This is an edited version of the talk given by Dr Owen Miller of SOAS to TAS on 24 March 2025, on the history and recent developments in South Korea. A video of his talk and the discussion, questions and answers, is here.
In terms of this overview of what has been happening in South Korea recently, I am going to divide it into two with a brief history of South Korea and its politics in the 20th and 21st century; then I will talk about what has happened more recently.
I am a historian. I have spent time living in Korea and I know Koreans who are activists and on the left and socialists and so on. I have not been living in South Korea recently, so I am not on the ground. So, my view is from a distance.
I would start the story from the late 19th century when Korea at this time before the division of the country became a point of conflict between imperialist powers. It had been an independent kingdom for many centuries but in the late 19th century it was very much weakened and was being fought over by Japan, China to some extent, and Russia, but the main fight in the end was between Russia and Japan for control of the Korean Peninsula. As a result of the Russia-Japanese war in 1904-05 (which was the main approximate cause of the first Russian Revolution) Japan basically gained the Korean Peninsula and made it into a formal colony in 1910. It was under colonial rule for 35 years until Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.
The key thing I want to get across is how South and North Korea were set up in 1945 because that is still particularly important for understanding the politics of the two countries. In August 1945 Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule but immediately reoccupied by the two emergent superpowers: the Soviet Union occupying the North and the USA occupying the South. This was an agreement made between the two sides. It was the Americans that suggested the partition just prior to Japan’s surrender to Stalin and he accepted it. Korea was never supposed to be permanently under partition but, of course, the Cold War kicked off in the ensuing years of 1946-47 and thus partition very rapidly became a permanent division of the country. This was obviously much against the wishes and expectations of all Koreans who had absolutely nothing to do with the partition whatsoever. It was entirely imposed upon them by the USA and, to some extent, the Soviets.
In this period, you had an emerging doctrine from the US side of anti-communism, an ideology that spread into South Korea and the emergence of pro-US leader Syngman Rhee. He was basically the first dictator of South Korea. North and South Korea were founded in 1948 as separate countries and Syngman Rhee led a brutal dictatorship through the Korean War (which broke out in 1950) up until 1960.
In 1960 South Korea had its first revolution in which the existing regime was overthrown. It was not substantially a social revolution but I think nonetheless it is right to call it a revolution. Syngman Rhee’s hated dictatorship was overthrown and replaced with a new constitutional government. However, that was not to last very long because in 1961 there was a military coup where General Park Chung-hee took over and ruled until 1979 before he was assassinated in what you might call a palace coup really by his intelligence chief. In the 1960s and 1970s there was what is known as the ‘Korean miracle’, a very rapid development on the basis of an authoritarian state.
After 1979, Chun Doo-hwan took over after another coup and the military dictatorship continued until1987 but what’s important here is that in May 1980 there was a very major pro-democracy uprising in a South Korean city called Gwangju that became instantly radicalised after being attacked by special forces troops paratroopers who killed lots of people. As a result, the whole town rose up against the state, took over the town and forced the military out for about 10 days. The uprising was defeated in the end but during the 1980s the democracy movement in South Korea really took off and this eventually led to a mass uprising centred in the capital Seoul in 1987. This was the second big political revolution of South Korea’s history, which brought back direct presidential elections.
This may be obvious to say but when the formal democratic institutions were reinstated that does not mean that the task of installing liberal democracy was over because all the forces and interests that were there under the previous dictatorship were still there, so since 1987 it’s been a continuing struggle. There has been a civil society and quite liberal bourgeois forces but also more radical forces have been fighting to preserve and extend those democratic gains. But on the other side you have had forces linked to the old authoritarian regimes and big capital and so on that want to roll back a lot of those democratic gains. What has happened most recently with Yoon Suk Yeol, the current president who is in the process of being impeached, is part of this push and pull, this historical back and forth. But it is still quite unprecedented for there to be such a push back against the democratic gains made since 1987.
In the early 1990s there was the burgeoning of a really mass workers’ movement with the Democratic Union, which effectively changed the pay and working conditions of Korean workers. This shifted South Korea to a consumption economy. You also had South Korea going with the global shift towards neoliberalism and globalisation. Then in 1997 you had the Asian financial crisis, which really hit South Korea hard. In the 21st century there has been quite a big shift in the sense of a move from a developmental state with full employment to being a sort of ultra-neoliberal ultra-competitive society with low growth. South Korea has also become a ‘world leader’ in declining birth rates.
In terms of politics, I think you have probably seen the same thing happening in quite a lot of countries, which is a sort of decomposition of classic liberal bourgeois politics towards the demagogic characters of the far-right we are seeing. An early example of that was the election in 2013 of Park Geun-hye, the first female president of South Korea. But at the same time, she was also the daughter of the dictator Park Chung-hee, so it represented a nostalgic turn back towards the former authoritarian rulers of the past. She was impeached in 2016-17 after massive street protests, so, once again, people came onto the streets to defend democracy. This is often referred to as the Candlelight Revolution because people carried candles at demonstrations and they became a symbol of the movement against Park Chung-hee’s rule. I personally have a bit of a problem with calling it a revolution because compared to previous cases in South Korean history, I do not see this a massive change in South Korean politics. There was no attempt after to make any constitutional changes so essentially you just return back to this kind of alternating system, which is to some extent like British politics where you have that movement between a right-wing conservative bourgeois party and a centre-right or centre-left (but as with the US there is no mainstream party that has any roots or basis in labour).
In terms of what has been happening most recently, Yoon Suk Yeol was elected very narrowly in 2022. He is a former prosecutor and there is a lot of overlap in South Korean politics with the prosecution. Yoon was pretty unpopular from an early stage. The South Korean economy has been struggling and he has not had any solutions. There was also a terrible disaster around a Seoul Halloween crowd crush in the autumn of 2022 and the way the government dealt with that made him even more unpopular. Yoon’s election itself was quite disturbing because it took on certain kinds of quite far-right talking points. With his misogynism he built a popularity among right-leaning young men and he leant into anti-Chinese feeling in South Korea. In April last year there were the legislative elections for the National Assembly. South Korea has a system a bit like the US: you have a presidential election and then a couple of years later you have a legislative election. It tends to create this situation where you can often have a president and a National Assembly that are completely at loggerheads. It also quite often creates a scenario where the president becomes a lame duck for their last years in power and that is exactly what has happened with Yoon. He was decisively defeated by the Democratic Party in the National Assembly election last year and that is really the beginning of his coup plot. He just could not contemplate the fact that he was going to be a lame duck and he began to put in place plans to overturn the legislature in what was a classic type of self-coup or administrative coup.
However, when it happened in December 2024 it was a really big surprise for people in Korea and I had no inkling that something like this was going to happen, nearly 40 years after the transition to democracy. Having said that, there were a small number of opposition law makers who had been predicting it and they were proved to be right. Yoon made a televised address and said that he was declaring martial law to deal with what he is calling anti-state forces or pro-North Korean forces. Right-wing governments in South Korea always use ‘red scare’ tactics; it is part of their playbook. He said he was doing it to save the country and he then sent in special forces troops to various locations such as the National Assembly and the electoral commission. Yoon seems quite obsessed with right-wing conspiracies and right-wing YouTubers, and lots of them had been talking about the idea that the National Assembly elections had been interfered with.
There are a number of reasons it went wrong but what happened was that he sent police first of all to seal off the National Assembly; but the police did not do a good job and probably felt uncomfortable about it. When they heard of this coup attempt, lawmakers streamed back to the National Assembly, even climbing over the fences and so on to get in. When the special forces troops did finally arrive they were very hesitant about going in and following the president’s orders, which were to drag out, tie up and arrest all the opposition lawmakers. The National Assembly was able to convene with a quorate number and it was able to vote down the martial law, which is its prerogative to do. Eventually, in the early hours, Yoon gave in and said that he would withdraw the martial law. The coup was defeated and quite a lot of the military were not really prepared to go through with it. It is a long time since South Korea was a military dictatorship and I guess the whole role of the military and Korean society is quite different now. Yoon had assumed that they would just follow his orders but it seems as though the lower officers and the ordinary soldiers on the ground were not really willing. The soldiers were faced with a situation of ordinary citizens and lawmakers physically confronting them. Even though they were heavily armed this really paralysed the soldiers I think. Yoon underestimated the extent to which ordinary people were going to come out onto the streets to defend democracy.
Yoon’s coup attempt was not happening in a vacuum. It’s not even like the old days of South Korean authoritarian politics because he does have a following; people who are coming out onto the streets in at least thousands to support him. This is nowhere near as big as pro-democracy supporters but still worryingly big. One of the main constituencies supporting the far right and Yoon is a retired generation of people over 65. They are often evangelical Christians, very socially conservative and anti-LGBT. Many get their news from far-right YouTubers that tend to broadcast anti-Chinese and North Korean conspiracies. Another one of Yoon’s constituencies is far-right young men who feel deeply dissatisfied with South Korean society with its ultra-competitive winner-and-loser culture. South Korea has had a pretty rapid transition from being a very traditionalist Confucian patriarchal society to neoliberal individualism. It is still absolutely a patriarchal society but even just the perceived loss of some privileges seems to be enough to motivate these men. The evangelical churches, closely linked to right-wing Protestantism in the US, are a huge organising force that gets lots of people out onto the streets. The far right also has an intellectual base in South Korea around something called the New Right movement.
The main opposition party in South Korea is not a left-wing party but the Democratic Party that descended from the opposition of the dictatorship days. It does not have any working-class base, being much more like the US Democrats. There have been long-running attempts to form a social democratic or labour party in South Korea. The most successful incarnation of that was probably about 20 years ago with the Korean Democratic Labour Party, which ultimately broke up into various parts. More recently, the main left electoral party in in the National Assembly is the Justice Party but it has recently been in decline. Its politics are perhaps a little bit to the left of the UK Labour Party. There is also still quite a vibrant pro-democracy civil society in South Korea, a non-party social movement left. Organisations such as the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy can get masses of people out onto the streets and it helps to build these huge pro-democracy rallies.
Then there is the radical left, which is just as small and divided as in the UK. The big difference in South Korea is that there is a long-running rift between the more pro-North Korean left and the non-North Korean left. The British SWP has a sister organisation in South Korea that is currently called Workers Solidarity but it has been involved in a lot of controversies over recent years and has become a bit of a pariah on the left (which maybe sounds familiar). In terms of organised labour, the unions can still be quite radical in their approach and they are not shy of getting involved in politics. They can call general strikes and so but their actual ability to impact national politics is relatively limited because union density is pretty low in South Korea.
One of the biggest things of the last 20 years in South Korea has been a really significant decline in the student movement, which was the backbone of the left in South Korea. But that student politics has just dissipated and it means although you can have these big pro-democracy mass movements and people coming onto the streets there isn’t any organisational backbone. It tends to blow up into a big thing and then, as it happened in in 2017, it disappears completely and you then have another centrist government, which is probably what will happen next. This might be moderately better in certain ways but then will just lead to another right-wing government in a few years.
You can read a fuller, extended version of this talk also on the RS21 website.
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