doubled; from December 1960 to April 1961, for example, the price of rice increased by 60 percent, while unemployment remained above 23%. Widespread food shortages resulted. Chang Myon, meanwhile, representing the Democratic Party's "New Faction", had been elected Prime Minister by the thin margin of three votes. Purges of Rhee's appointees were rendered ineffective in the public eye by Chang's manipulation of the suspect list to favour wealthy businessmen and powerful generals. Although Rhee had been removed and a democratic constitution instituted, the "liberation aristocrats" remained in power, and the worsening problems facing South Korea were proving insurmountable for the new government. The breakdown of South Korean politics and the administrative purges racking the army combined to demoralise and discourage the Military Security Command, which was charged with the maintenance of the chain of command in the military and weeding out insubordination. The reluctance of the Military Security Command to act allowed plans for a coup to unfold, and the problems of the Second Republic provided the context for the coup to be organised and realised. Factionalism in the military A direct factor in paving the way to the coup was factionalism in the South Korean army itself, one of the largest in the world at the time with 600,000 soldiers. The army had been given a distinctive identity by the dual Japanese and subsequently American training that many of its members had received, "combin[ing] the Japanese militarist ethos with the American spirit of technical efficiency to expand its mission from defending the country against communist aggression to that of helping it build itself into a modern nation". Reformist junior officers viewed the senior generals as having been corrupted by party politics, and the problem was compounded by a bottleneck in promotions caused by the consolidation of the positions of the senior commanders of the army after the end of its rapid expansion in the Korean War. The army was also divided along regional lines and between factions of officers who had graduated from the same school. Of the latter, the most influential were the competing factions who had graduated from the Japanese Military Academy and from the Manchurian officers' school at Xinjing respectively, while more lower-ranked officers were divided by their class of graduation from the post-liberation Korean Military Academy. Park Chung-hee had attended all three institutions, and was uniquely positioned to lead what would become the coup coalition,