Economic Stress Makes the Heart Grow Fonder of Authoritarianism

SEOUL —  The specter of South Korea’s economic turmoil evokes memories of the early years after the signing of the armistice that ended the Korean War in July 1953. Discipline was the only way to pull a nation from poverty, and strong leaders in the mold of emperors, who united the country in dynastic wars and fended off Japanese invaders hundreds of years before, were in demand. From this postwar milieu of poverty rose the men who would come to dominate the giant chaebol or conglomerates that formed the backbone of the Korean economic miracle. A young general named Park Chung Hee also emerged during this time. In 1961, he seized power and ushered in an era of dictatorial rule--and unprecedented growth and prosperity.

So successful was Park’s rule in terms of forging the Korean miracle that he’s remembered today with a certain fondness. Rhee In Je, a candidate for president in an election fewer than three weeks away (Dec. 18) bears a striking physical resemblance to Park. He’s rumored, in fact, to have shaped his hairstyle to look like that of Park in an attempt to win the votes of a sizable number of people who think Korea would be better off today with some of the stern leadership that marked Park’s rule.

It is not an idle fantasy. Humiliated by the need to ask the International Monetary Fund for bailout credit and a reluctant participant in four-way talks involving all the Korean War protagonists--North and South Korea, the United States and China--South Korea may be vulnerable to a popular yearning for more authoritarian ways.

There is plenty of reason to fear such a turn of events. Democracy remains a fragile blossom implanted on a civilization ruled by a succession of emperors under a strict hierarchical system until the Japanese threw out the last emperor. The Japanese then imposed their own harsh colonialism on Korea for 35 years, yielding to the United States in the south and Russia in the north after surrendering in August 1945.

For more than a thousand years, the ideology of imperial rule, if there was one, was a Confucianism imported from China and transformed, Korean-style, into a neo-Confucianism more rigid than that in China--more popish, as it were, than the pope. At the heart of this Confucian philosophy was unswerving veneration of one’s elders and betters.

Rhee says his resemblance to Park cuts both ways. Some people view Park’s record with increasing admiration, he admits. Others, notably followers of Kim Dae Jung, the dissident whom Park held in jail and prison hospitals for years after Kim embarrassed him by winning 45% of the votes in a presidential election in 1971, blame Park for the current troubles.

Now Kim is running for president for the fourth time, the third time since another general and disciple of Park, Roh Tae Woo, under pressure from millions of demonstrators, introduced democratic reform in 1987, staged the first presidential election and won over an opposition divided between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam. Then, unable to succeed himself under the 1987 constitution, Roh merged his party with that of Kim Young Sam, who defeated Kim Dae Jung for the presidency in 1992.

Even without the latest economic trauma, this show of democracy was, at best, an overlay on an old system. The chaebol, the political parties, the bureaucracy are all top-down structures whose leaders expect complete loyalty from their followers.

Competing structures have gotten along with each other by greasing the way with payoffs. Politicians, in the pocket of the chaebol, paid off bankers, who approved loans, far too large, for their chaebol colleagues. The chaebol passed on a percentage to the bureaucrats and, in the case of Roh and Chun Doo Hwan, the general who staged a mini-coup shortly after Park’s assassination 18 years ago, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to their coffers. It was the way vassals have displayed fealty in Korea from ancient times.

In return, these loyal subjects looked to the emperor for leadership. One reason for the confusion in Seoul these days is that Kim Young Sam, zealous in his prosecution of military officers and bureaucrats, including both Chun and Roh, for corruption, has not offered tough or shrewd guidance. Instead, he has failed to control the bureaucrats and to impose the discipline needed to hold rival structures in his grasp.

It was Park’s disciplinary zeal and vision of a dynamic Korea-against-the-world that ignited the explosion of the chaebol, driving them to take over company after company on borrowed money. It was Park’s determination to “export or die,” to turn Korea into a world-class economic power, that drove the aggressive chaebol to all corners of the globe, shipping, selling and building at costs far below the competition from Japan, Europe or North America. And it was Park’s intolerance of democratic debate that stifled the kind of dissent that might have given voice to long-term doubts about the chaebol system and the wisdom of assigning so much economic power to such a small sliver of society.

It is altogether likely now, in the period of embarrassing IMF “supervision” of the economy after the election, that Koreans will hark back to that discipline in considering how to extricate their society from its present plight.

The strictures of a top-down order are likely to be harsh. The IMF undoubtedly will force the closure of some of the merchant banks, conduits for many bad loans. But the next president and his finance minister will have to go much farther in compelling bankrupt companies to close and in shutting down prestige government projects. The first casualties may be thousands of workers, laid off or denied overtime.

The downside of this kind of discipline is that it also will provoke dictatorial policies of the sort to which Korea has resorted so often over the past two generations. Not even Kim Dae Jung, venerated by American liberals for his courage against Park and Chun, is sure to change the pattern. He is said to rule with a dictatorial hand over his own followers, to tolerate no dissent within his organization--and to be as susceptible as most politicians to a handout needed to stay alive politically.

The worst fear, though, is that Korea might follow a still more dictatorial course under pressure from a flagging economy--and from the North. There is always the risk, as the economy worsens, jobs are lost and dissent increases, that generals, in the name of patriotism, may decide they’ve seen enough of civilian rule and impose some law and order.

That denouement would be very much in keeping with the pattern not just of the governance of Park Chung Hee, who may go down in history as the father, if not the patron saint, of modern South Korea, but of a couple of millennia of Korean history.

For an example of a Korean dictatorship in the old style, one need only look north. While North Koreans starve, Kim Jong I1, son and heir of “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, reigns supreme. That’s all in keeping with the deepest instincts of Confucian Korean society, if not of the communist ideology that purports to inspire North Korea through its suffering.*