Abstract
South Koreans routinely take to the streets to express political dissent about a wide range of issues, including free-trade agreements, neoliberal labor law revisions, political corruption, and the expansion of nuclear energy facilities and U.S. military bases, to name a few. In addition to the familiar faces of students, workers, and intellectuals, protest participants consist of unconventional groups such as teenagers, housewives, artists, journalists, lawyers, Catholic nuns, Christian pastors, and other religious leaders. The vibrancy of South Korea’s protest sphere is commonly attributed to the 1980s democracy movement, which brought about a decisive end to nearly four decades of military rule in 1987. However, Paul Y. Chang argues in his astute and well-researched book, Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979, that we must look before the 1980s to the previous decade of the 1970s to understand the dynamism of South Korea’s social movement landscape.
Despite the decade’s reputation as a “dark age for democracy,” Chang identifies the 1970s as the pivotal era that fostered the growth and diversification of a contentious civil society. Park Chung Hee (1961 to 1979) implemented key legal and institutional measures during the second decade of his presidential rule that formalized a “legal dictatorship.” In addition to suspending direct presidential elections and authorizing indefinite consecutive terms under his draconian Yusin Constitution (1972), Park Chung Hee issued nine Emergency Decrees (EDs) between 1974 and 1975 that empowered the military, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), and the local police to carry out mass arrests, torture, surveillance, and imprisonment of political dissidents, particularly university students who were vocal opponents of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian regime. The enactment of repressive state policies and practices garnered the intended political effect—the swift demobilization of the student-led democracy movement by the mid-1970s. However, it also had an unintended effect—the activation of a diverse set of protest actors who became leading voices of change. Christian activists, who were deeply influenced by liberation theology, took visible leadership roles in anti-government protests after the disorganization of the student movement in 1975. Journalists demanding the end of media censorship and lawyers representing human rights cases, particularly on behalf of murdered and imprisoned student activists, also became politicized as part of the burgeoning democracy movement by the late 1970s.
People familiar with the severity of state repression and violence against democracy activists during the 1970s will find that Chang’s argument resonates deeply with their political memories and experiences. Sociologists, particularly political sociologists and social movement scholars, will recognize the sociological rigor and brilliance of Chang’s research contributions. Utilizing an impressive archive of Korean language sources, including the Korea Democracy Foundation’s “dictionary” of protest events and movement organizations (the eight-volume series published on the 1970s Democracy Movement by the National Council of Churches in Korea) and the UCLA Archival Collection on Democracy and Unification in Korea, Chang constructed an original events database that enabled him to systematically analyze nearly 3000 protest and repression events. Chang also conducted 20 in-depth oral history interviews with 1970s democracy activists, which adds narrative depth and specificity to his arguments. The inclusion of four appendices in the reference matter section at the end of the book provides comprehensive background on the data sources consulted; the codebook for Chang’s Korea Democracy Project Events dataset, which is housed at Stanford University; the continuity of individual leadership between the 1970s and 1980s democracy movement; andan overarching timeline of protest and repression events during the 1970s (pp.217–46).
The chapter organization of Protest Dialectics follows a coherent and well-developed narrative arc. Chapters One and Two provide historical context for the consolidation of Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian state regime. Chang shows how the constant threat of popular opposition plagued Park Chung Hee’s rule from the moment he seized state power through a military coup in 1961 to the moment he was assassinated by one of his own military advisors in 1979. Although Park Chung Hee made active use of the military and the state’s national security tools during the 1960s, it was not until he almost lost the presidential election to opposition candidate and movement leader Kim Dae Jung in 1971 that he enacted sweeping measures to formalize authoritarianism. Chang’s analysis of the characteristics and frequency of state repression tactics in Table 2.1 (p. 39) shows that of the 2,604 instances of mild, moderate, heavy and extreme repression, 1,928 instances (74.03 percent) reflected the use of heavy repression, including arrest, containment, trashing organizational offices, confiscating files, expulsion from school, wage cuts, factory closures, and legal prosecution.
Chapter Three provides extensive and compelling evidence from Chang’s protest and repression events dataset to support the book’s key argument about the dialectic relationship between state repression and social movement dynamism. Student opposition to the results of the 1971 presidential election and the possibility of election fraud was followed by the announcement of the October garrison decree, the military occupation of ten universities, the arrest of 1,889 student activists, the forced military conscription of 177 male university students, and a sweeping Declaration of the State of National Emergency by the end of the year (pp. 64, 66). Students reworked the organizational basis of their movement between 1973 and 1974. However, the coordination of nationwide anti-government protest on April 3, 1974, met immediate and decisive state repression. Park Chung Hee issued 12 new articles under Emergency Decree #4 that were intended to “permanently break the power of the student movement” (p. 71). Once again, student activists were systematically rounded up, brutally interrogated, indicted, and imprisoned, resulting in the precipitous decline of student-initiated protests for the remaining years of the decade.
Chapters Four and Five discuss the emergence of Christian activists, lawyers, and journalists as new democracy movement actors. Although Christian activists made up a much smaller protest group than university students, their religious identity in an explicitly anti-communist Christian community allowed them to avoid heavy and extreme forms of state repression. Their extensive organizational networks and strong global connections to religious and human rights groups also hindered the state’s ability to act without impunity. As a result, “Christians staged more protest events than any other group between 1975 and 1978, marking the passage of leadership from students to Christians” (p. 83). Chapter Five continues this line of analysis by showing how progressive journalists, particularly in connection with the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper, and human rights lawyers defending students and other democracy activists escalated their public opposition against Park Chung Hee’s regime in the context of escalating state repression.
Chapters Six and Seven shift the analysis to the changing character of movement frames, tactical repertoires, and movement alliances in the context of intensifying state repression. The entrance of new movement actors facilitated the rise of an overarching human rights discourse that equated authoritarian repression with human rights violations, particularly when well-known Christian pastors were arrested and jailed. Chang’s compilation of all known protest tactics in Table 6.1 (p. 148) shows a wide and varied range of protest tactics, reflecting the diversification of the movement’s tactical repertoire. A close analysis of intergroup alliances between different social movement groups shows how escalating state repression also coincided with more frequent cross-movement solidarity statements and the formation of umbrella coalitions representing the interest of multiple movement groups, a phenomenon that is still widespread in the contemporary movement landscape.
The impressive theoretical scope and sophisticated empirical analysis of Protest Dialectics should be required reading for all students of political sociology and social movements. Chang’s original interpretation of the dialectics between state repression and movement dynamics not only enhances understanding of Park Chung Hee’s controversial regime, but it also provides crucial insight into the causes and consequences of state repression on popular democracy, an issue that is becoming more urgent in many countries around the world today.