kevin gray

of Park Geun-Hye to the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential palace, after her victory in the December 2012 election, cannot but prompt reflections on the nature of the country’s democratization process. Ms Park grew up there as the daughter of the dictator Park Chung-Hee, who ruled the Republic of Korea with an iron fist after the 1961 military coup that brought him to power. Following her mother’s death in 1974, the young Geun-Hye served as General Park’s First Lady, until he in turn was shot over the dinner table by his chief of intelligence in 1979. The dictatorship persisted for another eight years under Park’s brutal successor, General Chun, in face of countrywide protests that culminated in the great June Uprising of 1987, after which a period of ‘managed democracy’ ensued. The decade of centre-left government that opened in 1997, under the presidencies of Kim Dae Jung, a famous dissident, and Roh Mu-hyun, a former civil-rights lawyer, suggested to many that the liberal opposition movement had at last entered into its inheritance, supplanting an older, more conservative generation—albeit under the inauspicious sign of the Asian debt crisis. In 2007, however, a low turn-out by disappointed Roh voters helped the right-wing candidate, ex-Hyundai ceo Lee Myung-Bak, into the Blue House with the support of just 30 per cent of the overall electorate.

Park Geun-Hye’s victory, crowning her party’s success in last April’s legislative election, now sets the stage for a full decade of conservative rule, from 2007 through to 2017. More than this, it appears to ensconce the rule of an elite that governed the country not just under the Cold War dictatorship but under the bitter decades of Japanese colonialism that preceded it. To understand the political dynamics of contemporary South Korea it is necessary to consider the origins and development of this class, as well as the character of the 1987 ‘transition’ and the limited, though not inconsequential, achievements of the liberal Kim–Roh administrations in dealing with this traumatic legacy.footnote1 I will argue that the polarization of the country’s political culture is the result of a hegemonic struggle over the meaning of South Korea’s development course, pitting those who benefited from the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and the decades of breakneck industrialization, under authoritarian governments and American tutelage, against those who suffered from them. Recent attempts by South Korean intellectuals to reburnish the ideological credentials of the business and political elite should be read in this light.

The crucible

To a degree almost unparalleled among other oecd economies, the process of class formation in South Korea has been shaped by a series of wrenching shocks and dislocations, from both external and internal sources. ‘Modernization’ of the peninsula began with Japan’s annexation of the ancient, unitary state in 1910, as the colonial authorities set about a radical transformation of Korea’s traditional, agrarian-bureaucratic society, in line with the Imperial master-plan. Large numbers of Koreans were recruited to staff the lower ranks of the burgeoning Japanese administration and the notoriously brutal colonial police. As Bruce Cumings demonstrates in his classic Origins of the Korean War, landowners were left in place, to collaborate with the authorities or retreat into cultural pursuits or contemplation; but harsh new taxes based on a countrywide cadastral survey drove subsistence tenant-farmers to desperate rebellion. From 1931, the peninsula was intensively developed as the gateway to ‘Manchukuo’; uprooted peasants were coerced as shock troops to build roads and railways, to man heavy industry in the North or to fight in Manchuria, as anti-colonial guerrillas multiplied. With the full-scale invasion of China in 1937, increasing numbers of Koreans were forcibly conscripted, while others volunteered for the Imperial Army. Ideological terror also intensified: Anti-Communist Association branches undertook ‘thought-cleansing sessions’ at village and factory level, often operating out of police stations; suspected leftists would be tortured to reveal their comrades’ identities. Labour mobilizations were also carried out by Korean police officers—the most hated of all the collaborators.footnote2

The collapse of the colonial power after Hirohito’s broadcast on 15 August 1945 was greeted by Koreans with spontaneous celebrations, the release of some 30,000 political prisoners from colonial gaols and the countrywide establishment of people’s committees. Attacks on the police proliferated as Japanese Army units disintegrated, and half-starved Koreans returned to their villages from forced labour in mines and factories to confront the collaborators who had sent them there. The us decision to divide the country, to contain the influence of its Soviet neighbour, had been accepted by Stalin without a murmur. While collaborators in the North were sacked and anti-Japanese guerrillas (like Kim Il Sung) welcomed home as heroes, in the South the opposite policies applied. Alarmed by the state of popular mobilization when they arrived in September 1945, the us occupation commanders determined to retain and ‘Koreanize’ the Japanese administrative machinery and colonial police. The nucleus of the future Republic of Korea Army, over which the us would retain operative command, was staffed with Japanese-trained officers.footnote3 These repressive forces were immediately unleashed against a rebellion that spread across the South in 1948, initially sparked by protests against police terror on Cheju island, and fighting for independence and unification. Just as under the Japanese, tens of thousands of political prisoners were gaoled and many more were sent to ‘guidance camps’ for anti-Communist re-education. Meanwhile the American occupation authorities oversaw an electoral process, widely boycotted, which confirmed the authoritarian Syngman Rhee, a long-time Korean exile in the us, as head of state. A ‘tepid opposition’, largely made up of former Southern landlords, was confined to a virtually powerless National Assembly.footnote4

The us thereby forestalled any national accounting with the forces that had collaborated with Japanese fascism; and indeed it was this layer that went on to rule the Republic of Korea. The three years of brutally destructive warfare on the peninsula that followed between 1950–53 served only to cement the position of what was disparagingly known as the ch’inilp’a, or ‘pro-Japanese faction’: the main social cleavage was defined as that between Communist and anti-Communist, rather than between Korean patriot and collaborator. Any challenge to the ruling order was painted as ‘Communist’ and ‘benefiting the North’.footnote5 Capitalist development during the Cold War era took shape within this framework. Industrialization under Hirohito had been state-sponsored, albeit often undertaken by the zaibatsu, principally Mitsui. The ever-open spigot of American funding, channelled through the authoritarian rok state, led to the concentration of wealth in giant chaebols owned by a handful of families who were soon densely intermarried with the ruling elite. Under Park’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 70s, state monies were poured into his home region of Kyŏngsang, while the restive Chŏlla provinces in the south-west were starved of aid.

Relentless economic expansion was meanwhile creating another enemy for the ruling elite, in the form of a fast-growing working class. Strike waves broke out repeatedly against the sweatshop conditions of the textile industry, soon joined by workers in the steel, auto, shipbuilding, machine-tools and electronics sectors. They were met by police terror, with labour organizers routinely tortured by Park’s notorious kcia. After Park’s assassination in 1979, his acolytes, Generals Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, seized control. Chun proved even more murderous than Park, sending troops to fire on demonstrations in the Chŏlla capital of Kwangju; the charismatic Chŏlla liberal leader, Kim Dae Jung, who had already been serially subjected to house arrest, kidnapping and imprisonment, was sentenced to death for treason, though ultimately allowed to escape into exile through pressure from Washington. Throughout the 1980s, a radical minjung or ‘common people’ movement built up outside the party system, rallying students, industrial workers, missionary activists, peasants and the urban poor. The minjung mobilized the mass protests of June 1987 when Chun announced that his crony, Gen. Roh, would succeed him as president. Under pressure from the Reagan administration, now tilting towards the ‘decompression’ of America’s Cold War dictatorships, Roh agreed to stand for election.

But 1987 proved to be a ‘conservative democratization’, managed from above, with the regime pouring in huge amounts of money to ensure the right result.footnote6 Two liberal candidates split the anti-dictatorship vote—Kim Young Sam, chairman of the ‘tepid’ opposition party, standing against Kim Dae Jung—allowing Roh to scoop a plurality. (In the 1992 election, Kim Young Sam pushed this logic to its conclusion and ran successfully as the candidate of the governing party.) Nor were the liberal leaders interested in an alliance with the now highly mobilized working class that might have posed a fundamental challenge to the rok ruling order. For its part, courageous shop-floor struggles won improvements in pay for organized labour, but attempts to constitute a political force—along the lines of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, for example—were met with ferocious repression and the usual charges of ‘Communism’ and ‘working for the North’.footnote7 Yet 1987 was also the moment when the rok growth model began to founder, ‘squeezed’ between the rising economies of China and Southeast Asia and aggressive us exchange rates, while the modest improvement in labour’s bargaining power helped to undermine its low-wage industrialization strategy; the profitability of the chaebols entered a long-term decline. The government’s response under Kim Young Sam’s presidency (1993–97) was to prime the chaebol pump with massive doses of credit, borrowed overseas but guaranteed by the state, while encouraging the expansion of the casual, non-unionized labour force and fending off demands from Washington to lift restrictions on fdi and clarify the chaebols’ accounts. The credit bubble burst with the Asian Crisis of 1997, leaving South Korea’s finances in tatters and its economy wide open to the imf battering ram. This was the inheritance of the liberal opposition when Kim Dae Jung entered the Blue House in the first days of 1998.

Liberal disenchantment

Up until 1987, the authoritarian character of the ruling order in South Korea meant that there was little need to develop any genuinely conservative ideology; in any case, the breakneck course of an externally imposed modernization meant there was little to ‘conserve’, so to speak. Annexation by Japan led to the almost instantaneous collapse of the cultural and political authority of Korea’s traditional ruling classes, and left Confucianism thoroughly de-legitimized.footnote8 With their origins all too often compromised by collaboration with the Japanese, conservatives suffered from a chronic legitimacy deficit for which they compensated by loud declarations of nationalism, identified with a virulent anti-Communism—and, under Park, the salve of tangible economic expansion. Under the more competitive conditions of contested elections, and with increasing economic insecurity after the 1997 crash, this lack of legitimacy became a more serious problem. The liberals now seemed buoyed by a demographic tide of baby-boomers who had come of age in the pro-democracy struggles of the 1980s and were inoculated against an authoritarian, ‘growth-first’ ideology which they identified with chŏnggyŏng yuch’ak, or ‘government–business collusion’.footnote9

Conservatives were left on the sidelines, prophesying ruin, as Kim Dae Jung pursued his enormously popular Sunshine policy of engagement with North Korea, proposing a confederal system with two autonomous regions. Its stalling, after the historic inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, was widely attributed to us opposition: the Clinton administration, which had nearly gone to war with dprk in June 1994, cold-shouldered Kim’s initiative and failed to deliver its side of an October 1994 agreement, providing an alternative energy supply to Pyongyang’s nuclear reactor. Bush’s openly hawkish denomination of the North as a member of the Axis of Evil was widely resented in the South. With Kim Dae Jung’s term coming to a close, his fellow-liberal Roh Mu-hyon fought a successful election campaign in late 2002 that was openly critical of Bush, vowing to put rok–us relations on a more equal footing—albeit reversing course once in office and dispatching Korean troops to Iraq.footnote10

Ultimately, Kim and Roh’s economic policies did more to erode their support than did the attacks of the conservative opposition. Unemployment and casual-labour rates soared under imf diktat, while Kim effectively neutralized the independent labour movement, kctu, when its leaders agreed in 1998 that redundancies would not be challenged, in exchange for minimal welfare safety-nets and recognition for themselves. The regulatory regime that the imf demanded for the Korean conglomerates—at the behest of us conglomerates—could be portrayed as ‘anti-chaebol legislation’, hence part of the liberals’ ‘progressive’ agenda. But such growth as there was between 1998 and 2007 resulted largely from the short-lived and highly destructive consumer-credit and asset-price bubbles that followed Kim’s roll-back of controls on fdi; Roh’s tenure (2002–07) was marked by increasing income inequalities, skyrocketing house prices and corruption scandals.footnote11 Yet to compensate his base, widely opposed to neoliberal restructuring, Roh in particular initiated moves to tackle the legacy of the colonial state and ‘deal with the past’—kwagŏch’ŏngsan.

The Roh government established not only a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the crimes of colonial rule, the Korean War and the military dictatorships, but also an Investigative Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators, which sought to reclaim the wealth amassed by nine individuals who had held key positions under the Japanese; this money would be used to compensate independence fighters and their descendants, as well as supporting projects to commemorate the independence movement. A non-governmental organization, the Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities, compiled a dictionary of thousands of people who collaborated with the colonial government, including politicians, judges, religious leaders, artists, scholars and journalists.footnote12 Roh also attempted to repeal the notorious National Security Law and to prune back the Agency for National Security Planning (the new name for the kcia).

Textbook furore

It cannot be said that the conservatives received such efforts in a spirit of reconciliation; the Lee government (2007–12) immediately disbanded the Commission. More broadly, the response to this challenge has seen the emergence of a more sophisticated New Right movement, which aims to distinguish itself from the old conservatism—now seen as corrupt, divided, overly dependent on Cold War anti-Communism and bereft of any wider ideological appeal—while still targeting the Kim–Roh governments as ‘leftist and pro-North’, or chwap’a chongbuk. Strong proponents of free-market liberalism, its moving spirits are intellectuals in their 30s and 40s, as well as religious leaders and civil activists. The movement itself consists of three principal components: ideological think-tanks, including the New Right Foundation, Textbook Forum, NewRightThink.net and Liberty Union; the policy-oriented Hansun Foundation for Freedom and Happiness; and a political-action group, the New Right Union, actively involved in supporting the Lee Myung-Bak government of 2007–12.footnote13

This movement has sought to counter the rising influence of left-nationalist historiography over the past decades by casting the role of Japan and the us in the country’s economic development in an altogether more positive light, and by promoting a specifically South Korean nationalism. In 2008, Lee Myung-Bak and his ruling party, as well as conservative organizations such as the New Right Union and the Korean Freedom League, pushed for the renaming of the August 15th holiday from National Liberation Day (kwangbok chŏl) to National Foundation Day (kŏn’guk chŏl), to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the rok in 1948, under American auspices, rather than the end of Japanese rule in 1945. The move was hotly contested, leading to separate celebrations by the two camps, and ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the episode sheds light on conservatives’ attempts to strengthen their own legitimacy by playing down national—pan-peninsula—liberation from Japanese rule, the role of the domestic resistance and of exiled independence activists such as Kim Ku and the Shanghai-based Korean Provisional Government, and emphasizing instead the contribution of the us–South Korean alliance to the state’s foundation and subsequent ‘miracle’ economic growth.

A storm has also erupted over attempts under the Lee government to revise school history textbooks. Debates have long raged over the dynamics of late Chosŏn dynasty social and property relations, not least among Marxist historians in Korea, who have disputed the function and characterization of land ownership, clan systems, communal social production and slave labour, and offered widely differing interpretations of ‘Asiatic mode of production’ models or of a late Korean ‘feudal’ period, nurturing endogenous ‘capitalist sprouts’. Since the 1980s this last view has been widely propounded by left-nationalist historians such as Kang Man-gil, with the implication that Japanese colonialism crushed a promising Korean path to capitalist modernity. This historiography has always been contested, both by Western scholars and by Korean and Japanese historians who have stressed the relatively ‘stagnant’, if not crisis-ridden, nature of the peninsula’s late 19th-century agrarian economy. A 1988 work, Socio-Economic History of the Late Chosŏn Period, by the (then) Marxist economic historian Yi Yŏnghun was an important contribution to this latter view.footnote14

More recently, Yi Yŏnghun has been the editor of a series of volumes bringing together new quantitative economic research on the period, and has argued for a full-scale economic crisis in the second half of the 19th century, with the decline of the Chosŏn state’s grain-loan system a trigger for the collapse. It was the development of infrastructure, labour and credit markets under Japanese suzerainty that ‘laid the basis for the development of the Korean market economy and industrial society’.footnote15 As a substantive historical argument, this would also be the assessment of scholars such as Bruce Cumings and Carter Eckert, though Cumings has long stressed the importance of understanding the ‘fractured’ nature of the social upheaval instigated by Japanese modernization, in conditions of imperial-militarist expansionism: changes were far-reaching but ‘abortive’, and did not run their course.footnote16 But Yi Yŏnghun’s work has also been taken up by the New Right campaign for textbook revision, of which he is a leading light. The Alternative Textbook for Modern Korean History (Taean kyogwasŏ: han’guk kŭn-hyŏndaesa), published by the Textbook Forum in 2008, was accused of subordinating nuanced historiographical analysis to political purposes. Cumings and Eckert were among many scholars who signed a joint letter protesting that the Ministry of Education’s revision appeared to be driven by ‘a specific political agenda to homogenize history textbooks’, and arguing that, by allowing ‘only one historical interpretation’, it prevented ‘diverse interpretations, based on accumulated historical research, from being reflected in the textbooks’.footnote17

Similar debates have raged over the possibilities for resistance under colonial rule. In the context of increasing pressure under the Roh government, writers associated with the New Right have sought to emphasize the extreme repression of the colonial era, implying that resistance was simply not an option and that Koreans had little choice but to collaborate with the Japanese.footnote18 Yet this deterministic logic leaves unexplained the fact that resistance did actually occur. Again, the intentions seem to be to downplay the contribution of Korea’s independence movement.

The Bulldozer

South Korea’s political sphere remains a hotly contested space. Lee’s 2007 victory, as noted, was largely due to abstentions by left and liberal voters, following the implosion of the Roh Mu-hyon administration; turnout dropped to a historic low of just over 62 per cent, from nearly 71 per cent in 2002. Lee was also able to mount a compelling attack on the lacklustre economic record of the ‘lost decade of leftist rule’ under Kim and Roh—attributed in part to their ‘anti-chaebol policies’, detrimental to business profits—and on the stalling of the Sunshine policy, despite the high-profile Gaesong Industrial Complex and tourism programmes.footnote19 In office, Lee attempted to live up to his nickname as ‘the Bulldozer’, drawing on the image of Rhee and Park to suggest a strongman who gets things done. The restrictions on chaebol financing were lifted, and the Blue House attempted to push through a number of large-scale construction projects, with parallels to Japan’s ‘bridges to nowhere’ in that they were of scant social or economic benefit but promised to be highly lucrative for the chaebol construction companies. Among these was the ‘Four Rivers’ plan, aimed at the beautification of the Han, the Nakdong, the Kŭm and the Yŏngsan; with estimated costs of around $19 billion, the project would see rare wild wetlands destroyed to make way for urban-style ‘citizens’ parks’.

Lee also adopted a markedly more aggressive posture vis-à-vis the North, cutting back inter-Korean projects and scaling up publicity for the massive us–South Korean joint military exercises that regularly take place along the North’s coastline, in the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea. Skirmishes, including the ‘bumping’ of Northern fishing boats by rok naval vessels, have brought fatalities on both sides. In March 2010 the sinking of the rok anti-submarine corvette Ch’ŏnan was attributed by Seoul to a dprk ‘bubble jet’ torpedo, a claim that met with widespread scepticism amongst the South Korean public, particularly of the younger generation.footnote20

Indeed, Lee’s tenure proved in many respects a testament to the traditional ideological weaknesses of South Korean conservatism. One important component of his support came from the highly conservative Protestant mega-churches, located overwhelmingly in Seoul’s wealthiest districts, Kangnam, Sŏch’o and Songp’a. Nearly 30 per cent of South Koreans describe themselves as Christians, with Protestants outnumbering Catholics by two to one. In the 1970s and 80s, activists from both denominations, as well as Buddhists, played a role in the country’s minjung movement, and to some extent a tradition of resistance remains, particularly with regard to environmental and peace issues. Divisions between conservative and progressive Protestant churches date back to post-war debates over whether to affiliate to the World Council of Churches in Geneva, regarded by the conservatives as pro-Communist.footnote21 Since 1987 the ultra-conservative wing of the Korean Protestant church has witnessed phenomenal growth, preaching a doctrine of personal wealth accumulation as a manifestation of strong faith. The Lee government had particularly close ties with the evangelical movement: Lee himself is an elder of the Somang Presbyterian Church, one of the most prominent in Seoul.

The mega-churches have played an active role in political mobilization in recent years, but this can also backfire. An example was the referendum on means-testing for free school meals called by the conservative Mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-Hoon, in August 2011. Mega-church pastors threw themselves behind Oh’s campaign, the leader of the Onnuri Community Church in Yŏngsan contributing the interesting suggestion that free school lunches for all could lead to a rise in homosexuality.footnote22 Mayor Oh was obliged to resign when voter turnout in the referendum fell below the minimum threshold. The mega-churches then launched a virulent campaign against the centre-left candidate Park Won-Soon in the mayoral election that ensued, the pastor of the Kŭmnan Methodist Church warning his 120,000-strong congregation that Park was possessed by the devil. Once again their intervention backfired, however, and Park was elected with a 7-point lead over his rival and an overwhelming majority among younger voters.

Oppositions

Resistance to Lee’s government, then, was never far below the surface. Within months of his inauguration, protests against a free-trade agreement with Washington, originally proposed by Roh Mu-Hyun, which involved the importation of us beef, brought forth the largest street demonstrations since the June Uprising of 1987.footnote23 The South Korean media remain overwhelmingly conservative: three newspapers, Chosun Daily, Joongang Daily and Dong-a Daily, known collectively as Chojungdong, dominate the market, overshadowing the left-liberal and pro-labour broadsheet Hankyoreh, which emerged out of the democratization struggle and is strongly supportive of engagement with the North, as its name (‘One Nation’) suggests. Kyunghyang Daily, originally established by the Catholic Church, then owned by the Hanhwa chaebol, was bought out by its employees in 1988 and has a similar editorial stance to Hankyoreh’s. High-quality left journals include Changbi (Creation and Criticism), Marx 21 and Radical Review. High-circulation left-liberal magazines include Sisain, which emerged out of a dispute at Sisa Journal over an article on Samsung, and Hankyoreh 21.

More irreverent voices can also now make themselves heard. Punning on the names of two popular Korean actresses, the new media satirized the cliquish nature of Lee’s first cabinet as the ‘Kang Buja–Ko Soyoung S-Line’—linking Kangnam, the upmarket Seoul neighbourhood on the south bank of the Han, with Korea University (Lee’s alma mater), Somang Church and the Yŏngnam region (the generic name for Lee’s home province, Kyŏngsang).footnote24 If the term loses much of its pungency in translation, it may suggest the way in which Lee’s tendency to reward cronies with ministerial roles was viewed. The current-affairs podcast Nanŭn Ggomsuda (literally: ‘I’m a petty-minded creep’), scathing about the Lee government, got over two million downloads per episode.

New web-based media outlets such as Redian, Pressian or Ohmynews, which has a ‘citizens reporting’ platform, have adopted innovative combinations of commercial and alternative rationales. The popularity of non-mainstream liberal politicians such as Ahn Chol-Soo and Park Won-Soon lies in part with this constituency. There have also been ructions in the Korean television industry, with strikes breaking out at the kbs, mbc and ytn channels against Lee’s attempts to replace directors of broadcasting with his own people. An investigation of the Somang Church by the mbc programme pd Notebook led to the sacking of the producer, Choi Seung-Ho.footnote25 Yet some of these disgruntled tv reporters have established their own online news programme, Newstapa, available through YouTube and reaching a wide audience. While Lee’s government lifted anti-monopoly restrictions to allow newspaper companies to enter into television broadcasting, the newly established conservative cable tv stations have struggled in an already saturated market.

There has been an upsurge in critical film-making in recent years. Im Sang-soo’s The President’s Last Bang (2005), about Park Chung-Hee’s assassination, controversially depicted the general at ease in speaking Japanese to his associates, and became the object of a legal battle over its use of documentary footage of demonstrations—held to blur the boundary between fiction and fact. Chung Ji-young’s Unbowed (2011) dealt with the authoritarian legacies of the country’s legal system. Just before the 2012 election there was a small flurry of films investigating the dictatorship period: Jo Geun-hyun’s 26 Years dramatized a revenge attempt by five survivors of the Kwangju massacre; another film by Chung Ji-young, National Security 1985, dealt with the torture of democracy activists; O Muel’s Jiseul told the story of the 1948 Cheju massacre. There has also been a proliferation of documentaries along similar lines.

The alliance of left and liberal forces that challenged the dictatorship has undergone profound changes since the 1990s. If, once in office, the leaders of the democratic opposition took on the colours of the neoliberal centre-left, the combative independent workers’ movement was severely affected by the shift of labour-intensive industries to lower-cost production sites in China and elsewhere, and by the sharp increase in casual labour in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis. It was from this greatly weakened position, and following their 1998 deal with Kim Dae Jung, that the leaders of the kctu—the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, umbrella for the myriad militant workplace organizations that had emerged in the 80s and 90s—set about founding the Democratic Labour Party, established in 2000 as a broad ‘united front’ aiming to group social movements and progressive ngos as well as workers.

Yet the dlp has suffered from deep-running divisions within the Korean left, which emerged into the open from June 1987 between what are known as the ‘national liberation’ and the ‘liberation of labour’ (nodong haebang) or ‘people’s democracy’ lines. The former, numerically stronger, stress the centrality of geopolitical and anti-imperialist questions, and argue for a united-front alliance for national liberation informed by dependency theory and Juche concepts; the latter privilege the labour–capital contradiction rather than that of imperialism.footnote26 The dlp won 17 per cent of the vote in the 2004 legislative election, benefiting from anger at Roh Mu-hyun’s record in office, yet struggled to convert this support into a coherent activist formation. In 2006, following the leadership’s refusal to expel two party officials convicted of ‘spying’ for North Korea, a breakaway faction led by former-student-turned-labour activist Roh Hoe-chan left to form the New Progressive Party. The dlp, reformulated as the Unified Progressive Party in 2012 after fusing with two smaller factions, won only 10 per cent of the vote in the April 2012 legislative elections, though it managed to maintain its position as South Korea’s third political party (Roh Hoe-chan’s npp got just 0.5 per cent of the vote).footnote27

Meanwhile the trajectories of the civil-liberties groups—organizations such as the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy or the Citizen’s Council for Economic Justice—which emerged from the broader minjung movement of the 1980s to tackle the vestiges of authoritarian developmentalism, have tended to align themselves with the mainstream of the neoliberal centre-left. An example of this was the minority shareholder-rights campaign launched by the pspd. The aim was to purchase a token amount of chaebol shares which would allow activists to gain access to company reports and challenge the management over the conglomerates’ monopolistic practices. In the event, the pspd’s attempts to strengthen minority shareholder rights were ultimately hijacked by government and business interests, and by profit-oriented shareholders whose aims were far removed from those of the pspd.footnote28

The dictator’s daughter

This was the context, then, for the presidential contest of December 2012. In a tightly fought race, the independent and upp candidates withdrew before polling day to allow a clear run to Moon Jae-In, former aide and successor to Roh Mu-hyon. The personal backgrounds of the two main contenders were dramatically opposed: as a pro-democracy student activist Moon had been gaoled by Park Geun-Hye’s father in the mid-70s, just as she was presiding as First Lady in the Blue House. Yet their platforms were virtually identical, with Park promising the ‘democratization of the economy’ (kyŏngje minjuhwa) and a ‘Korean-style welfare system’, with increased pensions, healthcare reforms, greater state provision of childcare and relief for heavily indebted home-owners—issues that had traditionally been the preserve of the liberal-left. Nor was there much substantive difference between the two on relations with the North: distancing herself from Lee’s hard-line policies, Park pledged ‘to build trust and dialogue’ and argued that humanitarian aid should be separated from politics. On foreign policy, she called for deepening the alliance with the United States and upgrading the partnership with China, promising to maintain harmonious cooperative relations with both. If there was a nuance of difference here with Moon’s policy of putting rok–us and rok–China relations onto an equal footing, the most substantive contrast between the two was that Park ruled out the tax rise for the rich proposed by Moon Jae-In.

On her role as the dictator’s daughter, Park Geun-Hye managed to have it both ways. Her family lineage undoubtedly appealed to older voters who remembered Gen. Park’s rule as an era of rising living standards, in the context of today’s increasing insecurity. Yet she also felt obliged to display remorse for her father’s reign of terror, stating that ‘the ends cannot justify the means’ and making well-publicized visits to memorials to activists who had resisted his rule—often to ironic effect: her attempt to lay a wreath at the foot of a statue to Chun Tae-Il, who burnt himself to death in protest at inhumane sweatshop conditions in 1971, was somewhat marred by the rough handling her bodyguards gave to protesting workers, engaged in a long-term strike at Ssangyong Motors. This was a change of tack from her earlier statement that her father’s military coup was ‘the best choice in an unavoidable situation’, a comment that attracted widespread criticism. The apology also angered members of her own camp: Cho Gap-je, a conservative journalist, regarded it as ‘a political show’ and ‘spitting on the grave of her father’.footnote29 Park also distanced herself sharply from the deeply unpopular Lee Myung-Bak, in effect running almost as much against his record as against Moon. While the evangelical mega-churches remain a significant support base for her party, her publicists took care to emphasize her personal atheism, suggesting less scope for tension with other religious communities.

The bid for a new conservative hegemony in South Korea scored an undoubted success with Park Geun-Hye’s victory in the December 2012 election. Yet its scale needs to be qualified. Park’s 3-point lead—51 per cent of the vote, compared to Moon’s 48 per cent—was hardly invincible. Park’s support came predominantly from the over-50s, with Moon substantially ahead among younger voters. Regional loyalties were as pronounced as ever, with Moon winning nearly 90 per cent of the vote in Chŏlla, while Park did almost as well in the more populous Kyŏngsang provinces. In the major conurbations of the north-west, Moon led in Seoul by 51 to 48 per cent, while Park was ahead by the same fraction in Inch’ŏn/Kyŏnggi.

In some respects, Park Geun-Hye is the perfect figure to carry forward the ‘passive revolution’ of 1987: a symbol of the dictatorship, and of the collaboration with fascism that preceded it, recast in conciliatory form. Park herself made much of her gender and the need to modernize Korea’s patriarchal politics during the campaign. Yet as Charles Armstrong has noted in these pages, the political capital of rok presidents can evaporate with surprising speed. Even before her inauguration in February 2013, Park has had to accept the resignation of her designated prime minister, Kim Yong-Joon, after allegations of corruption. The advanced manufacturing economy her father built, at huge social cost, is fast becoming unworkable; the lower-end textile and clothing sectors have already gone, and the higher end faces relentless pressure from China, in an already saturated world market. Yet there is no obvious alternative. Meanwhile, with a new leader installed in Pyongyang and in the context of a rapidly changing East Asia, the massive us military base in downtown Seoul is testimony that the rok remains a semi-sovereign state, its destiny decided outside its borders.