RENOUNCING HEAVEN'S MANDATE

The Economist, july 10th, 1999

IN 1987, shortly before Roh Tac Woo instituted direct presidential elections, an author called Yi Munyol wrote a novel about power in South Korea. When Han Pyongtae, a boy from a smart part of Seoul, moves to the country, he expects to be the star at his new school. Instead his life is dominated by the class monitor, Om Sokdae. The boys give Sokdae the best food from their lunch boxes. He takes their money and their presents. In return, he sorts out fights and protects them from boys in other classes. If anyone wants to play a part in classroom life, it is Sokdae who decides what it should be. Pyongtae resolves to challenge him. However, in exams Sokdae is first in every subject. Pyongtae is ostracised and ridiculed, although Sokdae is careful never to be present when this happens. When the new boy persuades the teacher to ask the class to write down Sokdae's wrongdoings, they list instead his own trivial breaches of the rules. Pyongtae eventually falls in with Sokdae, and begins to enjoy special favour and

power. But then a new teacher arrives. When he discovers that Sokdae is forcing the cleverest in the class to substitute their exam papers for his, the teacher beats the boy in public. Seeing Sokdae humiliated, the class immediately deserts its hero for the powerful new teacher. Much behaviour in South Korea bears the mark of a Sokdae. In a company, the head of a department bullies his staff, yet commands total loyalty. The banker lends a company money because a bureaucrat makes it known he should. The salaryman intrigues for the chaebol owner. And the politician runs his party as a personal vehicle in which ideology plays little part. Free-market reform is a challenge to this way of thinking. it will succeed only if bureaucrats become impartial, managers run their companies in the interests of all the shareholders, and bankers assess loans on their merits. That much the reformers accept. Where they go wrong is to hesitate about also reforming South Korean politics. For all the bullying and manipulation, Sou

th Korea is far from lawless. On the contrary, even after an impressive amount of deregulation by the cur-rent government, the country has so many rules that everyone is guilty of breaking some of them. in a frank moment, for example, most Koreans will admit that they have fallen foul of one or more provisions of the tax code. The point is not just that South Korea is overregulated (though it is), but that the rules permit bureaucrats to intervene whenever someone important sees fit. one reason why few Koreans buy foreign cars is that until recently all owners of such cars were subject to a tax audit. A headhunter complains that even after recent deregulation, the interfering local authority has the power to come and inspect the profiles that he keeps on various candidates and the jobs that might be on offer, which he must keep in a predetermined format. Corruption follows close behind. Local officials were unhappy when the government scrapped rules that limited the opening hours of whisky houses. The proble

m was not that the reform encouraged noise or drunkenness, but that it would put a stop to the bribes the whisky houses paid to stay open late. As Michael Breen, the author of a recent book on South Korea, caustically observes: "Falling foul of the law isn't a problem, as long as one doesn't fall foul of the people who enforce it." Nobody can say where cordiality ends and graft begins. Fair enough, perhaps, that parents offer presents to teachers as a mark of respect, and in the hope that this will give their children a better chance in class. Less acceptablethat the academics who set national exams have to be secreted in a safe house for a month to make sure nothing is revealed to outsiders. Although honesty is prized in South Korea, the examiners would come under intolerable pressure to reveal the questions to their children, or the children of relatives and friends. As a former dissident, President Kim Dae Jung might be expected to be only too aware of the potential for abuse of presidential power. Nevert

heless, after taking office he decreed an amnesty for 5m Offenders. A generous act, perhaps, but one hardly calculated to enhance the impartial application of the law. And it is hard to think of a statesmanlike explanation for the vindictive trial of the previous president's deputy prime minister and his senior economic adviser for neglect of duty: their crime was to fail to avert the Asian economic crisis. Most South Koreans like to put this sort of behaviour down to "Confucianism". The venerable man taught his students that there was a hierarchy, they say, and made a great virtue of loyalty. In Korean Confucianism, a good king has a "mandate from heaven". His law is an extension of his will, not a way of protecting the individual, as in the West. If a "king" wants something done, his subjects' overriding duty is to obey. In fact the Korean king, who was usually held in check by his powrful scholar-bureaucrats, was no autocrat. "[Korean autocracy] has little to do with Confucianism; it's just a plain bad ha

bit," scoffs Cho Soon, who is an opposition member of parliament as well as a classical scholar, a former governor of the central bank and former mayor of Seoul. The governor of North Cholla province, You Jong Keun, identifies this habit as a residue of rural Korea. Forty years ago, when twothirds of the population lived in the country, the head of the village held sway and his people presented a united front to the outside world. Today the village has become the department within the company, the class at college or-when foreigners are present-the nation.

The regal republic

Whatever the explanation, it leads to an overmighty presidency. Mr Kim has sometimes treated parliament with disdain. In January the ruling coalition passed 66 bills in a quarter of an hour. In May it forced through six bills in eight minutes. The speaker counted votes by asking those in favour to stand up, even though the floor of the assembly was crowded with opposition members who were on their feet to protest. If it has to put up with conduct like that, no wonder the South Korean parliament is not doing a very good job. Rather than serving as a forum for ideas and interest groups, it goes in for a feeble sort of gesture politics. Committee meetings are interrupted because someone crosses his legs in an insulting way. There are fights on the floor of the assembly. when earlier this year the opposition found secret-service dossiers on parliamentarians in room 529 of the National Assembly building, it tried to put a stop to the assembly's business by blocking the entrance to the chamber and barricading the

speaker in his office. The ruling coalition felt it had won a famous victory when it smuggled members back into the chamber through a back entrance. Another reason why politics is weak is that parties are weak. In his time, Kim Dae Jung alone has founded four of them: the Democratic Party, the New Democratic Party, the Party for Peace and Democracy, and the National Congress for New Politics (NCNP). There are not manycountries where the centrists (the Grand National Party) would be kept out of government by a coalition formed by the "left-wing" NCNP and "right-wing" United Liberal Democrats. But in South Korea people count, not left and right, and Kim Dae Jung can work with his contemporary, Kim jong Pil, even though that particular Mr Kim founded the Korean CIA, which persecuted the president in his dissident days. And perhaps voters get the representatives they deserve. Koreans look to their politicians for favours rather than ideas. No member of the assembly can turn up to a wedding or a funeral without a

present. Supporters bused to rallies expect payment, or at least a good meal. According to one politician, simply running for office costs more than 1 billion won, 20 times an MP's annual pay. No wonder even some politicians describe South Korean politics as "very corrupt", and complain that party managers do nothing to stop it. A former head of the secret service tried to kill himself after it emerged that before the 1997 presidential election the North Koreans had been bribed to identify Kim Dae Jung as a sympathiser and to stir up trouble. But simply legislating away corruption will not work. Kim Sang Woo, an MP close to the president, dismisses the idea of reforming campaign finance on the ground that it would "make criminals of everyone". Because parties are built around personal loyalties, rather than ideas, Korean politics also suffers from regional discrimination. The three generals who turned president in recent years were all from Kyongsang, in the south-east, and every one of them ensured that th

eir region got more than its share of steel plants and shipyards. On the other hand, people from Cholla, in the south-west, are stuck with a reputation for being untrustworthy. Kim Dae Jung was thought unelectable because he comes from an island in Cholla. Samsung, one of the five big chaebol, long had a rule that it would not employ anybody from that region. Until recently its subsidiary in Cholla was known as plain Kwangju Electronics, for fear that the Samsung name would remind the locals of that piece of discrimination (although now the name has been added back in). When unification comes, it is easy to imagine northerners becoming victims of similar prejudice.

Just say no

So far, what has been missing from Kim Dae Jung's programme is political reform. The best way to curb the power of chaebol owners would be to create a society where people can say no: where managers can turn down foolish investments, bankers can refuse a loan to a friend, bureaucrats can stand on principle, and politicians feel free to ignore the orders of the party boss.

The place to start is with the presidency itself. The office holds too much power for the country's good. Although there is a cabinet, the pesident can rule virtually alone if he chooses to. President Kim Young Sam got through six prime ministers in four years. Even if President Kim Dae Jung turns out to be an ideal ruler (and only 18 months into his five-year term it is too soon to say), his successor could be a bad man or a foolish one.

if the president were to devolve his power to the prime minister, other ministries and parliament, it would establish the idea that kings of any kind are no longer omnipotent. impossible, says mainstream opinion in Seoul: political reform would require a change to the constitution, and would never get popular approval in a referendum. Anyway, it is argued, South Korea is not readyfor reform. Without an assembly that is up to the, task, reform would only lead to the sort of parliamentary paralysis that has plagued Italy and japan. As it happens, none other than President Kim has put reform on the agenda, arguing that democracy is needed for development. Shortly before taking office last year, he blamed the crisis on "Asianstyle democracy in which governments are built around a powerful leader who dictates economic policy." During his election campaign, Mr Kim proposed that South Korea move to a parliamentary system in which the president would stop holding the reins of power and instead become a moral, stabil

ising force, as in Germany. Executive power would move to the prime minister and the cabinet. When he took office, the scheme was shelved because of the economic emergency. The hope is that it will be revived, supposedly in August. However, there are signs that Mr Kim will favour less radical measures, such as voting reform, which do not diminish his own power. In truth, Kim Dae Jung's reform proposal was the political price for bringing Kim Jong Pil and his party into the coalition. But the proposal suggests that real political reform is not altogether implausible. It is certainly needed. An economy in thrall to big business needs legislators who can represent all interests-including those of the people of the North, who will in time be part of a unified Korea.