Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Korea's rural communities have been continuously hard hit by imperial exploitation, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. After the end of Japanese imperial rule, rural society was transformed into a peasant economy that was subordinated to the urban sector. As South Korean society turned from an agricultural to an industrial one, the rural population decreased from more than three-quarters to one-tenth of the whole population. Traditionally, the rural communities had been bastions of social conservatism, even becoming a reactionary electoral base for the military dictatorships that ruled Korea in the postwar years. However, under the impact of rapid industrialization and urbanization, rural communities faced natural disasters as well as government policies of low agricultural prices and social discrimination. Recently, the indiscriminate opening of domestic markets to transnational agricultural monopoly capital has further harmed rural Korea. Thus, most peasant households are riddled with huge debts and driven to the verge of complete bankruptcy. From the 1970s, farmers began to fight back for survival. In the initial stages of the movement, the Catholic and Protestant churches helped farmers organize. Not a few rural pastors and former student activists helped, in spite of threats and propaganda by government officials and local authorities. Often, activists were ... log in or subscribe to read full text