7 October 5 – The Gwangju Uprising (1980) & South Korea’s Democracy Movement

An impending clash between democracy activists and riot police in Seoul, June 10, 1987.

• Kyung Moon HWANG, “South Korean Democratization,” 226-234
• Namhee LEE, “Minjung, History, and the Crisis of Historical Subjectivity,” 175-178 and 183-186.
• SEO Hye-gyoung, “What Is the Most Important Thing?,” 217-227

Reminder: Due to the short essay, there is no homework assignment due this week.

The topic of this class is South Korea’s democracy movement in the 1980s. After 1945, the Koreas were both authoritarian societies. However, South Korea’s eventual progress in achieving democracy marks an important contrast with North Korea, which remains strongly authoritarian. The objective of Tuesday’s class is to gain an understanding of how and why democratization was achieved in South Korea, with a focus on the perspective of university activists and their ties to labor activists.

At the core of the democracy movement was the minjung (subaltern common people’s) movement, which was led by progressive and radical student and labor activists. Although South Korea was nominally a liberal-democratic country, in reality, the authoritarian regimes of Syngman Rhee (1948-1960), Park Chung Hee (1961-1979), and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1988) engaged in intensifying–and at times violent–repression of political dissent. State apparatuses, such as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and state laws, including the National Security Law (covered in last Thursday’s class), were utilized by the state to ensure the continuation of conservative rule. Democratic norms were widely flouted when liberal or progressive politicians attempted to introduce political and social reforms, and for political campaigns and elections. The 1980s democracy movement aimed, at one level, to realize a more representative democracy that followed procedural and electoral norms.

At the same time, the democracy movement–and especially the progressive/radical minjung movement at its core–sought to address historical injustices and historically rooted structural problems from Korea’s modern past. These problems, movement activists believed, continued to plague Korea in the 1980s. For example, the political settlement of 1945-1953, which had resulted in the division of the Korean peninsula, was regarded as the tragic product of superpower  intrusion in national affairs due to Cold War geopolitics. Cold War division gave way to South Korean authoritarianism, which was supported by the United States, in the name of anticommunism. Minjung intellectuals and activists addressed these issues as part of the 1980s democracy movement. The minjung/democratization movement had roots that extend back to the 1960s, but really expanded and gathered momentum after the rise of reviled authoritarian president Chun Doo-hwan and the tragic Gwangju Uprising of 1980.

In addition, the rise of the minjung movement enabled the surfacing of countermemories of the Korean War into public discourse. These countermemories–and the desire to correct the systemic problems that were rooted in the 1945-1953 political settlement–were the key motor of the minjung movement. In short, the minjung movement’s revised version of national history, which was based on countermemories, challenged the state’s official anticommunist ideology and the master commemorative narrative.

• Start by reading the Hwang chapter, which provides a concise overview of the democracy movement in the 1980s. The key events of 1980s democratization were the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 and the June Struggle of 1987.
• The Namhee Lee reading provides a denser, more conceptual examination of the “minjung movement,” which was at the heart of the democracy movement. Note: The term undongkwon means the “social movement sphere” or the “counterpublic sphere.”
• The Seo Hye-gyeong reading is an excerpt from the memoir of a former university student who, in the first half of the 1980s, gave up her studies and joined a factory in the Guro Industrial Complex, a major manufacturing center in western Seoul. The minjung movement was centered on an alliance between progressive/radical university activists and labor activisits. In the area of socioeconomic reforms, the movement sought to improve the livelihoods and the overall living circumstances of the working class as well as other people who were struggling to make a living and were otherwise on the margins of society. The aim was to realize social equality and equity, and to carve out greater pieces of the pie for the working people who were enabling South Korea’s economic growth. Uprooting the entrenched interests of the country’s conservative establishment–and its intimate connections to US neoimperialism–was deemed necessary to achive these goals. However, as the minjung movement progressed, activist leaders had to deal with the gap between university students and workers. While the latter were on the ground living the realities of industrial labor, students were ensconced in rather different circumstances. To close this gap, growing numbers of university activists, like Seo Hye-gyeong, became factory laborers. Here are some bits of information that may be useful as you read Seo’s memoir:
  • 12.12 coup is the December 12, 1979 coup in which General Chun Doo-hwan seized control of the military, an important step in his rise to the presidency in 1980. The coup was staged just 1.5 months after the assassination of Park Chung Hee.
  • Seoul Spring of 1980 was the time after Park’s assassination but before Chun’s seizing of the presidency in which liberal, progressive, and radical students, intellectuals, and activists hoped for the implementation of substantial democratic reforms. These hopes were stamped out by the Gwangju Uprising and Chun’s consolidation of political power.
  • “Seonbae” is a student of the same school who is in a higher year of study; “hubae” is a student of the same school who is in a lower year of study.
  • Jeon Tae-il was a worker in a sweatshop who, in 1970, committed self-immolation (protest suicide by setting fire to oneself) in protest of the pervasive violations of the labor law in Seoul’s sweatshops. Chun’s protest suicide shocked the nation, and caused student activists to learn more about the difficulties suffered by workers. It facilitated the growth and expansion of the labor and student movements.

In Tuesday’s class, you will be discussing South Korea’s democracy movement with a focus on the minjung movement and university student activism. As you read the Lee and Seo texts, consider the following questions.

• Who were/are the “minjung:?
• How did minjung practitioners view modern Korean history?
• How did university students/intellectuals strive to relate to and represent the minjung?
• What drove student and labor activists into taking action against state authoritarianism, in spite of the many risks?
• What kinds of social and political changes did they aspire for?