The Economist 20161001 ed79b8

The Economist October 1st 2016 Asia 29
Protest in South Korea
Death by water
cannon
SEOUL
The violent demise ofa demonstrator
touches a chord
NOTHER has been killed like this,
“A again,” lamented the mother of Lee
Han-yeol, who was fatally injured by a
tear-gas canister in 1987 during a demonstration
against the military regime of
Chun Doo-hwan. She was amongmany attending
the funeral of Baek Nam-gi, a 69-
year-old South Korean activist and farmer.
Mr Baek was knocked over by a blast from
a police watercannon duringa demonstration
last year; after ten months in a coma,
he died on September 25th.
Clashes between demonstrators and
police have a special resonance in South
Korean politics. The death of Mr Lee became
one of the defining moments of the
country’s transition to democracy. As he
lay in a coma, fellow students circulated a
photograph ofhim, bloodied and slumped
in the arms ofa friend. Almost 30 years on,
protests, frequent and raucous, are still a
big part of public life. But just how far it is
legitimate for protests to go, and how police
should respond, are still matters of
fierce debate.
Mr Baek’s death struck a chord in part
because he epitomised the dogged activism
that helped to put an end to the authoritarian
order that endured from the
second world war until the late 1980s. He
first protested against Park Chung-hee,
president from 1962 to 1979 and father of
South Korea’s current, democratically
elected president, Park Geun-hye. He was
twice expelled from university in Seoul in
the 1970s for his dissent.
At one point, when a warrant was put
out for his arrest, he found refuge in a cathedral,
and subsequently spent five years
as a monk. The law did eventually catch up
with him: he spent time in prison for violating
the strict restrictions on political activity
imposed by martial law. He was so
committed to the cause that he named one
of his children Minjuhwa, which means
“democratisation”.
Even after a series of former opposition
figures were freely elected president (starting
in 1992), Mr Baekcontinued to join protests,
in support of another cause dear to
many Korean hearts: rice farming. The
protest during which Mr Baek was injured
was intended to persuade the new President
Park to keep her promise to maintain
huge subsidies and an artificially high
price for rice, which had fallen thanks to
free-trade agreements, but is still double
the world price. At least 68,000 farmers,
unionists and other activists (130,000, according
to the organisers) faced off against
20,000-odd police (the authorities typically
aim for an overwhelming police presence
at big demonstrations).
The police shot water laced with pepper
spray at protesters from their cannons,
and continued to blast water at Mr Baek
even as he lay on the ground. A photograph
of the scene was shared widely on
social media, prompting outrage. Many of
the protesters, some of whom carried iron
bars, were also violent: 100 policemen
were injured and 40-odd police buses
damaged.
When two farmers objecting to early
plans to open the rice market a little died
after a battle with police in 2005, the president
of the day, Roh Moo-hyun, a former
human-rights advocate, sacked senior officers
and apologised. Ms Park, a conservative,
has not apologised for Mr Baek’s treatment.
The police said apologisingfor every
injury was “inappropriate”; they have repeatedly
requested an autopsy (a court ordered
one on September 28th), presumably
in the hope of being exonerated. The
UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of assembly
this yearnoted “a slow, creepinginclination”
in South Korea to erode it; the
use of water cannons to target lone protesters,
he said, was “difficult to justify”.
Im Byeong-do, a blogger, says that
South Korea’s democratic governments
still view demonstrations as a challenge to
their authority. Han Sang-gyun, a union
leaderwho helped organise the rallyin November,
was held accountable by the
courts for the violence that ensued and
sentenced to five years in prison—an
unusually harsh penalty. As democracy
has flourished, the nature of protests has
shifted. Candlelit rallies, for example, have
become common. Yet those too are still often
treated as riots, says Mr Im—and that
pressure may in turn be hardening the culture
ofprotest. 7
Mould-breaking politicians (1)
Going into battle
TOKYO
A new governortakes on vested
interests, up to a point
IN HER first two months on the job Yuriko
Koike, Tokyo’s governor, has ruffled
many feathers. She began before she was
even elected, by running without the endorsement
of the Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP), of which she is a member but which
supported another candidate. Since taking
office she has revealed that the site to
which the city’s main fishmarket is supposed
to move has not been properly decontaminated;
she is banning her staff
from working past 8pm in the name of
“life-work balance” and she has declared
war on financial waste and corruption—
taking the lead by pledging to halve her
own salary. The hallmarkofhertenure, she
says, will be “major change” to the way the
city is run.
In fact, it is a major change simply having
someone like her as governor—mayor,
in effect, of Tokyo prefecture, with a population
of 13.6m and an economy roughly
the size of Canada’s. Not only is she a
woman (unlike 87% of Japanese parliamentarians).
She is also neither a political
dynast (unlike five of the past seven prime
ministers), nor a party stalwart. That
played to her advantage in the election,
but, alas, will limit her clout when taking
on the old-boys’ networkofcity politics, as
she has promised to do.
Pledges to take on vested interests tend
to be popular in Japan. Fully 85% of Tokyoites
approve of Ms Koike’s handling of the
fishmarket issue, forinstance. But changing
her pay and her staff’s working hours is
one thing; shaking things up outside her
austere, cavernous offices in north-western
Tokyo is quite another.
Ms Koike may well be able to rein in the
rapidly rising budget for the 2020 Olympics,
which Tokyo will host. And she
seems likely to triumph in the row about
the fishmarket, although it has infuriated
developers and brought her into conflict
with Shintaro Ishihara, a former governor
who is being blamed for the failure to decontaminate.
But she will struggle to eliminate
incestuous practices, such as amakudari,
or “descent from heaven”, the system
by which senior bureaucrats glide into
cushy jobs in one of the many public or
private bodies affiliated with the city government
after retirement, earning as much
as 10m yen ($100,000) a year. “She is in a
bind,” says Koichi Nakano of Sophia University.
“She needs popular support and
that means looking unafraid of vested interests,
but if she continues like this she 1