South Korea: Hope in the Hermit Kingdom

SOUTH KOREA

To the spartan people who have lived there for 4,000 years, to the Japanese conquerors who ruled it for 35 years ending in 1945, to the U.S. troops who fought there in the 1950s, Korea usually seemed a land of painful yesterdays and even darker tomorrows. Recurrent wars, occupations, famines and coups sapped its spirit and resources. For a generation, it has been split into two bitterly hostile parts: the Communist North and the non-Communist South.

But today, South Korea can take credit for some remarkable gains in the difficult task of nation-building. The picture is not all bright; the country suffers from moral and material problems endemic in much of Asia. Still, South Korea could serve as something of a model for other troubled and divided countries, including South Viet Nam.

Winning the West. Under President Chung Hee Park’s six-year-old government, South Korea is constructing a political and economic base that is the envy of its Asian friends. Factories and homes are sprouting in Seoul (pop. 3,700,000) and other cities. New roads are piercing deep into the harsh hills of the interior. “When we hammered in the spikes for a new railroad recently,” said Deputy Prime Minister Key Young Chang last week, “I was reminded of American cowboy movies and the winning of the West.”

The change in this longtime dependent country is not just physical but also psychological. Asia’s once isolated “hermit kingdom,” as it was called by 19th century missionaries, is becoming a viable, if somewhat fragile, democracy and is reaching out toward the world with more self-assurance than it has ever known. To South Viet Nam it has sent 10,000 engineers and 46,000 battle-shrewd “ROK” (Republic of Korea) troops. Through the Asian Pacific Council, it plays a leading role in promoting regional cooperation. Next week President Park will receive a U.S. economic mission, and South Korea’s Prime Minister II Kwon Chung will be in Washington discussing Korean and Viet Nam development with President Johnson. Chung will ask for U.S. financial aid to enlarge Korea’s engineering corps in South Viet Nam to as many as 50,000 men, have them undertake an intensive program of building schools, bridges and roads within Korea’s assigned area of military responsibility.

War Boom. The prime force in Korea’s resurgence is President Park, the taciturn ex-army general who seized power in a 1961 coup, then went public two years later and held elections, squeezing into office by 156,000 votes, out of 11 million cast (in a population of 27 million). Going to work on the country’s feeble economy, Park devalued Korea’s inflated currency, lured new investment with tax concessions and low-wage labor and started a five-year development plan. To help pay the bills, Park even ignored virulent anti-Japanese feelings in Korea and normalized trade and diplomatic relations with Korea’s former overlord. In return, Japan came through with $800 million in loans and grants.

As Park’s government embarks on its second five-year plan, Korea is pulsing with activity. The war demands of Viet Nam have created a huge export market for uniforms, boots, rubber goods, plywood, construction materials and galvanized sheet plate. This, along with other expanding Asian civilian markets, helped to lift the country’s commodity exports last year to a record $255 million. To reduce imports, South Korea’s first oil refinery, built two years ago at Ulsan, is being expanded, and another $50 million refinery is going up at Yosu, providing the base for a $100 million-a-year petrochemical industry. A four-nation consortium of firms is planning a $100 million iron and steel mill on the coast. Plans are also under way for $300 million worth of power plants that will more than double the country’s generating capacity by 1971.

Price of a Patriot. Park permits the press and politicians to say almost anything they choose. Last September he even refused to intervene after an opposition member of the National Assembly, carried away by an emotional debate, poured a can of excrement over the heads of Park’s Cabinet ministers. But Park’s tolerance does have its limits. His government maintains a midnight-to-4-a.m. curfew over most of the country, and has enacted a tough anti-Communist law that gives the security police and the courts wide leeway in dealing with real or imagined subversives. One young writer who published a blistering allegory of American influence in Korea, called The Dung Hill, is being tried under the law because his short story was picked up and reprinted in North Korea.

To guard against frequent subversion attempts from the North, Park maintains a 600,000-man army along the 151-mile, tense demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas; they are backed up by 50,000 U.S. troops. Park has also sealed the border area with a high wooden fence and hundreds of “K.P.s,” or killing posts, manned by ten-man teams of sharpshooters. Not even mail is permitted to pass. To catch agents who do slip through, bounty signs are scattered all over the country, offering 200,000 won (about $700) for the capture of enemy agents. “Become a patriot and become rich,” they urge, “by catching a spy.”

50¢ a Day. With new elections approaching in May, opposition politicians are speaking out more and more. “The rich are getting richer,” says Opposition Candidate Po Sun Yun of the New Democratic Party, “and the poor are getting poorer. Small and medium-sized businessmen and farmers are suffering under the government’s economic policies”—mass-production policies which clearly favor the larger, more efficient producers.

Park admits that there are conspicuous problems, including corruption at lower levels of government. Unemployment amounts to 7% of the country’s labor force, and another 25% are underemployed. Some working women earn as little as 50£ a day, and per-capita income last year was only $123, compared with Taiwan’s $225 and Japan’s $740, the two highest in Asia. But starvation has been almost completely eliminated, the literacy rate has been lifted to 90%, and the traditional spring question—enough rice or revolution?—is a bitter memory of the past.

The country is still clearly on the move, and Park seems likely to move with it, right back into Seoul’s blue-roofed presidential residence. “Not all government officials are doing the right things on all levels,” he allows, “but we are trying, and we are learning.”