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Article Excerpt
Do not let my death be in vain
--Chun Tae-il
ON NOVEMBER 13, 1970, IN SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, CHUN TAE-IL, A 23-YEAR-OLD garment worker, set himself on fire at Chongghye-Chun, the country's largest textile and garment wholesale district, to protest the subhuman working conditions in the sweatshops and the government's lack of enforcement of even the most rudimentary rights of workers. The district was comprised of the Peace Market, Tong-il Shopping Center, and Donghwa Market, with approximately 800 sweatshops and an estimate of 20,000 workers. Most of the workers were young females in their early teens. The working conditions were beyond description: mostly young female workers were laboring in a small two-story compartment filled with material and sewing machines. The ceilings were so low that standing up was barely possible and the air was saturated with fabric dust. During boom seasons they had to work overtime, almost around the clock, with no extra pay; however, they had to endure drastic cuts in work hours or even layoffs when business was slow. In addition, the pay was far below poverty level. Given these terrible working conditions, many of the new hires tended to quit within several months and those who survived eventually became sick with pneumonia and were forced to quit. Although labor unions did exist in Korea at that time, most were management- and government- controlled entities attached to large corporations that did little in actuality to protect the interest of workers. Sweatshops, owned and operated by small family-owned firms, did not even have puppet unions.
Employed at one of these sweatshops since 1965, Chun Tae-il developed sympathy for these young female workers, and struggled to improve working conditions by petitioning factory owners, organizing rudimentary forms of labor unions such as the Society of Fools and Samdong [Three Buildings] Friendship Association, petitioning the Ministry of Labor, providing information so workers' life conditions were reported in major daily newspapers of that country. In spite of small victories and the ensuing euphoria, all these efforts ultimately failed to improve working conditions. Alarmed by his efforts, the owners tightened their control over the sweatshop workers by using fear, which rapidly eroded their enthusiasm. At this juncture, Chun prepared his final act.
A public demonstration on November 13, 1970 was organized by Chun with the support of his friends and followers. A burning ritual of the country's Labor Standards Law was planned for the day as a symbolic protest against the subhuman working conditions in the sweatshops and the government's indifference and neglect in enforcing the basic rights of workers guaranteed them only in letters. Unfortunately, the protest plan had already leaked out to the police and the owners of the sweatshops at the markets. The owners kept many of their workers from attending the protest; police and security guards prevented access to the protest site; and the 500 workers who had managed to gather were forcibly separated by the police and directed back to the factories. With the planned protest on the brink of cancellation due to interference, Chun poured a can of flammable paint thinner prepared for the event all over his body and was set on fire by an unsuspecting friend. Then he took to the street, desperately chanting, "Observe the Labor Standards Law!" "We workers are not machines! No work on Sundays!" "Stop enslaving the workers!" Engulfed in flames, Chun collapsed on the street. People--both other protesters and the bystanders alike, shocked at the scene--stood still; they could not think of putting out the flames. A moment later, the dispersed workers and bystanders started to gather around him. A copy of the country's Labor Standards Law was thrown onto his burning body, ironically accomplishing the aborted burning ritual: the law burning together with the worker it was supposedly written to protect. A newspaper reporter, given advance notice by Chun, arrived later at the marketplace, rushed to him. "Do not let my death be in vain" was the only decipherable words coming from his mouth. Those were the same last words said to his mother and friends while on his deathbed. Chun died in a hospital about 9 hours later, surrounded by his mother and friends (Cho, 2003 [1983]).
Chun's suicide was apparently a form of protest. This unusual use of suicide as protest--I use the term "suicide protest" to indicate it being a form of protest by means of suicide--has occurred more often than one would expect in modern societies throughout the world. (1) In South Korea alone, a total of 107 protesters, including Chun, died by suicide protest from 1970 to 2004. Suicide protest was not limited to Korea. According to a study, about one-half of all 133 incidents of "suicide by burning," reported in The Times of London or the New York Times from 1790 to 1971, were "political suicide"; all of these political suicides have occurred since 1963 (Crosby, Rhee, and Holland, 1991). Another study reports a total of 533 incidents of self-immolation having occurred during the period from 1963 to 2002 across 36 countries, with three-quarters in India, Vietnam, and South Korea (Biggs, 2005).
What made so many people commit this highly unusual form of suicide? What did they want to achieve with their suicide protest? Notwithstanding the unexpected and counterintuitive surge of suicide protest in the second half of the twentieth century across countries, these incidents were rarely subject to systematic scholarly study. When studied, much of the emphasis was placed on the act of suicide rather than the motive for protest (Wood, 1980). Suicide protests were rarely analyzed from a perspective of social movement and collective action. Consequently, they were seen as being issues with more psychiatric bearing than that of collective action. Suicide protest was suggested by some as resulting from psychological disorders (Scully and Hutcherson, 1983). Others viewed it as an outlet for expressing inflammatory emotions or as a path to a divine state or means for self-glorification after death (Ashton, 1980). Yet others attempted to classify personality types that might be prone to committing self-immolation (Crosby et al., 1991). As Park (1994) aptly summarized, this "psychopathological account of suicide stresses unconscious or irrational elements in individual psyches, maintaining that suicides are caused by some impulsive 'psychodynamics' stemming ultimately from 'depression.'" (66).
Recent studies show that the psychopathological interpretation of these incidents of self-immolation is not quite empirically supported (Park, 1994; Biggs, 2005). For example, Singh and his associates (Singh et al., 1998) investigated 22 survivors of self-immolation in India and found only one incident of psychopathological symptoms. Likewise, Biggs (2005), after examining a total of 533 incidents of self-immolation between 1963 and 2002, reports little incidents of self-immolation resulting from psychological disturbances such as the pursuit of vanity or escape from personal failings. He concludes that the "suicidal tendencies almost never lead to self-immolation.... Self-immolation is rarely explained by suicidal tendencies" (201). Park (1994) criticizes the psychopathological approach as neglecting the actor's beliefs and values, and more importantly, "the significance of their suicides as political acts" (67).
Instead, recent studies emphasize the political aspect of suicide protest (Jorgensen-Earp, 1987; Uehling, 2000). Thus Park (1994), through analyzing the wills, notes, and other materials left by 17 self-immolators in Korea, contends that those self-immolated protesters had strong and uncompromising personal beliefs in right and wrong, had a great sense of sympathy for the oppressed, possessed a sense of moral urgency for immediate action, and viewed themselves as the moral conscience of the country, the rightful representative of oppressed people, and agents of history. Accordingly, Park views self-immolation as "a means of demonstrating personal integrity" and "a serious, sincere gesture of commitment to a cause" (67). Likewise, Biggs (2005) contend that most incidents of self-immolation were geared toward "advance[ing] their cause" (196) by "appealing to others and inciting potential sympathizers" (201). Self-immolation was "a costly signal which conveys information: the depth of the individual's sense of injustice on behalf of the collective cause."
Despite the belated yet welcome recognition of the political dimension associated with suicide protest, its strategic aspect remains largely unspecified. As contemporary scholarship on collective action and social movement amply documents, all protests are purposive and goal-oriented. What purposes or goals did the suicide protesters have on their mind when they committed this unusual form of protest? Also, how did they think their action would help achieve these goals? If suicide protest is an appeal to others and a way to advance the cause, as Biggs speculates, precisely how did they imagine their mostly solitary action of suicide protest as helping to advance the cause? For example, critical mass theory postulates that an early contribution by the pioneering critical mass has the capacity to induce a bandwagon effect by making a collective project more successful and thereby more "profitable" to potential followers (Marwell and Oliver, 1993). Did the suicide protesters sacrifice their only lives because they believed their action alone would sufficiently enhance the prospect of success of a movement? If not, then what strategic value did the suicide protesters see in their action, which would almost certainly cost them their lives?
This paper is an attempt to explore this largely neglected question concerning the strategic dimension of suicide protest. Contemporary social movement theories, especially the social-psychological framing theory of mobilization, postulate that for individual actors to be mobilized to participate in a social movement, their hearts and minds must be first mobilized in line with the worldviews of the social movement (Snow et al., 1986). This task of "micromobilization" of hearts and minds consists of persuading potential supporters of the presence of a problem (diagnosis framing), presenting ways or means to solve the problem (prognosis framing), and the actual motivating of supporters to take action for resolution of the problem (motivational framing). In a similar vein, Klandermans (1984) argues that the actual mobilization of people's support and participation is proceeded by what he called consensus mobilization ("a process through which a social movement tries...
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