South Korea

South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, is a capitalist country in East Asia on the southern part of the Korean peninsula, bordering North Korea to the north. Its capital and largest city is Seoul.

After the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, the people of Korea quickly constituted the People's Republic of Korea, a provisional republic of people's committees, to fill the political void. When the Allies jointly occupied the Korean peninsula, the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south, these people's committees were suppressed in the southern zone in favor of a new government. Discussion of reunification of the two zones into one Korea was shut down when the United Nations ordered elections to be held only in the South, eventually leading to a new state, the modern Republic of Korea. The ensuing Korean War would determine the new borders of the two nations to this day.

After the Korean War, there were several socialist rebellions and corresponding massacres during both the direct US military government and the puppet government that came after it. Examples include:

• The Autumn Uprising of 1946
• The Bodo League massacre
• The Jeju Uprising
• The Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion

South Korea is one of the worst places in the world for women's rights. Labour Rights aren't much better. Some argue the fearmongering about North Korea is a distraction from South Korea's Extensive Human Rights Abuses.

History

Allied occupation

The American military occupied the land in 1945 and its regime was characterized by popular discontent. For one it was because it kept the Japanese colonial government in place, which when removed the former Japanese governors were kept as advisors, with the People's Republic of Korea that had formed right after Japanese occupation being ignored, censored, and ultimately forcibly disbanded, despite the PRK being both functional and popular. The US further supported UN elections that divided Korea, which were also unpopular. The US military was largely unprepared for administration of the country, having a lack of knowledge of the language and the political situation there, and largely imposed its own will onto the people.

Syngman Rhee

Syngman Rhee in 1948 at the age of 72. Rhee would remain in power for 11 more years until a CIA internal memo admitted he was "near senility" and recommended a military coup.

South Korea became a republic in 1948 under Syngman Rhee, a US-backed figure selected for his vehement anti-communism and support for the United States.

Despite his hardliner stance, Rhee ended up copying several reforms from the DPRK to the north, including social and land reform, although in an inferior fashion to the original, Northern policies. Land reforms in the South were more complex than in the North, with South Korean landlords being compensated, tenants having to pay for the land in installments over five years, and the process of redistribution being more drawn out. As Rhee was not yet a dictator, he had to operate within a system of private property under the auspices of a democratic government, putting reforms through painstaking legislative and budgetary processes, compounded by the fact that many legislators were themselves large landowners who tried to delay reforms, increase compensation to landlords or, failing these, create loopholes that allowed for landowners to retain much of their private property. After reforms were put through a convoluted amendment process which saddled them with contradictory and sloppy language, Rhee further delayed them by sending them back for redrafting.

Park Chung-Hee

Korea was still basically an agrarian country in 1960. Under Park's dictatorial rule, the state set out to industrialize. The capitalist class was weak but by no means insignificant. After arresting the main business leaders for corruption, Park came to an accommodation with them. He reformed the state bureaucracy, set up an economic planning ministry (following the successful Japanese model), and nationalized the banks to gain control over credit allocation. He then relied on the entrepreneurial vigour and investment strategies of a nascent group of industrial capitalists who were invited to enrich themselves in the process. During the early 1960s industrialists became export-oriented because Japan increasingly used them as an offshore platform to re-export its own partially manufactured goods to the US market. Joint ventures with the Japanese flourished. Koreans used them to gain technology and experience of foreign markets. The Korean state supported this export-led strategy by mobilizing internal savings, rewarding successful businesses, and encouraging their merger into chaebols ... through easy access to credit, tax advantages, procurement of inputs, control over the labour force, and support in gaining access to foreign (particularly US) markets. With support from a heavy-industry development strategy (focusing on steel, shipbuilding, petrochemicals, electronics, automobiles, and machinery) several chaebols switched focus and became global players in these industries from the mid-1970s on.

— David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Society and culture

Though South Korea is considered a wealthy country, it has a significant amount of inequality and other severe problems. South Korea has the highest elderly poverty rate in the OECD, at about 50%, which gives rise to phenomena such as Bacchus Ladies, which are elderly women, some in their 80s, who solicit men for sex in the nation's capital. There are also several oddities in South Korea, such as the 2016 political scandal in which it was revealed that the president, Park Geun-hye, was being secretly manipulated by a shamanesque cult leader. There are many high-profile corruption scandals, with then-prime minister Lee Wan-koo resigning due to one in 2015, hardly two months into his term, with Park Geun-hye becoming tied into his scandal and others. This culminated with her removal from power in 2017, being found guilty of 16 charges, and in 2018 sentenced to 25 years in prison. Lee Myung-bak, president from 2008 to 2013, was also charged with corruption in 2018 and sentenced to 17 years in jail. The OECD published a report in 2015, before these scandals, which found that only 34% of South Koreans have confidence in their government, which is lower than the OECD average of 42% as well as the figures of some developing countries. The report also showed that only 29% of South Koreans were confident in their judicial system as of 2013, much lower than the OECD average of 54%. With this, 53% of South Koreans were reported to have been satisfied with the country's education and school system, which is below the OECD average of 67%.

Culturally, South Korea is heavily influenced by the United States.

South Korea also inherited a hardline capitalist attitude, which it is arguably more staunch on than the US. Largely because of this, South Korea has one of the world's highest suicide rates — about three times the world average and two and a half times the OECD average. A disproportionate amount of the suicides is by elderly people, whose children often cannot support them as past generations have done, leaving many elderly people not wanting to feel like a burden on their families. Students also have abnormally high suicide rates for a variety of reasons: for one this is because of increasing pressure to succeed academically, and in the case of not reaching certain expectations many students feel like they have dishonored their families. This is compounded by alcohol use, sleep deprivation, stress, and social alienation. Jumping off a bridge is one of the most common suicide methods in South Korea, so much so that in Seoul, the Mapo Bridge has earned the nickname "The Bridge of Death" or the "Suicide Bridge" because of how many people jump off it. Japan, whose situation is similar to South Korea's in many ways, including its aggressively capitalist attitude, suffers from very similar problems.

South Korea has the lowest fertility rate of any country in the world, falling to record lows in 2020 to 0.84, with the OECD average being 1.63. That same year, South Korea's birth rate was eclipsed by its death rate, for the first time since Statistics Korea began collecting data in 1970. As the South Korean economy stagnates and fails to provide for its younger generation of workers, burdening them with increased work loads and stress, they feel less able to raise the generation after them, failing with this to look after the elders in society.

Moonies

From the United States were inherited things such as circumcision and Protestant Christianity, from which the "Unification movement", an anti-communist Christian cult that is also known as "the Moonies", was originated from and in turn spread to the US. 1-2 million people belong to this cult, which seeks a world order in which only Korean is spoken and all other religions are banned. It arranges mass weddings of strangers and is based around a cult of personality surrounding its founder, Sun Myung Moon, who is considered to be a messiah whose work The Divine Principle is held to be scripture. He was coronated in the US Senate in 2004, stating that emperors, kings and presidents had "declared to all heaven and earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent" — and indeed he and his wife are considered by the cult to be the members' "True Parents". Since 2003 the cult has a political party called "The Party for God, Peace, Unification, and Home".

Chaebol

Chaebols (Korean jaebeol, related to Japanese zaibatsu) are oligarchic family-held conglomerates. Hyundai, Samsung, and LG are all examples of modern chaebols. Dictator Park Chung-Hee encouraged the formation of smaller companies into huge chaebols as part of his industrialization scheme in the 1960s.

Prostitution

“The women were readily available,” a U.S. official at the Embassy in Seoul told me, describing the time when he’d been stationed in Korea in the early 1980s. “There was kind of a joke” where guys “would take out a $20 bill and lick it and stick it to their forehead.” They said that’s all it took to get a girl.

— David Vine, Politico magazine

“Our government was one big pimp for the U.S. military.”

— Kim Ae-ran, former sex worker

By the time of their defeat in 1945, the Japanese administration had been using Korean women for “comfort” purposes since the 19th century and had established a robust system of state prostitution. Rather than abolish this network, the American military authorities co-opted and regulated it to service their own troops, replacing the Japanese open coercion with direct state support and encouragement. The Rhee government continued to expand this system through the 1940s, but it exploded upon US involvement in the Korean War and in the years following. By 1958 there were an estimated 300,000 South Korean sex workers in a country of only 22 million. By enforcing VD checks on prostitutes and even, according to one testimony, assigning them numbers for easier tracing, the Rhee government evidently intended to increase the flow of US dollars into the South Korean economy.

The Park military government officially gave legal sanction to the US's “special districts”, and by 1965 85% of American GIs reported having used them. ROK officials even theorized about ways to “encourage GIs to spend their money on women in Korea rather than Japan” and provided classes on Western etiquette and English for prostitutes. GI prostitution continues to exist in South Korea but has come to include more foreign sex trafficking from countries like the Phillippines and the former Soviet Union.