Sons against fathers. (youth protests in South Korea)

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1991 Economist Newspaper Ltd.

CAN the younger generation of Koreans invent a substitute for the old rural base of their culture? This is the question that lies beneath South Korea's regular violent clashes between its government and protesting youth.

This week's clashes followed the death of a student. Five policemen have been charged with killing him. In street riots during the student's funeral on May 14th, 141 policemen were said to have been hurt. But although the riots are the worst for several years, they follow an established pattern. Formally, they are anti-military, even though President Roh Tae Woo, an ex-general, was popularly elected. One rioter explained, "We want a new civilian government, a president who is from the citizens or a professor. No more military."

Many students want the 43,000 American troops to go home, despite the danger of an invasion from North Korea. "We want independence from America," some shout. Since none of these sentiments is popular with most Koreans, the student demonstrators have been left pretty much on their own this year.

More subtly, the demonstrations express youthful demands for freedom of individual choice against age-old Confucian traditions of filial piety and obedience to a paternalistic state. You might say the sons are taking on the fathers.

Korea is East Asia's most deeply Confucian society. Confucianism was the state ideology from 1392 to 1910. As Korea has become industrialised and westernised, mainly since the 1950s, the last bastions of orthodox Confucianism have been its villages. In rural life, even now, Confucian thought governs how an older generation thinks and acts, with its notions of hierarchy and harmony, communal obligations and subordination of son to father, younger brother to elder brother, wife to husband, individual to group; and subject to state.

Few people have had to change so fast as the Koreans have. A mere 30 years ago 80% of Koreans lived off the land. At this time of year you would see armies of men and women in straw hats out in the paddies transplanting rice. Now such pastoral scenes are enacted only in the paintings to be found in Korean homes. Factory chimneys, motor cars, power lines and tile-roofed brick houses are everywhere. Agriculture is mechanised.

Fewer than 15% of Koreans are still rural. Those who remain on the land have become richer. Between 1985 and 1990 average rural household incomes rose from $8,000 to $15,000. In 1985, 50% of villagers had refrigerators and telephones, and 25% of them colour televisions. Now practically all do, and many have a motorcycle or car.

Because most Koreans are former peasants, or the children of peasants, city dwellers keep close ties with the villages. They tend to return at least twice a year, if only to visit parents' graves. Korean families, holding on to the Confucian tradition of respect for scholars, make great sacrifices to educate their children. Some 40% of young Koreans go to university. Many study computer science, electronics and the other high-tech disciplines that are making South Korea such an economic powerhouse.

At university, however, the students also find their family-bred Confucianism challenged by western ideas of all kinds. In crowded greater Seoul, where 45% of South Korea's 44m people live, and where there are many university campuses, tradition seems less relevant. Many students behave unpredictably, exuberantly hospitable and friendly towards westerners one minute and xenophobic and rude the next. They appear to be caught between a burning desire to be part of the world and a fear of losing their identity as Koreans.

The village, the old cultural anchor, is under strain. Confucian peasants are baffled by the rioting students they are working hard to see through college. They worry, too, about American pressure to open Korea's rice market to imports, a move that would mean the death of many village farms. Only 6m peasants are still tilling tiny ancestral plots in a rice culture going back 12 centuries. Because they are subsidised and protected from foreign competition, the retail price of a kilo of Korean rice is $1.42. A kilo of Thai rice costs 85 cents.