Mark Peterson is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
The end of Korea?
By Mark Peterson
The video “South Korea is Over” has been making waves in Korea. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. It gives a statistical analysis of the end of Korea as its dystopian population decline will ruin not only the population but the culture, the housing and the economy of Korea as it declines into ruin. The video argues that it may already be too late — that the freight train of low population growth cannot be stopped. It is a very grim video.
People who see the video report feeling depressed and hopeless, and that, indeed, is the message of the video.
I don’t completely disagree with the video, but I do think there is hope on the horizon. The reason I feel hopeful is that I’ve seen Korea, in the last sixty years, overcome many difficulties, and I think they can overcome this one. But it will require a sea change in culture — a paradigm shift, we say.
But I’ve seen sea changes before. The most obvious one was the economic miracle. I first came to Korea in 1965 when per capita income was $125 per year. Grinding poverty was everywhere. Korea, on the economic front, is an entirely different place now. They pulled off a paradigm shift in work, labor and economic development.
A paradigm shift, more attuned to population issues, is the shift from son preference to daughter preference. I was dismayed to see Korea in the 1990s practicing widespread selective female fetus abortion. Prior to the 90s, Korea had already transformed into an “only two child” paradigm, but at least one of the children had to be a boy, leading pregnant women into the new, at-the-time, technological world of gender identification. And in a few years, the gender imbalance grew dramatically. In conservative rural areas, the incoming class of grade-school children was 90 to 100 percent boys.
This raised the obvious question of who will these boys marry. At this point, a good friend of mine, Linda Lewis, an anthropologist, was in Korea and on the subway, she saw a government posting designed to encourage families to discontinue the abortion of females. The poster had a drawing of a Korean groom on one edge wearing the traditional groom’s costume and a shocked expression on his face. On the opposite edge was a bride, but she was not Korean — she was an African woman with glaring, exaggerated, racist, stereotypical facial features. In between the bride and groom was the message, “If we keep aborting our females, where will our brides come from?”
My friend, Linda, was incensed at the racist nature of the propaganda and set about the next day to ride the subway again, but this time with her camera — yes, this was in the days before we all had a camera on our phone in our pocket — ready to take a picture of the offending posting and then take it to the Ministry of Heath, the author of the posting, and demand that they take the offending poster down.
She rode the subway, walking through each car and could not find the poster. She switched lines and switched lines and rode throughout the city and could not find another poster. It had already been taken down. The point is, Korea at that point realized that overboard boy preference was untenable. And over the next few years, precious daughters gained preference, to the point that thereafter, boy preference gave way to girl preference. The paradigm shifted.
Now the paradigm has shifted one step more to the point of the low birth crisis we are now in.
The video “South Korea is Over” argues that, in many regards, it is already too late. A birthrate of 0.68 means that every 100 women will have 36 daughters. Those 36 women will have six daughters. The video says that the result of a low birthrate hits you like a freight train — that before you realize it, it is too late. By 2060, in 35 years, Korea will see abandoned houses (such as we now see in Japan), ghost towns in rural areas, and the virtual destruction of the culture, the economy, and indeed the country.
The economy's workforce will decline such that workers will not be able to support retirees. Older adults will fall into poverty as the funding of retirement income falls apart. There will be other economic chaos. It is really a dystopian view of the future.
Is there hope for change? Of avoiding this dystopia outlined by the statisticians? I’ve indicated significant changes we’ve seen before. That gives me hope. But I don’t see signs of the paradigm shift. Not yet. The video says it is already too late. If there is to be a change, it must happen soon and radically.
But I remain optimistic and hopeful. Maybe.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.