[Nodong-il Column] Move Beyond Park Chung Hee’s Shadow

Niccolò Machiavelli emphasizes that great rulers and leaders should not passively submit to fate, but should seize opportunities and overcome crises by demonstrating bold decisiveness and the ability to act. The qualities of great leaders, as seen through Machiavelli and others, are the foresight to grasp the challenges of their times, a sense of calling toward their country and its people, and the decisiveness and ability to act needed to fulfill that calling despite criticism and opposition. “Dogs pee on big trees.” This saying is used figuratively to mean that great people and ideas are bound to face envy and criticism. Throughout history, great figures who achieved great things have often become targets of criticism. Being subjected to criticism for a long time is itself evidence of a person’s influence.
In modern South Korean history, the figure who fits both descriptions—a great leader and a constant target of disparagement—is President Park Chung Hee. When President Park said he would use funds from the claims settlement with Japan to build what is now POSCO, opposition politicians and intellectuals fiercely opposed him. They argued that “pouring the price paid in our ancestors’ blood into a vast steel mill with little chance of success is a dangerous gamble.” The Gyeongbu Expressway, too, faced criticism as “a pleasure road for the wealthy.” President Park saw the projects through, firmly believing that the country needed a steel mill to build the backbone of its industries and an expressway to move goods.
The policy to promote heavy and chemical industries in the 1970s also faced fierce opposition. Experts, including those at the World Bank, warned that “for a country like South Korea, with neither capital nor technology, investing in heavy and chemical industries is reckless.” But the industrial foundations President Park built became a crucial stepping stone for South Korea’s rise to become a global economic powerhouse. The seeds of future growth planted at the time blossomed into today’s “K-industry,” including semiconductors, electronics, chemicals, automobiles, shipbuilding and defense. The Saemaul Undong developed beyond an effort to overcome rural poverty into a nationwide movement to reform public consciousness. Today, it is recognized as a globally influential model for poverty reduction and mental reform, one that the United Nations and developing countries use as a benchmark.
Of course, the erosion of democratic values, human rights abuses and sacrifices by workers during President Park’s rule are rightly subject to criticism. A proper assessment is possible only by looking at both the light and the shadow that coexist. But the relentless “demonization” of President Park himself goes beyond legitimate criticism of the “Park Chung Hee regime.” It includes claims with scant historical evidence that he was a pro-Japanese collaborator, suppressed independence fighters, was a communist and pioneered regionalism. The recently released film “Assassin(s)” is the 2026 version of the demonization of Park Chung Hee. The director’s statement that “I did not think President Park Chung Hee was behind it” is exposed as false by the film’s line: “What if someone could think their political interests mattered more than their wife’s life?”
The progressive camp’s attempts to demonize Park Chung Hee stem from the fact that the South Korean success story built under President Park threatens the ideological foundations of the camp. Ironically, this is proof that President Park was a mighty tree that no amount of filth could defile. Kim Shin-jo, a former North Korean agent sent to the South during the January 21 Incident, said in an interview in June 2010: “Looking back now, North Korea kept trying to kill only President Park Chung Hee. They thought it would be difficult to turn South Korea communist as long as Park was alive.” As his description of the Park Chung Hee regime as a “cruel dictator” suggests, Professor Paik Nak-chung is one of its most prominent critics. In a lecture in November 2004, he disparaged the slogan “Let’s all try to live well, too” as “the philosophy of a beggar.” (I believe the slogan was effective because it spoke directly to our people’s most earnest wish at the time, when they were mired in absolute poverty and defeatism: “making a living (escaping poverty).”)
Even Professor Paik concluded that “not every dictator achieves economic growth, and few dictators have achieved growth as dramatic as South Korea did under Park Chung Hee.” He proposed that “we should not only acknowledge the economic growth achieved during President Park’s tenure, but also study in depth the parts of his economic strategy that remain valid and explore how they might be reconciled with the values of democracy and reunification.” That is the right direction.
October 26, 1979. Forty-seven years have passed since that day, yet nostalgia for Park Chung Hee is said to persist. This may reflect public frustration at the lack of leaders with foresight, a sense of calling, decisiveness and the ability to act. It is regrettable that, nearly 50 years after his death, no leader in South Korea’s modern history has surpassed Park Chung Hee. It is time to move out from under the shadow of that towering tree. The so-called progressive camp must stop throwing filth at it. Conservatives, too, must overcome their dependence on nostalgia for Park Chung Hee. Our task is to create a greater leader—one who surpasses Park Chung Hee so completely that the very word “nostalgia” no longer comes to mind.
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