Korea: The Impossible Country
The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.
Summary
Daniel Tudor covered Korea for The Economist and wrote this as a general introduction to the country for readers who know it only through its exports. The structure moves from history and religion through culture and social norms to contemporary business and politics.
The economic material is the part most useful to a business reader. Tudor covers the Park Chung-hee period, the directed credit that built the chaebol, the 1997 crisis and the restructuring that followed, and the current position of the large groups in Korean society. He explains the education system and the private academies, the examination culture, and the way both shape labour market entry. He also covers the parts of Korean life that the development story omits: the suicide rate, the position of women in the workforce, the treatment of foreign workers, and the gap between the chaebol employment that a minority obtain and the small-firm and self-employed sector where most Koreans work.
Tudor's framing concept is that Korea achieved in forty years what took other countries a century, and that the social costs of that compression are still being paid. He writes as an outsider who has lived in the country and is sympathetic without being uncritical. The book is journalism and offers no original research; readers wanting the economics of Korean development should go to the specialist literature. As orientation for someone doing business in Korea it is the best single volume available.
Key takeaways 7
- Korean industrialisation compressed into forty years the social changes that took Western countries a century, and the social costs reflect the speed.
- The chaebol grew from directed credit under Park Chung-hee, which means their scale is a policy outcome rather than a market result.
- Chaebol employment covers a small minority of Korean workers while dominating the aspirations of the whole education system.
- Examination competition determines lifetime outcomes at eighteen, which sustains a private tutoring sector that most families cannot afford to leave.
- The 1997 crisis forced chaebol restructuring but left the family control structures intact through circular shareholdings.
- Korean workplace hierarchy derives from age and educational cohort rather than from role, which constrains how information travels upward.
- Tudor argues that Korean self-criticism about the country's culture is itself a national characteristic and is usually overstated.
Who should read it
Operators and investors starting work in Korea who need social and institutional context behind the corporate structures they will deal with.
Where it sits in the reference 2
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