The KMT’s Continued Grip on Power

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political and social cleavage structure in South Korea has historically been regional, and support for democracy or transitional justice was not always evenly divided along these lines. Taiwan, on the other hand, has largely been divided on the issue of national identity, a cleavage that manifests itself in markedly different collective memory and historical narratives between the competing groups there. Fourthly, on an institutional level, the constitutional court of either country has its distinct beginning and

development. The Constitutional Court of Korea as it exists today was established in 1988 with the adoption of a new constitution. The Council of Grand Justices in Taiwan, on the other hand, did not experience any reform until five years after martial law was lifted. This had a demonstrable effect on its review of issues related to transitional justice during that period.

Lastly, the time elapsed between events of severe state violence against the population and the beginning of democratization in Taiwan and South Korea varied between the two based on the type of internal security apparatus that was in place during authoritarianism.

Whereas events like the 228 Incident and the height of the White Terror were well in the past for many Taiwanese, the horrors of the Gwangju 5.18 Incident were still fresh in the minds of South Koreans, young and old. This may have lent more popular support to transitional justice reforms in South Korea’s post-transition era.

4.1.1 The KMT’s Continued Grip on Power

Taiwan is a unique example of the third wave of democratization, in that it experienced a political transition to democracy without a simultaneous change in regime. South Korea, on the other hand, established its democratic system of governance with the voting out of the Democratic Justice Party in 1992, although a new constitution for the Sixth Republic was written in 1988 and political liberalization had been taking place since then. This has had a major bearing on the type and scale of transitional justice measures that have been carried out in either country.

Why was the KMT able to continue to hold its grasp on governing power, despite being the same organization that upheld the authoritarian party-state apparatus for almost four decades, inflicted tremendous wounds on the population through selective, yet

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widespread, state violence, and created a climate of fear and repression amongst ordinary Taiwanese? As Slater & Wong (2013) find, “the KMT conceded democracy from a position of extraordinary strength, not weakness” and that “this reflected the party’s deep reserves of antecedent strengths accumulated during the postwar period” (p. 723). It lacked no confidence in itself and believed that by allowing liberalization and free elections, it would not lose its position of power, and it was correct in this assumption.

The KMT had two major sources of antecedent strength: 1) its use of local elective institutions and 2) the Taiwan “economic miracle” experienced during the latter part of authoritarian rule.

The KMT introduced local elections from early on in their control of the island, using a single-vote, multi-member district framework they had inherited from the Japanese (Roy, 2003, p. 37). This was intended to create a sense of legitimacy for the ruling party;

elections “created a feedback loop through which the KMT heard peoples’ concerns and meant the KMT could scout and recruit new talent from the grassroots into the party’s rank-and-file” (Slater & Wong, 2015, p. 723). It was an effective way of incorporating local elites into the party’s clientalist politics.⁸

Furthermore, the party’s recruitment of local Taiwanese into its central leadership, a tactic whose use increased rapidly during the rule of Chiang Ching-kuo, created a much wider support base for the KMT once Taiwan democratized. This is reflected in the two competing factions of the diminishing mainlander elite and the native islanders who joined the KMT in the decade leading up to transition, a divide that still exists in some form today. The generation that came of age during the martial law period, both

mainlander and native Taiwanese, and particularly civil servants or those who worked in the public sector, are much less likely to be persuaded that investigating KMT human rights abuses is a necessary or good thing (Su Ching-hsuan, Personal Correspondence, May 5, 2017).

8 Clientelism is the trading of goods, services, or privileges in exchange for political support. The KMT engaged in a variety of clientelist practices during authoritarian rule, including offering local factional elites significant economic privileges, which they in turn offered for the clients below them. This kind of

relationship also took place in the military and with influential families and large, mainlander-owned enterprises throughout the martial law period. It was a primary means of maintaining the ruling legitimacy of the KMT (Wang, 1994).

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Taiwan’s robust economic performance during the 1960s and 1970s has historically been attributed to savvy policy instituted by the KMT leadership, namely the evolution of a well-run developmental state, following the flying geese model⁹ of moving from import substitution to export-led growth, and instituting large-scale land reform (Roy, 2003, pp.96-99). In reality, KMT policy that was enacted to maintain political and social control, coupled with a very large amount of aid from the U.S. during the 1950s, as well as the hard work and flexibility of local small- and medium-sized enterprises, comprised the core foundation for the “economic miracle” that took place in Taiwan.

South Korea at the time of democratization was a country that had for decades been rocked by “military coups and political turmoil,” had developed a “multi-party system but little true democracy,” and “its political parties lacked the KMT’s institutionalization;

when a party leader was deposed or assassinated, his party disintegrated” (Clough, 1996, p. 1065). It maintained two similar facets of strength upon transition: elections and economic success experienced during the Park Chung-hee era.

Park, after gaining initial power in the May 16 Coup, the 1961 military coup d’état that ended South Korea’s Second Republic, was elected as president of the Third Republic in 1963. This denotes a key difference in the authoritarian-era elections of Taiwan and South Korea. As Jacobs (2007) notes, “Taiwan had many local elections, but only very limited central elections, and in Korea local elections were abolished in 1961 while the regime continued controlled central elections” (p. 245). Like those in Taiwan, though, South Korea’s “elections generated important feedback from society giving the party recurrent opportunities to gauge its popular appeal” (Slater & Wong, 2013, p. 725).

The era of Park Chung-hee, like that of post-KMT reform in Taiwan, saw rapid economic growth that also ensured a high amount of income equality, facilitated by the utilization of an effective developmental state, but also spurred on by a large, well-educated, and disciplined labor force, a massive amount of post-World War II aid from the U.S., and compensation for South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War (Paul Hanley, Personal

9 The theory of post-World War II East Asian development that places Japan as the leading power and views the production of commoditized goods as moving from more economically advanced countries to less advanced ones.

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Correspondence, February 17, 2017; Robinson, 2007, p. 134). This is the major reason why, even now, many of the older generation in South Korea look back on the Park regime fondly, and is partly why his daughter, now-deposed Park Geun-hye, was elected president in 2012.

Still, when democratization took place in South Korea, it had already been a long, hard, and violent battle by democracy activists, and the Democratic Justice Party of Chun Doo-hwan was hugely unpopular. One of the main reasons Roh Tae-woo was able to clench the presidency in the 1987 election was his decision to paint himself as a reformer, with a June 29 eight-point speech that made a number of concessions to the opposition,

including direct presidential elections and the freeing of political prisoners (Jacobs, 2007, p. 241). The other reason is that the two opposition candidates, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, split the opposition vote, allowing Roh a miniscule victory (Slater & Wong, p.

726). Roh’s presidency in some ways resembled the twilight years of the KMT party-state: a sort of liberalized, or soft, authoritarianism.¹⁰ However, his party did not have a legislative majority, “holding only 125 of 299 parliamentary seats” (West & Yoon, 1992, p. 74). Slater and Wong (2013) thus argue that by the beginning of Roh’s presidency, the

“DJP was deeper into its bittersweet spot than Taiwan’s KMT was during the same period” (p. 725).

Wu (2005) observes that “when democratic reform is launched from above by, or negotiated with, an authoritarian ruler, the latter is likely to wield greater power, even to stay in power, as in the case of Taiwan” and that “in such cases, both the prosecution of crimes and historical justice are unlikely to occur” (p. 6). However, even though South Korea experienced a relatively peaceful, negotiated transition, its authoritarian regime’s comparatively weak position caused it to lose power very quickly after democratization.