Korean President Park Geun-hye: biography and photos

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

What is the name of the President of Korea (meaning the Republic of Korea, or South Korea), who is in power today? Her name is Park Geun-hye, and she is the daughter of the third president of this country and longtime military dictator Park Chung-hee. He ruled the country for almost two decades in the 60s and 70s of the last century.

A few words about Park Geun-hye's father

The future President of the Republic of Korea, Park Chung-hee, was a peasant son trained to be an elementary school teacher. After three years of teaching practice, he realized the further unpromising nature of teaching and in 1940 volunteered for the Japanese army. He served in Manchuria, participated in battles against communist partisans (among which, by the way, there were many Koreans, such as, for example, the future first president of North Korea, Kim Il Sung). Apparently, he fought not for fear, but for conscience, as he was honored to study at the Japanese military academy and left it in 1942 as a lieutenant with a Japanese name.

Korean President Park Chung-hee never spoke about his service as an officer in the Japanese army, and journalists who tried to understand this period of hislife, expelled from the country. When the year 1945 came and the Japanese Empire was defeated, Pak did not at all make hara-kiri for himself, following the example of many of his Japanese colleagues, but quickly joined the newly created army of South Korea.

And here another amazing episode occurred in his life. In 1948, Park was involved in a communist uprising in Yesu province, which was brutally suppressed with the support of the Americans. What brought the young and promising officer into the ranks of the communist underground is unknown. Maybe peasant genes played a role, maybe a brother who was a communist influenced, now we are unlikely to know.

Although several thousand Yesu uprising participants were killed, Park was personally pardoned by President Lee Seung-man. It was such a refined Asian form of punishment. The offender is defiantly pardoned, but he has only two options left: either commit suicide or join his former enemies (after all, his former comrades-in-arms will no longer accept him into their ranks, considering him a traitor). And Pak preferred to become not an imaginary, but a real traitor. He gave the authorities a whole list of military men known to him who sympathized with the Communists, including his own brother, for which he was accepted into the military counterintelligence service.

Childhood and youth of the current President of Korea

Park Geun-hye was born in 1952. She became Park Chung Hee's first child born to his second wife Yook Yeon Soo (his first marriage was childless).

It was a difficult time for Korea. Its two parts are communist North Korea withcapital in Pyongyang and bourgeois South Korea with its capital in Seoul - met each other in a truly mortal battle. And this is by no means an exaggeration. After all, during the so-called Korean War, the opposing sides took Seoul twice and Pyongyang once, that is, a fiery shaft of war swept through the entire country from north to south at least three times in two years.

It was in such conditions that our heroine's early childhood passed. Her father was an active participant in this fratricidal war, making a dizzying military career on it: he advanced from captain to brigadier general and commander.

His family lived in Seoul since 1953, where Park Geun-hye graduated from high school in 1970. When the girl was seven years old, the so-called April Revolution of 1960 took place in the country, as a result of which President Lee Syngman was overthrown, and a year later her father came to power in the country as head of the military junta. Since 1963, he has been at the helm as the popularly elected president of Korea.

His eldest daughter, Park Geun-hye, attended Seoul University after high school, earning a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering in 1974. The choice of her speci alty is eloquent evidence of the changes that have taken place in the country during the reign of her father. South Korea is becoming a world leader in the field of electronics, and the corresponding speci alties are becoming the most prestigious and in demand.

Park Geun-hye enters the University of Grenoble to continue her education, but tragic events at home force her to return to her homeland.

Murder of Yook Yong Soo's mother

On August 15, 1974, the President of Korea and his wife were present at the National Theater at a ceremony marking the 29th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese rule. During Park Chung Hee's speech, a certain Moon Se Gwan, a Japanese citizen of Korean origin and probably a North Korean agent, opened fire on him with a gun. He missed the president, but mortally wounded his wife. Characteristic of Park Chung Hee is his behavior after the incident: when the dying Yook Yeon Soo was carried off the stage, he continued his performance.

After this assassination attempt, Park began to communicate only with a limited circle of people, and Park Geun-hye, who returned to the country, began to accompany him on official events, including foreign visits, playing the role of "first lady".

Murder of father

Korean President Park Chung-hee is considered the creator of the so-called Korean economic miracle. During the twenty years of his reign, the country's GDP increased nine times. However, in the early 1970s, he established a regime of the most brutal personal dictatorship in the country, called the Yusin period, which means "restoration." The name was chosen with a clear allusion to the analogy with the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the second half of the 19th century.

Actually, the regime that was then established in South Korea was not much different from the one established in his country by North Korean President Kim Il Sung. Suffice it to say that all gatherings of citizens were banned in the country, except for weddings and funerals. We don't know if Park Geun-hye had any influence on her father during the five years she lived in the country as first lady. Most likely not, she was too young and inexperienced for this.

Naturally, the number of those dissatisfied with the dictatorial rule of Pak grew, and this discontent already embraced representatives of the country's top leadership. On October 26, 1979, at a private dinner at the presidential residence, a sharp conflict arose between him and the head of Korean intelligence, Kim Chae-gyu, as a result of which the latter shot Pak himself and the head of his bodyguard.

Twenty years of reflection

According to the official website of the President of the Republic of Korea, Park Geun-hye spent the next 18 years after the murder of her father "in quiet contemplation and serving the disadvantaged."

It is known that in the early 80s she founded her own foundation, bearing the name of her deceased mother and funding education programs, and also published her own newspaper. She has been a member of the Korean Writers Association since 1994.

Park Geun Hye has also been active in her own education. In 1981 she completed a course of study at one of the Korean Christian colleges, in 1987 she received a doctorate in literature from the China University of Culture in Taiwan, in 2008 she received a doctorate in political science from the National University of Busan (South Korea) and a doctorate from from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and in 2010, a PhD in political science from Sogang University (also SouthKorea).

Focusing so much on self-cultivation resulted in Park Geun-hye never being married and having no children.

Return to politics

It took place on a wave of dissatisfaction with former politicians after the financial and economic crisis in the Southeast Asian countries in 1997. In 1998, by-elections to the National Assembly of South Korea were held, in which Park Geun-hye was elected to parliament. Then, within 10 years, she was elected three times as a Member of Parliament in the same constituency for the Great Country Party, which originates from the Democratic Republican Party, created by her father in 1963. For two years in the mid-2000s, she led this party and achieved significant electoral success.

In 2011, the party rebranded and changed its name to "Senuri", i.e. "Party of New Horizons". Its de facto leader was Park Geun-hye, who led the party to victory in the parliamentary elections in 2012. At the end of that year, she was elected president of the country by a margin of 3.5 percent over her rival Moon Jae-in. With her election, the period of rule in the country of liberal presidents ended, and a conservative woman president came to power, seeking to reduce taxes for businesses, reduce the regulatory role of the state in the economy, and establish enhanced law and order (well, remember her famous father!).