who’d flirted with communism as a youngster, he was not a man to
question.
“You can say anything, so talk without reservations,” Vice Chairman
Park, who also held the title of General in the army, told B.C.
B.C. made his case and pleaded for leniency.
“The people will not accept this solution,” President Park shot back.
The dictator had a grand bargain in mind. Samsung, he believed, was
chaired by a white-collar criminal. Prison time, however, would be
pointless, stripping Samsung of its use to the nation. Instead, B.C. would
have to give up large portions of his three banks to the state and cough up
$4,400,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties. Samsung would be expected to
fully cooperate with the General’s plans to build a new, wealthy, powerful
nation. If B.C. refused to cooperate, a prison cell awaited.
The son of a peasant, President Park was an unconventional thinker.
Thumbing his nose at Western wisdom, he closed the markets, imposed
martial order, and coerced businesses to act under his decrees. A good deal
of Park’s worldview came from his training by the Japanese Imperial Army.
Stationed in Manchuria, a center of wartime industry, he had bowed before
a picture of Hitler every morning, astonishing other students, and watched
the unfettered rise of the Japanese zaibatsu groups and their garish excesses
that hurt the national interest.
“Their old, dated ways of managing the business do little to inspire
progress. They do everything to concentrate and keep their properties
within the family,” the president once remarked of South Korea’s chaebol.
“This is standing in the way of the healthy development of companies.”
“What is urgently required of us now,” he said in a June 1965 speech,
“is not to be envious of America’s prosperity, or fearful of Japan’s
expansion, but rather to emulate the mental attitude and drive that made
such things possible.”
Under his watch, Korea retained parts of the prewar and postwar
Japanese economic models while becoming more disciplined, militarized,
state controlled, and bent on exporting high volumes of products at
breakneck speeds. The Japanese miracle, in other words, was to be taken to
an extreme in South Korea.
General Park had a powerful set of tools and levers to make this
happen. He fired up South Koreans with the belief that they derived
strength from a pure and unadulterated bloodline called the minjok, an idea