Some Confucian customs are receiving new stress, such as encouraging children to bow to their elders on New Year's Day
Such interference with the age-old traditions that are deeply held are part of the social engineering that Pak feels his people need. Although government spokesmen occasionally justify the reforms as being designed only at making the Koreans a more disciplined people, they also serve both to expand and demonstrate the regime's power and control. These features are evident in the accelerating Sae Maul Undong (New Community Movement), which now includes urban as well as rural restructuring. The Prime Minister recently hailed it as a program for improving "social discipline and . . . revitalizing the virtues of diligence, self-help, and cooperation." It is too early to tell how much progress has been made in these directions. Corruption, for instance, still appears in high political quarters. Nevertheless, Pak's ability to subject so many aspects of Korean life to his reforms clearly buttresses his political control. In the dozen years he has dominated Korea, Pak has been concerned fundamentally with reviving some modern approximation of the old Confucian order that was the fabric of Korean life and the means whereby Korean rulers through the centuries presided over public mores and maintained highly centralized power.
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