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IDEOLOGY AND URBANIZATION IN SOUTH KOREA

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IDEOLOGY AND URBANIZATION IN SOUTH KOREA

By

June Woo le

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Sociology—Urban Studies

1 999

ABSTRACT
IDEOLOGY AND URBANIZATION IN SOUTH KOREA
By

June Woo Kim

This study uncovered a distinctive pattern of urban development in South
Korea. Power is extremely concentrated in the Korean urban system. Most
decision-making takes place in Seoul. However, population is decentralized
among many cities. Income discrepancies among cities is not signiﬁcant. And
the contrast between wealthy neighborhoods and poor ones in Seoul is not as
stark as in other major cities in the world.

This pattern of urbanization stems from the importance of the
developmental state in Korean society. The “regulatory” states in the West limit
themselves to guaranteeing the basic functioning of the market, whereas the
developmental state in Korea intervenes to promote the market.

The ideology of the developmental state guides practical policies.
Gramsci deﬁnes “hegemonic ideology” as “a socially embedded world view
serving the interest of a class accepted by the majority of the population.”

Korea’s bureaucrats adhere to an ideology I call Confucian
developmentalism. The power of Seoul in the Korean urban system reﬂects
Confucian ideology. The spread of wealth in the Korean urban system reﬂects

Korean developmentalism — an emphasis on the development of the nation as a

whole rather than the pursuit of individual wealth. Extensive investment in
infrastructure, development of industrial estates, and revenue sharing all
contribute to reducing income differentials across cities.

Equitable urban development in Seoul stems from developmental
mobilization by bureaucrats. Urban development provides necessary public
infrastmcture for the masses and amenities such as housing for the middle class.
Extensive revenue sharing among wards guarantees a minimum level of social
services in different neighborhoods.

Seoul is not demographically a primate city by world standards even
though its great population size does leave room for concern. Investment in
industrial estates and transportation in the provinces offers alternative migration
destinations besides Seoul. Other measures to control population migration
include (1) designation of green belts around Seoul, (2) compulsory relocation of
factories in Seoul, (3) expansion of educational opportunities outside of Seoul,

and (4) decentralization of secondary government agencies.

Copyright by
JUNE WOO KIM
1 995

This dissertation is dedicated to my mom (Myeung Hae Lee), dad
(Yung Che 10m), sys (Soc lm Kim), and bro (Sung Jee Kim)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I'd like to thank many people who made it possible for me to ﬁnish up this
dissertation. iBichard Hill, who is my major advisor, set an example of a good
researcher. l have always tried to think through the topic as he does. He was
like a father to me as well. Dr. Steve Gold helped me to have a balanced view in
analyzing social issues, which are usually ﬁlled with human emotions, during his
seminars. Dr. Kevin Kelly enabled me to understand the real problems, which
are usually ignored by both foreigners and Americans alike, in his courses on
race and class. Dr. John Schweitzer, my boss and advisor at Urban Affairs
Programs, was my mentor. His tolerance and patience on me has enabled me to
grow not only academically but also personally.

Many of my friends helped me to grow. I thank Shashi for showing me
with how intelligence can marry tolerance. Nina kept me sane throughout my
graduate programs. Shashi and Nina should be also credited for criticizing me
on the narrow-minded prejudices l have had. I thank Vibha for her big smile and
sharp criticisms on my proposal. Aloka and Ralph, my editors, have always
prayed for me when l was not doing that for myself at all. I do not know how one
can even try to reciprocate for that kind of help. Sheri has helped me not only
with the editing and also with her comradely. Donggeun has always supported

me emotionally and nourished me with his hospitality. For Mann-ping, I owe her

endless belief in me. Chia-Huang has been my good friend and colleague

throughout the past years. Shuko, a very nice friend of mine, has helped me with
my ﬁeld-research in Japan. I owe Shu Fen for her always-encouraging words.
There are so many other friends I feel so grateful. I believe I am such a

lucky person to be around them.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURESVI
INTRODUCTION1
CHAPTERl

IDEOLOGYAND URBANIZATION7
Gramsci and Ideology 12
Differentldeologies?... . 21
Americanldeologyvs. Japaneseldeology 23
Lockean Liberalismin America... 25
“Politically Equal but Economically Unequal”.. 2.9
Confucian Developmentalism In Japan... .. ...37
“Economically Egalitarian but Politically HIerarchIcal” ..46
US vs. Japan: Ideology and Urbanization. 54

CHAPTER2

CONFUCIAN DEVELOPMENTAL URBANIZATION... .. ..58
Dimensions of Urbanization... .. ..61
“The Seoul Republic": The Power ConcentratIon In othe CapItal City. .62
Seoul: Crowded but not Overpopulated... .. . ...71
Korean Cities: Homes ofthe Middle Class 83
Seoul is not theWealthiest City in Korea87

CHAPTER 3.

AGENCY IN URBAN KOREA: THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE... .91
The “Natural” Market: Human Ecology/Modemization PerspectIve .92
DependencyNVorld System Theory... ...98
The Developmental State as the Agent .102

CHAPTER4.

CONFUCIAN DEVELOPMENTALISM IN KOREA... ..111
Reviving the Age-old Confucianism In the Early 1960s ..1 15
Turning Political Nationalism into Developmentalism” .... ..131

viii

CHAPTER 5.

THE IDEOLOGY AT WORK IN URBAN KOREA... ....149
Dispersing Resources beyond Seoul...... ....152
Dispersing Population beyond Seoul... ....168
Building Middle Class Cities... .. 171

Holding on to the Power Embedded in Seoul ......184
CONCLUSION... 191

ix

Table

8.
9.

10. Public Financial Conditions by Ward in Seoul.....

 

LIST OF TABLES

. The Degree of Power Concentration in Different Urban Systems...
Population Size of Major South Korean Cities in 1993...

The Population of Taiwan's Major Cities with Different Boundaries
in 1990.... . .. .. ..
The Population of "Japan' s Major Cities with Different Boundaries

The Degree of Population Concentration in Different Urban Systems...

Income Disparity in Seoul and New York.........

Gross Regional Product per ”capita” for Major Korean Cities
and Provincesin1995... .

Developmental State Index......

Settled Revenues of General Account by Gu (ward) in 1995...

1‘1. Budget Per Capita.” and Local Tax Burden Per mCapita by” Wards

In Seoul, 1988..

Page

.70

74

...79

...80

108
..176

177

...179

LIST OF FIGURES

Figures Pages

1. Map of Northeastern Asia... ...64

2. Map of Korean Peninsula... ....65

3. Map of Major Administrative Areas in South Korea, 1994... .72

4. Map of Major Urban Areas in South Korea... .....73

5. MapofSeoul84

INTRODUCTION

Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city is a crowded city of jarring
contrasts. From a vantage point atop one of the city's shimmering high-
rises, other modern skyscrapers displaying the corporate logos of
multinational businesses and bustling six-lane highways ﬁlled with cars
and trucks stretch out for miles through the smoggy haze. At street level
along the major avenues, the sights, sounds, the smells of heavy vehicle
trafﬁc remind a visitor of Southern California highways Although there
are very few trees or green areas in this city of concrete and glass, there
is a veneer of great commercial activity, prosperity, and growth. The
sprawling downtown area of tall buildings is home to scores of luxury
hotels and restaurants, sleek ofﬁce buildings, and upscale shopping
arcades But in the less visible parts of the city, in slums off the main
avenues and sprawling squatter settlements and shantytowns on the
outskirts of the metropolitan area, the masses of Jakarta live starkly
different lives. The fortunate few work in manufacturing industries
producing commodities like clothing or athletic shoes for global markets
where pay is about the rupiah equivalent of US $2 a day; others are
employed as "entrepreneurs" in less formal enterprises like vending and
driving bajai taxis (small, noisy, three-wheeled cabs).

Smith (1996: 1-2).

Inequality seems to be a ubiquitous element in urban life. Severe levels
of spatial polarization are obvious even in wealthy metropolises in the West. A
good example is New York. If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you
might know that the census tract directly north (between Fifth and Park Avenue
from 86‘" to 91 ") had the highest average family income in New York in 1990. At
over $301,000 average family income, it is just a short cab ride from the

Bradhurst section in Harlem (Bradhurst Avenue to Frederick Douglas between

West 145'“ and West 150'“) which had the lowest average family income of just
$6,000 in 1990. Few would put that area on their list of 'must-see” New York
sites, yet the contrast is very signiﬁcant (American Sociological Association,
1996).

Metropolitan areas in the Third World share the same problem with even
more human suffering and despair. On top of the above-mentioned polarization
within the metroline, most Third World cities face severe uneven development
among cities in their national urban system. Third World nations tend to have an
extreme concentration of power, population, and economic activities in their
largest cities. Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, is 25 times larger than the next
largest city, Chiang Mai (Lanegran, 1998). Most of these primate cities are
national capitals as well. As the host city of Thailand’s traditionally strong
central bureaucracy, Bangkok exerts its power over Thailand’s other cities
(London, 1980). The majority of Thailand’s factories are located in the
metropolitan Bangkok area. Quite naturally, Bangkok enjoys a much higher per
capita income than other cities in Thailand (Lanegran, 1998).

Even though some of the people in those countries might be proud of the
impressive skylines in their capitals, the human suffering and injustice caused by
the neglect of other cites is not a joking matter. Urban residents in other cities
not only get small paychecks but also endure limited educational opportunity,

poor health care, and less-than-adequate social amenities. For example:

The Ivory Coast provides a striking example of the singular magnetism of
the capital In 1968, the eight-story, 500-bed Center Hospitalier
Universitaire, one of the largest and most modern hospitals in all of Africa,
was built in the luxurious Cocody quarter, home of high government
ofﬁcials - the funds given by France were originally intended for twelve
regional hospitals (Cohen, 1974, 229; Gugler 8. Flanagan, 1977: 282).

This study ﬁrst examines the ‘unevenness' of urban development in
South Korea (hereafter Korea) in comparison with the experiences of other
countries. The time frame of the analysis is from the early 19603 to the mid
19903 with a special focus on the time period from 1961 to 1987 which I believe
best represents the operations of the developmental state in Korea.

Power concentration in the Korean urban system is extreme. All decision-
making seems to be taking place in Seoul. However, the population is modestly
decentralized among other cities. Income discrepancies among cities is not
signiﬁcant. Nor is the contrast between wealthy neighborhoods and poor ones
in Seoul as stark as in other major cities in the world.

This urban pattern deviates from the assumption that power, population
and wealth go hand in hand. Most urban researchers think that uneven
urbanization is a function of the economy, and that the less developed countries
have more serious urban inequalities than developed countries on each
dimension: power, population, and wealth.

I name this puzzling pattern of urbanization in Korea, “Confucian

developmental urbanization,” as I believe that the phenomena can be

understood only by using a concept widely accepted among social scientists

studying the economic development of Northeast Asia; the developmental state.
As will be detailed later on, many scholars argue that the state in Korea has
been more in charge of the society than the “regulatory' states in the West. The
bourgeoisie was not the powerholder in Korean society. Bureaucrats made the
important decisions about what to produce, how to produce, and how to reinvest
the surplus.

In contrast to the Western bourgeoisie who believed in the high ideal of
political freedom and the concept of a self-regulating market, Korean
bureaucrats have not cared much about either democratic procedures or the
sanctity of private property rights. The age-old Confucian tradition of “rule by
the scholar-ofﬁcial” helped the public bear elitist decision-making by
meritocratically chosen bureaucrats. The experience of Japanese colonialism
(1910-1945) convinced Koreans of the need for national economic development
even at the cost of the “self-regulating market.” As will be explained in detail,
the Korean hegemonic ideology from the 19605 can be regarded as Confucian
developmentalism.

I believe that this study contributes to the existing urban literature in the
following ways. First, this study lays the ground for additional urban studies
using the Gramscian notion of “hegemonic ideology' as a conceptual tool.
Second, four distinct dimensions of uneven urbanization are analyzed. This may
help future researchers understand uneven urbanization at the national level,
and facilitate international dialogues comparing different urban combinations

around the globe. Third, I uncover a distinct combination characteristics in

Korean urbanization and term it ‘Confucian developmental urbanization,“ as I
believe that it results from a hegemonic ideology. This may help those
interested in Korean urbanization to understand the phenomena in its totality.
Fourth, the concept, “Confucian developmentalism,“ can be used to understand
other social aspects of Korean society. My analysis of the developmental state
and its ideology since the early 19608 provides a more balanced understanding
of Korea. Fifth, my analysis of how “Confucian developmentalism” was
translated into different dimensions of urbanization, provides a dynamic way of
understanding uneven urbanization as an expression of class interest and the
capacity of a class to go beyond its narrow interest.

The main task of this study is to ﬁnd out how the ruling ideology of the
developmental state in Korea guided the actual practices of urban development.
Chapter 1 starts by examining the concept of ideology in the writings of Antonio
Gramsci. My own interpretation of his notion of ideology is presented and will be
used as the working deﬁnition of ideology throughout the chapter. Ideologies in
some other societies will be also examined from a comparative perspective and
their relationship with urbanization will be mentioned. In chapter 2, the details of
“Confucian developmental urbanization” will be presented along with
explanations as to why this pattern is a new phenomenon deserving attention.
Chapter 3 attempts to answer the question of “who actually shaped Korean
urbanization from the early 19603 to the mid 19903?” This chapter reviews
previous attempts to understand the issue of uneven urbanization in Korea, and

ends with describing how the bureaucrats in Korea came to be powerful decision

makers since the 1960s. Chapter 4 attempts to show how the ideology of
Confucianism and nationalistic developmentalism held by high bureaucrats in
Korea motivated them to shape urban Korea in a speciﬁc way. Chapter 5 looks

into the urban policies and practices of bureaucrats guided by their ideology.

CHAPTER 1. IDEOLOGY AND URBANIZATION

When the Chinese Communists began to sweep toward victory in their
civil war with the Nationalists in 1948 they came into control of large cities
for the ﬁrst time - ﬁrst in Manchuria, and subsequently across all of
mainland China Although some radical elements among the new
rulers advocated dispersing up to half of the population of cities such as
Shanghai to the countryside, more moderate voices prevailed, and the
Chinese Communists did not adopt the radical measures against
urbanism that their Cambodian pupils later did. The leadership of the
Chinese Communist Party recognized that much of the strength and
vitality of Chinese society depended upon her cities, and that ways had to
be found to purge them of their evils and utilize their strengths. They set
out this task immediately, utilizing the experiences they had gained in
their rural base areas, advice and models borrowed from their Soviet
allies, and ad hoc experiments and improvisations designed to cope with
unfamiliar problems.

Some of the fundamental goals of the Chinese Communists in this
urban reform effort can be stated fairly simply. Foreign control and
inﬂuence should be eliminated. Cities should become spartan and
productive places with full employment, secure jobs with a range of fringe
beneﬁts, minimal income and life style differences, an end to conspicuous
consumption and lavish spending, and with decent consumption
standards for all. Crime, prostitution, drug addiction, begging, and other
social evils should be eliminated (Whyte and Parish, 1984:15—6).

In spite of the power of ideology in changing cities as shown in the case
of socialist urbanization, there has been ambivalence regarding the link between
ideology and urbanization. For example, Sjoberg (1965) takes technology to be
the key variable for explaining the nature of the industrial city. Sjoberg
(1965:252) adds that ideology has a secondary importance, saying that “the
scientiﬁc method seems to support and is itself sustained by an ideology that

gives rise to and promotes the democratic process, and such norms as

universalism and emphasis on achievement in modern bureaucracies.”
However, Sjoberg (19652220) also states that ideology facilitates urbanization by

providing people a rationale for living and for dying:

Nowadays most nations, large and small, are striving to achieve a higher
degree of industrial urbanization. Indeed, some countries are taxing all
their resources to achieve this goal Social orders farther down the
scale that have recently thrown off the colonial yoke have set their sights
on imitating the powerful nations. Most signiﬁcant of all is the fact that
societal rulers are implementing such policies even at the expense of the
traditional authority structure that supports their own power position.

' They recognize that unless the society industrializes and urbanizes, it
may revert to its former colonial status, a possibility that is so repugnant
that industrial urbanization becomes the lesser of the evils.

Ideology is also a secondary variable for Marxist urbanist, Castells
(1977). It is a mask the ruling class is wearing in order to keep people from
understanding the urban contradictions resulting from capitalist class relations.
For example, Castells argues that suburbanization in the US can be attributed to
the interest of monopoly capital. The role of suburbanization in the process of
capitalist accumulation was not limited to the capital directly invested in the
production of housing, highways, and public facilities. Rather, the whole
suburban social form became an extremely effective apparatus of individualized
commodity consumption and reproduction of existing class relations (Castells,

1977:388):

The shopping centers and the supermarkets were made possible by
suburban sprawl, as were the new leisure activities (from the drive-in
restaurant or cinema to the private swimming pool). But even more
important was the role of the single—family house in the suburb as the
perfect design for maximizing capitalist consumption. Every household
had to be self-sufﬁcient, from the refrigerator to the TV, including the
garden machinery, the do-it-yourself instruments, the electro-domestic
equipment, etc.

At the same time the suburban model of consumption had a very
clear impact on the reproduction of the dominant social relationships. At
the most elementary level, this whole domestic world was built on
borrowed money and the chronic indebtedness tied individuals into the
job market and into society in general in a most repressive way. Any
major deviation or failure of individuals to conform could immediately be
countered by withdrawal of access to consumer credit. Mass
consumption also meant mass dependency upon the economic and
cultural rules of the ﬁnancial institutions.

Castells (1977:388) argues that the pervasive “return to nature“ ideology
is just a “myth“ persuading the mass of wage workers that a degrading relation to
nature experienced in the industrial work process can be compensated for by a
satisfying relation to nature in “the community.”

However, Castells (1977:180) acknowledges the “relative autonomy' of
ideological symbols. For instance, Jeffersonianism, a ﬁne egalitarian ideal,
leads, in practice, to an increase in inequality between communities and barriers
of social distance through all kinds of discriminatory land-use regulations: large-
lot zoning, minimum house-size requirements, exclusion of multiple dwellings,
restrictive building codes and so on (Castells, 1977:180,392).

One interesting ﬁnding of my own is that Sjoberg and Castells are using

the term ideology with different connotations. To Sjoberg (1965), ideology has

more relevance in preindustrial cities which functioned as governmental and
religious centers. On the other hand, Castells (1977) treats ideology as
something deceptive if not insigniﬁcant.

I believe that ideology needs to be taken seriously and deﬁned without
negative connotations. This is why I start this chapter with the interpretation of
Gramsci’s major concepts: “ideology and “hegemonic ideology.” Ideologies
seem to have more relevance when they are not deﬁned as abstract ideas but as
embodied in the social practice of individuals and in the organization within
which social practices take place. Moreover, some of the ideologies are more
important because they are widely accepted across different classes in a
society.

Maybe ideology is part of the answer to one of the fundamental questions
of human history: how have the few have been able to dominate the many?
Ruling classes feel most secure when what they preach is embraced by the
masses and not just imposed upon the people at the point of a bayonet. When
what they preach loses its status as the common sense of the common people,
their privileged status is also in jeopardy.

As Eckert (1993:110) aptly points out, history is richly stocked with
forgotten classes, cliques, parties, and other groups who for one reason or
another were unable to move beyond the realm of coercion to popular support.
Eckert (1993) cites the recent collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern

Europe for contemporary examples of such failure.

10

After providing a working deﬁnition of ideology and hegemonic ideology,
the possibility of different ideologies in advanced capitalist societies as explored
by Gramsci will be examined. Gramsci was aware of the weakness of liberalism
in Italian society as contrasted with the strength of bourgeoisie ideology in
Western Europe and the US.

To better understand hegemonic ideology in modern Korea, the US and
Japan will be used as reference points. The hegemonic ideology in the US is
“Lockean liberalism.“ In Japan, it is “Confucian developmentalism.“ Lockean
liberalism supports social relations that are “economically unequal but politically
equal“ and Confucian developmentalism supports “politically authoritarian but
economically egalitarian“ social ties.

As will be detailed in chapter 4, Korea's hegemonic ideology is also
Confucian developmentalism. As Korea shares the same type of hegemonic
ideology as Japan, I will brieﬂy explore the link between ideology and
urbanization in Japan. As will be brieﬂy mentioned in the conclusion, Korea has
become more willing to embrace Lockean liberalism since the mid-19905. This
makes the link between American ideology and urbanization not only a good
counter-reference but also a future possibility in Korean urbanization. Having
that in mind, the continuum between Confucian developmentalism in Japan and
Lockean liberalism in the US may help us understand Korean urbanization as

part of the bigger picture.

11

' d ldeol
What kept Marxists puzzled during the time of Gramsci (1891-1937) was

the absence of socialist revolution in Western Europe. Boggs (1984:154) aptly
explains how the Marxist assumption that the proletariat in the developed

capitalist societies was an inherently revolutionary force came to be questioned:

Classical Marxism derived much of its ideological strength from a
convincing theoretical projection of imminent capitalist crisis leading to
systematic breakdown As the Erfurt Programme of German Social
Democracy made clear in 1891, the capitalist mode of production could
not be expected to survive its own explosive contradictions — an optimism
buttressed by an underlying mood of scientiﬁc certainty. By the turn of
the century, however, this scenario was beginning to lose its credibility,
especially in the more advanced countries (England, Germany, France,
Sweden, Holland) where capitalism had in fact consolidated its economic
and political power, and where the working class was not being
transformed into a cohesive revolutionary force. Instead of the
anticipated class polarization, leading to widespread socialist
consciousness and insurrectionary politics, the overwhelming trend was
toward stabilization, a fragmented class consciousness, and political
refonnism.

Ideology became an issue. Rosa Luxemberg was one of the Marxists
who shared this doubt and started to look into the question of worker
consciousness. From Luxemburg's perspective, the problem was proletarian
“immaturity,“ in which subjective factors lagged behind objective conditions
(Boggs, 19842154).

Gramsci took a slightly different approach, looking into the ideological

dominance of the bourgeoisie. According to Gramsci, the resilience of Western

12

capitalism stems from the bourgeois leadership in civil society through
organizations such as schools, the media, churches, trade unions and political
parties (Salamini, 1981; Bellamy and Schecter, 1993).

In one of the best-known passages in Prison Notebooks, Gramsci
. (19712238; as cited in Simon 1982:28) explains how civil society functioned as “a

fortress“ of capitalism in Western Europe:

In Russia the state was everything, civil society was primordial and
gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and
civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society
was at once revealed.

Whether Gramsci’s emphasis on ideology deviates from the Marxian
belief in the primacy of material conditions in human history is beyond the
boundary of this study to answer. This section has the modest goal of outlining
the concepts of “ideology' and “hegemonic ideology' in the Gramscian sense.

I will just point out that Gramsci ﬁrmly believed in the importance of the
material base but also felt there was room for ideology in Marxian logic. In his
article, The Modern Prince, Gramsci vehemently argues that Marxism is not

synonymous with economism (1957:155):

One point of reference for the study of economism and for understanding
the relationship between structure and superstructure is that passage
from The Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx says that an important phase
in the development of the social group is that in which the single
components of a trade union do not struggle any longer only for their own

13

economic interests, but for the defense and development of the
organization itself. This should be remembered together with Engel’s
statement that only in the “last analysis” is the economy the mainspring of
history (in his two letters on Marxism published also in Italian), and taken
together with the passage in the Preface to the critique of Political
Economy where it says that it is in the ﬁeld of ideologies that men become
aware of the conﬂict which takes place in the economic world.

Gramsci (1957:156-61) states that economism (1) does not take account
of the formation of economic classes but assumes a mean and usurious self-
interest, (2) has reduced economic development to a succession of technical
changes, and (3) has resulted in fatalistic ﬁnalism. In such ways of thinking,
Gramsci (1957:160) asserts, there is no understanding of how mass ideological
facts always lag behind mass economic phenomena and how the automatic
drive of the economic factor is slowed down, cramped, or even broken up
momentarily by traditional ideological elements.

For Marx, “ideology' means “false consciousness.“ Ideology is a
distortion of reality; but even more, it stands reality upon its head (Lichtman,
1975247). In The German Ideology, Marx explains the distortion; power over
material production confers power over the production of consciousness

(1967:438; as cited in Lichtman, 1975:53-4):

In every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, that is,
the class that is the ruling material power of society is at the same time its
ruling intellectual power. The class having the means of material
production has also control over the means of intellectual production.

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the
dominant material relationships grasped as ideas, hence of the

14

relationships which make one class the ruling one and therefore the ideas
of its domination. The individuals who comprise the ruling class possess
among other things consciousness and thought. Insofar as they rule as a
class and determine the extent of a historical epoch, it is self-evident that
they do it in its entire range. Among other things they rule also as
thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and
distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of

the epoch.

I think Gramsci ﬁrmly agreed that bourgeois ideology was used to
legitimate their exploitation of workers. However, it seems he did not think that
an ideology is necessarily false. Each ideology is the same in that it serves the
interest of a class, but different in the class served.

Gramsci's creativity is his ability to change the meaning of “ideology'
while staying in the Marxian tradition. For him, communism is also an ideology,
a morally superior ideology representing the interest of workers. So, communist
leaders are preachers of this “true“ ideology and critics of “false“ capitalist
ideologies.

l interpret Gramsci's notion of ideology as “a socially embedded
worldview serving the interest of a class.“ I used the expression “socially
embedded“ because of the historical materiality Gramsci assigned to the term
“ideology.“ Simon (1982:58-60) argues that the Gramscian notion of ideology is
not individual fancy, rather it is embodied in communal modes of living and

acting:

15

For Gramsci, ideology is more than a system of ideas Ideologies have
material existence in the sense that they are embodied in the social
practice of individuals and in the organization within which these social
practices take place. These organizations include the political parties,
trade unions and other organizations forming part of civil society; the
various apparatuses of the state; and economic organizations such as
industrial and commercial companies and ﬁnancial institutions. All these
bodies play a part in elaborating, sustaining, and spreading ideologies.

The term “worldview' is used to represent the broad nature of ideology.
Boggs (1980: 60) argues that the Gramscian notion of ideology encompasses
the whole range of values, attitudes, beliefs, cultural norms, and legal precepts
that permeate a society. As a worldview, ideology guides the everyday lives of
people like religion does. According to Gramsci (1971 :367; Simon, 1982258),
ideology is equivalent to “a religion understood in the secular sense a unity

. between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct.“

Gramsci seeks to demonstrate that every socially embedded

worldview “serves the interest of a class“ by analyzing how professional
organizations evolve into a class. In the ﬁrst moment of collective political
consciousness, a professional organization does not have a class
consciousness. Group solidarity falls short of spreading to other groups in the
class (Gramsci, 1971 :181 )2

A tradesman feels obliged to stand by another tradesman, a manufacturer

by another manufacturer, etc, but the tradesman does not yet feel

solidarity with the manufacturer; in other words, the members of the
professional group are conscious of its unity and homogeneity, and of the

need to organize it, but in the case of the wider social group this is not yet
so.

16

In the second moment, class consciousness is reached but is still mostly
preoccupied with class interest in the economic ﬁeld and not yet forming an

ideology that can seriously contend with other worldviews (Gramsci 19712181):

Already at this juncture the problem of the State is posed - but only in
terms of winning politico—juridical equality with the ruling groups: the right
is claimed to participate in legislation and administration, even to reform
these - but within the existing fundamental structures.

In the third moment, one becomes aware that one’s own corporate
interests, in their present and future development, transcend the corporate limits
of the purely economic class, and must become the interests of other

subordinate groups too (Gramsci, 1971:181):

This is the most purely political phase, and marks the decisive passage
from the structure to the sphere of the complex superstructures; it is the
phase in which previously germinated ideologies come into confrontation
and conﬂict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of
them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself
throughout society - bringing about not only a unison of economic and
political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the
questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a
“universal“ plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental
social group over a series of subordinate groups.

In this third moment, an ideology becomes “hegemonic,“ another term of
Gramsci's. I understand “hegemonic ideology' as equivalent to “ideology

accepted by the majority of the population.“ Every ideology basically serves the

17

interest of a class, but some come to be perceived by other classes as serving
the broader “public interest.“ Then, the ideology is “hegemonic.“

In order for a class to become hegemonic, it has to go beyond sectional,
or what Gramsci calls “economic-corporate“ struggles. And, the class must be
prepared to become the national representative of a broad block of social forces
(Simon, 1982223).

A class succeeds in securing ideological hegemony over society through
leadership (which is based on consent) and not through domination (which is
based on coercion). Gramsci wrote (19712365; Salamini, 1981) that leadership

is what makes and keeps a group dominant over other groups:

A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before
winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions
for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it
exercises power, but even if it holds it ﬁrmly in its grasp, it must continue
to ‘Iead' as well.

The term “hegemony“ is derived from the Greek hegeisthar', which means
“to be a guide“ or “to be a ruler“ (Pellicani, 1981232). With this term, Gramsci
sought to express the idea that the supremacy of one class over others can not
be reduced to a relationship of mere coercion; on the contrary, the dialectic of
“dominant class - dominated class“ is almost always based on a tight web of
relationships that imply direction; in other words, it suggests the capacity of the
upper class to satisfy certain objective needs of a society, such as legal

administration, management of economic and administrative activities, cultural

18

production, and elaboration of models of exemplary behavior (Pellicani,

1981:32).

Having deﬁned hegemonic ideology, it is useful to examine its
characteristics in anticipation of my later application of the term to urbanization
in Korea. Hegemonic ideology has several characteristics: (1) national-popular,
(2) common-sense oriented, and (3) and contradiction-embracing.

Hegemonic ideology has national-popular elements which do not arise out
of the relations of production. For example, a nation which is oppressed by
another develops traditions of struggle for national liberation, and in the course
of history the people of every country develop powerful ideas, expressed by
terms like ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’ which can, as Gramsci says, have the
force of popular religions (Simon, 1982:42-3). A hegemonic class is one which
succeeds in combining these patriotic struggles and ideas with its own class
interests so as to achieve national leadership (Simon, 1982:43).

Once an ideology has been accepted and internalized by the majority of
the population, it appears as “common sense,“ i.e., as the “traditional popular
conception of the world“ (Gramsci, 1971; as cited in Boggs, 19842161 ).

Common sense is not rigid or ﬁxed. In his essay, The Study of Philosophy,
Gramsci (1971:326) wrote about the ﬂexible, enriching nature of commonsense:

Every philosophical current leaves behind a sediment of “common sense”;

this is the document of its effectiveness. Common sense is not something

rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself

with scientiﬁc ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered
ordinary life.

19

 

Even though he doesn’t mention much about this issue, I believe he was
aware of the contradictory nature of hegemonic ideology. Common sense is full
of contradictions. Common sense is the uncritical and largely unconscious way
in which a person perceives the world, often confused and contradictory, and
compounded of folklore, myths, and popular experience (Simon, 1982225).

As all classes who contend for hegemonic position try to embrace
“traditional“ or “national-popular“ elements in a society, there are logical ‘
inconsistencies in hegemonic ideologies. For example, one may ﬁnd it logically
incoherent to combine Marxism and nationalism. To Gramsci, however, it may
be perceived as an appropriate strategy for the proletariat as combining .
nationalism helps to build a system of alliances. In Prison Notebooks, Gramsci
pointed out the need for communists to be “intellectuals who are conscious of
being linked organically to a national-popular mass (1971:204)“ rather than
elites separated from the masses.

Having developed a working deﬁnition of “ideology“ and “hegemonic
ideology,“ I will now focus on how Gramsci dealt with the issue of Ideology in
comparative perspective and show how his analysis can be extended to shed

some light on the case of Korean ideology.

20

ifferent ldeol ies?

Gramsci thought that bourgeois ideology in Italy was different from other
Western European countries. “Liberalism“ was the hegemonic ideology in most
Western European countries. But bourgeois ideology in Italy fell short of being
liberal and failed to draw legitimacy from the masses.

Gramsci associated economic liberalism in Western Europe with free
trade and minimal state regulation over economic activities on behalf of the

bourgeoisie (1971:159-160):

The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error
whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a
distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into
and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely
methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil
society, and that the state must not intervene to regulate it. But since in
actual reality civil society and state are one and the same, it must be
made clear that laissez—faire too is a form of state “regulation“, introduced
and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate
policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic
expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a
political programme dealing with a fraction of the ruling class which
wishes to modify not the structure of the state, but merely government
policy; which wishes to reform the laws controlling commerce, but only
indirectly those controlling industry.

Gramsci associated political liberalism with the separation of state
powers. The division of powers in the state enables a rotation of leading-class

parties in government and channels regulation in a way favorable to the

21

bourgeoisie (Gramsci, 19712160). According to Gramsci (19712246), making
posts elective, through a permanent Constituent Assembly or the election at
ﬁxed intervals of the Head of State, gives the illusion of satisfying popular
demand.

In contrast, the Italian bourgeoisie failed to establish liberalism as the
hegemonic ideology. Gramsci found the answer in Italian history. According to
Gramsci, the Risorgimento of the 1860s and 1870s, despite its vision of Italian
uniﬁcation, did not achieve a bourgeois-democratic revolution as in France
where the Jacobin force awakened and organized the national-popular collective
will (Boggs, 1984:172-3). The architect of uniﬁcation had been the Moderate
Party, composed of the followers of the Piedmontese monarchy and the agrarian
elites (Bellamy and Schecter, 19932148). With the sole purpose of maintaining
their socio-economic position by securing political power, they achieved this goal
through a mixture of conquest and power-broking with foreign nations, the
bourgeoisie, and sections of the working class (Bellamy and Schecter,
1993:1439). Southern peasants were not included in the system based upon
collusion between Northern industrialists and Southern landowners, leaving
Southern Italy in “the status of a semi-colonial market, a source of savings and
taxes“ (Gramsci, 1971 :94; as cited in Boggs, 19842174).

Italy‘s late entrance into the capitalist system led to a less liberal state.
Economic nationalism won out over liberalism (Boggs, 1984249). In Origins of

the Mussolini Cabinet, Gramsci (19782129) also points out the absence of

22

separation of powers within the state and the predicament of the Italian

bourgeois state:

No separation of powers had yet taken place; parliamentary prerogatives
were very limited; there did not exist large scale parliamentary political
parties. At that time, the Italian bourgeoisie had to defend the unity and
integrity of the State against repeated attacks by reactionary forces,
represented above all by an alliance between the big landowners and the
Vatican. The big industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, led by Giovanni
Giolitti, sought to resolve the problem with an alliance between all the
urban classes and the class of agricultural wage laborers. What was
involved, however, was not some parliamentary process. It was rather a
question of patemalist concessions of an immediate kind, which the
regime made to the toiling masses organized in trade unions and
agricultural cooperatives.

Korea, since the 19603, shares a characteristic with Italy before the

WWII: the absence of hegemonic bourgeois liberalism.

American ldeolggy vs. Japanese ldeolggy

As already summarized, Gramsci discussed the complexity of ideology
and the existence of different ideologies among capitalist societies. 1 will now
compare the ideological compositions of Japan and the US as a prelude to the
analysis of hegemonic ideology in Korea. Japan and the US have dominant
positions in the world economy. In The Modern Prince, Gramsci (19572170)
mentioned that ideologies in more developed countries diffuse to less developed
countries where they combine with local worldviews. As a matter of fact, Japan

and the US have exerted the most foreign inﬂuence over the history of modem

23

Korea. Japan colonized Korea from 1910-1945. After that, South Korea came
under the geo-political umbrella of the US. About 37,000 US forces are still
stationed in Korea (Korea Times, 1998).

The contrast between hegemonic ideologies in the US and Japan is also
of interest. As mentioned, Gramsci thought liberalism had most rooted in the
US. On the other hand, liberalism is absent from Japanese ideology
(Morishima, 1982).

Fajnzlber’s (1990) article on the United States and Japan as models of
industrialization shows how ideologies in the two societies are different and how
they diffused into the ideologies of neighboring developing countries. According
to Fajnzlber (1990), key aspects of the development patterns in Korea and the
Latin American NICs - Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico - may be understood as
outgrowths of efforts to emulate the Japanese and American development
experiences, respectively. Having Japan as the source of inspiration, post-1960
Korea emphasized saving, strategic industrialization, and international
competitiveness.

Latin American elite strata, on the other hand, sought primarily to
reproduce the “American way of life.“ Latin American development is
characterized by (1) consumption trends that are heavily skewed in favor of
urban elite groups at the expense of the rural and lower income majorities and
(2) productive structures that are biased toward production for domestic rather

than external markets (Fajnzylber, 1990:324-5).

24

 

Fajnzylber (1990:325-6) argues that different development patterns in
Japan and the United States are at least partially rooted in their distinctive

contemporary histories:

The internal legitimacy of Japanese political leadership is inextricably
linked with the successful recovery of national dignity. As a smaller
insular nation with scarce national resources, Japan has constructed its
economic power via careful sectoral strategies and long-range planning.
In return, the resulting pattern of vigorous growth has legitimated the
Japanese political leadership and existing institutional arrangements. On
the other hand, the United States has become accustomed to the role of
the paramount global power in the post World War II era. The United
States has served as a model for other nations by virtue of its language,
the strength of its currency, the attractiveness of its afﬂuent life-style, and
its productive, continental economy.

As reﬂected in their economic development pattern, the hegemonic
ideologies in the US and Japan are quite different. Whereas U.S. hegemonic
ideology is best represented by Lockean liberalism, the Japanese counterpart is

Confucian developmentalism.

Lockean Liberalism in America

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it.1

25

There is not much disagreement that liberalism has been the hegemonic
ideology in the US. Gramsci regarded the United States as the society in which
the liberal bourgeoisie had established the most complete ideological
hegemony. Gramsci attributes strong bourgeois hegemony in the US to (1) the
absence of a feudal stage of development, (2) an optimistic vision of progress
through economic growth implanted by the early colonialists, and (3) a strong
presence of the Protestant ethic emphasizing efﬁciency, private property, and
proﬁts (Boggs, 1984: 178-80).

Fukuyama (198925), who made the sensational argument about “the
universalization of Western liberalism,“ believes that liberalism in America has
not changed much since the Declaration of Independence, and the basic
principles of liberalism in America cannot be improved upon. Huntington (1981)
also argues that liberalism has been broadly supported by most elements in
American society and has changed little in the course of two hundred years.

Then, how have previous thinkers deﬁned liberalism in America? In The
Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz (1955:4) claimed to use the term “liberalism”
in the classic Lockean sense, and Lodge (1975) deﬁned American liberalism
using the term “Lockean ideology' as composed of three elements (1)
individualism, (2) property rights, and (3) a limited state. These meanings of

liberalism came to the US across the Atlantic Ocean from England just as

 

' Thomas Jefferson, 1975 “The Declaration of Independence” p. 235 in the Portable Thomas Jeﬂerson
edited by Merrill D. Peterson. Baltimore, MDzPenguin.

26

Confucianism in Japan can be traced to the teachings of Confucius in China
across the East China Sea.

According to Locke, society is made up of independent individuals who
contract with others into a community (Dunning, 19052232; Simon, 1951 :391 ).
In The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke describes how this voluntary
formation of society is associated with political equality and the rule of the

majority (19462127; as cited in Simon, 19512391):

Men being by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be
put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another,
without his own consent When any number of men have
consented to make one community or government, they are thereby
presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority
have a right to act and conclude the rest For that which acts any
community being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being
necessary to that which is one body to move one way, it is necessary the
body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is
the consent of the majority

Locke does not think human nature is communitarian. He does not
believe in organic social principles, nor does he adhere to a moral philosophy
based upon a vision of community (Lodge, 1975: 93).

The rights of property come from the status of “atomized“ man. Because
Locke regarded individuals as the proprietors of their own person, they are able
to acquire property freely (Locke 1959:58; Post, 19862149): “Whatsoever he

removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed

27

his Labor with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it
his Property.“

Locke’s dictum that “The great and chief and of Men’s uniting into
commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation
of their Property (The Second Treatise of Civil Government Section 124)“ is
echoed some one hundred years later by Madison in The Federalist Papers in
these words (Lodge, 19752101): “The protection of these faculties [the diversity
in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate] is the ﬁrst
object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of
acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property
immediately results.“

The role of the state also starts with the needs of individuals. According
to Locke, the purpose of social contracts among individuals is the protection and
preservation of property in the broad sense of the word — that is life, liberty, and
estate - against dangers both from within and without the community (Dunning,
1905:232). Dunning (1905:232-3) argues that the voluntary nature of political
authority leads to a state limited in power:

The social contract involves an agreement by each individual to give up

his natural right of executing the law of nature and punishing offences

against that law. Each resigns, not all his natural rights, as Hobbes held,
but merely this single right. This right, moreover, is given up, not to any
particular person or group of persons, but to the community as a whole.

The society thus becomes, by the act of individuals who form it, vested

with the functions of determining what are against the law of nature and

punishing violations of that law, and these functions constitute, in Locke’s
view, the whole scope of political authority. There is in this conception

nothing of that absolute, unlimited, and uncontrollable sovereignty which
was the soul of Hobbes’ system.

28

'Politically Egual 9g! Emigllx ”mual'

According to the Census Bureau, from 1989 to 1993 the typical American
household lost $2,344 in real annual income, a fall of 7 percent.
Practically all the rise in national income went to the top one ﬁfth (with
48.2 per cent of national income against the bottom one ﬁfth’s 3.6 per
cent), while the earnings of college educated workers stagnated, and the
number of households in poverty (with less than 314.763 per annum at
1993 prices) increased from 13.1 per cent to 15.1 per cent. In other
words, the average American family paid for the windfall gains of the rich,
while the poorest families paid most of all. The "liberated" free market
meant free handouts for the rich paid for by the poor. As Robert B. Reich,
Secretary for Labor, remarked, “America has the most unequal
distribution of income of any industrialized nation in the world.“ (Perkin,

1 996:35)

This section focuses on two urban-related characteristics of liberalism in
America: one is the much-touted “political equality“ and the other is the less-
publicized “economic inequality.“

The political aspect of Lockean liberalism has been well known to the
American people. Locke’s two basic premises are reﬂected in the American
Declaration of Independence: All men are born free and equal; and the origin
and basis of government is in the consent of the governed (Lodge, 1975293).

Locke’s “political equality“ emphasizes individualism and the limited state.
Closely tied to Lockean individualism is the idea of equality implied in the phrase
“equal opportunity“ (Lodge, 1975110). In the American colonies, the removal of

overt distinctions between classes (titles and so forth) and British libertarianism

29

had produced a situation where political equality was taken to be the basic
presupposition of all government (lngersoll and Mattews, 1991 :56).

In A Letter Conoeming Toleration published in 1689, Locke argues that
government may not interfere with any individual’s religious beliefs (lngersoll
and Matthews, 1991236). This public~private dichotomy eventually develops the
groundwork for the creation of civil rights, that is, rights individuals have that
neither the state nor society may interfere with. In the United States, this idea of
civil rights ﬁnds its clearest expression in the ﬁrst ten amendments to the United
States Constitution, usually called the Bill of Rights (Ingersoll and Mattews,
1991237). The reason why Fukuyama claims that American ideology has
changed little, even with the inclusion of women and minorities, may be because
those changes have taken place within the basic premises of liberalism; that is
“political equality.“

Of course, the abstract values of liberty and equality mean nothing
without the ability to fulﬁll them. lngersoll and Matthews (1991295) raise a

provocative question:

A person residing in the United States possesses a theoretical freedom or
right to leave that country for any other place in the world. That
theoretical freedom does not, however, put the money in his or her pocket
that will permit the exercise of this right. Isn’t a person similarly situated,
but who possesses the means to exercise the abstract right of free
movement, actually more free than one who does not?

30

The economic means to fulﬁll basic rights in America is a more
contentious aspect of American ideology, as it is obviously not one of the
manifest elements. Some scholars deny that there are negative characteristics
in American liberalism. For example, F ukuyama (198929) argues that the
underlying legal and social structure of the US has remained fundamentally
egalitarian and moderately redistributionalist. According to Fukuyama (198929),
economic inequality in US society should not be blamed on liberalism but on the
legacy of premodem conditions, such as slavery and racism.

One way to evaluate Fukuyama’s argument about economically
egalitarian liberalism is to go back to the historical origin of Lockean ideology.
Polanyi (1944238) argues that the struggle between King and Parliament was
partly because the Tudors and early Stuarts used the power of the Crown to
slow down the process of economic growth until it became socially bearable -
employing the power of the central government to relieve the victims of the
transformation, and attempting to canalize the process of change so as to make
its course less devastating.

According to Polanyi (1944:33-4), economic liberals insisted on judging
social events from the economic viewpoint and were willing to achieve
improvement at the price of social dislocation. Polanyi (1944235) called

enclosures “a revolution of the rich against the poor“:

31

 

The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down
ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by
pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their
share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto
unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and
their heirs’. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages
and the ruins of human dwellings testiﬁed to the ﬁerceness with which the
revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its
towns, decimating its population, turning its over-burdened soil into dust,
harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a
mob of beggars and thieves.

By placing the sanctity of the individual’s quest for property over social
protection, Locke provided a logic that embraces economic inequality. Because
property was something inherent in the individual and subject to only minimal
regulation by government, Locke's notion of a free market economy became an
individualist liberal dogma (lngersoll and Mattews, 1991291-2).

Second, the Lockean position regarding property rights led to a belief that
since property is sacred in its own right, men of property deserve power and
honor (Lodge, 19752109). Locke argued that those who have used their labor to
appropriate property are these who have most obeyed God’s will - they are the
most rational as well as the most industrious (Post, 1986:149-50).

Third, Locke’s proclamation of property as a natural right was designed to
justify the rights of a rising group of acquisitive entrepreneurs against the

monarchy (Lodge, 1975:101-2).

32

Locke was less tolerant when it came to the issue of poverty. He was a
determined enemy of beggars and the idle poor, believing that an impoverished
family had no right to expect leisure for its children after they passed the age of
three (Laslett, 1967243; Lodge, 19752102).

Lockean logic later inﬂuenced the ideas of Adam Smith and Charles
Darwin. Locke’s individualism was reinforced by Smith’s emphasis on man’s
self-reliance, his “constant effort to better his own condition,“ which if allowed to
progress in a free, competitive environment, would insure a good community“
(Lodge, 19752101). This belief was at the root of Smith’s labor theory of value:
“The property which everyman has is his own labor, as it is the original
foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable (Wealth of
Nations, Book 1 Chap. X, Part 2)“ (Lodge, 19752101 ). Implicit in early America’s
conception of property rights was the assumption that if each individual used his
property for his own self-interest, a good community would result (Lodge,

1 975:1 1 5).

During the 1880’s, the Lockean basis for Iaissez-faire capitalism received
an important boost from Charles Darwin's notion of natural selection (Lodge,
19752119). Darwin’s discoveries were translated into human terms by the
English sociologist Herbert Spencer, who argued that, as with animals, so with
men - the ﬁt survive. His trip through America in 1882 was greeted with
religious enthusiasm (Lodge, 19752119). Spencer railed against social
legislation as an infringement upon individual rights and the sanctity of the

contract (Lodge, 197521 19)

33

Thus, Lockean liberalism in US included Locke's emphasis on property
rights but also competition and survival- of-the-ﬁttest. The emphasis on
“competition“ as the means to acquire more property came from Smith. Lockean
liberalism absorbed the Smithian idea that the uses of property are best
controlled by each individual proprietor competing in an open market to satisfy
individual consumer desires.

The notion of “survival of the ﬁttest“ was added to Lockean liberalism
mainly by Darwinian idea that the inexorable process of evolution is constantly
working to improve nature. The Darwinian idea helped emerging capitalists
argue that inequity is an inevitable consequence of some men pursuing their
self-interest with more passion and skill than others, a system of distribution by
natural selection that Keynes compared to giraffes with the longest necks getting
nearest to the trees "by dint of starving out the others." (Eckert, 19932121).

This more aggressive version of Lockean liberalism imported by America

comes close to Polanyi's (1944) description of the liberal creed:

The idea that the economy should be organized through self-regulating
markets; where markets are natural and spontaneous contacts between
buyers and sellers; where labor, land and money are commodities for sale
on the market; where anything interfering with market competition distorts
the collective interests; and where the economy is thus separated from
the polity and in command.

34

Lockean liberalism explains why the capitalists in America have been self-
righteous about their enormous wealth. In 1892, for example, at the height of
early American capitalism, the authors of a book on the “marvelous career“ of

ﬁnancier and railroad speculator Jay Gould wrote that (Eckert, 19932121 )2

The equitable distribution of wealth, the riches that arise from the soil, the
climate, the intelligence, the toil, the skill, the thrift of the country at large
is a most difﬁcult problem, and has thus far been an impossible task. If
there is a mass of value in the possession of one man equal to
$100,000,000, can we be quite sure that in the long run and in the largest
way, it would be better to parcel it out into a hundred fortunes of a million
each, or that any further subdivision would more completely answer the
highest social requirements.

At the end of the nineteenth century, business leaders answered the
attacks on the abuses of big business by asserting that business is the temple of
America's traditional ideology, from where all blessings ﬂow (Lodge, 19752120).
The iron-master Abram S. Hewitt protested popular hostility to business

(Kirkland, 19562127; Lodge, 19752120):

It is curious that the mass of the people of this country should fail to
recognize their best friends, because corporations have been the only
barrier between the despotism of ignorance and the invasion of the rights
of property. Doubtless they abuse their privileges at times, but they alone
have the ability and courage to resist attack, and they are doing the work
which was done by Jefferson and Madison in the early years of the
Republic.

35

Lastly, how was liberalism able to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the
common people? The most obvious answer is the electoral process. As Eckert
(19932116) has pointed out, capitalist ideological hegemony in the West has
rested on the historical role of the bourgeoisie not only in generating national
wealth but also in championing revolutionary values of economic and political
freedom that have great popular appeal. Gramsci (19712246) was aware of this
popular appeal, but critically commented that “in Republics, the election at ﬁxed
intervals of the Head of State gives the illusion of satisfying this elementary
popular demand.“

One might be puzzled about the economic aspect of liberalism. As
mentioned, economic liberalism implies “economic inequality.“ In America,
economic liberalism has been interpreted as meaning “economic opportunity.“ It
may have something to do with America’s rich resources and dependence on
immigrants as sources of labor which have made the motto of the “American
dream“ appealing.

Education is another factor that has sustained the “American dream.“
Even with the inadequate educational environment in many American schools
due to limits on local ﬁnancing, the American dream still serves as a
“meritocratic illusion.“ All these factors help explain why the American corporate
class has sustained its powers without conceding more egalitarian policies to the

working class, such as national health care, as in Europe.

36

Oman Developmentalism in Japan

Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and
everlasting and have deeply and ﬁrmly implanted virtue; Our subjects are
united in loyalty and ﬁlial piety and have from generation to generation
illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental
character of Our Empire, and heroin also lies the source of Our education
(Imperial Rescript on Education issued by the Meiji Emperor in 1890).

Just as American capitalists took Lockean liberalism as self-evident truth,
Japanese bureaucrats since the Meiji revolution considered Confucian
developmentalism as their orthodox religion. Just as the American elite found
their “universal truth“ helpful in legitimating their appetite for proﬁt, the governing
elite in Japan since 1868 has been pleased with the role of “modern religion“ in
maintaining the prestige and power of the organization they belong to.

I argue that Confucian developmentalism has three deﬁning
characteristics that are symmetrical counterparts to Lockean liberalism: (1)
familism, (2) managed national economy, and (3) extensive state.

Whereas individualism in the Lockean tradition meant the individuals’
freedom from the restrictions of the communitarian feudal order, familism in
Confucianism means keeping individuals within the boundary of family, extended
family, family-like organizations, and the family state. Individuals can not be
separated from family because “self-cultivation,“ the utmost value in

Confucianism, starts from cultivating meaningful relationships with family

37

members (Tu, 1998a213). Confucianism has tremendous faith in the possibility
of ordinary human beings becoming awe inspiring sages through personal and
communal endeavor (Tu, 1998a28).

The emphasis on family had signiﬁcant political ramiﬁcation as it made a
family the unit of governance. When Confucius (551-479 BC.) was asked why
he did not take part in government, he responded by citing a passage from an
ancient classic, the Book of Documents, to show that what one does in the
conﬁnes of one’s private home is politically signiﬁcant: “Simply by being a good
son and friendly to his brothers a man can exert an inﬂuence upon govemmentl“
(Tu, 19983212). When Confucius responded that taking care of family affairs is
itself active participation in politics, he made it clear that family ethics is not
merely a private and personal concern because the public good is realized by
and through it (Tu, 199Ba:13). Confucians are fond of applying the family
metaphor to the community, the country, and the universe: addressing the
emperor as the son of Heaven, the king as ruler-father, and the magistrate as
the “father-mother ofﬁcial“ (Tu, 1998a213).

A famous passage in the Great Learning shows the importance of family
as a linkage between personal cultivation and public affairs (Smith Jr.,

1959213):

Their hearts being rectiﬁed, their persons were cultivated. Their persons
being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being
regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly
governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

38

This incremental nature of the Confucian political world may have
something to do with the distinctiveness of familism as contrasted with
individualism and collectivism. Mencius (371-289 80.), who was allegwa
educated by a student of Confucius’s grandson, criticized the ideologies of Mo
Tzu’s collectivism and Yang Chu’s (440-360 BC.) individualism (Tu, 1998a:
14,15). During the period of 550-200 8.0., a golden age in classical Chinese
thought which is known as the age of the “hundred philosophers,“ Mo Tzu
advocated “universal love“ and Yan Chu argued for the “primacy of the self.“
Mencius contended that the result of the Moist admonition to treat a stranger as
intimately as one would treat one’s own father would be to treat one’s own father
as indifferently as one would treat a stranger, and excessive attention to
individual self-interest will lead to political disorder (Tu, 1998a24,15).

This emphasis on family has been one of the integral elements in
Japanese Confucianism as well. In Japan, Confucianism was introduced via
Korea about 404 AD. (Smith Jr., 1959). During the Tokugawa Era (1603-1867),
Confucianism was a moral code for the samurai class and gradually spread to
rich farmers and merchants (Morishma, 1982). Confucian family ethics are
found in guild regulations during Tokugawa times (Smith Jr., 1959):

We shall require children to respect their parents, servants to obey their

masters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, to live in harmony,

and the young to revere and cherish their elders, in short, we will
endeavor to lead the people to walk righteously.

39

\NIth the Meiji revolution (1867), Confucianism became a hegemonic
ideology. One of the values in the Imperial Rescript on Education was ﬁlial piety:
“Our subjects are united in loyalty and ﬁlial piety and have from generation to
generation illustrated the beauty thereof.“ Postwar Japan has maintained
familism through various institutions. For example, lifetime employment and
seniority-based wages and promotion, and company (rather than trade) based
unions all share an emphasis upon the company as a “family“ and therefore
encourage relationships between employees and the company which are not
viewed as contractual but as moral commitments (Omatowski, 19962582).
Morishima (198228) acknowledges that modernization in Japan did not replace
familism with individualism:

Throughout Japanese history up to the present individualism has never
prospered, and, as a result, a strong, serious advocacy of liberalism has
been virtually non-existent. The Japanese have been required to obey
their rulers, to serve their parents, to honor their elders
The second deﬁning characteristic of Confucian developmentalism,

“managed national economy,“ came from putting national wealth above private
property. The emphasis on national economic development in Japan started
with the slogan of the Meiji revolution: “a rich country and a strong army.“

However, the formation of developmentalism as a unique economic
paradigm took place only after the Manchurian Incident in 1931 (Gao, 1997).
Japan’s attempt to solve economic problems by expanding its military power in

mainland Asia, drove Japan into a military confrontation with Western powers

40

who had vested interests in East Asia (Gao, 1997273). Branded an aggressor
by allegedly “racist“ Western countries, the global trend toward resumed block
economies led the Japanese to articulate an economic ideology geared to
strengthen national production in preparation for full-scale war.

“Competition“ and “Proﬁt“ had to be managed for the good of the national
economy during the war period of 1931-1945. For example, cartels were
established in each industry to prevent “excessive competition“ from forcing
private companies into bankruptcy (Gao, 1997226). The proﬁt principle was
strongly challenged not only by the managed ﬂow of capital into the munitions
industries but also by the bureaucratic control over dividends in private
companies (Gao, 1997227).

Despite the postwar changes in Japan’s economic institutions and
national purpose, developmentalism has remained fundamental to Japanese
industrial policy (Gao, 1997214). The ideology advocates an economic system
based on private ownership and market economy, but run with the goal of
augmenting national wealth rather than individual well-being.

In order to achieve this national objective, proﬁt and competition are still
managed. The pursuit of shareholders’ proﬁt was still regarded as conﬂicting
with the national goal of building up competitiveness in strategic industries,
which required companies to invest more and pay out less in dividends (Gao,
19972185). Liberalization of trade and capital investment since the 1960s did
not lead to greater competition. As underscaled business operations were

perceived to be the major disadvantage of Japanese companies in competition

41

with Western companies, the state tried to limit competition through government
regulations and by encouraging cartels and business groups (Gao, 19972236).

The Third deﬁning characteristic of Confucian developmentalism,
“extensive state,“ is the result of the ﬁrst two characteristics. The need to
intervene in the market for national development makes the state’s role more
than simply a design to protect people and their property as in Lockean
liberalism. Instead, the state needs to set national priorities and implement them
even at the expense of private proﬁts.

The Confucian notion of “rule by the educated“ also gives bureaucrats
legitimacy to guide and mobilize people. Like social interaction in a family,
education means “self-cultivation.“ The Confucians believed that the self-
cultivated are not only philosophers but also teachers and statesmen (Tu,
1998a24). By giving legitimacy to the “scholar bureaucrats,“ Confucius rejected
the status quo during his time, which held that wealth and power spoke the
loudest (Tu, 1998a27).

It is a duty of a scholar to serve the country as a bureaucrat. According to
Mencius, scholars were busy serving their kings and society, just as farmers
were busy farming (Lou, 1997230). Zi Xia, one of Confucius’ students, remarked,
“Those who have done well at their ofﬁcial post should teach after retirement
and those who are excellent at their studies should become ofﬁcials to serve
their king, state, and society“ (Lou, 1997230).

The ideology, “rule by the educated,“ can be materialized only through a

meritocratic recruitment system. In the case of China, for 2,000 years, from the

42

Han Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty, all the mlers took Confucian ideas
as their own guidelines and standards for selecting and training government
ofﬁcials (Lou, 1997229). Mastery of Confucian thought, through memorization of
the “Five Classics“ and the “Four Books,“ was the entry test into the Chinese
civil service (Frederick, 19972196).

Chinese scholar-bureaucrats recruited through this meritocratic process
had interpretive power that went far beyond the typical, professional
bureaucracy analyzed by Weber (Yue, 1997278). The discretion of bureaucrats
was considered so valuable that it extended into the interpretation of laws. “The
doctrine of the Mean,“ one of the most important Confucian classic works,
recorded an anecdote of King Ai of Lu asking for a way of governing, and
Confucius answering him very clearly: “All the guidelines and policies in
governing by Emperor Wen and Emperor Wu of the Zhou Dynasty are recorded
in books. The trouble is that there are no appropriate people to carry them out.
If there are worthy ofﬁcials, the state can be well-govemed; if there are not, the
state will be in chaos“ (Lou, 1997231 ).

The fact that Confucianists insisted that “governing all depends on man“
did not mean “law“ was unnecessary, but showed that human initiative played a
more important role than law (Lou, 1997232). Xun Zi, one of the original
Confucian thinkers, also reiterated that good ofﬁcials are the crux of governing
correctly, making perfect laws, and putting them into effect (Lou, 1997233). As
law can not automatically play a role without human beings, he stressed that we

should select good ofﬁcials to carry out the law (Lou, 1997234).

43

Meritocratic recruitment establishes and strengthens the bureaucrats’
position in a society. This meritocratic recruitment system enabled bureaucrats
to keep the power of a monarch in check. As Yue (1997277) points out, a
monarch could execute someone or abolish a law at will, but he could not
wantme destroy a bureaucratic colony or culture. When emperors and
bureaucrats share the tenets of Confucianism, the opinions of bureaucrats who
are well versed in Confucian classics can not be ignored easily (Frederickson,
1997). A centralized bureaucracy, enjoying a stable supply of able bureaucrats,
can preempt royal-aristocrats or a local military elite from rising to power.

Japanese Confucianism shares this principle of “rule by the educated.“
Morishima (1982217) mentions that “a society in which Confucianism prevails is
a kind of “diploma society“ in which people are distinguished by their educational
attainments.“ Morishima also describes how the expansion of education during
the Meiji period helped Confucianism to achieve the status of national ideology
(198221 7):

According to a Confucianist interpretation made during the Meiji period,
the essence of a samurai lies in his education, so that a farmer, a
merchant or a worker was regarded as a ‘samurai’ if he was well
educated. In fact, even in the late Tokugawa period, it was not
exceptional for an educated farmer or merchant to marry the daughter of a
samurai. As education spread in the Meiji era, the ‘samurai’ class
supporting Confucianism expanded, and in this way it became the
national ideology rather than the ideology of only the government and the
elite.

Morishima was also aware of the distinctiveness of the “rule by the
educated“ in contrast to other types of social hierarchy such as “the rule by the
propertied.“ Morishima argues that the possibility of social mobility through
education prevented the Japanese from seeing their economy from the Western
point of view as consisting of a capitalist and working class even after capitalism
was established during the Meiji era (1982217).

It is only since the Meiji revolution that Confucianism rose as a truly
hegemonic ideology in Japan. Morishima (1982249-50) claims that
Confucianism was embraced only by the samurai class during the Tokugawa
period. “Rule by the educated“ came when “the Meiji government established a
modern education system and then employed able university graduates in the
government sector irrespective of their family backgrounds“ (Morishima,

1 982: 1 7-1 8).

For the selection and training of a modern elite, which at the same time
primarily meant stafﬁng the government ministries, the Imperial University, now
known as Tokyo University was selected (Kerbo and McKinsky, 19952138).
Many Tokyo University graduates entered the civil service through competitive
exams. “Of the ninety-seven men who were appointed as higher-civil service
trainees in the 1888-1891 period, all but nine were Todai graduates“ (Kerbo

and McKinsky, 1995286).

45

" co i II E alitarian utP liicall Hierarchical'

A person in a position of authority is a Confucian, because that doctrine
supports the status quo. Out of power or ofﬁce, they become Taoists,
because Taoism rejects both worldly authority and individual
responsibility. As death approaches, a person turns to Buddhism,
because that faith offers hope of immortality (Chinese saying).

We oppose Iaissez-faire capitalism because the extremely selﬁsh
motivation and the excessive free competition will deepen the gap
between the rich and the poor. We also oppose socialism because its
proposal to destroy existing economic institutions and to eliminate the
capitalist class will disturb the course of national development. Our
doctrine is to sustain the economic system of private ownership, and we
will try within this framework to avoid class conﬂict and to pursue societal
harmony by the efforts of individuals and the power of the state’.

Based on the three deﬁning elements of Confucian developmentalism, l
extract the urban-related characteristic of the ideology in Japan as:
“economically egalitarian but politically hierarchical.“ The “economically
egalitarian“ aspect comes from the need for equality in the process of national
mobilization prescribed in developmentalism. Gao (1997281) reports that state
control over labor relations from 1931 to 1945 reveals an important facet of
Japanese nationalism: To mobilize workers for the national program, the state
had to provide a certain degree of economic equality in distribution.

The Japanese state often acted as a buffer between the conﬂicting
interests of capital and the working class in order to maximize national resources
in support of war (Gao, 1997281 ). As mentioned earlier, proﬁts of capitalists

were tightly restrained by bureaucrats. Under the Wage Control Ordinance in

1940, wages were determined by government formulations considering age,
years of experience, region and type of work, and the total amount to be paid in
wages was also limited (Morishima, 19822133). This regulation narrowed the
gap beMen workers, Morishima argues (19822133).

Gao (19972296) argues that postwar developmentalism has also been
sustained by nationalism. And, nationalism will not work if there is a deep gap in
the distribution of economic welfare among citizens. Serious income inequality
can dampen popular enthusiasm for the national mission. Mobilizing the whole
country to respond to the axtamal challenge, the politics of Japanese industrial
policy have often resulted in the development of governance mechanisms aimed
at reducing domestic conﬂicts. This reduction of conﬂict was materialized by
ensuring a relatively fair share of the pie by major economic actors at several
critical moments in modern Japanese history (Gao, 19972296). For example,
the institutionalization of lifetime employment and seniority-based wages since
the 19603 meant sharing the fruit of economic development with the laborers.

The continuing need for the state to mobilize people even after WWII can
be partly attributed to Japan’s lack of natural resources and dependence on
trade. Maybe that is why the educational system in Japan is considered a
national priority, whereas investment in human resources is subject to a cost-
beneﬁt evaluation in the US (Fajnber, 1990). The issue of equity in this national

mobilization is like feeding soldiers well in a military campaign. Failure to

 

2 The opening declaration ofthe major representative ofthe German historical school in Japan, the Social
Party Association, in 1897 (Suniitami 19862115; Gao, 1997261)

47

equalize income, at least relatively, divides the “national soldiers“ into

 

individuals and classes.

Describing Japan as “a nation at war in peace,“ Garon (199728) reports
that Japanese bureaucrats repeatedly invoked the image of war and the
country's vulnerability even when the country was neither at war nor getting
ready for one. I

In this respect, developmentalism has been to a signiﬁcant degree

embraced by the Japanese people as wall. Garon (19972235) seems to be

 

puzzled with the extraordinary willingness of the Japanese people to manage
their own lives and make real sacriﬁces for the sake of the nation state. This
ability to identify other citizens as part of us, in turn, may have brought about the
consensus necessary for the redistribution.

Having investigated the enigma of Japanese egalitarianism, I link the
other urban-related characteristic, “politically hierarchical,“ with the Confucian
tradition. Contrary to the voluntary nature of social contract between individuals
in Lockean liberalism, Confucianism offers two less-than-politicalIy-free choices:
“hierarchical“ or “authoritarian.“ There are two schools of thought on the issue of
authority in Confucianism: populist and legalist. I think the populist school has a
“hierarchical“ view of human relationships, whereas the legalist school has an
“authoritarian“ conception.

Mencius, who can be said to represent the populist school, acknowledges
the “hierarchical“ nature of human society but emphasizes reciprocity in human

relations. In the Book of Mencius, Mencius presents a hierarchical division of

48

labor (Tu, 1998b2124): “There are those who use their minds and there are
those who use their muscles. The former governs; the latter are governed.
Those who govern are supported by those who are governed.“ However,
Mencius’s “populist“ appeal is evident when he says that the people are more
important than the state, and the state is more important than the king, and the
ruler who does not act in accordance with the kingly way is unﬁt (Tu, 1998a215).
The spirit of mutuality is everywhere in his writings. On the relationship between

ruler and minister, Mencius says (Tu, 1998b2126):

If a prince treats his ministers as his hands and feel, they will treat him as
their belly and heart. If he treats them as his horses and hounds, they will
treat him as a mere fellow countrymen. If he treats them as mud and
weeds, they will treat him as an enemy.

Han F ei Tzu represents the legalist group arguing for an authoritarian
social order devoid of the spirit of mutuality. The primary concern is not the well-
being of the individual persons involved but the particular pattern of social
stability which results from rigidly prescribed rules of conduct (Tu, 1998b2123).
Han Fei Tzu (Tu, 1998b2122) says: “The minister serves the king, the son serves
the father, and the wife serves the husband. If the three are followed, the world
will be in peace; if the three are violated, the world will be in chaos.“

Confucianism can be said to have a “hierarchical“ nature as both the
populist and legalist schools consider respect for authority an important virtue

and take political authority as an essential factor for the maintenance of social

49

 

order (Tu, 1998b2130). Confucian classics mostly support the authorities. The
ﬁrst item in the list of approved attitudes and behavior from the Ana/acts of

Confucius, (Wright, 196228) urges submissiveness to authority:

Submissiveness to authority — parents, elders, and superiors
Submissiveness to mores and norms

Reverence for the past and respect for history

Love of traditional leaming

Esteem for the force of example

Primacy of broad moral cultivation over specialized competence
Preference for nonviolent moral reform in state and society
Prudence, caution, and preference for a middle course

. Noncompetitiveness

10. Courage and sense of responsibility for a great tradition
11.Self-respect (with some permissible self-pity) in adversity

12. Exclusiveness and fastidiousness on moral and cultural grounds
13.Punctiliousne33 in treatment of others

09151991259919?

There is no doubt that Confucianism was a “hierarchical“ ruling ideology
that supported the class system in ancient China. Confucius and his disciples
lived in the era of warring states in China, and the ﬁrst priority of the ruler was to
maintain order (Creel, 1957; Tong-so Pak, 19862491 ). In an effort to maintain
order, stratiﬁed relationships were created within the family and among different
classes in society were created (Tong-so Pak, 19862491). The ideology of “rule
of man“ dictates to society as parents do to their children. In ancient China,
there were four classiﬁcations of people: scholar-bureaucrats, farmers, workers,
and merchants (Frederickson, 1997230).

Confucianism has the idea of “the mandate of heaven“ which comes from

ancient China, and can be traced to the Book of Documents, “Heaven sent

50

people down to earth and selected the virtuous to be princes and teachers. Help
the king and you will be loved all around, and I will be with you to punish the
guilty and reward the innocent.“ (Chu-chin Kang, 19862437).

I argue that modern Confucian societies can be either “hierarchical“ or
“authoritarian.“ Japan and Singapore are good examples of modern
Confucianism. Both countries share Confucianism as a ruling ideology
(F rederickson, 1997; Bellows, 1989). Both countries are governed by
bureaucrats highly educated and competent. Singaporean bureaucrats have
allied with political elites less known for their political openness, their Japanese
counterparts have enjoyed more democratic partners since WWII.

One may ﬁnd it easy to say that the Confucianism practiced by
Singaporean elites is authoritarianism. However, one might ﬁnd it awkward to
accuse postwar Japanese bureaucrats of practicing authoritarian Confucianism
considering the electoral process in place. Even though Charlmers Johnson
(1995248) regards the post WWll Japanese governing system as “soft
authoritarianism,“ I believe that Japan after WWII is better characterized as
“hierarchical.“

Modern Japan started as an “authoritarian“ Confucian nation, however.
The Meiji bureaucrats vested themselves not only with the secular authority of
modernization but also with the same Confucian authority that the leaders of the
feudal state had claimed by acting in the name of the imperial throne (Cutts,
1997252). This “emperor system“ following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was

administered by a small corps of military ofﬁcers, civilian bureaucrats, and police

51

(Garon, 1997:5). Situating themselves above society, Japanese ofﬁcials molded
Japanese minds through “thought police“ and a highly centralized set of
institutions such as the national school system, the military, a network of State
Shinto shrines, and numerous hierarchical organizations (Garon, 199725).

One of Japanese history’s most famous documents, the 1890 Imperial
Rescript on Education issued by the Meiji Emperor, put the guiding philosophy
frankly: loyalty and ﬁlial piety toward the Empire (Cutts, 1997210). In the
govemment’s view, the sole purpose of teaching history was to foster reverence
for the emperor; teaching children about the French Revolution or the American
Declaration of Independence, and thereby acquainting them with such concepts
as freedom, equality, humanism, and independence, could only work to the
disadvantage of the government (Yamazumi, 19892234).

Things changed after WWII. School principals no longer read the
Rescript aloud to ceremonial gatherings of student bodies on national holidays.
There is no “thought police.“ Electoral process has been put in place.

But Japan is still governed by an educated elite. The meritocratic
recruitment system is still intact. Higher civil servant positions are dominated by
Tokyo University graduates. The Ministry of international Trade and Industry in
1995 took 75 percent of its new fast-trackers from Todai, and the Home Ministry
and the National Police Agency were not far behind, with 72 percent each
(Cutts, 199725). Despite the fact that the Japanese constitution gives legislative
power exclusively to the elected members of the Diet, it is the bureaucrats who

actually initiate and draft virtually all important legislation (Johnson, 19972123).

52

Johnson (1997248) pointed out the hegemony of an elite working within a formal
system of legality and popular sovereignty.

The “hierarchical,“ not “authoritarian,“ nature of Confucianism in modern
Japan has translated into less intrusive social control on people. Gao (1997221)
claims that through the paradigms of industrial policy the Japanese state not
only provides individual Japanese with a “way of seeing things,“ but it also blinds
them as it deprives them of the power of independent judgement. Garon (1997)
documents how “moral suasion“ by the government continued after WWII. For
example, the “National Salvation Savings Campaign“ supervised by Prime
Minister F ukuda Takeo in 1946 shows how the government had a hand in
manufacturing this consciousness. The Prime Minister’s Ofﬁce structured public
opinion polls so as to give respondents few choices but to agree with the
statements, then touted these surveys as proof that the people themselves
believed in the idea (Garon, 19972174). In the mid-1990s, the widespread
sense of crisis and pessimism in Japan occasioned a return to more visible
efforts to manage society. Bureaucrats and the media tout the “collapse of the
bubble economy“ as a moral lesson for the Japanese people and only by
returning to the habits of diligence, thrift, and conservation of resources, ofﬁcials
argue, will the nation maintain its position in world markets and preserve social
stability (Garon, 19972232).

In the area of education, the attempts for social control have been more
visible. In 1956, the Diet changed the system for selecting members of

educational boards from an elective system to an appointive one and the

53

 

Ministry of Education toughened its inspection on social science studies
textbooks (Yamazumi, 19892240). From the 19705, the government has
attempted to revive the Imperial Rescript on Education (Yamazumi, 19892241 ).
In 1974, the prime minister, Tanaka Kakuei, wrote (Yamazumi, 19892241 )2
“Education today over emphasizes intellectual development at the expense of
moral development. While we fatten children’s intellect their morals starve
Much of the Imperial Script expresses universal moral principles. It has qualities
that transcend its form, that speak to us today as then.“

Confucianism in modern Japan legitimates itself through the same
mechanisms as in the past. The meritocratic recruitment of the elite through
national civil servant examinations continues to have a strong popular appeal as
it preempts playing the system for oneself or a family member. The Confucian
belief in the association between scholarship and morality is still alive. In
modern Japan, there is still a high trust in public administration (Frederickson,

1997:201).

(1S vs. Japan: Ideology and urbanization

I can only mention a few studies that link ideology and urbanization in the
US and Japan. Comparing localities in Japan and America, Cupaiuolo (1994)
started with the values in each nation's Constitution. Whereas the Japanese
Constitution enacted in 1947 stipulates regulations pertaining to the organization
and operation of the local entities, the US. Constitution is totally silent on local

governments. The American local system reﬂects the long-held belief that no

54

government should be too powerful, thus separating power between national
government and local government. The centralized approach of Japan has
produced a system of local government characterized by standardization and
equity, while the decentralized approach of the United States has produced one
characterized by autonomy and diversity.

Interested in why the Japanese central government has tried to control
local governments, whether they are successful or not, Akizuki (1995:364)
argues that Japan’s political leadership in the late nineteenth century shared
certain national goals such as “enrich the nation and strengthen the military,“
which were given much higher priority than local preferences. These
fundamental conditions have been translated into a belief shared by both elites
and the masses that the central bureaucrats are morally, technically, and
administratively superior to local bureaucrats.

Studying the urban development of Philadelphia from eighteenth century
to the 19303, Warner brings in a value which sounds similar to Lockean
liberalism: privatism. According to Warner (196823-4), privatism became the

American tradition by the time of the Revolution and can be deﬁned as follows:

Its essence lay in its concentration upon the individual and the
individual’s search for wealth. Psychologically, privatism meant that the
individual should seek happiness in personal independence and in the
search for wealth; socially, privatism meant that the individual should see
his ﬁrst loyalty as his immediate family, and that a community should be a
union of such money-making, accumulating families; politically, privatism
meant that the community should keep the peace among individual
money-makers, and if possible, help to create an open and thriving setting
where each citizen would have some substantial opportunity to prosper.

55

Privatism encouraged building for the interest of the businessman at the
expense of the common citizens. The people who planned, or who sat on
planning commissions were downtown merchants, utility, transit, and bank
directors, real estate men, railroad and ocean transport carriers, and a few
professionals (Warner, 19682206). All the projects were to bring trafﬁc to the
dovmtown, to beautify it, and to raise or maintain downtown business property
values while ignoring the needs of other sections of the city (Warner, 19682207-
14).

Barnekov, Boyle, and Rich (1989) argued that various urban renewal
programs since the 1960s reveal the inﬂuence of privatism. According to
Bamekov etc. (1989253), there has been a widespread belief that it was the
private sector, particularly large corporations, that possessed the creative
leadership and economic resources to help the urban poor. This notion has not
proved viable as public-private partnership in many urban redevelopment
projects resulted in uneven development limited to downtown areas.

Thus it seems that at least some studies conﬁrm the “politically equal but
economically unequal“ urban ideology in the US and “economically egalitarian
but politically hierarchical“ characteristic in Japanese urban ideology. \Mth this
US-Japan spectrum in mind, one may ﬁnd the following chapters examining
urbanization and ideology in Korea more interesting. In chapter 4, it will be

explained that Korea since the 1960s shares an ideology similar to that of

56

Japan. Since the mid 19905, however, Korean elites have been taking American

ideology more seriously.

57

CHAPTER 2. CONFUCIAN DEVELOPMENTAL URBANIZATION

Confucian developmental urbanization in Korea is characterized by
extreme power concentration in Seoul, moderate population dispersion in the
urban system, and low income disparities among and within cities. This pattern
which I call “Confucian developmental urbanization“ has been only partially
understood. Two reasons have kept previous researchers from understanding
this urban pattem accurately and in its totality. One is the “correspondence
assumption“ that led urbanists to assume that the distribution of power,
population, and wealth go hand in hand. The other is “selective cognition“
leading scholars to embrace only those facts that ﬁt well with their theoretical
inclination.

The “correspondence assumption“ is wide spread among urban
ecologists. Walter Christaller, a German geographer, assumed that the
functional order of central places in the urban system is related to their
population size (Bradford and Kent, 1977:6,10). The order of a central place
depends upon the type of goods and services it produces which in turn depend
on the spatial distribution of suppliers and consumers. A larger set of goods and
services mean more people employed (Bradford and Kent, 197729). For
example, in a study of thirty-three central places in Snohomish County in

Washington State, Berry and Garrison (1959) showed a linear relationship

58

between population size and functional importance in the urban system
(Bradford and Kent, 1977222).

Hawley (1950:122) argues that the size of a population imposes limits on
both the extent of specialization and the number of different activities that may
be carried on simultaneously. Hawley cites Adam Smith's dictum that the degree
of specialization is directly related to the size of the market (Smith, 1931217;
Hawley, 19502122):

There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind, which can be
carried on nowhere but in a great town. A porter, for example, can ﬁnd
employment and subsistence in no other place. A village is much too
narrow a sphere for him; even an ordinary market town is scarcely large
enough to afford him constant occupation.

The self-regulating market is held to link population, function, and wealth.
A higher income level is inevitable with a higher level of specialization. Due to
labor specialization, the heartland metropolis will experience a rising wage ﬁrst.
Some industries will then be priced out of the high-income labor market and will
move to low income cities or regions (Berry, 1971: 116).

Dependency and world system theorists also share the correspondence
assumption. London (1979) argued that power concentration necessarily shifts
economic development toward the urban areas where the power elite resides.

Bangkok was his prime example. As civil and military ofﬁcials monopolized

59

power in the capital, they channeled a disproportionately large amount of
resources to Bangkok through ﬁscal, educational, and other institutional policies.
Gugler and Flanagan (1977) also mention how the power holders in West
Africa did the same thing after independence. When state functionaries took
over power from colonialists, resources poured into the capital at the expense of

other cities (Gugler and Flanagan, 19772282):

The Ivory Coast provides a striking example 499 out of the country's

617 industrial enterprises are located in Abidjan and 60% of the jobs in

the “modem“ sector of the economy are found there.

Market-oriented human ecology theory and Marxism-inﬂuenced
dependency perspectives ﬁrst arose as efforts to explain situations in Europe
after the bourgeois revolution. Big cities meant factories, crowds, money, and
powerful capitalists. But these perspectives, as I shall see, do not ﬁt the Korean
situation.

“Selective cognition“ is also an issue. Mills and Song (1979) argued that
Korean urbanization during the third quarter of the twentieth century ﬁt Western
modernization theory, but they focused on wealth and population
decentralization and did not pay enough attention to the capital city, Seoul.

Nemeth and Smith (19832183), who are world system theorists, can be
credited for acknowledging that “the capital, Seoul, is dominant functionally and

culturally in many ways over other Korean cities.“ However, they too stayed

away from this puzzling phenomena by choosing to emphasize other aspects of
Korea’s urbanization.

This issue of uneven urban development will be revisited in chapter 3
where I examine what previous urban researchers consider to be the causes of
urbanization. The remainder of this chapter will cover the four dimensions of

urbanization, and the details of Korean urbanization for each dimension.

Dimensions of urbanization

Four dimensions of urbanization will be examined. Three are about the
interurban distribution of resources, such as power, population, and wealth. The
fourth concerns the intraurban distribution of wealth. I basically identiﬁed the
dimensions which have been of interest to previous researchers. Gugler and
Flanagan (1977) mention three dimensions of urban inequality in West Africa

between 1950 and 1970.

1. The imbalances between life chances in the urban and rural sectors.

2. Among cities, the concentration of limited resources in the capitals
and/or primate cities.

3. Within cities, the economic disparity between the masses and a small
wealthy elite.

61

London (1980), explaining the dominance of Bangkok in the urban system
of Thailand, distinguishes functional primacy (which can be political, economic,
social and cultural-symbolic) from size primacy (which is the population of the
biggest city compared to the size of other cities or to the total urban population).

Carol Smith (1985) also distinguishes function from population. She
found that population size is not a good measure of urban functions, as indicated
by the number of lawyers and industrial establishments. She reported a huge
discrepancy between population primacy and functional primacy in Guatemala.
In 1970, Guatemala City was 16 times bigger than the second largest city,
Quezaltenango. However, the industrial establishments ratio between

Guatemala and Quezaltenange was just 8:1.

“The Seoul Republic“: Power Concentration in the Capital City

Koreans say; “everything is in Seoul.“ Those who do not live in Seoul feel
like they are disempowered. The companies they work for have their
headquarters in Seoul. Important decisions concerning their city or town are in
the hands of high ofﬁcials in Seoul. This feeling of frustration is carried on to the
next generation. Korean students try their best to get into a handful of
prestigious universities in Seoul thus acknowledging that the city is a ticket to

good connections and jobs. Requiring non-capital regions to remain as the arms

62

and legs of the Seoul empire can be politically explosive causing regional
factionalism. Jong Ki Kim et. al. (1991) mention that the non-capital region
residents resent concentrated decision making in Seoul and complain about

govemment-led regional development.

The dominance of Seoul over other cities dates back to the establishment
of the Chosun Dynasty in 1392. After extensive searches, the founding king,
Song-Gye Yi, decided to build his capital where today's Seoul stands. It was
conveniently located in the middle of the Korean Peninsula close to all parts of
the country (See Figure 1 and Figure 2). The Han River also provided easy
transport access making Seoul ideal for the new capital. The four inner
mountains were natural ramparts and a setting for the construction of the city
wall (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1998). The King built royal shrines,
palace buildings, and a fortiﬁed wall surrounding the capital making Seoul the
center of bureaucratic power. Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 did not
change the status of Seoul. Bureaucratic departments proliferated at the

govemment-general headquarters in Seoul (Cumings, 19972148).

63

Figure 1. Map of Northeastern Asia

 

 

 

 

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1998. <http:llwww.metro.seoul.kr>
Korea.

Figure 2. Map of Korean Peninsula

RUSSSIA

I

 

u,

 

7f

  

 

‘. ‘. DO ‘“‘V U U“
. ungdo
l Indium .8 .OUL‘~ “Ddtdo
l
l
..1 ”chem-do

 

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1998. <http:l/www.metro.seoul.kr>
Korea.

65

This “Seoul Republic“ refers to the concentration of Korea's decision
making process in Seoul. In 1995, the headquarters of 27 out of Korea's 30
largest corporations in terms of annual sales were located in Seoul.3 The
biggest corporations are virtually all in Seoul. Korea had 10 of the global
Fortune 500 companies measured by revenue in 1998: Daewoo Group (18), SK
(71 ), Hyundai Corp. (105), Samsung Corp. (121), Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
(142), Samsung Life Insurance Co., Ltd. (180), LG lntemational Corp. (236), LG
Electronics (270), Korea Electric Power Corporation (294), and Hyundai Motor

(359). All resided in Seoul.

Seoul is also Korea's center of education, information, and culture. Seoul
National University (SNU) is the most prestigious in Korea. SNU outshadows all
others in terms of graduates who passed national examinations for professions
such as the civil service, law, and accounting, or who are chief executives of
companies (Nature 19942644). Major corporations stationed in Seoul tend to
locate their research institutes in or around Seoul. For example, Samsung
Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), which acts as the central laboratory of
the 26 companies of the Samsung group, is located just south of Seoul. In 1993,
nearly half (450) of Samsung’s 1,000 researchers (not including 13,000
development engineers) were at SAIT along with 150 administrators and

technical support staff (Nature, 19932382). All the major newspaper publishers

 

3 It is according to the 1996 version of “World Scope” database, produced by World Scope/Disclosure
Partners. a joint venture of Wright Investors’ Service (WIS) and Disclosure Incorporated. The database
contains comprehensive information on 13,312 companies in 47 countries.

66

and broadcasting companies are also located in Seoul. Markusen & Gwiasda’s
(1994) description of multilayering of functions in and around Tokyo as “New
York (ﬁnancial capital) + Greater Detroit (industrial center) + Washington, DC.
(political capital) + San Francisco (high—tech agglomeration) + Boston

(preeminent educational city)“ seems to ﬁt Seoul as well.

To examine the degree of power concentration in the Korean urban
system by world standards, I came up with a rating system. For comparability
with other countries, only the economic dimension has been taken into
consideration. The business management-coordination function is measured by
the percentage of headquarters of major companies located in one area‘. The
largest corporations in terms of 1995 sales were selected. Up to 20 ﬁnancial
and up to 20 non-ﬁnancial corporations were included. Only countries where I
can pull out more than 5 corporations in total were included. In cases where
there were more than 5 ﬁnancial corporations on the list, the economic capital of
the country was determined by the distribution of those corporation
headquarters. Otherwise it was decided by the number of non-ﬁnancial

corporations’ headquarters.

 

‘ The information about the locations ofheadquarters is from the October, 1996 version of “World Scope”
database. Countries include those with the largest capital markets worldwide. Data is extracted from
documents ﬁled with stock exchanges in all countries and from other sources (e.g., Ministry of Finance in
Japan). Business and ﬁnancial publications are used as a supplement. Data is drawn from at least one
ﬁnancial daily newspaper in each country. Additional information is received directly from most
companies, commonly the annual report to shareholders. The distinction between ﬁnancial and non-
ﬁnancial are based on the industry group/class classiﬁcations in the database. The group/class covering
ﬁnancial sectors are as below: bank, commercial bank, commercial ﬁnance companies, insurance,
insurance companies, investment companies, real estate investment trust, land & real estate, other
ﬁnancial, other ﬁnancial services, personal loan, rental & leasing, savings & loan, and securities
brokerage.

67

The preference for ﬁnancial corporations over non-ﬁnancial corporations
in the measurement reﬂects the importance of the service production sector in
the vitality of urban economy. Drennan (1991 :36) argues that core cities retain

their dominant position as the center of information-based services:

Producer services ﬁrms have expanded in New York city and national
nodal cities because the beneﬁts of agglomeration are far more important
to producer service ﬁrms than to manufacturing headquarters. Producer
service ﬁrms are information-intensive; information is complex,
nonrountine, and not internal to the ﬁrm. Mergers and acquisitions
require teams of highly specialized lawyers, investment bankers and
consultants.

After the economic capital was decided upon, the number of headquarters
for both ﬁnancial and nonﬁnancial categories which are located in city were
counted. The sum is divided by the total number of corporations and multiplied
100 times, which leads to the percentage of corporation headquarters located in

the functional capital.

Power is concentrated in Seoul even by world standards. Table 1 shows
that Korea ranked 8" out of 38 countries. Seoul had 33 out of 40 of Korea's top
ﬁnancial and nonﬁnancial companies, or 82.5 percent concentration. Those with
urban systems displaying greater concentration than Korea are mostly Third
World countries in Asia and Latin America: Philippines (1 st), Thailand (2nd),
Chile (3rd), Malaysia (4th), Argentina (5th). Two Scandinavian countries were

ahead of Korea as well: Finland (6th) and Belgium (7th). Japan and Taiwan

68

were in the middle ranking 20" and 21‘ each. North American countries (US,
34th and Canada, 33th) showed relatively low power concentration. Some other
European countries showed the most decentralized urban power distribution:

Poland (38th), Switzerland (39th), Italy (40th), Netherlands (41 st).

69

Table 1. The Degree of Power Concentration In Different Urban Systems

Rank Country Functional Function 3 of Total # 3 of Non- Total # A + B +
lng Capital (FC) al Financial of top Financial of top C D
Primacy Hqs in F. ﬁnancial HQs out Non- (E) (F)
Davis“ C. out of HQs up of D (C) Financial
Index ( I B (A) to 20 (B) H05 20
51F) (D)
1 Philippines Manila 100 20 20 20 20 37 40
2 Thailand Bankok 97.5 20 20 19 20 39 40
3 Chile Santiago 97 12 13 20 20 32 33
4 Malaysia Kuala Lumpur 92.5 19 20 18 20 37 40
5 Argentina Buenos Aires 90.5 1 1 18 20 19 21
8 Finland Helsinki 89.5 15 18 19 20 34 38
8 Korea Seoul 82.5 17 20 18 20 33 4o
8 Belgium Bruxelles 82.5 16 20 17 20 33 40
9 Ireland Dublin 82.4 13 14 15 20 28 34
10 Indonesia Jakarta 82.1 18 19 18 20 32 39
11 Peru Lima 81.5 5 7 17 20 22 27
12 Venezuela Caracas 78.8 3 3 8 1 1 1 1 14
14 U. Kingdom London 77.5 16 20 15 20 31 40
14 South Africa Johannesburg 77.5 14 20 17 20 31 40
15 Turkey Istanbul 78.5 12 14 14 20 26 34
18 New Zealand Auckland 73.1 5 8 14 20 19 28
17 France Paris 72.5 18 20 11 20 29 40
18 Austria Wien 71.1 13 18 14 20 27 38
19 Japan Tokyo 70 15 20 13 20 28 40
20 Taiwan Taipei 88.8 1 1 12 1 1 20 22 32
21 Sweden Stockholm 87.5 18 20 11 20 27 40
23 Hungary Budapest 88.7 0 0 8 9 8 9
23 Mexico Mexico City 88.7 7 10 13 20 20 30
24 Pakistan Karachi 82.1 8 9 10 20 18 29
25 China Shanghai 57.1 0 1 12 20 12 21
28 Spain Madrid 52.5 10 20 11 20 21 40
27 India Bombay 50 2 4 10 20 12 24
28 Australia Sydney 45 10 20 8 20 18 40
30 U. S. New York 42.5 8 20 9 20 17 40
30 Canada Toronto 42.5 12 20 5 20 17 40
31 Denmark Kobenhavn 37.5 7 20 8 20 15 40
32 Colombia Bogota 35.7 4 9 6 19 10 28
33 Brazil Sao Paulo 35.3 8 14 4 20 12 34
34 Poland Warsaw 35 2 4 5 18 7 20
35 Switzerland Zurich 32.5 8 20 5 20 13 40
38 Italy Rome 30 7 20 5 20 12 40
37 Netherlands Amsterdam 25 5 20 5 20 10 40
38 Germany Muenchen 20 5 20 3 20 8 40

70

eoul: rowded but not v Iated

Despite Koreans' concern about overpopulation in Seoul, Seoul is not
highly overpopulated by world standards. It is true that Seoul is packed: Seoul
comprises only 0.6 percent of the total land area of Korea (See Figure 3), but the
population of Seoul in 1993 was 10.9 million, 24.8 percent of Korea's total
population (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1994). The packed megacity has
high living costs and long commuting hours. Housing prices are several times
more expensive in Seoul than in Korea's other major cities and it is not
uncommon for Seoulites to spend four or ﬁve hours a day commuting.

However, Korea has other cities with considerable population: Pusan 3.9
million, Taegu 2.3 million, and lnchon 2.1 million (See Figure 4 and Table 2).
Seoul is 2.8 times bigger than the next biggest city. There are other countries
with much higher primacy: Peru (10.1 ), Philippine (9.3), and France (7.4) (UN,
1995).

For comparative purposes, I use the Davis Index“. There are other
indexes: (1) the percentage of the biggest city out of the total urban population
and (2) the population ratio of the biggest city to the second biggest one. The
ﬁrst has a severe shortcoming: nations have different deﬁnitions of what
constitutes an urban area making cross-country comparison almost impossible.
The second index covers the population of only the two biggest cities, thus not

representing the larger picture.

 

5 The Davis Index is 1‘ largest city’s population divided by the population sum ofthe 2'“, 3'“, and 4":
largest cities.

71

Figure 3. Map of Major Administrative Areas in South Korea, 1994

Square Kilometer‘ )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   
 

8041.77

 

I § (Chaiu)
1 826.80

{‘1 8(Ch6nnam)
11 863.32

 

 

 

 

   

    
  

   
       
    
     
      
   
  
  

  

  
   

 

 

 

 

 

(Iii I
’0‘ 7|
O (Ky onggi) Z! I 8
2 . ~ (Kangwon)
N I (Seoul)
L3805i‘3 10 780.62 , 1:6 870‘“
- S Re
2! 8 answer.) a u (Ch'unobukl O
’ 389.61 (Cll'ungnam) 7 438.56 a Q ,
8 367.65 (Ky éngbuk)
I ﬁtKwarigluI O .- m In a (T «£1
set .1324 a a 19 451.10 3"
(Chonbuk) e

 

(Taegu)
”XI-L)?“ ..‘ts.
..-,:_,§.450.1,7..ﬁ?551

     
   
  

a ‘d
(Ky ongnam)
I 1 780.23

..;a" .. W58"; 5‘8““ .

"1*“:

 

 

Source. Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1994. Comparative Statistics of Major
Cities Korea. .

 

6 One square kilometer equals 0.3861 square mile

72

Figure 4. Map of Major Urban Areas in South Korea.

.Arldallg

.
Isl-“nu." "3°.” Pohang ‘

-. hitch-
Klrnl .0 ' °

Taegu Kyongja
"Inn.

Chill]: “'8‘” ‘

 

Source: Ki Tae Kim. 1999. "Sensitive Map of Korea."
<http:llﬁrefox.postech.ac.kr>

73

Table 2. Population Size of Major South Korean Cities in 1993 (In thousand).

Seoul 10,925
Pusan 3,888
Taegu 2,315
lnchon 2,144
Kwangju 1,250
Taejon 1,191
Songnam 731
Puchon 724
Ulsan 755
Suwon 714
Anyang 589
Chonju 550
Chongju 490
Ansan 401
Changwon 400
Masan 385
Kwangnung 342
Pohang 323
Koyang 307
Chinju 257
Uijongbu 255
Cheju 243
Mokpo 227
lri 217
Kumi 210
Kunsan 205
Chonan 203
Yosu 185
Chunchon 183
Kunpo 178
Wonju 178
Sunchon 181
Kangnung 154
Nonsan 153
Kimhae 149
Kyongju 145
Chongju 141
Sihung 132
Kurt 128
Chinhae 128
Andong 1 18
Cheshon 109
(Chechon)

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1994. Comparative Statistics of Major Cities Korea.

74

The Davis index covers four cities. Also, as it is a ratio, it is less
vulnerable to different boundary deﬁnitions. If the largest city’s population is
underestimated, a similar underestimation will take place for the other three

cities which helps mitigate the bias.

In measuring the population of cities, the unit of analysis is not the “city
proper“ but the “urban agglomeration.“ According to the UN. 7 (1996) deﬁnition,
“City proper“ is deﬁned as a locality with legally ﬁxed boundaries and an
administratively recognized urban status which is usually characterized by some
form of local government. “Urban Agglomeration“ refers to the population
density contained within the contours of a contiguous territory inhabited at urban
levels of population density without regard to administrative boundaries. It
incorporates population in a city or town plus the suburban fringe lying outside

of, but adjacent to, the city boundaries.

The US. is the best country to illustrate the differences between the two
concepts. The city boundaries of the US. are drawn by vote of the ballot box,
but the US. Bureau of Census reports the metropolitan area based on the

degree of economic integration using indicators such as the percentage of

 

7 The primary source of data is a set of questionnaires sent annually and monthly to about 220 national
statistical services and other appropriate govemment oﬁices. Data forwarded on these questionnaires are
supplemented, to the extent possible, by data taken from ofﬁcial national publications and by
correspondence with the national statistical services. When U.N. data were not available or complete,
national statistics publication were also used for Ireland (Central Statistics Ofﬁce. Various Years. Ireland:
Statistical Abstract Dublin), Taiwan (Executive Yuan. Various Years. Social Indicators in Taiwan Area
of the Republic of China Taipei), Hungary (Central Statistical Oﬁice. Various Years. Statistical Yearbook
of Hungary Budapest), Philippines (National Statistical Coordination Board Various Year's. Philippine
Statistical Yearbook Makati, Metro Manila).

75

commuters. These two different ways of making boundaries do make a
difference“.

I prefer metroline over citylimit because the administrative boundary is not
comparable among countries with different administrative systems. Some
countries, however, have concepts which can be somewhat between “city
proper“ and “urban agglomeration.“ These concepts are “municipality,“ or
“special city.“ Those terms are basically administrative, but somewhat reﬂect the
degree of population density and economic integration. Taiwan has a concept
“municipality“ which is applied to Taipei and Kaohsiung, the two biggest cities in
Taiwan. Korea is like Taiwan in that Seoul is a “Special City“ and several major

cities have the status of “Provincial City.“

Unfortunately, Korea does not have population data at the metropolitan
level. As U.N. researchers have done (1996), I use Special City or Provincial
City population data as the estimates for urban agglomeration. This can be
somewhat problematic because the Seoul Metro Area, like other major cities in
Korea but even more so, is bigger than Seoul Special City's administrative
boundary considering the frequent commuting from suburbs of Seoul and some

adjoining cities' economic dependency on Seoul.

The case of Japan is also relevant because the overﬂow of Tokyo is

similar to Seoul. The UN. actually uses two different urban agglomeration

 

'Whenrneasuredbyusingtheconcept “cityproper,” the mostpopulouscityinCanadain 1991 was
Montreal (1,017,666), followed by Calgary (710,677), Toronto (635,395), and Winnipeg (616,790). But
Toronto becomes the largest city when “urban agglomeration“ is used, with a population of 3,893,046
leaving behind Montreal (3,127,424), Vancouver (1,602,502), and Ottawa (920,857) (See UN. 1996).

76

boundaries for Tokyo: Tokyo-to (Tokyo Prefecture) and “Tokyo Metropolitan
Area.“ Tokyo-to (Tokyo Prefecture) comprises the 23 wards plus 14 urban
counties (shi), 18 towns (machi) and 8 villages (mura). The “Tokyo Metropolitan
Area“ comprises the 23 wards of Tokyo-to plus 21 cities, 20 towns and 2 villages

(U.N., 1996).

The boundary of Tokyo-to can be said to be similar to Seoul Special City
as both are administrative boundaries and also a boundary around the urban
core with signiﬁcantly integrated suburbs. Tokyo Metropolitan area is Tokyo-to
plus some portions of three adjoining prefectures (ken), which are Chiba-ken,

Saitama-ken, and Kanagawa-ken (National Land Agency, 1997).

I believe that this metropolitan level population data, which is not
available in Korea, reﬂect the actual level of economic integration in the Tokyo
area better than the population data for Tokyo-ku (which is similar to the concept
of Seoul Special City). The population of Metropolitan Tokyo Area was 32.7
million whereas the population of Tokyo-to was 11.8 million in 1996 (National

Land Agency, 1997).

The case of Taiwan is also similar. The population of Taipei Municipality
in 1995 was 2.6 million whereas the population of Taipei-Keelung Primary

Metropolitan Area was 6.2 million.

My use of Special City or Regional City population as substitute for
metropolitan area data can be justiﬁed for two reasons. First, it is beyond the

scope of this project to actually draw a metropolitan area line and calculate the

77

population. Some authors, such as Soon-Jhe Jo (1992) used the term Seoul
Metropolitan Area which includes Seoul, lnchon (the fourth largest city in Korea),
and a region surrounding Seoul (which is called Kyonggi-do) (See Figure 3). I
believe this boundary is too broad, because it includes a lot of rural areas. By
using this boundary, the population of the Seoul Metropolitan Area is inﬂated to
20.4 million in 1994, which is the sum of Seoul Special City (10.8 M), lnchon

Regional City (2.2 M), and Kyonggi-do (7.4 M) (Bureau of Statistics, 1995).

Soon-Jhe Jo's boundary is commonly called the “Capital Region,“ and is a
regional not a metropolitan concept. Japan has the same term Capital Region,
which is the Tokyo Metropolitan Area plus some portions of other surrounding
four prefectures: Ibaraki-ken, Tochigi-ken, Yamanashi-ken, and Gumma-ken.
The population of the Tokyo Capital Region soars up to 40.6 million whereas the
Tokyo Metropolitan Area population is just 32.7 million (National Land Agency,

1997)

The second justiﬁcation is that as I am using the Davis Index, which is a
ratio, the bias will not be that severe. The population of Taipei Municipality
divided by the population sum of Kaohsung Municipality, Taichung City, and
Tainan City in 1994 is .90. The same Davis index for Taiwan's Metropolitan
Areas in 1995 is 1.10 (Table 3). In 1990, the population of Tokyo-to divided by
the population of Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya is 1.48. The Metro Area
Davis’ Index for the same year is 1.58 of which the population order is: Tokyo,

Osaka, Nagoya, and Kitakushu (Table 4).

78

Table 3. The Population of Taiwan’s Major Cities with Different Boundaries in 1990

In 1994 In 1995

Close to “City Proper“ Metropolitan
Population Unit = 1.000 persons

1st largea Taipei 2,854 Taipei-Keelung 6,230
Municipality Primary
Metropolitan
Area
2nd largest Kaohsiung 1.418 Kaohsiung 2,624
Municipality Primary
Metropolitan
Area
3rd largest Taichung City 833 Taichung- 1,891
Changwha
Primary
Metropolitan
Area
4th largest Tainan City 703 Tainan Primary 1,158
Metropolitan
Area
Davis“ Index .90 1.10

Sources:
Executive Yuan. 1998. Urban and Regional Development Statistics Republic of China
UN. 1995. World Urbanization Prospects: The 1994 Revision NY.

79

Table 4. The Population of Japan's Major Cities with Different Boundaries in 1990

151 largest

2nd larged

3rd largest

4th largest

Davis“ Index

Sources:

Close to “City Proper“
Population Unit 8 1.000 persons

Tokyo-to (Tokyo 11,858
Prefecture)

Yokohama City 3,220

Osaka City 2,824
Nagoya City 2,155
1.48

Metropolitan

Tokyo
Metropolitan
Area

Osaka
Metropolitan
Area
Nagoya
Metropolitan
Area
Kitakyushu
Metropolitan
Area

1.58

Statistics Bureau. 1996. Japan Statistical Yearbook Japan.

UN. 1995. World Urbanization Prospects: The 1994 Revision NY.

25,013

10,482

2.939

2,448

As in Taiwan and Japan, I believe that the Davis Index using nonexistent
metropolitan population data for Korea would be a bit higher than Davis Index
using Special City and Regional City population, because the suburbanization of
the capital city has outgrown the three provincial cities in the index. However, as
the Davis Index is a ratio, my underestimation of Seoul Metropolitan Area in
comparison with other cities should be moderate as demonstrated with data on

Taipei and Tokyo.

Population in the Korean urban system can be said to be moderately
decentralized (Table 5). In 1990, Seoul ranked 14" out of 38 countries with a
Davis Index of 1.36“. Third World countries in Asia and Latin America were on
top of the list: Thailand (1 st), Philippine (2nd), Peru (3rd), Argentina (4th), Chile
(6th) with more than 3.0 on the Davis Index. US and Canada again

demonstrated a balanced population distribution with rankings of 29‘" and 31".

 

9 Most data on the major urban agglomerations around the globe are from two publications by UN: (1)
UN. 1996. Demographic Yearbook NY, and (2) UN. 1995. World Urbanization Prospects: 771a 1994
Revision NY. The primary source of the this UN data is a set of questionnaires sent annually and
monthly to about 220 national statistical services and other appropriate government ofﬁces. Data
forwarded on these questionnaires are supplemented, to the extent possible, by data taken from oﬂicial
national publications and by correspondence with the national statistical services. Information on the size
of urban agglomerations in Taiwan are from: Executive Yuan. 1996. Urban and Regional Development
Statistics Republic of China

81

Table 5. The Degree of Population Concentration in Different Urban Systems

Ranking

OONOG‘GN-ﬁ

Country

Thailand
Philippines
Peru
Argentina
Hungary
Chile
France
Austria
Mexico
Denmark
Finland
Japan
Indonesia
Korea
Ireland
Turkey
United Kingdom
Colombia
Pakistan
New Zealand
Taiwan
Sweden
Brazil
Spain
Malaysia
Venezuela
Poland
Switzerland
United States
Canada
Belgium
Germany
Australia
Italy
South Africa
China
India

Demographic
Capital

Bankok
Manila
Lima
Buenos Aires
Budapest
Santiago
Paris
Wien
Mexico City
Kobenhavn
Helsinki
Tokyo
Jakarta
Seoul
Dublin
Istanbul
London
Bogota
Karachi
Auckland
Taipei
Stockholm
Sao Paulo
Madrid
Kuala Lumpur
Caracas
Katowice
Zurich
New York
Toronto
Bruxelles
Essen
Sydney
Milan
Cape town
Shanghai
Bombay

82

Demog Year
raphic
Davis“
Index
7.79
4.17
4.03
3.52
3.45
3.3
2.7
2.53
2.22
2.2
1.59
1.58
1.38
1.38
1.35
1.26
1.22
1.17
1.14
1.13
1.1
1.03
1.01
0.98
0.9
0.88
0.83
0.79
0.71
0.88
0.88
0.88
0.85
0.81
0.59
0.54
0.51

3
8888383888888228838888888883888888888

Korean iti 3: Homes Middle lass

Korean cities are hardly attractive places for the lower class, and this is
especially true of Seoul. A white paper on Seoul city published by the Seoul
metropolitan government in 1998 states that the housing price in Seoul is 11
times the average income per resident, as compared to 3.4 times in New York
and 7.7 times in Tokyo. The homeownership rate of Seoul city in 1993 was 68.5
percent (Seoul City University, 1994). Welfare programs for urban residents in
Korea are also inadequate.

You can easily ﬁnd class-segregated residential areas in Seoul. Seoul
has squatters on various hillsides of the city. Most of Seoul's squatter residents
are rural migrants who came to the capital during the 19603 and 19703.
Dreaming of the good life in the big city, the migrants embraced any jobs they
could ﬁnd. Many became construction workers, street vendors or housemaids.
Some of the luckier ones landed jobs at factories or took up taxi driving (Far
Eastern Economic Review, 1988:86).

In contrast, some areas look more affluent. The development of the
Southern part of the Han River is a good example. Including 4 wards,
Kangdong-gu, Kangnam-gu, Songpa-gu, and Socho-gu (See Figure 5), this
area was included in the city in 1963, but was left rural until the 19703 when the
government devised a land development plan for solving a housing shortage
problem. Now these are well-planned residential areas for middle and upper

class residents (Rii, 1996).

83

Figure 5. Map of Seoul.

 

 

Dill City Map

 

 

 

 

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1998. <http:llwww.metro.seoul.kr>
Korea.

However, Seoul has few of the plywood shantytowns that are scattered
throughout Hong Kong, Manila, and other Asian cities. It has none of the
bombed-out devastation of New York's South Bronx or Harlem where rotting ﬁre
escapes, shattered windows and vacant lots mark the landscape (Far Eastern
Economic Review, 1988284).

Signs of showy consumption by Seoul's economic elites is not extreme by
world standards. Even though some wards have fancier shopping districts and
afﬂuent residents, it is less compared to the ostentatious housing and high-end
shopping malls found in America’s suburban cities.

Seoul, like other cities in Korea, is a city of the middle class. Table 6
shows that the discrepancy in monme income per capita in 1993 among the 22
wards in Seoul is minimal. For example, the highest ﬁgure for Kangnam was
982,859 won (USS 1,218) which is almost identical to that of the lowest one,
949,010 (USS 1,176) won for Yongsan.

Comparison with New York shows that Seoul’s intracity inequality is low
by world standards. \Mth fewer districts, income discrepancy in New York was
much more serious than in Seoul. Manhattan recorded annual income per
capita of $27,862 in 1989, which is almost three times that of the number for the
Bronx, $10,535 (Table 6).

Seoul's well-developed public transportation system, including extensive
subway lines, makes the lives of citizens who do not own a car less miserable.
One can usually ﬁnd places for shopping and entertainment right in the

neighborhood. Most of the streets are safe for night walking.

85

Table 8. Income Disparity in Seoul and New York

Seoul (1993) New York (1989)

gu (ward) Average Monthly Boroughs Per Capita Income
ncome (Won) (3)

Kangnam 982,859 Manhattan 27,882

Songpa 981,858 Staten Island 17,507

Uunpyong 979,983 Queens 15,348

Kangdong 971 .958 Brooklyn 12,388

Sodaemun 971 .203 Bronx 10,535

Kuro 989,875

Kangso 989,517

Kwanak 987,924

Socho 965,940

Yangchon 985,732

Chongno 985,378

Nowon 984,934

Mapo 984,588

Tongjak 980,597

Yongdungpo 959,928
Tongdaemun 959,383
Songbuk 958,978
Tobong 958,819
Songdong 955,721
Chung 955,149
Chungrang 952,040
Yongsan 949,010

Bureau of the Census. 1990. 1993. Census of Population: Social and Economic Characteristics
of New York

Lee, Bun-Sung, Eui-Seop Lee and Hyeon Park. 1995. “Estimation of Urban Productivity Indicator
for the Inﬂuence of Trafﬁc Congestion in Seoul.“ Pp 249-278. In Cities and Nation: Planning
Issues and Policies in Korea Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, Seoul: Korea.

It is my impression that there is an even less income inequality in other
Korean cities. The favorite destination for the displaced during Korea's
compressed industrial revolution has been Seoul. Unfortunately, my extensive
efforts to secure comparable information on other major Korean cities bore no
fruit, making intracity inequality comparisons between Seoul and other cities
impossible. The data on the income per capita ﬁgure of Seoul wards in 1993
(Table 6) were from a report published by a govemment-sponsored research

institute.

Seoul is not the Wealthiest City in Korea

Korea’s overall urban system is not that unequal, at least in economic
terms. In 1995, according to the ofﬁcial statistics from the National Statistics
Ofﬁce, the Gross Regional Product (GRP) per capita for Seoul was 7,868
thousand won‘°, which did not deviate that much from other major cities, such as
8,027 thousand won (lnchon), 6,556 thousand won (Kwangju), 6,464 thousand
won (Taejon), 6,198 thousand won (Pusan), and 6,162 thousand won (Taegu)
(See Table 7).

Seoul’s ﬁgure was not much different from that of Korea's ten regions, of
which the highest was 11,090 thousand won (Kyongnam) and the lowest is 6,571
thousand won (Kangwondo). It is quite surprising that there are cities and

regions with higher Gross Regional Product (GRP) per capita than Seoul.

 

'° In 1995, one thousand Korean won equals 1.2892 US dollars.

87

Table 7. Gross Regional Product per capita for Major Korean Cities and
Provinces in 1995 (Unit = 1,000 won")

Major Cities Provinces

lnchon 8,027 Kyongsangnamdo 11,090

Seoul 7,868 (Kyongnam)

Kwangju 6,556 Kyongsangbukdo 8,631

Taejon 6,464 (Kyongbuk)

Pusan 6,1 98 Chollanamdo 8,355

Taegu 6,162 (Chonnam)
Chungchongbukdo 8,265
(Chungbuk)
Chungchongnamdo 7,829
(Chungnam)
Kyonggido 7,718
Cheju 6,996
Chollabukdo 6,842
(Chonbuk)
Kangwondo 6,571

Source: The National Statistical Ofﬁce. 1997. Social Indicators in Korea Korea.

 

” In 1995, one thousand Korean won equals 1.2892 us dollars.

88

Comparison with US data shows that the US urban system lags behind
Korea. The US Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov) reports that in 1989 the
per capita income of New York City was $16,281, deviating a bit more from other
cities in the USA than Seoul did from other cities in Korea: $19,695 (San
Francisco), $16,188 (Los Angeles), $12,899 (Chicago), $9,809 (Philadelphia),
and $9,443 (Detroit). Whereas Seoulites earn about 28 percent more than
residents of the poorest among the Korea's biggest six cities, New Yorkers are
about 72 percent more affluent than the residents of Detroit.

When estimated by regional ﬁgures, many other nations seem to lag
behind Korea in terms of intercity equity. The income per capita of Greater
London (9,677 pounds") far surpassed any other comparable regional ﬁgures in
1997 including that of England as a whole (8,160 pounds) and the lowest one,
Wales (7,245 pounds) (Ofﬁce for National Statistics, 1996212).

Bangkok compared with other regions makes Korea look like a model
case. According to “Pocket Thailand Figures“ published in 1994 by Sukhum &
Sons, the Gross Regional Product (GRP) per capita of Bangkok in 1989 was
112,912 Baht". This ﬁgure was way above those of other regions: 73,268 Baht
(Vicinity of Bangkok), 40,824 (Eastern), 29,053 (Central), 26,927 (Western),
21,790 (Southern), 17,370 (Northern), and 11,460 (Northeastern).

Bangkok citizens are about 10 times richer than those living in the poorest

region. Residents in the Greater London are 33 percent more afﬂuent than

 

'2 1a 1997, one British pound equals 1.65 us dollars.

89

those in the poorest region in England, Wales. Paychecks of Seoulites are only
20 percent bigger than those of comparable counterparts.

In short, Confucian developmental urbanization in Korea is characterized
by extreme power concentration in Seoul, moderate population dispersion in the

urban system, and low income disparities among and within cities.

‘

'3 In 1994, one thousand Thai Baht equals 21.28 us dollars.

90

CHAPTER 3. AGENCY IN URBAN KOREA: THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE

Human settlements aren’t amoeba and biological metaphors are poor
substitutes for theories of change founded upon actual human practices,
intentions and desires.

Hill & Fujita (1995: 9)

Urban researchers tend to view urbanization as primarily shaped by
“economic“ forces. Gurr and King (198723) argue that there is ironic agreement
between the neo-conservative right and the neo-Marxist left in the United States
and Britain that urban growth and decline is a function of economic forces.
According to Gurr and King, the left attributes urban decay to the migration of
private capital in pursuit of greater proﬁt margins. On the other hand, the
conservatives believe that the fate of cities should be left to the regenerative
forces of the market which will save those cities which deserve to be saved.

This belief is also common among those who study uneven urbanization
in Third World countries. Both the human ecology/modemizatlon perspective
and dependency/world system theory focus on the role of the market in shaping
the urban landscape in cities of the developing world. The former focuses more
on innovation whereas the latter takes on its exploitative nature.

This chapter tries to answer the question, “who has shaped urban
Korea?“ However, only a proﬁle of the agent will be presented here. The

question of “why“ and “hour“ will be answered in the following chapters. Chapter

91

4i
bUl

win

age
caSl
its

Kore

overs
Korea

dectn

4 will examine the ideology of Confucian developmentalism which inspired the
bureaucrats who make up the developmental state in Korea. Chapter 5 will deal
with how the hegemonic ideology has been put into practice in urban Korea.

I start by reviewing how the two main theories have answered the issue of
agency in urbanization and how they have applied their answer to the Korean
case. Both schools, argue for the dominance of capitalists in urban Korea but
this may be inaccurate. The bourgeoisie has not been the powerholder in
Korean society.

Compared to the “regulatory states“ in the West, who limit themselves to
overseeing the basic functioning of the market, the “developmental state“ in
Korea intervened and promoted the market. The rise of bureaucrats as the key

decision-makers in urban Korea will be described.

The “Natural“ Market: The Human Ecology/Modemization Perspective

Human ecology/modemization theory believes that it is mainly the market
which determines urban outcomes. Spatial distribution of population, power, and
wealth are all dependent on the “natural“ market. The market changes cities
along a simple and linear path: from “preindustrial city“ to “industrial city.“

The idea of the “natural“ development of the market is well presented in
Adna Weber's (1967) book: The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. The

growing concentration of the population in the US cities is viewed as an outcome

of market force as embodied in factors such as the application of machine power

92

 

to agricultural production and the attendant job-displacing effects that
“encourage“ migration to cities (Weber, 1967; Timberlake, 198524). Market

activity is a “natural“ force (Weber, 19672185; Timberlake, 198524-5):

[chonomic development, or the integration of isolated social and
economic groups, demands the concentration of a portion of the
population in commercial cities. Similarly, the enlargement of the
market, which is one aspect of the process of growth of industrial society
from the village economy to the world economy, has brought about
centralization in the manufacturing industries and enforced the
concentration of another portion of the population in industrial, or
commercial cities.

Concerning the distribution of power, Keyﬁtz (1965) argues that a city
dominates its surrounding territory largely by force and organization in
preindustrial societies. But as a society industrializes, the dominance of the city
over the hinterland is determined principally by the efﬁciency of production.

Urban ecologist, McKenzie (1927232) argues that with the development of
communication and transportation, spatial dominance is more characterized by

economics rather than political matters:

As the agencies of communication improve and as the impediments to
movement are overcome, the world becomes organized on the pattern of
a spider's web All the old boundaries, both local and national, are
gradually losing their signiﬁcance; routes, rather rims, are becoming the
subject of stressed attention. Modern competition is between regions and
centers rather than cultural and political areas. While political boundaries
continue to receive much attention, nevertheless their modern
signiﬁcance is with reference to the movements of commodities and
people rather than the movements of armies.

93

Sometimes, the notion of the “natural“ market as an agent is well
camouﬂaged. For example, Sjoberg (19672214) regards technology and social
norms as the driving forces of urbanization. However, Sjoberg (19672215)
distinguished three types of urbanization which represent evolutionary phases:
the preindustrial, the transitional, and the industrial. I argue that Sjoberg had
already made up his mind as to who the agent was when he formulated this
natural course of urban evolution. Each phase of urbanization is already
assumed to be shaped by the degree of capitalist development. Sjoberg’s

(19672229) description of a typical industrial city is also a conclusion about “who

shaped this kind of city:

Industrial cities, in contrast to preindustrial ones, are more likely to
revolve about a commercial and/or industrial focus than around a
religious-govemmental complex. Symbolically as well as physically, the
typical industrial city’s commercial and industrial ediﬁces tower over those
of government and religion.

Embracing the market as the agent means believing in its “self-regulating“
nature. According to the modernization theorists, the working of the market
determines the spatial distribution of resources such as wealth, power, and

population.

The theory of “rank size distribution“ shows how the market shapes the

urban system in a country. It is mainly a model for the distribution of population

94

ac

in an urban system, but it is linked to the diffusion of wealth and power as well.
Economic growth sustained over long periods results in progressive, and also
optimum, integration of the space economy leading to “rank size distribution,“
according to Barry (1971). In a city system that conforms to the rank-size rule,
the second largest city is one-half the size of the largest, the third largest city is
oneethird the size of the largest, and so on.

Based on the experience of Great Britain and the United States in the
19th century, EI-Shakhs (1972) argued that countries increase demographic
primacy values during the traditional stage of development (prior to take-off),
reaches a peak during the early stage of development (or economic transition)
and decrease steadily with economic maturity.

At the initial stage of development, resources are poured into one city
until economies of scale are achieved. Development in technology and
economic means of production tends to be concentrated in space. This
centripetal process of concentration shifts, from a local to a regional to a national
scale. Equipped with overhead facilities, external economies and political
power, the primate city comes to serve as the center of innovation. It is at this
stage that regional inequality and differences are intensiﬁed, and the primacy
curve reaches its peak.

But at some point, the diffusion mechanism asserts itself. Further
developments in transportation and communication, along with changes in the
factors of production and market areas, leads to a decentralization of economic

activity and, of course, a decrease in urban primacy. Simply put, rising wage

95

level
deve

1972

Wesl
“prov

lheVl

urban

088cm
market

Danurb

levels in the primary city pushes industry out to the hinterland leading to the
development of other cities by the “trickle down effect“ (Berry, 1971; El-Shakhs,
1 972).

Those who regard the market as the primary agent tend to believe that
Western urbanization is the higher order and other countries will follow this
“proven' course of history. Sjoberg (19672220) equates industrial urbanization in
the West to “the good life with freedom and plenty for all.“

Sjoberg (19672230) believes that things have gotten better at least in

urban America:

Just as the lines between classes, ethnic minorities, and occupations are
less clearly drawn in the industrial-urban milieu, so too they are much less
obviously spatially. But what about the many studies pointing to “islands
of segregation“ in highly industrialized cities? These cases dramatize the
fact that complete residential equality for all urbanites has not been
attained; nor is there unlimited social and spatial mobility. With some
exceptions, such as the Negroes in America, these enclaves are fewer
and less isolated today than in the past, for advancing industrialization
has drawn various "minority groups“ increasingly into the mainstreams of
community activity.

When modemists see Third World urbanization not following their
prescribed path, they tend to blame “the spell of tradition“ which keeps the
market from doing its job. For example, Ginsburg argues that Southeast Asian
cities are less effective as modernizing media compared to Western equivalents

partly because of the “traditional“ nature of their industrial activity which is

In

characterized by a more “personal“ relationship between suppliers and
customers (Ginsberg, 1972249).

For human ecology/modemization theorists who had a hard time
explaining the severe intra-urban segregation and concentration of resources in
the primate cities of Southeast Asia and Latin America, Korean urbanization was
a model case proving that the market works. Korea’s urban system was held to
follow the path of the Western countries.

According to Mills and Song (1979248), the primacy Index of the Korean
urban system was 1.36 in 1949. It rose to 1.53 in 1970, and fell slightly to 1.51
in 1975. Thus, despite the concentration of people in Seoul, Korea is not a
highly primate country by world standards.

“Trickle-down“ of wealth is also visible in the Korean urban system,
according to Mills and Song. The newly industrialized cities of the Southeastern
coastal region are growing rapidly by accommodating migrants during the 19603
and 19703. Ulsan (See Figure 4), home city of Hyundai Motors, is a good
example. The population of the city increased from 30,000 in 1960 to 253,000 in
1975 (Mills and Song, 1979253).

Urbanization also improved the well-being of the urban poor in Korea.
Mills and Song (1972:172) point out that the number of squatters has decreased

since the early 19703.

97

e n rl
DependencyMorld system theorists agree with the human
ecology/modemization thesis that the market is the agent of urbanization.
However, more critical-minded dependency/world system people do not think the
market is “natural.“ On the contrary, these scholars argue that the market works

to maximize the proﬁts of the bourgeois class.

Castells (1973:13—14) points out the historical link between bourgeoisie
and the rise of capitalist urbanization in the West. According to Castells, the
medieval city represents the emancipation of the mercantile bourgeoisie in its
stnlggle to free itself from feudalism and the central power. Then, the
development of industrial capitalism resulted in the social domination of the
industrial bourgeoisie in the city. This capitalist domination was not a
technological fact; it was the expression of the capitalist logic that lay at the base

of industrialization.

Dependency theory regards the “world market,“ in which Third World
countries are dependent upon the interests of the Western capitalists, as the
agent of national urbanization in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Frank
(1972:59-60) explains how the primate cities of Latin American countries can be

better explained by the exploitative nature of the world market:

98

On the basis of the complete introduction of the whole of the continent
into the sphere of the world market, under British hegemony, there began
the systematic exploitation of the resources of the primary sector
demanded by the new industrial economies and parallel with this, the
creation of the network of services and transport necessary to these
activities Thus, the Argentina and Uruguay, founded on the
extraordinary expansion of cattle rearing and on the fusion of interests
between the mercantile bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires and the landowners
of the interior, experienced high economic growth, with a concentration of
all the tertiary functions in the capital, already a privileged place as an
exporting port.

Frank (1972:5-6) argued a web of exploitation channels through space in

a “metropolis-satellite relationship“:

Just as the colonial and national capital and its export sector become the
satellite of the Iberian (and later of other) metropolis of the world
economic system, this satellite immediately becomes a colonial and then
a national metropolis with respect to the productive sectors and
population of the interior. Furthermore, the provincial capitals, which thus
are themselves satellites of the national metropolis - and through the
latter of the world metropolis - are in turn provincial centers around which
their own local satellites orbit. Thus, a whole chain of constellations of
metropolis and satellites relates all parts of the whole system from its
metropolitan center in Europe or the United States to the farthest outpost
in the Latin American countryside.

Naturally, the world market is blamed by dependentistas for bringing on
extreme uneven urbanization in the Third World. The urban experiences of
Latin America have been characterized by a strong imbalance in the urban
network in favor of one predominating urban area; a lack of jobs and services for

the new urban masses; the segregation of the social classes; and a polarization

99

of the system of stratiﬁcation as far as consumption is concerned (Castells,
1977257).

For Nam, the exploitative nature of the world market accounts for uneven
urbanization in Korea as well. Nam (1988) applied the “dependent urbanization“
theory to the Korean urban system from 1960 to 1980. According to her, one of
the most critical aspects of Korean dependent development has been the
maximization of proﬁts through reduction of labor costs in export-oriented
industrialization.

According to Nam (19982108), the Korean urban system was
characterized by “ovemrbanization' and consequent an increase in primacy,
especially in the 19603. The concentration of capital, infrastructural support, as
well as other types of beneﬁts directed to a few big ﬁrms located in Seoul,
effectively encouraged the growth of Seoul. These urban biased policies
“pushed“ the rural population to cities, especially to Seoul. This rapid urban
growth created marginality and poverty because urbanization developed much
faster than the structural requirements for labor in the urban sector. Even
though the 19703 was characterized by decentralization, Korean urbanization
was again marred by regional inequalities.

The world system perspective can be viewed as an elaboration of
dependency theory. Whereas dependency theory has two categories (core and
periphery), world system theory adds one more (semiperiphery). The world
system perspective argues that a country's position in the international economic

system constrains patterns of urbanization. Class structures and the state are

100

mediating variables between a nation's world system position and the urban
structure of a society. The mediating variables are critical elements but they
must be understood in the context of a nation's role in the global system (Smith,
1996).

David Smith (1985, 1996) attributes the relatively balanced urban
hierarchies of South Korea with the nation's semiperipheral position in the world
capitalist system. According to Smith, Korea has not belonged to the periphery
of the world market as have most other Third World countries. During Japanese
colonialism (1910-1945), Korea was seen as a strategic military link to
Manchuria and a buffer against western colonialists in China. Unlike the
western powers, Japan invested heavily in transportation infrastructure in her
colonies and built factories there. Well-integrated railroad and port networks
helped diffuse urban growth in Korea early on. The country became a corridor
for trade between Tokyo and the frontier area, as well as a staging ground for
subsequent Japanese pushes into Asia (Suh, 1978; Smith, 19962128). With
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, there began a conscious policy to expand heavy
industries in Korea for military purposes (Suh, 1978; Smith, 19962128). The
diversiﬁcation of the Korean economy resulted in industries locating near the
factors of production serving to develop urban areas in all regions of the country
and to incorporate these cities in a system of interdependence (Nemeth and
Smith, 1985).

Due to Korea’s geopolitical position as a bulwark against communism,

Korea stayed under the US umbrella during the Cold War. Export manufacturing

101

proved to be a boon for Korean urbanization as factories need not locate close
to a concentrated domestic market. Export-oriented industrialization locates
plants close to land, labor and raw materials, often most plentiful in outlaying
regions, and to coastal transport platforms to overseas markets (Namath and
Smith, 1985; Smith, 1996). Korea’s more balanced urban system is
accompanied by a relatively low degree of informal activity and intra-urban

inequality, according to Smith (19962138).

The Developmental State as the Agent

There are urban researchers who acknowledge the role of the state in
shaping urbanization, although often as a secondary agent. One of them is
Brian Berry, a sophisticated modernization theorist. Berry (1971) understood
that some previously colonized developing countries in Southeast Asia were not
experiencing “ﬁltering down“ effects- Berry recommended the “growth pole“
strategy, which focused on investment in medium sized cities. Berry argued that
the allocation of public investments would stimulate the ﬁltering process by
creating an alternative magnet for migrants.

I argue that the state was the primary, not a secondary agent, in Korean
urbanization since the early 19603. As the issue of “hour the Korean state led
Korean urbanization will be detailed in chapter 5, I focus here on how the state
arose as the agent of social change during the period.

Whereas the capitalist-led market rules society in many Western

countries, the state has ruled society in Korea. Korea had a state-society

102

relationship similar to other Northeast Asian countries such as Japan or Taiwan,
which made the path of Korean urbanization different from other developing
countries. The Korean state since the 19603 can be regarded as a
“developmental state“ and it has intervened in and promoted the market rather
than letting the market take its course.

According to Chalmers Johnson (1987), the East Asian developmental
state arose ﬁrst in Japan, but four deﬁning elements are also present in Korea
and Taiwan. They are: (1) stable rule by a political-bureaucratic elite strong
enough to deter political demands that would undermine economic growth; (2)

' cooperation between public and private sectors under the overall guidance of a
pilot planning agency; (3) sustained public investment in education for everyone
and the equitable distribution of returns from high speed growth; (4) a
govemment that respects and uses methods of economic intervention based on
the market price mechanism.

Even though scholars may have similar conceptions about the
developmental state, they often differ in as to what the contrasting state concept
should be. Johnson (1982) himself contrasts “developmental state“ with
“regulatory state.“ The United States is a good example of a state in which the
regulatory orientation predominates, whereas Japan is a good example of a
state in which the developmental orientation predominates.

A regulatory, or market-rational, state concerns itself with the forms and
procedures of economic competition, but it does not concern itself with

substantive matters. For example, the United States government has many

103

regulations concerning the antitrust implications of the size of ﬁrms, but it does
not concern itself with what industries ought to exist and what industries are no
longer needed. The developmental, or plan-rational state, by contrast, has as its
dominant feature precisely the setting of such substantive social and economic
goals.

Korea’s developmental state began in 1961 with the military coup led by
General Chung Hee Park Park could seize absolute power partly because of
Korea’s weakened social structure. War and land reform had destroyed many of
the old social loyalties, the middle and working classes were insufﬁciently large
and organized to muster an effective opposition, and business monopolists were
parasitically addicted to government patronage (Cotton, 1992; Lie, 1992).

More to the point, Park changed Korea’s class structure. Before Park’s
takeover, dense patronage networks tied government leaders to the big
business elite. After seizing power, Park, himself, took on the role of ﬁnal
arbiter, with the backing of the military and technocracy (Olsen, 1980). The
state-business relationship actually grew closer under Park but the state now
had the upper hand (Amsden, 1989). State ofﬁcials conditioned their favor upon
industry's contribution to the development of Korea“ (Amsden, 1989; Lie, 1992).

Park undoubtedly had the Japanese developmental state in mind. He
placed his coup in the same lineage as the Meiji Reform in Japan, the
modernization of China under Sun Yat-Sen, and Nasser's revolution in Egypt

(Park, 1963). He especially identiﬁed with the Meiji Reform. When Park

 

” upon good export performance, for example.

104

marched across the Han river, which ﬂows through the center of Seoul, he was
casting himself in the role of the Meiji emperor (Amsden, 1989).

Park’s regime followed several institutional precedents set in Japan. The
creation of the Economic Planning Board, responsible for budgeting and
planning the national economy, began high-level bureaucratic coordination and
social mobilization for economic development (Cumings-Woo, 1995). Like
Japan’s Ministry of lntemational Trade and Industry (MITI), Korea’s Economic
Planning Board (EPB) was elevated above all other economic ministries. The
head of EPB was even given the status of Deputy Prime Minister. The
government also created, again, on the Japanese model, a Ministry of
Construction, charged with physical planning and building the nation (Alam,

1 989).

The Park regime exerted state autonomy on the model of Japan’s
developmental state. First, the regime acquired hegemony over economic
decision-making. The Economic Planning Board was in charge of planning and
budgeting but also handled price control, foreign aid, loans and investment, and
technology transfer (Jenkins, 1991). The EPB authored four F ive-year Plans
during the Park period, providing for budgetary and other policy actions.

Second, state ofﬁcials exerted control over the ﬁnancial system. The
government nationalized the banking system immediately after the coup
(Amsden, 1989; Alam, 1989). Responsibility for monetary policy was transferred
from the Bank of Korea to the Executive in 1962. The government created its

own commercial banks and ﬁnancial institutions. A system of ofﬁcial guarantees

105

for foreign loans, introduced in 1964, extended the govemment’s control even
further (Alam, 1989).

Third, state ofﬁcials used subsidies to shape corporate behavior,
including low-interest loans and tax breaks (Lie, 1992; Gittelman, 1988). The
Park regime sought to stimulate targeted industries by giving long-term credit to
select ﬁrms at negative real interest rates. Exporters enjoyed a 30 percent
income tax break and paid no customs duties on capital goods imports
(Gittelman, 1988; Amsden, 1989).

Fourth, the majority of Korea’s parliamentary statutes originated with
bureaucratic ofﬁcials not with lawmakers. Administrative policies were
orchestrated within the bureaucracy itself with a great deal of internal policy-
coordinating and consensus-building (Cumings-Woo, 1995).

The Korean bureaucracy has often looked to the Japanese precedent in
policy formation, as well. For example, Cumings-Woo (1995) reports on a policy
innovation survey among Korean civil servants in which 43% of the bureaucrats
surveyed listed “foreign examples“ as the source of new policy. When asked to
choose the country with the most similar policy environment, most respondents
chose Japan, explaining they studied Japan so closely for that reason.

I try to measure the degree to which a state is developmental, and see
how Korea compares with other countries mostly using data from World Bank's
(Table 8). Three variables are used to operationalize the developmental state

variable according to Johnson’s (1987) deﬁnition: (1) percentage of expenditure

106

on education out of Gross National Product (GNP)'° during selected years
between 1980 and 1990, (2) ratio of income held by the top 20% to that held by
the bottom 20% in 1990", and (3) the ratio of average savings to Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) from 1980-92". The ﬁrst and second variables are
direct measures of sustained public investment in education and the equitable
distribution of income. The third is an indirect measure of government
intervention targeted for high growth.

Korea ranked 2nd among 38 countries with an average 2 score of 1.02.
The result conﬂrrned the arguments of many scholars who claim that Northeast
Asian countries such as Taiwan (1st), Korea ( 2nd), and Japan (3rd) are
developmental states. Jenkins (1991) argues that the superior economic
performance of the East Asian Newly lndustrializing Countries (Nle) lies in the
existence of a developmental state with a high degree of relative autonomy from
local classes and class fractions. He further mentions that Taiwan and Korea
historically inherited effective state organizations from the Japanese colonial
period. Economic decision-making in both countries has been highly centralized
with pilot agencies in charge of planning and implementation of major policies.
The control of state over the ﬁnancial system was crucial in ensuring the

implementation of policies.

 

'5 For Taiwan 1 used Taiwan Statistical Data Book published in 1993 by the Council for Economic
Planning and Development.

16 World Bank. 1997. World Development Indicators on CD-ROM. Washington DC.

'7 World Bank. 1994, 1996. World Development Report Washington 0.0.: Oxford University Press.

'8 World Bank. 1997. World Development Indicators on CD-ROM. Washington DC.

107

Table 8. Developmental State Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

%

Devel Z edued 2 score gross

opm score Ion ot domed

antal - Z of % expan gross lc

8110 Score edu. ﬂue domestl

Index of rich2 axpen 011 of c (% of

(Aver rich20 0%lp rim GDP savings GDP,

COUNTRIE age of ”poor 0on oil of (‘80-'9 II 01.1 average
22L Oi 90L 2) 1.3L
1 Taiwan 1.15 .59219 5.15 . . 1.71072 32.48
2 Korea 1.82 .48949 5.70 .8721 1 5.45 1 .esosr 32.38
3 Japan .00 .74331 4.31 .01” 4.23 1.83145 32.03
4 Malaysia .81 -.82172 1 1.87 . . 1 .84840 33.18
5 Canada .8) 23828 7.05 1.853 8.83 -.29858 2234
8 Belgium .55 .70271 4.58 1.787 8.74 -.83518 19.63
7 Netherlands .54 .71331 4.50 33090 5.39 .08714 24.28
8 Hungary .52 .98343 3.18 .09495 4.35 .49418 28.34
9 Finland .50 .44008 5.97 .80499 5.35 .25940 25.15
10 Poland .49 .82052 3.92 -.1347 4.02 .77488 27.75
11 Austria .41 . . .58242 5.01 .28398 25.18
12 Denmark .41 22150 7.15 1.788 8.71 -.78048 20.01
13 kazerland .34 ~.04538 8.58 .54358 4.98 .51095 28.42
14 Sweden .32 some 4.81 1.020 5.88 -.74829 20.07
15 Italy .28 .42870 8.03 .73434 5.25 -.37783 21.94
18 Indonesia .23 .84593 4.88 -1 .350 2.30 1.37991 30.81
17 South Africa .17 . . -.3113 3.77 .85425 27.15
18 Germany .10 .47938 5.78 -.1723 3.97 -.01348 23.78
19 Thailand .08 .00402 8.31 -.6845 3.27 .89512 28.38
20 Venezuela .05 L.38838 10.31 .23979 4.55 .28885 25.29
21 France -.01 .15835 7.48 .38931 4.73 -.58887 20.98
22 Australia -.04 .23408 9.59 .44821 4.85 - 342T! 2212
23 Spain -.08 .7301 3 4.41 -.3888 3.88 -.51858 21 .24
24 New Zealand -.08 -.oeoae 8.78 13734 4.40 -.24388 22.82
25 China -.07 .33531 8.53 2822 .50 2.09032 34.39
28 U. S. -.07 -.10828 8.91 1.280 5.99 r1 .38878 18.94
27 Ireland -.29 . . ..0352 4.09 -.0370 21 .35
28 Peru -.29 -.40138 10.40 -.2194 3.90 -.24825 22.59
29 India -.30 .87738 4.89 -1 .007 2.79 -.58840 20.”
3) Argentina -.41 -.48917 10.85 -.2194 3.90 - 53791 21.13
31 U. K -.42 ~.24144 9.83 .35047 4.71 -1.37838 18.90
32 Mexico -.55 -.98851 13.83 -.7140 3.20 .05380 24.12
33 Philippines -.58 .18223 7.35 -1.120 2.83 -.73781 20.12
34 Girls eﬂ -1.813 17.00 -.0781 4.10 -.39308 21.88
5 Colombia -.91 -1 .334 15.50 -.8553 3.00 -.54553 21 .09
as Turkey -1 .15 . . -1.473 2.13 -.82299 19.89
37 Pakistan -1 .28 .87122 4.73 -1 .848 1 .80 4.88153 10.42
38 Brazil -1 .88 4.431 32.14 -.4314 3.80 -.17208 22.93
.IQIL 38 38 it 34 35 J

 

108

 

According to Jenkins, the bureaucracy is much more politicized in Latin
America. The upper, and in many instances even middle, level civil servants are
political appointees. Economic decision-making is also much less centralized
than in East Asia. A large number of government ministries and agencies are
involved in formulating economic policy. The banking system was in private
hands leaving the state with less leverage in guiding industrial development.

Malaysia ranked 4‘", and Canada 5'”. It is interesting to see that ranking
6th through 15th are all European countries: Belgium (6th), Netherlands (7th),
Hungary (8th), Finland (91h), Poland (10th), Austria (11th), Denmark (12th),
Switzerland (13th), Sweden (14th), and Italy (15th).

More laissez faire economies such as the US. (26th), Ireland (27th), and
United Kingdom (31 st) were near the bottom along with other Third World
countries in Latin America and Asia: Peru (28th), India (29th), Argentina (30th),
Mexico (32nd), Philippines (33rd), Chile (34th), Colombia (35th), Turkey (36th),
Pakistan (37th), and Brazil (38th).

This chapter started by reviewing the two main theories have answered
the issue of agency in urbanization and how they have applied their answer to
the Korean case. Both the human ecology/modemization perspective and
dependencyMorld system theory argue for the dominance of capitalists in urban
Korea.

This chapter ends with arguing that the primary agent in urban Korea is

the developmental state, not the bourgeoisie. Compared to the "regulatory

109

states" in the West, who limit themselves to overseeing the basic functioning of
the market, the "developmental state" in Korea intervened and promoted the
market. The rise of bureaucrats as the key decision-makers in urban Korea was

described.

110

CHAPTER 4. CONFUCIAN DEVELOPMENTALISM IN KOREA

We have been born into this land, charged with the historic mission of
regenerating the nation overcoming the existing difﬁculties for the
rapid progress of the nation, we will cultivate our creative power and
pioneer spirit. We will give the foremost consideration to the public good
and order Realizing that the nation develops through creative and co-
operative activities and that national prosperity is the ground for individual
growth, we will do our best to fulﬁll the responsibility and obligation
attendant upon our freedom and right, and encourage the willingness of
the people to participate and serve in building the nation (The
Charter of National Education in 1968)

In 1968, the “The Charter of National Education" was publicly declared by
President Park. The charter shows how Confucianism (as represented by words
such as “responsibility and obligation," and “public order”) well marries
developmentalism (as represented by words such as “building the nation,”
“public good,” and “national prosperity’). The military government required the
charter, which was reminiscent of the “Imperial Rescript on Education” during the
Japanese colonial era, to be contained in all the textbooks of all schools and to
be recited at all public events (Shinil Kim, 1995210).

Ironically, more students began to enjoy education from that year. The
open-door policy in education was extended in 1968 in accordance with the
charter (Adams and Gottlieb, 1993:1230). Under the new admissions policy,

every student who completed primary education could advance to middle school

111

as the entrance examination to middle school was abolished. Implementing this
new policy meant increased enrollment in middle schools in excess of the
planned targets (Adams and Gottlieb, 1993:130).

The above has been the irony of Korean society since the 19603. The
society has been “politically authoritarian (hierarchical since 1987) but
economically egalitarian.” How can a society be economically egalitarian under
the rule of military dictatorship?

Some might point out the fact that the fruit of fast economic growth
seemed to be unevenly distributed, with the industrial bourgeoisie having the
lion's share at the expense of marginalized classes such as workers and
farmers. Especially suppression of the labor movement led to continuous
resistance from workers who demanded higher wages. These scholars might
agree with Evans' (1987) explanation of the dreadful combination of repressive
politics and extreme social polarization based on the experience of Latin
America.

in Latin American theorizing, the authoritarian state prevents labor from
organizing on behalf of its economic interests thereby creating the conditions for
a growing disparity of salaries between skilled and unskilled labor as well as a
growing gap between incomes of wage earners and returns to capital (Evans,
1987:219). However, Korea shows an egalitarian income distribution by world
standards in the midst of dictatorial rule by President Park. Korea's gini
coefﬁcient for "Before Tax Household Income" was 0.351 in 1970, as contrasted

with Mexico's 0.567, Brazil's 0.550, 0.404 in the USA, and 0.335 in Japan

112

(Maddison 8. Associates, 1992211). Evans seems to be perplexed by the

absence of severe inequality in Korea, saying (19872209, 222):

In East Asia, the authoritarian state has clearly played the expected role
in repressing labors demand, but repression has not been accompanied
by increasing levels of inequality income distribution in which the top
10 percent of the population gets one-half of what their counterparts in
major Latin American Nle receive - and less than the share received by
the richest 10 percent under a popularly elected government in the United
States.

This chapter attempts to explain why the bureaucratic elite in Korea could
have been “politically authoritarian” and “economically egalitarian” at the same
time. The hegemonic ideology of the Korean elite since the 19605, Confucian
developmentalism, as expressed well in the Charter of National Education, will
be examined.

When explaining this modern ideology, I depend heavily on the ideals of
President Chung Hee Park. As I will explain in detail, Park changed the nuance
of Confucianism and developmentalism in modern Korea. Confucianism was
born again with more emphasis on loyalty toward the state as in Meiji
Confucianism in Japan. Park also changed Korea's politically-charged
nationalism into developmentalism.

Park’s ideals effectively penetrated the high-ranking bureaucrats. Below
are three mechanisms that helped bureaucrats to internalize the ideals of

President Park (Yong-Whan Hahn, 1996).

113

First, President Park extensively used the Ofﬁce of the Presidential
Secretariat. The Senior Secretary for Economic Affairs was one of the most
important staff members for the President in managing development programs
from a nationwide perspective. The best economic bureaucrats were recruited
into this ofﬁce as administrative assistants, giving them not only the pride of
recognition but also a good opportunity to learn how to make economic policies
and programs from a broader national perspective rather than from a narrow
ministerial viewpoint. Moreover, after two to three years of successful service in
the Blue House (the White House of Korea), these bureaucratic elites were sent
back to their home ministries usually with promotions. No doubt they would
become powerful missionary-agents in disseminating the President’s ideals
among the bureaucracy.

Second, President Park publicly dramatized clear, cold-blooded, and very
consistent criteria for reward and punishment by using “the New Year Brieﬁng
Session.” During the months of January and February, President Park visited
the ofﬁces of every minister and governor to get brieﬁngs on plans and
strategies for the current year and the preceding year's performance. Only
those who achieved one hundred percent or more of the planned target could
survive or be promoted. Those who failed to achieve a satisfactory level would
be ﬁred without exception. This triggered a positive attitude toward change and
innovation, and a greater concern for results rather than procedural legality.

Third, President Park relied heavily upon a number of “Bulldozer” type

administrators who were deeply committed to the realization of Park’s ideals.

114

pa
na'
Pre

50C

hler
Hera
inllia

in mc

These bulldozers worked extremely hard, not paying much attention to
difﬁculties or constraints of any nature. They just pushed the program through
until the target could be realized. The President provided them with every
possible means of support and defended them from all possible attacks. They
reciprocated with achievements far better than the President had expected.
Nak-Sun Lee, one of the bulldozers who was the Director of the National Tax
Administration from 1962 to 1966, achieved the miraculous success of a 66

percent increase in tax revenues within one year of his appointment.

Revivin A e Id onfucianism in the Earl 19603

When President Dae Jung Kim, the ﬁrst President from the opposition
party since 1961, was sworn into ofﬁce in 1998, Korea witnessed the start of a
national campaign; the “new intellectuals movement.“ On December 5,
President Kim said that the “new intellectuals” are people who add value to
society through innovation regardless of whether they have a college degree or
ofﬁcial certiﬁcation. By favoring creativity over “schooling“ and innovation over
hierarchy, the movement seeks to “de—Confucianize” Korean public life (Korea
Herald, 1998a). Putting aside the importance of yet another govemment-
initiated-nationaI-campaign, one could see the lingering inﬂuence of Confucius

in modern Korea.

115

Confucianism rose to the rank of a hegemonic ideology in Korea when the
Chosun dynasty was founded in 1392. Supplanting Buddhism, which had been
the ofﬁcial state religion of the preceding Koryo dynasty, Confucianism was used
to legitimize the new Confucian elite (Re, 1993).

Their dominance was institutionalized by putting into place a new
meritocratic access to government positions. The means to becoming a
bureaucrat in the Chosun dynasty was, in most cases, through the state civil
service examination on Confucian classics (Yong-mo Kim, 1976: 76). Even
though there were no limitations on commoners sitting in the examinations, the
scholar class practically held a monopoly over access to these exams (Su-gon
Yi, 1986: 104).

In spite of this class limitation, the recruitment system was ﬁercely
competitive which helped scholar-bureaucrats to expand the power of the state
and their stake in it. About only one out of every thirty applicants could pass the
preliminary exam. Of those who passed the preliminary exam, only half could
pass the main exam (Yong-mo Kim, 1976277).

This meritocratic elite recruitment gave Confucian bureaucrats a tool for
keeping the power of the king in check (Yong-mo Kim, 1976278). Similar to the
case in China, the consensus decision-making based on the tenets of
Confucianism made bureaucrats not just aides but also consultants and
sometimes critics (Tong-so Pak, 1986). Korean kings did not enjoy autocratic
power like the absolute monarchs of Western states due to this nature of Korea's

consensus politics (Tong-so Pak, 19862495).

116

As this bureaucracy expanded to the local level, so did the power of
bureaucrats. The new rising bureaucrats pushed for tighter central control of
local governments upon the establishment of the Chosun dynasty. The
pluralistic local administration - which varied according to the royal authority and
disposition of the party in power - was reorganized into a three-tiered hierarchy:
central government, provinces, and counties (Su-gon W, 1986: 105).

Heads of local government were now dispatched from the central
government (Tong-so Pak,1986: 499). A system of secret inspectors
supplemented the ofﬁcial method of controlling local government. Due to these
measures, the formation of a local political force that could effectively challenge
the central government during the ﬁve hundred years of the Chosun dynasty was
almost impossible (Tong-so Pak, 1986:198-9).

Just like in ancient China, Confucianism during the Chosun Dynasty was
“authoritarian“ in that it explicitly legitimized the class hierarchy. People were
divided into four groupings according to their occupation - scholar-gentry,
peasants, artisans, and merchants - a division referred to as the four classes in
the Book of Documents (Won-son Pak, 19862563).

The scholar-gentry were the literati who cultivated Confucian learning and
virtue and were considered the highest of the four classes (Won-son Pak,
19862563). Peasants were in the second class but were well regarded for their
agricultural labor. Agriculture was considered to be the foundation of all life.
Peasants established the customs of the nation with the scholar class (Won-son

Pak, 19862563).

117

It is difﬁcult to tell how much this mling ideology was accepted by the
masses during the period. In reality, many Confucian scholars failed to live up to
the high standards of the moral code. Palais (1996:1003) reports that many of
the ofﬁcials placed private interest over the public good, took bribes to enrich
themselves and their families, exploited peasants and slaves to increase their
wealth, and foreclosed on mortgages to expand their landed properties instead
of fulﬁlling their role as moral exemplars for society at large. Palais (199621003)
also points out problems with statecraft such as maladministration, bureaucratic
factionalism, unfair taxation, and deterioration of national defense.

Challenges against the class-hierarchy ideology by the masses seems to
be conspicuous from the seventeenth century onward as exempliﬁed in the
buying and selling of family documents by illegitimate offspring, and escapees
from slavery (Yong-mo Kim, 1986). This brought about upward mobility in status
in the late Chosun Dynasty, both in urban and rural areas (Yong-mo Kim,
19862745).

For example, the scholar class in Taegu city in 1870 was 42.5 percent of
the population which is a dramatic increase from 19.4 percent in 1684. For the
same, period, the percentage of slaves was reduced from 39.8 percent to 2.2
percent (Yong-mo Kim, 19862744). The boldest challenge to the ruling ideology
came in 1894 with the Tonghak (which means Eastern Learning as contrasted to
Western Knowledge) peasant revolt repudiating the class hierarchy (Yong-mo

Kim, 1986:746-7).

118

However, such revolts were infrequent during the Chosun Dynasty and
the attack on Confucianism was rare. It seems that the masses, mostly farmers,
wanted a Confucian benevolent government characterized by fair taxation and
no abuse by ofﬁcials rather than overthrow of the class system.

My argument may be partially supported by the fact that the masses
accepted Confucianism as a daily code of life. Even though peasants never
gave up animistic spirit worship and shamanism, they were eventually converted
to Confucian ancestor worship and patrilineal family organization (Palais,
1996:1003). Mahn Kee Kim (1991) mentions that Koreans became more faithful
to the tenets of Confucianism than Chinese people. He contrasts the case of
Japan where Confucianism provided a norm of behavior for the warrior class in
the upper echelons of society but failed to penetrate into the ordinary life of
farmers, merchants, and artisans.

Another supporting fact is the anti-colonial demonstration in 1919, which
broke out on the day of the funeral of the last monarch, Emperor Kojong. The
protest, called the March First Movement, successfully mobilized the Korean
masses as shown in the number of demonstrators killed (7,509), wounded
(15,961), and arrested (46,948) (Simons, 1995:134). It shows that the last
monarch had enough lingering loyalty from the Korean people to evoke a
nationalist movement on the day of his funeral.

From 1910 on, Japanese colonial bureaucrats replaced members of the
indigenous scholar class as rulers. Upon the signing of the Treaty of Annexation

between Korea and Japan on April 29, 1910, General Terauchi Masatake, an

119

army general and the former Minister of the Army of Japan, became the ﬁrst
Governer-General. Yamagata lsaburo, a civilian and former Minister of
Communications of Japan, was appointed Administrative Superintendent on
October 1, 1910 (Hong Hae Yoo, 1973255).

All administrative posts in the new government were held by Japanese
(Hong Hae Yoo, 1973255). Even with the announced policy of appointing
qualiﬁed Koreans to ofﬁcial posts later on, Koreans comprised only 12 percent of
the high ofﬁcial positions at or above the rank of soninkan (which means the
third rank) in 1943 (Han-kyo Kim, 1973:45). Even those Koreans with higher
ranks were kept out of positions of substantive power. Out of the 87 people who
served as bureau directors in the central administration in 1943, only two were
Koreans, both in the Bureau of Education (Han-kyo Kim, 1973:45).

In contrast to the notion that Confucianism became obsolete under the
Japanese rule, it seems that Confucianism maintained its position as a ruling
ideology even though it changed its form according to the need of the new alien
masters. The new masters, Japanese modern bureaucrats, not only supported
indigenous Confucianism in Korea but also planted their own version of
Confucianism in Korean soil. Concerned to identify Japanese rule with
traditional Korean ways, the colonial government in Korea was conciliatory and
protective towards Korean Confucianism (Wi Jo Kang, 1973: 71). Wnether
because of support from the colonial government or not, the response of Korean
Confucianists to the Japanese colonial government was not as antagonistic as

that of other elements in Korean society (Wi Jo Kang, 1973271 ).

120

Over time, indigenous Korean Confucianism assimilated to Japanese
Confucianism. Japan's Meiji Government, which replaced the Tokugawa
Shogunate in 1868, was not anti-Confucianist (Wi Jo Kang, 1973267). In fact,
the new regime was itself a product of Confucian historicism (Wi Jo Kang,
1973267). Morishima (1982) also argues that the Meiji revolution was carried on
by lower class warriors who had retained Confucianism but blended in Shintoism
as a catalyst to promote nationalism. This combination was perfectly suited to
the construction of a constitutional monarchic regime based on a modern
bureaucracy.

Even though Han-kyo Kim (1973) points out that excessive power
concentration in the Governor-General and the lack of career mobility made the
colonial bureaucracy in Seoul underdeveloped, the Japanese Government
General of Korea was a powerful centralized bureaucratic machine modeled
after the Japanese Meiji system (Jong Hae Yoo,1973; Woo-Cummings,1995).
There is no doubt that this alien bureaucracy was dedicated to strengthening
state power through extended local control and establishing meritocratic
recruitment.

A highly centralized system of local government was established as a
control measure for Japanese colonial rule (Jong Hae Yoo, 1973256).
Signiﬁcant power was delegated to the provincial governors who were appointed
by the Govemor-General of Korea (Jong Hae Yoo, 1973256). Provincial
governors appointed provincial civil servants and other executive heads such as

mayors, county chiefs, and district leaders (Jong Hae Yoo, 1973:64). Cumings

121

(19972152) argues that the Japanese effectively penetrated below the county
level and into the villages for the ﬁrst time, effectively demolishing the old
balance and tension between bureaucrats and the landed scholar class.

Added to the old county-level pivot of central magistrate, local clerks, and
landed families was a centrally controlled, highly mobile national police force,
responsive to the center and possessing its ovm communications and
transportation facilities (Cumings, 1997:152). In place of the old Korean
system, the Japanese instituted a modern civil service which, in the main,
followed the lines of the Imperial Japanese services (Woo-Cumings, 1995).
Provision was made for a high and a low examination of candidates, for salaries
and allowances , and for the appointment, resignation, and dismissal of ofﬁcials
(Ireland, 1926: 104; Woo—Cumings, 19952439).

Meiji Confucianism manifested itself as the Japanese attempted to mold
Koreans into loyal Japanese subjects for whom Emperor worship and the Shinto
shrine would have as much appeal as it had to the Japanese people (Smith Jr.,
1959). The objective of Japanese education in Korea shows this combination of
Confucianism and Shintoism. The ﬁrst educational ordinance for Koreans,
promulgated one year after the annexation, was “the making of loyal and good
subjects“ (Wonme Dong, 1973: 156). Ritualized formality framed everyday
school activities: the ceremonial recitation of the Imperial Rescript on Education
and the Imperial Oaths, training in sword exercises, weekly morning assemblies,
veneration of the Japanese Emperor’s portrait on commemoration days, listening

to heroic stories, and visits to Shinto shrines (Jung 1985; M. J. Rhee, 1997: 70).

122

. I believe that this Meiji Confucianism may have been even more
authoritarian in Korea than in the land where the Emperor actually resided.
Morishima (1982) argues that Meiji Confucianism resulted in a paternalistic and
an anti-individualistic Japan. On top of that, the burden of being the aggressors
made it difﬁcult for the Japanese to eliminate the old authorities in Korea. Japan
left the Korean landlord class, mostly Confucian scholars, intact as local
surrogates for colonial rule (Cumings, 1984).

The Meiji Confucianism imposed on the Korean people seems to have
failed to gain acceptance by the Korean people. The violent destruction of
nearly every Shinto shrine in Korea after the defeat of Japan in 1945 shows the
extent to which this effort had failed (Smith Jr., 19592182). Also, as a result of
indigenous Confucianism being utilized by the Japanese government, Confucian
strength in Korean society, at the end of Japanese rule, was almost nil (Wi Jo
Kang, 1973272).

The First Republic of Syngman Rhee (1948-60) seems to record the ﬁrst
fall of Confucianism as a governing state ideology in Korea since the 14‘“
century. The state of affairs during his reign should probably be characterized
as personalism rather than bureaucratic governance. Bureaucratic appointment
under Rhee was less than meritocratic (Kwang Woong Kim, 1987:101-2; Evans,

1995: 51-2):

123

Under Rhee, the civil service exam was largely bypassed. Only about 4
percent of those ﬁlling higher entry-level positions came in via the civil
service exam. Nor were those who entered the higher civil service able to
count on making their way up through the ranks via a standard process of
internal promotion. Instead, higher ranks were ﬁlled primarily on the basis
of “special" appointments.

The ruling elite during the Rhee regime were not bureaucrats; instead
Syngman Rhee and his “clique“ dominated the politicians in his Liberal Party
(Chayudang). Rhee’s charismatic authority, not consensus among bureaucrats,
became the pillar of political order (Quee-Yong Kim, 1983214). The informal
transition of power during his reign shows the obvious personalized nature of

political institutions during his time (Quee-Yong Kim, 1983:15-16):

After 1956, Rhee turned over the major responsibility of governmental
administration to his ministers, and most of his power in political and
governmental affairs to Yi Ki-bung. Yi became the most powerful man in
the country, as the Speaker of the National Assembly, the de facto
chairman of the ruling Chayudang (the Liberal Party), and also de facto
chief of the executive branch. He had personal control over the process
of elite recruitment. Virtually all important government ofﬁcials were
appointed, promoted, and dismissed by Yi’s authority. There was no
tendency on Yi's part, however, to override the authority of Rhee, to
whom his loyalty was unquestionable. Rhee did not allow him to innovate
or lead and he was by nature no mover or leader of men. He had the
virtues of humility and sincerity as well as the personal trust and support
of the President. The relationship between the two men, however, went
beyond the realm of politics when the childless Rhee adopted Yi’s eldest
son, Kang-sok Thus the political link between Rhee and Yi became a
comprehensive personal bond, a relationship which could not be broken
by political considerations alone (Quee-Yong Kim, 1983:15-16).

124

fro.

Cu:

The military coup in 1961 by General Chung Hee Park signaled the
resurgence of bureaucrats as the governing elite. Afraid of the possibility of
revolt from the military, Park established a ﬁrm control over the military through
various measures including forcing early retirements of his potential rivals,
outright purges, and the extensive use of security forces to supervise the
activities of higher ofﬁcials (Yung Myung Kim, 19922113). Even though the
majority of cabinet posts within the ﬁrst cabinet of the Military Revolution
Commission were occupied by military men, by 1963 only 5 out of 18 cabinet
members were from the military (Wan Ki Paik, 1991:52-3). President Park
arduously blocked political intervention in the policy process by insulating the
bureaucrats from political pressures (Young-Whan Hahn, 1996).

As the power of the armed forces was on the decline, bureaucrats moved
to the top of the hierarchy (Olsen, 1980). The dominance of bureaucrats was
indicated in the selection of economic ministers. During 16 years (1964-1979),
only seven (14.9%) of the 47 economic ministers were ex-military men,
compared to 46 (38.3%) of the 120 non-economic ministers. No military ofﬁcers
ever served as Minister of Finance during the period (Chung Kil Chung,
1986:38; Young-When Hahn, 19962195).

The recruitment of the bureaucratic elite became more meritocratic. An
open competitive examination for the higher civil service was introduced in 1963
(Hahn, 19962192). From 1963 to 1981, the rate of competition was anywhere
from 50 aspirants to one successful candidate all the way to 100 to one (Woo-

Cumings, 19952450). In addition to injecting new blood through these

125

examinations, government ministries established many research institutions
staffed by highly professional experts with Ph.D. degrees (Young-When Hahn,
1 9962193).

Not only did Park revive Confucianism by making the meritocratic
bureaucrats the ruling elite, but he also took the role of a father-ruler himself.
Park insisted on instilling a “can-do-spirit“ in the minds of the Korean people. At
the same time, he kept pointing out to people what was wrong with them. Park
gave detailed attention to his speeches and many times corrected drafts
prepared by aides or wrote them himself (Chosunilbo, 1999a). Park made many
emotional speeches that were laced with anger, Iamentation, discipline, and
warnings. For example, his letter to educators at universities in the early 19605
says, “You should repent your past, as universities did not play their role
giving out degrees randomly and creating social problems.“ To farmers, he
wrote, “Several days ago, I flew over Kyonggi (the capital region) and saw ﬁelds
that were not being cultivated or having their soil turned. You farmers must
wake up and go about your business properly. In the future, those with inferior
growing records will have their fertilizer allocation lowered“ (Chosunilbo, 1999a).

The following excerpt from one of President Park’s speeches shows how
he combined ﬁlial piety with state loyalty: “Just as home is a small collective
body, so is the state a larger community One who does not maintain a
wholesome family order cannot be expected to show strong devotion to his state

" (Tai, 1989: 17).

126

Familism, when extended to the state, meant an extensive state. F ather-
like rulers are intrusive in mobilizing people whether their governance is
benevolent or autocratic. This modern Confucianism developed into several
govemment-Ied movements, turning bureaucrats into father-like ﬁgures just like
President Park.

The New Village Movement, which was initiated personally by Park, is
one of the best examples of the extensive Confucian state. The Park’s drew
upon traditional virtue in the countryside to generate a patriotic national
movement to improve rural households’ incomes through cooperative efforts
(Bong-Gyu Ha, 1989). The movement began in the early 19705.

One of the projects of the movement was the green revolution designed to
achieve rice self-sufﬁciency. A new crop, a japonica-indica cross with yield
potential estimated at 30 percent higher than the varieties commonly cultivated
in Korea, was developed by the late 1960s. In spite of ambivalence by scientists
and farmers over rapid replacement of traditional varietal types because of
concerns about taste and the need for more fertilizer input, the adoption and
diffusion of the new varieties were aggressively pushed through bureaucratic
mobilization. Varied strategies were used to gain farmer compliance

(Burmeister, 19902209):

The Ofﬁce of Rural Development director general captured one of the
most common methods in this observation: “In Sinan-Gun Jeonnam-Do
(Chonnam-Do) guidance workers persuaded famers to plant the new
variety under the slogan “Visit Farmers Ten Times.“ Many farmers
accepted the recommendation to save the guidance workers“ “face.“ This

127

mode of reaching agreement by pestering the opponents into stolid
consent is apparently a time—honored approach in the Korean
bureaucratic setting. More heavy-handed measures were employed when
necessary - for example, using govemment-distributed fertilizer to coax
compliance and, on occasion, physical destruction of traditional variety
seedbeds. Not only extension workers, but other local county and
township ofﬁcials (county magistrates, township and village chiefs, chiefs
of police, etc), assumed responsibility for promoting new variety
cultivation on predetermined plots within their physical jurisdictions.

In 1973, President Park brought the Factory New Wllage Movement
before the public with the following slogan: “Treat the employees like family; Do
factory work like my own personal work.“ (Bong-Gyu Ha, 19892211). From the
mid-19703, the New Spirit Movement was headed by the daughter of President
Park and resuscitated the traditional values of loyalty, ﬁlial piety, and
observance of proprieties, directly drawn from the Confucian code of ethics
(Keun-Hae Park, 1979; Bong-Gyu Ha, 1989:211).

Park also introduced a wired broadcasting system, comparable to the
radio distributed by the National Socialists in prewar Germany, to facilitate the
propaganda work (Young Jo Lee, 1990: 239). Villagers in the remotest areas
were given speakers connected to an ampliﬁer-equipped “wired broadcast
ofﬁce“ through which catch-phrases, songs, and Park’s public speeches were
transmitted (Young Jo Lee, 1990: 239-40).

These mobilization efforts intruded on people through an administrative
hierarchy reaching down to the neighborhood. The smallest administrative unit,

made up of 14 to 20 households, called ban in Korean, were important points of

128

social mobilization and control. Once a month, all ban met to discuss local and
national issues. One representative per household attended. Strong social
pressures were put on households to attend and nonattendance incurred a ﬁne
of about 3,000 won (nearly half a day's wage for rural male laborers at 1982
prices), the money being used for some collective purpose agreed upon by the
ban (Wade, 1983:17). The content of discussions at the ban meetings was
prepared by the government. A special newspaper (12 or so pages) for those
meeting, explained major government policies; gave agricultural instructions
such as how to ﬁght pests and diseases; and often devoted as much as half of
the space to topics of nationalism and anti-communism (Wade, 1983).

The Confucianism held by the developmental state could be considered
authoritarian since the bureaucracy dominated over the civil society. Young Jo
Lee (1990) argues that Park’s regime is similar to a “bonapartist' regime in the
sense that the executive part of the state achieves a commanding power over all
other parts of the state and over society, as described by Marx”. In 1972, the
new constitution removed the limitations on presidential terms and empowered
presidents to make political appointments, to nominate one-third of the National
Assembly members, and to issue any emergency decree presidents deemed
necessary (Bong-Gyu Ha, 1989: 175).

Even during the 1960s, when elections were competitive and held
regularly, bureaucrats were not held accountable by the public. Woo-Cumings

(19952453) reports that the majority of parliamentary statutes during the Park

 

2° Marx, Karl. 1963. The Eighteenth Brumar're of Louis Bonaparte New York, lntemational Publishers.

129

regime originated with the bureaucracy and not with the lawmakers. Woo-
Cumings (1995:453) also mentions that the Korean bureaucracy was not
accountable to the legislature either. Woo-Cumings argues that economic
policy-making was produced in the manner of a typical hierarchy (19952 200-
201):

Policy guidelines are given initially in the basic guidelines formally

approved by the cabinet and the president. These broad terms of

reference are translated into more speciﬁc and operational plans by
bureaucrats within the Economic Planning Board (EPB) under the EPB

Chairman’s direct command with the assistance of technical experts from

outside. The business community immediately realized that once they act

in accord with the preferences of government planners they will have
great prospects for proﬁt making and corporate expansion through the
govemment’s full backing.

“The mandate of development“ continued on during the ruthless rule of
President 000 Hwan Chun (1980-1987). Seeing himself as the Iegatee of Park’s
early successes, Chun was anxious to keep the economy moving (Gibney,
1992: 79). Not possessing Park’s vision and dynamism, however, he was
content to leave economic guidance and leadership to the bureaucrats (Gibney,
1992279). Park’s New Village Movement continued under the charge of Chun's
brother (Gibney, 1992283). “Park Confucianism“ thus lived on within the
bureaucrats even as they served “another Emperor.“

The “hierarchical,“ although no longer “authoritarian,“ nature of Korean
Confucianism can be still found. For example, the mobilization of people

through ban organization is still in practice even though the authoritarian nature

has been largely eliminated. The policy making process is still almost

130

exclusively in the hands of elite bureaucrats. The government constantly tries to
mold people’s minds with help from the media through various campaigns. For
example, the “new intellectuals movement,“ which was designed to “de-

Confucianize" public life in Korea, is being pushed by the central government.

Turning Political Natiggglism intg ngglgpmentalism
On Feburuary, 25 1999, President Dae Jung Kim perplexed many

Koreans by denouncing nationalism (Korea Herald, 1999a):

The 21" century will be the century of the greatest revolution in human
history. The days of narrow-minded nationalism are passing away. The
scale of the world economy has now become too great to be supported
solely by individual nations Indeed, nearly 6 billion inhabitants of this
world are now walking out from old national boundaries into a new world
of “universal globalism.“

Then, he went on to list what he had achieved during his ﬁrst year in the

ofﬁce for the ideal of “universal globalism“ (Korea Herald, 1999a):

I have advocated a transition to a truly open economy. I emphasized that
in order to improve our economic fundamentals, it was necessary to open
the market to foreign products and foreign investment. Further, I insisted
that it was crucial to scrap the protective system of a govemment-
controlled economy in favor of a few chaebol (large family-owned) ﬁrms
The Korean government has carried out a bold program of
deregulation Such a rapid and comprehensive program of
deregulation will promote the development of a market economy and
enhance the climate for foreign investment.

131

Terms are important in discussions. In the Korean debate about
“economic nationalism“ and “universal globalism,“ I argue that the term
“developmentalism“ should be used rather than “economic nationalism“ to
describe Korea's hegemonic ideology since the 1960s.

There are two reasons why developmentalism is a better choice. First,
“economic nationalism“ has negative connotations. Levi-Faur (19972367) says
that economic nationalism has been usually associated with a fascist political
economy (Hitler's and Mussolini’s economic policies, Mihail Manoilescu's
political economy) and with the agendas of right-wing extremists (Patrick
Buchanan in the USA) and social conservatives (the Euro-skeptics in the British
Conservative Party).

The widespread negative perception of economic nationalism forced
researchers in the ﬁeld to argue that not every version is bad. Cohen (1991)
distinguishes between “malign“ and “benign“ economic nationalism. According
to Cohen (1991247), malign nationalism seeks national goals relentlessly, even
at the expense of others. Benign nationalism, by contrast, is prepared to
compromise national policy priorities where necessary to accommodate the
interest of others.

Second, developmentalism is a distinct ideology, and cannot be fully
emcompassed by the term economic nationalism. Gao (1997) mentions several
characteristics of developmentalism in Japan such as (1) strategic view of the
economy which emphasizes upgrading of industrial structure, (2) limiting

excessive competition to allocate resources more effectively at the national

132

level, and (3) rejecting the proﬁt principle to attain growth and a more equitable
distribution of income.

Having said that developmentalism is a distinct ideology, I should admit
that developmentalism is indeed sustained by nationalism. The nationalism in
Korea since the 19603 seems to be in line with other Third World nationalisms
after WWII. Mayall (1990) stresses that nationalism in the Third World is
perceived quite differently than in the West. Post-colonial nationalism is
associated with progress, the transcendence of parochial loyalties and
development (Mayall, 1990211 1).

Taking India’s ambitious second ﬁve-year plan in 1956 as an example,
Mayall (1990:16) points out why modern nationalists need a program for

economic transformation:

Although European governments understandably resented the charge of
neglect (arguing that they were responsible for building up the modern
sectors of the colonial economies), from the nationalist viewpoint, the
concentration on development was an appropriate response to a
fundamental problem. Once alien rule had been dislodged, the new
rulers faced the oldest question in politics: by what right do you rule? In
the heady atmosphere of the anti-colonial struggle, the organization of a
movement for self-govemment had been sufﬁcient legitimation; once the
goal had been achieved something more was required to underpin the
exercise of power.

Obviously, Korean developmentalism is a response to the experience of
Japanese colonialism, whereas Japanese developmentalism originated during
the Meiji era under the Western imperial threat. The warrior class in Japan had

to emphasize the relationship among different social classes in terms of shared

133

history and blood ties (saying that all Japanese were members of a big family,
with the emperor at the top). On the other hand, the experience of economic
domination by a modern Japanese emperor may have brought Koreans together,
making them willing to sacriﬁce their individual and class interests in order to
build a strong economy that would not repeat the humiliation again.

Developmentalism since the 1960s became a mling ideology for the ﬁrst
time in Korean history. In contrast to Western Europe, where mercantilism had
been the guiding principle of national economic policy as early as the ﬁfteenth
century (Reich, 1992214), economic policy during Korea's Chosun Dynasty
(1392-1910) was far from being outwardly aggressive. Until the late nineteenth
century, Korea was considered to be “the hermit kingdom.“ Until the forced
treaty with Japan in 1876, Korea was content with tightly regulated trade with
China and Japan (Nahm, 1988).

Just as mercantilism in Western Europe was for the interest of the kings,
queens, and the retainers who contrived, ﬁnanced, and directed various
schemes to accumulate foreign riches (Reich, 1992213), isolationism during the
Chosun Dynasty was for maintaining the economic base of the ruling Confucian
bureaucrats.

The scholar bureaucrat class was also the landlord class. Yong-mo Kim
(19862748) points out that in 1905 the majority of rural farmers (84.1 percent)
were poor tenants working for an extremely small number of big landlords.
According to him, scholar bureaucrats (3.1 percent) and unemployed scholars

(1.1 percent) in Seoul and regional cities constituted the absentee landlords and

134

the leisure class. By the end of the Dynasty, a tenant farmer’s rent was paid by
sharecropping on a ﬁfty-ﬁfty basis (Yong-mo Kim, 19862738).

Palais (1996:1007) suggests that an emphasis on agricultural production
and the concomitant denigration of industrial and commercial activity in Korean
Confucian thought supported the preeminent economic and political position of
the landlords by hindering the accumulation of wealth by artisans and
merchants, and by preventing their participation in the competition for
bureaucratic ofﬁce.

Penetration by Japan and Western powers in the latter half of the
nineteenth century threatened Korea’s existence as a nation and thus stimulated
three varieties of nationalism by different groups of people (Kwan-rin Lee,
1986). The ﬁrst was by Confucian bureaucrats with nationalism sloganed:
“defend orthodoxy and ban heterodoxy.“ Orthodox scholars tried to reform the
society according to Confucian classics. Taewongun, who took power in 1864,
led an energetic program to discipline the royal clans, bring in new blood,
straighten bureaucratic practice, strengthen central control, and attack the tax
privileges of the scholar class (Cumings, 19972108). Believing in the virtue of
the Sinic world order, he had a simple foreign policy: no treaties, no trade, no
Catholics, no West, and no Japan (Cumings, 19972100).

The following instance of Western contact shows why he took this path
and how this isolationism could be popular among Korean people (Nahm,

19882148):

135

In the summer of 1866, a heavily armed American merchant ship, the
General Sherman, consigned to a British ﬁrm, made a voyage to Korea to
establish trade relations with the “hermit kingdom.“ After arriving in the
middle of August at an inlet in the Taedong River it ran into a
sandbank and was immobilized when the high tide receded The
Magistrate of Pyongyang, Pak Kyu-su, informed the shipowner, W. B.
Preston, and Captain Page, that he had no authority to negotiate with
foreigners. The ship’s 24-man crew seized a local ofﬁcial stole food
and water from local inhabitants and also kidnapped women to the ship.
As a result the local people, angry at “the crafty and beast-like
foreigners,“ attacked the ship, burned it and killed all of its crew, including
two Americans and a British citizen.

It seems to me that Taewongun and his followers were similar to the
Japanese ultranationalistic intelligentsia before the Meiji revolution who
advocated “honor the Emperor, expel the barbarians.“ Those Japanese militants
were known for their terrorism against foreigners (Morishima, 1982269).

The second nationalism by the end of the Dynasty was the “Tonghak
(Eastern Learning)“ movement by peasants. Seizing opportunity out of the
erosion of traditional thought and the penetration of Christianity, Tonghak
established itself as a new religion in 1860 combining Confucianism, Buddism,
Taoism, and practices of lower-class popular religion (Kwang-rin Lee, 1986;
Robinson, 1988).

The religious movement changed to a political movement as it raised
issues of social equality and economic equity, reﬂecting the agonies of peasants
due to Japanese agricultural exploitation and corruption in local government
(Robinson, 1988; Tae Shin Chung, 1988). The opening of the country in the

1870s only deepened the plight of the peasantry. Rice was now going to Japan

136

in ever greater quantities, causing rapid rises in price (the proﬁts of which went
to middlemen) and inﬂation in the price of daily necessities (Cumings,
199721 16).

The movement demanded the abolition of the traditional social hierarchy
and a halt to rice exports to Japan (Cumings, 19972116). At least one hundred
thousand peasants participated in the peasant uprising in 1894 and fought the
Japanese army dispatched to Korea (Cumings, 19972116-7). The explicit
antiforeign statements of the Tonghak rebels emphasized their patriotism,
introducing a unique nationalistic ﬂavor to the movement (Robinson, 1988223).

The third nationalism is the “enlightenment“ ideology advocated by the
more liberal among the scholar class. They preferred to give up the traditional
system and learn from the technology, and especially the military prowess, of the
foreign powers (Kwan-rin Lee, 199622). Following the signing of the Kanghwa
Treaty, which opened the ports in 1876, the enlightenment activists developed
into a political force, often called the “Enlightenment Party“ (Cumings,

199721 1 1).

Activists in the Progressive Party like Ok-kyun Kim (1851-1894) urged the
abolition of the scholar class in order to promote modernization (Kwan-rin Lee,
199624-5). Believing that working within the existing political system was
impossible, he led a failed coup in 1884 with help from the local Japanese army
(Cumings, 1997:112—3). The incident, which left at least seven Korean ofﬁcials
murdered and the king and queen held hostage, outraged many Koreans

(Cumings, 19972113).

137

I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to perceive any of the above three ideologies before
Japanese colonialism as economic nationalism. Neither Confucian isolationism
nor popular peasant xenophobia can be said to be economic nationalism, as
these ideologies do not have one of the foremost objectives of economic
nationalism mentioned by Gilpin (1987): industrialization.

The enlightenment thought does envision modernization as a national
strategy. However, it seems like the advocates of this ideology didn’t have a
clue as to who was going to modernize Korea, as evident in their dependence on
Japan for achieving political power. It seems to me that this lack of self-identity
makes the liberal idea fall short of economic nationalism. In contrast, the
Japanese Meiji revolution envisioned the samurai class as the agent of political
and economic transformation, not any of the foreign powers.

Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) equated Korean nationalism with anti-
Japanese sentiment. After the mass demonstrations calling for immediate
Korean independence in 1919, Korean nationalism had become a mass
phenomenon and was no longer a monopoly of Westemized intellectual elites
(Robinson, 199823). The nationalist movement took many forms. With the help
of local Koreans, Korean guerillas were strong in Manchuria (Cumings, 1987).
Some chose nonviolent resistance focusing on issues like education and culture
(Nahm, 1988). Others, like Syngman Rhee, depended on writing letters to the
heads of foreign states.

It seems to me that Korean economic nationalism started to develop

during colonialism in response to Japanese economic dominance and

138

exploitation. Yong-mo Kim shows some numbers indicating the poor economic

condition of Koreans (19862748):

The landlord took from tenant farmers 74 to 76 percent of total production.
During the Japanese occupation period, landlords constituted less than 4
percent of the total farm households but owned more than 65 percent of
the total arable lands, while 18 percent of the population were
independent farmers, and 80 percent of the tenant farmers cultivated land
held by landlords. Japanese landlords constituted 2.5 percent, thus
owning nearly half of the arable land. Those engaged in commerce and
industry constituted 16.0 percent of the total households, but most in this
category were laborers, and Korean workers represented ten times the
number of Japanese workers, while most of the Japanese were big
capitalists. Under the Japanese colonial policy, racial discrimination was
enforced in wages

Yong-mo Kim (1986) correctly points out that this type of colonial class
structure turned into a racial conﬂict, and Koreans came to conceive of class
struggle in terms of nationalism, developing it into a national independence
movement.

The case of Man-sik Cho’s Products Promotion Society may be the best
case of economic nationalism during the colonial period. Responding to Korea’s
dependence on the Japanese economy, he urged Koreans to patronize Korean
products in order to promote a national economy based on native industry
(Wells, 1985). He thought that through moral, mental, and practical training
together with a campaign for unity, the people would avoid economic extinction

and gradually reconstruct a viable economic base (Wells, 1985:855).

139

Even though moderately successful, it seems like the movement failed as
it was not able to present a united front with communists. ln-ﬁghting among the
nationalists divided the loyalty of the public. For Man—sik Cho it might have
meant losing a signiﬁcant portion of his possible supporters, that is, the workers.
And, for communists, attacking nationalistic Christianity instead of conservative
Confucianism was a strategic blunder (Wells, 1985:855).

During the presidency of Syngman Rhee, nationalism meant anti-
Japanese sentiment. Public antagonism toward Japan and Syngman Rhee’s
own desire to exploit anti-Japanese sentiment to solidify his political power at
home kept Korea from normalizing diplomatic relationship with Japan until 1965.
Chong-sik Lee (1985) refers to the Japan-Korea relations during the Rhee
presidency as “the clash of emotions“ over the assessment of Japanese colonial
rule in Korea. President Rhee, a life-time independence activist, was angered
not only by what he considered intransigent Japanese policies against Koreans
in Japan (which he viewed as a reﬂection of the Japanese attitude toward
Korea), but also by Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its misdeeds in Korea
(Chong-sik Lee, 1985224). On the other hand, it was simply impossible for most
of those Japanese involved in colonial affairs to accept the notion that Japanese
conduct before 1945 deserved Korean condemnation (Chong-sik Lee, 1985227).

The clashes were also real, and one of them was over a ﬁshery issue

(Chong-sik Lee, 1985236):

140

Having concluded that the Japanese attitude toward Korea had not
changed, the Republic of Korea (ROK) government proclaimed on
January 18, 1952, its sovereignty over waters 50 to 60 miles off the
Korean coast Korea took unilateral action (which) was the
political equivalent of war as far as the Japanese were concerned
President Rhee ordered his navy to capture Japanese ﬁshing boats
violating the Rhee line and some one thousand Japanese ﬁshermen
were sentenced to prison terms on October 13.

It was unfortunate Rhee was not very nationalistic where economic
matters were concerned. Rather than indigenous industrialization, “Korean-
American co-operation“ was his economic philosophy (Oliver, 1954). Rhee

said (Oliver, 1954226):

Without American aid we never could hope to revive our blasted and
divided economy. United States military aid is helping us to build the
army American technicians are helping us to organize the coal mining
American fertilizers are providing the basis for the best crop year in
our history.

Foreign aid was indeed extraordinary. Cumings reports (1997:306-7):

We have seen that aid funds alone amounted to 100 percent of the ROK
government budget in the 19503 One high point was 1957, when
Korea drew $383 million in economic assistance from the United States,
as against $456 million in domestic revenue. But then there was an
additional $400 million in military aid in 1957, and another $300 million for
the costs of US troops in Korea.

141

 

 

The fact that he was not willing to push ahead with a national economic
policy also disqualiﬁes President Rhee as a “developmentalist.“ In 1959, the
Economic Development Council (EDC) ﬁnished a draft Three Year Economic
Plan, which set 1960 as the ﬁrst year (Hahn-Been Lee, 1968:90-91). The basic
goal of the plan was to increase the Korean gross national product by
approximately 5 percent annually (Hahn-Bean Lee, 1968291 ). The plan,
however, was shelved by the cabinet, who chose the maintenance of political
control over long-term economic development (Hahn-Bean Lee, 1968291 ).

President Park changed the shape of economic ideology in Korea. He
discontinued the politically-charged practice of “Japan-bashing.“ He took a more
“strategic“ approach, willing to make a deal with “the devil.“ Recognizing the
need for large infusion of foreign capital, Park took the vital but highly unpopular
step of normalizing relations with Japan (Time, 1999). Park said (Do Sung Lee,

1995; Sae Jung Kim, 19962144):

There have been a lot of criticisms and objections on establishing a
diplomatic tie with Japan on the grounds of being humiliating. However,
can we keep our pride by constantly bagging wheat ﬂours from the US? I
do believe that this is the only way to build our economy. Even though it
may be humiliating now, not normalizing the relations means greater
humiliation from the Japanese later on. I will put my career on the line for
this.

142

President Park risked a lot. To achieve the normalization of relations with
Japan, the Park regime had to ignore the political opposition, manipulate the
National Assembly, suppress student dissent, and stiﬂe newspaper criticism
(Gong-Gyu Ha, 19892159). However, there is no doubt that the war reparation
money and technology transfer Korea received from Japan was crucial in her
economic development. Normalization with Japan in 1965 brought with it $800
million in economic aid (Time, 1999).

The economy was the ﬁrst thing in President Park’s mind. A study of
President Park’s major speeches delivered during the period of 1964-67 showed
that more than 50 percent of 52,000 words centered around “economic
development,“ “modernization,“ “reform,“ and “change.“ (Whang, 1985:248-50;
Yong-Whan Hahn, 19962187). President Park sought to endow the nation with
an economic value worthy of the allegiance of the people, coining slogans such
as “First is the economy, and second is the economy (Yong-When Hahn,
19962108)“ For him and his bureaucrats, economic development might have
been the key to everything: legitimization, a political voice in international
society, and military power.

However, Park was doubtful about Iaissez faire economies. In his book,
Our Nation ’8 Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction, he prefers a certain degree

of intervention in the market (1970:37-8):

143

There was once a time when the Iaissez faire policy was the only way to
guarantee the maximum freedom of people’s economic activities; but it
was realized subsequently that such a policy was apt to widen the gap
between the haves and have-nets and create massive unemployment.
Hence, it was felt necessary to combine laissez faire with planning and for
the State to directly and positively participate in economic activities so as
to guarantee the economic welfare of the individual.

His long-tenn economic plans put national interest before private proﬁt

(1970:213-4):

We must take a great leap forward toward economic order which will give
priority to the public interest over the selﬁsh pursuit of private proﬁt at the
expense of the people in this nation. In order to maintain the priority
of the public interest, it is urgently necessary to have an economic plan or
a long-range development program through which reasonable allocation
of all of our resources is feasible.

It was President Park who compelled the bureaucrats to concretize and

implement his economic goals (Yong-Whan Hahn, 1996:1578):

As soon as the military regime took over the power in May 1961, it
decided to secure a plan that could be put into effect at the start of the
following calendar year. Toward the end of 1961, the Economic Planning
Board (EPB) ﬁnished the formulation of the First Five Year Economic
Development Plan on the basis of the previous Economic Development
Council plan, effective in January of the following year Adoption and
vigorous implementation of the plan was a genuine reﬂection of the
developmentalist aspect of the time orientation of the elite of the
regime.

144

The ﬁrst ﬁve year plan details ﬁve basic strategies (Chosunilbo, 1999b):

(1) A guided capitalist system will be introduced based on free enterprise
which respects individual creativity but with government intervention in
key sectors,

(2) Emphasis will be centered on the public sector upon which the
government has direct policy measures,

(3) The ultimate goal for Korean economy is industrialization and so in the
preparatory stage emphasis will be on securing energy supply sources,
the increase of agricultural productivity, the expansion of key industries
and SOC projects, employment expansion, national land development,
increasing exports and technology promotion,

(4) Domestic resources and the work force will be utilized to the maximum in
order to attract foreign investment,

(5) Increase in defense spending will be kept to the required minimum.

Even property rights are not absolute, according to Park (19702218):

Neither state nor society can be the victim of the private greed of powerful
interest groups Private ownership of production should be
unconditionally encouraged except in instances where it is necessary to
control it to stimulate national development and protect the interests of
the people in general.

145

The principle of rejecting proﬁt is directly related with the egalitarian
nature of developmentalism. He wanted to limit the extreme proﬁt-making by
capitalists and at the same time see the rise of a middle class in Korea

(1970:215-7):

Our future policy should be to conﬁscate illegally acquired wealth and turn
it back to the state treasury through a loophole-proof taxation system and
utilize the increased revenue for education, social security, and other
essential public services. To raise the mass of the people to middle class
status in its modern terminology is the basic ideal of the democratic and
cooperative society we are building.

The egalitarian nature of developmentalism can be understood out of a
concern for mobilization. As Korea is a resource poor country, Park’s military-
campaign-like push for national development had to depend on human
resources. And, the material inequality in the army should be kept at a
minimum.

In this regard, it is informative to go back to the New Community

Development Movement. Wrgnaraja (1996) reports how the movement had a

“de-classing“ element:

Leaders from all parts of the country are brought in groups to participate
in these programmes. Cabinet Ministers, senior government ofﬁcials,
university professors and other elites and technical experts also have to
participate and exchange ideas with village leaders in a mutual Ieaming
process. Irrespective of status, all participants dress alike, eat the same
food and sleep in the same dormitories during the training. This is part of
de-classing and re-orienting the elite.

146

Burrneister (1990), who critically reported on the heavy-handed
bureaucratic coercion to plant the new variety of rice, also acknowledges that
Korea's green revolution lifted up rural income signiﬁcantly.

For the economy as a whole, the average real wage increased at a rate of
nearly 7% per annum during 1963-1975. During the same time period, average
real wages in agriculture rose at about 5% a year (Rao, 1978: 386). Alarmed by
the widening gap between average farm and non-farm incomes and the potential
shrinkage of political support, the government began "new deal" for Korean
farmers in 1968 with the ﬁrst of a series of increases in government procurement
prices for rice which within a few years took the domestic price well above world
market levels.

Allied to the introduction and rapid spread of high yielding rice varieties
after 1970, to growing subsidies for fertilizer and to a substantial shift of
government investment to rural areas, this change in policy resulted in a very
rapid increase in rice production and in real farm incomes (Moore, 1984: 59).
Rao (1978: 388) points out that the resulting government deﬁcits on grain and
fertilizer were very large - about 2% of GNP in 1974 and 1975, excluding the
amounts needed to ﬁnance the increase in stocks of grain and fertilizer.

The purpose of this chapter was to explain why the bureaucratic elite in
Korea could have been ” politically authoritarian" and "economically egalitarian”
at the same time. By instilling his ideals in the minds of the high-ranking
bureaucrats, President Park established Confucian developmentalism as the

hegemonic ideology in Korea since the early 19605. With Park as a father-ruler,

147

Confucianism was born again with more emphasis on loyalty toward the state.
Familism, which is linked to the extensive state, gave the ideology an
"authoritarian" tint.

Park also changed Korea's politically charged nationalism into
developmentalism. Park put the national economy before private proﬁt, making
the bureaucrats in charge of "the guided capitalist system." As Korea is a
resource poor country, Park's military-campaign-like push for national
development had to depend on human resources. In order to make the
mobilization successful, the material inequality in the country had to be kept at a

minimum.

148

CHAPTER 5. IDEOLOGY AT WORK IN URBAN KOREA

This chapter describes how Confucian developmentalism planted its seed
in the womb of Korean statecraft and gave birth to the baby called Confucian
developmental urbanization. As the details of this hegemonic ideology have
been already exposed in the previous chapter, this chapter will only focus on the
way Confucian developmentalism has affected different aspects of urbanization
in Korea.

In achieving relatively even urbanization between and within cities,
Confucianism and developmentalism have proved the way they can interact:
synergetically. The same, mutually reinforcing effect has also prevented
demographic primacy in Korea even though it is common in other Third World
countries. The “egalitarian“ nature of developmentalism was translated into
urban reality with the help of “hierarchical“ Confucian bureaucrats.

However, when it comes down to the issue of power, Confucianism and
developmentalism interact differently; one prevails over the other. The
decentralization of power in the Korean urban system hasn't materialized.
“Authoritarian' bureaucrats haven't responded to the developmentalist call for
spatial decentralization of power.

Bureaucrats in Seoul ably implemented development projects across the

country, taking the role of patriarchs. Confucian developmentalism worked to

149

the interest of bureaucrats in so far as the ideology was about achieving even
urban development. Building roads and distributing tax resources beyond the
Seoul metroline, ordering factories to move out of Seoul, building massive
middle-class apartments in various cities, redistributing tax money to poor
neighborhoods in the cities, have been to the interest of the bureaucrats.

Meritocratic bureaucrats, who are mostly from middle class backgrounds,
rarely own much land or run factories in their home cities. Civil servants are also
somewhat insulated from local political demands as they are outside the direct
electoral process. The growth of the national economy as a whole enables and
legitimates the expansion of a bureaucracy elevated above the rest of society.

However, when people who do not live in Seoul started to complain that
super-concentration of decision-making in the capital city runs counter to the
rhetoric of developmentalism, the bureaucrats in Seoul showed a lukewarm
attitude toward rectifying this type of unbalanced urban development. High
bureaucrats in Seoul and nearby suburbs know that they are the ones
responsible for the concentration of power. Central government ministries and
agencies wield great power as they have guided the private sector since the
early 19605.

It is in the interest of bureaucrats to stay in Seoul where they ﬁnd their
power embedded in the intertwined links among government complexes,
corporate headquarters, research institutes, ﬁnancial institutions, and
prestigious universities. Most of the high civil servants were educated in

prestigious universities in Seoul. They enjoy the information and transportation

150

infrastructure of Seoul which make their rule easier. Seoul provides nice places
to meet with their junior partners, corporate managers. And, the embedded
power can potentially serve the interest of bureaucrats beyond their own
generation. Bureaucrats want to stay in the capital so that their children can
follow their paths by attending one of Seoul’s prestigious schools.

The successes and limits of Confucian developmentalism show the
potentials and boundaries of a hegemonic ideology in abiding by and venturing
beyond a given class interest. A hegemonic ideology achieves results when it is
the interest of the class who holds the ideology. But when an ideology implies
achieving something at the expense of the hegemonic class, however partial the
loss may be, every step of the way is a struggle if not a charade.

It is truly difﬁcult for a hegemonic class to give up its own interest for the
general good of the public. However, as soon as the masses regard this failure
to be a serious infringement on their own interest, hegemony is being
challenged. Even though it is beyond the scope of this study, Korea's serious
problem of regional antagonism partly stems from the arrogance of bureaucrats
expressed in the language of space. The longer the Confucian elite hold on to
the sweet taste of power embedded in their “Seoul connection,“ the more difﬁcult
it is for them to inspire the “national-popular“ fervor which Gramsci said is

essential in maintaining the integrity of the hegemonic ideology.

151

is rsin Resources d eoul

In the mid-19605, after deciding that a highway between Seoul and
Pusan was needed to link the economies of the two cities, the Korean
government asked the World Bank and other sources of development
funds for assistance. The government was turned down for various
reasons, including the belief that the project was not justiﬁable on a cost-
beneﬁt basis.

Korea proceeded to build the road on its own. Lacking the funds to
contract the project to qualiﬁed foreign construction companies, the
project was undertaken entirely with domestic efforts. Most of the
equipment used was re-engineered from that left behind by the US.
military after the Korean War. Small, inexperienced Korean companies
joined together to meet the challenge. The project was successfully
completed in just twenty months - far less time than anyone had expected
— and at virtually no cost in foreign exchange The Seoul-Pusan
Highway has become the cornerstone of Korea’s industrial corridor and
has been a key determinant of how the economy has evolved since.

- Interview with a former minister of ﬁnance by Reinfeld (199724)

The construction of the Seoul-Pusan highway, which linked the capital
city and the port city in the Southeast, was carried out just like a military
campaign. President Park took the lead, from the inception to the
implementation of the project. When President Park visited West Germany in

1964, he showed keen interest in the autobahn system (Chosunilbo, 1999c):

Park’s motorcade drove 160 km (99 miles) along the autobahn and made
two stops for him to look at the scenery and inspect the road surface and
facilities. Park asked President Reubke’s protocol chief many questions
regarding the autobahn, such as how it was constructed, managed and
how much it cost He explained in detail to Park using a map of the
country and Park took notes.

152

Before the construction began in 1968, Park ﬂew a helicopter up and
down the zone for weeks with a sketchpad on his knees accompanied by the
engineers in the Ministry of Construction (Keon, 1977278). Once the
construction started, Park visited construction sites sometimes with specialists
such as geologists or hydrologists to ﬁgure out the pending problems (Keon,
1977279). Park also personally assigned young ofﬁcers from the Army Corps of
Engineers as overseers and troubleshooters for each section of the construction
operation (Keon, 1977279).

The construction of the Seoul-Pusan highway is one example showing the
deﬁning elements of developmentalism: an emphasis on the nation as a whole
rather than private proﬁt. The project was a tool for stimulating national
economic development as a whole rather than an investment for proﬁt based on
cost-beneﬁt analysis. It was not just the World Bank and private international
ﬁnance who thought that the project was far from being ﬁnancially sensible. The
legislators, including those of Park’s own party, also believed that its
construction and maintenance costs would bankrupt the country (Keon,
1977278). It is not difﬁcult to imagine why people were so skeptical. Even when
the highway was completed in 1970, there was only one passenger car per 519
people (Economic Planning Board, 1988). The Gross National Product per
capita in 1970 was USS 252 (Economic Planning Board, 1988).

Park led this national project with a Confucian mindset. He took the role

of a father who would never stop persuading “his son-like subjects.“ At the rally

153

held in Taegu to celebrate the completion of the highway, the President said,
“We have come to possess a greater self-conﬁdence in ourselves. If we step up
this effort towards modernization, the day will not be far off when we attain self-
suﬁicient economy.“ (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1970).

Sometimes his playing the father role looks authoritarian. The oath he
requested from the military engineers before they were dispatched to the
highway construction site indicates the kind of mind-set he demanded from the
Korean people in general. The oath required complete dedication and

submission to the cause (Keon, 1977279):

“I hereby swear I will do my best for the prosperity and welfare of my
homeland and my fellow-countrymen by devoting body and mind to my
assignment and that I will receive gratefully any punishment should I be
found guilty of failure in this connection.“

The Seoul-Pusan highway shows how the dynamic chemistry of
Confucian developmentalism was put into practice. Developmentalism, aiming
at spreading economic development beyond Seoul to cities across the country,
was facilitated by top-down Confucian leadership of held by President Park and
his bureaucrats. Many may question the degree of success but few will deny the
impact the Seoul-Pusan highway had in boosting national economic

competitiveness and spreading economic opportunities beyond Seoul.

154

The mechanisms that translated Confucian developmentalism into
relatively even development among Korea's cities have been (1) national land
planning, and (2) intergovemmental relations.

The Korean constitution establishes Confucian developmentalism as the
ideology of national land planning in Korea. The constitution says that the
establishment of national land planning is a responsibility of the state and that
planning should aim for efﬁciency and balance (Korea Research Institute for

Human Settlements, 1984a21 )2

Article 117. The land resources shall be protected by the State, and the
State shall establish a plan for their balanced development and utilization.

Article 119. The State may impose restrictions or obligations necessary
for the efﬁcient utilization, development and preservation of farm, forest
and other land in accordance with the law.

The “spatially egalitarian“ aspect of developmentalism can be found in the
stated objectives of Korea’s national land development plans. The basic goals
of the First National Land Development Plan (1972-1981) emphasize efﬁciency
but also spatially extensive development (Korea Research Institute for Human

Settlements, 1984az20):

(1) To enhance efﬁciency in national land use and management.

(2) To expand and consolidate the development base for the national
economy.

(3) To maximize the utilization of endowed natural resources consistent with
the need of their conservation and protection.

(4) To improve the living environment for the people.

155

The goals of the Second National Land Development Plan (1982-1991)
also focus on expansive and balanced development (Korea Research Institute

for Human Settlements, 198225):

(1) Human settlements in local areas will aim at balanced growth by reion
and national security.

(2) Development potential will be expanded throughout the country by
construction of industrial infrastructure.

(3) People’s well-being will be enhanced by way of systematic improvement
of the living environment.

(4) The nation’s endowed resources will be best utilized, and the natural
environment conserved.

The goals of the third plan (1992-2001) have a similar emphasis (Ministry

of Construction, 1992222):

(1) Create a regionally decentralized pattern of development.

(2) Establish productive and resource saving national land utilization
systems.

(3) Improve the living environment of the people and conserve the natural
environment.

(4) Provide development bases for the uniﬁcation of the country.

Also, the “hierarchical“ aspect of Confucianism is unabashedly declared
in the plans. The Second National Land Development Plan speciﬁes that one of
the basic characteristics of the plan is to play a leading role, as a higher

plan on a national scale, to guide regional plans“ (Korea Research Institute for

156

Human Settlements, 198221 ). The Comprehensive National Land Planning Act
of 1963 speciﬁes that national plans dictate the nature and boundary of regional
planning (Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, 1984b).

The national plans were prepared by the Ministry of Construction (MOC).
The Ministry of Construction (MOC) was established in 1962, one year after
Park’s coup, in order to push forward massive investments in infrastructure such
as the Seoul-Pusan highway. Only after the Comprehensive National Land
Planning Act was enacted in 1963 did the Ministry of Construction (MOC) take
charge of national physical planning.

The task of implementing the plans, however, has been shared with other
ministries under the coordination of the Economic Planning Board (EPB) and the
Ministry of Finance and Economy (MOFE). Different ministries took leadership
in implementing the national plans depending on the nature of the projects. In
1993, six ministries were responsible for administrating policies concerning
national physical development (Korea Research Institute for Human
Settlements, 1993). They were the Ministry of Construction (MOC), Ministry of
Transportation (MOT)", Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Resources
(MOCIR), Ministry of Agricultural, Forest and Fishery (MOAF F), Ministry of
Home Affairs (MOHA), and Ministry of Environments (MOE). In the same year,
the Ministry of Construction was in charge of building ports, highways, industrial

bases, dams and housing sites. The Ministry of Transportation (MOT) oversaw

 

2‘ In 1994, the Ministry of Construction (MOC) and the Ministry of Transportation were merged to form
the Ministry of Construction and Transportation (MOCI')

157

the construction of airports. The Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Resources
(MOCIR) had control over industrial sites. Until 1994, the Economic Planning
Board headed by the deputy prime minister coordinated the implementation of
national land development plan with the power to evaluate the performance and
approve budgets for each project (Reinfeld, 1997). From 1994 to 1998, the
Ministry of Finance and Economy (MOF E) took over the coordinating role of the
Economic Planning Board (EPB) as EPB merged with The Ministry of Finance
and renamed itself MOF E.

The national land plans implemented by the central ministries maintained
high hopes for “balanced spatial development“ even though each plan had a
different approach to realizing the goal. The First Comprehensive National Land
Development Plan (1972-1981), which coincided with the later period of the Park
regime (1961-1980), put more emphasis on building small cities away from
Seoul. This so-called “growth pole“ approach was meant to diffuse development
effects from strategically selected large-scale development. Large-scale
industrial complexes were designated outside the major cities and transportation
infrastructure was built linking the booming cities to other parts of the country.
The Second Comprehensive National Land Development Plan (1982-1991) also
aims at decentralized and balanced growth but with a different strategy:
“concentrated decentralization.“ (Korea Research Institute for Human
Settlements, 1984a25). Rather than promoting small growth poles, it

emphasized the promotion of regional centers.

158

Two policy areas in the national land development plans seem to have
most helped achieve relatively even urban development: (1) developing
industrial estates beyond Seoul and the capital region, and (2) building a
transportation system that beneﬁts cities located away from Seoul and the
capital region.

The developmental state since the 19605 has been a major creator of
“locational advantages“ for industrial estates. Park and Markusen (1995:90-91)

describe the development process of one of Korea’s New Industrial Districts

 

(NID) in Kumi, located in the Southeastern region:

In 1969, when its fate was sealed, Kumi was a small agricultural
village where not much had changed economically for generations. To
build the industrial complex, land was reclaimed from the Nakdong River
and a 12 Km embankment was built to rechannel the river’s ﬂow.
Factories and dormitories were rapidly erected, ﬁlling up the grid lines laid
down on planner’s maps.

The leading agent for Kumi’s construction was the Korea
Electronics Industrial Corporation, reorganized in 1974 as the Kumi
Export Industrial Corporation (KEIC) KEIC is an arm of the national
government, belonging to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, with its own
special trust fund to ﬁnance land clearance and development. Over the
years, KEIC’s operations have been increasingly funded out of the
proceeds of its land and energy activities, but its development policy is
still overseen by the national government.

Government subsidies and incentives have played a major role in
inducing companies, both South Korean and foreign (mainly Japanese),
to site plants in Kumi. Land clearance, site preparation, infrastructure,
and water and energy supplies are ample and come cheaply, and efﬁcient
transportation links to Seoul and southern seaports are assured. Not all
the inducements are physical in nature. Tax breaks, worker education
and training programs, and a modest level of business services have
been provided. Although a plant is supposed to be ‘clean’ to qualify as a
Kumi resident, the government has tolerated both water and air pollution,
an advantage to ﬁrms who ﬁnd restrictions tightening in Seoul.

159

 

The principal input into the production process in Kumi is labor, the
target labor force being young women from the 400 villages within 15 Km
of Kumi. KEIC has actively helped to recruit the labor forces by combing
the high schools in rural areas.

As described above, the city was designed and laid out by the state,
which also constructed incentive packages and in many cases strong-armed
businesses into relocating within the districts. Indigenous entrepreneurship was
almost entirely absent during the formation of the districts. There was no pre-
existing Iabor force; it was created through recruitment and internal migration.

Park and Markusen (1995288) argue that the instruments available to the
Korean state to achieve its locational policies were powerful, not unlike the
“command“ structure determining new industrial city building in the former Soviet
Union and China. Each local authority estimated the approximate amount of
land needed for industrial purposes and required the Ministry of Construction
(MOC) to change land zonings (Woo-Jin Kim, 19972144). Land needed for
various purposes was coordinated within the framework of the ten-year national
land use plans (Woo-Jin Kim, 1997).

In order to enforce industrial estate development, the government ﬁxed
land prices in the designated areas, exempted taxes for the factories moving
from Seoul or Pusan, and provided loans to the ﬁrms to be established in the
industrial estates (An-Jae Kim, 1978).

The construction of industrial estates was implemented at an impressive

speed. Starting with the Kuro industrial estate in Seoul, which opened in 1967,

160

 

the size of industrial estates stood at 5.2 square miles in 1970 (13.4 square
kilometers). It rose to 63.1 square miles (163.5 square kilometers) in 1980 and
jumped again to 35,090 square miles (90,884 square kilometers) in 1997 (An-
Jae Kim, 1978; Ministry of Home Affairs, 1980, 1997).

From the 19605, the state developed progressively more estates beyond
Seoul and the capital region (Kyonggi province) (See Figure 3). The land in
Korea’s total industrial estates located in Seoul was only 1.2 percent in 1980. It
dropped to .02 percent in 1997 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1980, 1997). In terms
of the number of employees in industrial estates, Seoul’s proportion was only
17.7 percent in 1980. It fell to 5.6 percent in 1997 (Ministry of Home Affairs,

1 980, 1997).

The pattern is similar at the regional scale as well, even though it is less
impressive. In terms of industrial estate land size, the capital region took a
signiﬁcant but less than dominant proportion in 1980: 17.7 percent. It was cut to
5.6 percent in 1997 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1980, 1997). In terms of the
number of the employees in industrial estates, the capital region held 40.6
percent in 1980. It dropped to 38.2 percent in 1997 (Ministry of Home Affairs,

1 980, 1 997).

Transportation infrastructure was developed to connect the industrial
estates to other parts of the country. As shown in the case of the Seoul—Pusan
highway, almost all investment in Korea has been achieved by the initiatives of
the state rather than the private sector. In spite of this strong-handed approach,

investment on transportation has been an important equalizer in urban Korea.

161

The developmental state in Korea since the 19605 undertook substantial
investments, often in the range of 6 to 8 percent of gross national product (GNP)
per year, but almost never below 4 percent of GNP per year (Reinfeld, 1997).
The length of highway rose to 1,025 miles (1,650 kilometers) in 1994 from zero
in the mid 19605. The annual cargo capacity of ports jumped from 15 million
tons in 1966 to 276 million tons in 1994 (Korea Maritime and Port
Administration, 1979; Economic Planning Board, 1995).

Seoul and the capital region have not dominated Korea’s transportation
infrastructure. The lncheon port, which is the only major port in the capital
region, had only 13.4 percent of the total annual capacity of cargo holding in
1978. In 1994, the proportion remained about the same at 14 percent.

Seoul and capital region have not had a disproportionate share of the
highway system either. In 1974, Seoul and the capital region together counted
for 15.8 percent (Economic Flaming Board, 1975). It remained almost the
same in 1994 with 16.8 percent (Economic Planning Board, 1995).

Having discussed all the positive aspects of the development of industrial
estates and construction of highways mainly undertaken under national land
plans, I have to point out that many Koreans are not much impressed with what
national planning has done to urban Korea. Especially, most residents in the
Southwestern region (Chonnam and Chonbuk) have expressed outrage over the
lagging development of cities in their provinces (See Figure 3).

It is true that the state-led investments were not evenly distributed across

urban Korea. For example, the biggest new lndustrializing cities, such as Ulsan,

162

Pohang, and Kumi are located in the Southeastern region (Kyongbuk and
Kyongnam) (See Figure 3 and 4). It seems like there are two major reasons
why: political considerations and the legacy of past urban development. From
1961 to 1998, Korea's three successive presidents were from the Southeastern
region. It is well-known that Kumi (See Figure 4) was chosen to be developed
mainly because it is the hometown of President Park (Park 8. Markusen, 1995).
The underdevelopment of the Southwestern region has been attributed to its
political rebelliousness toward Park and subsequent presidents. Dae-Jung Kim,
who became president in 1998 was a political dissident during the reign of
President Chung-hee Park (1962-1979) and President Doo-hwan Chun (1980-
1 988).

Even before the alleged political considerations started in the 19605,
cities in the Southwestern region were not well connected with other cities in
Korea. The existing railway transportation network connecting Korea to
Manchuria during the Japanese colonialism connects the Southeastern region to
Seoul. The Southwestern region had other natural disadvantages such as a
shallow seashore, which makes it difﬁcult to build ports and industrial estates
around the ports.

However, I agree with Huzinec that the effort of the Korean state to
disperse industrial facilities should not be overly criticized. Huzinec (1978)
reported that even in the Soviet Union, the promotion of small industrial cities
was difﬁcult because of the merits of large cities as urbanization economies,

economies of scale, and established social overhead capital (SOC).

163

Besides, I think that the regional discrimination did not take place at least
in spending public money, developing industrial estates and building
infrastructure. In 1994, the Southwestern region (including Kwangju city) had a
population of only 5.5 million. For the same year, the Southeastern region
(including Taegu city and Pusan city) had 13 million people. Considering that,
the 317 km of highway that the Southwestern region had in 1994 doesn’t look
that bad compared to the 578 km in the Southeastern region. For the same
year, the ratio in cargo handling falls short of the population ratios as well: 59
million ton for the Southwest versus 119 million ton for the Southeast (Economic
Planning Board, 1995). During the period from 1978 to 1989, the percentage of
industrial land supply in the Southwestern region was 25.6 percent of the total
whereas the Southeastern region took 41.8 percent. As emphasized earlier, per
capita income level between different cities does not show that much disparity in
Korea. It is true that there are more Seoutheast industrial cities with income
levels are higher than those of cities in the Southwest. However, not every city
in the Southeast is ﬂourishing. For example, the gross regional product (GRP)
per capita of Kwangju, the regional center of the Southwestern region, was
US$6.286 (5.073 million won) in 1993. The ﬁgure was higher than those of the
major regional cities in the Southeastern region for the same year: Taegu with
US$5.758 (4.647 million won) and Pusan with US$6.133 (4.950 million won)
(National Statistics Ofﬁce, 1995).

Now, I turn my attention to the other mechanism that implemented

synergic Confucian developmentalism in Korean urban development: the

164

intergovernmental system. In chapter 1, I pointed out that Confucianism
legitimates rule by educated bureaucrats as education is considered to be a
process of self-cultivation.

Confucianism in intergovernmental relationship can be understood as the
rule of the “highly-cultivated“ over the “moderately-cultivated“ within the
bureaucracy. Confucianism is held by high bureaucrats in central ministries who
believe that the Confucian notion of “good scholars make good rulers“ should be
applied to themselves not local bureaucrats. In Korea, there are different levels
of civil service examinations and those who pass the higher level exam usually
start their career at one of the ministries in Seoul. On the other hand, most local
bureaucrats have passed lower level exams.

The high-ranking bureaucrats think that they are carrying forward a
“beneﬁting-all“ developmentalist mission. A researcher in the Korea
Development Institute (KDI), a think-tank under the Economic Planning Board
(EPB), represents the high bureaucrat’s attitude about intergovernmental

relations based on Confucian developmentalism (Wan-Soon Kim, 1974221 )2

Provision of ﬁnancial aid to, and assertion of control over major
expenditure programs by the central government is not to be condemned
in general. It would be inefﬁcient and uneconomical to have these
functions carried out by a host of local governments without some degree
of national control or nationally established basis for cooperation in the
performance of such functions as roads, rivers, health, and education of
which the beneﬁts extend beyond the boundaries of a single province. In
particular, Korea, setting out on a course of rapid industrialization, could
entrust only limited functions to local governments which lack personnel
of sufﬁcient ability and knowledge to assist in the implementation of
developmental expenditures.

165

 

The central bureaucracy in Seoul has managed to retain tight control over
the provinces through institutional, technocratic, and ﬁnancial coordination
(Woo-Cumings, 19952455). The centralization of the state power started with
the suspension of the autonomous government system in 1961 by General Park
(Myung-Rae Cho, 19912163). Until recently, provincial governors as well as
other important local bureaucrats down to the county level were appointed from
Seoul and were rotated rapidly by the center (Woo-Cumings, 19952455). For
example, mayors of the major cities have been elected only since 1995.
Financially, not much local revenue came from local taxes, and revenue
shortfalls have been covered by transfers from the central government (Wan-
Soon Kim, 197429). Local governments have effectively served as the central
govemment’s ﬁeld ofﬁces to execute the centrally determined plans (Kim and
Mills, 19882164).

Within the central government, the supervisory organ for the entire local
government machinery has been the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA). Until the
mid-19605, the Ministry controlled not only the personnel of the local
governments but also their budgets, accounting and auditing, tax collection,
local borrowing, and the disbursements of shared revenues (Wan-Soon Kim,
197427).

The control of the central government over the local governments is not

limited to the areas under the inﬂuence of the Ministry of the Home Affairs

166

(MOHA). It is broader and more extensive because a great number of serial
laws enable the various ministries to deal with their special functions, issuing
directives and instructions to the provincial governors (Wan-Soon Kim, 197428).
For example, the Ministry of Education assumes and supervises local
educational ﬁnancing (Wan-Soon Kim, 197427).

However, this hierarchical intergovernmental system also championed
“egalitarian“ developmentalism. The central government, which was responsible
for 89 percent of all tax revenues in 1983, took more in proportion to Gross
Regional Product (GRP) from high-income regions, resulting in a more equal
distribution of disposable income. In 1983, individuals and corporations in Seoul
paid 13 percent of their GRP for national taxes, Pusan paid 5.1 percent, and low
income provinces each paid around 2-3 percent (Mera, 1988).

The central government redistributed money in the form of block grants
and subsidies. These transfers were directed mainly to low-income provinces
(Mera, 19882225). In 1983, the percentage share of transfers to Seoul was only
2.8 percent. In contrast, other provinces (excluding cities such as Pusan,
Daegu, and lncheon) had an average of 40.2 percent of their revenue from
central government transfers (Mera, 19882224). Two provinces in the politically
oppressed Southwestern region had a larger proportion of the transfer in their

total revenue: 47.7 percent and 46.5 percent.

167

 

Qisgrsing Populations beyond §§QUI

The national land planning and intergovernmental system described in
the previous section were also the mechanisms bureaucrats used to disperse
population beyond Seoul. The job opportunities and provision of modest urban
services in the booming cities outside Seoul have functioned as alternative
destinations for migrants.

In this section, I will cover policies that speciﬁcally aimed to check the
population explosion in Seoul or disperse p0pulation away from Seoul. As will
be shown, these policies express the mutually-reinforcing nature of Confucian
developmentalism. The policies used by bureaucrats to keep the number of
Seoulites in check have been (1) designation of green belts around Seoul, (2)
compulsory relocation of factories from Seoul, (3) expansion of educational
opportunities outside of Seoul, and (4) decentralization of secondary
government agencies.

As a physical barrier to urban sprawl, the ﬁrst greenbelt of 55.4 square
miles (143.4 square kilometers) was established around Seoul in 1971 (800
Young Park, 1998:254). The greenbelt policy has been ﬁrmly and consistently
administered. Landowners in the greenbelt are prohibited by law from
constructing new buildings and changing existing land uses for purposes other
than agriculture (Won-Yong Kwon, 1988:126).

The greenbelt policy has been always controversial because of its

infringement on individual property rights. In the name of the public good, the

168

designation and enforcement of greenbelt areas denies the property rights of
land owners by restricting land development and by not giving proper
compensation in return. Won—Yong Kwon (1988227) reports that residents in the
greenbelt are disadvantaged by the relative decline in their property value.

Compulsory relocation of factories from Seoul emphasizes beneﬁts to the
public even at the expense of individual rights. The Industrial Distribution Law
enacted in 1977 empowered the Minister of Trade and Industry (MOTI) to order
ﬁrms to relocate away from congested zones (800 Young Park, 19982255). The
government issued relocation orders to all types of factories in Seoul except
those producing items of daily urban consumption such as printing and food
(Won-Yong Kwon, 19982124).

In terms of educational infrastructure, there have been govemment-
dictated efforts to equalize the Ieaming opportunities between Seoulites and
non-Seoulites in order to restrict people’s movement into Seoul. The
concentration of educational opportunities in Seoul has been kept under control
since the early 19705. In 1970, an equalization program was introduced into
school districts involving the abolition of the high school entrance examination
(Song, 1980287). It was intended to make several ﬁrst-class Seoul high schools
the equal with many others outside Seoul. In the same year, the transfer of
middle and high school students into Seoul, except to join their families, was
restricted (Song, 1980287).

Enrollments in colleges in Seoul were strictly rationed from 1973 (800

Young Park, 1998:254). Under the quota system, the number of students

169

attending colleges outside of Seoul has mushroomed. In 1972, Seoul had three
times more college students on a per capita basis than the national average. In
1991, the proportion of college students in Seoul became almost the same as
the national average (Jong Chul Kim, 1993235).

According to the Confucian principle of “moral“ governing, the “father-like“
bureaucrats have been “forced“ to set an example for the national task of
population decentralization. In 1977, the Minister without Portfolio, who was
assigned by the President to deal with the population redistribution problem,
announced a package of programs to relocate secondary government ofﬁces
and state-run corporations outside Seoul (Won-Yong Kwon, 19882128). In
1983, four central government ofﬁces including the Ministry of Construction
(MOC) reluctantly moved into a new administrative town (Kwocheon) just south
of the administrative boundary of Seoul. Later on, many other ministry ofﬁces
including the Economic Planning Board (EPB) moved there (Won-Yong Kwon,
1 9882128).

In 1998, a third government complex was established near Taejon (See
Figure 3), located 99 miles (160 km) south of Seoul, hosting 11 secondary
government ofﬁces including the Ofﬁce of Supply, the Small and Medium
Business Administration, the Korean Industrial Property Ofﬁce, the Ofﬁce of
Customs Administration and the Korean National Railroad. About 13,000 civil

servants and families are expected to move to Taejon (Koreaherald, 1998b).

170

uildin Middle la it'

At the time in Italy and France similar blocks were under construction
using funds from the Marshall aid program, and so I decided that we
needed these skyscrapers rather than condominium style as there was
not much land free In Seoul, several apartment blocks already
existed, but these were lived in by poorer families I decided to change
the impression of apartment blocks by inviting middle class families. I
explained this to the Supreme Council including Kim Jong-pil (one of the
military ofﬁcers who joined Park’s coup in 1961) and they all agreed. I
asked USOM (United States Operations Mission) for the money
necessary for construction, but the head of the housing section opposed
this, saying how could a country with a per capita income of US$80 use
some of the money to import elevators. As a result, I had to use
government funds and make the apartments six stories instead often as
we could not get elevators. We opted for a central heating system, but
the public thought this was a luxury and so we resorted to briquette
boilers in each apartment. There was also criticism on the toilet systems,
but on this I stood ﬁrm, though we had to import them from Japan as there
was no domestic manufacturer. I invited architects to design the buildings
and as they had not seen overseas buildings they came up with uniquely
Korean designs. The small apartments were to be rented out as I wanted
as many people as possible to experience living in them (Chosunilbo,

1 999d).

The ﬁrst batch of six buildings was completed with 450 apartments on
December 1, 1961. The above recollection was by Dong-Won Chang, the
commander of the engineering battalion of the 2"“ army command headquarters,
who was later appointed president of Daehan Housing Corporation, right after
the coup.

In 1962, he had a chance to take a look at the middle-class apartments in

the Western standard (Chosunilbo, 1999e):

171

 

I visited Rome and Ieamed that my taxi-driver lived in an apartment.
Wanting to see what it was like, I visited his home and found the interior
was much better than the outside. I ﬁrmly believed in the apartment block

In 1968, he was made head of the Korea Housing Corporation and

 

oversaw the building of massive apartments South of the Han River in Seoul
(Chosunilbo, 1999d).

By 1977, more decent middle-class apartment complexes became visible

 

in Seoul (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1977):

Along the banks of the frozen Han River, south of central Seoul, stand
new apartment complexes for miles on end. More such complexes are
being built, steadily expanding on the still relatively open southern side of
the river. These buildings are perhaps the most tangible expression of
South Korea’s rapid modernization and the emergence of the country’s
middle class. Inside one block, in one of the more spacious ﬂats
overlooking the river and the riverside highway, lives Whang Young Juhn,
a manager with South Korea’s biggest trading company, Samsung, with
his wife and three children. Their 1,400 sq. Feet (132 sq meters)
apartment has three bedrooms

Just as it emphasized national scale, developmentalism in Korea
emphasized huge structures, the symbols of modernization. Confucianism was
also important as the modernization projects depended upon state leadership.
The speech of Chung Hee Park made at the new residential block in 1961 was a
mixture of the Confucian rhetoric of “benevolent and responsible governance“

and the developmentalist mentality of “all-out, enthusiastic self-mobilization of

people for the goal of modernization“ (Chosunilbo, 1999d):

172

“Whenever I sat at the table to eat dinner, the lights would go out. If I lit a
candle then the lights would come on and when I blew out the candle, the
lights would go out. Now though I can have light all night long. We did
not develop a new power source or increase capacity, so how is this
possible? It is because our officials are not corrupt. First of all, all the
governments must be efﬁcient and honest. Secondly, people should have
conﬁdence in the government and support it. When the government and
the people are united then there is a miracle. We have to create a
miracle for the country in this generation.“

It is not difﬁcult to understand why the interaction between Confucianism
and developmentalism has been middle-class oriented and thus somewhat
egalitarian. For example, the building of high-rise apartments of decent size was
in the absolute interest of bureaucrats. First of all, bureaucrats are going to
need one of those units for their own families. Second, it is in line with national
development using the middle class not only as the producers but also
consumers of the ever-booming national economy. Third, building middle class
cities across the country seems like a reasonable way to secure political support
for bureaucratic rule.

Relatively even urban development within Seoul can be attributed to (1)
extensive revenue sharing among wards, (2) state-managed supply of middle-
class housing, and (3) extensive investment on public transportation.

The ﬁscal policy of Seoul city is quite similar to Korea's national policy.
City hall redistributes tax resources in a “hierarchical“ manner. Just as Seoul

city’s autonomy is short-changed due to the city's ﬁnancial dependence on the

173

national government, wards in Seoul have to give up their own decision-making
power as they are ﬁnancially dependent on the Seoul city government.

However, just as poor cities and regions receive subsidies from the
national government, Iess-well-off wards in Seoul receive subsidies from the city
hall. Extensive revenue sharing among wards helped to guarantee a minimum
level of social service in each neighborhood.

Ward revenues consist of local tax, non-tax income, designated ﬁnancial
sources, control grants, and subsidies. Local tax and non-tax sources are tied to
the income level of each ward. Local tax items include tax on real estate and
automobiles as well as on acquisition, registration and so forth. Non-tax income
consists of property rents, fees, and miscellaneous items (Seoul Metropolitan
Government, 1997).

The combined amount of local taxes on real estate and automobiles for
the top two wards (Socho-gu and Kangnam-gu) in 1995 was 4.5 times larger
than the sum of these taxes for the bottom two wards (Kangbuk and
Keumchun”). The differences are mostly a function of wealth considering that
the ratio of the population between the above two pairs of wards is just 1.421 for
the same year (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1997). Designated ﬁnancial
sources are usually insigniﬁcant in amount and do not correlate much with the
wealth of each ward as it mainly consists of proceeds from disposal of properties

and miscellaneous charges (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1997).

 

2’ In Figure 5, it is spelled as "Kumchon-gu."

174

Control grants and subsidies are tools for revenue sharing with the poorer
wards in Seoul. Control grants are designed to ﬁnance speciﬁc priority projects
of the Seoul metropolitan government, and subsidies are matching-up money for
wards in which local tax and non-tax income falls short of spending needs.
During the period 1991 to 1995, the combination of local tax and non-tax income
was about 60 percent of the total revenue whereas the transfers consisted of
about 40 percent (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1999: 485).

Table 9 shows that the total revenue of wards in Seoul in 1995 was 2,255
billion won (US$ 2.9 billion). This revenue was being divided into local tax
(744), non-tax (665), designated ﬁnancial sources (58), control grants (709), and
subsidies (79). The share going to revenue transfers, which is the combined
sum of control grants and subsidies, amounted to 34.9 percent of the total
revenue.

The wards with the highest percentage of self generated ﬁnancial support
in 1997 (Chung, Socho, and Kangnam) did not receive any transfers from Seoul
metropolitan government in 1998. These three wards were nearly self-sufﬁcient:
Chung-gu (96.4 percent), Socho-gu (94.2 percent), and Kangnam-gu (96.8
percent). By contrast, those wards with a lower percentage of ﬁnancial self-
support (Table 10) received the lion’s share of transfers. Chungrang-gu,
Kangbuk-gu, Tobong-gu, Uunpyong-gu, Tongjak-gu, and Kwanak-gu received
subsidies and controlled grants which amounted to half or more of their budgets

in 1998.

175

Table 9. Settled Revenues of General Account by Gu (ward) in 1995 (In Billion Won)

Total Local Non-tax Designate Control Subsidies Percentage
Revenue Tax Revenues Financial Grants (C) Share of
(A) Sources (B) Transfer
(B+C)IA
2,255 744 885 58 709 79 34.9

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1997. Seoul Statistical Yearbook. Seoul, Korea.

176

 

Table 10. Public Financial Conditions by Ward in Seoul

Ward Self-Support Transfers in 1998 Transfers
of Financial (Sum of Control out of
in 1997 Grants and Total
(Percentage) Subsidies) Budget In 1998

(In Billion won) (Percentage)

Kangnam 98.8 - -

Chung 98.4 - -

Socho 94.2 - -

Songpa 84.7 15 5.7

Yongdungpo 77.0 17 12.3

Chongno 65.5 27 17.5

Kangso 52.3 49 34.9

Yongsan 51.8 44 34.8

Yangchon 51.3 49 41.9

Kuro 51.3 47 39.8

Kwangjin 49.3 45 39.5

Kangdong 48.2 49 30.4

Mapo 48.2 55 38.2

Songbuk 43.8 59 38.4

Songdong 43.2 55 44.0

Nowon 42.3 84 40.8

Tongdaemun 41 .4 82 41 .5

Keumchun 41 .4 44 48.8

(Kumchon)

Sodaemun 40.4 57 45.0

Kwanak 39.3 85 48.9

Uunpyong 38.2 81 47.8

Chungrsng 38.4 59 48.9

Tongjak 35.4 55 48.0

Kangbuk 34.8 58 54.4

Tobong 34.3 52 55.5

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1999. Whitepaper on Seoul Metropolitan Governance.
Seoul, Korea.

177

The redistributing effect of these transfers (controlled grants and
subsidies) is evident in Table 11. The tax burden per capita shows more
discrepancies among wards than budget per capita. A resident in Chung-gu, the
highest taxed ward, pays about 7.1 times more than the average Seoulite. A
Nowon-gu resident, who pays the least amount of local tax, pays just about 40
percent of the average. Budget per capita centers around the average. A
Chung-gu resident, who is contributing the largest chunk of the budget, receives
about 3.3 times more than the average Seoulite. A Nowon-gu resident, who
pays the least amount of tax, still enjoys about 79 percent of the average per
capita budget in Seoul.

Another mechanism that implements Confucian developmentalism in
Korean cities is the central provision of housing. Contrary to previous research
that either emphasizes the Korean govemment’s weak involvement in housing
(Manjae Kim, 1992) or criticizes state intervention in the market for being
inefﬁcient and favoring only the upper and middle class (Deukho Cho, 1993),
Woo-Jin Kim (1993) argues that state intervention was extensive, efﬁcient, and

middle-class oriented.

178

Table 11. Budget Per Capita and Local Tax Burden Per Capita by Wards in Seoul, 1998 (In
Thousand Won)

Wards Bedget Local Tax
Per Burden
Capita Per
Capita
Chung 980 581
Chongno 852 244
Kangnam 418 281
Socho 310 187
Yongdungpo 271 138
Yongsan 484 117
Mapo 352 88
Kangso 235 84
Songpa 220 92
Keumchun 319 59
(Kumchon)
Kuro 288 57
Tongdaemun 345 57
Songdong 335 57
Kwangjin 253 55
Sodaemun 329 51
Kangdong 217 51
Songbuk 301 48
Tongjak 254 44
Yangchon 231 43
Uunpyong 237 38
Kangbuk 257 38
Chungrang 229 35
Kwanak 225 35
Tobong 231 34
Nowon 231 33
Average 293 82

Source: Seoul Metropolitan Government. 1999. Whitepaper on Seoul Metropolitan Governance.
Seoul, Korea. ,

179

A fair judgement on Korean housing industry requires some historical
background. Woo-Jin Kim (1997) describes the miserable housing conditions

up until the 1950s:

After independence from Japan and the subsequent partition in 1945, a
large number of repatriated Koreans, from Japan and elsewhere, and
refugees from North Korea entered the country. The symptom of this
inﬂux was the emergence of Sangjajip, a kind of poor housing, made of
cardboard and other ﬂimsy materials. It was common for between two
and ten households to be sharing a house. To make matters worse, the
Korean War (1950-53) destroyed or made uninhabitable about 600,000
housing units, equivalent to 18 percent of the housing stock, and a further
million were estimated to be damaged to a lesser extent. More refugees
from the North added to the serious housing problems. According to a
North Korean source, the total reduction in the northern population
between 1949 to 1953 was 1.13 million Every night, stations were full
of homeless people. Moreover, unexpected typhoons and ﬂoods swept
away about 30,000 housing units per year during the second half of the
19505. Refugee camps or temporary shelters were built with the aid of
UNKRA, AID and so on, to accommodate the refugees and the rooﬂess.

Housing standards and environments were not a concern Wooden
boards and bricks were laid in a hurry on any open space to shelter
people from the severe climate.

Since the early 19605, the industrialization drive pulled up the demand for
decent housing. The percentage of Koreans living in urban areas increased
from 28.0 percent in 1960 to 70.8 percent in 1990. Seoul’s population grew from
2.4 million to 10.5 million in the same period (Deukho Cho, 1993235). Nuclear
families were becoming the norm, further increasing the need for more houses.

The growing housing shortage led the government to intervene in the

housing market through a drastic amendment of the Housing Construction

180

 

 

Acceleration Act in 1977 (Woo-Jin Kim, 1997:111-2). Price control was
launched. The Housing-Related Saving Scheme entitled savings account
holders preferential purchase rights to new apartment units at half to one-third of
the open market price, and rights to housing mortgages when they purchased a
house of 915 square feet (85 square meter) or less in size (Woo-Jin Kim,
19972113). The scheme effectively drew savings from households into housing
funds at low interest rates, supplied cheap loans to designated housing
suppliers, and allocated houses at controlled prices to the savings account
holders (Woo-Jin Kim, 19972113). In 1990, 34.5 percent of urban households
and around 200,000 units were part of this scheme (Woo-Jin Kim, 19972179).

I believe this housing scheme expresses the synergetic interaction
between Confucianism and developmentalism. This monopoly over the new
apartment supply was used as a rather “intrusive“ social control promoting
developmentalist goals such as family planning, earning foreign currency, hard-

working, and saving. Woo-Jin Kim (1997:114, 120):

Those at the top of the waiting list, according to the amount and period of
their savings with low interest, are rewarded for their fortitude by being
able to buy a decent home at cheaper prices than the market price it
gave people a discipline of hard work and high savings housing
policy has been often used as an instrument by which wider social aims
can be achieved. For example, priority in the allocation of new housing
was given to those who practiwd contraception when the government
launched a strong family planning campaign; and, when the Middle East
construction boom started, priority was given to those who worked
overseas.

181

“Relatively egalitarian“ developmentalism was also put into practice
through (1) restrictions on land development gains, and (2) price control and
size quotas. Quasi-govemmental bodies such as Korea Land Development
Corporation (KLDC) or public entities such as Korea National Housing
Corporation (KNHC) under the Ministry of Construction, developed land, and the
sale price of land developed by the institutions was tied into. housing price
controls (Woo-Jin Kim, 19972144). Large size housing buyers subsidized small
size buyers as homebuilders were required to build a portion of the small units at
a low price (Woo-Jin Kim, 1997:147-8).

It is only “relatively“ egalitarian as the scheme did not beneﬁt lower class
residents much. The scheme depends on the continual inﬂation of housing
prices to some degree making it ever more difﬁcult for those who don't have the
saving accounts to enter the program (Woo-Jin Kim, 1997). Many middle and
upper class people exploited the scheme by applying many times for the windfall
gain through dividing up dwellings among household members and other illegal
means (Deukho Cho, 1993).

Investment on transportation represents Korea’s commitment to the
middle class. Seoul is a good case as bureaucrats had to decide whether to
spend tax money on the subway system or on roads. They chose the subway
system and this means that the bureaucratic decision-making process may have
been “top-down“ but mainly served the interest of “those without their own

means of transportation.“

182

Beginning its ﬁrst phase of operation in 1974, with the installation of Line
1, the subway system has developed into the city's main traffic system. In 1999,
there were 4 subway lines that stretch 83 miles (133 kilometers) with 114
stations. The subway system transports about 29.8 percent of the total daily
trafﬁc. In order to reduce trafﬁc congestion, the Seoul Metropolitan Government

(SMG) has expanded the system. The second wave of subway construction,

 

currently underway, will add a total of 90 miles (145 km) to Lines 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Upon completion of the second phase of subway construction, the subway will

 

carry about 40 percent of the trafﬁc (Seoul Metropolitan Government, 1998).

Seoul city has put its priority on the subway system rather than intercity-
highways. In 1998, the total budget of the Seoul Metropolitan Government
(SMG) was 9,808 billion won (US$ 8.2 billion). For Roads and Transportation,
2,770 billion won (US$ 2.3 billion) was put aside. About 61 percent of the
money for Roads and Transportation, 1,695 billion won (US$ 1.4 billion), was
used for the construction of the subway (Seoul Metropolitan Government,

1998)

183

Holdin onto theP mbed i eoul

As the head of the ministry in charge of the general affairs of government
ofﬁcials, Jung-Kil Kim explains that “The public service might appear

to be just another hierarchy with a top-down structure, but it is a very rigid
organization with enormously self-protective nature“ (Korea Herald,

1 998C).

Plans to open a new government site outside of Seoul (and its near
suburb) can be traced back to 1985, during Doo-hwan Chun’s presidency.
But they were foiled by most government ofﬁces’ insistence on remaining
in the capital. The ground for the present site wasn’t broken till 1993
“But if Taejon ends up as the host of 10 auxiliary administrations, while
other agencies of greater importance remain in Seoul, people will wonder
what the fuss about a new administrative capital was about, after all,“ one
government critic said, questioning the impact of dispersing the
govemment’s administrators (Korea Herald, 1998b).

Like in ancient China, the urban hierarchy during the Chosun Dynasty
represented the bureaucratic orden national capital, provincial cities, and local
cities. Even though manufacturing and commercial activities were most active in
Seoul, this city was mostly known for its bureaucratic power. Bureaucrats
actually ran the country, consulting about state affairs with the king. Seoul has
been the hub of the central government since 1392.

The power of Seoul made the scholar class living there more powerful as
the city functioned as a place for educating and placing bureaucrats. Yong-mo
Kim (1976:83-4) reports that 52.8 percent of those who passed the main civil

service examination were Seoul residents, the rest coming from provinces.

184

Provincial residents suffered not only the inconveniences in transportation and
communications, but also institutional disadvantages.

Higher educational institutes were monopolized by Seoul. All four
accredited schools and the National Academy were located in Seoul (Yong-mo
Kim, 1976276-77). Those who graduated from one of the four accredited schools
were exempted from taking the competitive preliminary exam and applicants for
the main exam were required to have taken 300 credits at the National Academy
(Yong-mo Kim, 1976:76-77). In addition, there was the practice of providing the
descendants of ministers with the privilege of applying for the main exam without
passing through the preliminary exam (Yong-mo Kim, 1976283).

To Confucian scholars, cities meant places for governance rather than
money-making. And this Confucian notion seems to have helped maintain
bureaucratic hierarchy in the urban system. Artisans and merchants were
regarded with contempt as proﬁt seemed to be their sole motivation (Won-Son
Pak, 1986). Manufacturing and commerce were limited due to the prevalence of
family economy and regulation by the state. A signiﬁcant proportion of the
artisans and merchants were producing or supplying speciﬁcally for the
bureaucracy (Won-Son Pak, 1986). Many merchants were subsidized, often
with monopoly licenses, to provide items to the king and upper class (Palais,
1996:1006). Skilled artisans were often employed by the state, in producing
items such as brocades, silks, and ﬁne pottery (Palais, 1996:1006).

Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945 did not change the status of

Seoul as a bureaucratic center. The imposed modernization did not mean the

185

dominance of a new bourgeoisie in urban Korea. The colonizers, themselves,
had never experienced a bourgeois revolution. The strong, highly centralized
colonial state mimicked the role that the Japanese state had come to play in
Japan - intervening in the economy, creating markets, spawning new industries,
suppressing dissent (Cumings, 19972148).

Cumings (19972148) reports how the colonial government turned Seoul

into the nerve center of the country:

The huge Oriental Development Company owned and funded industrial
and agricultural projects and came to own more than 20 percent of
Korea’s arable land it employed an army of officials who fanned out
through the countryside to supervise agricultural production. The colonial

Bank of Korea performed central-banking functions Bureaucratic

departments proliferated at the govemment—general headquarters in

Seoul.

However, the educational importance of Seoul was scaled down as the
country was being run by expatriate Japanese bureaucrats. Naturally, higher
education was not promoted. Even with the assimilation-oriented education
policy during the later days of colonialism, there was no government university in
Korea until the Keijo (Seoul) Imperial University was ofﬁcially organized in 1923
(Eugene Kim, 1973: 140). Even in this university, strict quotas were applied to
Korean applicants limiting the percentage of Korean students to under 40
percent (Dong, 1973).

Power concentration in Seoul since the 19605 shows similarity to the past

in the sense that it is the bureaucrats who represent the city. The supremacy of

186

bureaucrats over business was obvious as the Park regime followed the
Japanese model of state-led development. State interventions in the banking
sector sometimes substituted for risk assessment by bankers or investment
consultants. Foreign loans used to be channeled through the state.

Bureaucrats could literally make or break the companies:

Shortly after seizing power in 1980 the government announced a new
plan to reorganize the heavy and chemical industries along lines that
would eliminate competition among rival domestic producers and created
specialized monopolies for supposedly more efﬁcient export production.
In accordance with this new plan, Hyundai and Daewoo, the main
competitors in the automobile and power-generation equipment
industries, were to cease competition and effect an exchange of
properties that would make each ﬁrm a virtual monopoly producer in one
of those two areas. Chung Ju Yung of Hyundai and Kim Woo Chung (Kim
Ujiung) of Daewoo were summoned to the Ministry of Commerce and
Industry and ordered to work out such an arrangement within a week
Both Chung and Kim reluctantly agreed to go along with the new state
policy, and a deal was struck wherein Hyundai would takeover the
automobile industry and leave the production of power plants to Daewoo
(Eckert: 105-6).

 

The hierarchical structure of the bureaucracy centered in the capital city.
The centralization of state power was secured when the military junta suspended
the local autonomous government system in 1961. Local authorities were
downgraded into de facto ﬁeld ofﬁces to carry out the assignments ordered by
the central state. Local elections at all levels, including mayors of the big cities,
began to be held in Korea only from 1995. However, the scope of decisions by

local government is still limited because of limited taxing power and legal rights.

187

The educational importance of Seoul heightened again. Seoul boasts the
best universities in Korea along with the best of the best: Seoul National
University (SNU). Just like Tokyo University in Japan, Seoul National University
is speciﬁcally designed to educate the top bureaucrats. The dominance of SNU
graduates is evident and is still deepening.

The dominance of SNU graduates in top bureaucratic elite recruitment
began in earnest during the Park regime. For example, during Park’s civilian
rule (1964-1972), SNU graduates comprised 33.9% of the top bureaucratic elites
and during his Yushin rule they reached 50.8% (Chul, 1994). Even in civilian
president Young Sam Kim’s ﬁrst cabinet in 1993, SNU graduates constituted
65% of bureaucratic elites. The remaining bureaucratic fractions come from a
few prestigious private universities in Seoul such as Yeonsei University and
Korea University.

The amount of magnetism SNU and other prestigious universities add to
Seoul is enormous because they build a network of people based in Seoul. The
dominance of these schools over others is not solely based on their academic
excellence. Talented high school graduates from "local" schools want to go to
good universities in Seoul, fully acknowledging that they will beneﬁt not because
of the high quality education but because of the advantage of connections. The
chance of making it in the system depends on which school one graduated from.
Woo-Cumings (1995) mentions that school connections among bureaucrats are

so important as to be one of the means to resolve inter-agency conﬂict.

188

The description of Confucian school networks by Jong S. Jun and Hiromi

Muto (19952126) might apply to the Korean case just as well:

When a former bureau chief who served in the Economic Planning
Agency was asked to describe his relationship with his immediate boss,
he ﬁrst stressed that he had been fortunate to have his senpai (senior) as
a supervisor. His senpai (senior), like himself, graduated from law school
at the University of Tokyo and shared his alma mater. Because of this
connection, he was able to establish a highly paternalistic and trusting
relationship. The personal relationship with another individual with the
same educational .. connections not only inﬂuenced his intra-agency
activity but also his inter-agency and inter-ministerial relationships when
he sought advice, political support, or information.

The congregation of corporate headquarters in Seoul should be attributed
to this existence of high ofﬁcials in and around the capital city. This phenomena
is quite similar to the case in Tokyo. Hill and Fujita (1995) report that the very
existence of a strong state apparatus in Tokyo leads to the concentration of
functions in the Tokyo region. State-led industrialization required businessmen
to have smooth contact with Tokyo bureaus. The advantage of proximity leads
inﬂuential groups - bureaucrats, politicians, executives in regulated and
protected industries, third sector mediating associations and consultants - to
conspire to continue Tokyo's functional primacy.

Similar to the experience of Tokyo, industrial capitalists ﬂocked to Seoul
in order to establish smooth contact with bureaucrats. Since the coup in 1961
and the emergence of the developmental state, Seoul came to have renewed

signiﬁcance. The central government selected strategic industries, developed

189

industrial estates, and exercised administrative and ﬁnancial assistance
extensively to support those industries. Vlﬁth the great inﬂuence of the central
government, the domestic and international business transactions were
consummated in Seoul where face-to-face contact with bureaucrats was possible

(Hong 8. Kim, 1996).

i 77"

 

190

CONCLUSION

This study has documented a new pattern of urban development
associated with the developmental state. Power concentration in the Korean
urban system is extreme. Most decision-making takes place in Seoul. However,
the urban population is modestly diffused across other cities. Income
discrepancies among cities is not signiﬁcant. And the contrast between the
wealthy neighborhoods and the poor ones is not as stark as in other major cities
in the world.

This “Confucian developmental urbanization“ questions the explanatory
powers of the two main academic approaches: market-oriented
modemizationlurban ecology theory and Marxism-inﬂuenced dependency/world
system perspective when it comes to Korea. Both theories assume that
concentrated power, population, and wealth go hand in hand. This assumption
doesn’t ﬁt Korea and perhaps that is because mainstream neoclassical
economics and Marxism originated to explain the economic situation in Europe,
after the bourgeois revolution. Big cities meant factories, crowds, money, and
powerful capitalists.

In order to understand the pattern of urbanization in Korea, this analysis
began by acknowledging the importance of the developmental state in Korean

society. Compared to the “regulatory“ states in the West, which limit themselves

191

to overseeing the basic functioning of the market, the developmental state in
Korea intervened and promoted the market. The bourgeois class was not the
powerholder in Korean society. Bureaucrats made the important decisions on
what to produce, how to produce it, and how to reinvest the surplus.

Korea’s developmental state began in 1961 with the military coup led by
General Chung Hee Park Park changed Korea’s class structure. The state-
business nexus actually grew closer under Park but the state now had the upper
hand. State ofﬁcials conditioned their favor upon industry's contribution to the
development of Korea. “The mandate of development“ continued during the rule
of President 000 Hwan Chun (1980-1987). Seeing himself as the Iegatee of
Park’s early successes, Chun was more anxious than anyone to keep the
economy moving by leaving economic guidance and leadership to the
bureaucrats.

The developmental state is armed with its own ideology which guides
practical policies. Following the position of Gramsci, I consider the acceptance
of the ruling ideology by the public to be important in understanding the question
of “by which right they rule“ and “how they rule.“ My understanding of Gramsci’s
writings led to the working deﬁnition of “ideology“ as “a socially embedded world
view serving the interests of a class.“ “Hegemonic ideology' is considered to be
“an ideology accepted by the majority of the population.“

In order to see where Korea stands in the world of ideas at the global level,
I contrasted the hegemonic ideologies in the US and Japan. Lockean liberalism

in America is made up of (1) individualism, (2) property rights, and (3) the limited

192

state. Confucian developmentalism in Japan focuses on (1) familism, (2) a
managed national economy, and (3) an extensive state.

Whereas Lockean liberalism philosophically freed individuals from the
feudal order, Confucianism has kept individuals in the web of family and family-
like organizations. While Locke’s emphasis on property was embraced along
with the later Locke-inﬂuenced classical economics and Darwinism,
developmentalism focused on augmentation of national wealth and rejected
concepts such as the sanctity of property rights, the insatiable pursuit of wealth,
the “survival of the ﬁttest,“ and the primacy of the self-regulating market even at
the expense of social dislocation. These differences in ideology contain distinct
urban-related characteristics: “politically equal but economically unequal“
American urban ideology, and “economically egalitarian but politically
hierarchical“ Japanese conceptions of city-building.

Since the early 19605, the bureaucratic elite in Korea passionately
embraced Confucian developmentalism. Under the guidance of the “family
state,“ with General-tumed politician President Park as the head of the
household, the developmentalist goal of economic growth has penetrated to
every niche in the society. While acknowledging the authoritarian nature of the
national mobilization, it should be understood that this hegemonic ideology has
been embraced by many Koreans as well. While still harboring hate toward
President Park’s ruthless rule, especially during most of the 19705, many

Koreans still regard him as a person who put the national interest before his own

193

and led the country out of absolute poverty and dependency on the US in the
19505.

As in all areas of Korea society, Confucian developmentalism has been
put into practice by bureaucrats. The power of Seoul in the Korean urban

system reﬂects the lingering Confucian ideology in Korean society. With the

 

trust in Confucian tradition by the military dictators, Seoul drew power from its
position in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Bureaucrats in Seoul add a magnetic

character to the city that forces private capitalists to ﬂock there.

 

The spread of wealth in the Korean urban system should be understood
in the context of Korean developmentalism, which emphasizes the development
of the nation as a whole rather than the pursuit of individual wealth. Extensive
investment in infrastructure, development of industrial estates, and revenue
sharing all contributed to reducing income differentials across the cities.

The equitable urban development within Seoul itself also stems from the
developmentalist mobilization by bureaucrats. Urban development targeted the
necessary public infrastructure for the masses and provided other amenities,
such as housing for the middle class. Extensive revenue sharing among wards
helped to guarantee a minimum level of social service in different
neighborhoods.

Seoul is not a demographically primate city by world standards even
though its sheer population size leaves enough room for concern. The
investment in industrial estates and transportation in the provincial economies

has helped to offer alternative destinations for internal migration besides Seoul.

194

Other measures devised to control population migration include (1) the
designation of green belts around Seoul, (2) the compulsory relocation of
factories in Seoul, (3) the expansion of educational opportunities outside of
Seoul, and (4) the decentralization of secondary government agencies.

Things are changing in Korea, however. In my opinion, the fervor of
Confucian developmentalism reached its peak when President Park was
assassinated by his own intelligence chief in 1979. Since then, the system has
been working as it was but without the steam or “genuine energy of the people.“
The massive demonstrations by both students and citizens during the 19805
brought democracy back to Korea in 1987. The ﬁnancial crisis in 1997 was a
heavy blow for the legitimacy of bureaucracy. The public, fully aware of who
was running the Korean economy, viewed bureaucrats as ultimately responsible
for the ﬁnancial crisis. Whether that will lead Korea in the direction of Lockean
liberalism remains to be seen. The Korean people are starting to take American
ideas as genuine alternatives.

American ideology has now become a serious contender for disenchanted
Korean minds. Bureaucratic regulations appear counterproductive, if not
suspiciously corrupt. Newspaper editorials publicize that the nation has no other
alternative but to adapt to American rules, blindly underscoring the “survival of
the ﬁttest“ theory in order to stave off the current economic mess (Korea Herald,

1998c):

195

In compliance with accelerating liberalization, Western values — more
precisely American values - have become an outright virtue. Companies
appear quick in introducing American business culture: the performance-
based wage system has been a norm in many of the large business
concerns, for instance the nation has no other alternative but to adapt
to American rules

Urban policy is now also under attack. Jeong-sik Lee, who is a vice
president of the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, argues that
lessons from the current crisis include normalization and self-govemance (Korea
Herald, 1998a). According to him, distorted urban economic processes should
be replaced by a “normal path“ of economic operation. Politically inﬂuenced
land management systems should be based on economic logic and market
principles. The govemment’s role as a distributor of resources will therefore be
minimized along with the relaxation of various regulations, especially in the area

of housing, land and construction markets. He continues:

Competition based on “the rules of game“ should be guaranteed to
minimize the expected disorder of market functions that will accompany
deregulation. Such deregulation should be aimed at expanding the role
and scope of the private sector. In addition, the institutional environment
should be reformed to meet international standards, thereby attracting
foreign investment.

196

His views are similar to that of the IMF, preaching American values as an
outright virtue in economic matters: legalizing lay-offs, adoption of performance-
based wage system, deregulating M 8 A activities, minimizing government
regulations in business, and lifting all controls on capital ﬂow in and out of
Korea. He simply transferred those principles to cities and regions. Fiscal
subsidies for poor localities are regarded as similar to corporate welfare for
incompetent Korean enterprises. He considers infrastructure investments
targeting balanced regional developments as similar to the unproﬁtable, long-
term, and market-share oriented behaviors of Korean ﬁrms. Foreign investment
on urban projects is welcomed as in other sectors. As free agents, localities
should have the right and duty to decide their future - like individual ﬁrms.

To be fair, I have to point out that the trend toward Lockean liberalism was
something that has been witnessed since the early 19905. “Efﬁciency“ and
“individual property“ rather than “balanced national land development“ have
been the motive behind slowing changing urban policies. In 1994, it became
easier to build factories and high-rises in Seoul (Korea Herald, 1994). In the
same year, the government also enacted the Private Capital lnducement Law for
Expansion of Social Infrastructure, granting private entrepreneurs the right to
expropriate land for construction of public facilities (Heon-Joo Park, 1998:139).
In 1997, the requirement for building small apartments for apartment developers
was abolished except in Seoul and 14 other cities around Seoul (Nae-Yeo-
Keong-Jae, 1997). From May 1998, the land market, together with the real

estate market as a whole, has been completely open to foreigners (Heon-Joo

197

Park, 19982139). In 1999, the central government is seriously considering
abolishing greenbelt zones to curry the favors of voters owning the lands.

The effect of this Americanization on Korean urban development may be
similar to what is happening in the Korean economy. Korea’s unemployment
rate rose from 2.6 percent in 1997 to 6.8 percent in 1998 (Korea Herald, 1999b).
The income of urban workers in the bottom ﬁfth of the income distribution
dropped 17.2 percent in 1998 while the income of the top fifth dropped only 0.3
percent (Korea Herald, 1999c). As the middle and lower classes bore the brunt
of the IMF induced structural adjustment policies in the form of lay-offs and
reduced salaries, poor cities have had to endure ﬁnancial degradation. As
domestic and foreign capitalists see proﬁt opportunities in liberalization, rich
cities such as Seoul will profoundly beneﬁt. Not only will income levels rise in
relative terms but also a signiﬁcant in-ﬂux of population might be expected with
the decline of provincial economies. As capitalists arise as new masters or
ruling partners of bureaucrats, Seoul will be as powerful as before as the host
city of the power holders.

Like their counterparts in the West, the new private elites may champion
the high ideal of political freedom. However, they may also follow the suit of
being “irresponsible leaders“ by neglecting the need of the masses living in poor
neighborhoods and Iess-than-affluent cities. A brotherly approach to poor wards
and localities may be replaced with a cold-blooded, survival-of-the ﬁttest
mentality. Disparities in urban systems and urban places will be heightened and

population concentration in Seoul will gain momentum. Power, however, will

198

remain in Seoul as private power holders continue to congregate in Seoul for the
exploitation of its market, human resources, and foreign contacts.

To put it simply, liberalization will make Korean urban patterns more
similar to that of other Third World countries resulting in an extreme power
concentration in capital, a severe income disparity among and within major

cities, and a population explosion in the capital city.

199

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