By Deauwand Myers
Recently, President Yoon Suk Yeol dismissed Korea’s umbrella intelligence agency’s (National Intelligence Service, or NIS) powerful head, Director Kim Kyou-hyun, and oddly, Director Kim’s two chief deputies.
Dismissing the three top officials of any country’s defense or intelligence services is unheard of for modern, advanced democracies and world powers.
Consider Chinese President Xi and his complete reshuffling of four of the seven members of the nation’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Former Premier Li Keqiang, an economist who spoke fluent English, was China’s top economic official for a decade, and was the most prominent among high-ranking government officials within the Standing Committee being unceremoniously replaced; sadly, he recently died of a heart attack.
Li’s fate was succinctly explained in an Associated Press article late last year, entitled “China’s Premier Li Keqiang dropped in leadership shuffle,” in which the article states, “…Li was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu era’s consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence.”
In 2023, Xi continued his dismissals and purgings by firing and sometimes imprisoning a fairly large group of powerful government officials in a very short amount of time, with little explanation thereafter. A few examples: China’s National Defense Minister General Li Shangfu, Rocket Force (China’s version of the United States’ Strategic Command, an umbrella defense agency tasked with integrating and coordinating the United States’ nuclear arsenal), Commander Li Yuchao, along with his deputy Liu Guangbin, and a former deputy Zhang Zhenzhong, and most surprisingly, Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
Ego, and a lack of contemplative vision mediated through vigorous public debate, are some of the many problems with true autocracies. Before Xi, governing in China worked as a kind of consensus of the few, an oligarchy of sorts. Oligarchies are little more than councils of the powerful and elite within a subset of the highest echelons within a society wherein they parse apart a set of dictums by which a nation-state is run.
Even this is better than what Xi has materialized: All power accrued to himself and all heads not only subordinate to him, but aggregable to his points of view.
President Yoon’s administration is by no means a Xi-style government. But the hallmarks of an anti-democratic aura do permeate Yoon’s ousting of so many officials at so high a level at so important a government office at so critical a juncture in geopolitical machinations.
North Korea (or the DPRK, the Democratic Republic of Korea) has been steadily developing a better and more reliable nuclear weapons program and the delivery systems therein to, at least in the Kim Regime’s mindset, secure its survival. North Korea, after many failed attempts, has successfully launched a spy satellite into low Earth orbit, and bragged that it has now been able to capture images of the United States’ and Korea’s sensitive military and governmental installations.
Xi’s decapitation of the higher ranks within defense sectors of the omnipresent Chinese government has, and this I say with a grain of salt, some merit. Of all sectors within the Chinese government, graft, corruption, and rank bribery are par for the course, and have been for generations within the Chinese military. He also uses his corruption purge as a means to silence and subvert real or perceived political enemies. Good for him; everyone needs a hobby.
What Yoon and his political allies should recognize is this: Even by half, emulating this behavior is disconcerting for any observer witnessing it, and it poses more questions than answers.
Again, in advanced democracies, of which Korea is one, this level of dismissal of high-ranking defense officials is unheard of. It looks like something sinister, and raises far more questions than it answers. Transparency, for one, is key. That is, Korean citizens and the international community have no idea why Yoon would dismiss so many officials so swiftly. We understand Xi and his accrual of all power to him. That’s autocracy 101. But what on earth are the reasons that Yoon, halfway through his only term, would need to uproot so many top officials within the NIS without a satisfactory explanation?
The NIS and its iterations beforehand have always been a place of, shall we say, dark political implications. But without a full-throated transparent explanation, explicating why Yoon decimated such an important segment of his national security apparatus, policy wonks like myself are asking, in dark and muted tones: Why? Power? Xi light?
Palace intrigue happens even in the most transparent democracies. I’m not naive. But considering the fairly recent, dark history of Korea’s nascent democracy: Presidents Park and Chun, for example, I’m apprehensive.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He is an educator and writer-at-large. ory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul.
Yoon's costly palace intrigue
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04.12.2023
By Deauwand Myers Recently, President Yoon Suk Yeol dismissed Korea’s umbrella intelligence agency’s (National Intelligence Service, or NIS) powerful head, Director Kim Kyou-hyun, and oddly, Director Kim’s two chief deputies.
Dismissing the three top officials of any country’s defense or intelligence services is unheard of for modern, advanced democracies and world powers.
Consider Chinese President Xi and his complete reshuffling of four of the seven members of the nation’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Former Premier Li Keqiang, an economist who spoke fluent English, was China’s top economic official for a decade, and was the most prominent among high-ranking government officials within the Standing Committee being unceremoniously replaced; sadly, he recently died of a heart attack.
Li’s fate was succinctly explained in an Associated Press article late last year, entitled “China’s Premier Li Keqiang dropped in leadership shuffle,” in which the article states, “…Li was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu era’s consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party’s ruling seven-member Standing Committee with........
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