Syngman Rhee
On July 20, 1948, Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea in the South Korean presidential election, 1948 with 92.3% of the vote; the second candidate, Kim Gu, received 6.7% of the vote. On August 15, the Republic of Korea was formally established in South Korea and Rhee was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Korea. The next month, on September 9, the north also proclaimed statehood as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Rhee himself had been an independence activist, and his relations with the "chinilpa" Korean elites who had collaborated with the Japanese were, in the words of the South Korean historian Kyung Moon Hwang, often "contentious," but in the end an understanding was reached in which, in exchange for their support, Rhee would not purge the elites. In particular, the Koreans who had served in the colonial-era National Police, whom the Americans had retained after August 1945, were promised by Rhee that their jobs would not be threatened by him. Upon independence in 1948, 53% of South Korean police officers were men who had served in the National Police during the Japanese occupation.
History of South Korea
Park Geun-hye was inaugurated in February 2013. She was the eighteenth President of South Korea and is the eldest child of South Korea's third President, Park Chung-hee. She was the first woman to be elected South Korean president, but was impeached in December 2016, because a of series of scandals which led to her impeachment. She was the first woman to be elected as a head of state in the modern history of Northeast Asia. However, after a corruption scandal involving Choi Soon-sil quickly blew up after reports from multiple news organizations (the most notable of which was JTBC) in 2016, nationwide protests ensued on a weekly basis, with participant count hitting a maximum of over 2.3 million (as reported by the protesters). These protests turned out to be the biggest series of mass protests in Korean history. The protests continued even after the Congress voted on Park's impeachment. Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn acted as President of South Korea pending completion of investigations into the actions of Park Geun-hye, and in the absence of any intervening election. The impeachment was upheld by the Constitutional Court on 10 March 2017, ending Park's presidency and forcing her out of office.