the number of civil servants by 200,000. The purges of the government apparatus, Park's triumph in the power struggles that followed the May coup, and his eventual election as civilian president in 1963 set the stage for the consolidation of his developmental regime. Legacy and evaluation The May 16 coup was the starting point of a series of military regimes that would last in some form until 1993. It also provided a precedent for the December Twelfth and the May Seventeenth coups of Chun Doo-hwan, Park's effective successor. With the development of a concerted opposition under Park and its evolution into the Gwangju Democratization Movement after 1980, the coup became the subject of much controversy, with many opponents of the military regime, such as Kim Dae Jung, looking back on the coup as an unjustified act of insurrectionary violence that toppled South Korea's first genuinely democratic government. Others point to the positive legacy of the coup, however, such as the 1994 Freedom House analysis which refers to the rapid industrialization that followed the coup and the "uncorrupt" nature of Park's rule. Name In official discourse before 1993, the coup was referred to as the "May 16 Revolution" (), but under the reforming non-military administration of erstwhile opposition leader Kim Young-sam, the event was re-designated as a coup or military insurrection (). Park had described the "May Revolution" as an "unavoidable ... act of self-defense by and for the Korean people", and in the historiography of the military regimes, the Revolution was presented as having been the result of the will of the nation as a whole. Kim Young-sam's re-designation of the event rejected this analysis, and was accompanied by the corresponding recognition of the April 1960 demonstrations as the "April Revolution". This reading was cemented in 1994–95 with curriculum reforms and the issuing of history textbooks applying the new labels. See also History of South Korea Third Republic of South Korea References Sources Military coups in South Korea Second Republic of Korea Third Republic of Korea Park Chung-hee 1961 in South Korea 1960s coups d'état and coup attempts Far-right politics in South Korea Political history of South Korea 1961 in politics May 1961 events in Asia