Transcript 

The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of South Korea

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Speaker
Ezra F. Vogel
Henry Ford II Research Professor
Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University

Moderator
Charles Armstrong
Professor
Center for Korean Research at Columbia University

Dr. Stephen Noerper, Senior Vice President of The Korea Society, welcomed the speakers and guests, noting Professor Vogel’s long history in Asian studies and Professor Armstrong’s continued kind support of The Korea Society. Speaking to UC San Diego Professor Steph Haggard’s description of the new book edited by Ezra Vogel and Professor Kim Byung-Kook as “the most significant work on the Park period,” Dr. Noerper praised its comprehensiveness, balance and utility for the classroom and in policy discussion. Dr. Noerper especially welcomed those streaming live from the Korea Foundation and Korea University and thanked supporters the Korea Foundation, Samsung, and the Tong Yang Group.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Thank you all for coming tonight. I would like to say a couple of words of introduction before passing the baton over to Ezra.

I was peripherally involved with this project when it began quite a few years ago at a conference in Seoul. At the time it was already quite striking how important the book clearly would be. It is by far the best book, I think, on the Pak era and the first to really cover all dimensions of this very significant period in Korean history: the economic, political, cultural and so forth.

It's not a small book. It's quite a hefty tome, but I think a very comprehensive and important book. Ezra will talk more about the project and the particular aspect of the project he was involved with. After that I will make a few remarks of my own.

EZRA VOGEL:
Good evening. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to be with you this evening. When I was asked to make this presentation, I agreed; with the understanding that we get a Korean specialist like Charles Armstrong to join in the presentation, as I am not a Korean specialist. I was brought into the project as a comparativist who focuses on China and Japan, but one who is very interested in Korea.

About thirteen years ago, Kim Byung-Kook (who had been a student of mine and probably all of you know) came to me and said, "Would you help me edit a collection of articles on the Park Chung Hee era?" At first I said no, but he persisted. His argument was this.

As the Park Chung Hee era is so controversial, it's very difficult to put into perspective. Park Chung Hee was such a cruel person: with the CIA; with his clamping down on the intellectuals; with his efforts to control by intimidation; and with the Yushin Constitution, which ended any hope of real democratic policies during his era. On the other hand, he accomplished a great deal. Since intellectuals had suffered under him, it was very hard to get any intellectual distance. Byung-Kook thought that if we had some foreigners involved to do comparative studies, we might be able to get a little more intellectual distance.

Byung-Kook and I shared the conviction that too many people were approaching these area studies with a theoretical perspective, without any real analysis of the politics involved. We felt what was really needed was to research the political aspects. Byung-Kook told me that there were close to 800 students in Korea who had studied political science as graduate students in the United States (an extraordinary number) and within that group we would try to select some of the best to do various studies.

When we had the first conference thirteen years ago, there were three volumes of papers. In an effort to narrow the project down, we attempted to select the best: the ones that were the most logical, the most informative and were the best written. We realized that even though Korean graduate students had learned English, the writing often wasn't up to the editorial standards of the American academic reader. We then contacted Elizabeth Gilbert of the Harvard University Press to edit the documents to meet academic standards. We're very grateful to Elizabeth for her contribution.

We started this process thirteen years ago. We've had the good fortune, now, to have this published on the fiftieth anniversary of Park Chung Hee's rise to power. Sweet are the uses of procrastination that occasionally come out pretty well. We're sorry it's taken this long, but it's a very good time to examine the past fifty years of Korean history.

I thought I would start by sharing my personal perspective on this. I have spent the last ten years working on Deng Xiaoping. Both Deng Xiaoping and Park Chung Hee were soldiers. They both became the heads of their respective countries. They both acted in an authoritarian manner and made great breakthroughs that brought modernization to their countries. That established patterns that still have an impact today. The essay I wrote for this volume was actually written about ten years ago. I would like to make a few more comments about the comparison between Deng and Park, because I think it does help put a perspective on the historical events of that era.

Deng was a nationalist whose policies were not compromised by having worked closely with another foreign country. When he dealt with the Soviet Union, he was very clear that he was speaking as a Chinese against the Soviet Union. Of course, Park Chung Hee was compromised by having worked so closely with the Japanese, especially in Manchuria. In addition, Park Chung Hee came to power by way of a coup, so he never had the legitimacy that Deng did.

Deng also had so much more to build on. The institutions were partially in place. In comparison, Rhee Syngman and Chang Myon had never built up the institutions that would pave the way for modernization. Therefore, the kind of people that Park Chung Hee could rely on were a combination from the military (who had not had much experience in the civilian economy), people he had worked with very closely who were disciplined and could go into other kinds of work, and a tiny number of bureaucrats who had mostly been trained under the Japanese and understood a great deal. While they were in lower positions in the Japanese bureaucracy, they were able to learn and to stretch.

Deng Xiaoping, in contrast, could rely on people who moved from the military to civilian life much earlier. After 1949, a lot of the people who did economic work in China were people who had been generals like Li-Hsien Yang and Li Fu-Chen. All these people had been very active in the military. There was Chen-yi who went into foreign policy. They had come in much earlier, so by the time Deng came to power these people already had institutional experience for over twenty years. What Deng dealt with, of course, was a group of senior party leaders who had, had political experience. Park Chung Hee wasn't supported by people with political experience in the same way as Deng. The group of allies that Deng had were senior officials who had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution and were no longer in office; but they were able to give him special support against those who had risen during the Cultural Revolution at the expense of these senior officials.

In contrast to Park Chung Hee, who identified with the Kyung-sun people, the Chung-chun people and some of the northerners who had a strong base in those areas; Deng Xiaoping had a much broader base of senior officials who had worked in all kinds of areas. Deng also had a much larger scale economic base to build on. With that, they could let in foreign companies without worrying that they might take over the country. They could let in companies in one part of the country with the hope they would be able to control any attempts by these companies to dominate the economy.

Because Japanese companies were so strong in South Korea and had, had such an impact; South Korea (learning from the Japanese) felt that they had to keep out foreign companies or they would dominate the country. They were learning the Japanese pattern of trying to build up their own industries and their own service sectors without allowing the foreign countries to have a strong foothold. In the case of South Korea it was even more important, because so many of the companies they learned from were Japanese companies.

China started with an economy that was fairly large-scale, and they could let the economy grow in the service sector because it was out of the planned sector. They already had a large, planned economy. What really started the growth was allowing individual enterprises to grow outside of those large companies. Park Chung Hee had to establish the Economic Planning Board and begin to build companies from scratch.

The way I read the chaebols is that they started with small companies in one sector; and once they succeeded in one sector, then Park Chung Hee would select people who had succeeded in one sector and help them grow in other sectors. Deng, by contrast, had such a huge operation that he was able to give more autonomy to individual companies that grew up in the countryside: in the towns and villages. Because Deng allowed this new growth outside the planned economy, the planned economy could stay roughly the same size and the growth took place outside. Park Chung Hee only built up the larger companies and the bigger sectors.

Of course, they both learned from Japan. Pohang is the spitting image of a Japanese steel plant. One of the things I had an opportunity to do when I was studying in Japan was visit a number of the large steel plants. When I visited Pohang, I could see that everything about the operation was exactly like Japanese steel companies.

The Chinese already had steel companies, but their breakthrough came from doing exactly the same thing (learning from the Japanese) because they had the largest integrated steel mills. The big Bhushan Steel Plant that went up outside of Shanghai was the spitting image of Kimitsu, and when Deng Xiaoping had gone to Japan in 1978, he saw that plant, went back to China and copied it.

The South Koreans had a much more difficult complex with the Japanese than the Chinese did, although there were some similarities. The Koreans had worked with them closely and were very afraid of domination, but they knew the Japanese language. They could learn about all the intricacies of Japanese companies. Deng Xiaoping had a similar problem that Park Chung Hee did in trying to get the Chinese to accept the Japanese. The Koreans were very upset at Japan and so were the Chinese. When Park Chung Hee made the big step in 1965 to normalize relations with Japan that was a huge blow.

Deng Xiaoping had much more political experience. He went to Japan in 1978 and arranged to have the trip filmed so he could show the Chinese people that they were warmly accepted by the Japanese, what an advanced country Japan was, and how the Chinese were so far behind Japan.

And Deng continued to become closer to Japan. In the 1980s he introduced Japanese literature along with Japanese movies, which became very popular in China during that decade. It was only after the Tiananmen incident in 1989 when Chinese leaders began worrying about the patriotism of their citizens. That started the Patriotic Education Campaign of anti-Japanese propaganda. China became, on a large public scale, openly anti-Japanese.

Both South Korea and China had to deal with the problem of letting their public accept this kind of aid. South Korea, of course, had to worry much more about domination by Japan because Japan was so much bigger and so much stronger. China could allow Japanese companies in certain localities and not worry that they would take over the whole country.

A lot of South Koreans look at the big buildup of industry along the Southeast Coast as a partiality of Park Chung Hee because he was from the Kyongsang area. They believed he had a prejudice against Cholla. Although Deng Xiaoping was from inner China, he built up his industry on China's southeast coast. There was a certain logic to this location because it made it easier for ships to travel across the Pacific to facilitate import and exporting activities. Of course, there was a lot of American growth and American involvement there, as well.

Another area that was very important to development was scientific advancement. As early as 1978, China realized that they had to send people to the United States for study. One of the big differences was in the role of military technology and military advance. Because the American military was so heavily involved in South Korea, a lot of the technology was a spin-off from the military. People like Park Chung Hee, who had been in the military, already had a lot of technical training which they could use in the civilian economy.

In the case of China, Deng Xiaoping felt the military was so far behind that in order to really begin to modernize, they had to concentrate first on the civilian sector. Even with the Cold War, the United States was not prepared to supply the technology, so China could not get much technology through the military. It came overwhelmingly from the civilian area. Deng Xiaoping, therefore, decided to build up the civilian area before he developed the military.

Because Park Chung Hee was so worried about the continued danger of invasion and conflict with the north, and particularly after Nixon's "grand doctrine" of 1975 with the threat that the United States might pull out of the Peninsula, there was real concern that they had to develop heavy industry very quickly. Therefore, they concentrated on very heavy industry.

On the contrary, when Deng Xiaoping first came to power in 1979, he was very worried that the Soviets and the Vietnamese were going to surround China. He therefore decided to demonstrate China's determination by invading Vietnam, and he did so in the spring of 1979. Once that was over, he was no longer really worried about foreign invasion, and he could then begin to concentrate, in a more relaxed way, on civilian industry while relying on the consumer industry to spur the economy.

In the case of Park Chung Hee, he was worried about the danger of invasion from the north. Because he had watched what happened in Manchuria, where World War II's success depended so much on heavy industry and having an industrial base, he was determined to build up the heavy and chemical industry as Japan had done, in case of continued danger from North Korea. Deng Xiaoping was able to concentrate on the civilian economy, and to tell the military people to wait with the development of modern technology. It wasn't until two decades later, in the late 1990s, when the military was allowed to modernize in the same fashion.

Park Chung Hee had to cooperate with the United States; so despite his ambivalence, he felt it necessary to send troops to Vietnam. China had never been an ally (even during the Cold War the United States and China cooperated but were not allies) so this meant that the United States did not supply as much technology. It also meant that the local people had to develop the civilian economy, and China could cooperate with their local consumer industry as a way of really boosting the economy.

It's interesting to me that at the very end of both the Deng and the Park Chung Hee eras, they both ran into problems and for similar reasons. At the end of the Park Chung Hee era the South Koreans were concerned about inflation, and a lot of new anti-Park sentiment developed. That was the context in which he was shot by the director of the KCIA.

In the case of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the basis for that was also inflation. The reason that became such a big incident is that the people were so frightened of inflation after 1988 (the freeing of prices) that they demonstrated on the streets. The popular public in Beijing supported the students.

The bottom line was that the real crises at the very end of both their periods came from the fear of inflation. It wasn't so much that the populace was concerned about democracy, and it wasn't what led to most of their problems. Of course, people wanted democracy in both places. The real crises came from worries about the pocketbook, and I think the basic popularity of both leaders also came from economic progress. Thank you very much.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
I wanted to say a few more things about the book, and then make a couple of brief comments on two different areas of inquiry that I think the book doesn't fully address. I will get to those in a moment.

First about the book: It is certainly a very rich and detailed exploration of the Park Chung Hee period, but it is by no means a hagiography of Pak the man, or a glorification of that period. It brings to light all of the complexity and negative aspects of Pak's new period, I think, quite fairly; and we see the sometimes ruthless use of the corrosive apparatus of the state very dramatically in a number of places.

I want to point out a few things that I found really striking in reading different chapters of the book. There are a lot of complexities I had not realized about the period which are often seen (whatever side you're on in the debates in Korea) in sort of black and white, either/or terms.

For example, the role of intellectuals I thought was covered very nicely in the book. There is a tendency to see the Pak period as being divided between an authoritarian state, on the one hand, versus the intellectuals as the opposition. Of course, that's not necessarily the case. There were intellectuals who strongly supported Pak, there were those who were more neutral about his rule, and there were those who waited to see what would happen. There were, of course, intellectuals who remained consistently opposed to the authoritarian regime, as well.

To understand Korea today (which for a long time had been portrayed in American society as having undergone this long period of authoritarian rule and then had been thoroughly rejected) we must see the routes of contemporary Korea in its various aspects going back to this period of time.

A second consideration which I found striking was the discussion of the Chaeya, or the opposition. The multiple origins and perspectives of different opposition forces that evolved within the political structure over time (again often seen in black and white terms as Pak versus the Chaeya versus the opposition political structures) is really much more complex and fluid than that stereotype.

A third aspect is regionalism. Regionalism, as I'm sure most of us are very familiar with, is seen as an endemic characteristic of Korean politics and that division is often attributed to Park. One of the authors (I forget who) points out that at least the persistent Cholla region opposition to the state is more a product of Chun Doo Hwan than Park Chung Hee; and the Cholla people were actually much more divided about their view of Park Chung Hee than they were of his successor. The really hard regionalism of South Korean politics cannot entirely be attributed to Pak's regime; but is, to a great extent, a product of what comes after. His policies certainly did contribute ultimately to that.

There's several chapters that discuss the economy and especially the chaebol (the conglomerates) which I thought were really rich and fascinating, particularly the chapter on POSCO. I had never seen a full study of POSCO before, and POSCO is a very important company that one alludes to when mentioning Pohang.

Finally, there's a whole section in the book on comparisons which I also found fascinating. It included some usual comparisons you would expect, such as Park Chung Hee South Korea compared to Japan and Taiwan. Your own chapter was a little bit more surprising with its comparison of Park to Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew and Kemal Atatürk, of all people.

Jorge Dominguez's chapter on Latin American development (looking at Brazil, Mexico and Chile) had the provocative title "The Perfect Dictatorship?" which is certainly something to think about, especially in comparison to Latin America. There was also the chapter that negatively compared Park Chung Hee South Korea seen as a great success versus the might have beens or the failures. One in particular that stands out, which is explored very well in the book, is the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos.

Another one which I think would be an obvious comparison (and is not talked about very much surprisingly) is South Vietnam. This also explores the question of American policy in East Asia. In a certain sense I think the United States, by the late sixties, was trying to find South Vietnam's Park Chung Hee, and they were succeeding in doing so.

One comparison that isn't explored, which I want to talk about for a few minutes, is the comparison of South Korea to North Korea (and of the leaders of the two countries at the time we explore in this book) Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung.

Gregory Henderson once edited a book called Divided Nations in a Divided World which is one of very few broadly global comparisons of the issue of divided nations. The division of Korea during the Cold War seemed to perfectly reflect this geopolitical division. South and North Korea represented, in a microcosm, the competition between these two opposing systems.

Once you looked closely at North and South Korea, you could see a number of interesting similarities: a divided country and parts of a divided nation, devastated by war, with strong authoritarian leaders, and both attempting to industrialize as quickly as possible. You saw North Korea actually succeeding in this a little bit earlier than South Korea. Indeed, in the late 1950s North Korea, by some estimates, had the highest rates of industrial growth in the world. Some people (at least North Korea's sympathizers) were referring to North Korea at that time as the economic miracle of the Far East. Others would talk about South Korea as the economic miracle of Asia ten or twenty years later.

Even in terms of the political system (particularly in that period of what we might call high authoritarianism in the 1970s under Park Chung Hee) Park's move toward a more explicitly dictatorial system with the Yushin Constitution of 1972 created a situation in which North and South Korea probably looked more like each other than at any time before or since. Both of them even established new constitutions in the same year, 1972. At the same time, of course, they also engaged in interaction with each other for the first time directly since the Korean War had ended.

The individuals themselves, Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung, show some striking similarities. They were "two sons of the soil" coming from very impoverished backgrounds in peripheral areas of Korea. They both had lived through the Japanese colonial period. They both had fought in foreign armies outside of Korea (Park for the Japanese and Kim in the Chinese Communist Army and then in the Soviet Army at the end of World War II). Both returned to Korea with unswerving missions to make their countries modern and great.

There were differences between the two, of course, that were also very striking; the austere, rather introverted, Confucian Park versus the much more extroverted and gregarious Kim Il Sung. Kim, of course, began his rule much earlier. He was the initial leader of North Korea. Pak came to power after a coup. The timing of this is really perfect, because it's almost exactly fifty years ago this month that, that coup took place. Even in the point of greatest similarity in the 1970s, North Korea was at a different place (one of much more self-confidence, having a history of what they saw of a successful development behind them) but we can see, in retrospect, there was already the beginning of a decline.

The differences were also equally, if not more, important. They had different types of political economies. South Korea's economy was never centrally planned. Although it did have multiyear economic plans, it was always a collusion of business and government rather than the business being controlled by the state.

The two had different types of political systems. Even if South Korea did move toward a one-man dictatorship in the 1970s, there was always a space for opposition, however constrained. There was always an ideal, somewhere, of a liberal democracy upon which South Korea was founded, and none of that existed in North Korea. There was never the space within North Korea for any kind of serious, widespread political opposition; only certain kinds of disputes at the center of power, and even that was essentially dissipated after the mid-1960s.

And, of course, the external environment between North and South Korea was vastly different, although in some ways symmetrical. One could see the two great powers on the one side (the Soviet Union and China backing North Korea) facing a kind of mirror image of the United States and Japan supporting the South. Of course Japan and the United States were never rivals the way the Soviet Union and China were. Japan was always a subordinate player to the United States.

The United States loomed extremely large as a hegemonic power in Korea as the Soviet Union and China never did after the 1950s, and Park Chung Hee was never able to maneuver between Japan and the United States the way Kim Il Sung was between the Soviet Union and China (although he was able to get very significant concessions from both Japan and the United States).

Thinking about the historical context, it seems to me that both of these regimes are, after all, Korean. Both of these men were products of twentieth century Korean history. And even though North and South Korea have diverged so dramatically in the last few decades, I think it might still be worth exploring in more depth what we can learn about how political economies of this type can work and what kinds of alternative directions history can go in coming out of the same culture and the same background.

A second thing I want to talk about (and I think we might have an interesting discussion of this later on) is the legacy and the memory of Park Chung Hee. This has been, in the last fifteen years or so, referred to (not entirely positively) as Park Chung Hee syndrome. And not to take anything away from the value of this book, in a way the project itself emerges out of this Park Chung Hee syndrome which was at its full flower in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

By the time Pak was assassinated in 1979, he was not a popular man; either within the inner circles of government or within South Korean society more broadly. It's clear (and the book brings this out) he had, in a way, gone too far in many of his policies and in his self-aggrandizing belief in his own significance for Korea. This was already apparent, of course, in the Yushin Constitution in 1972. Like all dictators (and we certainly see many of them in various parts of the world today) Pak came to believe he was indispensable for Korea. He had no intention of stepping down despite the fact that he had said, several times since the beginning in the early 1960s that he would.

When Park was assassinated in 1979, there was a widespread expectation (and in many sectors of Korean society, a hope) that Korea would follow a different course. It didn't turn out to be quite that way; but despite the fact that after this brief period of a democratic opening in late 1979, Chun Doo Hwan staged his own coup, an almost repeat of what Pak had done in 1961. It seemed that Chun wanted to distance himself from Pak. He carried out much of the same policies in the economy as Pak, but he and his media (that was controlled by the state at this time) tended to portray Pak in a rather ambiguous if not negative light.

As the Chun Doo Hwan era progressed, the opposition which had begun to emerge under Pak grew more powerful and more vociferous. Finally, Chun was forced to step down from power after the massive protests of the summer of 1987. Chun, it has to be said, was not terribly missed. There had been rehabilitations of Park Chung Hee's reputation and Rhee Syngman; but it's hard to imagine Chun Doo Hwan's memory becoming too burnished any time soon.

I could be wrong about that. There's always more than one life in Korean politics. Certainly Chun Doo Hwan was seen as someone who, in a sense, had continued with the practices of Chun Doo Hwan without, as it were, the historical necessity of what Park Chung Hee had done to take South Korea from dire poverty into relative affluence and power. With the democratization of the late 1980s, the whole authoritarian period of Park and Chun tended to be lumped together in a very critical way.

By the mid-1990s, this began to shift and under Kim Young Sam, the Park Chung Hee legacy began to be reevaluated in films, in popular media, TV shows, and scholarly works. All kinds of proliferations of writings about Pak that came out became enormously popular in the late 1990s. Indeed, in a poll taken by the government in 1997, Park Chung Hee was rated the most respected historical figure in all of Korean history, ahead of Great King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun-sin whom Park Chung Hee himself had elevated to this great historical icon while he was president.

Now what explains this explosive growth in the popularity of Park Chung Hee at this time? It's hard to say for sure, but there are a number of factors that might be involved. One is the post-democratization reevaluation of South Korea's political history and the distancing of the society from this authoritarian period which was no longer seen in this single light.

Related to that was a disillusionment with the presidents of the post-democratization period; all of which, beginning with Roh Tae Woo began with enormous popularity and ended being extremely unpopular; sometimes down in the single digits according to popularity polls. There was a kind of nostalgia back at that time when there was a unifying leader there without the messiness and the complexity of divided popular opinion at least being made public.

There was also a generational change in South Korea, more and more, with people coming of age who didn't have strong memories of the Park Chung Hee period itself, and who saw the new affluence of Korea's society being linked back to him. This tended to wash over the negative aspects of his rule. And perhaps there was a need (again related to the disillusionment with the current political leadership) for a hero in twentieth century Korea of which there was a rather short supply. Park Chung Hee, who was attributed with this great project of taking war ravaged, desperately poor Korea into the ranks of advanced industrial societies (at least beginning that process) was a likely candidate.

This is not to say, by any means, that Park Chung Hee's memory is entirely positive. South Korean society remains deeply divided over the legacy of Park Chug Hee, although I think at the popular level the view of Pak is more positive than negative. Among the intellectual class, there is a very strong critical element that simply see Park as a dictator.

Nevertheless, there are various contending views of Park's memory, both in media circles but also in popular culture as well, that will remain for some time. And if nothing else, I think it's fair to say that Pak is the most complex, most interesting and most significant (whether we agree or support what he did or not) of any of the leaders that South Korea has had since the republic was founded in 1948.

The final question I want to ask is when did Park Chung Hee era end? This book is called The Park Chung Hee Era. Clearly it began fifty years ago in May, 1961 with the military coup; but when does it end? It doesn't end, I think it's fair to say, with the death of Park Chung Hee in October, 1979 because in many ways, as I've suggested, what his successor Chun Doo Hwan did was continue most of Park's legacy. Perhaps it ended with the democratization of 1987. That's one point. I think it's more reasonable to say that the political legacy was more fundamentally transformed in 1992 with the coming to power of Kim Young Sam, or perhaps in 1998 with Kim Dae Jung's presidency.

In the area of the economy, much of what Park Chung Hee put in place remains, but the type of big business/government collusion that characterized the developmental state of Park Chung Hee has transformed quite dramatically since the late 1990s. Many of the legacies, however, that Park Chung Hee can be attributed to still continue, and maybe we can conclude by saying we are still living in the Park Chung Hee era. Thank you. We will take questions or comments.

HENRY SEGGERMAN:
I want to respond to what you said about the comparison of the Korean business development in the Pak era relative to Japan's development earlier and the comparison of the chaebol system and the keiretsu/zaibatsu system, a comparison that's been made quite frequently.

A lot of people talk about in a larger Asian context the "iron triangle," the collusion between big business, banks and government. This is frequently discussed as a nickname for this type of controlled economy with fast economic development based on banks doling out money when the government tells them to give it to so-and-so.

It's now thirteen years after the Asian currency crisis. When the IMF came into Korea there was a lot of finger-pointing and talk about how the iron triangle, the chaebol system, and Korea's economic growth had somehow been a sham; and that being why the economy tanked at the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998.

If you really think about it in a long-term, historical perspective, Korea's economy has grown about 10,000 percent between 1960 and today. Compare what Korea and Japan did long-term since World War II economically to countries like Mexico or the Philippines or Poland recently (you could think of a lot of similar populace nations with the potential to grow that did not). In your opinion, is there something about the iron triangle and the chaebol/zaibatsu system that works? Is there something that just takes leverage and uses it excessively and enthusiastically but succeeds for countries like Japan and Korea?

EZRA VOGEL:
Park Chung Hee used the prewar zaibatsu system, something that he knew very well. He remembered the prewar Japanese military where the zaibatsus had very strong control over development and really dominated the economy. After the American occupation of Japan and the breaking up of the zaibatsus, the iron triangle was far less powerful than it had been in the 1930s.

There's no question that all of the prospering Asian countries had very tight control during certain periods of development. America's advice to the world was to get democratic. Think of the two great examples of democracy in Asia, the Philippines and India. Have those countries been very successful? I think you'd have to say no. Park Chung Hee didn't listen to American advice about developing a steel company at that time (and really pushing the economy hard) and he succeeded.

Another thing I would like to stress is that both Deng and Park were very driven people and they wanted to move very fast. They were overwhelming the people who wanted to have a more balanced financial system. So there's no question that it worked very well.

One thing about the legacies of Japan and Korea (and Charles has raised some very interesting questions) is in many ways Korea has done much better than Japan in the last fifteen years. Why? For one thing, strong leaders have played a bigger role in Korea, and you currently have a very strong president. Japan has changed leaders very often during the last ten or fifteen years. This has resulted in weak leadership and societal institutions unable to do any strategic planning.

If you take the private sector economy, one of the things that surprises me is that in comparison to Toshiba and Hitachi there was Samsung. Twenty years ago when the founder of Samsung, Lee Byung-chol, passed away, Toshiba was maybe twenty times as big as Samsung. Now Samsung Electronics is larger than all of the largest Japanese companies put together.

In reference to Korea's response to the financial crisis; Korea was in more trouble so it responded more vigorously. The Japanese banks have not responded as vigorously. Neither Japanese companies nor the Japanese government have had a strong, centralized leadership to make the tough and fast decisions. South Korea, coming out of that period, was much more successful in keeping up that rapid rate of change and had the strong leadership to make tough, difficult decisions.

Even somebody like Kim Dae Jung (an advocate of democracy) was not a weak leader. He was a strong, vigorous person. It's interesting to me that that the leaders in the democratic period after Pak have all been quite strong. The political system of Japan (by not having an elected president for a longer period of time) has had much weaker leadership.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Yes, that's true. I think part of the problem with Japan is structural. The way its government is set up makes it very difficult for a strong leader to emerge. I don't have much to add to that except to say that in the words of our former president, Korea has been "consistently misunderestimated." The end of the South Korean economic miracle has been predicted many times, but they keep getting stronger and stronger, and I think that has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the potential of Korea, and also the determination (and I think that's the right word to use) of the Koreans to make this work.

One thing that seems to have been effective is the Koreans' refusal to listen to a lot of outside advice. It's been said that one reason the South Korean economy was able to rebound as quickly as it did to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s is because it didn't listen to all of the advice of the IMF. But what I hadn't realized until reading this book is how long South Korea has not been listening to the advice of the IMF. Park Chung Hee did a pretty good job of that, too.

KIM:
I'm Kim from Cornell University Medical College. I have two questions. One concerns Park Chung Hee's relationship with the United States government. Certainly he was disliked by the U.S. government. At one time, he tried to develop an atomic bomb. That created some tense moments between the two countries. The United States did not like him.

The book The Two Koreas [by Don Oberdorfer] describes a lot of these conflicts; yet, what the U.S. policy was, was not clear. The U.S. certainly supported dictators around the world. I'd like to know a little more about U.S. government's attitude toward Park Chung Hee.

My second question is about Park Chung Hee's relationship with the Korean intellectuals, particularly with the democracy movements. Did Park Chung Hee ever consider collaborating with North Korea to suppress this kind of intellectual, anti-American democracy movement? Would that ever be a possibility? Thank you.

EZRA VOGEL:
South Korea has a large Christian population, and the Christian groups in the United States have played a very large role in shaping American attitudes. Because a lot of the Christian groups were associated with intellectuals (and more concerned with democracy) I think that is one of the things that led to the political support in the United States for the democratic movements.

The United States had leverage over South Korea because we were giving them a lot of money. Because of this, I think there was a great desire to promote democracy, particularly toward the latter part of the Cold War as more Americans became concerned we had been coddling too many dictators.

Even though people felt that way (and certainly President Carter was an example when he was talking about pulling troops out of South Korea) I think there was a limit, all during the Cold War, as to how far that could go. There were powerful people in the Pentagon and the White House talking about how much we need South Korea.

I think it was a very ambivalent, complicated attitude. On the one hand, I think Park felt much more comfortable with the Japanese than he did with the United States. He was certainly very unhappy with all the opposition in the United States to what he was doing and all the pressure to try to be more democratic.

As to the question of whether there was any possibility of North and South cooperation to suppress intellectuals, as far as I can see there was none. The enmity between North and South Korea was so strong. In addition (as Charles has pointed out) the intellectuals were very ambivalent. There were people who were cooperative but certainly much more sympathetic to Pak than they were to North Korea. Now, there was a small, distinct group of South Koreans who were sympathetic to North Korea because they were so alienated from Pak, but I think the chance that the Pak regime would cooperate with the North to suppress intellectuals is a nonstarter.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Yes, indeed. One of the reasons for the Yushin movement toward dictatorship was related to reaching out to North Korea. Pak wanted to make sure that interacting with North Korea would not encourage pro-North Korean sympathies in South Korea. He wanted to keep pro-North Korean sympathies under control in the South by extending the state's surveillance and repression of any such criticism from emerging.

As you point out, there were many issues that caused friction between the U.S. and South Korea, and there were two rather outstanding ones in the 1970s. One issue was quiet, and that was South Korea's move to develop nuclear weapons which was put to a halt under strong U.S. pressure. The other issue was more public, and that was Jimmy Carter's calls for troop withdrawal and the promotion of human rights. That was the point at which, I think it's fair to say, U.S.-South Korean relations were at their nadir; around the time Carter was elected.

Things got back on track after that. I remember ambassador to Korea Bill Gleysteen's memoir of how disastrous Carter's visit to South Korea was when he met with Park Chung Hee and lectured him about human rights. Pak did not like that at all. As we all know Carter reversed his position on troop withdrawal and the criticism of human rights, and whether we agree with it or not it became muted after that.

MALE:
Perhaps you can say a few words about the motivations of the president. It always seemed to me (I lived in Korea during much of the seventies) that generally Koreans wanted to develop their place on the world stage. They still do, which is why they're still progressing. They believed that President Park had the same kinds of motivations. Even though everyone didn't agree with everything being done, it was a good opportunity for the government and civilian society to collaborate to keep moving the country forward.

I believe you're correct in saying that Korea progressed over time by not paying too much attention to foreign advice. Korea did heed one important piece of advice: It was no longer necessary to out-Japan Japan and Korea could move in its own way. I'd be interested in your comments on how President Park (if you accept this thesis) might fit into that. As a final comment, I think the word "collusion" has been used too much in these discussions. There was collusion, but there was a lot more than that.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Well, you could call it "cooperation," I guess. Close cooperation. Park clearly was interested in the Japanese model. Obsessed is not an unfair characterization. Park had his ambassador to Japan send home every book he could find on the Meiji Restoration, because that's what he saw as the touchstone for what he wanted to accomplish in Korea. I don't think there's much more to say about that. I think at this point South Korea has largely gotten over "out-Japaning" Japan and has really charted its own course.

EZRA VOGEL:
One of the things that impresses me about South Korea (compared to other countries in Asia) is that they're so cosmopolitan. They've been very interested in what goes on in Japan, China and the United States. To me one of the reasons for their success is because they've sent so many people abroad and because they're so deeply embedded in the economy everywhere.

If I had to characterize some of the differences between the Koreans and the Japanese, it's that the Japanese are a little more introverted and have more of a "small island" mentality than Korea. Compare the number of students from Korea that are in the United States and in China. There are now more than from Japan; yet Japan has roughly three times the population. I find extraordinary this cosmopolitan coming of age of the South Koreans and their surpassing of Japan. Park Chung Hee was born in Japan, but the South Koreans modeled the United States and China, I think, even more than Japan.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
The book keeps referring to these two phrases of Park Chung Hee: rich country, strong army which comes from Japan and can-do spirit which, of course, is stereotypically American. It was those two together (not just the Japanese model) but the Japanese model and the American influence that really came together in a very powerful way in Park Chung Hee's career.

JOHN KOCH:
I'm John Koch. I'm a researcher. I did my military service in Korea during the Park era. I don't really have any memories other than the fact that Park Chung Hee was our ally. It didn't go beyond that. But in terms of Park as a political leader, I think he was a man for all seasons.

If you look at the elements of leadership and what he had to contend with (and if you look at him relative to the nine Korean presidents since Park and Rhee) he's the only one that has been assassinated, and assassination can be an elevating aspect of leadership. There was the attempted assassination at the beginning of his relationship with Kim Il Sung, but he turned it around and entered into dialogue with North Korea.

I think Koreans can feel a lot of self-respect from the way he handled North-South relations. I think he really has no peers in terms of cementing Korea's position as an economic powerhouse, and that is so bound up with the identity of South Korea on the world stage that, again, it just reinforces his leadership.

As to the United States, at the beginning of Park's rule, the Kennedy administration was preoccupied with civilianizing the Korean government. As Professor Armstrong mentioned, he had problems during the Jimmy Carter period and even before with Kim Dae Jung's kidnapping. For more than a decade, including during the Vietnam era, he played that to Korea's economic advantage and was unchallenged politically by the Americans.

I remember the "Brown Memorandum" which stated we wouldn't involve ourselves in the internal affairs of South Korea because they were contributing to the effort in Vietnam. I think on those four levels his leadership was exemplary, and I think that you have to give him high marks.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
All I want to say is that Park Chung Hee's assassination prevented him from leaving office in disgrace or from dealing with his predecessor. It helps his legacy in a strange way, I think.

MALE:
Fascinating talk, so far. I have a few questions in regards to the Park Chung Hee era and lessons that countries in Sub-Saharan Africa can draw from Park Chung Hee-style of leadership and his deep belief that Korea could transform itself. That's something I don't think a lot of African leaders have. They're at a point where they could transform their countries if there weren't so many other things that are going on: civil wars, IMF intervention and lack of institutions. I was wondering if you would comment more on Park Chung Hee's leadership. Thank you.

EZRA VOGEL:
I would go back to comparative colonialism. The Japanese argue that when Korea was a colony, there was much more development. They built the university and they built the institutions. I think a lot of the colonialism in Africa was not really developmental. At the time the Koreans broke away from colonial Japan, there were a lot of people who were already trained in technology, finance and economics who took part in the modernization effort. This was not true of colonialism in many of the African countries. I think that explains why the Koreans were more confident. They had, had more experience and they knew how these systems worked.

I think a strong military makes a big difference, and a military that has fought in big wars makes a difference. Look at the countries of Latin America, for example, whose dictators and military leaders have never been to war. Fighting wars on a large scale requires coordination, communication and discipline.

Deng ran his political campaigns like a military campaign. When he had to deal with problems, he practiced "regrouping." After a military campaign, you regroup for the next campaign. You don't waste time worrying about what when wrong before. Your focus is not on giving blame to the past, but reorganizing for the next battle. You don't waste time on blame. You don't waste time with ideology. You're very practical. I think people who fought in big military campaigns over a period of time learned to deal with issues in that kind of way. That contributed to Pak's leadership, and I think it contributed to Deng's leadership.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
It should be remembered that in the 1970s, the more popular Korean model in much of Sub-Saharan Africa was North Korea, not South Korea. North Korea seemed to be a great example of a country that had pursued an independent course of development and this was something that the recently liberated states of Sub-Saharan Africa thought they could follow. North Korea, indeed, had policies of trying to educate and to bring its developmental model (or at least its Juche ideology) to a number of places in Sub-Saharan Africa. It wasn't until the 1980s that it began to be clear that the North Korean model wasn't working very well and there was a turn to the South.

I think it's very hard to replicate any such program anywhere else, and in some ways the South Korean path has been unique. But if there's a larger lesson to be taken from the Park Chung Hee era experience, it is that in the crafting of South Korea's development (and you can compare this to North Korea) what Pak did was neither go on a path of autarchy nor completely relinquish control to the outside. Rather, he dealt selectively with the outside world in order to develop his country's economy. And that's not easy to do. That takes a certain kind of leadership that can't be easily replicated.

ALLEN KIM:
My name is Allen Kim. I'm a graduate student studying Korean history at Columbia. I wanted to ask a question regarding the meaning of reevaluating Park Chung Hee's era. As a student studying Korean history, I have noted that Koreans often think of themselves as victims of history being stuck with big powers around them geographically.

It struck me, Professor, when you discussed the difference between the uncompromising figure of Deng Xiaoping and Park Chung Hee as a compromise figure who had to deal with the Japanese colonial legacy and an existing institutional setting which he had to overcome to achieve economic success. In reevaluating the Park Chung Hee era, could you see this as an opportunity for Koreans to reevaluate their own view of history; that of being victims? And what would be the implications of this way of thinking?

EZRA VOGEL:
There are so many difficult and complicated issues. First, I believe that victimhood comes at a time when you're not very confident about yourself and you're not doing very well. The Chinese also used victimhood terribly, and they go back to it again when they have problems with foreign countries. After the Tiananmen incident of 1989, the Chinese talked about foreign sabotage and the linkage of local dissidents. The problem was one of foreign influence trying to mobilize actions and cause difficulties. They still go back to that occasionally.

Maybe Charles can talk about this a little more, but I think South Koreans were victimized. They were small, and they were caught between the two larger powers of China and Japan. In addition, because Korea is so centrally located, it's a place where wars break out. Think about the difficulties of 1895, 1904, 1905, as well as the Korean War. Different powers met and had their battles in Korea.

It seems to me that there's a lot of truth to the description of victimhood, and that maybe it's not reevaluating history. It increased the potential for Park Chung Hee to develop South Korea. We can do something about it. We can do something about a past defined by victimhood.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
Park Chung Hee was very interested in getting Koreans out of their victim mentality. He, much more than Rhee Syngman, strongly promoted setting up hero figures in Korean history. Under Park Chung Hee these statues and monuments to Yi Sun-shin proliferated all around the country (the admiral who had defended Korea against the Japanese in the1590s). Yes, I think the reevaluation of Park Chung Hee is partly something that goes back to Park himself in reevaluating Korean history; and Koreans began to see their history as not just one of victimization, but one of success and of independence.

MALE:
I am interested in who was standing behind Park Chung Hee at the critical points that helped him to do that kind of balancing that you were talking about, Charles, between excessive dependence on the U.S. and on the other hand a country focusing on itself and not open to outside forces.

There are a whole series of people that come to mind that were absolutely critical: Nam Duk-woo, Kim Jae-ik, and Ham Sokhon. Kim Yong-wan if we go beyond the economy to other fields. And you can say Pak deserves all the credit because he had the good sense to take advice and counsel from these people and to allow them to direct policies. I don't know if Pak would be seen as such a great leader without this great assemblage of people who were extraordinarily important and made extremely critical (and retrospectively, we could say, very correct decisions) on the economy and politics and a lot of other areas.

I think that in order to reevaluate the Park Chung Hee era, we really need to think about a whole panoply of top-notch people. You might say it's hard to find their parallels in subsequent decades of Korean history.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG:
That's absolutely right. Pak did not do all this himself, and that's clearly expressed in this book in many of the chapters which go into detail about who were making the decisions at many levels in the political system, the economy and so forth. This can't all be attributed to one man. Ultimately, he was the person in charge. You alluded to some factors that attributed to the generation that really came to power under Pak which made this possible.

EZRA VOGEL:
I noticed that most of the names you mentioned were people who were intellectuals and very talented people. I happen to have been very close to Kim Yong-wan who had studied at Harvard. I have enormous respect for him, and I think Korea was very lucky to have those very talented people who did their graduate training abroad, or who knew Japan, or knew the United States extremely well.

But it was often difficult for them. Kim Yong-wan talked to me about the problems of whether intellectuals would accept him for working with the enemy, and working with that dictatorial military. It was a very difficult job for somebody who was an intellectual to serve very close to that power. That was really a very tough time.

In addition to those you mentioned, I think you'd have to say that Kim Jung-pil and people like that also played a very big role. It's rather remarkable to me how many of the military (who were in the 8th class at the Korean Military Academy) ended up having quite distinguished careers and who adapted quite well. It was the same thing with people like Chung-yi who became foreign minister, a very distinguished role. I think it's really quite remarkable how many of those military people, in addition to the intellectuals that we all love and speak so highly of, also played a very constructive role.

MALE:
I just wanted to add a brief word having known most of the economic people that were mentioned. While it's true that the president had to take advice and so on, it was always my impression that he was the one who really made the decisions.

Kim Yong-wan one time claimed he was going to tell Park Chung Hee that the president had a form of blow torch management. Basically he came over to the Economic Planning Board once a month for a report. Nobody wanted to go in front of him without having accomplished what they were supposed to have accomplished in the previous month. You had a whole country like that. It wasn't just at the presidential level. There were all kinds of people who didn't want to come back to report not having succeeded in what they were supposed to do.

STEPHEN NOERPER:
Thank you. That brings us to a close. Please help me in thanking Professor Ezra Vogel, Professor Charles Armstrong and, at a distance, Professor Kim Byung-Kook. [Applause]