May 16 coup

The May 16 military coup d'état () 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 Prime Minister Chang Myon and President Yun Posun, 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 Military 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 in terms of the development of post-liberation South Korea. Although the singularly problematic economic and political climate of the Second Republic encouraged a military intervention, the roots of the coup go back to the late Rhee period. Historians like Yong-Sup Han argue that the common view of the coup as caused solely by the vagaries of a new regime paralyzed by instability is too simplistic. From 1948, South Korea was governed by President Syngman Rhee, an anti-Communist who used the Korean War to consolidate a monopoly on political power in the republic. Rhee represented the interests of a conservative ruling class, the so-called "liberation aristocrats" who had risen to positions of influence under American occupation. These "liberation aristocrats" formed the bulk of the political class, encompassing both Rhee's supporters and his rivals in the Democratic Party, which advanced a vision of society broadly similar to his own.