Stipulated by the provisional “Organic Law of Village Committees” promulgated in 1987, village elections are an institutional practice by which, every three years, villagers elect or reelect members of the village committee – the governing body of their village. Both in form and in practice, village elections are an institution associated with a set of clearly specified rules, procedures, and expectations regarding both the election process and the functioning of the elected village committee. During the two decades between the 1990s and 2000s, village elections evolved through intensive interactions among multiple actors, involving state policies, local governments, and villagers. There have been a large number of studies on this topic (He 2007, Manion 2006, O’Brien and Li 2000, O’Brien and Han 2009, Perry and Goldman 2007, Shi 1999). The emergence of village elections in rural China presents a fascinating case for understanding how different institutions work and change in relation to one another, especially how over time state policies and the evolving role of local governments interact with villagers in the process of rural governance.

Previous chapters empirically established the fact that Korea’s development state had been notoriously hostile to labour unions while disciplining chaebols, by suppressing labour movements forcibly and punishing chaebol families who failed to comply to the state’s preferences. This chapter revisits that important topic in more depth, by focusing on the violent suppression of the labour movement from the 1970s to 2018. Some of the years covered in the chapter overlap with the initial phase of democratization and the legal recognition of labour unions. The chapter explains why such state violence was needed for economic growth, while we also analyze why it is related to economic inequality and wage structures in Korea in the 2000s. Furthermore, as we will explain, during both the democratization and post-democratization periods, state-sourced violence and repression of the labour movement and other niche markets shifted towards privately supplied violence specialists, which acted, and continue to act, implicitly, and at times explicitly as proxies for state power.

THE LABOUR FORCE IN THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE

The issue of labour has long attracted the attention of social scientists from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines and approaches. The case of labour issues in Korea is no exception and especially so regarding scholarship focused on explaining Korea’s rapid economic miracle. When Park Chung Hee assumed power following the 1961 coup d’état, as already explained throughout the preceding chapters, he did so under the pledge to instil economic growth and order. Moving away from the import-substitution approach that had been adopted, much to the detriment of the economy by the Rhee Syngman regime, Park first focused on the development and promotion of labour-intensive EOI, mostly from 1961–72 (Haggard & Moon 1993: 54). This move towards EOI was rewarded with remarkable growth until the end of the decade when the GDP began to decline, coupled with rising inflation and wages among other worrisome economic conditions. In conjunction with an economy in decline, and thus with Park’s reduced legitimacy, politically the regime was increasingly being challenged by opposition seeking to capitalize on the weak economic performance.

This chapter is concerned with explaining the basis and structure, in other words, the genesis, of what has frequently been coined “Korea Inc.”. Although the focus of our analysis is certainly on the postcolonial period, we would be remiss to not acknowledge the roughly 40-year period of near complete dominance of the peninsula by Japan. This discussion, even after more than 75 years after the end of Japanese colonialism, continues to be undeniably controversial, with the majority of those engaging the Korean miracle typically avoiding altogether this uncomfortable, potentially anti-nationalist narrative. This section, while brief, discusses some of the key arguments about this period, while acknowledging the methodological difficulty of robustly linking the colonial period to the economic take-off in the 1960s.

COLONIAL AND CULTURAL LEGACIES DEBATED

As noted earlier in this text, scholars of Korean history typically trace this country’s roots back to ancient Joseon (Gojoseon) (c. 2333–108 BCE). Despite the much earlier origins of what would become Korea, most scholars point to the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) as the key point in Korea’s modern emergence as a rationalized state. The Goryeo period was then replaced by the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), which governed the peninsula until it began to slowly erode as principally a result of corruption and inefficiency (see Cumings 1997). The Joseon dynasty’s descent coincided with Japan’s emergence as a major regional power, thus setting the stage for the colonial period in which Japan replaced Korean-domestic rule by fully annexing it in 1910 and then governing the entirety of the peninsula until its defeat at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

By the time Korea had been annexed, Japan itself was immersed in its own decades-long efforts against its potential colonization by foreign powers, which had in large part precipitated the end of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and advent of the Meiji era (1868–1912), in which its traditional government and economy was replaced by a more modern, Western-influenced one, with the goal and ultimate realization of rapid industrialization.