The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and the Making of State Populism in

Korea
Author(s): Seung-Mi Han
Source: Pacific Affairs , Spring, 2004, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 69-93
Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40022275

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,

preserve and extend access to Pacific Affairs

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement:
Park Chung Hee and the Making
of State Populism In Korea1
Seung-Mi Han

Introduction A close reading of the South Korean Minjung series reveals insights into
how farmers from that period remember Japanese colonial rule.2 In the
autobiography of an elderly farmer from Bulgyo, South Cholla Province,
memories are an important part of reality. The narrator speaks highly of the
Japanese colonial period and of how it brought about national development
in Korea. He lost both parents at an early age, and became a tenant farmer.
He was fortunate enough to be able to use modern, "better quality" Japanese
farming equipment. The farmer underwent difficulties during World War
II, but up to then, he said, "thanks to the Japanese, I could live in comfort."
How are we to interpret this rather shocking comment coming from an
elderly farmer? Is it a mere legacy of successful colonial propaganda, or the
reflection of a lower-class mindset separated from the all-too-familiar official
nationalism? How are we to fit such comments into an ordinary,
contemporary Korean's worldview?
Difficult as that task may seem, even greater interpretive skills may be
required to understand what memories Korean people have of the Park
Chung Hee government (1961-1979). Unlike the clear mandate of
"nationalism against colonial rule," "nationalism" as it was espoused during
Park's rule was associated with such diverse ideas as dictatorship, national
security, economic development and modernization. Without colonial rulers,
nationalism became a vague ideology charged with differing interests, not
strong enough to entirely legitimize Park's tyranny. Moreover, interpreting
a not-so-distant past is a very sensitive task, since it is still being played out

1 This paper was originally presented at a conference on Korean Political History organized
jointly by the Harvard University Asia Center and the Korea University Peace Institute in Seoul, 2000.
I thank professors Byung-Kook Kim and Chung-In Moon for including me, and also Professors Ezra
Vogel, George Dominguez, Carter Eckert, Charles Armstrong, Byung-Kook Kim and Dr. David Steinberg
for giving me extremely helpful comments. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Pacific Affairs for
their constructive advice.

2 Ki-Woong Park, ed., "Keuttae nun Korokoreum Doe Ittjae" (Back Then, Things Were Such:
The Life of Farmer Lee Bong-Won in Bulgyo) in the Minjung Autobiography Series, vol. 12 (Seoul: Ppuri
KipunNamu, 1990).

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

through current political/moral repercussions. We have seen the Park Chung

Hee Syndrome surface during the Asian Financial Crisis and presidential
election campaigns in the late 1990s.3
Taking a step back from the perspective of Park supporters, we look at
what elements appealed to the people during Park's rule, and how those
elements managed to work around certain limitations. Instead of taking a
political position, however, this paper seeks to find out how the autocrat
Park Chung Hee could gain public support for a considerable period of
time. The intention is to show how it was possible for different values to
coexist at a time when people were forced to think the same way, and how
those values changed over time. For example, Silverberg looked at how the
Japanese - during the 1930-40s when militarism and anti-Western capitalism
were at their peak - still managed to embrace Charlie Chaplin movies and
indulge in consumer culture. 4 Young conducted another study on the subject
by challenging the view that the Japan of the 1930-40s was purely the work of
the military, and that the Japanese populace was indifferent to the political
drama. Was it possible to build the "empire" without public support ?5 Both
studies offer a useful interpretation of the Japanese worldview in the 1930-
40s. Considering that Park's coup conspirators were from poor farming
families, the Korean coup more closely resembles the 1930s Japanese military
coup than the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Therefore, in order to understand
the relationship between the Korean people and the Park Chung Hee
government, we should focus our attention on the New Community
Movement (NCM, Saemaul Undong, 1971-1979), 6which started off as a "rural"
development project but which came to impact every aspect of life as a general
social mobilization mechanism. The NCM continues to play a role in the
collective memory of Koreans, and thus provides an appropriate window
into the range of popular perceptions concerning Park.
This paper highlights the NCM and Park's anti-elitist and populist ideals,
which were manifested in the form of "state populism ."7 These values, along
with the opportunities which emerged amidst dynamic social changes,

3 Byung-Man Ahn conducted a survey on Korean presidents among scholars of political/

administrative science (231 out of 700) . Park scored highest in the categories of competence, courage/
determination, ability to relate with the people, historical perspective and expertise (Hangyoreh Daily,
April 16, 1992).
4- Miriam Silverberg, "Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of
the Disappearing Western Woman," Positions, vol. 1, no.l (1993), pp. 24-76.
5 Louise Young, Japan 's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998).
6 It continued after Park's death until the present day, but in a changed form. The focus in this
paper is the NCM during Park's rule.
' Park felt sympathy toward the poor farmers. His compassion contained populist elements, but
instead of "populism" I call it "state populism," because the word "minjung (mass) in the 1970s and
1980s exclusively indicated the anti-Park, pro-democratization forces.

70

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

appealed to the masses, despite the inequality and conflicts that arose during
his rule. The paper will also address the irony behind the uses of power. The
power mechanism in "NCM spiritual training" embedded egalitarianism in
everyday life and produced "enthusiastic warriors of industrialization," but
simultaneously, it brought about the "consciousness-raising (uishikwha)
programme" of the minjung ideology camp, which later produced fierce
opponents who answered the regime's oppression with equal ferocity. This
synergism between Park's populist ideals and the opposing minjung ideology
produced the generally self-restrained, "solemn"8 and disciplinary
atmosphere, which deepened as the Park government reached its end.
Section 1 looks at the situation prior to the 1970s and provides some
background to the NCM. A growing urban-rural economic imbalance, along
with Park's bitter experiences of hard-won elections, acted as catalysts for
the creation of the NCM. The movement did create positive responses in
the countryside, at least until the mid-1970s. The second section of this essay
analyzes why this was the case. The genesis of "state populism" - its emphasis
on an egalitarian ethos and the breathless mechanism of national
mobilization - is contrasted with the Park government's official support of
Confucian ideology. The next section explains the transformation of the
NCM from a "work-ethic-building movement" to a "social control
mechanism." Analysis of updated field data on two former NCM leaders'
"success stories" provides an example of "Korean-style" democracy and a
sense of how peoples' memories from the Park regime are undergoing a
change. The paper concludes that the real "success" of the NCM lies in the
way it has come to be remembered as an undeniable economic achievement
from the Park era rather than as a narrowly defined - and even "failed" -
rural development plan. The NCM puts Park's "state populism" in
comparative perspective.
Sources for this study include NCM materials, case data and interviews.
Lecture tapes at the NCM training centre were randomly selected from the
NCM Museum Archive. Cases from Kyunggi (neutral, close to metropolitan
area), Cholla (a supposedly anti-Park region) and Kyungsang (a pro-Park
region) Provinces were chosen, to ascertain whether or not people in
different regions had different opinions on the NCM as a result of Korean-
style regionalism .9 Villages were randomly chosen, either because these places
were included in the archives at the NCM centre or in the government
documents published by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) , or because
the villages had been locales for the anti-NCM movement.

8 Myung-Seok Oh, "Cultural Policy and Discourses on National Culture in the 1960s-70s," Bikyo
Munwha Yeonku (Comparative Cultures), vol. 4 (1998), pp. 121-152.
y Regionalism does not seem to matter until the 1980s. Elections had been paralyzed since
1971. Also, even in Cholla provinces, memories of the NCM are quite favourable.

71

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

The Historical Background of the NCM: the Landscape Before the 1970s

While the NCM undeniably started as a compromise between the political

and economic imperatives of the times, it also succeeded in mobilizing
peoples' energy. The reasons for this were threefold: unlike its predecessors,
the government was in a better economic position in 1971 to fund a policy
supporting high rice prices; second, after trial and error, the bureaucrats
became more experienced; and lastly and more importantly, the state realized
that grassroots leaders, rather than romantic urban elites or "special agents"
dispatched to a remote region, were the best agents for fomenting social
change.
The NCM could be better described as the Korean equivalent to the classic
European Enclosure than as a rural development plan. That being the case,
the NCM's political efficacy was time-bound. At first, it reinforced the already
existing nationwide yearnings for modern life and created an exciting work
atmosphere and rhythm. But when the modern economic sector began to
have its own problems, the NCM became a mechanism of social control
more than anything else.
From 1945 up until 1960, significant events took place in Korea, such as
the Land Reform and the Korean War. The country's industrial structure
and its GNP, however, did not change much. In the rural area, which was
home to a majority of the people, families stretched their means to provide
good educations for their children. In the early 1960s, the unemployment
of the well-educated became a chronic social issue. There were not enough
jobs to go around, just limited positions in public offices, state-owned
enterprises, the press, banks and schools. Instead of the "Ivory Tower,"
universities were called "Cow Towers," meaning parents had to sell cows to
pay for the tuition, but the children remained out of work.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many university students also left for
farming/fishing areas during their school vacations to work as volunteers
and to trumpet "regional development." However, volunteer work, ranging
from the New Life Movement to the Regional Pioneer Movement, 10 did not
bring about significant change, either in terms of regional development or
in the standard of living. This was due primarily to the limitations of having
"outside" human resources for only a brief period of time each year.
Every spring, more than 300,000 households nationwide ran out of food n;
this shortfall continued through the mid-1960s. 12 The ruling Democratic
Party launched an Economic Development Plan in 1960 and a Land

10 Tae-Soon Park and Dong-Chun Kim, 1960 Nyundae ui Sahoi Undong (Social Movements in the
1960s) (Seoul: Kkachi, 1991), p. 169.
11 Hun-Joo Chung, "Was the Democratic Party Government Really Incompetent?" Shindonga
(New Asia), April 1985.
12 " Geuttaerul Ashipnika?" (Do you know those days?) (Seoul: MBC TV Documentary Production,
1987).

72

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

Development Project in 1961 to appease the people, who were running out
of patience. The May 16, 1961 military coup, however, cut these efforts short.
The Democratic Party's development plan also intended to provide work to
starving farmers and unemployed workers, but in a manner different from
the NCM; the former was modelled after India, which prioritized agricultural
development embracing "comparative advantage," while the latter followed
Japan, a wealthier, rapidly industrializing country led by the state.
The early military government began to emphasize export-driven light
industry to jump-start industrialization, soon after it realized that its initial
policies for the redistribution of wealth in rural areas were unrealistic. An
important change in vision took place around 1963: the government went
from a classic development strategy emphasizing comparative advantage to
an "industrialize first, invest in agriculture later" approach. The classic model
was inappropriate because it would only take longer before the agricultural
sector grew mature enough to accumulate resources for industrialization.
Moreover, "Koreans were overzealous about education so they appropriated
the surplus created on the farms for their children's tuition fees rather than
re-invest it for enterprise farming" (interview with a former policy maker,
Seoul, May 1999). 13
Throughout Park's rule, chaebols (large conglomerates) and farmers were
his most ardent supporters. In 1963, 63 percent of the total working
population was engaged in farming or fishing. It was only in 1985 that the
ratio of primary and secondary industry evened out .14In fact, the well-known
phenomenon of a ruling party teaming up with farmers, and the opposition
party with city dwellers, appeared only in the 1970s. In the 1967 presidential
election, opposition party candidate Yoon won majority votes in the rural
area with promises of high rice prices. Surprised, the Park government
implemented the Special Project for Income Increase in Farming/Fishing
Regions (1967-1968) to compensate for the sluggish outcome of the military
government's National Reconstruction Movement. However, even when the
second Five Year Economic Development Plan (FYEDP) was near completion,
the urban-rural income discrepancy was too great to be ignored, and Park
only narrowly won the 1971 election.
Enter the NCM as a political remedy to the urban-rural economic
imbalance. Just as the 1930s colonial Village Revitalization Movement served
dual purposes of increasing productivity and calming down the radical Red

13 I thank all my interviewees and those who introduced them, although, to protect their privacy,
I cannot reveal their names, following the anthropological convention. Without them, this paper
would have been impossible. High-level officials/policy advisors, low-level policy implementers,
grassroots NCM leaders as well as activist farmers were interviewed. Interviews took place from 1999
to 2000, and cases from different provinces were all quoted as "interviews," followed by the province
names.

14 Chul-Gyu Kang, "The Ideology of 'Growth-First' and its Price," Y

History), vol. 29 (1995), pp. 39-56.

73

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1 - Spring 2004

Farm Movement (Jeoksaek Nongjo),15 the NCM was both an economic

endeavour to improve the quality of life and a political means to buttress the
slipping popularity of the government among the rural population.
In the early 1970s, while city life became an object of desire, the modern
sector already began to show the side effects of rapid industrialization. There
were signs of strain - the self-immolation of a factory labourer (1970), and
the protests by the urban poor in Sungnam City (1971). "Crisis consciousness"
arose within the regime, which grew along with the dollar shock, American
trade protectionism, the Nixon Doctrine and the deteriorating bottom line
for Korean export industries. The propagation of the NCM (1971), the 7.4
North Korea-South Korea Joint Communique (1972), and the 8.3 Financial
Measures (1972 )16 were all emergency procedures meant "to meet the
challenges of the times," and which all paved the way for the ascent of the
authoritarian Yushin regime (1972 ).17
Nevertheless, the NCM met with genuine response from the countryside.
Its key methodology was spiritual training. It was enforced under guidelines
set by Park himself, and "non-economic" mental/social issues were addressed
in order for the economy to prosper. Park was influenced by Japanese-style
mental training, as were his high-ranking officials and policy advisors, who
also believed in a Weberian emphasis on work ethics. "The Swiss had the
Puritans, and the Japanese have Ninomiya Ginjiro" (interview, April 1999). 18
Interestingly, this comment by a former NCM policy maker at the Blue House
was echoed by an elderly farmer in the countryside: "I knew instantly what
the president was getting across. It was Ninoyama Ginjirol He was in our 6th
grade textbook!" (Interview with a farmer in his seventies, Yeoju County,
Kyunggi Province, May 1999). In fact, it signalled an urban bias to assume
that the culture of poverty - laziness, despair and intemperance - was behind
the slow economic growth in the countryside. Farmers in general had not
given up on life before the NCM was introduced, as the slogans suggested.
Rather, the problem was structural in nature.

Hard work was just as conspicuous in the farming-fishing village where I

lived in 1966 as it is today. The only difference is that 15 years ago there

15 I thank Hong-Koo Han for pointing this movement out to me.

16 7.4 Communique was the first announcement of future cooperation between North and South
Korea, and 8.3 measures annihilated all the private debts of business firms. The numbers indicate the
date when the communique was issued, i.e., 4 July and 3 August.
17 Modelled after the Meiji Ishin, the October Yushin (Restoration) was designed to strengthen
the power of the president, who was "elected" by the indirect voting of the Tongiljuche Kukminhoeui
(National Council for the Autonomous Unification) members, appointed by the government. Hyuk-
Baek Im argues Yushin was an outcome of Park's political steering rather than an inevitable corollary
of the difficult times. Hyuk-Baek Im, "Anti-Communism and 'Modernization' - the Disappearance of
Politics," Yeoksa Bipyung (Critiques of History), vol. 29 (1995), pp. 23-38.
18 A self-made farmer from 1840s Tokugawa Japan, he became the national role model after the
Meiji Period.

74

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

was not enough of it to go around. When you were poor, you could not
work even if you wanted to because of the shortage of land and boats.
Wealth provided the opportunity for hard, prolonged work. The richest
men in the village were the hardest working. This association of leisure
and poverty may have convinced casual observers from outside that
laziness caused poverty. 19

The farmers' will to live was as strong as their longing for a modern life.
In fact, it is surprising that the NCM, despite having inaccurate assumptions
regarding the countryside, was still able to garner considerable support
among the farmers, and began to identify itself as an irreversible modernizing
trend in Korean society. Goals of "teaching the illiterate" disappeared.
Instead, the free supply of cement and steel induced farmers to participate.
Earlier movements had had similar goals, but limited resources were spent
on operating headquarters and there was not enough financing to provide
substantial help to the farmers .20 Organizational inefficiency between
administrative bodies and rural counterparts further exacerbated problems. 21
The NCM provided the first large-scale material support to the countryside,
combined with systemic social mobilization.
Indeed, Park is remembered for his achievements in riverbank building,
the drilling of underground water, the readjustment of arable land - realized
through such measures as rectangular planting patterns for rice fields -
and hunger relief. Peoples' memories of Park revealed signs of gratitude
that overshadowed any mention of his faults:

Important figures, such as a judge, a police chief or a Presidential

candidate from the Democratic Party, came from our village. But they
were of no help. They didn't care about others, they didn't help build a
bridge. There are none like our President Park. Before his term, come
springtime, we would grind barley and make porridge.... We were
devoted to the NCM because we could eat rice. He was a dictator, but he
fed the people. (Interview with a female leader in her late fifties, Cholla
Province, July 1999)

True, there was an element of coercion to the NCM, 22 but bureaucrats,

not just villagers, felt coerced. Officials knew the NCM was high on the
president's agenda, and they were evaluated on their scope of participation
and level of effort. It is intriguing that even those who later became leaders

19 Vincent Brandt, "Rural Development and the New Community Movement in South Korea,"
Korean Studies Forum, no.l (1976/1977), pp. 32-39.
20 Jin-Whan Park, Kyungjebaljeon kwa Nongchonkyungje (Economic Development and Rural
Economy) (Seoul: Haepyung Sunsaeng Whakap Kinyumhoi, 1987), p. 149.
21 Byung-Tae Kim, "New Prospects for the Agricultural Policy: Let's Organize Farmers' Efforts,"
Sasanggye (Intellectual World) (March 1963), p. 230.
22 The poorest people resisted the NCM because free voluntary labour meant no income; the
richest did so because they had to contribute land for free.

75

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

of peasant movements embraced the NCM at first. This proves that in its
initial stages, the government initiative really did provide an alternative for
those who yearned for a better life.
Important figures from the Kyunggi chapter of the CAP (Catholic
Association of Peasants) who were at the forefront of the peasant movement
are an example of leaders who favoured the NCM until the mid-1970s. If
one looks at CAP's core members, who formed the organization at the
Hampyung "sweet potato incident" in Cholla Province, 23 they first got to
know one another in May 1970, not at some "anti-government" programme
but at the state-led National Reconstruction Movement Training Centre in
Suyuri, Seoul. They went back to their villages, ran the village-level banking
institutions and worked as NCM members. It was only in the mid-1970s that
the peasant movement was born, through CAP training .24 At first, the NCM
was embraced even by the activists-to-be, because it fed people and the high
rice pricing guaranteed higher incomes.

The NCM was very popular in the beginning. Modern kitchens and
whatnot. People had never got much from the government, nothing
even after the Korean War. It was only in 1974 that I learned of peasant
movements. Until then, I thought the government was really for the
people. I didn't feel anything lacking in 1974. We had food! . ... I thought
there would be technology training when I heard a preacher was coming
to the village to teach something. I got my first CAP training in the winter
of 1974. In 1978, 1 became the general secretary, (interview with a CAP
leader, Yeoju County, Kyunggi Province, August 1999)

The government never had any intention of sustaining the high rice-price
policy for long, however. It was originally designed to suppress grain imports
and attain food security, but was to cease the moment household incomes
for farming approximated those of urban households P Also, toward the
late 1970s, the government deficit grew bigger due to the Heavy and Chemical
Industrialization programme (HCI) , distorted credit policy and the slowdown
in exports. As soon as the high rice-price policy stopped, the gap between
city and countryside income began to increase once again.
In the end, the politics of the NCM and its impact on Korean society can
only be understood when one recognizes the NCM's double ironies. First,
from the beginning, there existed a fundamental contradiction between the
economic objective and the political efficacy of the NCM. Although the NCM

23 The Agricultural Co-op strongly urged farmers to grow sweet potatoes with a guarantee of
buy-back, resulting in an oversupply. Peasants protested against the co-op, arguing that it didn't keep
its promise.
24 Keum-No Noh, Ttang eu Adeul (A Son of the Earth) , vol. 1 (Seoul: Tolbaegye, 1986) .
^5 Chung-Ryum Kim, Hankuk Kyungjejeongchaek 30 nyunsa:Kim Chung-Ryum Hoikorok (A 30 Years
History of Korean Economic Policy: Recollections of Kim Chung-Ryum) (Seoul: The Choong-Ang
Daily, 1990), p.186.

76

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

was publicized widely as a "comprehensive rural development plan," its tacit

goal was to achieve a Korean equivalent of the European Enclosure, targeted
more at turning farmers into industrial workers rather than enriching them
in their normal pursuits. 26 Policy makers thought the most serious economic
problem was "the potential unemployment of the rural population under
the small-lot farming system," 27 and they tried to resolve it primarily by
creating more jobs in the cities rather than by developing the countryside
itself. Despite the rhetoric, exodus rather than local development summed
up the experience.

It wasn't so much the government enhancing the quality of life for

farmers. It was more like a wake-up call: 'It's your life. Better get to work.'
With factories up and running, the farmers' exodus into the cities took
only 10 years, which is 10 times faster than that in Japan. That saved
farmers, (interview with a former policy maker, Seoul, April 1999)

It was clear from the outset that the political efficacy of the NCM, which
depended on the regime's loyal supporters in the countryside, could only
last so long. The more successful the NCM became, the faster it eroded the
political base of the regime. "The speed of leaving the countryside was really
fast, indeed too fast" (interview with a former policy maker, Seoul, April
1999). Although those who coordinated the NCM might have had a real
concern for the countryside, the NCM's effects on rural development itself
left much to be desired. It is significant to note that peasant movements
appeared along with the emergence of consciousness contrasting "urban,
ordinary folks" (seomin) and "peasants" (nongmin) as different segments of
the minjung ideology. 28 "The government's top priority is urban folks. It
doesn't care [about] farmers' income [s]. Farming requires prior planning,
but the government just calls for 'more production,' which only brings about
[an] over-supply" (interview with an activist farmer, Kyunggi Province, August
1999).
Second, although the NCM's stated aim was to increase incomes, instead
of an all-out investment to further that goal the government put an emphasis
on nation-wide spiritual training. The government budget for the NCM
increased from 4.1 billion won in 1971 to 165.3 billion won in 1975, but the
proportion of the total amount invested in the Income Increase Project was

26 E.R Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963) .
27 Park, Economic Development and Rural Economy, p. 14.
28 Despite concerns over widespread poverty and unemployment, the language of class, conjuring
up an image of conflictual relations, was largely absent in the 1960s. Hagen Koo, ed., State and Society
in Contemporary Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). In the 1970s, minjung, as an alliance of
factory workers, farmers, student activists and progressive intellectuals, emerged as a powerful term
for a political, social and cultural movement demanding democratization. See also Nancy Abelmann,
Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996).

77

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1 - Spring 2004

only 26.5 percent. 29 Moreover, the investment did not always produce the
desired results, although some regions, close to large cities and keen on
market variability, succeeded in commercial agriculture. 30 Projects aimed at
basic environmental improvements were given first priority, because they
were cheap and mobilized many people.
The emphasis on spiritual training also worked as a form of thought
control, although the NCM was never publicized as such. "I believe [that]
those who are genuinely calculating can never become communists. Look
at China. Farmers become either communists or capitalists, depending on
policy. The NCM was a very sophisticated anti-communist policy" (interview
with a former policy advisor, Seoul, May 1999) . Communism was, nevertheless,
both a real threat and an excuse for dictatorship, and any challenge to the
NCM was regarded as defiance against the state and was therefore
condemned.

When I (as a sophomore) was brought to the military court for a trial, a
KCIA agent came out and testified that I was a dangerous fellow because
I had spoken badly about the NCM at a students' meeting at Seoul
National University. Soon I was conscripted. And on my way to the military
training camp in 1973, 1 heard the vivid, loud voices of President Park
and the NCM leaders broadcast from a radio on the bus. (interview with
a former student activist, Seoul, August 1999)

Thus, with the fourth FYEDP ( 1977-1981 ) , government investment in the

agricultural sector was reduced dramatically. Toward the end of the 1970s
as the income-increasing projects suffered, government efforts focused al
the more on spiritual training, laying the groundwork for a disciplinary
society.

State Populism and Industrialization: The Egalitarian Ethos

as the Means for Mobilization

The NCM was used as an acute problem-solving method rather than as

an abstract theory, and the Blue House tried to keep it as practical as possible.
Also, the way the state exercised power through the NCM was more
complicated than the well-known marriage of Confucianism and
authoritarian rule; it contained both Confucian and non-Confucian elements,
which were used as ruling ideology and means of mobilization respectively.

29 A survey of 210 villages reveals that income increase was only the fifth-ranked priority among
the various projects of the NCM. Byung-Jip Moon, "Organization and Management of the New
Community Movement to Promote Income Increase: A Commentary on Agricultural Co-operative,"
series no. 2,JibangHaengjeong (Local Administration), vol. 26, no. 289 (1977), pp. 102-119.
30 Yun-Shik Chang, "Personalist Ethic and Market in Korea," Comparative Studies in Society and
History, vol. 33 no.l (1991), pp. 106-129.

78

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

Traditional local elites without any job to do - usually village elders with a
bit of wealth, education and a prestigious lineage - acted as useful levers in
electoral campaigns, but they were never given any power or resources to
carry out government projects. Since the Park government was not interested
in developing electoral politics, it was natural that these people were treated
only as ideological upholders of the regime, with Confucian loyalty and filial
piety. In contrast, young, motivated people in their forties, usually with an
insignificant family background but with a strong will and a burning desire
for a better life, were mobilized by the state to check on the traditional elites
and to implement the NCM. The "can do" ethos spread by the NCM
encouraged a dynamic work ethic, as the planners had hoped, but oftentimes,
especially since the mid-1970s, it has also functioned as an excuse for coercing
citizens into unwanted or excessive work.

The secret to the NCM's popularity lies in the fact that many people
identify it with Korea's modernization, and subsequent economic success,
and thus cherish it along with their own bittersweet memories of passionate
youth. The case of an NCM leader discussed below, who now proudly
identifies himself with "anti-governmental forces" (bipan seryok), eloquently
testifies to two things. First, it reveals what state populism and the minjung
ideology shared in common and how, in the changed environment since
the 1980s, the minjungideology provided a "social framework" ( cadres sociaux)
for rural villagers 31 through which diverse individual memories coalesced
into the "collective memories" of anti-governmental forces .32 Second, while
top-down enforcement coexisted with voluntary participation in the 1970s
NCM, the 1980s were marked by a watershed in rural consciousness, brought
on when another military regime tried to reorganize the NCM in the midst
of re-emerging rural discontent.
The years from the mid-1950s through the 1960s, and especially the period
right after the Korean War, was a time that, briefly, allowed for greater social
mobility. This was because the effects of the war expedited the demise of the
landed class begun by the Land Reform (1949-50), and the relatively
unstructured initial phase of industrialization permitted many people a
variety of uncharted career trajectories ,33
Social volatility can also be surmised by popular narratives concerning
the ownership of land. In Togye village in North Cholla Province and in
many other villages, the relatively well-to-do accumulated much of their land

31 Urbanites rapidly detached themselves from the minjungideology in the affluence of the 1 990s,
but the rural sense of relative deprivation intensified.
32 Maurice Halbwachs, quoted in Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover:
University of Vermont /University Press of New England, 1993), p. 7.
33 Byoung-Kwan Kim, Structural Changes and Continuity: Industrialization and Patterns of Career
Occupational Mobility in Korea, 1954-1983 (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1993).

79

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

during the unstable period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.34 Many
put up their land for sale as a result of successive bad harvests since the Land
Reform. The prevalence of loan sharking dropped land prices even further.
With a bit of money, you could purchase some property and accumulate
wealth. After the most influential people had left a village for better
opportunities in the cities ,35 there emerged a space for "new faces" to rise in
the local social standing ,36 It was not that the whole class structure and status
hierarchy was completely dismantled from below, but rather that there was a
new fluidity and openness in the social world of village communities,
comparable to but not as dynamic as the entrepreneurial atmosphere of
cities.

The state took full advantage of this mood, and reinforced and steered it
to a specific direction through the creation and management of the NCM.
From the beginning, it was acknowledged that developing grassroots
leadership different from the past "village headman" format was necessary.37
A new social and political realignment was sought, giving the new faces the
backing of the state. These young aspiring leaders usually did not belong to
the real top-notch local elite, although they had more experience in the
outside world and could afford to take on extra activities that were not directly
related to supporting themselves 38 (interviews with a former policy advisor/
sociologist, July 1999) . Gradually they entrenched themselves within the local
scene, transforming the existing leadership structure. Their green caps, arm
bands, special postcards to the minister of Home Affairs 39 and their influence
with the Agricultural Co-op all symbolized strong state backup. They had
more political influence than the village headmen, who took care of
administrative chores. In the process, what can be called "state populism"
was fomented and practiced as a means of national mobilization. Economic
equality and egalitarianism was to the 1970s as freedom and revolution was
to the 1960s, and it pervaded every measure taken to arouse and sustain the
NCM.

34 Okla Cho, "The Economic Rationality of Contemporary Korean Farmers," Hyunsang kwa Inshik
(Phenomenon and Consciousness), vol. 6 no. 1 (1982), p. 213.
35 The poorest also left the village. Man-Gap Lee, Hankuk Nongchonsahoi Yeonku (Korean Rural
Society) (Seoul: Tarakwon, 1981).
36 Sung-Chan Hong, "The Trends of Large Landlords around the Land Reform," unpublished
paper presented at the Institute for Modern Korean Studies Seminar "The R.O.K Land Reform in
1950" (Seoul: Yonsei University, 1999); Jae-Seok Choi, Hankuk Nongchon Sahoi Yeonku (Korean
Rural Society) (Seoul: Iljisa, 1975).
37 Seoul Shinmun (The Seoul Daily) , April 14, 1972.
38 Only 22 percent of NCM leaders in 1972 had more than a high school education. Sang-Ho
Choi, "A Study of Social Background and Motives of Saemaul Leader," Hankuk Nongup Kyoyook
{Korean Journal of Agricultural Education), vol. 9 no. 1 (1974), pp. 78-83.
39 Postcards were distributed to NCM leaders so that they could bypass all bureaucratic ladders
and directly petition the minister of Home Affairs regarding the difficulties they faced in the fields.

80

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

The NCM tried to legitimize not only the government but also capitalism
itself. It is safe to assume that the NCM tried to become the Korean equivalent
of the Protestant spirit identified by Weber. It was spun off to various
workplaces in the form of Factory NCM, School NCM or Workplace NCM,
enforcing a "new work ethic" from the mid-1970s. It was MOHA with its far-
reaching administrative power that took charge of the NCM, but ultimately
it was the Blue House that steered the NCM and maintained it as an amoeba-

like spiritual training ground.

NCM was like a religious movement. It didn't require much funding. It

was a vocal movement. Spend money maybe on cement? Because MOHA
couldn't request a separate budget, we collected money from different
ministries. It was only later that we were allocated a separate budget,
(interview with a former policy maker, Seoul, March 2000)

The NCM had nothing to do with religious leaders, however. Instead, a

self-made farmer, Ha Sa-yong, was picked by Park Chung Hee as the
movement's role model. He lived as a house/farm servant (meosum) , and his
wife was a house maid (shikmo). Whether in a randomly selected sample
from the NCM Training Center archives, or in an essay in the NCM magazine,
the New Wave[l9S4 (1978) December] [unclear what this refers to]or an
interview with an NCM leader from the notorious Hampyung region, the
subject never fails to mention his/her having worked as a meosum/ shikmo or
having grown up under a father who had been a meosum. Either there were
indeed many meosum/ shikmo, or such people had a higher likelihood of being
selected to present their success stories. One thing is certain: when NCM
leaders were asked to present their stories, there was no reason why they
should hide their humble backgrounds. What the Monthly Economic Trend
Review, the National NCM Leaders' Conference, and the NCM Training
Center looked for in a success story was not expertise but "human drama"
(interview with a former policy maker, Seoul, May 1999) . There were success
stories from villages with one dominant yangban/elite lineage as well; when
a powerful family made up the whole village, it could efficiently carry out
development projects, cashing in on wide family networks and informal yet
strong leadership .40 However, such leaders did not get as much time in the
limelight as those from humble backgrounds.

There was no ideology for the NCM. It was proletarian to the bone.
What does it matter that you graduated from Ewha Woman's University?

40 Kwang-Kyu Lee, "Rural Development and Role of Leadership," Hankuk Munwha Inryuhak
(Korean Journal of Anthropology) , vol. 5 (1972), pp. 151-194; Kwang-Ok Kim, "Tradition and
Rationality of Peasants in NCM Headquarters," ed. NCM headquarters, Undong Ironchegye Jeongrip
(Theories of NCM), vol. 2 (Seoul: the NCM Headquarters, 1984).

81

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1 - Spring 2004

People are jealous when they hear you graduated from a girls' high school
even. Nobody wants a leader who boasts of education or father's
occupation. A smart cookie with an elementary school education will
do. Stamina and drive, that's all it takes, (interview with a high-level
policy maker, Seoul, 1999) 41

Interestingly, the Korean tradition of dure, which had been slowly

disappearing since the colonial period, was resurrected and strategically
exploited to bring about rapid social change. Dure, which represented an
autonomous organization of villagers, was based on an egalitarian ethos and
stressed a sense of community. Even the rich and powerful were obligated to
lend their manpower or livestock to the community .42 It was this emphasis
on community that became the mobilizing force behind the NCM. But this
egalitarian ethos was not some pure ancient heritage; rather, it represented
a tradition that was reworked to include modern elements of a newly
emerging mass. After the military coup in 1961, there was a gradual
transmission of leadership in every region ,43and the Confucian rule by village
headmen, which silenced the young and kept them from active participation
in village affairs, was dismantled. While the NCM was pursuing the macro
ideal of urban-rural equity, therefore, young local leaders got a taste of micro-
level social revolution by moving a little up the village social ladder.
From Brandt's dualistic model of Korean villages, 44 the "informal, vulgar,
egalitarian community ethic" was emphasized and paraded over the "formal,
lineage-based, and highly ranked moral principles" to mobilize human
resources at the local level, while the latter was strenuously upheld at the
level of governing ideology to indoctrinate people into becoming loyal
subjects of the state. An NCM leader from Hampyung describes egalitarianism
in the following way:

The learned, the well-to-do, the retired officials, and people whose son
made it big in the city all held the NCM in contempt. A hundred percent
of the time, the haves and the learned turned their back on the poor.
When times called for cooperation, their participation was the lowest.
When called upon to clean up the neighbourhood, they would say, 'I
don't have to do this. It's your job. You are the Saemaul (NCM) leader,
the farmer.' I answered back, 'You live in the same neighbourhood. What
makes you so special?' Those who do not participate have to pay a fine

41 He shared a lot with Park: love of peasants, youthful immersion in communist ideology and a
strong belief in capitalism.
42 Pil-Dong Kim, Hankuk Sahoijojiksa Yeonku (A Research on the History of Korean Social
Organizations) (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1992).
43 Choi, Korean Rural Society, p. 546; Sung-Jin Ahn, "Hankuk Nongchon Sahoeui Kaldeung
Yeonku: Catolic Nongminhoe Undong" (A Research on the Conflicts in Korean Village Society: The
Case of CAP Movement), (master's thesis, Seoul National University 1986).
44 Vincent Brandt, Korean Village: Between Farm and Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1971), pp. 25-28.

82

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

amounting to a worker's wage. That's where the power of collective action

lies. Messages do not get through when we communicate one-on-one.
But when we go as a group and shout in front of the stiff-necked
uncooperative neighbour, he gets really embarrassed. There were many
funny episodes. Frankly speaking, even though the NCM was so-called
'government-led', the opposition parties were against it and so were the
high-ranking officials. I was a member of Candidate Kim Dae-Jung's
presidential election campaign camp, and he also claimed that the NCM
was a political scheme targeted at the elections. But I really thought it
was for enhancing the quality of life in the countryside, (interview with
a former NCM leader, Cholla Province, July 1999)

The NCM helped build a national ethos, and cut across cleavages in the
nation's moral landscape. In terms of social mobilization, non-Confucian
egalitarianism and state populism were at play. In terms of national ideology,
the government chose to emphasize hierarchy, loyalty and filial piety as the
cornerstones of the Yushin system (Park's more authoritarian rule, 1972-
1979). This is also witnessed in how the Agricultural Co-op settled itself in
the countryside. The co-op's mutual banking [unclear meaning] absorbed
funds that would otherwise have gone into credit unions (kye) or usury, and
was able to check, to a certain degree, the influence of the rich in the
countryside .45 This is very different from Japan, where government-led
agricultural/industrial co-operatives were used as local social clubs for the
well-to-do to firmly establish their ground .46 Unlike in Japan, where the state
re-ordered villages without reshuffling the existing social structures, the
Korean state, through its re-organization procedures, opened up a new source
of status mobility hitherto unavailable in rural society.
State populism thus existed as an important element in the moral
topography of the Park regime, while the minjung ideology gradually
entrenched itself among urban labourers, students, progressive intellectuals
and some disillusioned farmers from the mid-1970s on as a moral vision of
political, economic and sociocultural resistance against the state- chaebol
alliance. The case of the Hampyung leader is particularly interesting as he
situated his lifelong NCM activities in line with the "peasant movements,"
although he made it clear that technically, NCM and CAP activities had
nothing in common. His story reveals how the meaning of the NCM changed
after Park's death and how, over time, the recollections of the NCM ironically
became amenable to the Halwachsian collective memory of the minjung
ideology, which pervaded the Hampyung region for more than a decade.

45 Jaryojip (Interview Data) (Seoul: Choongang Daily and Hankuk Chungshin Munwha Yeonkuwon,
1999), p. 27.
4b Seung-Mi Han, From Regional Craft to National Art: Politics and Identity in a Japanese
Regional Industry" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1995) ; Ronald Dore, City Life in Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978 [1959]).

83

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1 - Spring 2004

His self-chosen career in the opposition camps began right after his return
from the military in 1966, when he fought against the Agricultural Co-op
head who embezzled money, and helped organize the election campaigns
of the opposition party candidate. Asked how he became an NCM leader
when he must have naturally belonged to the upper echelon of village society
with his inherited property of 6,000 pyong,47 he retorted,

My father has worked as a meosum for 30 years ! He was a self-made man ....
An NCM leader was supposed to work hard for his village, but was not
supposed to fight and be beaten by the police as in the Hampyung
Incident (1977 ).48 We never thought about fighting against the
government to increase our income.
There was no dialogue between the peasant activists and the NCM
leaders. The CAP was a highly conscious group. They knew a lot more. I
heard they have a worldwide network. It's not easy for people like us
who are afraid of policemen to raise our voice for rights.
The Hampyung Incident participants were harshly beaten . . . CAP
members, mostly from outside the Hampyung County, sacrificed
themselves and led the demonstration at Kwangju .... However, if
something similar had happened to my own village, I would probably
have stood up to it. An NCM leader should know how to sacrifice himself
for the sake of the village, (interview with a former NCM leader, Cholla
Province, August 1999)

In his story, "sacrifice" emerges as a medium to link activities far apart on

the ideological spectrum. In spite of his rather surprising attitude toward
the CAP - probably due to a sense of inferiority - he emphasized that he
did his best to protect the interests of the village, and in that sense, the NCM
was a "peasant movement in its own way" and therefore righteous. "[The]
CAP might be virtuous, but theyjust criticized the government without talking
about raising the standard of living" ( interview with a former NCM leader,
Cholla Province, August 1999). Importantly, although he still cherished the
NCM period as a precious time in his life, he re-situated his stance again as
"oppositional" to the post-Park military regimes that "abandoned the true
spirits of the NCM," and felt that he had not fared as well as his fellow
villagers/ siblings who went to metropolitan cities during the NCM.

I think I would probably be better off if I had left for the cities. My house
is worth only one million won but my younger brothers' and sisters'
apartments in the cities are worthy of several 100 million won. All NCM
leaders that I know of really sacrificed themselves...

47 One pyongis about 3.3 square metres.

48 The Hampyung Agricultural Co-operative encouraged the production of sweet potatoes and
promised a wholesale buy-back. When it did not keep its promise, farmers protested, in front of
rotten bags of sweet potatoes. When CAP supported the protest, police intervened and heavyhandedly
suppressed the protest.

84

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

The (post-Park) new military regime wanted to prosper upon a

reorganization of the NCM but we objected to it. We argued that since
the NCM was made by the farmers, it should be of the farmers and not
of the president. But . . . they tried to use NCM leaders for their own
purposes. The whole movement got the bruise, and we began to distrust
it. (interview with a former NCM leader, Cholla Province, August 1999)

In short, the NCM succeeded in mobilizing the country by appealing to

the newly reinforced egalitarian ethos. Confucian hierarchy as the organizing
principle of everyday life was degraded as "inefficient," but its value as a
ruling ideology was strengthened to preserve the authoritarian body politic.

Trajectories of the NCM: Discipline and "Korean-Style" Democracy

Unlike the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the NCM did not turn the village
structures upside down, even though it expedited the generational shift of
authority. Important changes took place within the villages, however, when
many of these young, motivated NCM leaders also left for cities. Here we see
the transition of the NCM from a work-ethic-building movement to a social
control mechanism. Spiritual training provided important sites where
individuals negotiated the meanings of state policies imposed upon them.
Research on a model NCM leader's recent, rather tragic circumstances reveals
the ironies of Korean-style democracy (hankukjeok minjujuui), for which the
NCM was alleged to be an excellent training ground.
Expansion of commercial agricultural markets, introduction of new seed
varieties and high rice prices raised rural standards of living to a certain
degree, but more people left for the cities because of their children's
education, "disillusionment" 49 or the increasingly unbearable generational
conflicts. Around 1978-79, when the government changed its policy stance
to emphasize "comparative advantages," 50 agricultural policies became the
first target of criticism by the Economic Planning Board (EPB) , along with
export credit programs, financial policy and the HCI plan. "In the mid-1970s,
many NCM leaders began to rethink. Not only that there was no substantial
reward, but their own households deteriorated due to their activities outside
of home. Many capable leaders left for the cities to support their own families"
(interview with a policy maker, Seoul, March 2000) . In a very ironic sense, a
high-level policy maker's comment that the NCM was a "spiritual revolution
more than anything else" aptly describes the situation. On the one hand,
lack of material rewards even to the faithful NCM leaders accelerated rural-

49 Jong Dae Lee, "Why Did We Desert Our Beloved Land?" Daewha (Conversation) , vol. 1 1 (1976) ,
pp. 160-177.
50 Jong-Whan Choo, "The Mistakes of the So-Called 'Seogang School'" Shindonga (New Asia)
(August 1985), pp. 234-245; Mark Clifford, Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats, and Generals in
South Korea (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).

85

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1 - Spring 2004

urban migration. On the other hand, as the ideal of community became

increasingly untenable with commercialization, the spread of TV, and the
growing labour shortage in rural areas,51 the NCM's emphasis on an
individual work ethic was even more accentuated in urban work settings,
encompassing anything "disciplinary" with regard to modernization.. In the
process, the meaning of the NCM was amplified to symbolize all positive
effects of hard work, self-discipline and the whole modern achievement of
the nation.

Indeed, it was the militaristic state - rather than the bourgeoisie or even
the late-nineteenth-century scholar52 - that embraced the role of purveying
a moral vision of capitalism. Instilling the capitalist ethic was as critical to
the success of the regime itself as it was to the large bourgeoisie. Unlike
Western countries, however, the large bourgeoisie did not object to the
authoritarian rule53 or its campaign for capitalistic discipline. This helped
undermine its own chances for moral hegemony against the increasing
critiques against its concentration of wealth. But this neither stopped the
lines of rural job-seekers, nor turned the rural parents into activists.
Interestingly, as the criticisms against the NCM grew louder, the spiritual
training's target was broadened to include high-level officials of the central
bureaucracies, National Assembly members, bankers, businessmen, chaeboh
and their children, professors, musicians, novelists, military officers and other
influential figures. Its purpose was to silence criticism by having a mixed
group of people go through a miniaturized ordeal together. They were made
to run, eat and sleep along with farmers, and were also forced to listen to the
model NCM leaders' "success stories" in a strangely egalitarian way. "Those
who should stay within the regime's sphere of influence were the target,
whereas blue-collar workers and the opposition party members were
'strategically excluded'" (interview with a former low-level NCM implementer
at the Blue House, August 1999). This person, who used to draw up lists of
prospective trainees from various walks of life, had the following recollection:

In 1974, the training for the 'upper echelons of the society' began. Since
the message was 'don't crab when the wretched are trying to change
their lives with sweat,' those creatures with American diplomas were
drafted first. NCM was a means of autocracy? Yoshi (fine), these elites
must be reformed. Let them listen to the voices from the bottom (badak)

51 Mutsuhiko Shima, "Agricultural Practices of a Naju County Village in the mid-1970s,"

in Mutsuhiko Shima and Asakura Tosio, eds., Henmosuru Kankoku Shakai (Korean Society in Transition)
(Tokyo: Daiichi Shobo, 1998), pp. 87-115.
52 Carter Eckert, "The South Korean Bourgeoisie: A Class in Search of Hegemony," in Hagen
Koo, ed., SSCK, 1993, pp. 95-130. Although Eckert 's point on the Korean bourgeoisie's reactionary
role in the country's political development, and therefore the bourgeoisie's hegemony, is illuminating,
his use of Yu Kilchun, a nineteenth-century Korean thinker, is a bit problematic, because Yu never
enjoyed the place of Fukuzawa Yukichi in modernizing Korea.
53 Eckert, "The South Korean Bourgeoisie."

86

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

of the society. The intention was to make them say things that fit our
national circumstances, (interview with a low-level NCM implementer
at the Blue House, Seoul, May 1999)

State populism, which was a strange amalgam of egalitarian ethos, an

ideal of social welfare and developmentalist dictatorship was, however, lacking
in any notions of process or proper procedures as a means of mediating
differing interests, even regarding critical issues with tremendous future
impact on peoples' lives. Democracy was achievable, it was declared, "not
through elections but through gradual training and practice" in carrying
out state-supported projects. The NCM village meetings that were publicized
widely as the real drill hall for Korean-style democracy were left with rather
technical issues of village conflict resolution. And, since the NCM was based
on promises of economic benefits and characterized by the desire to achieve
an objective at any cost, it was always vulnerable. The absence of any one
element of its material basis could threaten the whole movement.

In a 1977 lecture tape in the NCM Museum archives, a passionate female

leader from Dalsung, North Kyungsang Province recounts her "success story."
When juxtaposed with subsequent interviews with her husband in 2000, this
story reveals how a dramatic turn of events could befall even a "successful"
NCM village. The leader was born in 1941. Her family was very poor, and
her father had been a house-servant (meosum) . She had to quit school before
the age of 13. When her parents tried to marry her off, she ran away from
home in 1958 to join the Rural Enlightenment Movement, which she learned
of through a college student who stayed in the village as a voluntary worker.
She met her prospective husband there; he had also joined as a voluntary
middle school student. Her husband's family was extremely poor, too. Later,
when she got married, she decided to "abolish the tradition of yangban" and
make the village prosperous. During her husband's seven years of absence
for college and military service, she brought more than 8,400 pyong of
wasteland under cultivation. It was then that the Park government launched
the NCM on a nation-wide scale.

She finally succeeded in initiating a Village Women's Organization 54 and

started managing a village shop. Her husband also became an NCM leader,
made new roads, and built the Village Hall in 1975. Soon, at the suggestion
of the governor and the county chief, the couple and the villagers started
cultivating a mountainous area into a huge orchard, to be finished by 1980.
When, in 1976, they achieved three times the yearly objective for cultivation,
she received a prize from the prime minister, and her husband received an
award from MOHA. She passionately presented her case, sobbing from time

54 The state's developmentalist project never had any feminist agenda, but women's stories were
regarded as "more effective in moving peoples' minds" (interview with a former policy maker, May
1999).

87

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

to time, as one would do in a "faith sharing" (kanjeung) ritual among some

of the enthusiastic Christian sects in Korea. The NCM never tried to mobilize

particular religious groups for fear of introducing divisiveness, but some

common ground certainly existed, such as their "growth-oriented
strategies,"55 their emphasis on modernity, and their evangelical zeal and
sanctioning of frustration-releasing rituals.
The female leader's story ends with a rosy dream of a "better life in the
1980s" and a strong determination to overcome any difficulties in her way.
But when follow-up interviews took place in 2000, the village no longer
existed. It happened that the area was designated an industrial complex in
late 1978, and the whole village was demolished in 1979. Years after the
evacuation, she had a stroke while at work, and could not move or speak
thereafter. Now the area is merged with Taegu City. Her husband, as an
NCM leader and later village headman himself, witnessed the villagers futile
demonstrations against the government. He describes the turn of events in
the following manner:

President Park came to the village in 1977 for the Kumi Highway opening
ceremony. His visit brought about the whole change. At his passing
comment, 'I want to make an industrial complex here,' officials hurriedly
came up with a plan to build an inland industrial complex connecting
Changwon and Kumi. ... [The] defense industry didn't come, because
there was a recession after the president's assassination ... and an Oil
Crisis ...

With the village gone, people splintered, too. We had to abandon

houses. ... We moved to Taegu City for [the] children's education in the
early 1980s. ... The land we inherited and our ancestral grave sites were
all absorbed by the complex. It was much worse than the Korean War.
We blamed the government and resisted, but ... the government didn't
care much about us. Ten years of efforts evaporated overnight in the
name of a 'New Rural Modernization.' (interview, March 2000)

Indeed, state populism was a far cry from democracy, because it never
cherished proper decision-making procedures, let alone representational
politics. A simple "misfortune" or, perhaps, an "exorbitant price of
bureaucratic over-loyalty," could befall even those who faithfully embraced
state policies [unclear meaning, sentence structure] . Strong state leadership
could "undermine rather than reinforce the heroic 'own bootstrap'
mentality ."56True, Park mobilized masses in such a clearly defined discipline
and group reward framework that those interested thought they were
participating voluntarily. What was equally true, however, was that there
certainly existed a wide base for a successful implementation of the NCM, at

55 Hankuk Kyohoi 100 Nyun Chonghap Yeonku Bokoseo (100 Years of Korean Churches) (Seoul:
Hankuk Sahoimunje Yeonkuwon, 1980), p. 33.
5b Brandt, Rural Development , p. 38.

88

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

least until the late 1970s, when the discontinuance of the high rice-price
policy and the growing labour shortage in rural villages began to check the
NCM's growth. The enabling infrastructure consisted of, first, the relatively
homogeneous ownership structures of land in the rural area, a result of
land reform and urban migration ,57 and second, a fervent mass desire to
break out of the misery of war and hunger, sentiments which, until the mid-
1960s, had never been systematically exploited.
Indeed, one important characteristic of the stories from Yeoju, Hampyung
and Dalsung is that although an order from the government permeated
every step of the NCM way, people still recollected that their participation at
that stage differed from the later, 1980s NCM structure, in that their affiliation
was voluntary. This emphasis on voluntarism was shared even by those CAP
activists who initially embraced the NCM; they turned away from it not
because they opposed the NCM's goals, but because they thought the
government never delivered on its promises, i.e., building rich villages.
However, as for the government, all it could do was encourage people;
becoming rich was an individual business.
The state skillfully touched on the egalitarian ethos for its developmentalist
project - the non-Confucian, "persistent peasant elements" in Korea, in the
Ginzburgian sense of the term .58 State populism in fact shared much of the
ethos of minjung ideology in emphasizing the lowest rungs of the society. In
away, state promotion of the egalitarian aspects of Korean village traditions
backfired against the authoritarian government itself in the form of minjung
ideology, which declared its goal as the true realization of democracy and
distributive justice.
Both the state and the minjung ideologues tried to monopolize discourses
on the nation (minjok) , essentializing it as an ultimate value that could never
be compromised, and calling themselves the true representers of national
spirit. Importandy, both shared, wittingly or unwittingly, the same powerful
techniques, which they used to inculcate their ideologies and encourage a
one-track mindset. This tendency was reinforced as the competition between
the strong state and the defiant society became fierce, leading to the habit
of classifying everyone as either an enemy or a friend. As Foucault pointed
out, power was indeed "productive."59 The oppressed used the techniques
of the oppressor in their resistance. There is a surprising Foucauldian
similarity between the spiritual training that took place at the NCM centre 60
and the consciousness-raising programme organized by the Urban Industrial

57 Vincent Brandt and Man-Gap Lee, Community Development Program in Korea, C. C.

Expert Meeting Paper on Korea (Seoul: Korean National Commission for UNESCO, 1977).
58 Carlo Ginsburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]).
59 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977,
ed. Collin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
60 Park, Economic Development.

89

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

Mission; 61 both used small group activities as their focal point of action and
employed discipline as an effective means of communication. The stronger
the oppression became, the more tenacious and violent the resistance grew
to be.
If one considers that it was the exclusion of urban labour interests from
the system which finally shattered the infrastructure of Park's rule, the way
the NCM dealt with this issue was incredibly naive. Although "Factory NCM,"
which was launched in 1974 as a way of transferring the movement from the
rural villages to the factories, started as a kind of Quality Circle movement
with a particular emphasis on increasing productivity and saving energy
(interview with a person at the Seoul Chamber of Commerce, June 1999), it
was only business owners who were given spiritual training in order to address
labour issues. They were made to listen to the dire circumstances of the
"bottom," "feel it," and then say in front of everybody whatever they could
think of as a remedy to the problem just heard. In other words, it was a
threatening individual inquiry: What can you do about this? The simple logic
of "Let the top suffer and take care of their own workers" could never be a
panacea to the structural problems of a rapidly industrializing society.
Likewise, the problems could not be alleviated through the occasional
presidential gifts to the bus girls, nor the making of a model factory NCM
worker into a National Assembly member. 62 As urban migration progressed
at a much faster rate than expected, Park's rural political base eroded rapidly.
Also, the increasingly exorbitant work demands placed on factory workers
only exacerbated urban dissatisfaction. Faced with the growing defiance and
the opposition party's rising call for democratization, the Park regime finally
collapsed from inside when he was assassinated by one of his confidantes in
1979.

Conclusion: State Populism in a Comparative Perspective

This paper has outlined how the NCM changed over time from a
comprehensive rural development plan to a national mobilization project,
and from a work-ethic-building movement to a panoptic disciplinary system.
The emphasis on a "New Community" meant that the whole nation was
treated in the manner of a giant village, and the focus of discipline was
transposed from villages onto individuals, in order to produce people fit for
the national mobilization.

Perhaps the real success of the NCM lies in the way it has come to be
remembered for the undeniable economic achievements of the Park era

61 Youngdeungpo Urban Industrial Mission, Youngdeungpo Sanupseonkyohoi 40 nyunsa (40 Year

History of Youngdeungpo Industrial Mission) (Seoul: Youngdeungpo UIM, 1998).
62 Called Yujeonghoi, a third of the National Assembly members could be appointed by th
president.

90

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

rather than for the narrowly defined rural development; as can be seen in
the bitter feelings of former NCM leaders, the latter certainly did not
constitute a success story, but rather featured betrayal and even failure. Started
under the banner of village-level modernization during Park's political crisis,
the NCM filled the dual purpose of mobilizing the countryside while keeping
it poor to encourage urban migration. Material rewards - however limited
they may have been - and plebiscite politics replaced electoral politics and
democracy. By 1978, contrary to many farmers' expectations, the government
stopped financial support for the agricultural sector completely and the true
colours of the NCM were laid bare. Peasant movements of various sorts

emerged in the late 1970s, usually in the form of Christian or Catholi

farmers' organizations and employing the language of minjung ideology
echoing the already fierce urban labour resistance.
Around the mid-1970s, the predominant narratives of the NCM wer
beginning to detach themselves from rural villages to become the glorio
National History of Modernization. Some remembered the NCM for th
new roads built into the remote villages, or for prizes handed out to encourage
abortion, 63 but others also remembered the strenuous examination of lunch
boxes at urban schools to guarantee the "proper ratio of barley and rice" for
food security. Still others remembered the endless indoctrination o
productivity, or rising early in the morning to run.
If one grand narrative of national development were to be sought from
these fragmented and often discordant memories of the NCM, it was th
sharing of hardships and tears among people of that generation, who h
experienced the colonial period, the Korean War, and the ensuing socia
chaos. This hardship is what made the NCM possible; regardless of clas
position, everyone had suffered, especially those born between the late 1920s
and 1940s who became the active target of the NCM. They cried silently
upon hearing the selected NCM leaders' "success stories," even though the
might not agree with the NCM or other government propaganda.
Comparisons to the Korean situation can be made with Japan and with
Latin America. First, the NCM policy makers consciously modelled the
movement after Japanese agricultural development, but in Korea, the
relationship between the military and the conglomerates was different. I
1930s Japan, there existed a great deal of antipathy toward zaibatsu, because
industrialization had already reached a stage at which the negative sides
zaibatsu-party political linkages were revealed; recruited from the sons o
poor peasants, the military shared with the general populace a widesprea
abhorrence against ties between politicians and businessmen. In 1960s an
1970s Korea, on the other hand, the military could not sustain such an anti-
business attitude for long; soon after the 1961 coup, Park realized that h

63 Family planning started in 1961 and reached its peak in the 1970s.

91

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Pacific Affairs: Volume 77, No. 1- Spring 2004

needed well-developed business ties. He quickly changed his stance to create

a symbiotic relationship between the government and the business sector.
Indeed, it was the Park government that ipso facto supported chaebol by
strategically distributing or withholding favours, and in return, chaebol
remained his faithful allies.

It should be emphasized, however, that Park was both anti-capitalist and a

supporter of chaebol. Although his anti-capitalism and anti-elitism seemed to
dissolve soon after the coup, they reappeared in the way he promoted
capitalism. That is why it is important not to simply fall back on the seductive
idea of Confucian capitalism in understanding modern Korea. Confucian
elements were at play, mostly in the form of educational zeal and support
for the ruling ideology of the nation, but the actual mobilization of the
populace to modern forms of labour relied more on the newly reinforced
egalitarian ethos than on Confucian values. The difference with the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, which also relied on anti-elitism, was that the NCM was
more geared towards capitalistic production, and while encouraging an
egalitarian ethos, it never intended to bring about a total collapse of the
village structure. NCM policy makers were also extremely keen on guarding
the movement from any kind of doctrinal/ideological debates. The "weak
but contentious society" which for a long time characterized Korea, along
with the "strong but breakable state," may not be the mere "heritage of the
colonial times," 64 but a creation brought about by active mimicry of Japan,
combined with the selective reinforcement of Korean-style egalitarianism.
Second, Korean state populism was very different from that observed in
South American cases. Unlike countries in South America where, with some
variations, urban popular sectors and a national bourgeoisie formed an
alliance in defiance of the landed oligarchic interests tied to metropolitan
capital ,65 the Korean urban labour force did not find any political allies until
it finally burst into displays of resistance. In contrast to the rural population,
whose political support the regime eagerly sought, Park never really tried to
appeal to the urban popular sector directly. He mistakenly assumed that by
training capitalists with farmers in the NCM centre, the message would get
across to all. Indeed, the ultimate irony of the NCM was that despite the
regime's ruthless march into industrialization, it was totally unprepared to
deal with industrialization's outcome - the urban popular sector.
NCM was a success in terms of ending starvation and absolute poverty,
but it was a failure because it never delivered its promise; instead of the
advent of a welfare society, vehement peasant movements arrived in the 1980s.
In the end, just when the lack of proper interest coordination between
villagers, local bureaucrats and the central government was unexpectedly

64 Koo, State and Society.

65 Koo, State and Society; James M. Malloney, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

92

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The New Community Movement: Park Chung Hee and State Populism in Korea

bringing about enormously painful policy outcomes, even to the NCM's

faithful followers (as witnessed in the case of the female NCM leader from
Dalsung) , Park's sudden death in 1979 meant an end to the era. The regime
abruptly collapsed from within in the face of rising urban unrest.

Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, January 2004

The New Zealand

Journal of History
Editors: Caroline Daley
Deborah Montgomerie

Vol.38, No.l April 2004

CONTENTS

Jim McAloon Class in Colonial New Zealand: Towards a Historiogra

Rehabilitation

Fiona Paisley Performing 'New Zealand': Maori and Pakeha Delegates at

the Pan-Pacific Women's Conference, Hawai'i, 1934

Lydia Weavers The Pleasure of Walking

John Stenhouse God's Own Silence: Secular Nationalism, Christianity and

the Writing of New Zealand History

The New Zealand Journal of History is published twice yearly, in April and October, by the
University of Auckland.

Subscription rates for 2004, payable in advance: Domestic $40.00 (students $24.00); Overseas
$NZ50.00 (student $30.00). Back numbers available: Domestic $7.00; Overseas $NZ10.00. All
prices include GST and free postage.

Subscriptions and all business correspondence should be addressed to:

The Business Manager, New Zealand Journal of History History Department,
University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019 , Auckland, New Zealand.
Email: [email protected]

For more information and for Style Sheet for Contributors please view our web site:
www.arts.acukland.ac.nz/his/nzjh.html

93

This content downloaded from

58.229.145.212 on Mon, 09 Oct 2023 06:25:19 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms