The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form

7. The Redemptive Realism of Korean Minjung Literature

Expressways, Exports, and Park Chung Hee’s New Village Movement The growth of transport systems and the allure of movement is a powerful metaphor for several reasons, not least being the actual reduction in a nation’s size. All three New Asian City nations, in fact, became unwilling islands between  and . Under the Kuomintang, Taiwan was contentiously severed (again) from the mainland,provoking to this day competing versions of One China and the specter of military attack from Beijing. As we saw in chapter , Singapore was disassociated from its hinterland, Malaya,rendering it a city-state,or“a heart without a body”(Lee,Singapore Story, ) despite its continued practical linkages with the Malaysian peninsula.And the partition of the Korean peninsula, Bruce Cumings has remarked, turned the south into a virtual island and a decades-long antagonist toward its rival in the north.1 Like other ex-colonies, these states contend not just with the distorted industries and societies left behind by colonialism, but also with the haphazard geographies and overly concentrated populations resulting from the process of decolonization.In such precarious and geographically limited contexts,the extraordinary development    The Redemptive Realism of Korean Minjung Literature I think I have to stay on one road, Though roads are open everywhere No more attachments, No more sideways. —kim chi-ha,“No Sideways”  The Redemptive Realism of Korean Minjung Literature of roads and transport systems integrates the nation space with the demands of international capitalism and compensates for territories cut off from their adjacent regions.With no other way to survive, these nations— and perhaps most enthusiastically the Republic of Korea—chose to promote the free movement of their only available surplus resource: labor power.Focusing on South Korea in this chapter,I again argue that the forms of national infrastructure become the figures through which material and ideological debates are staged. If one of Fanon’s greatest concerns regarding “the pitfalls of national consciousness” was the centralization of postcolonial power in capital cities to the neglect of the rural masses (),Park Chung Hee’s transportation systems symbolically (if not actually) achieve countrywide inclusion into the national project. Images of the country’s newly built roads, freeways, and bridges both allegorize the future path of the nation and prescribe the correct use of national space. Like the two previous regimes discussed, the presidency of Park Chung Hee (Pak Chŏng-hŭi)—from  until his assassination in —stressed the physical development of postcolonial South Korea in terms of a single national project. Numerous political and economic studies of Park’s rule have traced his authoritarian style to his training in Manchurian, Japanese ,and Korean military academies and note his service as a lieutenant in the Japanese Kwantung army. Despite being denounced as a communist in  and almost sentenced to death in the military purges of the Syngman Rhee era (–), he took advantage of the disorder that followed the April ,,student-led protests (sa-il-gu) that ended Rhee’s reign.With his military allies, he staged a successful coup d’état in  and quickly turned to restructuring the country. Park followed the Japanese model of a strong state-business alliance and export-oriented industrialization, but the incredible growth in productivity of the working masses cannot be explained by this strategy alone. Following Kim Hyung-A’s analysis, I argue that Park was most successful in steering the country toward an efficient labor system (Kim, ) in which the ideas of construction and reconstruction of the nation were mobilized simultaneously at physical,national,and psychic levels. Kim Hyung-A describes how Park cannily tapped into the liberal public discourse that flourished in the year of civilian rule preceding the coup of .Based on the apparently shameful history of Korean dependence (on The Redemptive Realism of Korean Minjung Literature  the Chinese,the Japanese,and now the Americans) and the embarrassment of national division, the reconstruction of a new dynamic Korean nation became paramount. The evident dissatisfaction of the masses with Syngman Rhee’s corrupt and inefficient leadership laid the groundwork for a results-oriented government,just as Singapore’s resourceful People’s Action Party enjoyed enormous success following British rule.Like Lee KuanYew, Park rechanneled desires for a new and independent nation into a state-led effort, characterized by both U.S.-backed anticommunism and the singleminded goal of developing Korean exports. Just a few of the achievements of his...