Chapter 4 – What Lies Behind the Different Approaches
4.1 Key Contributing Factors
4.1.5 A Matter of Time
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Council of Grand Justices is Taiwan’s counterpart to the Constitutional Court of Korea, and the sole institution entrusted with the power of judicial review.
High level officials of the Judicial Yuan were originally nominated, with the consent of the Control Yuan, by the President (Chapter VII, Article 79), but the additional articles of 1992 switched the consenting body to the National Assembly, reflecting the democratic reforms taking place at the time. In 2005, a new set of additional articles to the ROC constitution effectively dissolved the National Assembly, and conferred the power of consent to the Legislative Yuan. Since then, the political leanings of the court depends on which party is in power in the executive and legislative branches, and who they appoint to the position of grand justice.
The Council of Grand Justices is supposed to be free of partisanship, but as with the Constitutional Court of Korea, this is simply not the case. However, in Korea, a judicial branch created with the forging of a new, democratic constitution has favored legislation and policy bolstering the system that gave birth to it. This has included, significantly, legislation dealing with transitional justice, even if these decisions have, at times, been questionable. Meanwhile, the five year period between the lifting of martial law and the amending of the ROC Constitution in 1992 in Taiwan saw the continuation of a judicial system and constitutional court that was more beholden to KMT interests. The most important example of this situation is the Court of Grand Justices’ issuing of
Interpretation No. 272, which confirmed the constitutionality of Article 9 of the National Security Act.
4.1.5 A Matter of Time
One of the issues that engendered great public sentiment in South Korea at the time of democratization was determining accountability for and getting a more accurate idea of the events surrounding the Gwangju 5.18 Incident. This is partly due to the fact that, at that time, only a decade had passed since the violent incident had occurred. Even during the Roh Tae-woo administration, the National Assembly began holding hearings on Gwangju, which led to compensation payments for victims and their families. This minimalist first step, combined with pressure from a strong South Korean civil society,
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eventually snowballed into the comprehensive approach to transitional justice that has been described in previous chapters. A similar situation unfolded in Taiwan, yet ended only with compensation payments for the 228 Incident and the White Terror. This, the author finds, may be due to the fact that a much larger amount of time had elapsed between the height of the KMT’s use of state violence and Taiwan’s democratic transition. The author additionally found that this difference in time between violent events and democratization was caused by a separate, underlying factor – the nature of either country’s internal security apparatus – which will be discussed in the proceeding paragraphs.
Despite a growing consensus in Taiwan on the wrongs committed by the KMT
authoritarian regime, and especially on those of Chiang Kai-shek, it is useful not to think of the KMT or its actions on Taiwan during martial law as having been solely controlled by Chiang. In fact, it has been noted that, from the 1950s onward, Chiang Kai-shek took a much less active role in governmental affairs, leaving his son and the future leader of Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo, to manage everything from the KMT bureaucracy to national security (Taylor, 2000, p. 223; Wu, 2003, p. 473). Part of this was leading a campaign of brutal suppression, known to many as the White Terror, as the head of a new, unified, and far-reaching system of internal security.
The KMT, after retreating to Taiwan, was forced to make a number of large reforms between 1950 and 1952. By 1949, Chiang Kai-shek had realized that “the Communist victory was not due to military factors, but to the superior organizational power of the CCP” (Dickson, 1993, p. 58). The KMT’s lack of cohesion and weakness, absence of mechanisms to judge feedback from the population, and factionalism of rival elites within the party, led Chiang to push for a complete organizational overhaul (Ibid., pp. 58-59).
This included founding an academy for training party cadres, purging the KMT of officials deemed to be “corrupt, incompetent, or disloyal,” forcing older leaders to retire at the hands of the Central Advisory Council, founding a political commissar system for the military and universities, and establishing a Central Reform Committee composed of younger cadres that was tasked with making “recommendations on restructuring the party” (Roy, 2003, pp. 80-81).
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In reforming and reorganizing the party, the KMT essentially “reinvigorated those aspects that had become dormant because this dormancy was believed to be a primary cause of its defeat on the mainland” (Dickson, 1993, p. 60). These reform measures effectively promoted “growth in discipline, efficiency, and morale within the KMT, resulting in a dramatic increase in membership” (Roy, 2003, p. 81). They also gave way to an increase in the suppression of criticism, although in a targeted and clever manner. A certain amount of political dissent was accepted, as long as it wasn’t consistent and didn’t violate core KMT tenets (Ibid., p 81).
Importantly, party reforms also included the reorganization of the KMT’s internal security apparatus. Before arriving in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek had opted for a disjointed, exclusive system of overlapping security organizations. This reflected his perception of military and political elites as being the biggest threat to the legitimacy and survival of his rule, as a fragmented security apparatus would encourage infighting among its agencies and discourage cooperation in possibly overthrowing the dictator (Greitens, 2016). Once the KMT arrived in Taiwan, however, that threat perception shifted to the native Taiwanese population. This is in no small part due to popular resistance the KMT had encountered during and after the 228 Incident. Also, the elites that had posed the risk of a coup or takeover, like K.C. Wu or Sun Li-jen, were
effectively neutered by the mid-1950s, and this, combined with “the warning that American aid was contingent on domestic political reform, enabled and, in fact,
compelled Chiang to concentrate on managing the threat of popular unrest” (Ibid., p. 89).
What emerged was a unified, inclusive system of administering internal security, what Greitens (2016) calls the “coercive apparatus.” All of the previous organizations with overlapping powers and jurisdictions were incorporated into the National Security Bureau, the “central intelligence coordinating body,” administered by Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who “held the nominal title of deputy head of the NSB, but in reality acted as chief” (Taylor, 2000, p. 212). The new system, which included the
aforementioned political commissar, infiltrated every level of Taiwanese society. The aim was not social or economic control, but rather consistent and accurate surveillance of political activities. On its face, this was a Cold War era tactic to stop the spread of
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communism, but in reality “Taiwanese nationalism, stimulated by the disillusionment of the late 1940s, provided the single greatest target for internal security forces” (Roy, 2003, p 90). Nevertheless, the unification of the coercive apparatus in Taiwan, as well as its newly inclusive nature, allowed for significantly higher quality intelligence on
threatening popular activity, and thus the rate of state violence became more targeted, more discriminate, and declined sharply over the last few decades of martial law rule.
The South Korean experience in regards to the establishment and development of its postwar security apparatus differed markedly compared to Taiwan. For one, the specter of North Korea defined the relationship between military and government, in that the overwhelming external threat of an attack by North Korea and heavy U.S. influence in military affairs prevented “coup-proofing fragmentation within the military” (Greitens, 2016, p. 142). Internally, however, the perception of threat shifted from one autocratic leader to the next, and with it the structure of South Korea’s coercive apparatus.
The first dictator, Syngman Rhee, “promoted internal competition and social exclusivity”
in order to prevent the wresting of power by political rivals (Greitens, 2016, p. 143).
However, the emphasis Rhee placed on political loyalty may be the key to his use of this kind of fragmented, exclusive system of internal security. As Robinson (2007) notes,
“Rhee faced little opposition within his own government and the new ROK constitution granted few powers to the newly elected National Assembly with which it might curb the power of the ROK presidency” (p. 111).
Park Chung-hee, inheriting the fractured system of competing security forces, centralized it by creating the KCIA, named after the U.S. intelligence organization, which would have “unitary powers of coercion over the rest of the coercive agencies,” and
“establishing broadly inclusive intelligence networks” (Greitens, 2016, p. 148). This was to combat popular anger over the coup d’état orchestrated by Park that ended the short-lived period of democracy under the Second Republic. It included infiltrating college campuses to suppress student protest, arresting suspected radicals and communists, and strengthening the National Security Law to clamp down on the press (Robinson, 2007, p.
135).
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Park’s threat perception changed after the promulgation of the Yushin Constitution, an internal restructuring of not just the security apparatus, but of the government in general.
Whereas Park had been an elected president in his first term, he now became a full-blown dictator; he “declared martial law, dissolved the National assembly, abrogated the old constitution, had a new constitution written by an Extraordinary State Council made up of his appointees, and then legitimated the new structure in a referendum in November of 1972” (Robinson, 2007, p. 136). This period marked an uptick in the number of cases of political persecution and suppression of popular dissent, but also of a refocusing of the internal security apparatus towards controlling the threat of elite rivals (Greitens, 2016, p.
156). This was not without warrant: Park experienced numerous attempts on his life; one succeeded in killing his wife, and the last brought about his own demise. He therefore moved towards a system of “increased fragmentation and exclusivity” which led to a
“deterioration of Park’s rule during the 1970s” (Ibid., p. 159).
Chun Doo-hwan, the final truly autocratic leader in South Korea, who had also gained power by way of coup d’état, was and still is extremely unpopular. This can be largely attributable to his government’s handling of the Gwangju Incident of 1980. His threat perception, unlike that of Yushin-era Park Chung-hee, was of another popular uprising like the one that had erupted in Gwangju. Greitens (2016) posits that “Chun also worried about the risk of assassination, but appears to have thought it most likely that the assassin would be a disgruntled member of the population” (p. 167). This pushed him to unify his coercive apparatus under the Defense Security Command, the central coordinating
agency, and then diminish the remaining authority of the KCIA, the organization that had essentially been Park Chung-hee’s bodyguard but whose director had also been Park’s assassinator (Ibid., p. 169).
Greitens notes that an internal security apparatus that is unitary and inclusive produces a decreasing level of violence in an authoritarian state because intelligence is of better quality and thus suppression can be used more sparingly to eliminate true threats. An exclusive and fragmentary coercive apparatus, on the other hand, produces the opposite.
It is marked by an increasing level of violence because this kind of system “creates interagency competition that provides motivation to escalate rather than minimize
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violence” (Greitens, 2016, p. 53). Taiwan’s situation falls into the first category, while South Korea’s presents an interesting grey area, as three different leaders with varying threat perceptions created a situation in which state violence both increased and decreased over certain periods of time.
What bearing does this have on the method of transitional justice used in either country?
The nature of the KMT’s perceived threat was that of a popular uprising against the regime, and it forged a security apparatus in the early 1950s that used violence
discriminately. By the time martial law was lifted in 1987, most of the horrors of the 228 Incident and the White Terror had long ended. In South Korea, varying levels of violence meant that some very violent episodes, especially the Gwangju Incident, were still fresh on everyone’s mind. This situation, combined with an incredibly strong civil society that had taken an active part in South Korea’s democratization and desired to see justice served for the years of repressive autocratic rule, was a driving force in the more comprehensive transitional justice approach taken by South Korea’s democratic government.