniversary of the Korean War. Its results are likely to be more geared to internal government needs in Korea and to a lesser degree to international public relations than to any practical accomplishments.
It is unlikely that there is any present force that can immediately challenge President Chun’s government. The official sense of quiet, however, should not foster a sense of complacency, for the Korean situation remains potentially explosive, but when it may erupt is unclear. If it does, it may do so with an intensity not known before in South Korea.