Past Forward — page 3

Park never let up. A 1972 constitution allowed him to rule indefinitely and legitimized political repression. Labor unions were powerless: nothing was going to get in the way of those export quotas. Despite conspicuous growth, mighty shipyards, the world's largest shirt and shoe factories, South Korea in the late 1970s still felt like a country under siege. Seoul had a midnight curfew. Once a month, all cities shut down completely for one chilling hour, with lights extinguished and everyone off the streets, to keep people prepared for war. Industry hogged all the resources: bank loans for residences were rare. But the public was quiescent; aside from nagging by U.S. President Jimmy Carter on human rights, Park seemed unvanquishable.

Over dinner on Oct. 26, 1979, Park was shot to death by the head of his own spy service, Kim Jae Kyu, amid a power struggle. Those three shots ended South Korea's strongman era. In 1981, nationwide protests erupted against Park's successor, General Chun Doo Hwan, and hundreds of people in the southern city of Kwangju were killed in the ensuing crackdown. Chun led a Park-like regime for seven years and narrowly escaped a 1983 Pyongyang-engineered bombing in Rangoon that wiped out most of his cabinet. But small liberalizations, such as the end of the curfew, and growing prosperity only made South Koreans more restive.

In 1987, when Chun arranged to surrender power to protege Roh Tae Woo through a highly limited electoral system, students and workers poured into the streets for months. The chaos threatened the Olympics scheduled in Seoul for the following summer, and Roh took the decision to allow free presidential and parliamentary polls. Chun acceded gracefully--but upon stepping down, he was forced into two years of internal exile at a Buddhist monastery. Roh transformed South Korea into a true electoral democracy; after he retired, both he and Chun were dragged into court and convicted of corruption. (Their life sentences were later commuted.) During his five-year term, Kim Young Sam did more to eradicate corruption than any other Korean leader, and through a shrewd purge effectively ended the military's role in politics. Having mismanaged the economy, though, he too retired in disgrace.

How could the South Koreans, with such deep wells of dedication and such tangible success, be so hard to please? It helps to understand some national traits. Japanese colonization left an indelible stamp of xenophobia on South Korea. (It often colors feelings toward the U.S., the country's main protector, because of Washington's failure to unite the peninsula in the 1950s and its support of two successive military regimes.) The hopeful teachings of Christian missionaries at the turn of the century and the liberal postwar U.S. school texts combined with older values to give South Koreans an unshakable belief in progress, equality and the expectation that leaders would distribute spoils fairly. In one academic's term, they are the world's true "ethical communists"--with a unique capacity to get angry and hold a grudge.

Today, the depredations of foreign lenders and currency speculators make the outside world again appear threatening and unkind. At the same time, the all-powerful chaebol have been identified as the country's economic villains, not its proud builders. It's a confusing time for South Korea, with no discernible target to throw rocks at, but many reasons for soul searching. Lee Woo Bok, co-founder of the Daewoo Group, likes to look at the old days when hard work was all that was required. "I lived 20 years of my life thinking that anything unrelated to work was a waste of time," he recalls. "My happiest moments were dozing two to three minutes on the toilet bowl. I used to envy the drunk construction workers on the bus home each night. To me they lived in paradise, and I wondered what made them so lucky."

Lee is retired now, and feeling slightly guilty about it. For him, the greatest memory of the past 50 years was his country's headlong rush to develop. "It was impossible to stop," he says. "We just could not put a brake on it, because we felt it would all collapse. It was a bit dangerous, like trying to fly when we had no wings." That sentiment is far too gloomy. All one has to do is look above the 38th parallel to realize that South Korea did have wings in its first 50 years and, if anything, more than enough thrust. For the next 50, it simply needs new engineers.

—With reporting by Stella Kim/Seoul

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