But the widening scandal won’t end there. Last week prosecutors were following a trail of corruption from Seoul to Switzerland. Along with Roh–who last month tearfully confessed to amassing a $650 million slush fund during his presidency-police interrogated executives of 36 leading South Korean corporations on suspicion of giving kickbacks to win government and military contracts. The investigation could snare other top politicians. Opposition leader and onetime dissident Kim Dae Jung has already admitted taking $2.6 million from Itoh during his 1992 presidential race. His rival, President Kim Young Sam, has denied accepting “a single cent”; but Kim’s political party has said it benefited from $100 million received from Roh, though it hasn’t specified how it used the funds. President Kim, attending Japan’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, tried to wrest something positive from the wreckage, calling it “a breakthrough to completely sever close links between politics and business.”

That may require taking a sledgehammer to the modern state. South Korea’s economy-now the 11th largest in the world–is built on a solid bedrock of government patronage and corporate expansionism. When military leaders seized control in 1961, they set about transforming the country from an agricultural to an industrial society. In the process they fostered a culture of corruption in which bribes to bureaucrats became the standard payback for tax breaks, soft loans and plum projects. Today, South Korea is a tangle of private and public-sector interests, dominated by 30 chaebol (conglomerates), which account for 75 percent of all industrial output. President Kim has cut red tape to make it easier for entrepreneurial companies to compete; new banking laws now require accountholders to use their names instead of aliases. That helped bring Roh’s illicit millions to light.

But will it bring down South Korea’s governing elite? “The old political system is finished,” insists Park Kye Dong, the young National Assemblyman who broke the scandal in mid-October. The impetus for reform comes from former dissidents–many of them jailed under generals like Roh–who have joined Park’s Democratic Party. President Kim, who is limited to one term that ends in 1998, may try to recruit Park and others into his “new generation” bent on “clean politics.” That would be indeed be progress. Kim’s predecessors have all been exiled, deposed, assassinated, sent to a monastery–or, most recently, tossed into prison, awaiting trial.