The legacy of authoritarianism and people’s movements.
“Minjung Theology is dead.”
This obituary was whispered to me with more than a hint of regret by a third generation minjung theologian during a research trip to South Korea. The “minjung” (a term to denote the masses, or the “people”) was a hallmark of South Korea’s democracy movement. But as ubiquitous as the minjung sentiment was in the 1980s, manifest not only in political rhetoric but also in music, art, literature, philosophy, and theology, you would be hard-pressed to find remnants of it today in South Korean politics and society.
While some lament the death of the democracy movement—a “glorious” movement when the people rose up to fight tyranny and injustice—others see it as the natural trajectory of a nation that made the transition to democratic governance. Riding the “third wave of democracy,” South Korea reinstituted direct presidential elections in 1987 (rescinded in 1972) and today, enjoys a relatively stable democratic polity. The peaceful transitions of power between South Korea’s conservative and progressive parties are sure signs that South Korea is now a functioning, if not always peaceful, democracy.
Though the 1970s are considered by many to be the “dark age for democracy” in Korea, it was in the crucible of this repressive decade that a sustained movement for democracy emerged.
Reconciling the decades of authoritarian rule by military despots with the more contemporary image of South Korea as a democratic capitalist nation is not always easy. The promise of a democratic Korea, the stated goal when the UN attempted to establish an independent Korean nation-state following World War II, soon buckled when the peninsula splintered under Cold War pressures. Though hopes had run high among the Korean people, who justifiably demanded and expected a new era of freedom and prosperity after their liberation from the Japanese in 1945, the division into the Republic of Korea in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North would irrevocably compromise the democratic transitions of both countries.
The omnipresence of North Korea in the political and social consciousness of the Korean people justified the development of a national-security state in South Korea. South Korean leaders, beginning with Syngman Rhee (elected in 1948), used the threat from the North as a rationale for securing extra-constitutional executive powers. Former Major General Park Chung Hee, who succeeded Rhee as President of South Korea, consistently relied on the security threat to buttress his authoritarian policies in the 1960s, and then his transition to formal authoritarianism in 1972. Another military strongman, Chun Doo Hwan, continued the authoritarian system after Park Chung Hee’s assassination in 1979, and ruled with an iron hand until democratic transition in 1987.
The contest between democracy advocates and successive authoritarian governments was bitter and often violent.
Throughout the authoritarian period, from the 1950s to 1987, multiple generations of progressive activists emerged to claim the democracy they had been promised by the UN in 1948. The contest between democracy advocates and successive authoritarian governments was bitter and often violent, leading to the torture of civilians and an unknown number of deaths (at least in the hundreds). The 1970s, in particular, which saw the official move to authoritarian rule with the 1972 revocation of direct presidential elections and a new, decidedly less democratic constitution (the Yusin Constitution), are considered by many to be the “dark age for democracy” in Korea. And yet, at the same time, it was in the crucible of this repressive decade that a sustained movement for democracy emerged.
Though the term is associated more broadly with the 1980s, the minjung concept took root in the mid- to late 1970s. One of the earliest articulations of the “three min ideology” came in the form of a 1974 student protest, in which students across the nation jointly proclaimed the Declaration of People, Nation, and Democracy (Minjung minjok minju sŏnŏn) which would become a master frame in the 1980s democracy movement.
For their part, Christian activists added an ontological layer to the “minjung imaginary” (Nancy Abelmann’s phrasing in her 1996 book), by creating a Korean liberation theology. The fundamental axiom in liberation theology—namely the “preferential option for the poor”—found currency in progressive Korean Christian circles and Minjung Theology was born in the 1970s. Minjung Theology justified Christian political activism through its underscoring of the social gospel and the importance of Christian engagement in social activism and, when necessary, political dissent. In 1979 Minjung Theology was codified in the eponymously titled Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History, an English-language volume that represented the culmination of a years-long process—marked by protest, arrests, and torture—of “theologizing” the Christian struggle against Park Chung Hee’s Yusin government.
The minjung became a cornerstone of the democracy movement’s ideology in the 1980s. Bequeathed by the preceding waves of student and Christian activism, the minjung frame found a wide variety of cultural expression in the 80s, igniting the imagination of an entire generation of democracy activists. By the time South Korea transitioned to democracy in 1987, the minjung movement evolved into a cultural force, sparking literature, music, and visual art which dramatized the lives of the minjung in their struggle against authoritarian rule.
in-depth account of South Korea’s democracy movement in the 1970s.
There were moments before 1987 when democracy seemed a likely possibility—most notably in the spring of 1960 and then again in 1980—but in the same way that dissidents became entrenched in their antigovernment position, authoritarianism was consolidated as ever-new repressive laws were promulgated to put down the democracy movement. If South Korea in the postliberation period is characterized by a “strong state and contentious civil society” (as Hagen Koo argued in his 1993 book), it was through a dialectical process of protest and repression that the state became “strong” and civil society “contentious.”
Maybe the spirit of the democracy movement has indeed been quenched, but the legacy, or perhaps more precisely, the scars of past social movements are still evident today, as South Korea is “more fragmented than ever before” (this, according to a 2005 paper by Sook-Jong Lee). Social psychology tells us that ingroup identity and solidarity are a function of outgroup contention. It should come as no surprise then that Korean activists who fought against the dictatorial system for decades would develop a collective concept of self that bears all the hallmarks of an oppositional social identity, where individual-level attributes (e.g. meaning, self-esteem, and purpose) are tied to membership in various movement generations—the student demonstrations of the 60s, the anti-Yusin movement of the 70s, the minjung movement of the 80s.
It is in this context that we can understand better why current President Park Geun-hye (first daughter of Park Chung Hee) is such a polarizing force. Her election in 2012, although through democratic procedures, represents the reemergence of conservative forces at best, and, at worst, the authoritarian legacy. And while the democracy movement has indeed waned, to make room for more institutionalized civil society movements, decades of struggle against authoritarianism resulted in a significant portion of Korean society unwilling, indeed unable, to support the progeny of dictatorship.
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Paul Y. Chang is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979.
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