One Miracle Demands Another : South Korea’s Success Fuels Student Pressures for Democracy

SEOUL — Since arriving here in May to begin research on a new project in Korean history, I have, for the most part, avoided the sporadic student demonstrations that have punctuated an unusually tumultuous spring semester. But after nine days of sustained demonstrations, beginning on June 10, my luck ran out. As I sat in the university research library I should have been safe, for most of the students on campus were rioting at the front and side gates. But shifting winds brought the nauseating sting of pepper gas through the open windows, quickly clearing the reading room of its few remaining occupants, including myself.

Americans, smug in our 200-year tradition of stable politics, often wonder why upwardly mobile and highly educated societies like South Korea’s can’t find a mechanism for orderly dialogue and political give-and-take. We are baffled by the black-and-white character of South Korean politics, the seemingly total abdication of that very American virtue of “fair play.” Yet in the last 80 years Korea has had to endure brutal colonization marked by economic exploitation, impoverishment and a catastrophic civil war. Catching its breath under American political domination in the 1950s, South Korea plunged after 1960 into a sustained and rapid economic development that has fundamentally altered the way in which Koreans live and work.

We are accustomed to thinking that as non-Western societies “modernize” they become more like us. Perhaps in material terms this is unfortunately true, but in terms of values, political culture, social organization and intellectual life, modern societies take on many forms. While in the West we managed to make the transition from farm to factory, village to city in roughly 200 years, the people in what is now South Korea have accomplished this feat in fewer than 50. Indeed, the South Korean government has been happy to tout the accomplishments as a miracle, and, given the widespread enthusiasm for the Korean model of economic development among Third World economists, it seems that the message has been received.

Yet the South Koreans are now prisoners of their own success. Not only are demands for open access to Korean markets being made in the Western world, but pressure is rising in broader circles for the South Korean political system to more closely approximate ideal world standards for democracy and basic human rights.

The economic miracle that has seen South Korea rise from a devastated, war-torn, underdeveloped nation to a rapidly industrializing country with a substantial middle class, with family income in the $10,000 range, has sent aspirations soaring. Although a college education is expensive, costing $2,500 to $3,500 per year, families scrimp and pool their money to have a child obtain a higher education.

The number of universities and the student population, representing a South Korean postwar “baby boom,” have mushroomed in the last 10 years. There are more than 100 institutions of higher education and hundreds of thousands of students, and their effect is magnified because they are concentrated in the national and provincial capitals.

While labor, which has been repressed and has suffered from the government’s policy of suppressing wages, has been part of the opposition movement, it is the students who form the vanguard in the current demands for reform and democratization. Idealistic and spirited in the same vein as were the American student participants in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, South Korean students find the prospect of becoming well-paid businessmen and bureaucrats no longer enough. In a highly literate country in which the censored, captive press has been looked on as a joke, they are demanding an end to militaristic authoritarianism and a voice in shaping the future, especially since it will take a further economic surge for them to obtain jobs commensurate with their education and skills.

Demands for democratic institutions and guarantees for human rights are ideas that students here share with the traditional opposition forces, both past and present. However, students also emphasize American culpability in supporting the military-dominated politics since the 1961 coup of Park Chung Hee. They furthermore question the role of the United States and Japan in South Korea’s economic development, and urge a new focus on issues of income distribution and equity. This new focus on Korea’s strategic and economic dependency augments the increasingly strident nationalism of South Korea’s youth--a nationalism based on pride in economic development and a perception of Korea’s elevated international stature.

Although most South Koreans are uneasy with the more extreme student views and neo-Marxist rhetoric, there is widespread support for student demands for constitutional revision and direct presidential elections. The escalating violence since June 10 has forced the government to reconsider the idea of dialogue and possible compromise. As I write, there is an uneasy lull in demonstrations as the entire population awaits the outcome of high-level meetings between government and opposition leaders. While it is the students who have led the way and who have provided the dramatic imagery for the world press, the opposition party leaders have the support of a broad range of religious, labor, intellectual and citizen groups.

As an American, I worry about my government’s response to the extraordinary situation here, and I hope that the Reagan Administration doesn’t revert to supporting “stability” at the cost of draconian repression. Recent public statements by the Administration urging the South Korean government to return to negotiations and to check the urge for military intervention are an encouraging shift in our past policy of “quiet” diplomacy. Perhaps the winds of change that are blowing over the peninsula have spread even across the Pacific.