Suicide Protests in South Korea
In this zine I will be exploring the history of popular struggle in South Korea through the lens of religion, gender, and violence. I will be looking at the role of suicide protests and commemorative practices as core tenets of the Minjung movement in history and today. Content Warning: This zine will be exploring suicide and self-immolation as a mode of protest.
민정
민족 한
There is no official time stamp for when people all agree the Minjung movement began. It’s typically scaled down to the democracy movement. For others, it begins with Korean resistance under Japanese colonial rule. The Minjung movement is a “framework which to reinterpret history through the lens of those who were politically oppressed and economically marginalized.” While the ideology of minjung frames “workers, farmers, and the underprivileged” as the subject of this history, the concept itself was “the product of intellectuals”, with student activists commonly centered in the movement.
The term minjung goes hand in hand with minjok, a term that can imply nationalist sentiment. Minjok refers to Korean people specifically in heritage, bloodline, and culture, not necessarily as a body of people who share the same political beliefs. Yet, it is commonly invoked in political dialogue. It implies the Korean diaspora is all a part of one minjok. The matters of the minjok are not limited to Koreans living in South Korea. Thus, it is often deployed in conversations around reunifaication.
Loosely translated, han signifies “the sorrow and anger that grow from the accumulated experiences of oppression.” While the word is commonly used, the implications are very serious. It represents the build-up of intergenerational oppression, not just pain from a single moment or for one individual. “When people die of han, it is called dying of hwabyong, a disease of frustration and rage following misfortune.” That being said, han carries implications of resistance that must not be diminished in the face of memorializing the pains of struggle.
the Minjung April Revolution (1960) Civilian discontent over Rhee’s autocratic and repressive rule led to mass protests by student and labor groups. The discontent was also born out of Korea’s lack of social and economic development. The protests ended with Rhee’s resignation.
After the Korean War: Syngman Rhee, president during the Korean War and Cold War conflct, adopted a strong anti-communist and pro-American stance. Rhee was condemned by the public for his authoritarian governance and for making amendments to the constitution to stay in power.
Coup d’état (May 16, 1961) Led by Park Chunghee, a military coup was carried out against the democratic government. Although Korea’s economic power significantly grew during this time, it was in part due to the militant authoritarianism and the suppression of democracy. At the time of the coup, many civilizans mobilized in protest.
g Movement October Restoration (Oct 10, 1972) Park Chunghee suspended the constitution, abolished the national assembly, and declared martial law. Civil liberties like freedom of speech were significantly reduced. Park’s dictatorship was challenged by student, labor, and religious activists. This time was also referred to as the Yusin regime.
May 18 Democratic Rising (1980) The Gwangju Uprising took place from May 18 to 27 in protest of Chun Doohwan’s rise to power. This was a part of a series of protests across the country that took place after Park Chunghee’s assassination. Park’s death revitalized the prodemocracy movement.
June Democracy Movement (1987) From June 10 to June 29, there were nationwide protests against Chun Doohwan’s military regime and move to consolidate and transfer power to Roh Taewoo. The protests were successful, and Korea held its first democratic election that year.
Self-Immolation as Suicide Protest In Korea, the idea that one could die meaningfully has been a phenomenon since the Choson Dynasty. Committing suicide was considered an honorable act, “especially when facing a dilemma that threatened a person’s loyalty, chastity, and filiality the overarching Confucian principles that governed Choson society.” Moving into the colonial period, suicide remained one of the most powerful ways to resist and passionately express one’s patriotism. In twentieth-century Korea, “meaningful suicide” for the purpose of a greater cause, was intimately linked to the politics of national sovereignty, anticolonial resistance, and postcolonial democratization. Chun Tae-il is a textile worker who set himself on fire in protest of extreme labor conditions in November 1970. Chun made various attempts to address the situation through institutional channels, such making formal petitions and going directly to government offices. The issue went unaddressed. Finally in protest, Chun set himself on fire in the Peace Market, the sweatshop district in Seoul. As his body became engulfed in flames, he shouted “We are not machines!” “Allow us to rest on Sundays!” “Abide by the Labor Standards Act!” In his hands were a copy of the Labor Standards Act. Chun was in fact, not the first Korean person to use self-immolation as a protest tactic, nor did he have the most dramatic performance. Yet, his suicide became the “raw material” for a “narrative of martyrdom that inspired a whole generation of activists” that followed. Self-immolation was not a common practice, in fact it was rarely used during “the most oppressive political conditions of the 1970s and early 1980s.” The first self-immolation after Chun Tae-il’s death occurred in June 1980 by a worker protesting for labor rights and an investigation of the Gwangju massacre. Following that, suicide protests occurred with shocking frequency in the 1980s. In total, there were at least 27 suicide protests between 1980 and 1987. 17 of these were by self-immolation. Between 1986 and 1991, 59 people died by suicide protest to “express their indignation over the slowness of post-transition reform in politics and labor.” Forty-nine of those were by burning. In 1991 alone, twelve activists committed self-immolation.
The generation inspired by Chun’s protest was a generation of students, inspired by previous labor rights activists and the contentious state of politics and violence in their time. They were witnessses to the brutality of Gwangju and grew consciousness of American imperialiam. The feeling that Korean people were once again losing grasp of their own country, teetered the movement towards a matter of life or death. I argue that in some sense, suicide protests and self-immolation in particular, brought labor activists and pro-democracy students together in the 1980s. It made the Minjung movement cohesive for both working class laborers and intellectuals. Activists were galvanized into re-creating and making meaning out of self-immolations as protest. Their suicide protests were not only a part of charging the movement, but to some extent a homage to their predecessors.
박승희
(1972-1991)
Pak Sunghui was a Chonnam University student who died in 1991 by self-immolation. She poured paint thinner over her body, set herself on fire on campus, and ran across campus during a rally, yelling “Twenty thousand students, unify and fight! Oppose America! Overthrow the Roh-Taewoo government!” Although she was just a teenager, Pak “was crystal clear in all respects, including consciousness, ideological language, and emotional register.” She left three notes behind stating her logic that was “clear as her death itself.” Pak’s death left an intense emotional impact on people, and her last words became a rallying cry for survivors.
“Don’t just weep in sorrow; that is not what you should do. You should fight with fire in your heart. You should struggle on the front line bearing hatred and burning hostility agaisnt the enemies. That fight should not be yours alone, but must be a fight in which every single one of the twenty thousand fellow students stand hand in hand, and fight together.”
“I will always be with you, so please forge on with spirit, thinking of me, even if it gets arduous and painful. There are cosmos seeds in my drawer. Pleae plant them where the twnety thousand fellow students frequent. I’d like to always be with you.”
박혜정
(1965-1986)
Pak Hyejong was a Seoul National University student who died in 1986 by jumping off the Hannam bridge. In her suicide note, she “agonized over her weakness and halfway commitment that resulted in her inability to act in accordance with her political ideals.” While many suicide protests at the time were embroiled in passion and anger, Pak Hyejong’s motive for dying appeared to be for individual reasons stemming from shame and fear. Despite this difference, her death was emblematic in echoing many of the thoughts of young people at the time. She is memorialized as a martyr.
“Why can’t I die? Why don’t I die?... After agonizing together, after suffering in despair together, bailing out alone. Escaping alone by suicide. The one who does not have the courage to live and suffer should die in shame. I cannot handle the debt of guilt any more. I feel ashamed to everyone who lives a beautiful life. Please curse me, curse and forget...”
Suicide and... Gendered implications Martyrdom “draws upon and generates ideals of ‘masculinity.’ Martyrdom figured as sacrifice, however, also generates a value-inverting understanding of victimhood as virtue. Hence, passivity and submission - quintessentially feminine values... are given a privileged status.” The Minjung movement has largely been associated with images of Korean people as both victims and heroes. While most suicide protests have been by men, women have also partaken in self-immolation as protest. For example, Pak Sunghui is one of the martyrs most remembered. While it is easy to compare Pak Hyejong’s death to others who self-immolated or died purely for the cause - I would resist against the idea that she must be included as a martyr. Adrienne Harris describes this point of contention for female activists, saying “there is often tension between personal action and responsibility to the collectivity. Personal endeavors of individual women may be denounced as elitist or male identified.” The inability to categorize Pak Hyejong’s suicide and intent into clear lines of masculine/ feminine meaning, is what makes measuring the meaning of her death for the Minjung movement so diffiicult. While radical performances of suicide and protest increasingly became normalized, Pak Hyejong’s death required people to reimagine what a meaningful death could look like.
Cultural Assumptions Historically, suicide protest and self-immolation specifically, has had significant power in not only mobilizing the masses, but also resulting in response from the government. Conversely, to other countries, self-immolation can appear to be a barbaric form of protest. In “Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and ‘Death by Culture’,” Uma Narayan discusses how issues of other countries, particularly those related to social issues and violence, cannot be translated in their full integrity through “border-crossings.” Narayan does this by discussing how dowry-murders have been honed in on as the “paradigmatic case” of “violence suffered by Indian women.” Although dowry-murders is a form of domestic violence, the West latches onto it as a “spectacular” form of domestic violence, “underlining its ‘Otherness’.” In the case of self-immolation in Korea as a form of protest - for an outsider, and especially from the Western hegemonic perspective, self-immolation is not a common practice and so it will appear exotic, foreign, or uncivilized. Due to this inability to understand another country’s unique practice of protest, the reasoning behind self-immolation is boiled down to a “cultural explanation,” of self-immolation being a part of Korea’s culture. Then, people who self-immolate are thought of as being victims to “Death by Culture.”
commemorative practices martyr memorialization Memorialization is a common ritual of Confucian practice. In Korea, “the practice of commemorating virtuous individuals and martyrdom became a central part of state-initiated rituals” in the Choson Dynasty. Commemoration is also an ongoing process of confronting power. Specifically for martyrs, the memorials “meant directly confronting the political power that necessitated martyrdom.” Chandra Russo further explores this activist understanding of commemoration, in “Solidarity Protests on U.S. Security Policy: Interrupting Racial and Imperial Affects through Ritual Mourning.” Russo looks to the School of the Americas Watch, to understand the ways in which activists use rituals - which “often serve to uphold hegemonic social relations” - to “imbue dominant identifications and practices with subversive meaning.” Specific to the Gwangju Uprising, memorialization is significant due to the history of censorship and loss of narrative control to the larger public. While Gwangju remains an event not fully uncovered and a bit lost in history, the protest suicides were hypervisible to the Korean public. In this way, protest suicides came to be a powerful form of imagery for people to rally around and invoke as a constant reminder of history, especially for those who were not there.
HEALING PRACTICES Are these commemorative practices are fully working towards healing? Is healing even an objective of the Minjung movement? In “Religion, Memory and Violence in Rwanda,” Longman and Rutagengwa discuss the debates over whether Rwandan churches should become sites for memorialization or sites of critical healing due to their historical significant role in the Tutsi genocide. They argue that while “memorialization is important to help people learn from the mistakes of the past… dwelling too much on the past can prevent the process of reconciliation.” There is a fine line between remembering and dwelling. It is difficult to imagine this line in a movement subsumed with han like the Minjung movement is. The Minjung movement is “inevitably linked” to “violence and hardship,” due to serving the “disadvantaged” or, “others who are living or dying in the shared time-space.” It is a movement defined by shared trauma, collective suffering and resistance. Jung-Hwan Cheon argues that “a death not fully mourned can be embedded as a trauma.” While I generally agree, I wonder if it is fully applicable to the Minjung movement. The commemorative spaces for the Minjung movement appear to be less for mourning in order to heal, and more of mourning to keep the memory of trauma alive.
Works Used Castelli, Elizabeth A.. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Harris, Adrienne. “Bringing Artemis to Life: A Plea for Militance and Aggression in Feminist Peace Politics.” Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics, ed. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989. Kim, Jungwon et al., eds.. Beyond Death: The Politics of Suicide and Martyrdom in Korea. Center for Korea Studies, University of Washington, 2019. Kim, Elaine H. "Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals." Social Justice 20, no. 1/2 (51-52) (1993): 1-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766728. Lee, Namhee. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Cornell University Press, 2007. Longman, Timothy and Théomeste Rutagengwa. “Religion, Memory and Violence in Rwanda.” Religion, Violence, Memory and Place, ed. Oren Stier and J. Shawn Landres. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 132-49. Narayan, Uma. “Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and ‘Death by Culture’: Thinking about Dowry-Murders in India and Domestic-Violence-Murders in the United States.’” Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York: Routledge Press, 1997. 81-117. Russo, Chandra. “Solidarity Protests on U.S. Security Policy: Interrupting Racial and Imperial Affects through Ritual Mourning.” Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality, ed. Paola Bacchetta, Sunaina Maira, and Howard Winant. New York: Routledge, 2019. 195-212.
Image Credits Korea Democracy Foundation Open Archives: http://db.kdemocracy.or.kr/main YouTube Video: 91년 5월투쟁- 강경대, 박승희, 운암대첩 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7E_pznMOnM 홀로 시대를 고민했던 박혜정 열사를 기억하다 http://www.snujn.com/news/19798 [학생열사] 박승희 [1991-05-19] http://www.yolsa.org/bbs/board.php?bo_table=tbl_ life&wr_id=202&ckattempt=1