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This chapter identifies trends whose legacies have resonated in South Korean politics through the ensuing decades. In particular, it explores the radicalization of the South Korean democratization movement, with reference to the endurance of radical discourse in South Korea. To uncover these linkages, it examines the series of discursive shifts that took place under Park Chung Hee’s rule, focusing on political activism under the repressive Yushin constitution (1972–1979). Special consideration is given to the effect that anticommunist rhetoric had on both dominant and dissident political discourses. What becomes clear is that the experiences of activists under Yushin strongly influenced the configuration of domestic and transnational networks that emerged during the 1980s. This portrayal of the political environment that emerged in the years leading up to the Kwangju uprising provides the backdrop to the narratives developed in Chapters 3–5.

April 19^th, an extraordinary outburst in the mold of the paradigmatic March First Independence Movement (1919), took place in and through the transposition of memories of anticolonial resistance to postcolonial politics. Following the overthrow of the Rhee-LP regime, many public observers truly believed that the student protestors – and, by extension, South Koreans – had turned the corner out of the postwar crisis and into a new era of national history. This chapter examines post-event discourse on how to parlay the “spirit of April 19^th” into a forward-looking program of wholesome modernization that effectively linked developmental policies of the democratic state to the everyday endeavors of upstanding citizens. It then turns to the aftermath of the May 16^th military coup of 1961 to scrutinize Park Chung Hee’s partial assimilation of post-April 19^th optimism into his ideological program during the incipient phases of his nineteen-year rule.

This chapter examines the role of the United States and South Korea's military officers in creating and sustaining developmental autocracy in the country between 1961 and 1972. It suggests that American officials helped Park Chung Hee in implementing unpopular policies and weakening his opposition so that he could institute crucial reforms necessary for economic development. After discussing American efforts to push the military junta away from military rule and economic nationalism toward political and economic liberalization, the chapter looks at the conflict between Washington and the Park regime owing to their differences over how a developmental autocracy should function, as well as Park's rifts with his domestic opponents over foreign policy. It also analyzes Park's introduction of Yusin, a harsh authoritarian system that essentially rejected democracy and which the United States had to support because it had little choice.

This chapter describes the developmental state model and discusses the formation of a developmental mindset in Korea. It pays particular attention to the shared formative experience of Korea's first developmentally minded policymakers under Japanese colonial rule, especially the experiences of Park Chung Hee, who is widely remarked as the father of Korean developmentalism, and his closest associates. It shows how the colonial encounter generally, and their service in the Japanese Imperial Army in 1930s Manchuria and Korea in particular, fueled these men's strong desire for Korean independence. The occupation exposed them to Japanese-style statecraft, showing them firsthand how a state could effectively manipulate an economy for nationalistic, industrial transformation purposes. The chapter concludes with an examination of how developmental ideas became a shared way of thinking among the Korean policy elite.

This chapter focuses on poet and playwright Kim Chi-ha, tracing his war with the Yusin state. Since this war was fought within the political and ideological terrain shaped by colonial legacy, national division in the context of the global Cold War, and American hegemony and United States–Japan–Korea security alliance in post-WWII world order, it begins by locating the Winter Republic within a historical matrix that demarcated what political scientist Choi Jang- jip called the “American boundaries” within Korea. It then considers three different types of texts that Kim Chi-ha produced during his long war with the Park regime, and which correspond temporally to the three major moments of his resistance. The first is “Eulogy for Ethnonational Democracy” (Minjokchŏk minjujŭI changryesik chosa) that he wrote in 1964 as the wordsmith of the student protest movement against normalization of relations with Japan. The second is Kim’s famous narrative poem “Five Bandits” (Ojŏk, 1970), a raucous satire of the Park regime’s minions that started a decade of intense persecution of writers by the Winter Republic. Finally, the chapter turns to the transcript of Kim’s trial from 1976.

This chapter examines how the United States' nation building helped create a powerful South Korean state committed to maximizing its control over society as well as a formidable opposition intent on bringing democracy to the country. It looks at the continuous struggle between the state and pro-democracy forces such as students and intellectuals, particularly after Park Chung Hee introduced the Yusin system in 1972 that sparked protests against South Korea's growing authoritarianism. The chapter also considers the rise of a new military dictatorship led by Chun Doo Hwan following Park Chung Hee's assassination in 1979, which led to the escalation of conflict between democratic forces and the state. It argues that America's influence declined during this period due to its reduced commitment to Asia in general, and increased South Korean autonomy in particular.

This chapter examines the relation between Cold War metropolitan and peripheral developmentalisms. The peripheral free-world state, the Park Chung Hee regime of the 1960s, asserted a nation/state coincidence that ended up placing it in a continuing state of crisis. The relation between Park's early formulation of South Korean ethnodevelopmentalism and the opposition to the state and the Cold War division system came to the fore during and in the aftermath of one of the most important events in post-1945 South Korean history, the April 19 movement of 1960. In this context, the works of Nam Chŏng-hyŏn (b. 1933) offered a sustained critique not only of the U.S. presence in South Korea but also of domestic authoritarianism and the broader Cold War order. It is in Nam's works, more than those of any other writer in the 1960s, that one can encounter the visual politics of statist development and its contestations.

This introductory chapter begins with the story of young high school teacher Yang Sŏng-u, who recited the unpublished poem “The Winter Republic” before an electrified crowd on February 12, 1975. The poem offered a pointed attack against the Park Chung Hee’s authoritarian regime, which was on its fourteenth year of power. The chapter then sets out the book’s purpose, namely to understand how writers emerged as a public conscience at one of the most formative moments in modern Korean history. For supporters and critics alike, there is no denying the fact that South Korean society as we know it today took shape in the harsh season of Park ’s authoritarian rule. In seeking to provide a historically situated and textually rich account of how and why literature emerged as the most privileged site of anti-authoritarian resistance in South Korea in the 1970s, the book turns to four major writers of the Winter Republic: Kim Chi-ha, Yi Mun-gu, Cho Se-hŭI, and Hwang Sok-yong.

This chapter examines the rise of developmental autocracy in South Korea in 1961 following a turbulent period of successive student and military revolutions. It first appraises the role of U.S. foreign policy in bringing Syngman Rhee to power and enabling him to survive armed challenges to his rule. The chapter then looks at the student-led revolution that paved the way for the country's first democratic government in April 1960, followed by a virtually bloodless military coup d'état led by Park Chung Hee that seized power in May 1961. It also considers the United States' support for the military junta due to its leaders' strong determination to promote economic development. The chapter argues that Washington's decision to recognize Park instead of trying to restore South Korea's democratically elected leaders brought about developmental autocracy in the country.

This concluding chapter contemplates the aftermath of the Winter Republic and its surprising return. Park Chung Hee’s death in 1979 did not so much end the Winter Republic as suspend it. And the return of the Winter Republic to the center stage of Korean politics under his daughter’s presidency in the second decade of the twenty-first century suggests a pervasive state of confusion about how to evaluate the paradigm of statist, developmentalist, and anti- communist nation building begun under Park Chung Hee, an alternative to which has yet to be found in South Korea. Moreover, this confusion has spread to the question of how to evaluate the legacy of South Korean democratization. The chapter reconsiders the terms of the struggle that writers waged against the Winter Republic, and the resources that their engagement both on and off the pages may provide for understanding the bewildering legacies of the authoritarian era. These were resources that were as much taken up as rejected in the militant 1980s.

This chapter looks at the Korean minjung literature and the work of Hwang Sŏk-yŏng as a response to dictator Park Chung Hee’s prescriptions for national productivity and growth. It reviews Hwang’s short story Longing for the North, a Far and Desolate Place, which gives account of the plight of a young man who tries to fulfill his mother’s dying wish to be buried with his father. Hwang’s story provides understanding of the communal and redemptive nature of minjung and encapsulates the concept of unfulfilled longing or regret. The chapter concludes with an outline of the forms of national infrastructure through which material and ideological debates are staged.

During Park Chung Hee’s first term as president (1963-1967), regime ideologues incorporated selected elements of the wholesome modernization and student vanguard schemas into his gendered program to “Modernize of the Fatherland.” This program subordinated the position of women to that of men in the collective enterprise of rapid but uneven economic development. It also replaced the unreliable student vanguard with the notion of the militarized vanguard, which was to serve as the primary force for the interlinked projects of national defense and industrialization. On the other hand, progressive activists drew on unofficial memories of April 19^th and the vanguard schema in staging antiregime protests in 1964-1965. In doing so, they consolidated the culture of noninstitutional youth protest that drove South Korea’s democracy movement (1964-1987).

This chapter examines Yi Mun-gu as a writer of the Winter Republic and his works as a critique of the state’s strategies of interpellation through the central trope of the neighbor. During the Park era, a time of rapid industrialization that witnessed disintegration of rural communities at an unprecedented scale and the emergence of new forms of “community” living such as apartment and factory complexes, the figure of the neighbor gathered unto itself both old nostalgia and new anxieties. Harnessing such ambivalence, the Park regime instituted a system of neighbor surveillance and embarked on a series of community revitalization campaigns designed to subsume forms of local group identification under the state. It also sought to weld “individuals” (kaein) directly to the developmental state by mobilizing people in the name of “the national subject” (kungmin). Given this historical context, Yi Mun-gu’s insistence on the neighbor enabled a piercing critique of totalitarianism.