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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The Assessment of Park Chung Hee, the brutal dictator who many credit with launching South Korea's accelerated economic development, is central to debates on Korean democracy, development and independence. Paik Nak-chung, distinguished literary critic and a leading Korean public intellectual, delivered this keynote address to the International Korean Studies Conference on ‘The Park Era: A Reassessment After Twenty-five Years’ at University of Wollongong.
[1] For a brief discussion of this concept in English see Paik Nak-chung, “Coloniality in Korea and a South Korean project for overcoming modernity,” Interventions 2(1), 2000, particularly the section on ‘Korea since 1945 and the “division system”‘, 76-78; also available here.
[2] “Chisok pulgan?nghan palcho’�n-ui yugongja,” JoongAng Ilbo, 12 August 2004, p. 35.
[3] Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun (W. W. Norton 1997), Chapter 7 ‘The Virtues, II: The Democratic Movement, 1960-1996’.
[4] This expression, not unexpectedly, generated a good deal of controversy at the conference. Professor Kim Young-Jak argued that Park's philosophy could hardly be characterized in such a narrow and unfair manner. My answer was that I was not speaking of Park's philosophy as such, (Park himself obviously entertained much grander ambitions than a beggar's!), but only the philosophy implicit in the slogan he chose for the Saemaul (or New Village) Movement. Professor Han Kyung-Koo had a more ingenious objection: that one ought to differentiate between a beggar (who wants something for nothing) and a poor person (who usually is ready to work), and that my characterization could hence be insulting to the many poor people who participated in Saemaul. But would it really have been less insulting to them if I had said ‘the philosophy of the poor’ instead? While I was ready to admit the need to differentiate my ‘beggar's philosophy’ from the beggar's psychology as defined by Professor Han, I maintained that, granting an element of exaggeration, I would stand by my characterization of the Saemaul slogan.
[5] A theocratic outcome is hardly imaginable in South Korea, but I wanted to draw attention to the Shah's Iran as another instance of dictatorship whose economic development programs failed to be sustained.
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