100 Books, Stories From 20 Countries, More Than a Dozen Scholars: Understanding National Transformation — South Korea
**A year ago, we asked a question: [“Is this society too good to its young people?”](http://www.qdaily.com/special_columns/54.html)**
Why We're Doing This Series
A year ago, we asked a question: “Is this society too good to its young people?”
At least two dimensions of it are worth digging into. First, beyond materialism, how are the culture and values of the society that will belong to young people being built? If what gets handed down to young people is a society in disarray — confused values, a lack of trust and respect, rampant cynicism, violence, ignorance, ingratitude — and if the civilization humanity has accumulated is brushed aside, then there is no way we can call that “good to young people.”
The other dimension looks self-evident now but will cause growing worry: how will a just system be built, or kept? This is the same question the American political scientist Robert Putnam raises in Our Kids: people generally believe that “political inequality is more frightening than economic inequality,” and that “inequality between generations is worse than inequality within a single generation.” It is also the question Woodrow Wilson faced a hundred years ago: while governing a society that is industrializing, how do you find a way for everyone in it to benefit at the same time?
The world the younger generation will live in is bound up with how benefits get redistributed in an industrializing society, and with whether a just and equal society really takes shape.
This is the question we set out with.
It runs, inevitably, into the idea of transformation. When we discuss transformation, we are also discussing our own future — what kind of world do today's young people, and tomorrow's, live in?
In the Chinese context, this might be put in a different vocabulary: the road to “common prosperity,” say, or worries about class stratification and ossification and what to do about them. One thing is certain — this is a question no one, including those in charge, intends to dodge.
QDaily invited more than a dozen scholars to write more than a dozen articles on this big subject of “transformation.” We hope they give you something to think about. More important, each article is followed by a recommended reading list on national transformation, so that if you're interested, you can read and think further.
Immanuel Kant said: “The greatest problem for the human race is to achieve a civil society that can administer universal justice.” As always, QDaily believes these reports will help each of us who cares about the future think further. The problems we face are large enough to deserve some serious thought.
Below is our sixth installment, on South Korea's transformation.
South Korea is China's close neighbor. What you probably know best about it is its entertainment industry. TV dramas like Descendants of the Sun, My Love from the Star, and Jewel in the Palace; films like The Attorney, My Sassy Girl, and Silenced; groups like EXO, Big Bang, and Girls' Generation; and even the original formats behind hit Chinese variety shows like I Am a Singer, Running Man, and Sisters Over Flowers — all of it is made in Korea. It has become an important part of the entertainment lives of most young Chinese people. South Korea's influence on China doesn't stop there, of course. Korean cosmetics, Korean clothes, Korean cars (Hyundai), Korean phones (Samsung), Korean food — it reaches into nearly every corner of our lives.
Yet this young country, born of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, remains an important arena for great-power rivalry in the post-Cold War era. In 2016, the United States deployed the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea. China protested and took a series of measures, one of them the so-called “Korea ban” — Korea-related entertainment products were rectified or cancelled one after another. The Seoul Economic Daily listed the specifics: no investment in newly established Korean cultural companies, no performances by Korean idol groups before crowds of more than 10,000, no screenings of newly contracted Korean film and TV productions, no Korean actors in Chinese TV dramas.
But South Korea is still South Korea. Koreans have their own narrative and their own complexity. From films like A Taxi Driver, May 18, The Attorney, Silenced, and Joint Security Area, you can get a rough sense of modern Korean history.
After the Korean War ended in 1953, the country changed enormously over the next three or four decades. Economically, it made the leap from developing country to developed one — per capita GDP grew a hundredfold — and it climbed out of the middle-income trap. Politically, it endured almost every kind of pain that comes with social transformation; only after a long struggle did Koreans win a successful democratic transition. Socially, classes ranging from religious groups to farmers to the middle class not only drove the transformation together but also achieved reconciliation among themselves.
It is almost a textbook case for the American political scientist Samuel Huntington. In The Third Wave, published in 1991, he made the famous argument that “in the long run, economic development creates the base for democratic regimes.” By Huntington's logic, a country's chances of reaching democracy rise the further it modernizes, because modernization drives social pluralism and so reshapes the existing class structure — a large middle class rises, presses harder for democracy, and pushes the country's transformation along.
South Korea's transformation followed exactly that course. According to World Bank data, per capita GDP surged from US$94 in 1961 to US$3,511 in 1987, a 37-fold increase. Data from South Korea's Economic Planning Board also shows that by 1985 the middle class made up about 38 percent of the adult population, more than a third. That laid the ground for the smooth democratic transition of the late 1980s.
But Huntington was only half right. In his view, liberal democratic values, the rule of law, and pluralism were peculiar to Western civilization, not universal — and spreading liberal democratic values across cultures would take force. The most famous champion of that view was Lee Kuan Yew, for many years the prime minister of Singapore. He too held that liberal democracy was not a universal value but a Western idea, and that culture set the limits of how far it could spread — the Confucian world, for instance, was not covered. People in that world, he argued, put loyalty to family and community above individual freedom and individual needs, were glad to defer to authority, and valued order over conflict.
But living examples like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan refute that. Take South Korea: for all the trouble along the way, it reached a relatively happy ending. It has completed the shift from growth miracle to mature economy — in its growth trajectory, economic structure, innovation capacity, capital flows, and financial system — and joined the developed countries; it also carries global weight in social creativity, large corporations, and culture (film, TV, exported formats). Its social structure has moved closer to that of developed Western countries as well: party politics now matters less in people's daily lives, and the country has entered a mature society.
The author of this piece, Su Qi, is deputy editor-in-chief of Caijing magazine, in charge of macroeconomic and academic coverage. He reads widely and follows history, economics, and politics. He was previously director of the economics department and lead writer at China Newsweek, and director of the regional desk at The Economic Observer. He also wrote our “100 Books, Stories From 20 Countries, More Than a Dozen Scholars: Understanding National Transformation — Eastern Europe”. This article on South Korea examines in detail the long struggle and transformation the country went through as it democratized.
In his view, South Korea's transformation counts as a relatively successful case. The authoritarian government led by Roh Tae-woo decided in the late 1980s to hand over power peacefully, agreed without flinching to the opposition's demand for direct presidential elections, and stepped down having done its job. Roh was later tried alongside former president Chun Doo-hwan over the Gwangju incident and corruption, but the public in the end forgave him and he lived out his later years in peace. Because the political transition was peaceful, South Korea also managed the next stage of its economic transformation fairly smoothly — it rode out the Asian financial crisis, climbed out of the middle-income trap, and joined the small ranks of the world's developed countries.
“Yet the biggest force behind this seemingly happy transformation was the Korean people's unrelenting resistance, and it was not without blood and tears. That brave and unyielding struggle finally made the authoritarian government see that economic performance alone cannot sustain a regime's legitimacy — all the more so once an economy that has passed the catch-up stage grows larger and more intricate, when even a strong government's policy record rises and falls, when social interest groups multiply and are harder and harder to satisfy. In the end the government had no choice but to bow its proud head to public opinion, beat its swords into plowshares, achieve national reconciliation, and move forward together, leaving old grievances behind,” Su Qi writes.
What Was the “Miracle on the Han River”?
(The story starts with Park Chung-hee, the father of Park Geun-hye. He was the most important figure behind South Korea's “Miracle on the Han River.” In power, he rolled out Five-Year Economic Development Plans and the Saemaul, or New Village, Movement suited to Korea's circumstances, driving fast growth in agriculture and industry and quickly raising living standards. According to World Bank data, during Park Chung-hee's 18 years in power, South Korea's per capita GDP rose from about US$94 in 1961 to about US$1,774 in 1979 — nearly a 20-fold increase.)
(But,) pressure from its American ally kept Park Chung-hee from having an entirely free hand; he needed at least nominal elections to rebuild the legitimacy of his military government. The oil shock of the early 1970s brought a stretch of slow growth and macroeconomic instability to the main markets of the newly industrializing economies. Quotas on textile and apparel exports had been in place since the 1960s, but protectionism tightened and spread into other sectors. Technological breakthroughs seemed to threaten the advantage the newly industrializing economies held in labor-intensive manufacturing. The 1971 election posed a serious challenge to Park: more than half of voters backed opposition candidates, among them Kim Dae-jung, who would become president of South Korea in the late 1990s. To quell that wave of opposition, Park introduced the “Yushin system” to tighten his grip.
The Problems the “Miracle on the Han River” Didn't Solve — Or the Ones It Exposed
Opposition voices never entirely disappeared in the Park Chung-hee era. To a degree, the “Miracle on the Han River,” Korea's economic leap under Park, rested on the “welfare repression” of labor. The advantage of export-oriented, labor-intensive industry lay in longer hours and relatively low wages. The Park regime set out to control labor politically and mobilize it economically, which took the form of militarized management of the workforce and economic-nationalist mobilization.
Yet for all the measures the state and the business groups took, they never got a thoroughly docile workforce. Outmatched as they were, Korean workers never gave up resisting. Under Park and the regimes that followed, they kept protesting bad working conditions.
The Park military regime, which had come to power by coup, spared no effort in crushing protest movements in the name of stabilizing the economy and preventing a North Korean invasion. But Park never managed to wipe out all his opponents. His nationalist propaganda and social campaigns may have swayed some groups — rural people with little schooling, for instance — but those tactics never reached students or workers.
To widen his base, Park tilted policy toward the countryside, launching the Saemaul Movement and pouring new investment into agriculture, which won him political support in rural areas. Yet throughout his time in power, manufacturing's share of total employment kept climbing, from 8 percent in 1963 to 23 percent in 1979, while agriculture's share fell from 63 percent to 36 percent.
To meet international competitive pressure, South Korea chose to force a leap in heavy and chemical industry through industrial policy. In fairness, the strategy partly worked: Korea upgraded its industries and raised its international competitiveness. But the government's forceful push also produced inflation, foreign debt, current-account deficits, and a decline in light industry, all of which held back further growth. The heavy-and-chemical-industry wave also concentrated industry further and made income distribution more unequal.
Inflation, the shrinking of small companies, and the labor troubles that came with them left Park in political difficulty as he tried to hold the Yushin system together, and handed the opposition its material. In May 1979, with the backing of the recently released opposition leader Kim Dae-jung, Kim Young-sam was elected chairman of the opposition New Democratic Party and demanded a full review of the Yushin system. Besides calling for political liberalization and a return from military rule to democratic rule, the opposition worked hard to win over the sectors that had lost out under the Yushin system, the heavy-industry drive, and the stabilization measures used to fight inflation.
Support from those losers came faster and harder than anyone expected. The Park regime's favoritism toward heavy industry drained investment away from light manufacturing, the key sector for exports and jobs. Most manufacturing workers were employed not by the chaebol but by small and medium-sized firms, and women workers were concentrated above all in export industries like textiles and electronics, making up 70 percent and 60 percent, respectively, of employment in those two industries in the 1970s. They were typically very young (14 to 24), worked extremely long hours (10 to 12 hours a day, one day off a week), and earned half of what male workers made. It was the protests by textile women workers in the summer of 1979, and the crackdown they set off, that led to the infighting and collapse of the Park regime.
On August 9, 1979, 178 women textile workers from the YH Trading Company occupied the New Democratic Party headquarters, asking the party to help settle their labor dispute. YH Trading was a typical small or medium-sized firm; many such companies were then going bankrupt or shutting down for a time because of rising labor costs and the credit squeeze used to fight inflation. Police later stormed the party headquarters, leaving one woman dead and 30 people injured, several of them members of the National Assembly.
Kim Young-sam condemned the government's handling of the incident in harsh terms, which got him expelled from the National Assembly on October 4 — and that, in turn, set off fierce demonstrations in Busan and Masan, drawing in not only increasingly militant students but also aggrieved workers. Inside the Park regime, opinion split over how to respond: Park and the head of the Presidential Security Service held that the unrest in Busan and Masan should be crushed at any cost, while KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu proposed conceding something to the protesters. Kim Jae-gyu went on to assassinate Park.
After Park's Assassination, the Authoritarian Government Endured
With Park dead, infighting broke out in the military and the security agencies, and civil society rose up dramatically, much as it had after the fall of Syngman Rhee. For a moment, South Korea's political stage showed many conditions favorable to a democratic transition: a deepening economic crisis, broad social mobilization, a divided military. Yet the military and its allied institutions, the core of the authoritarian order, not only rode out the economic and political crisis of 1979-1980 but quickly reestablished their control.
One explanation holds that the military faction led by Chun Doo-hwan found its footing largely because the United States let it. Given how heavily South Korea depended on the United States for security, a firm American stand against the declaration of martial law might have opened the way to a democratic transition then. Partly by acquiescence and partly by deliberate calculation, the United States accepted the martial-law order, accepted the use of troops to suppress the Gwangju Uprising, and accepted Chun's quick rise from martial-law commander to president. Facing an aggressive Soviet Union in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, and in the western Pacific at the time, Washington may have been unable to bear the emergence of a left-leaning, possibly even pro-communist, regime.
The split in the opposition is also counted as a reason the transition failed at that stage: the personal contest between the “two Kims” — Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam — over who would lead the opposition weakened it. Behind their tactical disagreements lay deeper political, regional, and even class differences.
Then, too, the escalation of violent student protests, the large-scale unrest among miners and steelworkers in April 1980, and the Gwangju Uprising all pushed away conservative members of the middle class. Here 1980 and 1987 stand in contrast: in 1987 the middle class joined anti-government demonstrations in large numbers and played an important part in forcing constitutional reform.
Two factors mattered more, though: ties between government and business remained fairly solid, and the credibility of strongman military politics had not finally collapsed. The chaebol were the main beneficiaries of the political order the Park regime built under the Yushin constitution. Even as credit tightened for smaller firms while financial resources flowed to heavy industry, and even as the major business federations voiced worry about particular policies — the effect of the 1979 stabilization plan on credit, for instance — the private sector did not join the opposition in demanding a change of regime. In fact, the private sector believed the democratization movement might endanger the many privileges large companies enjoyed under the Yushin system. As the YH incident and the wave of strikes in 1980 showed, a democratic victory would inevitably require a fundamental change in labor relations. In a country whose economic strategy leaned heavily on exports and on staying internationally competitive, that danger was especially frightening.
The power struggle around Park's assassination revealed serious rifts inside the security apparatus. But after Chun Doo-hwan staged a coup in December 1979, those conflicts were settled. After full martial law was declared in May 1980, Chun held power comparable to Pinochet's in Chile, monopolizing political authority and dominating the military and the security agencies. Over the six months from October 1980 to March 1981, Chun organized a referendum on a new constitution, followed by separate presidential and legislative elections. The new constitution, drafted by the martial-law leadership, went through no meaningful public debate, since the main opposition figures and student leaders were already in jail. A month before the referendum, Kim Dae-jung, the most important opposition leader, was sentenced to death on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government during the Gwangju Uprising. The new constitution, as expected, won “overwhelming” support at the polls, and it let the president be chosen by indirect election.
In the presidential election that February, Chun defeated only token opposition. Then, relying on strict limits on campaigning, political bans on the main opposition leaders, and new controls on the press, Chun's Democratic Justice Party (DJP) took 69.4 percent of the vote in the March legislative elections. By early 1981 the authoritarian order was consolidated again, and the momentum toward democratization went quiet for a while.
With his political footing secure, Chun resumed the economic stabilization plan that Park's assassination had interrupted. To outside observers, South Korea proved quite successful at meeting its stabilization targets: the average annual rise in the consumer price index fell from 14.1 percent between 1979 and 1982 to 2.9 percent between 1983 and 1984.
The military government achieved fiscal restraint by scrapping or cutting politically sensitive programs. One was the “grain management and fertilizer fund,” which Park had used to cultivate supporters in the countryside through price subsidies. In a sweeping campaign, public-sector salaries were frozen, promotions were halted, some posts were downgraded, and hiring stopped. Under the cover of a “social purification” campaign, large numbers of government employees were purged.
The government also tried, against fierce opposition from big business, to squeeze credit to large firms, though the flaws in their financing structures made that reform harder. It isn't hard to see that Chun's drive for stabilization weakened nearly every base of support Park had painstakingly built: farmers, civil servants, big business, small business.
Around this time, shifts in the world economy brought fresh pressure on the Chun regime. High dollar interest rates and the second oil shock cast a shadow over Korea's capital- and energy-intensive projects. The United States, facing a huge trade deficit, pressed the newly industrializing economies to “graduate” as fast as possible, to carry the same responsibilities as developed industrial nations in the international trade and financial system, and to liberalize trade in goods and services step by step while easing controls on foreign capital. By the mid-1980s, exchange-rate policy had become a central point of dispute. Under American pressure, South Korea had to let its currency appreciate and to liberalize finance, leaving the exchange rate to the market. Appreciation forced export-oriented companies to adjust, and confronted the government with new conflicts over industrial restructuring and wage policy.
(Authoritarian governments always hope to draw legitimacy from economic development. As described above, Chun in this period naturally pushed the economy forward as well. According to World Bank data, South Korea's per capita GDP rose from US$1,704 in 1980 to US$3,511 in 1987 — roughly doubling.)
Roh Tae-woo's 1987 Election, and What a Reconciled, Rational Society Produced
(But,) the success of an authoritarian developmental state always plants the seeds of its own destruction, because the urbanization and the middle class that modernization brings sharpen the demand for democracy, which in turn drives the authoritarian government from power during the later stages of economic liberalization and political democratization.
That reading seems to have become a scholarly consensus. But there is no free lunch: having led a country to modernization, an authoritarian government will not calmly and voluntarily walk off the political stage. Economic development and the rise of a middle-class society only add momentum to a democratic transition; without sustained contentious politics, the transition may be put off indefinitely, or rushed through once a crisis erupts — either way making the whole society pay a higher price for it.
South Korea's transformation counts as a relatively successful case. Yet the biggest force behind this seemingly happy transformation was the Korean people's unrelenting resistance, and it was not without blood and tears. That brave and unyielding struggle finally made the authoritarian government see that economic performance alone cannot sustain a regime's legitimacy — all the more so once an economy that has passed the catch-up stage grows larger and more intricate, when even a strong government's policy record rises and falls, when social interest groups multiply and are harder and harder to satisfy. In the end the government had no choice but to bow its proud head to public opinion, beat its swords into plowshares, achieve national reconciliation, and move forward together, leaving old grievances behind.
It must be stressed that across the whole of postwar Korean history, the successive authoritarian governments — however much their capacity for repression and control varied — never wiped out the protest movements led by students and workers. They always left some room to breathe, which is why the spirit of student and worker resistance never died: whenever the smallest opening appeared, they seized it to show their strength, and in adversity they struggled to survive, until the moment came again to step forward and lead the tide of public opinion.
From Syngman Rhee to Roh Tae-woo, “combative” students were always at the front line. Rhee's final years in power were full of economic chaos and official corruption, which stoked public anger, and the electoral fraud of 1960 set off widespread student protests that drove him out. Because the political climate was relatively more democratic in 1960 and 1961, student groups and labor unions launched nearly 2,000 demonstrations involving more than a million people.
With domestic and foreign pressures reinforcing each other, campus radicalism and confrontation surged after 1985. Political reform was naturally the opposition's main agenda, since Chun found it hard to separate himself from the Park era. The opposition focused above all on constitutional revision, and South Korea's 1980 constitution became a prime target: it set up an indirect electoral-college system that in effect let Chun name his own successor. Amending it to allow direct presidential elections and to guarantee political freedoms fully became the demand that pulled the opposition together.
Chun's economic program became a target too. The opposition cast import liberalization, the internationalization of the financial sector, and the loosening of rules on direct investment as fawning on foreign pressure. It appealed to those hurt by stabilization and structural adjustment, and pointed to the continuing corrupt ties between the government and big business. The more radical wing argued that the whole export-led growth strategy had succeeded only because workers, farmers, and the country's less-developed regions had paid for it.
Strikingly, some ruling-party legislators sided with the opposition in the National Assembly, accusing the United States of hypocrisy and protectionism and of ignoring South Korea's standing as a reliable military ally. Foreign debt became the focus of nationalist anxiety, and given the string of financial scandals involving the Chun family, the idea that foreign funds were being put to political use sounded plausible.
Students began to make more radical and far-reaching criticisms of the Korean economy, and worked to build organizational ties with other discontented groups — trying to get inside the labor movement, for instance, in order to form a more radical front. Anti-Americanism became a student catchphrase. Grassroots farmer and worker organizations backed by the Catholic and Protestant churches, meanwhile, concentrated on the countryside and the edges of the cities.
The first round of this contest came during the legislative election campaign of February 1985. As in Chile and other crisis cases, elective office gave the opposition an important opening. Facing widespread discontent, the ruling Democratic Justice Party won only 35.3 percent of the vote, and held onto control of the National Assembly only through unfairly drawn districts and the unfair allocation of at-large seats. It was a stunning, unexpected setback — all the more so because the main opposition force, the New Korea Democratic Party, had been founded only just before the campaign began.
After the election the opposition worked on several fronts. Students held the firmest anti-government line and led the organizing of protests. They also formed alliances with worker and farmer groups, partly under the protection of the churches. Unlike in the past, radical students now drew growing support from opposition politicians and growing sympathy from the public.
The government's response swung between concession and repression, a sign of the widening disagreement inside it over how to handle the opposition. It proposed talks with opposition politicians on constitutional revision, but the talks went almost nowhere. On April 13, 1987, Chun Doo-hwan “suspended” the debate on direct presidential elections. The decision touched off a nationwide wave of protest. In June, the Democratic Justice Party formally nominated the former general Roh Tae-woo as its presidential candidate, all but guaranteeing his election, and that set off a second nationwide wave. These protests drew international press attention partly because Seoul was to host the Olympics the following autumn, and partly because Seoul's middle class and professionals joined them in large numbers — a sharp contrast with the relatively “timid” showing of 1980.
Facing mass protests and the precedent of the Philippines, Chun set aside the advice of the hardliners at the Blue House. This is where Huntington's democratic “snowballing” theory in The Third Wave comes from. Compared with 1980, moreover, the United States — increasingly on top in the Cold War — had grown less tolerant of dictatorial allies, which put a strong check on any decision to run the repression script again.
The increasingly divided authoritarian government then gave way to pressure from highly mobilized social groups. Responding directly to the protests, Chun's designated successor, Roh Tae-woo, announced a political reform package on June 29, 1987, that included direct presidential elections and guarantees of political and civil liberties. That declaration made the direct presidential election of December 1987 possible. Roh won it with a plurality, but the opposition took a majority of seats in the National Assembly elections the following April.
For a long time people tended to think Roh won his 37 percent plurality because the two main opposition candidates, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, split the opposition vote, taking 28 percent and 27 percent respectively. In fact, that is exactly what shows how undramatic Korea's transition was, and how much continuity it kept with the past.
The results showed that the private sector, for all its tense relations with the Chun government, did not abandon it the way business had in other crisis transitions, but quietly backed it. In the view of Stephan Haggard and others, the middle class's shift toward the opposition in 1987 was wrongly read by parts of the left as opening the door not just to democracy but to social-democratic or more radical redistributive politics. In fact, the middle class broadly supported the basic development strategy the government had followed, and was skeptical of the opposition's economic and social proposals. Kim Jong-pil, the fourth candidate and a man closely tied to Park-era politics, took another 10 percent of the presidential vote, which means nearly 50 percent of voters backed conservative candidates for president. So although the opposition parties won most of the popular vote and, after the legislative elections that spring, became the majority in the National Assembly, Roh's relatively strong showing reflected the strength of conservative support.
By then, after wave upon wave of long struggle, South Korea's democratic transition was settled and complete; what was left was finishing and patching.
The 1998 “Legend” of Koreans Donating Gold, a Sign That National Institutions Had Changed Successfully and Society Had Reconciled
(There is a “legend” from the Asian financial crisis of 1998 about Korean citizens donating gold to save the national economy (reported by The New York Times and the BBC). The story goes that 3.5 million Koreans donated 227 tons of gold in 1998. That gold pushed the price of gold that year to an 18-year low. In a sense it shows the steadying role South Korea's middle class played in the country's development. The successful transformation of South Korea's national institutions produced a rational, positive social attitude.)
(So, in the transformation histories of countries around the world,) South Korea's counts as a relatively successful case. The authoritarian government led by Roh Tae-woo decided in the late 1980s to hand over power peacefully, agreed without flinching to the opposition's demand for direct presidential elections, and stepped down having done its job. Roh was later tried alongside former president Chun Doo-hwan over the Gwangju incident and corruption, but the public in the end forgave him and he lived out his later years in peace. Because the political transition was peaceful, South Korea also managed the next stage of its economic transformation fairly smoothly — it rode out the Asian financial crisis, climbed out of the middle-income trap, and joined the small ranks of the world's developed countries.
(Note: the italicized text in parentheses and the subheadings were added by the editor and do not represent the author's views. The original title was “South Korea's Democratization: A Long Struggle and Transformation.”)
Recommended Reading List
1. Pathways from the Periphery
This book tells the political story of economic growth in six newly industrializing economies: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico, and Brazil. After noting that both neoclassical and dependency theory ignore domestic politics, Professor Haggard explains these six economies' choices of growth path and industrial strategy at four levels of analysis: the international system, domestic coalitions, political institutions, and ideas.
The book gives a fine comparison across time and across countries of the relations between government, interest groups, and markets — or between state, society, and economy. Its value for understanding the “Chinese miracle” lies not in answering the broad question of whether China fits the East Asian model, nor in supplying arguments that explain China's growth, but in offering a way of analyzing the problem: different growth strategies rest on different political foundations, or political conditions.
“The success of the East Asian newly industrializing economies provided empirical evidence for neoclassical theory and opened a third front in the critique of import substitution. The evidence has shown again and again that promoting exports raises growth rates more than import substitution does. In the economically turbulent 1970s, the East Asian newly industrializing economies, though heavily dependent on foreign trade, performed far better than the inward-looking newly industrializing economies of Latin America. Moreover, even measured against developed countries, the East Asian newly industrializing economies had more equal income distribution than Latin America did. Part of the reason was the large-scale land reforms in South Korea and Taiwan and the absence of a low-income agricultural sector in Singapore and Hong Kong, but the main contributor to income equality was the labor-absorbing character of export-led growth,” Haggard writes.
2. The Developmental State
This book collects essays by scholars abroad re-examining the theory of the developmental state. The developmental state has long led economic development in Northeast Asia; since the concept was coined in the early 1980s, various scholars have enriched and refined it, and it has become an important variable for explaining the economic miracles of Northeast Asia — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — in the 1960s and 70s.
In sum, the developmental state has four features: a sustained intent to develop; a highly autonomous core economic bureaucracy; close cooperation between government and business; and selective industrial policy. Drawing especially on the development experience of South Korea and Taiwan, the contributors argue that these developmental regimes promoted growth through government-business cooperation and industrial policy, making them models for other late-developing countries and regions. The book also offers plenty for China's political and economic development to learn from.
“For half a century the United States has worked to make Japan and Korea ‘more like us,’ yet today, on the edge of the twenty-first century, they still pursue a course deeply shaped by the legacies of nationalism and economic mobilization that formed East Asia. This is not to say reform is unnecessary, or that the developmental state will simply carry on as before. If Japan and Korea reform their systems to show greater respect for the rule of law (rather than administrative guidance), that would benefit everyone; understood broadly, respect for the rule of law means that the links running through the state, the banks, and the large corporations are legal, regulated, and transparent. If nothing else, they need to do this to sharpen the international competitiveness of their industries and stage a comeback. But in this book we are more concerned to show how the present state of affairs came about,” the book's editor, Meredith Woo-Cumings, writes in the preface.
3. Beyond Left and Right
How should we understand the nature of political radicalism today, and where it might go? Political radicals are usually taken to be people on the left, opposed to a conservatism that clings to the past. Yet in today's world the left has been pushed onto the defensive, while the right has turned radical, championing market forces that must break through the traditions and customs in their way.
How do we explain so strange a knot between the two positions? To answer it, the eminent sociologist Anthony Giddens builds a new framework for radical politics. He takes nourishment from what he calls “philosophic conservatism,” but puts it in the service of values usually held by the left. Ecological crisis sits at the center of his analysis, though he understands it in an unconventional way — as a response to a world in which modernity, as a social and moral marvel, has been exhausted. Nature as an entity independent of human intervention has come to an end, and under the impact of globalization, so has tradition. These are the forces we must now face, use, and cope with.
“The sacred value of human life, universal human rights, the protection of species, and care for future generations as well as for children today — all these values, though realized on the defensive, are certainly not negative ones. They imply an ethics of personal and collective responsibility that, as its values claim, can bridge the gulf of interests. Responsibility is not obligation, and it has been suggested that it lacks the authority needed to summon the obligation demanded of ‘true believers.’ Yet compared with obligation, responsibility means giving reasons rather than obeying blindly. Though it stands opposed to fanaticism, it has a moving power of its own, because commitments freely made are often more binding than those simply handed down by tradition,” Giddens writes.
4. From Miracle to Maturity
This important book was written jointly by the eminent economists Barry Eichengreen, Dwight H. Perkins, and Kwanho Shin. It is about South Korea's experience of economic growth and transformation. The three authors studied, systematically and in depth, the progress Korea has made in transforming its growth trajectory, economic structure, innovation capacity, capital flows, and financial system, and they argue that Korea already shows the marks of a mature developed economy, having completed the shift from growth miracle to mature economy. Many of the book's insights also offer lessons for China's current economic reform and transformation.
“Korea's experience can help China judge its economic prospects. At the very least, it can point to the problems China may meet and the major policy mistakes it can avoid. First, Korea's experience shows that an economy that begins as agricultural, with only very limited industrial capital, can grow fast by moving labor from agriculture to manufacturing while keeping the investment rate high. An export-oriented strategy is essential to successful catch-up: it means manufacturing growth is no longer confined to domestic demand, and domestic manufacturers face international competition from the start. Chinese readers watching their own economy will find this familiar. At the same time, Korea's experience shows that a period of rapid growth built on moving labor from the countryside to the cities, a high investment rate, and fast export growth has limits — it cannot go on forever. In the end the surplus rural labor force will be used up, foreign demand for domestic products will saturate, and easy investment opportunities will run out. Growth will slow at that point, and adjusting the growth model becomes necessary. Second, Korea's experience shows that trying too hard to stop that slowdown, or refusing to accept a change in the growth model, will produce consequences that undermine economic stability. Third, with an aging population and a shrinking labor force, China faces a set of major demographic challenges. Fourth, a successful developing country must carry out structural reform in order to keep growing fast and avoid falling into the ‘middle-income trap,’” the three authors write.
(Note: the description of each book was added by the editor and does not represent the author's views.)
This is the sixth installment in the national transformation series. Click the underlined link to read the first installment, “100 Books, Stories From 20 Countries, More Than a Dozen Scholars: Understanding National Transformation — Eastern Europe”;
The cover image is a still from the film The Attorney. Source: Douban.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.