Rural Development in South Korea: A Sociopolitical Analysis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS125 they provide a thoroughly researched description of the period of mobile warfare in Korea, written by a historian who observed the action and who has walked the terrain both in the heat of battle and in the calm of later reflection. Appleman's personal judgments are well-informed and worthy of consideration and debate. In all, these books are of unquestionable value to the military professional, to those who would study warfare at the theater and operational levels, and to those who wish to delve more deeply into this one aspect of the far greater story of modern Korean history. Donald W. Boose, Jr. U.S. Army War College and Wilson College Rural Development in South Korea: A SociopoliticalAnalysis , by William W. Boyer and Byong Man Ahn. Newark: University of DeIaware Press, 1991. 155 pp. Price not given. This short and valuable work, compact with good analysis as well as suggestions of ideas to be followed up, is a succinct and hard-hitting history of rural South Korea since 1970—the same period during which the two authors have known each other. William Boyer teaches at the University of Delaware, and Byong Man Ahn (An Pyöng-man) at the Foreign Language University of Korea. Starting with the problem of overweaning centralization of decision -making in Seoul, with the concomitant dearth of local autonomy, the authors detail the rise, florescence and decline of the central government 's rural development program. The great and continuing migration of farmers to the cities, especially to Seoul, the persistence of poverty in the areas they left behind, and the [alleged] alienation of the remaining country folk are then discussed in satisfactory detail—even if one cannot accept quite all of their conclusions. They end the study with a questionnaire -based look at the changing nature of village leadership: although village leaders were viewed as prime problem solvers . . . villagers still held to a democratic notion of a periodic turnover of their village leaders. (P. 105) Unlike [village meeting and village decision-making] where villagers preferred a democratic style of leadership, they opted for authoritarian leadership for work implementation, (pp. 107-108) 126BOOK REVIEWS A short coda on "strategies for the future" discusses the achieving of local autonomy, a requisite for recasting the "new village movement," and the reversing of rural-to-urban migration trends. Along with these they state: What is needed now are new government strategies to abolish or greatly reduce tenant farming and usurious private loans. A vigorous "return-the-land-to-thetiller " program, marked by fair compensation to absentee owners and financial support for the landless poor is needed to transfer rural lands to their cultivators. (P- 113) Given the above, is there anything in this analysis that can be faulted? Two minor points come to mind—the matter of claimed alienation of farmers, and a possible extension of the authors' data analysis. In all my reading on attitudes of farmers in a number of countries and reports over many decades, I have found that farmers—whatever their culture and economic circumstances—rarely admit to being satisfied with the powers that be. Now, regarding analysis, let me bemoan the authors' bypassing a golden opportunity to squeeze more juice out of their data. On pp. 7778 , Boyer and Ahn present the standard division of land-using types— pure tenants who own no land, farmers who "own the land that they cultivate but . . . also cultivate a larger area owned by others," farmers "who cultivate an area owned by others that amounts to a lesser area than their own cultivated land," and farmers who are (by implication) full owners of all the land they cultivate. These four categories appear in the official statistics, and are a snapshot view, as the situation on the ground is much more complex from year to year. At any rate, the authors then throw away valuable information when they state (p. 78), "our analysis reveals that the differences between tenant and nontenant farmers become clearer by treating tenant farmers as a whole than by dividing them into the three categories." Inserting the four categories as a criterion set into a canonical correlation analysis, while placing the remaining variables...