Dispatch from Seoul

Dispatch from Seoul Doyne Dawson June 2003 · Historically Speaking13 The experience of Korea in the 20th century was not unique; in all Asian societies the traditional elites struggled with tensions between ancient national identities and the challenges ofthe modern West. But the Korean transition to modernity was unusually traumatic. The Korean ancien régime died hard. The Confucian mandarin class resisted Westernizing and modernizing influences even more stubbornlydian did their counterparts in imperial China. As a result, the "Hermit Kingdom" fell easy prey to the modern army and navy ofJapan, which in 1910 abolished the1200-year-old Korean monarchy and annexed the peninsula. Most non-Western the challenge of reinventing a Korean national identity following a half-centurylong interruption marked by the total collapse of the old elite, foreign conquest and occupation, a terrible civil war, and the loss ofhalfthe national territory. This reinventionwas accomplished largelyduringthe long . . . the new "Republic ofKoreafaced the challenge ofreinventing a Korean national identityfollowing a half-century -long interruption marked by the total collapse ofthe oldelite, foreign conquest and occupation, a terrible civil war, and the loss ofhalfofthe national territory. countries went through a long colonial period, but in the case of reign ofGeneral ParkChungHee (president intermittent lip service to parliamentary forms. Finally, schools taught a fierce anticommunism , which intensified during South Korea's vigorous participation in the Vietnam War on behalf of its American ally. Resistance to Chinese-supported communismwas seen as the currentstage in the long national epic ofstruggle against outside forces. Anti-communism was used constantlybyPark and the equally authoritarian leaders who followed him to justify their repressive policies. There was a tension between tradition and progress or, roughly speaking, between the Korean and the Japanese elements in this synthesis . The regime refused to allow any degree ofpolitical modernization commensurate with South Korea's Korea the colonizer was also non-Western. That the conquerors belonged to the same race and the same Sinitic civilization as the conquered did not make their relationship easier. Koreans had traditionallyregarded the Japanese as their cultural inferiors. Yet the Japanese conducted experiments in total cultural assimilation, such as forcingKoreans to take Japanese names, which no European colonial powerwould everhave attempted in an Asian country. The Japanese occupation left bitter memories that still rankle. TheJapanese withdrew at the end ofthe Second World War, to be replaced by other foreign intruders. With Soviet backing, the first communist regime in the Far East was setup atPyongyang in 1948 andwould have imposed itselfupon all Korea had itnotbeen for the intervention ofthe United States. The war of 1950-53 killed 1,300,000 South Koreans and 55,000 Americans and left the devastated peninsula divided between anAmerican protectorate in the South and a Red Chinese protectorate in the North. (During the war China had replaced the Soviet Union as Pyongyang's main patron.) Thus the new Republic of Korea faced 1961-1979), the man chieflyresponsible for spectaculareconomicprogress. In this respect South Korea's rapid economic development. the Korean leadership lagged far behind Park had been an officer in the Japanese Japan, which had the advantage of a long imperial army at its most militaristic period. After the liberation he emerged as a conservative nationalist determined to stamp his own image on theyoungrepublic. First, neoConfucianism was reaffirmed as the Korean ideology, emphasizing discipline and obedience in family and state, and the role ofthe leader as moral exemplar and father of the nation. The textbooks created bythe newsystem ofuniversal education gave Confucianism a nationalistic slant by portraying Korea as a permanentlyembattled nation, squeezed between China and Japan and repeatedly forced to fight for its independence against the two larger powers. Second, the Park regime inculcated an un-Confucian faith in rapid economicmodernization and progress on theJapanese model, die goal ofwhich was not slavish imitation of the West but rather the molding ofa distinctive Far Eastern way to modernization thatplaced communityvalues above individualism. Parkhad a lowopinion ofdemocracy, though pressure from his American patrons compelled him to pay American occupation. Until almostthe end of the century the old guard, including the bureaucracy, the military, and the leaders of the business conglomerates, continued to make use ofthe communist threat to censor and marginalize its opposition. But by then...