The Road to Democratization ― Korea's Upheaval

In the previous episode, we saw the south and north of the armistice line begin to walk opposite roads. The South achieved the Miracle on the Han River under a developmental dictatorship and was coming to hold affluence in its hands. Yet that affluence did not come as a set with freedom.

The more the economy grew, the more people’s lives changed, education spread, and many gathered in the cities. And the society that had grown wealthier gradually began to hold a different question: why can we not choose our own leaders with our own hands?

What this episode portrays is the fierce two decades in which Korea swayed in pursuit of freedom and democracy. There was blood that was shed, rights that were won, and the economic trial that awaited beyond them. Neither praising nor condemning any particular government, we wish to look at both the light and shadow of this era as calmly as we can.

A Gunshot, and a Dark Spring

What pulled the trigger of the upheaval was a single gunshot.

On October 26, 1979, at a facility in Gungjeong-dong in Seoul, President Park Chung-hee was shot dead by his close aide Kim Jae-gyu, director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. This event, called the 10·26 Incident, brought the eighteen-year Park government to an end in a single night. The center of a long-lasting strong rule was suddenly lost.

Amid the vacuum of power, many people held hopes for democratization. But those hopes did not last long. Chun Doo-hwan and others, who seized real power within the military, took the initiative in politics. The step toward freedom that people had hoped for was once again about to be blocked by the military.

And in May 1980, that tension erupted in Gwangju, a city in the southwest. Against demonstrations by citizens and students protesting the expansion of martial law, the military moved to suppress them by force, and many were killed or wounded. This event, called the Gwangju Incident, is remembered as a particularly deep wound even in modern Korean history.

What happened in Gwangju was long kept from public knowledge, and fierce debate continued over its assessment. Later, Korean society would come to reposition it as a democratization movement. But at the time that blood was shed, a dark spring still continued in the south of the peninsula.

The Ballot That Was Won

The wish for democratization that seemed to have been suppressed had not vanished. Throughout the 1980s, it spread quietly but surely at the base of society.

The turning point came in 1987. Voices demanding a constitutional revision that would let the people directly elect the president grew louder year by year. But in April of that year, the Chun Doo-hwan government put forward a policy of handing over to the next administration under the existing constitution as it was, attempting to halt the very debate over constitutional revision.

This set fire to people’s anger. When word spread of a student tortured to death and of a young man gravely wounded by a tear gas canister during a demonstration, the protests spread all at once. In June 1987, not only students and workers but a broad range of citizens, including religious figures and company employees, took to the streets. This movement, called the June Democratic Struggle, shook the entire nation for about three weeks.

And on June 29, Roh Tae-woo, the ruling party’s presidential candidate, issued a declaration accepting a constitutional revision toward a direct presidential election system, among other things. This was the so-called Democratization Declaration. Through this declaration the constitutional revision was realized, and at the end of that year, for the first time in sixteen years, an election was held in which the people chose the president with their own hands.

The next year, 1988, Korea welcomed the Seoul Olympics. Whereas the previous two Games had been split by boycotts of the Eastern and Western blocs, this Games is said to have brought together many countries from both the American and Soviet camps. A country devastated by war and once among the poorest had achieved economic growth, launched a democratic system, and welcomed the world ― the Olympics became a grand stage for Korea’s entry onto the international scene. After affluence, people were at last coming to hold freedom too.

The Shadow of Prosperity ― Chaebol and the IMF Crisis

Having passed through democratization and the Olympics, Korea seemed to greet an age full of confidence. But shadows also fell across that prosperity.

What had driven the growth were the giant corporate groups called chaebol. Holding a wide range of industries ― steel, shipbuilding, automobiles, electronics ― within a single group, they expanded their scale with exports as the axis. Chaebol-led growth was the driving force that pushed the Korean economy onto the world stage. Yet at the same time, it harbored weaknesses: excessive concentration in particular companies and rapid expansion reliant on borrowing.

That weakness surfaced in 1997. That year, the Asian financial crisis, with Thailand at its epicenter, spread to various parts of Asia. In Korea too, the failures of large corporate groups came one after another, the currency plunged sharply, and foreign reserves were drained. In December of that year, Korea came to seek financial support from the International Monetary Fund, that is, the IMF.

For the people of Korea, this IMF crisis was a deep shock. Many companies fell, people lost their jobs one after another, and life was transformed. On the other hand, prompted by this crisis, reforms to overhaul the structure of corporations and finance were advanced, and the Korean economy would in time recover. Accompanied by pain though it was, it was also an entrance to a new stage.

The figure of Korea striving to overcome the crisis was one point of arrival for the south of the peninsula, which had walked in pursuit of freedom and prosperity. But around the same time, north of the armistice line, an entirely different and far more serious crisis was quietly advancing. In the next episode, we will look at the hardship that North Korea bore, and the new tension over nuclear weapons.