Los instrumentos de la regulación financiera

Here I describe the structural relations inherited by Park Chung Hee, beginning with the Korean War. As noted in chapter 5, the war ruined the South Korean economy. Throughout the 1950s, therefore, South Korea survived only with US economic aid so that, by the early 1960s, the capitalist and working classes still remained much underdeveloped. Conversely, the traditional landowning class was eliminated in the late 1940s under the land reform implemented by the first South Korean government. Thus, even in the early 1960s, the three typical social classes in a bourgeois society, namely, capitalists, wage labourers and land owners, were all underdeveloped. In contrast, because of the war, and for South Korea’s national security, coercive state apparatuses were overdeveloped (for overdeveloped states in postcolonial societies, see Alavi 1972). Park Chung Hee seized the oversized state apparatuses through his military coup. Therefore, compared to state managers in the liberal-bourgeois democracies in the same period, Park Chung Hee could enjoy greater autonomy from “particular” social classes. For the emergence and development of the PCHM itself was a process of making and nurturing social classes more typical of bourgeois civil society. Nevertheless, South Korean social forces did influence Park’s policies – but as a “nation” that had previously been colonised by Japan and was then partitioned. In other words, South Koreans tended to act as an ethnically homogenous, anti-Japanese and reunification-aspired state population (for more details, see chapter 7).29

29 _{In South Korea, monopoly capitals started resisting governmental policies in an organised way from} the early 1980s. They objected to the neoliberalisation of the economy. Likewise, as an organised social force, starting from 1987, workers strongly influenced government policies by waging a national general strike (see Chapter 8). Of course, this does not imply that labour had not resisted during the Park Chung Hee era – but this was quite occasional and relatively unorganised (for the history of labour moment in South Korea, see Chang 2009; Sonn 1997).

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Second, a lay understanding of international relations in Far East Asia during the Cold War era seems that Japan, South Korea and the US formed a triangular and capitalist alliance against the other triangular and socialist alliance among China, North Korea and the USSR. Yet, their relations were not that simple.

1. On the structural relation between the US and South Korea. The relation between the two has often been described as a “bloody alliance” but it was far from an even one. Nor have their respective Administrations and Governments always reached a happy agreement on political, economic and military issues. In 1945, the southern half of the Korean peninsular was occupied by the US military and, for 3 years thereafter, the armed forces ruled South Korea. In 1948, the US transplanted liberal democracy in South Korea. As a result, the first general and presidential elections were held, respectively, in May and July in the same year, which established South Korea’s Government officially for the first time.30 _{In the presidential election, Lhee Syngman}

was elected. Although he was one of the liberation activists, his career was rather different from those of usual leaders of liberation movements. For, he had previously studied at George Washington (BA), Harvard (MA) and then Princeton (PhD). Furthermore, exceptionally, he was a pro-American protestant. In 1949, as mentioned, the government implemented a capitalist type of land reform, eliminating thereby the traditional landowners too. Then, the Korean War occurred. During the war, the wartime and peacetime operational control of South Korea’s military was handed to the United Nations Command. In 1979, the authority was turned to the ROK-US

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Combined Forces Command.31 _{Yet, in both cases, the commander was the commander}

of United States Forces Korea, implying that operational control of South Korea’s military has been fundamentally subordinate to or, at least, strong influenced by the US. Moreover, as noted, the South Korean economy could even be managed without US economic aid. South Korea’s military itself, which was gigantic in comparison to its economy and civil society, operated thanks to this aid. In sum, as regards its economy and military, South Korea was deeply reliant on the US. For this reason, many South Korea leftists have deemed South Korea as one of the (neo-)colonies of the US.32 _This

is what I refer to as a structural relation between South Korea and the US. It was inherited by Park Chung Hee in the early 1960s. He sought to (re-)build a nation- and national state and to development the economy. Yet, his strategic actions for the projects should be considered in this structural context, together with other structural relations. Based on those, Park had strategically different relations with US administrations. For instance, he maintained good highly cooperation only with the Johnson administration, conflicting with the Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Carter Administrations.

2. On the structural relation between Japan and South Korea. The collapse of Imperial Japan and South Korea’s decolonisation after the end of the Second World War disarticulated South Korea from Japan. Their diplomatic relation was re-established only in 1965. Thus, starting with the Park Chung Hee era, their relation started being

31 _{The ROK is an acronym for Republic of Korea, that is, the official appellation of South Korea. On} the contrary, North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

32 _{In the debate over South Korea’s social formation which was fashionable in the mid- and late 1980s,} pro-North Korean and nationalist lefts argued that South Korea was nothing but one of the colonies of the US. On the country, Marxists regarded the country as a neo-colony.

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re-structured. First, from that time, Japanese funds started flowing into South Korea in the form of loans, grants and compensation. The export-oriented industrialisation (EOI) of South Korea from the mid-1960s was based largely on these funds. In consequence, not only financially, but also industrially, South Korea’s economy was re- articulated with the Japanese economy in a rather subordinate way. EOI was based on processing trade. Hence, South Korea should import raw and auxiliary materials, parts and components, and so forth. Among them, high value and technologically advanced products were imported from Japan. The rise of the South Korean economy thereby contributed to that of the Japanese economy too. In this context, South Korea’s economy has been referred to as the “cormorant” economy (Komura 1988/1989). Let me explain this metaphor. In Japan or China, trained cormorants on leashes dive into rivers and then catch fishes by swallowing them intact. Yet, because of the leashes, these fish remain in the cormorants’ gullet and fishers recover them from the birds. In this context, the cormorant economy refers to a phenomenon that, when South Korean cormorants catch profits in foreign rivers, Japanese fishers will finally gain the large proportion of the profits.33 _{This shows a structured relation between the Japanese}

economy and the South Korean economy since the mid-1960s. This structural relation was inherited by Park Chung Hee but emerged in his era. On the other hand, Park

33 _{Akamatsu highlighted this aspect of the regional division of labour through the “flying geese”} metaphor. Yet, intriguingly, he did so even before the Japanese economy was re-articulated with the South Korean economy. In this context, whilst his claim has its own relevance from a current point of view, it seems to be anchored on the ideological aspiration for the prewar Japanese right-wing’s pan-Asianism. His claim also exaggerated Japan’s role. For, although the metaphor describes Japan as an independent leader in the region, the relation between Japan and South Korea has been subordinately articulated with the US.

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Chung Hee was highly pro-Japanese. Therefore, he kept an extraordinarily close relation to behind-the-scene elder statesmen in Japanese politics.

3. On the structural relation between North Korea and South Korea. In South Korea, it is often said that we have not yet achieved independence. South Korea was liberated from Imperial Japan and then immediately partitioned, with the two parts remaining under the influence of the US and Japan and the USSR and/or China respectively. That is, the two Koreas have both failed to build an independent nation- and national state after the peninsular was liberated although both have continued to plan and execute their respective projects and operations for (re-)building a unified state. In this context, North Korea has basically regarded South Korea as a colony or puppet regime of the US. In contrast with South Korea, in which pro-American and/or pro-Japanese leaders ruled, North Korea describes itself as a “nationally” legitimate state because it was built by the anti-Japanese armed guerrilla. Furthermore, it claims officially that North Korea is still waging a war against the US to liberate South Korea from control of this new imperialist force. South Korea makes the opposite argument. Dominant factions in South Korea’s politics and their ideologues have refuted the politico-religious myth of North Korea. For them, North Korea is lying when it claims to have eliminated formerly pro-Japanese elites from its government (see chapter 5). They also argue that Kim Il-sung was not a liberation activist, but a military official in the Soviet Army and, therefore, nothing but a puppet of the USSR. So South Korea has regarded North Korea as a puppet regime or anti-Korea organisation. Yet the relation between Park Chung Hee and Kim Il-Sung was more complex than the structural relation between North and South. For, as we will see, the two sometimes cooperated with each other for their own political purposes.

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It follows that the legacy of these structural and agential relations was inscribed in complex ways into the emergence and development of the PCHM and, indeed, as I will show, different aspects were condensed in specific ways in different phases of the Park Chung Hee era.