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June 20 1987 was a Saturday and the UK papers seem to have suddenly turned their attention to the serious matter of… the Olympics, with both the Times and the Guardian producing articles with a focus on the possible consequences for the 88 Seoul games. Instead of those, here’s David Watts’ feature piece touching on everything from the Catholic Church, to the education system to the monarchy of the ‘Yi Dynasty’. Watts seems to have developed something of a strange obsession with the Korean middle class, which he claims makes up 78 percent of the population - although this seems to be a statistical impossibility to me. In true British fashion he also manages to bring up that old canard of the Magna Carta in his explanation of the Korean desire for democracy.

Firebomb path to Seoul’s Olympic flame: Mass opposition to South Korea’s generals
David Watts
The Times, June 20 1987, Saturday

The South Korean government stands virtually paralysed after more than a week of student riots in which police have been pelted with stones and firebombs.

Student protects are an almost daily feature of life in South Korea but this time they are different. The violence demonstrates a frustration with President Chun Doo Hwan’s government that leaves scarcely any sector of society untouched. The Korean word for it is han, accumulated frustration, and for many Koreans it has been building up since 1961, when the late Park Chung Hee, then head of the ruling military junta, told his people that democracy would follow a brief period of strong central government.

The opposition in the universities, in sections of the Christian church and now the middle class talks of revolution. It is the combination of the middle class and the church which could throw the country into what would be a bloody civil war if there is no response to their demands.

The middle class, to which 78 per cent of Koreans now belong, rarely curses the students for disrupting business or mouthing slogans sympathetic to North Korea. They hang out of upstairs windows to applaud or harangue the government’s hapless militia on the streets. Bus-loads of office workers returning home sing the national anthem as they pass equally packed buses full of riot police. The middle class, once guarantors of stability, are now among the government’s strongest critics. The potent political mixture President Chun now faces does not yet include many workers but the rest is more than enough to cause serious concern for the stability of his government.

Beyond the sea-change in the middle class there is a student movement now willing to moderate its public rhetoric to include political demands which it believes will broaden its support. There is a Roman Catholic Church willing to say publicly through Cardinal Stephen Kim that the government has lost its popular support.

The church, both Catholic and Protestant, has greatly influenced the middle class, not only through illustrating the immorality of the government’s conduct but through accurate reporting of events in the Roman Catholic weekly bulletin. Distributed throughout the country with at least four pages of news from the church hierarchy, each local diocese has a page for its own local news. With a national circulation estimated at 700,000, it circulates more widely than the government-guided mainstream press. The Catholic liberation theology, largely thought of in a Latin American context, has many adherents among South Korea’s younger priests and attracts government attention. The much larger Protestant church is equally active but probably less visible among the two million or more Christians.

The government has failed to realize how South Koreans have developed politically. They are not prepared to obey unquestioningly the government’s order to behave until the 1988 Olympics are over - when, it says, they might be allowed more say in who leads them.

South Korea’s economy has far outpaced political change. The country has never had the opportunity to make the interim step from Confucianism to a modern form of functioning democracy. England had Magna Carta to curb the power of Kings; Japan had its period of Taisho democracy to help ease it out of feudalism, and in China Marxist-Leninist thought put paid to Confucianism; but Korea moved from Confucian emperor to Japanese colony to the era of general-presidents with only a brief period of democracy in between.

The quantum leap now required to satisfy public aspirations and the consequent telescoping of political development would severely strain any society even with more enlightened leaders than President Chun. He and his advisers seem not to have grasped that with the explosion of technical learning in universities, which now teach more students per head of population than in Britain, has come an equally rapid growth in other fields.

The press may be controlled but schools and university curricula, the church and social institutions teach freedom. The threat from North Korea has always been advanced as the main reason for the need to control political activity but the present younger generation, for whom the Korean War is only hearsay, is unconvinced. They may be allowed only limited travel abroad and the government may circumscribe what they read but the country’s vibrant economy pulls in a vast amount of information: students can get any political tract they want from Marx to Thatcher.

Three elements have conspired to discredit the Chun regime and undermined its moral authority. The first was the torture and murder of the student Park Jong Chol, which the government first denied, then paid two police officer scapegoats to admit to and finally had to reveal was a much more widespread affair. Then there was the announcement in April that South Koreans must wait until after the Olympics for revision of the constitution which would give them greater say in the election of the president. Finally came Chun’s appointment as his successor of his fellow-general and partner in his seizure of power, Roh Tae Woo, who was closely associated with the infamous Kwangju massacre. Kim Dae Jung, the popular choice of many Koreans, has been under continuous house arrest for more than 70 days.

A new cabinet and a deft reshuffle of some senior military posts have since consolidated Chun’s stance. He has said he is so determined to see through his political programme that he would rather be killed than yield.

Chun acts like a Yi dynasty monarch while the people increasingly favour a move to democracy. Quite what form this might take has not yet been defined but the works of a brilliant young professor whose books try to bridge the gap have become best sellers and influenced editorial writers on the country’s leading daily newspaper.

For the government the great national task may be the holding of the Olympics next year, but for many South Koreans the immediate task is to start work on becoming a real democracy of which they can be proud when the world comes to call in 1988. The government’s options in handling the riots are limited, since further rioting in response to severe measures against dissidents could threaten the Olympic Games.

Students have always been the catalysts of political change in recent South Korean history and they have never ceased questioning the legitimacy of the Chun government. Only eight years ago their protests provoked such dissension in the ruling group that President Park Chung Hee was assassinated by the then director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Soon afterwards President Chun took power from a civilian interim president in a bloody coup involving troops withdrawn form frontline positions on the border with the North. The revolt in the city of Kwangju against the reimposition of military rule, which was brutally suppressed, has remained a stigma not only on the present regime but on the US military and government for its failure to advise against it.

All these things ordinary Koreans knew and were either unable to change or were willing to tolerate so long as they became wealthier and as long as they had President Chun’s commitment that he would leave office early next year. Now they know that his successor, from an almost identical military background, will bring more of the same. The use of vast numbers of police has been required to prevent even more serious unrest. Only a significant government concession can ensure that real stability returns.