just could not let go.Halfway through his third term, he staged what Latin Americans call an ‘auto-coup’. This involved dissolving the parliament and establishing a rigged electoral system to guarantee him the presidency for life. His excuse was that the country could ill afford the chaos of democracy. It had to defend itself against North Korean communism, the people were told, and accelerate its economic development. His proclaimed goal of raising the country’s
President Park launched the ambitious Heavy and Chemical Industrialization (HCI) programme in 1973. The first steel mill and the first modern shipyard went into production, and the first locally designed cars (made mostly from imported parts) rolled off the production lines. New firms were set up in electronics, machinery, chemicals and other advanced industries. During this period, the country’s
The country’s obsession with economic development was fully reflected in our education. We learned that it was our patriotic duty to report anyone seen smoking foreign cigarettes. The country needed to use every bit of the foreign exchange earned from its exports in order to import machines and other inputs to develop better industries. Valuable foreign currencies were really the blood and sweat of our ‘industrial soldiers’ fighting the export war in the country’s factories. Those squandering them on frivolous things, like illegal foreign cigarettes, were ‘traitors’. I don’t believe any of my friends actually went as far as reporting such ‘acts of treason’. But it did feed the gossip mill when kids saw foreign cigarettes in a friend’s house. The friend’s father – it was almost invariably men who smoked – would be darkly commented on as an unpatriotic and therefore immoral, if not exactly criminal, individual.
Spending foreign exchange on anything not essential for industrial development was prohibited or strongly discouraged through import bans, high tariffs and excise taxes (which were called luxury consumption taxes). ‘Luxury’ items included even relatively simple things, like small cars, whisky or cookies. I remember the minor national euphoria when a consignment of Danish cookies was imported under special government permission in the late 1970s. For the same reason, foreign travel was banned unless you had explicit government permission to do business or study abroad. As a result, despite having quite a few relatives living in the US, I had never been outside Korea until I travelled to Cambridge at the age of 23 to start as a graduate student there in 1986.
This is not to say that no one smoked foreign cigarettes or ate illicit cookies. A considerable quantity of illegal and semi-legal foreign goods was in circulation. There was some smuggling, especially from Japan, but most of the goods involved were things brought in – illegally or semi-legally – from the numerous American army bases in the country. Those American soldiers who fought in the Korean War may still remember malnourished Korean children running after them begging for chewing gum or chocolates.Even in the Korea of the 1970s, American army goods were still considered luxuries. Increasingly affluent middle class families could afford to buy M&M chocolates and Tang juice powders from shops and itinerant pedlars. Less affluent people might go to restaurants that served
I longed for the chance to sample the tins of spam, corned beef, chocolates, biscuits and countless other things whose names I did not even know, from the boxes of the American Army’s ‘C Ration’ (the canned and dried food ration for the battlefield). A maternal uncle, who was a general in the Korean army, used to accumulate supplies during joint field exercises with his American colleagues and gave them to me as an occasional treat. American soldiers cursed the wretched quality of their field rations. For me they were like a Fortnum & Mason picnic hamper. But, then, I was living in a country where vanilla ice cream had so little vanilla in it that I thought vanilla meant ‘no flavour’, until I learnt English in secondary school. If that was the case with a well-fed upper- middle-class child like me, you can imagine what it must have been like for the rest.
When I went to secondary school, my father gave me a Casio electronic calculator, a gift beyond my wildest dreams. Then it was probably worth half a month’s wages for a garment factory worker, and was a huge expense even for my father, who spared nothing on our education. Some 20 years later, a combination of rapid development in electronics technologies and the rise in Korea’s living standards meant that electronic calculators were so abundant that they were given out as free gifts in department stores. Many of them ended up as toys for toddlers (no, I don’t believe this is why Korean kids are good at maths!).
Korea’s economic ‘miracle’ was not, of course, without its dark sides. Many girls from poor families in the countryside were forced to find a job as soon as they left primary school at the age of 12 – to ‘get rid of an extra mouth’ and to earn money so that at least one brother could receive higher education.Many ended up as housemaids in urban middle-class families, working for room and board and, if they were lucky, a tiny amount of pocket money. The other girls, and the less fortunate boys, were exploited in factories where conditions were reminiscent of 19th-century ‘dark satanic mills’ or today’s sweatshops in China. In the textile and garment industries, which were the main export industries, workers often worked 12 hours or more in very hazardous and unhealthy conditions for low pay. Some factories refused to serve soup in the canteen, lest the workers should require an extra toilet break that might wipe out their wafer-thin profit margins. Conditions were better in the newly emerging heavy industries – cars, steel, chemicals, machinery and so on – but, overall, Korean workers, with their average 53–4 hour working week, put in longer hours than just about anyone else in the world at the time.
Urban slums emerged. Because they were usually up in the low mountains that comprise a great deal of the Korean landscape, they were nicknamed ‘Moon Neighbourhoods’, after a popular TV sitcom series of the 1970s. Families of five or six would be squashed into a tiny room and hundreds of people would share one toilet and a single standpipe for running water. Many of these slums would ultimately be cleared forcefully by the police and the residents dumped in far-flung neighbourhoods, with even worse sanitation and poorer road access, to make way for new apartment blocks for the ever-growing middle class. If the poor could not get out of the new slums fast enough (though getting out of the slums was at least possible, given the rapid growth of the economy and the creation of new jobs), the urban sprawl would catch up with them and see them rounded up once again and dumped in an even more remote place. Some people ended up scavenging in the city’s main rubbish dump, Nanji Island. Few people outside Korea were aware that the beautiful public parks surrounding the impressive Seoul Football Stadium they saw during the 2002 World Cup were built literally on top of the old rubbish dump on the island (which nowadays has an ultra-modern eco-friendly methane-burning power station, which taps into the organic material dumped there).
In October 1979, when I was still a secondary school student, President Park was unexpectedly assassinated by the chief of his own Intelligence Service, amid mounting popular discontent with his dictatorship and the economic turmoil following the Second Oil Shock. A brief ‘Spring of Seoul’ followed, with hopes of democracy welling up. But it was brutally ended by the next military government of General Chun Doo-Hwan, which seized power after the two-week armed popular uprising that was crushed in the Kwangju Massacre of May 1980.
Despite this grave political setback, by the early 1980s, Korea had become a solid middle-income country, on a par with Ecuador, Mauritius and Costa Rica. But it was still far removed from the prosperous nation we know today. One of the slang expressions common among us high-school students was ‘I’ve been to Hong Kong’, which meant ‘I have had an experience out of this world’. Even today, Hong Kong is still considerably richer than Korea, but the expression reflects the fact that, in the 1960s or the 1970s, Hong Kong’s
When I went to university in 1982, I became interested in the issue of intellectual property rights, something that is even more hotly debated today. By that time, Korea had become competent enough to copy advanced products and rich enough to want the finer things in life (music, fashion goods, books). But it was still not sophisticated enough to come up with original ideas and to develop and own international patents, copyrights and trademarks.
Today, Korea is one of the most ‘inventive’ nations in the world – it ranks among the top five nations in terms of the number of patents granted annually by the US Patent Office. But until the mid-1980s it lived on ‘reverse engineering’. My friends would buy ‘copy’ computers that were made by small workshops, which would take apart IBM machines, copy the parts, and put them together. It was the same with trademarks. At the time, the country
