Park Chung-hee came to power in 1961 through a military coup, was elected president two years later, scrapped the Constitution in 1972 to make himself president for life, and ran a hated dictatorial regime until he was assassinated by his own security chief in 1979. But his was also a regime when Seoul began to be transformed into a thriving modern city, and South Korean economy, fuelled by policies that favoured exports, big-time industrialisation, technological advance, and the rise of powerful multinational conglomerates or chaebols, started on a journey of growth that has led it to its rise as an Asian "tiger".
Economic growth, however, hasn't helped solve many of the more basic problems that have remained embedded in Korean society. It still is, for example, a society where gender inequality is one of the starkest, male chauvinism is unabashed, and women are considered no more useful than cogs in a wheel to keep the system turning. It's also a society where income inequality shows no sign of narrowing. In a country where wage income accounts for about 65 per cent of all household income, the top 20 per cent of earners make 15 times more than what the bottom 20 per cent do, on average. Besides, workers are deeply unhappy over the imbalance of powers between them and the management, which they think robs them of their rights.
In other words, we're talking of a society that's unhappy deep inside, with a per capita income just not growing fast enough, a society that's ageing fast while birth rates keep falling, raising new concerns. It's this climate of unhappiness that daughter Park promised to address as she was installed in the presidential Blue House last month. "A new era of happiness" is what she has dedicated her presidency to, raising speculation that this is the second miracle she probably has in mind.
But doubts are already in the air: Will she be able to pull it off? Five years ago, the president she has replaced, Lee Myung-bak, had unveiled his famous "747 Plan" - seven per cent annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth, $40,000 per capita GDP, and seventh position for South Korea among the world's largest economies - but it failed to fly. The economy managed an average 2.9 per cent growth during his tenure, per capita GDP was $22,700 at the end of last year, and South Korea is only the world's 15th largest economy.
To be able to "promote individual happiness", her declared mission, Park Geun-hye must not only dramatically improve on her predecessor's economic record, but also discipline the chaebols into fairer business practices, steer firmly through South Korea's freewheeling, often violent and slanderous, political rivalries, fight corruption, boost the employment rate, curb management's powers and protect workers' rights, and, above all, ensure for women a greater degree of equality.
The order is very tall indeed, especially in respect of gender equality. Here are some facts to explain why. South Korea has one of the lowest proportions of women executives in Asia, a mere one per cent of the labour force. The salary of a South Korean female, on average, is 39 per cent less than that of a male counterpart. While there are many women in lower-level jobs, one rarely sees them at higher levels, where the pay and powers are bigger. Not a single woman holds an executive position in South Korea's 13 biggest state-run companies. In South Korea's top 33 business corporations, only 114 women hold director-level positions. In large companies employing more than 1,000 each, only 4.7 per cent of executives are women.
Such odds won't be easy to battle and conquer. There is a bill now before the National Assembly requiring all public enterprises to fill at least 30 per cent of their management positions with women. That will help, if the Bill goes through. But nobody in South Korea really expects their first woman president to be a miracle worker in the five years she has at her disposal. With only two women in a Cabinet of 30, she isn't even properly armed. As a prominent women's rights activist, Kim Jung-sook, pointed out, "Merely electing a female president will not do much to change the status of South Korean women or increase their participation in politics." Society must change as well, but right now South Korean society is too rigidly set in tradition to change, or be changed, in any meaningful way.
rbarun@gmail.com