The night the music refused to die

Back in the early 1980s, when Akbar S. Ahmed was contemplating whether Pakistan could be Japan, he might have missed an opportunity to focus on a more viable (although less desirable) East Asian role model for capitalist development.

- MAHIR ALI

Despite relentless military-dominated authoritarian rule peppered with bouts of martial law and brutal suppression of popular unrest, the economy grew in leaps and bounds through the 1960s and beyond, overtaking North Korea in the 1970s.

Even though the first president following the introduction of a recognisable form of bourgeois democracy in 1987 was a former general and a protege of the preceding dictator, ever since (unlike Pakistan) there has rarely been any serious threat of a return to military rule despite instances of political dysfunction and public dissatisfaction. Until this month.

President Yoon Suk Yeol's late-night announcement on December 3 was therefore greeted with shock within and outside South Korea. Yoon deployed military troops and police contingents to keep legislators out of parliament, but they managed to gather in sufficient numbers to formally rescind the measure.

Martial law lasted barely for six hours, which is probably a world record. To their credit, neither the soldiers nor the police seemed particularly keen to use violence against either the parliamentarians or the thousands of citizens who had gathered outside on a freezing night to resist their unpopular president's decree.