Park Chung Hee Quotes

Let us farm when it is clear and let us study when it rains.

The ground with more sweats dropped on it would yield more fruit. (Achievers Are Dreamers) Let us farm when it is clear and let us study when it rains. (Park Chung-hee)

The first thing to note about Korean industrial structure is the sheer concentration of Korean industry. Like other Asian economies, there are two levels of organization: individual firms and larger network organizations that unite disparate corporate entities. The Korean network organization is known as the chaebol, represented by the same two Chinese characters as the Japanese zaibatsu and patterned deliberately on the Japanese model. The size of individual Korean companies is not large by international standards. As of the mid-1980s, the Hyundai Motor Company, Korea’s largest automobile manufacturer, was only a thirtieth the size of General Motors, and the Samsung Electric Company was only a tenth the size of Japan’s Hitachi.1 However, these statistics understate their true economic clout because these businesses are linked to one another in very large network organizations. Virtually the whole of the large-business sector in Korea is part of a chaebol network: in 1988, forty-three chaebol (defined as conglomerates with assets in excess of 400 billion won, or US$500 million) brought together some 672 companies.2 If we measure industrial concentration by chaebol rather than individual firm, the figures are staggering: in 1984, the three largest chaebol alone (Samsung, Hyundai, and Lucky-Goldstar) produced 36 percent of Korea’s gross domestic product.3 Korean industry is more concentrated than that of Japan, particularly in the manufacturing sector; the three-firm concentration ratio for Korea in 1980 was 62.0 percent of all manufactured goods, compared to 56.3 percent for Japan.4 The degree of concentration of Korean industry grew throughout the postwar period, moreover, as the rate of chaebol growth substantially exceeded the rate of growth for the economy as a whole. For example, the twenty largest chaebol produced 21.8 percent of Korean gross domestic product in 1973, 28.9 percent in 1975, and 33.2 percent in 1978.5 The Japanese influence on Korean business organization has been enormous. Korea was an almost wholly agricultural society at the beginning of Japan’s colonial occupation in 1910, and the latter was responsible for creating much of the country’s early industrial infrastructure.6 Nearly 700,000 Japanese lived in Korea in 1940, and a similarly large number of Koreans lived in Japan as forced laborers. Some of the early Korean businesses got their start as colonial enterprises in the period of Japanese occupation.7 A good part of the two countries’ émigré populations were repatriated after the war, leading to a considerable exchange of knowledge and experience of business practices. The highly state-centered development strategies of President Park Chung Hee and others like him were formed as a result of his observation of Japanese industrial policy in Korea in the prewar period.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

No sooner did I start college than President Park Chung-hee’s Yushin dictatorship began. Everything was in turmoil, and not a day went by without riots and school closures. My classmates were being arrested left and right, and every time I went to class, there were fewer and fewer of them.

Many scholars and pundits have already analyzed Park Chung-Hee’s role in South Korea’s economic development. But attention should be paid to an obvious but nonetheless very startling fact: South Korea’s per capita income expanded from $100 to $20,000 within the lifetime of most of the adults now living. This was the result of their sweat and blood, to be sure, but it could not have been accomplished without the leadership of a man who emphasized the need for the “can-do” spirit.

The experts only try to discourage me by identifying risks and obstacles. Had I listened to their advice, I would have ended up doing nothing. Park Chung Hee

One of dynastic China’s great legacies, then, is high-quality authoritarian government. It is no accident that virtually all of the world’s successful authoritarian modernizers, including South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and modern China itself, are East Asian countries sharing a common Chinese cultural heritage. It is very hard to find authoritarian rulers with qualities like those of Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or Park Chung Hee of South Korea in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. But

During the 1950s, South Korea was “the poorest, most impossible country on this planet,” according to a long-time advisor to President Park Chung-hee, Kim Dong-jin (not his real name). The Korean War had made a third of the population homeless;

Why did Park Chung-Hee launch his political career in 1961 by lambasting Korean history? Why did he follow up two years later by saying, “Our five thousand years of history was a continuation of degeneration, crudity, and stagnation” and “We should set ablaze all our history that was more like a storehouse of evil”?