The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [29]
The gunshots in the National Theater marked the start of a period of intensified tension on the Korean peninsula, during which earlier moves toward North-South rapprochement were replaced with undisguised hostility. The impetus for the deepening struggle came in part from the failure of the decade-long U.S. military effort in Indochina. While Saigon was falling, Kim Il Sung made a bid to renew his open warfare against the South, but China refused to go along, and the Soviet Union avoided even inviting Kim to visit Moscow to make his case. By the mid-1970s, both the giants of international communism had much too great a stake in their own relations with the United States to risk another international war on the Korean peninsula. At the same time, U.S. diplomats intervened with secret persuasion and powerful threats to stop Park Chung Hee from proceeding with a South Korean nuclear weapons program that could bring new dangers of escalation that nobody, including the great powers, would be able to control. Washington's veto of Seoul's nuclear ambitions proved that the United States could still wield impressive clout on security issues when convinced that its most vital interests were at stake.
For months before the Independence Day shooting, tension in Seoul had been building toward a crisis as Park and his domestic opponents engaged in an escalating political struggle. As the shock of martial law had worn off, protests had grown-especially after the kidnapping of opposition leader Kim Dae Jung from Tokyo, which galvanized anti-Park forces. Pyongyang's subsequent suspension of the North-South dialogue robbed the government of its strategic justification for the internal crackdown.
Two of the most important groups in the growing democratic opposition were students and the Christian community, both of which were traditional foes of tyranny in Korea, and both of which had grown rapidly in the late twentieth century.
The unusual stature of students in Korean society and especially in political activism is the product of a tradition stretching back over many centuries. Undergirded by the Confucian emphasis on scholarship, students had spearheaded nationalistic movements against Japanese colonial rule. They saw themselves, and were often seen by others, as guardians of state virtue and purity, and they were expected to demonstrate their opposition to compromise with those ideals.
The practice of student political activism had been powerfully reinforced in the early 1960s. Massive student protests in 1960 against Syngman Rhee's increasingly authoritarian government were halted by police gunfire that killed 130 students and wounded another thousand in Seoul alone. The government's brutality robbed it of legitimacy in the eyes of the public and led to its replacement. The military coup led by General Park that took over the government by force in 1961 was never accepted as legitimate by many activist students, who passionately opposed the existence of military-dominated regimes.
After liberation from Japan, the thirst for education had led to rapid growth in the South Korean student population, from fewer than 8,000 college and university students in 1945 to 223,000 by 1973. While only a small percentage of Korean students were politically active, this vanguard was intensely engaged, prone to rigid, often radical political and social theories, and ready to do battle with government authority by employing their bodies as well as their voices.
Christianity, too, was strongly