There are a number of studies of Korean industrialization that have come out of anglo-american scholarship that focus quite heavily on the role of the state in industrial policy, and often in a positive light. One of the downsides of this discourse has often been a neglect of the roles that political repression, labour demobilization, and social regimentation played in constructing growth regimes of capital accumulation. Many Korean scholars, however, have also had their own things to say about these debates, and for them it was much harder to separate meritocratic bureaucracy from the anti-democratic or socially repressive forms of power relations that accompanied rapid industrialization. The problem is that a lot of this literature has not been available in other languages, and only some of the recent debates have been translated.

The following are some links for those interested in examining how some of these lines of thought have played out. The first is short presentation by Paik Nak-Chung called How to Think about the Park Jung Hee era, Paik argues that any account of the pros or cons of that era has to take into account the voices of its victims. For a more systematic account of social regimentation and developmental regimes, Cho Hee Yeon’s Listian Warfare State formulation is also a good place to start, you can find it on his english paper’s page here, or in an re-worked format in the Journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Finally, more recently a group of scholars, including Sungkonghoe’s Han Hong Goo and Yoo Chul Gyue, have used the term ‘developmental dictatorship’ to understand the Park Jung Hee period, a term that is used to get at both the ‘shadows and light’ of that period. There is translation of an edited collection of this material by Lee Byeong-cheon that was recently put out on the America-based Homa and Sekey books. The edition, Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-Hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea, was originally put out in Korea on Changbi, one of the larger academic publishers here.

It’s been busy here recently. Tonight we had Chen Hsin-Hsing visiting from Taiwan. He gave a talk on current political crisis in Taiwan and the larger, formative context of Taiwanese political groupings that informs it. Chen is from the Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies at Shih-Hsin University in Taiwan, which is in some ways a sister program to the NGO studies program here at Sungkonghoe. You can read more about Chen’s Institute at their website.

Chen was here as part of the Asian Civil Society Education Forum conference that took place over the weekend. The forum focused on building stronger ties between civil society groups involved in critical educational issues. You can read more about ACEF here.