A History of Korea (96 page)

Since the early 1980s, university students voiced the most radical criticism of the United States. Most students believed that South Korea’s military and economic relations with the United States bred their country’s dependence on U.S. assistance. The large U.S. military presence on South Korean soil was a major source of intense anti-Americanism among students who saw U.S. troops in their nation as occupiers, not protectors. The conviction of “U.S. complicity” with South Korean dictatorships became part of the general struggle against the authoritarian military regime and the democratization movement in South Korea. The 1980 Kwangju incident particularly inspired much of the anti-American rhetoric echoing throughout subsequent demonstrations across the country.

Since 1988 anti-Americanism generated by resentment of U.S. “misbehavior” in the course of South Korea’s democratization has virtually declined. Following the implementation of the 1987 democratic constitution, much public support for the radical student movement has diminished, and for many middle-class South Koreans, the mass protests of the mid-1980s achieved their goal. South Korea’s political system was democratized, and in 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007 politicians without a military background—Kim Young-sam, Kim
Dae-jung, Roh Moo-hyun, and Lee Myung-bak—were elected president consecutively. The more radical aspects of the student movements—the call for redistribution of economic wealth and praise for the North Korean regime— have alienated middle-class Koreans. Even on campuses, true radicals have comprised less than 5 percent of the student body. Still, however, residual anti-Americanism among a small number of student and dissident activists has spread to the mainstream, and charges of “American arrogance” remain a frequent accusation at most anti-U.S. demonstrations.

During the Cold War period, South Korea’s relations with the communist world were characterized by antagonism and hostility, similar to relations between North Korea and the United States. In fact, both Koreas were a “scapegoat” of Cold War politics, as the emergence of the two Koreas made the Korean peninsula into a major battleground in the Cold War.

On 1 September 1983 Korean Air Lines (
KAL
) Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet SU-15 interceptor as it strayed over Sakhalin. All aboard, a total of 269, were killed. Outraged, President Reagan denounced the Soviet action as an “act of barbarism,” ordered the U.S. forces in South Korea on full alert, and claimed that this was further proof that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” The Soviets justified the action on the ground that the airliner had been on a spying mission. The incident became a useful propaganda tool for the United States in the Cold War, but it worsened Soviet–U.S. relations at a critical time. It also slowed the pace of improvement in Soviet–South Korean relations. Until the tragic incident occurred, South Korea had cautiously tried to improve relations with the Soviet Union and had enjoyed some progress, but then South Korea bitterly denounced the Russians for their attack, and for a while the warming of relations between the countries was set aside.

In May 1983, when a Chinese airliner was hijacked to South Korea, China officially negotiated with the South Korean government for its return. Thereafter exchanges of visits were frequent, and later bilateral trade steadily increased after China shifted to a free market economy. China’s participation in both the 1986 Asian Games held in Seoul and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, despite the North Korean boycott, was a remarkable indication of increasingly improving relations. The Soviet Union also participated in the Seoul Olympiad. As Cold War allies, both China and the Soviet Union, however, constantly supported North Korea’s position on inter-Korean relations.

After the successful Seoul Olympics, South Korea increased its efforts to improve relations with communist countries including the Soviet Union and China, although the effort was aimed mainly at North Korea. Named
nordpolitik
after West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s
ostpolitik
of the 1970s, the policy would eventually alter the strategic alignments around the Korean peninsula in a historic fashion.

As the Cold War rapidly thawed in the late 1980s, South Korea seized the opportunity to normalize relations with the communist bloc, first with Hungary in February 1989, then Poland in November 1989, and finally Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Mongolia, and Romania, all in March 1990. South Korea also vigorously pushed its nordpolitik to draw closer, in particular, to the Soviet Union and China. In June 1990 President Roh Tae-woo flew to San Francisco to meet briefly with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, and on 1 October 1990 the two countries officially normalized relations; South Korean–Soviet economic negotiations soon followed. Finally, South Korea agreed to supply $3 billion in credits to the Soviet Union, which was desperately seeking economic development. Normalization of South Korean–Soviet relations was a product of mutual necessity—healing the breach in their relations for South Korea and securing economic assistance for the Soviet Union.

China was always more sensitive than the Soviet Union to North Korea’s reactions, and so it moved more slowly in normalizing political relations with South Korea. Trade between the two countries blossomed, but China remained cautious, insisting on a clear-cut separation of politics from economics. This caution did not last long, however, and from the early 1990s China gathered speed toward normalizing relations with South Korea. In May 1991 China did not veto South Korea’s entry into the United Nations, and on 24 August 1992 relations between the two nations were fully normalized. China’s determination to establish a formal relationship with South Korea resulted largely from Taiwan’s growing diplomatic recognition in the international community at the expense of mainland China. South Korea was the only Asian nation that recognized Taiwan’s nationalist regime as China’s legitimate government, but to normalize its diplomatic relations with China, South Korea broke off ties with Taiwan.

The
ROK’S
establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China dramatically changed the geopolitical situation on and around the Korean peninsula, especially in that North Korea was left more vulnerable and isolated than before. Although responding to the Soviet action with a bitter denunciation, North Korea coolly accepted China’s rapprochement with South
Korea as a fait accompli. The squeezed North Korea then sought to establish relations with the United States and Japan but without success. The new policy of nordpolitik was a great South Korean victory in a fierce zero-sum game of North–South Korean confrontation.

Since the early 1970s, the destiny of the North Korean state rested wholly on the wisdom and judgment of Kim Il-sung. On 25 December 1972, North Korea promulgated a new constitution that superceded the 1948 constitution. The new constitution reflected many of the changes in the balance of state and party power that had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, creating a powerful state presidency endowed with the formal functions and powers that Kim Il-sung had already held. Now Kim Il-sung’s autocracy was perfected in the totalitarian state of North Korea, and he held that position until his death in July 1994. The new “socialist constitution” moved Korea’s national capital from Seoul to Pyongyang, and thereafter North Koreans began to broadcast that Pyongyang was the “heart of all the Korean people.”

Since all political power was concentrated in Kim Il-sung and dissent was not tolerated, Kim’s decisions and strategies determined the fate of North Korea. Under Kim’s absolute leadership, North Korea staked its future on strictly centralized economic planning and rigid ideology. Kim’s strategy to inflexibly steer his country was represented by a nationwide ideological campaign known as the Three Revolutions Teams Movement. Officially launched in February 1973 and placed under the leadership of his son, Kim Jong-il, the movement dispatched teams of young “revolutionaries” like those in China’s Red Guard, all qualified party cadres and government officials, into mines, factories, and collective farms with the aim of increasing production by reigniting “revolutionary fervor” in three areas: ideology, technology, and culture. Because it depended solely on ideological fervor and neglected technological improvements and efficiency, the campaign failed to attain the desired end but instead accelerated the country’s economic stagnation.
¹⁹
Indeed, as we have seen earlier on, North Korea’s overemphasis on ideology and excessive efforts to build a powerful military force overtaxed North Korean lives as well as the economy, and the adverse effects would later threaten the very survival of the North Korean state.

After further consolidating his autocracy, Kim Il-sung began to groom his son, Kim Jong-il, as his successor. According to North Korean propagandists, Kim Jong-il was born in a log cabin on the slope of Paektu-san. More objective sources indicate, however, that he was born on 16 February 1942 in a Soviet military camp in the Far East, where his father’s guerrilla band hid from Japanese forces. During his youth in the Soviet Union he was known as Yuri Irsenovich Kim, taking his patronymic from his father’s Russified name, Irsen. The young Kim graduated from Kimilsung University in 1964 and then worked in the Korean Workers Party organization. In 1973 he emerged as the director of the Three Revolutions Teams Movement, described above, and the following year became a member of the KWP Politburo. Meanwhile, a cult of personality emerged, glorifying the young Kim’s accomplishments and urging the people’s support with the slogan “Let’s give our fealty from generation to generation.”

Despite Kim Jong-il’s prominence in the party, until 1980 little was said about him publicly. North Korean media referred to him only as the mysterious “party center” that was given credit for wise guidance and great deeds. Throughout this period, Kim Il-sung fully prepared the domestic and foreign public for the first family succession of the communist world. The veil was lifted at the Sixth Korean Workers Party Congress, convened in Pyongyang in October 1980, where Kim Jong-il surfaced as Kim Il-sung’s designated successor. He was named to a succession of high-level positions in the KWP hierarchy and was given the title “Dear Leader,” similar to his father’s moniker, “Great Leader,” and he assumed increasing responsibility in broad areas of policy. As for his father’s birthday on 15 April, Kim’s birthday, on 16 February, was celebrated as a national holiday.

Kim Jong-il completed his rise to power as North Korea began to face difficult, urgent problems. As the number-two man of the North Korean regime, first of all Kim had to help his father struggle with mounting economic failings that had already become North Korea’s Achilles’ heel. Also, he took almost all the responsibility for solving the problem of North–South Korean relations in a context of the Sino–Japanese and Sino–U.S. entente and China’s policy of economic pragmatism. In the 1980s South Koreans believed that Kim was behind much of North Korean terrorism against their country, and he was thought to have masterminded the assassination attempt on South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan while Chun was visiting Burma in October 1983. The younger Kim, therefore, was considered more aggressive and dangerous than his father.

During the 1970s the North Korean economy became increasingly stagnant. This was a predestined consequence, as already discussed, of the rigidity of the juche philosophy. By the early 1970s the centrally planned economy emphasizing heavy and war industries had already reached the limits of its production potential. In the 1970s North Korea implemented various multiyear economic plans to attain economic growth and industrialization. The Six-Year Plan for 1971–1976 was followed by the Second Seven-Year Plan, after a one-year intermission in 1977, for 1978–1984. These plans sought to restructure the industrial composition of North Korea characterized as a typically heavy industry–oriented command socialist economy.

The multiyear economic plans all failed, and in the early 1970s the North Korean economy was already exhausted. The factors that served to stagnate the economy had been experienced for many years: rigid administrative centralization, reliance on ideological rather than financial incentives, and constant mass mobilization of forced labor under the Three Revolutions Teams Movement, which, as noted, was supposed to encourage innovation and eliminate negative bureaucratic attitudes but failed to improve existing, unproductive work methods. Above all, the juche ideology isolated North Korea from the international economy and caused an irreparable technological lag. South Korea, in contrast, had advanced into new phases of technology and economic development.

To resolve these economic difficulties, North Korea tried to induce Western capital investment in the form of credit, enabling it to pay off the debt with the export revenue generated by the newly revitalized industries. But everything went wrong. First, the 1973–1974 oil shock and the resulting global recession derailed North Korean plans. More important, the North Korean economy was unprepared to receive foreign capital and technology. Finally, in 1974, North Korea stopped securing foreign loans and became a chronic debtor nation. Because it could no longer discharge its debt obligations, North Korea became increasingly unable and unwilling to negotiate satisfactory settlements of its debts and was cut off from further access to foreign investment and advanced technology. The North Korean economy essentially stalled at its semi-industrialized stage, and by 1980 economic stagnation set in as a result of the innate weakness of the juche system, with no hope of improvement.

Since 1962 the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung incessantly repeated that North Koreans would soon be able to “eat rice and meat soup, wear silk clothes, and live in a tile-roofed house.” But this traditional North Korean goal was not achieved even in the 1980s. From the 1980s on, the general economic situation grew increasingly dire because of inefficient economic strategies.