The Second Economy: The Origin of Yushin System in South Korea

The background of the Yushin System(1972) has attracted the attention of many Korean and international political scientists. Although most of them consider security crisis in 1968 combined with the Nixon Doctrine as a turnning point of the Park government and President Park's own idea on ruling system, Park's remarks on the second economy in early January of 1968, two weeks before the Pueblo Incident, deserve the attention.

This presentation will focus on questions such as what triggered the transition and why Park designed such a new idea at this particular time in early 1968. Considering the timing, there was a possibility that original idea of Park for the Yushin System started before the 1968 crisis. This approach would be also relevant to the historiography in Korean history, which has been a very complex decussation of internal and external factors

Tae Gyun Park is Assistant Professor at Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University in Korea and is currently a Coordinate Researcher at Harvard-Yenching Institute. He is an editorial board member of Critical Review of History (Yoksa Pipong), Pacific Affairs(UBC), The Review of Korean Studies (Academy of Korean Studies), and Seoul Journal of Korean Studies (Gyujang-gak, SNU).