Country Card: South Korea

By Yuchen Ge

Facts and Figures: South Korea Today

•   Official name: Republic of Korea (ROK)

•   Capital: Seoul; Sejong is the de facto administrative capital

•   Head of state and government: President Yoon Suk-yeol

•   Languages: Korean, Korean Sign Language (official), English (widely taught)

•   Government: Unitary presidential constitutional republic

•   Surface area: 100,410 km2 (2020) (World Bank)

•   Population: 51.84 million (2022 est.) (World Factbook)

•   Ethnic demographics: 95.1% Korean, 4.9% non-Korean (2019) (Hong)

•   Religion: No religion 56.9%, Protestant 19.7%, Buddhist 15.5%, Catholic 7.9% (2015 est.); Many also carry on at least some Confucian traditions and practices (World Factbook)

•   Total GDP (nominal): $1.734 trillion (2022 est.) (IMF)

•   GDP per capita (nominal): $33,591 (2022 est.) (IMF)

•   Major industries: Electronics, telecommunications, automobile production, chemicals, shipbuilding, steel (World Factbook)

•   Natural resources: Coal, tungsten, graphite, molybdenum, lead, hydropower potential (World Factbook)

•   Exports: Goods - $644,400 million; Services - $121,973 million (2021) (WTO)

  • Major products: Integrated circuits, cars, refined petroleum, transport vessels, vehicle parts (2020) (WTO)

  • Merchandise trade partners: China 25.9%, US 14.5%, Vietnam 9.5%, EU 9.3% (2020) (WTO)

•   Imports: Goods - $615,093 million; Services - $125,649 million (2021) (WTO)

  • Major products: Crude petroleum, integrated circuits, natural gas, refined petroleum, cars (2020) (WTO)

  • Merchandise trade partners: China 23.3%, US 12.4%, EU 11.8%, Japan 9.8% (2020) (WTO)

•   Countries with shared land borders: de jure - China, Russia; de facto - North Korea (i.e., have a claim on North Korea)

•   Countries with shared maritime borders: China, Japan

Background and Analysis

       With a history spanning thousands of years, Korea stayed within the tributary system of China almost incessantly while maintaining a virtually independent status throughout the unified dynasties of Silla (57 BCE - 935 CE, united since 668 CE), Goryeo (918 - 1392), and Joseon (1392 - 1897). After the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Korea gained a brief period of full independence but was soon placed under a protectorate of Japan in 1905 and annexed as a Japanese colony in 1910. The Allies’ victory in WWII brought the light of liberty to the Koreans, but their homeland was carved into two halves in late 1948 with a Soviet-backed socialist government in the north (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) and an American-backed capitalist government in the south (Republic of Korea, ROK). From 1950 to 1953, the two Koreas, both claiming to be the sole legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula, engaged in a devastating civil war that later involved China, the United States, and the Soviet Union. It resulted in an armistice that split the peninsula along a demilitarized zone around the 38th parallel. During the first years of the post-war period, South Korea saw widespread poverty, political instability, and inappropriate development strategies under its first president Syngman Rhee. After the 1961 military coup launched by Park Chung-hee - who later became the country’s longest-serving president - South Korea embarked on a path of rapid economic and industrial growth, a period known as the Miracle on the Han River. However, the widening social inequalities and the undemocratic forms of governance under Park’s administration sparked discontent among the South Korean public, culminating in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the subsequent armed suppression by General Chun Doo-hwan. Following seven more years of military dictatorship under Chun, South Korea established a democratic system, had its first free presidential election in 1987, and hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. After overcoming the 1997 Asian financial crisis and creating an uneasy truce with North Korea, today’s South Korea is the world’s twelfth-largest economy and a developed country with powerful manufacturing and service industries.

       Compared to its neighboring countries, South Korea has fairly limited natural endowments and low innate conditions. Located at the crossroads between the Asian continent and adjacent islands, the Korean peninsula has been a geopolitical hotspot of the Western Pacific region since ancient times and is still subject to escalating competition among nearby great powers. Despite the peninsula remaining ideologically and politically divided since the Soviet-American intervention in the Cold War, South Korea has been able to progressively become an industrial power, especially in the period after the “rampant patronage and corruption under Syngman Rhee” (You 535). The eighteen-year rule of President Park Chung-hee brought tremendous transformations to South Korea through large-scale projects like the Five-Year Economic and Social Development Plans and the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement) that prioritized “increased productivity and labor-management cooperation,” particularly in the industrial sector over national reunification (Kim and Sorensen 130). Although Park’s iron-fist governance has always been accused of autocracy and militarism, it essentially laid the foundations for Seoul’s economic take-off and the complete overtaking of Pyongyang in the 1980s by embedding state-led capitalism, a system in which “politics and economics are not separated from each other” as well as the emphasis on international trade in South Korea’s development structure (Kim and Sorensen 176). Such an advantageous position became more obvious than ever in the early 1990s when North Korea’s centrally planned economy collapsed as a result of the halt of Soviet and Chinese economic assistance, dragging millions of its population into starvation and poverty. In contrast, the South managed to join both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and ascend to the forefront of the Four Asian Tigers. Admittedly, the economic miracle of South Korea has its dark sides, such as the rise of plutocracy commanded by a few chaebols (family-owned conglomerates) and the dispatch of more than three hundred thousand armed forces to the Vietnamese battlefield in exchange for high profits. These flaws are comparable with the economic dominance of zaibatsus in imperial Japan and Tokyo’s lucrative role as a rear base for the United States and its allies during the Korean War. Nevertheless, the East Asian model, a paradigm characterized by “the Confucian value of respecting hierarchy/authority” (Shim 18) and “a growth-oriented alliance of state and capital” (Kohli 123) dedicated to rapid industrialization that South Korea exemplifies, is worth noticing for its merit in economic development and modernization. By drawing insights from this framework, many culturally similar emerging economies in the region, including the Chinese mainland and Vietnam, are currently on the way to achieving prosperity and progress.

       From a sociological perspective, South Korea can be readily classified as a semi-peripheral nation-state in the world system for its intermediary position in the global economy and politics. An industrialized, capitalist country, South Korea is deeply integrated into the world market and provides a variety of industrial goods that both the core and the periphery demand in large quantities, such as electronic circuits, automobiles, and refined petroleum oils. Its economy is highly dependent on foreign trade as exports have been enshrined as “a means to achieve a nation’s economic strength” since the Park era, leading to the emergence of numerous multinationals like Samsung and Hyundai that constantly seek expansion into overseas markets (Shim 27). More importantly, as a newcomer to modernization, South Korea is playing the role of a mediator between core and peripheral economies by promoting dialogues in international relations that aim to reduce the risk of unforeseen conflict. In the contact between the core United States and peripheral North Korea over the past few years, for example, South Korea under former President Moon Jae-in served as a facilitator of negotiations and rapprochement in pursuit of the establishment of stability and order in Northeast Asia. Without Seoul’s constant peace efforts, Washington and Pyongyang, the two extremes of the world system, would face larger difficulty in leaving aside long-standing disagreements and settling a common ground for regional security and coexistence. Meanwhile, with a Gini index of about 0.331 (2020), the eleventh-highest among all 38 OECD members, South Korea is one of the most socially unequal developed countries (OECD). The growing polarization between the rich and the poor, a phenomenon caused by the uneven distribution of wealth across different echelons of South Korean society, has become a structural issue for the country as it deprives many citizens of access to the dividends of economic development and impedes the adequate allocation of public resources.

       Apart from the aforementioned world-systems theory, the modernization theory proposed by American economist Walt Whitman Rostow also applies to the case of South Korea. Such a theoretical model assumes a linear progression of economic growth that consists of five basic stages, namely “the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption” (Rostow 4). The economic development of South Korea since the pre-modern period fits well within this analytical framework. During the dynastic age, Korea, a secondary member of the East Asian cultural sphere, was known as a “hermit kingdom” to the Western world for its spontaneous isolation from other civilizations and strict adherence to Confucian ideology. In the late Joseon era, Korea was tied down by “a personalistic apex, a factionalized ruling stratum, and a limited downward reach of central authorities” as the country refused to cast off its traditional, agrarian bureaucratic institutions or open itself up to any significant transformation (Kohli 30). The Japanese decades-long occupation in the early 20th century resembled a coercive introduction of external influence that gave rise to Korea’s transition to pre-take-off. In that period, a unifying capitalist system began to take shape in Korea under “a highly authoritarian and penetrating political organization” within which the colonial regime aligned itself with the ruling classes to suppress the lower classes and increase economic production (Kohli 18). It was not until after the end of the Korean War that an economic take-off formally emerged in the South with the initiation of an export-led development strategy. Under “a meritocratic and competent bureaucracy” headed by President Park Chung-hee and his successors, Seoul carried out extensive industrialization across the country and attained high productivity growth by attracting foreign investment and encouraging domestic expenditure on manufacturing and infrastructure (You 535). In the 1990s, with the downfall of right-wing military juntas and the democratization of domestic politics, South Korea’s economic development reached maturity as the country had higher degrees of urbanization, manufacturing output, and industrial variegation. Today, with a very high level of human development, South Korea is advancing toward the phase of high mass consumption through various guiding measures, including technological upgrades and the strengthening of service sectors, especially the entertainment, media, and music industries, to create a “more market-oriented, privatized, and diversified” economy (Shim 147).

       South Korea, a former periphery of East Asia successively ravaged by imperialist occupation, foreign intervention, and ongoing strife among compatriots, managed to modernize itself and achieved a remarkable economic miracle on the ruins of a destructive proxy war. Despite having several controversies and imperfections, the country’s course of development over the past six decades has considerable significance as a reference for emerging economies in the present-day world.

References

Hong, Ji-min. “Foreign Population in Korea Tops 2.5 Million.” The Korea Times. Oh Young-

jin, 24 Feb. 2020, 

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/07/742_283632.html.

Kim, Hyung-A, and Clark W. Sorensen. Reassessing the Park Chung Hee Era, 1961-1979:

Development, Political Thought, Democracy, and Cultural Influence. University of 

Washington Press, 2011.

Kohli, Atul. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global 

Periphery. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

OECD. Income inequality (indicator). https://doi.org/10.1787/459aa7f1-en (Accessed on 18 

Jan. 2023).

Rostow, Walt Whitman. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. 

Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Shim, T. Youn-ja. Korean Entrepreneurship: The Foundation of the Korean Economy. 

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

You, Jong-Sung. “Demystifying the Park Chung-Hee Myth: Land Reform in the Evolution of 

Korea’s Developmental State.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 47, no. 4, 2017, 

pp. 535–56., https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2017.1334221.