The Korean peninsula, a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, was effectively partitioned into Soviet and American zones of control at the end of the Second World War. Elections in the South in 1948, followed by the Korean War (1950–53), solidified this division. About a year after the 1960 April Revolution (or Movement) ended the presidency of the unpopular Syngman Rhee, a bloodless coup d'etat by Park Chung Hee in May 1961 established a military government in South Korea, which ruled until the 1963 elections put Park into the presidency. After a surprisingly close third-term re-election in 1971, Park declared martial law and assumed dictatorial power through the Yushin Constitution (유신) in autumn 1972. In October 1979, he was assassinated by the director of the KCIA, and power passed to General Chun Doo Hwan. Chun held the presidency until 1987, when power transferred to former General Roh Tae Woo, who kept his pre-election promise to democratize the country.

This chapter examines how Presidents Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan created and managed their coercive apparatus. Comparing two South Korean cases provides an opportunity to assess how two different autocrats’ threat perceptions shaped their coercive institutional choices for ruling the same country, and helps to examine the role of alternative explanations. If either external influence or path dependence was the best explanation for coercive institutional design, then we should observe very little difference between the coercive institutions of Park and Chun. Instead, the variation in their coercive institutional designs is striking. Consistent with previous chapters, this variation is best explained by the different threat perceptions of the two leaders.

The second section of this chapter illustrates that, unlike Taiwan, which organized itself to deal with popular unrest, or the Philippines, which was oriented toward elite threats, South Korea was first and foremost organized to deal with the external threat coming from North Korea. That threat prompted an unusually high degree of external (American) involvement in South Korea's coercive apparatus, including the retention of U.S. command authority over the Republic of Korea (ROK) military even under armistice conditions. The presence of an external threat and unusually high external influence limited the extent to which either autocrat was able to engage in coup-proofing fragmentation within the military, and imposed a national service requirement in which every South Korean male served in the military.

As in Taiwan, Marcos’ reforms of the coercive apparatus had a profound effect on the patterns of state violence that the Philippines experienced. As Chapter 4 documented, Marcos restructured the Philippines’ coercive institutions in order to protect himself from elite threats, especially as he moved toward the declaration of martial law in 1972. In order to defend against a coup, he fragmented his coercive apparatus and made it socially exclusive along educational, ethnic, and familial lines. These decisions resulted in increased state violence against the population. The fragmented, internally competitive relationship that Marcos fostered among the coercive agencies, combined with the Philippines’ bounty and rewards system, created clear material incentives to escalate violence, and hampered the intelligence-sharing and coordinative capacity of the internal security apparatus. Exclusivity hampered the collection of intelligence on popular threats, and lowered social incentives for coercive agents to refrain from violence against the out-groups who composed the majority of the Philippine population. By weakening the Philippines’ intelligence capacity and skewing incentives toward violence rather than restraint, both fragmentation and social exclusivity contributed to the escalation of violence against civilians over the course of the Marcos dictatorship.

The first section of this chapter describes the trend of rising state violence in the Philippines during Marcos’ autocratic rule. The second section outlines the pathways by which coercive institutional design affected violence in the Philippines; it argues, successively, that exclusivity hampered intelligence in ways that increased violence, that exclusivity warped incentives in ways that increased violence, that fragmentation hampered intelligence in ways that increased violence, and that fragmentation warped incentives in ways that produced higher levels of violence. The penultimate section of the chapter reviews alternative explanations for the rise in state violence in the Philippines and shows that coercive institutional design is a more powerful explanation for the patterns of violence observed than plausible alternatives like international influence, state capacity, or rising popular threat.

EXPLAINING THE RISE IN STATE VIOLENCE

State violence in the Philippines rose steadily from the time Marcos declared martial law until he was deposed in February 1986. Figures 7.1 and 7.2 show the trend of increasing state violence in the Philippines over the period from 1975 or 1977 (the earliest years for which these data are available) until 1986, as measured by the number of politically motivated arrests, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings by the security forces.

The use of violence by authoritarian regimes against their people has long been central to the trajectories of world politics and of human history. Historically, authoritarianism rather than democracy has been the norm, and much of citizen interaction with the state has been centered on trying to avoid abuse at the hands of those in power. Today, too, autocracies comprise a significant fraction of the world's countries. These regimes govern almost 60 percent of the world's population, dominate geopolitically critical regions of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and lead several of the world's great powers. From the gulags of Stalinist Russia to the failed protests in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989 to the post-Arab Spring crackdowns in Egypt and Syria, repression plays a central role in our conception of dictatorship; history and literature have provided us with towering accounts of the human effects of institutionalized terror.

The stakes of that repressive activity are high, for both regimes and their citizens. When militaries agree to repress, citizens are often killed in large numbers in public spaces, with reverberations around the globe; when coercive agents balk at participating in government crackdowns, their intransigence can topple dictators and pave the way for transitions to democracy (or to another autocracy). Where state coercion is unopposed by citizens, some of the world's worst human rights abuses can come to pass, as has happened in North Korea; but where it is resisted, as has happened in Syria, the struggle can metastasize into insurgency or civil war, and can even trigger external intervention leading to interstate conflict.

The abuses committed by states against their citizens, however, are a relatively overlooked source of political violence in the world. Conceptualizing authoritarian regimes as uniformly dependent on coercion ignores a critical element of variation in their governance: the different ways in which they use violence and repression to maintain power. In some places and at some times, autocratic regimes rely on low-intensity forms of repression such as surveillance and intimidation, while at other times they turn to high-intensity violence such as mass killing. Eighteen people per year died under Brazil's military junta, while the annual death rate in Argentina under military rule was a staggering 1,280.

Bao Chengling. Head cook of the public dining hall in the commune period and the dictatorial, corrupt, and immoral principal of the Da Fo school in the Mao era and early reform period. Target of struggle led by Bao Sheping and the Da Fo teachers.

Bao Chuanxi. Poor and timid farmer. Bullied by Bao Wenxing. Forced to plead for right to use electricity and water his crops.

Bao Haizhen. Arbitrary Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader in Da Fo. Received more than his share of land in the 1982 land division. Target of arson.

Bao Hongwen. Da Fo farmer. Feared and disliked Bao Yinbao and his friends. Saw Bao Yinbao-led mafia as criminal and in league with corrupt CCP officials.

Bao Junling. Da Fo farmer who mounted a physical challenge to “electricity tiger” Bao Wenxing in the reform period, stirring memories of resistance to party leaders and their brutal cronies in the Great Leap era. Champion of more timid farmers.

Bao Junwei. Da Fo farmer and migrant worker. Said all Chinese officials are corrupt, and gave up on CCP-guided democracy.

Bao Nianxi. Eight years old at the start of the Great Leap Forward. Dropped out of school in 1960 because of hunger. Survived the great famine by secretly eating raw grain, sweet potato, and pumpkin crops in the collective fields. Thirty-two year-old farmer in 1983. Victim of Strike Hard campaign. Arrested and treated as a petty criminal for taking off government-monopolized chemical fertilizer from state trucks.

Bao Ruimin. Suffered a ten-year prison ordeal because of yanda, missing his chance to mentor his young sons. Petition writer for fellow prisoners falsely accused and arrested in the throes of the Strike Hard campaign. Unpaid Da Fo migrant worker who joined with other migrant workers to wage sit-ins at homes of unscrupulous subcontractors in villages and towns in between Beijing and Da Fo. Leader of New Year's Eve dumpling rebellion.

Bao Sheping. Teacher and principal of Da Fo school in the reform era. Leader of protest against corrupt Mao-era principal and of movement to democratize the school administration. Driven by Confucian ethics imparted by his father to improve the school and serve the students.

In Da Fo, as in countless other Chinese villages, the Maoist Leap had ratcheted up pressure on tillers to give up more of their grain harvests to the state, resulting in a “procurement famine” of unprecedented magnitude. A pervasive memory of this state plunder and its attendant starvation persisted over the next four decades. This memory influenced popular thinking about political authority, making it difficult for post-Mao politicians to overcome the deep crisis of legitimacy they inherited. In essence, the failure of the Maoist procurement system was so profound that the Communist Party lost the authority to effectively collect taxes in much of the countryside.

The Central government relied on the mechanism of the household responsibility system (baochan daohu) to resolve this legitimacy crisis. Under this system, each farm household was to enter into a contract that gave its members the right to manage their own agricultural production. The household, in turn, was responsible for meeting a state grain quota, after which it was allowed to use the surplus however it chose. In Da Fo and much of Henan province, the obligation to pay a tax of 20 jin (0.50 kilograms) per mu (hectare) – the equivalent of a fixed land tax – was retained alongside the baochan daohu quota. Although designed to re-create Central government legitimacy by returning a degree of freedom to tillers at the same time that it gave them an incentive to increase harvest yields, the household responsibility system was highly contested in Dongle county villages.

Da Fo's farmers refused to accept the system. They harbored two fears, both of which were shaped by memories of suffering in the Great Leap famine. To begin with, they saw the baochan daohu system as a watered-down version of procurement, which had not ended with the dismantling of the communes but continued to play a role in the development of the post-Mao tax burden. The baochan daohu system required tillers to meet a quota set by the party-state before they could deploy whatever was left for their own needs. But what if the grain harvest was poor and the required quota cut into the portion of the harvest needed for basic consumption?

With democratic elections scuttled, villagers had to find ways to make higher-ups aware of their grievances. In the mid-1990s, Da Fo's people joined a growing chorus of protesters who engaged in petitioning county, provincial, and national ruling groups to voice their claims. In time, petitioning evolved into a protest movement that occupied center stage in the contentious resistance of rural people. In rural Henan province and Da Fo village, people from all walks of life turned to this form of protest, an important subset of them consisting of survivors of the Great Leap famine.

The petitioning system in China had deep historical and cultural roots. Partly through struggle and partly though dynastic practice, rural people had established their right to petition the powerful. Confucian writings portrayed the common people imploring the emperor for redress of grievances by submitting petitions, sometimes hovering outside the imperial palace with their letters and memorials. As one reform-era Chinese lawyer who had experience in helping petitioners put it, the common people did not always have a sophisticated understanding of the law, but they knew they could petition, and they subscribed to the Confucian notion that appealing to higher-ups in a deferential manner would result in fair treatment.

In the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area, this ageless petitioning system lasted into the Republican period. Between 1931 and 1935, for example, minor gentry, small landholders, schoolteachers, and semi-peasant salt makers in scores of villages successfully petitioned the Dongle county magistrate over the illegal, violent intrusions of the Central government's salt-tax police into the household-centered economy of earth-salt producers. Da Fo's semi-farmers made an important contribution to thwarting the expansion of Kuomintang Central government fiscal controls. Apparently, the petitioning system, in combination with popular collective action from below, worked rather well into the middle years of the Republic of China, when the Japanese invasion destabilized the Nationalist government and introduced the savagery and chaos that gave the Mao-led Communist Party its chance to seize power through agrarian-based insurgency.

The petition system was revived in the reform era. Supposedly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders in Beijing wanted to use it to provide rural people with the institutional means to remonstrate against the wrongdoings of local government officials and, simultaneously, to generate accurate, ground-level information about popular grievances in the countryside.

Facing a continuing legitimacy crisis in the deep countryside, on November 24, 1987, the Deng Xiaoping–led Central government passed the provisional Organic Law on Village Committees, which mandated the formation of new bodies of local government through democratic procedures in China's 900,000-plus villages. Subsequently, the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) set out to promote the democratic elections of Village Committees, the purpose of which was to liberate villagers from the coercive rule of Mao-era vigilantism and, according to Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, to “rejuvenate village leadership by cleaning out incompetent, corrupt, and high-handed cadres, all for the purpose of consolidating the current regime.”

Working with local government leaders and assisted by both the Carter Center and the Ford Foundation, the MCA attempted to promote several rounds of free and fair village elections in rural China. Between 1988 and 1998, its cadres sought to protect the young experiment in electoral democracy by providing secret voting facilities and legal oversight over violations of electoral procedures. Their hopes buoyed by Beijing's professed support for Village Committees, Western observers concluded that China's rural people had become weighty actors in the local electoral process, benefiting from a reform that was making village leaders more responsive to a popular electorate. Some even claimed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had planted the institutional seeds of local freedom.

The problem with this view was that it was a view from above. It was not rooted in an understanding of how local Communist Party leaders shaped the democratic experiment as it unfolded day by day, election by election on the ground. It presumed that popular support for elections was nurtured primarily by reformers in Beijing and that local party branch leaders were capable of supporting the fundamental principles and procedures underlying electoral democracy. Neither of these assumptions turned out to be true in Da Fo village. Because Da Fo experimented with electoral democracy between 1988 and 1998, we can draw on its history to generate a worm's-eye view of why elections mattered to villagers, of how contentious the electoral process was, and of the very limited extent to which local party leaders were inclined to endorse core democratic ideas and procedures.

When Mao died in September 1976, China's rural people were still suffering from the impact of his party's great famine. In much of the countryside per capita total daily consumption was below the poverty line, and material deprivation was shocking. In some villages of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan border area, where I interviewed in the following decade, dollar-poverty measures actually rivaled those of poverty-stricken Malawi, Niger, and Sierra Leone. Mao-era disasters, especially the Great Leap famine, had set rural China's economy back to the level of development that obtained in 1928. As Elizabeth Gooch has demonstrated, even with the post-1978 economic improvement, the imprint of the great famine's intensity seriously hindered the recovery of social well-being. With Mao gone, Beijing-centered reformers started to move rural China out of this predicament, or so it seemed.

Convened during late December 1978 in Beijing, the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) solidified the triumph of Deng Xiaoping and his reform agenda, which called for market-driven economic growth and political stability aimed at setting China on a pragmatic course of modern national development. When it came to restructuring the rural economy, this new course would be free of damaging party-state interventions in the habitual survival routines of the rural poor – or so it seemed. Assuming this was the case, Harry Harding proclaimed that the Central government was engineering a “Second Revolution” under Deng. And indeed, the post-Mao center's policy-making process raised the hopes of rural dwellers: the reformers apparently intended to enable farm people to abandon monocropping of grain for a diversified pattern of agriculture, to sell their crops to the state at higher prices, to garner off-farm income through petty trade in reinvigorated local markets, and to break away from the bondage of the collective by pursuing jobs in rural township-based factories and in urban-centered construction work.

Da Fo's farmers by and large welcomed this liberation from the Maoist collective. After all, as I demonstrated in Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China, in the two decades following Mao's Great Leap famine, many of them had waged day-by-day, year-by-year struggles to escape state control of their attempts to scratch out a living.

When Deng Xiaoping and his allies launched the one-child birth planning policy between 1980 and 1983, a step Tyrene White calls “the most extensive, aggressive, and effective attempt ever made to subject child-bearing to direct state control and regulation,” it was received in the countryside with suspicion and resistance by both farmers and some of the Communist Party cadres whose mission it was to implement it. Western scholarship on the policy tends to focus on the process whereby the central party-state overcame this resistance, thereby imposing its policy, or on popular acceptance of a modified version of its virtuous – though violent – demographic scheme. While such approaches certainly help explain some of the pedestrian forms of popular resistance to state attempts to manage child bearing, they slight a fundamental reason for the swift formation of popular resistance to the birth-planning campaign: this campaign threatened to overstep the boundaries of even the one-child policy and to rely on repressive methods that raised the specter of the Great Leap past, in which the perpetrators of Mao's famine had imposed a de facto no-child policy in Chinese villages, preventing villagers from bearing children. Behind the hostility to the one-child limit, in other words, was the memory of the Great Leap's harm, which had all but destroyed the credibility of official interference in family procreation.

This chapter investigates the evolution of resistance to the implementation of the center's birth-control policies in Da Fo village over the course of the 1980s and particularly the 1990s. The evidence from Da Fo suggests that Chinese villagers had kept alive memories of the party-state as the enemy of motherhood and child bearing. To many villagers, the regimentation of child bearing in the 1990s suggested a transposition of the Maoist context of the Great Leap to that of reform. What they actually were resisting was not the one-child policy per se but rather the attempt of a powerful central party-state to once again secure control over the entire process of procreation. Furthermore, the memory of the Great Leap famine and villagers’ delayed retaliation against Leap-era party leaders affected the willingness of Da Fo's leaders to press the birth-planning policies of Liangmen township, ultimately resulting in the defeat of the most stringent interpretations of the center's policies and their replacement by a conciliatory “bottom-line” local policy that accommodated tillers’ unwillingness to accept a one-child limit on their reproduction.