Is South Korea Socialist?(Editorial)

It was shaping up as a good spring for the vocal minority in South Korea. Actors shaved their heads and marched against a plan to allow more Hollywood movies into the country. Bank employees in red headbands and sky-blue shirts banged sticks in unison outside the nation's oldest bank, Chohung, to protest its "fraudulent" sale to private owners. Farmers blocked Seoul traffic with tractors to stop a free-trade deal with Chile. Truckers, teachers, railroad employees and factory workers went on strike, and so on. Labor histrionics are nothing new here, but under new President Roh Moo Hyun, the unions were starting to win these battles. Then, last week, Roh sent the police to break up a new railroad strike without even offering to negotiate.

The sudden decision to get tough appears to be driven by criticism that capitalist South Korea was tilting toward "socialism." Roh took office in February as the first president whose inner circle is staffed by the "386 generation"--Koreans in their 30s who were born in the 1960s and grew up amid the massive protests against military rule in the 1980s. Roh himself is a former human-rights lawyer who, before last week, had declined to roll out riot police against strikers, as his predecessors did. His young lieutenants openly defend the interests of workers over their bosses and soft European ideals over hard American models of capitalism. Their rise to power inspired the spring strikes, and it's not clear just when the mood in the presidential Blue House started to turn. But last month, amid rising economic losses, the Chinese ambassador to Seoul remarked that Koreans now tell him their country "is more socialist than China."

Many Koreans were shocked to hear that from a representative of the largest socialist state. After all, South Korea's last president was also an ex-activist, but Kim Dae Jung and his aides were older, and won praise as leading free-market reformers after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Roh is now earning a quite different reputation--as a leading backslider--and his administration is clearly sensitive on this point. Citing Seoul's vow to open its theaters to Hollywood, Deputy Finance and Economy Minister Kwon Tae Shin warns, "If we break ...