Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Hashflu/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
SOUTH KOREAN PRESIDENT Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in South Korea last night, claiming that the opposition Democratic Party was working with North Korea in order to undermine him.
Yoon was likely reacting to political scandals involving the Democratic Party aiming to block the national budget, as well as impeach him. This has particularly been the case after a scandal involving political broker Myung Tae-kyun.
At present, the South Korean legislature has voted down Yoon’s declaration of martial law, with 190 of 300 lawmakers making their way into the South Korean parliament to vote despite military presence. Though Yoon has to approve this voting down of martial law, so far, Yoon has stated that he does not intend to do so, and the military has withdrawn from the legislature. Even so, there have been some claims of arrest teams sent for opposition party politicians.
It is unclear why Yoon sought to declare martial law, with the event likely to add momentum to impeachment proceedings against him. It is possible that Yoon miscalculated and acted without the support of the military or sufficient political backing to make what could be understood as a coup take place successfully.
For Taiwan, the specter of martial law, as well as scenes of parliamentary aides tussling with military officers in the legislature, are bound to lead to strong reactions. Still, much has been made online of reactions by deep greens who praised Yoon’s actions, and suggested that the Lai administration should similarly declare martial law in order to root out the political influence of the KMT. After all, the KMT has also sought to block the national budget throughout the course of the current legislative session, and can be understood as acting as a fifth column in the Taiwanese political arena as a proxy of the PRC, inclusive of KMT legislators leaking confidential military documents to China, aiming to undercut defense-related legislation, or blunting legal punishments for military treason.
Yoon Suk-yeol. Photo credit: – 대한민국 대통령실/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
The Lai administration has expressed concern over events in South Korea. But the DPP legislative caucus’s social media account on Threads felt a need to respond to these mostly online reactions from deep greens through a statement emphasizing that it was the KMT who declared martial law during the authoritarian period and that the DPP opposed echoes of this history in today’s South Korea. This occurred after a poorly thought-out post from the DPP legislative caucus account expressing support for South Korea’s declaration of martial law, presumably by a social media manager who thought there was genuinely a North Korean threat. The post reflects badly on the DPP and perhaps reflects broader lack of understanding of regional politics in the party.
The DPP is probably cautious of such claims being weaponized by the KMT, which is likely to occur nonetheless. It was indeed the KMT that once kept Taiwan in what was then the world’s longest martial law period.
But the DPP would be unlikely to declare martial law. To begin with, it took many years for the DPP to move to take action against Chinese spying or United Front efforts in Taiwan, cautious as it was of the accusation that it was acting as the KMT did in the past, and simply seeking to punish political opponents. Even now, in the present, the KMT aims to freeze the Constitutional Court, and strip powers from other branches of government to grant this to the legislature–and the Lai administration’s hands were tied through such actions, because the Lai administration sought to maintain the appearance of restraint.
Yet one will likely see the battle between two different spins on current events in South Korea going forward, with the KMT attempting to allege that the DPP has parallels to the Yoon administration seeing as the DPP has attacked the KMT for close relations to China much as the Democratic Party was accused of ties to South Korea–ironically in spite of the KMT being the former authoritarian party and, in this way, more analogous to Yoon’s right-wing People Power Party. This would prove another case of a former authoritarian party appropriating the history of democratization to deploy as part of efforts to undermine democratic institutions, such as with the KMT’s current attempts to freeze the Constitutional Court or otherwise undermine the fundamental balance of powers.
While overt ties of solidarity between South Korea and Taiwan have been relatively sparse in the decade, it is to be expected that civil society groups such as those active in the Bluebird Movement will probably move to counter such pan-Blue narratives by highlighting ties between Taiwan’s democracy and South Korea’s democracy movements as part of the “Third Wave of Democracy”. Events such as the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and some of the most notable protest movements of Taiwan’s authoritarian period were relatively close historically. Paradoxically, this proves a way in which such events are still very much politically relevant, close to five decades on.