Kim Dae-jung
Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death twice, became president of South Korea, and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Born on an island off the south-west coast in 1924, he was educated during the Japanese occupation, ran a shipping business, and entered politics in the 1950s. He was elected to the National Assembly at his fourth attempt in 1961, days before a military coup dissolved it. He ran against Park Chung-hee in the 1971 presidential election and lost narrowly amid widespread irregularities. Weeks later a truck rammed his car, killing two people and leaving him with a permanent limp. In August 1973 Korean intelligence agents abducted him from a Tokyo hotel, took him aboard a boat, bound him with weights and prepared to throw him into the sea. American intervention is generally credited with stopping it. He was placed under house arrest and imprisoned repeatedly. After Park's assassination, the new military ruler Chun Doo-hwan had him sentenced to death in 1980 on a charge of instigating the Gwangju uprising, in which soldiers killed hundreds of civilians. International pressure, including from the incoming Reagan administration, commuted it to exile. He returned in 1985 and lost two further presidential elections, winning at the fourth attempt in December 1997, days after the country accepted a fifty-eight-billion-dollar IMF bailout. He pushed through severe financial restructuring, broke up chaebol holdings, and paid the loan back early. His Sunshine Policy of engagement with North Korea produced the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000 and the Nobel Prize; it was later criticised when payments to Pyongyang emerged. He died in 2009.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: South Korean
- Roles: head_of_state, statesman, dissident
