Name: Park Chung Hee
Title:
Birth: September 30, 1917 Korea
Death: October 26, 1979
Region:korea
Religion / Political: Park’s political ideology was mixed. After the end of World War II he participated in a communist cell organized within the South Korean army and was sentenced to death but gained a reprieve as a result of his cooperation with the authorities.
Main interests: He won admission to a two-year training program in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, and graduated at the top of his class. Park was then selected for another two years of training at the Tokyo Military Academy. Park’s experience with the Japanese government’s program of economic development in Manchukuo strongly affected his thinking when he ruled South Korea. Park adopted the Japanese name Okamoto Minoru and was in many respect essentially Japanese.
Notable ideas: One of the first things Park did after assuming power was to persecute South Korean business leaders for profiting from the corruption in the South Korean government. Twenty four of the leading businessmen were arrested. The founder of Samsung, Lee Byung Chull, escaped this treatment only because he was out of the country at the time. The Park regime morality campaign was said to be probably less about corruption than asserting the traditional Confucian social system in which “merchants” had to recognize their status at the bottom of the social hierarchy. There was a campaign against foreign products such as cigarets and foreign cultural influences such as dancing.
Works: In May of 1960, Park and a group of other officers of the South Korean army took control of the government. There was strong suspicions that Park was a crypto-communist and the media sometimes referred to him as “Parkov,” a Russianized version of his name. Although Park did not have affiliations with the communist movement, his thinking and ideological orientation was decidedly Stalinist, however Park’s program for the economic development was modeled more on Meiji-era Japan than the Soviet Union.
