4
capitalist class) and the historical ties between the state and the popular sectors (as opposed to
structural ties).
1
Despite its important contributions, the existing literature on East Asian developmental
states has largely overlooked their historical origins.
2
It either goes too far back in history or
gives history a perfunctory role. Not that the benign legacies of Japanese colonialism were not
important, a point well argued by Atul Kohli (1994). As some have pointed out, however, it is
not clear why Japanese legacies did not make Rhee the father of a developmental state but wait
for Park (Waldner 1999). This criticism points to a critical defect in the literature: the period
from the end of Japanese rule in 1945 to the economic takeoff in the 1960s has remained obscure
in all the aforementioned theories. How and why the births and growth of such states during the
first decades following independence may have contributed to later developmentalism has often
been ignored. If it is mentioned at all, it is often asserted rather than proven or at least
systematically analyzed.
3
Most accounts of the East Asian “success stories” have underestimated the unusually
coercive and extremist character of these states. For South Korea, few works have attempted to
deal systematically with the two critical periods prior to the Park regime. These were the period
of 1945-48 when the South Korean state was born and that of 1948-1960 when it was built. As I
1
For example, Waldner (1999) contends that elite unity within the South Korean ruling coalition lessened the need
to incorporate the masses and allowed the state to give priority to growth targets and to avoid distributive issues.
Waldner, however, ignores the late 1940s and the 1950s. Elite unity in his model actually came from the pattern of
elite polarization in these periods.
2
Other ad hoc explanations, such as the external threat of North Korea or the poor resource base of South Korea that
gave it a stronger imperative to develop, also suffer from the same weakness. These explanations are plausible but
have seldom been systematically tested (an exception is the threat theory presented by Zhu (2000).
3
Cumings 1987; Koo 1987. Cumings is the author of the seminal study of events in Korea during 1944-1953 but in
his 1987 essay, he advocates the product cycle and dependent development theories and gives the period of 1944-
1953 only a marginal role. Koo in the same edited volume mentions pre-1960 developments in Korea only to prove
that South Korean success story cannot be explained in terms of world systems theory alone. Jun (1991) focuses on
the 1945-48 period and suggests that this period contributed to the later formation of a developmental state in South
Korea, but he does not show how.
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