[Culture Op-Ed] Did the Chun Doo-hwan regime pursue the “3S policy” to keep the public docile?

Of all the conventional wisdoms about popular culture discussed so far, this is the most thinly grounded, yet at the same time the most widely accepted by the public—so much so that it has effectively masqueraded as an “established theory.” Even in just one month, March 2020, this “3S policy” was mentioned in articles by major national dailies such as Munhwa Ilbo, Hankook Ilbo, and Seoul Shinmun, as well as outlets such as Yonhap News, Media Today, and OhmyNews, as though it were an actual policy that had existed. In effect, it appears regardless of ideological leaning.

This “3S policy” also appears openly in sources easily found through portal sites, such as Doosan Encyclopedia and Wikipedia.

“3S, that is, a policy of stupefying the people through screen (film), sports, and sex. By steering the public toward these three S’s, it seeks to render them ignorant and induce political self-alienation and political apathy, thereby enabling the rulers to manipulate the masses at will. It is a typical example of an assimilative policy in colonial rule.” (Doosan Encyclopedia)

“In South Korea, this refers collectively to various stupefaction policies implemented by the government of the Fifth Republic, which came to power through the December 12 military coup, the May 17 coup, and the violent suppression of the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, for the purpose of redirecting public attention toward sports and entertainment and thereby neutralizing anti-government movements and the raising of political and social issues.” (Wikipedia)

Seen this way, it almost looks like some highly specific conspiracy. Above all, it even appears superficially plausible. But with even a little more attention to the facts, one comes to see that the very concept of a “3S policy” is not only groundless, but also logically incoherent from start to finish—a bundle of contradictions, a phantom concept, in practical terms closer to an urban legend. Let us look at the matter one point at a time.

The reality of the “3S policy” was in fact a line of expanding “sociocultural freedom”

First, let us examine exactly which policies of the Chun Doo-hwan government are supposed to constitute the “3S.” Naturally, nothing was ever actually named “3S,” nor is there any formal framework showing any kind of internal connection among these policies. What we find instead is simply a structure in which third parties make a retrospective “claim” by grouping together various cultural and sports policies from the Chun period. Accordingly, even the policies “claimed” to have been part of the “3S policy” are a mess—appearing in one document but omitted in another depending on the writer’s perspective. Below is a comprehensive list of the items mentioned in various media reports as the alleged “3S policies” of the time.

* Screen (film, screen): Nationwide launch of color television broadcasting ('80)

* Sports (sports): Seoul’s selection to host the 1988 Summer Olympics ('81), Seoul’s selection to host the 1986 Asian Games ('81), launch of professional baseball ('82), launch of professional soccer ('83), launch of professional ssireum ('83), launch of the National Basketball Festival ('83), launch of the Korea Volleyball Super League ('84)

* Sex (sex): Lifting of the nighttime curfew after 37 years ('82)

Anyone can tell at a glance that something is odd here. It is hard to understand how any of these could in themselves be considered policies for stupefying the public.

Let us start with color television broadcasting, categorized under “screen.” South Korea was already producing color televisions at the time. Korea National succeeded in producing the first set in 1974, and from 1977 GoldStar and Samsung Electronics had begun large-scale production. The only thing not yet in place was the actual broadcasting, which had simply been delayed under the Park Chung-hee government on grounds such as encouraging conspicuous consumption and provoking class resentment.

Then a new government came in, and amid the confusion caused by the second oil shock, weak domestic demand, and the resulting “first negative growth in 10 years,” discussion of color television broadcasting resumed. It was an urgent moment requiring countermeasures, as mid-sized electronics firms such as Hwashin Electronics, Jeongpum Mulsan, Dongnam Electric, Orimpos Electronics, and Ultra Electronics had already gone bankrupt, raising fears of a chain collapse among small and medium-sized parts suppliers.

The effect was indeed substantial. Once color television broadcasting began on December 1, 1980, more than 1 million color televisions had been sold by July 1981, just eight months later. As a result, in 1981 the total output of the electronics industry achieved remarkable growth compared to 1980: production rose 33 percent and exports 11 percent. In other words, this was essentially an economic stimulus measure, far removed from “stupefaction.” More fundamentally, South Korea is the only country in the world that has ever evaluated the start of color television broadcasting as a “policy of stupefying the public.”

The “sports” category is also rather absurd. International sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup are things many countries still desperately want to host today. The boost they provide to national branding is enormous in itself. The Olympics in particular serve as a marker that a country has entered, or is approaching, the ranks of developed nations. Even in Japan, where discrimination against ethnic Koreans in Japan persisted for quite a long time, the 1988 Olympics became a dividing point after which people arriving in Japan later were separately called “new comers.” The implication was that those who came after the country had become reasonably prosperous would be treated differently.

As for policies encouraging professional baseball, professional soccer, and other professional sports, the proper way to view them is as part of providing leisure opportunities to citizens in accordance with a certain level of economic growth. In fact, that is how virtually every country sees it. If anything, South Korea has even been criticized for having been somewhat lacking in this regard under the Park Chung-hee government, whose mindset emphasized not play but working hard.

Finally, citing the lifting of the nighttime curfew under the “sex” category goes beyond laughable and raises doubts about whether the document was written in any serious state of mind at all. Some texts instead stress this category by citing the boom in erotic films in the 1980s, but there are limits to insisting that a trend created by the private sector was somehow state policy. Such phenomena are better understood as a temporary strategy adopted by theatrical films to differentiate themselves at a time when television ownership was rapidly spreading. Likewise, Japan too experienced a boom in erotic films—pink movies centered on Nikkatsu—in the 1960s. In both Japan and Korea, the film industry ultimately returned to normal through innovation.

Thus, the substance of this so-called “3S policy” was in reality much closer to an expansion of “sociocultural freedom.” The direction was one of expanding freedom, and if one insists on calling that a “stupefaction policy,” there is little more to say. If one objects that freedom of political opinion in cultural content was still thoroughly blocked, that is something said without having even watched the socially critical and politically satirical films of the 1980s, such as director Lee Jang-ho’s Children of Darkness, Declaration of a Fool, and Widow Dance; director Im Kwon-taek’s Mist Village; and director Jang Sun-woo’s Seoul Emperor and The Age of Success. Film censorship was loosened broadly and across the board throughout the 1980s. That was the real substance of the “3S” of the 1980s.

Was the original source of the “3S policy” concept an early 20th-century antisemitic conspiracy theory?

Then how did this phantom concept of the “3S policy” arise in the first place? The earliest documentable source is the Kyunghyang Shinmun’s “Yeojeok” column of May 25, 1983. It contains the sentence: “It is often said that the modern age is ruled by 3S, following the initials of screen, sports, and sex.” The concept then appears explicitly as a “stupefaction policy” in a National Assembly interpellation to the government on November 2, 1983, in remarks by Kim Jeongsu, a lawmaker of the Civil Rights Party. Pointing to the state of professional sports at the time, he raised the question of whether it was “not a typical 3S policy of stupefaction.” By the time of the Dong-A Ilbo reporter’s Op-Ed “Imbalance in Publicity” of May 24, 1984, the term was already being used to criticize prosperous times of eating, drinking, and enjoyment: “The means of putting the people under hypnosis may vary according to the circumstances of the age, but in modern states the so-called 3S policy is being used.”

It gives the impression of having appeared quite suddenly. One explanation is that in the early 1980s the “3S policy” was already being mentioned fairly often on university campuses, especially among student activists. Then where, in turn, did those student activists get the idea of the “3S policy”?

In Korean documents, one only finds the claim that the concept was borrowed from the “3F policy” said to have been carried out by António Salazar, the Portuguese prime minister and dictator. Here 3F refers to Futebol (football), Fatima (the Catholic pilgrimage site), and Fado (folk music). In other words, the claim is that the people were stupefied through sports, religion, and culture and the arts. Something about this feels awkward. It is all the more so given that Portugal at the time was a dictatorship structured through a parliamentary cabinet system, making its conditions entirely different from Korea’s.

A more persuasive line of reasoning comes from elsewhere. The neighboring country of Japan had already produced the concept of “3S.” It appears in the words of Yasuoka Masahiro, an influential thinker during the imperial period. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, when the GHQ (General Headquarters)—that is, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers under Douglas MacArthur—carried out occupation policy in Japan, Yasuoka criticized it by saying that “they implemented 3R, 5D, and 3S policies to completely emasculate Japan, yet the Japanese rejoiced in it.”

Here 3R referred to the basic principles of Revenge, Reform, and Revive, while 5D referred to the main measures of Disarmament, Demilitarization, Disindustrialization, Democratization, and with 3S used as an auxiliary policy. But this too is essentially close to conspiracy theory, because although Yasuoka claimed to have heard it from a GHQ counselor named Gardiner, he explicitly stated that this name was only a pseudonym. In today’s language, it might well have been something imagined entirely in his own head.

But this “3S” was not even Yasuoka Masahiro’s own invention. Astonishingly, its original source reaches back to the rise of Hitler and the formation of the German Nazi Party. In The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic conspiracy text first published in Russia in 1903 and translated in the 1920s in the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, “3S” was introduced as one of the Jews’ strategies for world domination. It is understood as having emerged in the context of checking Jewish capital that dominated Hollywood in the United States at the time. And in 1923, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was distributed in Japan to the educational world under the name of the National Association of Middle School Principals.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is now regarded as the worst forgery in history, one that ultimately furnished the ideological basis for the Nazi Party’s slaughter of the Jews. Following the historical flow, it is persuasive to think that around the 1920s and 1930s, when this book was widely distributed in Japanese educational circles, it influenced thinkers of the time such as Yasuoka Masahiro—who founded the Institute for Oriental Thought, Kinkei Gakuen, the Japan Agricultural Moral School, and other institutions to penetrate the educational world—thereby spreading the concept of “3S”; that this idea was then reapplied after Japan’s defeat in World War II as a basis for anti-American thought and as one strand of left-wing revolutionary theory in Japan; and that it was then transmitted again to South Korean activist circles, which were modeling themselves on Japanese left-wing revolutionary movements such as Zenkyoto, Minminto, and the Japanese Red Army. In the end, the point is that this was nothing more than inheriting a mode of thinking that had descended from antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Does it make sense to think sociocultural freedom is a way of stupefying the public?

Of course, one might argue that regardless of where it “began,” there would be no issue if the theory of the “3S policy” actually worked in practice. But the biggest problem is that even judging from the history of the Japanese left-wing revolutionary movements that influenced South Korea’s activist circles, the concept of the “3S policy” produced effects exactly opposite to those expected.

What, after all, was the result in Japanese society after launching professional baseball in 1950 and allowing all manner of artistic freedom of expression and even sexual freedom throughout the 1960s? It gave rise to Japan’s left-wing revolutionary movements, beginning with Zengakuren in the 1960s. In fact, this is only natural. Sociocultural freedom ultimately becomes a “turning point in thought” that can even lead to challenges against the existing ruling order.

Moreover, the South Korea of the 1980s was not a period that merely fostered culture, the arts, and sports. As mentioned earlier, it was also a period experimenting with sociocultural freedom in many dimensions: the lifting of the nighttime curfew, freedom in hairstyles for middle and high school students, and the abolition of school uniforms. It also meant abandoning things like the crackdowns on miniskirts and long hair that had marked the 1970s. If that is the standard, then all advanced Western countries, which had long grounded themselves in sociocultural freedom, would have to be regarded as the original practitioners of stupefaction policy. There is more. If that were true, why is it that North Korea and various Middle Eastern states—countries that genuinely aim at stupefying the public—do not even pursue a “3S policy”?

The same goes even if one looks at Portugal’s alleged “3F policy,” which is claimed to have influenced the “3S policy” in the first place. Even Fado, the cultural and artistic component of the 3F, produced fado singers who ultimately stood at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the 1970s. During the Carnation Revolution of 1974, radio broadcasts played songs by the fado singer Zeca Afonso to rally the public. In other words, “cultural promotion” ultimately becomes the basis for political and social “public awakening” in one form or another. Yet despite the fact that the results of this pattern had already been visible over several prior decades, one is supposed to believe it was benchmarked as a “stupefaction policy”? That makes no sense.

Ultimately, the series of policy trends during the Chun Doo-hwan government in the 1980s that are labeled the “3S policy” can be understood as policies that accepted the public’s demand for sociocultural liberalization as incomes rose. This is well expressed in the saying, “The June 29 Declaration ultimately opened the era of per capita GDP of $3,000.” A genuine policy of stupefaction is not carried out through sociocultural freedom and the fostering of culture, the arts, and sports, but very simply through suppressing “education.” Even in the earlier Portuguese dictatorship, what made rule possible is better explained not by something like a “3F policy” but by a policy line that strengthened only primary education to reduce illiteracy while deliberately neglecting secondary education. South Korea, by contrast, in every postwar era placed the highest value on education and continued to foster it.

At any rate, from this perspective what may deserve more attention is the public mentality of the time, in which the concept of the “3S policy” was so readily accepted as plausible. It was an era that disparaged entertainers as “ddanddara” and television as an “idiot box,” belittling the value of culture and the arts. In a period when making a living was hard, many viewed various forms of cultural leisure with pathetic disdain, as if they were luxuries for the overfed. There is no need for that attitude to persist to the present. The delusion called the “3S policy” has now reached the point where it should be discarded—not merely as falsehood, but even as a superficially plausible conspiracy theory.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 전두환 정권은 우민화 목적으로 ‘3S 정책’을 펼쳤다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-03-31

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=9&idx=22521