# NIS 41B, South Korea, Country Profile/Spiritual Modernization

​"Spiritual" Modernization (u/ou)
Proliferating universities are attended by nearly 200,000 students—including 50,000 coeds—almost a 2,000% increase since the end of World War II
The group of junior officers who brought Pak Chong-hui to power in 1961 had no political program other than to weed out corruption and accelerate economic modernization. They claimed they were only carrying through the unfinished business of the student revolution of the previous year to save Korean democracy from corrupt, inefficient, older-generation politicians. However, they felt the need for an ideology more attuned to the modern world by compatible with the Confucian heritage, with which Pak and most of his associates are still deeply imbued. They sought some systematic guide to action which would at least popularize their economic goals and help mobilize public support. Because of passions aroused by the Korean war, anticommunism was a cardinal tenet for the military—as it was for most older Koreans. Nevertheless, anticommunism had been so abusively exploited by President Rhee that it could no longer have the vigor of a fresh appeal and could not arouse the fervor that the colonels required in order to rally popular support.
Democracy as an ideology also had drawbacks for the military. Rhee had consistently abused presidential powers, and his successor, Chang Myon had been too indecisive and his supporters too beset by factionalism to win any wide support for his own hopeful democratic experiment. Nevertheless, Pak recognized the strong attachment to the democratic ideal of most articulate Koreans, as demonstrated by the students and intellectuals during the upheaval in 1960. He has professed his adherence to democratic principles but also has warned against a democracy "imported lock, stock, and barrel" from the United States, recommending instead a "Koreanized form of welfare democracy." Even today the Pak regime preserves the forms of constitutional democracy, however far it has departed from its spirit.
Because Korea has been subjected to such sweeping, kaleidoscopic changes in the space of just one generation, there are insistent demands for a new spiritual identity. Both the student revolution and the military coup were carried out by representatives of a younger, very different postwar generation. Its members had been more exposed to modern education and a variety of new influences and sources of information. They were the first generation to be broadly educated in the native script, Hangul, a truly more national means of self-expression than the Chinese writing system formerly prescribed. Thanks to the easier, popular script and the "educational explosion" of the postwar era, literacy has jumped from about 21% in 1945 to 88% in 1970. Literacy is no longer the privilege of a small, exclusive elite; its spread ended the elite's monopoly of power, weakened the authority of the family and of class distinctions, and brought rural areas into touch with the modern city and its life. Combined with the impact of the war-born urbanization, postwar educa ​tion developed a new, widespread consciousness of social and political affairs which could not be ignored.
At the same time, it was becoming clear that Korea would remain divided for some time to come. Rhee's trident calls for a "March North" were quietly dropped and a new national identity for the South was becoming acceptable. The government has sought to make this meaningful by stressing that reunification—still the cherished goal of all Koreans—would become possible through diligence and discipline, and by building up South Korea's economy until it left the North far behind in any kind of competition.
The emphasis on the program of economic development and modernization has lent a certain elan to the government's efforts, but it also has tended to obscure some of Pak's more arbitrary acts that contravene constitutional procedures and civil liberties. Yet something more than the dramatic success of the economic development program was needed. Nationalistic exhortations voiced in a superpatriotic vein have reappeared and remain a perennial theme, but with diminishing effect. Memories of the Korean war are fading, particularly among the young, who might recall at most the discredited Rhee's abuse of the national defense theme. Shortly after they seized power in 1961, the military leaders promptly called for "spiritual" as well as economic modernization, incorporating these goals in an ambitious, if short-lived, National Reconstruction Movement that stressed austerity, diligence, and "national morality." After that particular program was phased out, President Pak elaborated a "National Renaissance: Social Reconstruction and the Remaking of Man" in Korea. He called for new ethics, stressing the deficiencies of his people in the pioneering of entrepreneurial spirit and in a sense of national honor.
A man of grim and austere mien, Pak had always displayed the puritanical steak that was characteristic of the young colonels who had organized the coup. Their suspicion of "corrupt politicians and capitalists" is reminiscent of attitudes held by young officers in prewar Japan, whose influence Pak undoubtedly felt in his formative years. Despite his interest in economic modernization, Pak has a distrust of Western beliefs; at the time of the coup he had had less contact with Americans that most senior officers. He disparages Western liberalism and "Americanizing" influences, and the "Revitalizing Reforms" he has enacted since late 1972 include a reduction in the hours of English taught in the schools and the introduction of "national education" in Korean ethics and history. Western term are to be replaced on shop signs and Western "pop" songs discouraged.
Ever since its earliest days, the present regime has made periodic efforts to "clean up" the cities, whose "debilitating" influence Pak deeply distrusts. Hundreds of hoodlums, petty criminals, and prostitutes have been apprehended and removed from the capital for varying periods of rustication. Shortly after the coup, coffee-drinking and nightclub dancing were banned for a time, and more recently, legislation has been directed against "decadent tendencies" such as miniskirts, long hair, and the like. To discourage the drift to cities and keep Koreans "down on the farm" a broad new program has been enacted to make the tax burden much less onerous for rural and small town inhabitants and to improve living conditions there.
Some Confucian customs are receiving new stress, such as encouraging children to bow to their elders on New Year's Day
Such interference with the age-old traditions that are deeply held are part of the social engineering that Pak feels his people need. Although government spokesmen occasionally justify the reforms as being designed only at making the Koreans a more disciplined people, they also serve both to expand and demonstrate the regime's power and control. These features are evident in the accelerating Sae Maul Undong (New Community Movement), which now includes urban as well as rural restructuring. The Prime Minister recently hailed it as a program for improving "social discipline and . . . revitalizing the virtues of diligence, self-help, and cooperation." It is too early to tell how much progress has been made in these directions. Corruption, for instance, still appears in high political quarters. Nevertheless, Pak's ability to subject so many aspects of Korean life to his reforms clearly buttresses his political control. In the dozen years he has dominated Korea, Pak has been concerned fundamentally with reviving some modern approximation of the old Confucian order that was the fabric of Korean life and the means whereby Korean rulers through the centuries presided over public mores and maintained highly centralized power.