Interview of Chun Woo-won, Grandson of Chun Doo-hwan: Only One in the Family to Apologize and Expose Irregularities

Albeit Belated... Offering a Flower: Chun Woo-won, the grandson of the late Chun Doo-hwan, offers a flower at a memorial ceremony commemorating the 43rd anniversary of the May 18 Democratization Movement at the May 18 National Cemetery in Buk-gu, Gwangju on May 17. Kwon Do-hyun, Gwangju

“I would like to ask the people who claim that the North Korean military was responsible for May 18 and that the South Korean soldiers never opened fire, ‘Have you ever met the victims or gone to Gwangju?’”

The voice of the young man in a white shirt with sleeves rolled up was firm. He continued, “I wonder how many benefits people who say things like that received from my grandfather.”

The person who labeled the people distorting and undermining the May 18 Democratization Movement as the “followers of his grandfather,” a dictator, was no other than Chun Woo-won (27, pictured), the grandson of former president Chun Doo-hwan who died in November 2021. Woo-won was the son of Chun Jae-yong, the former president’s second son.

Woo-won, who worked at an accounting firm in New York until two months ago, publicly referred to his grandfather as the May 18 mass murderer. He then came to South Korea, visited the May 18 National Cemetery in Gwangju and apologized on his knees. He was the first in Chun’s family to apologize for what happened in May 1980. Chun Doo-hwan had three sons and one daughter and eleven grandchildren including Woo-won.

The bold actions of the young man ignited several questions. Some saw him as a son seeking revenge against his father, who left his mother and married another woman, and others thought his actions were just a sudden act by a man who overdosed on drugs.

But the May 18 victims willingly embraced Woo-won and forgave him. Lee Gi-bong, the secretary-general of the May 18 Memorial Foundation said, “We felt enough sincerity (in his apology). Woo-won’s courage should be seen separately from the Chun family.”

We personally met Woo-won, who, since March 13, has been exposing the irregularities of his family living a luxurious life with his grandfather’s slush funds and apologizing claiming that the responsibility for the massacre on May 18 was with his grandfather.

The interview was conducted in the Kyunghyang Shinmun office in Jeong-dong, Jung-gu, Seoul on May 15, three days before the 43rd anniversary of the May 18 pro-democracy movement. The Kyunghyang Shinmun was the first Korean daily newspaper to interview Woo-won.

Q. Do you have dual citizenship?

A. I was born in Seoul in January 1996, and I moved to the United States when I was in the seventh grade. I volunteered for military service and served two years in the Republic of Korea. I went back to the States and studied business and economics in university. I worked in the strategic consulting department of an accounting firm in New York until March. I am a South Korean national with a U.S. green card.

Q. You suddenly came out into this world. Was there a reason?

A. Rather than have a special reason, I wanted to express at least once what I had always felt and kept in my heart over the course of my life. At first, I didn’t think it would cause such strong ripples. Forty-three years have passed since May 18, but my family has not changed their minds. I wanted to be free because ignoring it was too painful, and I also wanted to know more about the truth. I started the online broadcast right after I told my company that I would quit.

Q. Do you think your family has enough property to pay the fine (92.9 billion won) that your grandfather failed to pay?

A. In the past, there was no real-name system for financial activities and regulations were weak. I heard that they had a lot of unregistered bonds with an annual interest of 10% that could not be traced. The slush funds that were released to the public when my grandfather was still in power alone amounted to hundreds of billions of won. They probably have a lot of property overseas as well as in Korea. Since forty years have passed, I know that they have an astronomical amount of property.

Q. The public’s attention is on the existence of a secret safe full of cash in Yeonhui-dong.

A. I never personally saw the safe, and in fact that’s not even important. Grandpa ruled by giving people who were loyal economic rewards (money). I wanted to point out that system. There were really a lot of people who came to Yeonhui-dong, and they always received envelopes of cash. We once rented the gymnasium of a nearby school and held a badminton contest with dozens of people including our family, and when it was over, everyone took home envelopes.”

Q. Do you think your family is still hiding property in accounts under assumed names?

A. After I arrived in South Korea, I checked through the tax authorities. I found out for the first time that companies were established in my name and that the shares continued to shift around. I think there were about ten companies, and they were all domestic corporations. But there was no proper record of them.

Q. Is there a specific case that you confirmed?

A. There was a record of a 300-400 million won gift tax imposed on a young me in 2006. I asked for information on what the property I received was, but they didn’t have it. (A tax expert estimated that the property would be valued at around 1 billion won for a gift tax of this scale to be imposed.) The prosecutors and other government authorities that traced our family’s property at the time would have been aware of this, but they did not ask me anything. I don’t have much trust in public officials.

According to Chun Woo-won, the line of people visiting the former president never ended until the prosecutors conducted a search and seizure of his Yeonhui-dong home in 2013. The Chun family had a rule to gather in Yeonhui-dong every Sunday.

Woo-won said, “I think they brought the way of living in Cheongwadae into the (Yeonhui-dong) house exactly the way it used to be. The other people treated my grandfather like a god, and Grandpa was like a Mafia boss. He was an existence to be feared and made people uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to go because it felt like I was being tortured.”

The family rule began to weaken after Chun suffered from Alzheimer’s. Chun Woo-won said, “People stopped coming after my grandfather was diagnosed with dementia and the property was distributed.” He added, “There were some in our family who didn’t visit for months. After the money disappeared, the obedience system was broken.”

Q. Is it true that your grandfather suffered from dementia?

A. I served in the South Korean military from 2015 to 2017 and was discharged as a private first class. When I went to Yeonhui-dong when I was on leave, he couldn’t remember that I was in the military. Sometimes he would ask the same question a minute later. He couldn’t control his emotions and unlike usual, he would sometimes yell. Even when his golf video was released (Nov. 2019), in fact, his condition was very bad. I felt sorry seeing how nobody believed he suffered from dementia even though his symptoms were bad because he had lost the public’s trust.

Q. Did you attend your grandfather’s funeral?

A. I couldn’t because of COVID-19. I received news of his death when I was in the States, but emotionally, the impact was not that significant. Of all the things he used to say when he was alive, I remember him saying, “Wherever you go, work like crazy for the first one hundred days. Then you will be able to get some recognition.” But all the pictures taken with my grandmother and grandfather were staged.

Q. Was there a will?

A. It is so likely for him to leave a will (but I didn’t see it). Even if there was one, there is no way for me to know.

Q. What kind of person is your grandmother (Lee Soon-ja)?

A. She greeted me affectionately when I returned from the States. When I was studying, it cost quite a lot of money, but my grandmother supported me. I was grateful, but I had a hard time accepting the situation where she consistently lied (about the slush funds and about May 18). I’m sorry that people are blindly condemning her after the text message she sent me were released recently.

Chun Woo-won arrived in South Korea on March 28. After he was questioned by the police for his drug use, he visited Gwangju on March 31, apologized to the May 18 victims, and visited the graves. Many people sympathized with him as they watched him take off his jacket and wipe the tombstone of the May 18 victims. In a “May 18 awareness survey” of a thousand citizens recently conducted by the May 18 Memorial Foundation, 67.8% of the respondents viewed Chun Woo-won’s apology in a positive light. Only 11.7% were critical of it.

Q. The people welcomed your apology on May 18.

A. I only did what I should have done after putting it off all this time. I’m grateful that people accepted it positively.

Q. When did you find out that your grandfather came to power after violently suppressing the May 18 movement?

A. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time. It was frequently on the news, and I could feel it in the way people around me treated me. So I tried to find out about it as much as I could on the Internet. Just as people in Korea don’t all agree on May 18 even now, I intentionally tried to avoid stories that were not favorable to our family. But this time when I personally met the victims, I realized that they had been living in a hell-like world.

Q. You took off your jacket and wiped the tombstone of the victims.

A. I’ve never had much of an opportunity to visit a national cemetery, so I didn’t know what to do. I just thought (after looking at the dirty tombstone) that it would be good to wipe it with the best thing that I had. While I was wiping the stone I thought, “Is this right? What if I’m making a mistake?” I was grateful to the May 18 victims for giving me a chance to apologize.

Q. “The true father of democracy is all the people buried here.” Your words in the visitor’s book caught the public’s eye.

A. Really, I had nothing prepared. I found out only when I was there that I had to write in the visitor’s book. I just wrote what I had been feeling. Since it was the May 18 cemetery, the thoughts of the people who were brutally sacrificed didn’t leave my mind.

Q. Were you aware that in an interview with a conservative online media outlet in January 2019, your grandmother had said, “Who is the father of democracy (in the Republic of Korea)? I think it is my husband.”

A. I didn’t have my grandmother’s words in mind. It came out unconsciously. I compared my family, living a luxurious life while refusing to acknowledge the crime, with the victims of May 18, and I think I wrote it wondering, “How did someone like me end up all the way here, where patriots who really died fighting for democracy are laid?”

Q. Did you find out more about May 18 after your trip to Gwangju?

A. I read books and I also searched the Internet. I am looking for materials that can tell me about what really happened in Gwangju, and not stories siding with my family. I also saw a lot of pictures of the victims who died a brutal death.

Q. Your grandfather did not apologize to the May 18 victims when he was alive, and he did not admit his responsibility for the fires shot.

A. I think my grandfather once said, “I’m sorry for what happened in Gwangju,” but I think it was a show and not something he said because he was really sorry. He blamed other people because he didn’t want to be responsible. I think he always had this excuse, “to uphold the honor of the military.” I felt that he was wrong when I personally went to Gwangju.

Q. What do you want your family to do in the future?

A. If they read this interview, I wish they would stop hiding in the dark and come out into the light.

Chun Woo-won also had a message for the citizens. He said, “What surprised me this time was that there were a lot of people who didn’t know about May 18 even among people older than people, people over thirty. I agree that the Republic of Korea is indebted to May 18. I wish they would pay attention for even just thirty seconds as they watch the news (on the anniversary of May 18 this year).”

Chun, who said he had no plans to return to the States for the time being, recently donated his entire fortune of 50 million won, which he had saved up while working in New York, anonymously to over ten social welfare organizations nationwide, including May 18 organizations.