Free The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History by Don Oberdorfer, Robert Carlin

Seoul-Tokyo normalization, which was strongly encouraged by Washington, brought an immediate Japanese assistance package of $800 million and led to many more millions in Japanese investments and valuable economic tie-ups with Japanese firms. In another far-reaching decision of the mid-1960s, Park sent two divisions of Korean troops to fight alongside American forces in South Vietnam, for which he received Washington’s gratitude and Korean firms received a major share of war production and construction contracts. In 1966 revenues from the war made up 40 percent of South Korea’s foreign exchange earnings, making Vietnam the country’s first overseas profit center.
    Park took personal charge of the economy, bringing highly professional economists, many of them American educated, into the planning agencies. He established an economics situation room next to his office in the Blue House to monitor the implementation of the plans, and he frequently met with economic officials and businessmen who were developing projects with government support. Much like the “on-the-spot guidance” practiced by Kim Il Sung in the North, Park incessantly visited government offices in the economic area and construction sites in the field to check up on what was happening.
    Park refused to be guided by economists when he was determined to move ahead with one of his visionary projects. When American and World Bank economists said that South Korea could not successfully build, operate, or support an integrated steel mill and refused to approve financing, Park remained determined to build it. Declaring that “steel is national power,” he obtained Japanese loans and personally pushed through construction of a massive mill at Pohang, on the southeast coast, which became the world’s largest steel-production site and a foundationof Korea’s heavy industry. Park was the driving force behind the ambitious Seoul-to-Pusan expressway, which experts had also said was impractical. An engineer on the project recalled that “after a while, I found myself thinking of him, of all things, as a sort of conductor of an orchestra—with his helicopter as his baton. Up and down he would go, this time with a team of geologists to figure out what was wrong with some mountainside that had crumbled on our tunnel-makers, the next time with a couple of United Nations hydrologists to figure out how our own surveyors had got some water table wrong. If he didn’t know the answer on Tuesday, Mr. Park was back with it on Thursday or Saturday.”
    “President Park monitored the progress of every single project, both public and private, and closely governed the industrialists by the stick-and-carrot method,” according to Kim Chung Yum, who was a senior economic aide to Park and eventually his chief of staff. Park chose the firms that would be awarded contracts on large government-backed projects and provided or withheld credit through government banks, depending on their performance. The growth sectors of the national economy came to be dominated by a few highly organized, diversified industrial-business conglomerates known as chaebols , loosely modeled on the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or its postwar zaikai . Although this facilitated Korea’s dramatic economic rise in the 1970s and beyond, the intimate relations between government and business also set the mold for the corruption charges that later were to plague the retirement years of Park’s successors.
    Although he wielded enormous economic power, Park never became a rich man and was not personally corrupt. He usually had a simple bowl of Korean noodles for lunch and ate rice mixed with barley, to save on rice. He had bricks placed in his Blue House toilet to conserve water. Setting a modest style, he wore open-collar shirts without neckties in the summer months and encouraged civil servants to do the same.
    Park’s personal hold over the economy was embodied by his ambitious Heavy and Chemical Industries