Historical origins of Korea's political corruption

By Kyung Moon Hwang

As we head toward parliamentary elections in April, there is the usual scramble among politicians to break away from, rearrange, and construct new alliances. This endless cycle of party formation and destruction has characterized South Korean politics since liberation in 1945.

What seems to get lost in all this is the idea of public service, that holding elected office is a duty, not a prize or instrument for personal gain. With government office comes the great responsibility to use political authority not for oneself, but for the greater good.

Notwithstanding the chronic failure to live up to them, such ideals have been around for a very long time. They lay at the heart of Confucian political teachings that entered Korea more than 1,000 years ago and drove political development thereafter.

So why is it so difficult for Korean political culture to realize these ideals? Why do Korean political and government officials remain so prone to treating their offices as vehicles for self-aggrandizement or, even worse, as money-making ventures? In short, why is corruption still such a problem?

Despite nearly three decades as an electoral democracy and an even longer history of press monitoring of politics, Korea still consistently ranks embarrassingly low in the periodic surveys of corruption around the world. Habits of paying political authorities, from policemen to presidents, for gaining access, attention, and outcomes ― what in the U.S. is called “pay to play” ― seem almost innately ingrained among South Koreans, as if they were born with this inclination.

This cannot be true, of course, any more than it is for people living in other countries suffering from chronic corruption. And I have no definitive answer to explain this behavior, aside from turning to Korean history to find possible origins.

I would begin with Confucianism itself, which values not only hierarchy in social relations but also reciprocity, the idea that one must repay kind treatment (“grace”).

This is in general a good thing, but in the political arena, as reformers were observing hundreds of years ago, this can lead to officials expecting something in return for their decisions. And just as powerfully, it triggers the impulse to pay bribes, regardless of the official’s wishes, knowing that the official will feel obligated to return the favor.

Confucian political culture also worked together with deeply rooted forms of social hierarchy in Korea, which in the pre-modern era ordered people according to their birth identity (the social standing of their parents and ancestors), to turn government office into the most socially prestigious occupation. Political office, in sum, became the object and reflection of status (and power) more than a means of community service, which actually contradicted Confucian ideals, as Korean critics repeatedly noted in the past.

In the Joseon era, another product of this complex, distinctive mixture of Confucian ideals and hereditary social organization were the “hyangni” ― more commonly known as “ajeon.” These clerks, bound by birth as if they were enslaved into this position (which was not untrue), ran the day-to-day operations of local governments. As they had to be, they were administrative experts, managing tax assessment and collection, policing, and a wide range of other functions that their social superiors, the hereditary aristocracy (“yangban”), simply were unprepared to do.

But for all this, the hyangni clerks were not even regularly paid; they were expected to “skim off the top” while collecting the taxes. Despite the regular outcries over these clerks’ venality (what a surprise), for the most part the Joseon Kingdom did nothing to abolish or even reform this system of “legalized” corruption.

That the descendants of these hereditary clerks, during the transition to the modern era, went on to take commanding positions in the new social elite as landlords, politicians, and businessmen probably has something to do with the persistence of corruption. This is an educated guess, however, almost impossible to prove, although it’s not as difficult to find hyangni ancestry among local elites, even in the late 20th century.

Despite all of these deeply embedded sources of the culture of political corruption, what appears as likely the single biggest cause _ so big, in fact, that it might dwarf the others _ is Korea’s long and strong history of authoritarianism. Of course Korea had always had a dictatorship, strictly speaking, and authoritarian Japanese colonial rulers in the early 20th century would hardly have prioritized public service for the sake of Koreans.

But from 1948 to 1987, with a few brief interludes as exceptions, Korea was ruled by a succession of native dictatorships, which deployed all the modern mechanisms of domination, surveillance, and mobilization. Dictatorships by definition lack accountability and transparency, and hence they operate substantially through informal means ― what we easily recognize as corruption ― regardless of formal laws. This is particularly true for one-party dictatorships, but one-man dictatorship, which is what South Korea got, can be just as lethal to developing an honest and responsible political system.

So, while things have gotten a lot better since democratization, the political realm (together with business) still appears to be struggling to catch up to the broader yearning for fairness and accountability among the people, which was actually in place even during the dictatorships. It was, after all, what brought democracy to the country in the first place.

Kyung Moon Hwang is professor in the Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California. He is the author of “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).