Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee took South Korea in a coup in 1961 and built the economy that made it rich. He was born in 1917 in a poor village under Japanese rule, trained as a schoolteacher, and then entered the Japanese-run military academy in Manchukuo under a Japanese name, which is the part of his record his opponents never let go of. He was sentenced to death in 1948 for organising communist cells in the South Korean army and was reprieved after naming his associates. The coup of May 1961 followed a year of instability after student protests brought down Syngman Rhee, and put some 3,500 troops into Seoul before dawn. What he did with power is the most successful state-led industrialisation of the century. Five-year plans directed subsidised credit through nationalised banks to firms that met export targets and cut it off from those that did not, tariffs protected the domestic market, and the chaebol conglomerates were built on that arrangement — Hyundai, Samsung, Daewoo. Normalisation with Japan in 1965 brought capital against furious protests, and troops sent to Vietnam brought contracts. Income per head rose roughly twentyfold in a generation, and the countryside was electrified. The politics hardened as the economy grew. The Yushin constitution of 1972 made him president indefinitely, the intelligence agency kidnapped an opposition leader from a Tokyo hotel, and dissidents were tortured. He was shot at a private dinner in October 1979 by the head of that agency. The verdict on him divides almost exactly along generational lines in Korea, and both sides are describing the same record. His daughter Park Geun-hye was elected president in 2012 and impeached and imprisoned in 2017, which is a fair indication of how unsettled the argument remains.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: South Korean
- Roles: general, dictator, head_of_state
