May Coup (South Korea)
Major-General Park Chung-hee (front center) and soldiers tasked with effecting the coup.
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| Date | May 16, 1961 |
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| Location | Seoul, South Korea |
| Also known as |
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| Participants |
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| Outcome |
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| May Coup | |
| Hangul | 5·16 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | |
| Revised Romanization | O ilryuk gunsa jeongbyeon |
| McCune–Reischauer | O ilryuk kunsa chŏngbyŏn |
The May 16 coup (Hangul: 5.16 군사정변; Hanja: 五一六軍事政變; RR: O-illyuk gunsa-jeongbyeon) was a military coup d'état in South Korea in 1961, organized and carried out by Park Chung-hee and his allies who formed the Military Revolutionary Committee, nominally led by Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-yong after the latter's acquiescence on the day of the coup. The coup rendered powerless the democratically elected government of Yun Bo-seon and ended the Second Republic, installing a reformist military Supreme Council for National Reconstruction effectively led by Park, who took over as Chairman after General Chang's arrest in July.
The coup was instrumental in bringing to power a new developmentalist elite and in laying the foundations for the rapid industrialization of South Korea under Park's leadership, but its legacy is controversial for the suppression of democracy and civil liberties it entailed, and the purges enacted in its wake. Termed the "May 16 Revolution" by Park and his allies, "a new, mature national debut of spirit", the coup's nature as a "revolution" is controversial and its evaluation contested.
The background to the coup can be analysed both in terms of its immediate context, and the broader setting of the development post-liberation South Korea. While the Second Republic presented South Korea with a singularly problematic economic and political climate which encouraged a military intervention, the direct roots of the coup stretch back to the late Rhee period, and more recent historians such as Yong-Sup Han argue that the frequently recurring image of the coup as an inevitable direct response purely to the vagaries of a new regime paralyzed by endemic instability is over-simplistic.
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