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The ‘Land of Morning Calm’ is Working Itself to Death

“When someone questions the virtues of Western liberal democracy, back comes the riposte: ‘Why don’t you try North Korea then?’”

“On average, [South] Koreans work 1,910 hours a year, one of the highest rates in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), where the average is 1,716 (1,490 in France, 1,349 in Germany).

60% of Korean employees do not take their full holiday allowance as it is, often because they fear for their jobs

“Being a union leader means at some point going to prison,’ said Yang Kyeung-soo, president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), who received a one-year sentence for organising a strike during the pandemic. His union was set up in 1995, and all 12 of his predecessors have also been jailed.

In Korea, the official retirement age is 60, but the state pension is only paid from 65

Over-65s make up half the country’s poor.

At Seoul airport, US citizens have their own designated immigration channel.

The country ‘hosts’ the US’s largest overseas base. South Korea contributes the equivalent of $1bn a year to support the operation of the base,’ said Hyun Pilkyung, director of the Institute for Reappropriation of American Military Bases. ‘The US military pay the lowest prices for electricity, water, and gas in the country. And when a US soldier commits a crime, they’re dealt with by the base’s own special justice system.’

Around a thousand people live here. ‘They’re all like me,’ Yoon said. ‘They’re not outsiders: they’re people who worked hard to rebuild the country after the war. People who made sacrifices and were abandoned by the state. None of us receive a pension because none of us have made enough contributions.”

And it is interesting to know that “In the 1980s the dictatorship established a network of ‘re-education’ camps, where over 40,000 ‘delinquents’, most suspected of being communists, were interned.” The U.S. had actively played its repressive role and laid the background for such a dictatorship. Today, we read about the ‘re-education’ camps in China, but there no reference to what the U.S. had supported in Korea.

“The South Korean authorities often equate criticising capitalism with supporting Pyongyang. Parties claiming to be communist are banned and Marxism is tolerated only in universities.”

“South Korea’s life force appears to be ebbing: it has the lowest birth rate in the world, with just 0.78 children per woman.”

Behind the economic miracle …

Related

South Korea's 1980's 'concentration camp'

The South Korean economy of today has a background in brutality, the Korean War, a military dictatorship-led development, government-chaebol cooperation, achieving high productivity with acquiring technology and imposing the longest working hours in the world in the 1960s, a big foreign aid (especially from the U.S. and Japan) ...



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