“We are so happy!” read one popular placard on another, “This is our country this is our justice.” Politicians across party lines acknowledged that it was the street protests throughout the country that compelled parliament to make a motion for impeachment. The March 11 “Celebration of Democracy” was a political Mardi Gras, with floats and costumes and women dancing under bright green electrified umbrellas.
On March 11, 2017, hundreds of thousands of Koreans rejoiced in downtown Seoul after the country’s parliament and constitutional court confirmed the impeachment of President Park on bribery and corruption charges. By this spring, Park’s support had fallen to 4 percent, and even that number might have been a statistical aberration. South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution was the culmination of twenty successive Saturday night rallies that brought out over 16 million people from a population of 51 million.
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A series of revelations ultimately led to arrests and jail time for Choi, Park, various ministers and associates of the former president, and, most astounding to Koreans, the “Crown Prince of Samsung,” Lee Jae-yong.
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Facts and gossip collided in the public sphere, placing “Choi Soon-sil gate” into the hands of South Korea’s parliament, courts, university campuses and classrooms, and free press-all loci of fear during the country’s dictatorship era, which ended only thirty years ago. The media also reported at the beginning of 2017 that the president had collaborated with her chief of staff and culture minister to create “The Blacklist”: a registry of nearly ten thousand filmmakers, writers, artists, and academics deemed “anti-government” who were denied state funding during President Park’s tenure. The scandal that became known as “Choi Soon-sil gate” centered on emerging stories about bribes that President Park received in return for favors to businesses, including one that catapulted an heir at Samsung (which constitutes almost 20 percent of the South Korean economy) into a position to succeed the empire’s throne. This Korean “Devil Wearing Prada” helped spark the Candlelight Revolution: a movement that brought millions to the streets and led to a rare-perhaps unprecedented-peaceful and democratic overthrow of a democratically elected national leader. (Park’s father-the president of South Korea a half-century ago-and mother were murdered in separate incidents in the 1970s.) Without any credentials or authorization, Choi had advised the president on numerous policies and illegally colluded with big businesses such as Samsung. I armed myself with a coffee-stained dictionary, and together with the rest of the country I learned about a woman named Choi Soon-sil, confidante of former South Korean president Park Geun-hye and daughter of a notorious shaman who had helped a younger Park converse with her parents from beyond the grave.
Within weeks, however, these pictures and many others were flooding the living room of the apartment on the Yonsei University campus in Seoul where my family had moved a month earlier. My Korean is far from fluent, and the pictures smacked of a celebrity scandal, so I didn’t pay much attention at first. In October 2016, images of a middle-aged woman wearing white-rimmed, designer sunglasses started to pop up all over South Korean TV. Alexis Dudden ▪ Fall 2017įamilies celebrate Park Geun-hye's impeachment, March 2017 (courtesy of Alexis Dudden) South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution was the culmination of a sustained protest movement that brought out over 16 million people-almost a third of the country’s population.
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