Park Chung-hee

Park Chung-hee 1963
Korean spelling
Hangeul	박정희
Hanja	朴正熙
Revised Romanization	Bak Jeong-hui
McCune- Reischauer	Pak Chŏnghŭi
See also : Korean name

Park Chung-hee (born September 30, 1917 in Gumi , Keishō-hokudō Sub - Province, Chōsen Province , then the Japanese Empire , today's South Korea ; † October 26, 1979 in Seoul ) was a South Korean military, politician and President of the Republic from 1961 to 1979 Korea. He is considered to be one of the most controversial figures in South Korean history. On the one hand, with his rigorous economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s, he laid the foundation for South Korea's rise to the ranks of the leading industrial nations. On the other hand, he ruled the country with dictatorial harshness and suppressed the democracy movement.

Life

Park Chung-hee as a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army

Park was born into a farming family. During the time when Korea was a colony of Japan (1910 to 1945), he attended the military academy of the army of the Manchurian Empire in Changchun from 1937 . From 1944 he served as a soldier in the army of the Manchurian Empire, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant . He took the Japanese name Takagi Masao ( Japanese 高木 正雄) until 1945 .

After independence from the Japanese Empire, his career in this army came to an end and he joined the Korean police force in 1946, where he quickly made a career and which later became the South Korean army . In 1948 he was sentenced to death for participating in the police rebellion in Yeosu . A pardon came after he revealed the names of officers who allegedly sympathized with communists and were subsequently executed. He was then transferred to military intelligence and, at the end of the Korean War , was promoted to Brigadier General at the age of 36 . With a relatively small force of only 1,500 men, he carried out the military coup on May 16, 1961, which led to the demise of the democratic movement with the overthrow of the unstable Second Republic under the government of Yun Bo-seon . A constitutional amendment in December 1962 reassigned the president to a key political position. The members of the new government were provided by the newly formed Democratic Republican Party.

Political career

Park Chung-hee (3rd from left) at the SEATO summit in 1966

Park was elected President of the Third Republic for the first time in 1963 , but only narrowly won against Yun Bo-seon by 1.4 percentage points and the legitimacy of his rule was further questioned. He ruled with an iron hand and led the country on a hard but ultimately successful path of modernization and industrialization, which is characterized as a "development dictatorship". On June 22, 1965, he signed the Basic Treaty between the Republic of Korea and Japan and normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries. Its economic policy of the five-year plans enabled South Korea to rise from an agrarian state to a modern industrial country. From the end of the 1960s, South Korea's economic output exceeded that of its neighbor North Korea, which was integrated in the socialist bloc .

Park Chung-hee was re-elected in the 1967 and 1971 presidential elections after the economic boom, with secret funds and huge financial resources at his disposal. In the 1971 elections, his opponent Kim Dae-jung received over 45% of the vote. Park then declared a national emergency, declared martial law and kidnapped Kim Dae-jung. In 1972 he dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution and installed a one-man dictatorship. At the end of the same year he installed the Yushin Constitution and was elected President of the Fourth Republic and re-elected to that office in 1978, the election by the 2500 handpicked members of the "National Conference on Reunification". During a public speech on August 15, 1974, he escaped an assassination attempt by Mun Saek-wang , a Korean living in Japan , in which a bullet fatally injured his wife Yuk Young-soo under circumstances that are still not fully understood.

In 1979, Park was killed by his own intelligence chief Kim Jae-gyu in a failed coup . All of the conspirators were executed in 1980 . After Choi Kyu-ha's brief reign and another military coup , Army Chief Chun Doo-hwan became president.

Today's evaluation and entry of the daughter into politics

In conservative circles, Park Chung-hee and his life's work are honored to this day. Among other things, his daughter Park Geun-hye was chairman of the leading conservative opposition party Hannara-dang from 2004 to 2006 ( Sae-nuri-dang from 2012 to 2017 ) and president from 2013 to 2017 (impeachment). This circumstance made it difficult for political opponents, most recently Roh Moo-hyun , to critically come to terms with the South Korean past, because any criticism of Park Chung-hee could be understood as a politically motivated attack on the opposition. In addition to Park's anti-democratic leadership style, the left mainly criticizes the fact that the normalization treaty with Japan was concluded too hastily and with too great concessions to Japan. For example, the reparation payments were far too low and the so-called comfort women , forcibly recruited prostitutes for the Japanese war brothels, were not adequately compensated. It also called for a critical examination of the suspicion that Park Chung-hee and others, who played a leading role in emerging South Korea, were politically pro-Japanese during the Japanese colonial era. On August 29, 2005, a list of politically pro-Japanese Koreans was published for this time, on which Park Chung-hee's name can also be found.

literature

• Chong-hui Pak: Park Chung Hee, President of the Republic of Korea , The Korean Republic, 1963
• Patrick Köllner : South Korea's political system. In: Thomas Kern, Patrick Köllner (eds.): South Korea and North Korea. Introduction to history, politics, economics and society. Campus-Verlag 2005, ISBN 3-593-37739-X , pp. 50-70

Web links

Commons : Park Chung-hee  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Park Chung-hee in the catalog of the German National Library
• 1979: South Korean President killed. In: BBC On this day. (English). 
• Petra Kolonko: Kim's Abduction: Late Confession in Seoul. In: faz.net . October 24, 2007 . 

Individual evidence

1. ^ East Asia Institute of the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences : Japanese Occupation Period , accessed on April 22, 2012.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Köllner (2005), p. 56.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Köllner (2005), p. 57.
4. ↑ Gottfried-Karl Kindermann: The rise of Korea in world politics . From the opening of the state to the present. Olzog Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-7892-8165-5 .
5. ↑ Köllner (2005), p. 58.

Note: In this article, the family name is placed before the first name of the person. This is the usual order in Korean. Park is the family name here, Chung-hee is the first name.