Braun 38

The power of symbolic place in the Kwangju Uprising
Politics, cognition, and placemaking in the May 18 Revolution
By Andrew Braun
Abstract: The story of The Kwangju Uprising is a story intimately involved with the general idea of place—though less physical space than abstract, symbolic space. In the 10-day revolutionthere are three visible stages of cognition: Old Kwangju, Free Kwangju, and New Kwangju, each of which represents a different kind of vision by the community that formed from individuals who set the values of human dignity and democracy above their own personal safety. The lasting impact of The Kwangju Uprising demonstrates vividly the power of symbols in revolutions, and reminds us that minds and hearts are often stronger carriers of place than physical spaces.


Prelude

“We should not be afraid, we too should be ready to die for the ideal of political freedom.” A woman who has just lost her only son speaks to a crowd of 15-20,000 citizens in the city of Kwangju, a moderately-sized city in the southwest part of South Korea. “I am proud,” she says, “of the citizens of Kwangju.”[1] It is Friday, May 23, 1980; Kwangju has lost many sons and daughters to the bullets and bayonets of government troops in the past several days, and death looms close for more. Since the student protests that escalated into battles with brutal government forces on May 18 a great deal has happened. Blood is in the streets and in the eyes of the people who walk down Kumnam Avenue towards Province Hall, the geographic and symbolic heart of the city.[2] Many are dressed in bruises, powder burns, and torn clothing, but despite the sorrow each feels at the death of many residents of the city over the past five days, there is a light that burns through the clouds of smoke and exhaustion and makes its way towards the center of a crowd that is gathering around the speakers in the center of Democracy Square. Even those who have not gathered in the square today—the first full day of freedom from government domination in Kwangju—know what is at stake: their ability to create a new city, to create a new country, to create and sustain an alternative vision of the place they inhabit. “There is only one democracy! A free democracy!” cries one citizen.[3] Declares an activist in a meeting on May 24: “If we can resist another week, the uprising will spread beyond Cholla Province.”[4] This is the story of a place called Kwangju: a scream for freedom that echoed throughout South Korea for decades.

Argument

May 18 was a struggle for democracy. However, democracy for the citizens of Kwangju was dependent on more than just their ability to free their own city and to obtain a measure of self-determination. It depended upon their capacity to first create a free place and then craft it to fit their ideals; an act, in other words, of placemaking. Two major arenas of placemaking were vital to the movement: the physical city of Kwangju, encompassing at first the physical conflict and finally the political organization of the free city and the abstract realm of the minds and hearts of the people, in which an alternative vision of place was developed and realized. A politically conscious populace situated in a relatively traditional—but nonetheless urban—community was able to embrace both the dirty physical work of freeing their old city and the idealistic, rhetoric-laden work of creating a new one. Over the course of several days, the citizenry of Kwangju gradually joined, through a hybrid process of individual contemplation and catalytic encounters into a movement that coalesced into a unified vision of a liberated, transformed Kwangju, which turned, over the course of the next eighteen years, into one of the primary symbolic visions of Korea’s democratization movement. I will illustrate the process of place-creation via an examination of the intellectual and political movements in and around the Kwangju Uprising as revealed by eyewitness accounts and commentary by participants and scholars. This examination will take a narrative form, in which I will tell the story of Kwangju in five stages through the lens of cognitive/intellectual and physical acts of place-creation, which will serve to demonstrate that a unique place was created in Kwangju via the process of revolution, and which I will use to show, in a larger sense, that revolution and protest are agents of place-creation, in a symbiotic relationship with the intellectual, social, political and physical places that they must inhabit. This is the story of Kwangju, but it is also the story of how revolutions progress through many dimensions of space.


I: The Elements of a Storm

Revolutions do not occur in a vacuum; a myriad of forces must converge before critical mass appears. Perhaps most apparent in the Kwangju uprising are the external, structural pressures, though the ideology driving the democratic impulses of the people is perhaps as important. Nonetheless, the stage must be set before the players may appear; thus, an analysis of the structural forces involved is in order before we delve into ideology, which the rest of this essay will make clear. In order to make quick work of examining the structural forces we shall look at several categories: international affairs and domestic affairs on the national level; political and economic/social disenfranchisement on the Kwangju level, and the consciousness that this evoked in the population of Kwangju.

In 1980, South Korea was under a constant level of international and domestic stress. Internationally, Russian-backed North Korea was always in the back of everyone’s mind, and the United States, in classic Cold War fashion, saw it as their essential duty to ensure that South Korea was never at a potentially dangerous disadvantage. As we shall see, the American conscience in regards to democratic and humanitarian values generally suffered in this relationship. The tyranny of Japanese colonial rule in the latter half of the 20th century and the Korean War of the 1950s had left South Korea in the midst of a political landscape where their closest ally, the U.S, was a handy 5,000 miles away. A series of U.S-backed dictators maintained a strong (read, anti-communist) rule with policies that were heavy on the iron fist and light on the silk glove.[5] [6] The international situation was acutely felt in the domestic sphere: criticism of the incumbent regimes was generally frowned upon, McCarthy-like communist hunters were a constant presence, and Seoul-centric politics facilitated the development of a dictatorship predicated on industry and economic growth. In 1973 a New York Times reporter visiting Seoul commented that the popular consensus was that it was best “not to talk about anything at all to anybody.”[7] The U.S was generally in support of the government’s policies; documents discovered after the fact confirmed that the U.S was in support of the Korean government’s violent response to the situation in Kwangju: “the cables show,” says Journalist Tim Shorrock, “that the Carter administration never seriously considered a nonmilitary solution to the rebellion, which it feared was about to turn into a general uprising against military rule.”[8] The economic success that accompanied these dictators usually kept the war-weary Korean people quiet; soft power was generally sufficient. However, the growing intolerance of the government for free speech and democratic aspirations made new generations of Koreans, born into a time of economic growth, less content with their political situation.[9]

The domestic political situation in the year 1980 was unusually turbulent; the dictator at the time, Chun Doo-hwan, had gained power through the assassination of the former dictator—Park Chung-hee—a year earlier by a member of his government. Through political machinations, combined with a fairly ruthless approach to dealing with his rivals, Chun became the Director of the KCIA and the de facto leader of the country, and by 1980 was ensuring that challenges to his authority would not appear to haunt his regime.[10] [11] For the most part, his tactics of suppressing protests (protests were a Korean tradition that was increasing in popularity with every dictator) were reasonable, if heavy-handed.[12] During the month of May in 1980, student protests hit almost every major city in South Korea, and were not too harshly dealt with; however, the demonstrations in Kwangju escalated to the point where it became the bloodiest revolution in modern Korean history.[13] With this national background, let us turn to consider the situation of Kwangju and its surrounding regions in 1980.

It is not an unfair generalization to say that the disenfranchised in a society are usually those with the strongest motivations to change it, and also those best able to see past the superficial results of a policy or regime and identify the issues. Disenfranchisement may be economic, political, social, or any other number of factors; in Kwangju it was all of the above, and this created a consciousness in the residents of Kwangju that led them to regard their city as a unique place in South Korea. As mentioned above, South Korea’s economy was hardly in the gutter at this point; both the U.S and the South Korean government were determined to see it flourish (in large part to prevent the North from gaining any sort of foothold, whether industrial or rhetorical, over the South). Jean Ahn goes so far as to term the American hold on South Korea “Neo-Colonial fascism.”[14] However, whatever was driving the economy, it was a vast improvement over the impoverished conditions that Koreans had experienced for most of the 20th century, and most regarded it as an economic miracle. Kwangju, however, did not experience this miracle on the same scale as much of the rest of Korea.

“While for the rest of the nation,” says American eyewitness to the massacre and scholar of Korea Linda Lewis, “the rewards of Korea’s economic miracle outweighed the burden of authoritarian rule, in the Cholla provinces, oppositional sentiment flourished.”[15] Average income in Kwangju was far lower than the South Korean average,[16] due largely to the centralization of industry in Seoul and the crash of agriculture, the traditional backbone of South Cholla/Honam province.[17] Park Chung Hee’s policies were unabashedly targeted at keeping Kwangju—which had a bit of a reputation as a political hotbed—on the economic sidelines.[18] Many other factors play into the citizens’ belief that they were being systematically disenfranchised, or at least very pointedly ignored; however it is enough to hear from several voices that cried out during the uprising: “The paratroopers are all Kyongsang [the province occupying the southwest portion of the peninsula] natives. The soldiers have been ordered to wipe out South Cholla.”[19] “Everyone from Cholla is going to be murdered!”[20] “…it was widely reported within the city that the paratroopers had been specially selected… and they spoke in a Kyongsangdo dialect.”[21] Especially early on, in the chaotic stages of an uprising that was more than street fighting but less than a revolution, speculations of these sorts ran wild; citizens of Cholla were conscious of their subjection to economic regionalism, and deeply desired a change in their place in the development of South Korea.

But the revolutionary sentiment was not purely economy-driven; South Cholla has, for over a thousand years, been perceived as a bit of a political troublemaker.[22] Its place in the modern world did not change much; even during the Japanese imperialistic era they had been subject to political suspicion. Says Jean Ahn of the region’s reputation: “…the Honam area contained the conditions necessary to develop nationalistic, anti-imperialist, and democratic movements as it was a region where class contradictions and national contradictions were more serious than in any other region.”[23] Perhaps their brightest star was a man named Kim Dae Jung, a native of Cholla and “the symbol of the democratization struggle”[24] in Korea.[25] Having been exiled by the previous administration and only recently allowed to come back by the Chun Doo-hwan regime, he was a fitting symbol for a beleaguered province, and just prior to the uprising he had been arrested. Said Samuel Jameson, a foreign correspondent in Kwangju at the time: “I described the protestors as condemning the arrest of Kim Dae Jung.”[26] Considering that dictators Park in the seventies and Chun in the eighties hailed from Kyongsang province (a longstanding rival of Cholla) it is hardly a surprise that the people of Cholla should feel politically disenfranchised and be, perhaps more than the rest of Korea, ready to do something about it. As we can infer from Park and Chun’s economic policies towards Kwangju, they as a province held fairly little sway over the affairs of the nation; they were rather the home of opposition politics and were therefore alienated. However, the citizens of Kwangju did not see this as necessarily negative: The title of an essay by Linda Lewis well describes the fiery dynamic embraced by the citizens of Kwangju: “City of Light, City of Outlaws.”[27]

The factors that set the stage for the Kwangju uprising are enough for a book in themselves; however, all we need to understand is that the citizens of Cholla Province, of which Kwangju is the capital, were, in 1980 and well before, subject to regional discrimination, alienation from the political process, and economic disenfranchisement. Add to that their traditional affection for revolution and the status of the province as the homeland of Kim Dae Jung and it is not difficult to see why Kwangju was a likely candidate for revolution. As a corollary of its agricultural focus (due to its economic disenfranchisement), Kwangju’s culture was more traditional than most other regions of Korea, with an “everyone’s business is on the lips of everyone else” feeling to the community.[28] The closer sense of communication that this promoted was another important factor in the success of the uprising in Kwangju: it allowed the spread of ideas and ideals. A collective sense of injustice combined with this form of community made the spread of revolutionary ideals before and during the uprising far more efficient. Because revolutionary issues were a perennial concern of the Kwangju citizens’ identity, it was natural that their means of protecting the university students (for this was a primary concern of theirs: “save the students”[29] was a popular cry in the beginning of the revolution) would be to mobilize in the form of activism and resistance. To live in Cholla was to believe that one was set apart from the rest of Korea, in both disenfranchisement and a superior consciousness of the political situation.