Government Campaigns in South Korea: Exorcism and Purification of Nature and People

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze some more recent government campaigns in South Korea, namely the campaigns for "Frugal Living", "Factory Saemaul", "National Savings Drive", "Saemaum" (New Heart), and the "Nature Cleaning Campaign" which was launched in close connection with the "Remove-Illegal-Religious - Sites" campaign. These campaigns fit into a wider framework of 'campaigning' by authoritarian governments in Third World countries and have the main function of mobilisation and political control at the grassroots level. Furthermore, by analyzing these campaigns in South Korea, this paper attempts to provide additional material for the ongoing discussion on the interdependence of political, economic and ideological factors within the process of 'nation-building' in so- called 'new societies' whose main development features are a high degree of foreign dependence and enormous social costs due to the rapid - but strikingly uneven - patterns of industrial growth and export orientation. Though South Korea is not the only example for such kind of development strategies, it provides the picture of a somewhat extreme case, a policy which has caused both fast rising social disparities ard growing resistance by the people. Similar patterns in the field of social engineering can be found in several other Asian countries, for instance, Singapore. Thus, it will be interesting to follow how the governments succeeding the late South Korean dictator-president Park Chung-Hee will use the legacy of Saemaul (New Spirit) movements to achieve their political goals, or if they will attempt to replace these instruments of policy implementation by other measures in order to keep the majority of the population at bay. True reforms or 'counter-reforms' are still the main alternative in South Korea, as elsewhere.