Syngman Rhee Quotes

Emotionally and politically, Syngman Rhee could not accept the armistice terms. They left his nation and people divided; they left a million South Koreans dead seemingly in vain. Americans who grew bitter at old Syngman Rhee during these days, when it seemed he might wreck the peace, should have been able to imagine what Abraham Lincoln would have felt, or done, had Britain and France imposed an armistice upon the United States in 1863, leaving it forcibly divided, perhaps forever.

The Korean Peninsula was kind of left over when the Second World War ended. Stalin and Truman each occupied a bit in brotherly agreement, and decided that the 38th parallel would separate north from south. This was then followed by negotiations lasting forever about how Korea should be able to govern itself, but since Stalin and Truman didn’t really have the same political views (not at all, in fact) it all ended up like in Germany. First, the United States established a South Korea, upon which the Soviet Union retaliated with a North Korea. And then the Americans and the Russians left the Koreans to get on with it. But it hadn’t worked out so well. Kim Il Sung in the north and Syngman Rhee in the south, each thought that he was best suited to govern the entire peninsula. And then they had started a war. But after three years, and perhaps four million dead, absolutely nothing had changed. The north was still the north, and the south was still the south. And the 38th parallel still kept them apart.

It was especially taboo to talk about the Korean War and who started it. In the official histories (and there was nothing but official history in North Korea), it was the South Korean Army that invaded, acting on orders from the Americans, not the North Korean Army storming across the 38th parallel. “The U.S. imperialists gave the Syngman Rhee puppet clique an order to unleash a Korean War,” goes the account in Rodong Sinmun. Anybody who remembered what really happened on June 25, 1950 (and which Korean could forget?), knew it was wise to keep one’s mouth shut.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

Those years, from 1945 to 1950, had been confusing, with Kim Il-sung, the Red Army major, in the North, and Syngman Rhee, the American protégé, in the South. Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious