YS acted as'bridge' in transition

By John Burton

If one word summed up Kim Young-sam, it would be “bridge” in the sense that he served as a bridge between dictatorship and democracy, between Korea’s status as a developing economy and an advanced one and as a bridge between the analog age and the digital age.

The last achievement may be the most important. Although most of President Kim’s obituaries have focused on his career as a campaigner for democracy and bringing Korea into the OECD, the club of developed economies, they have largely ignored perhaps his most enduring legacy. Just as U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is now celebrated for introducing a trans-continental highway system in the 1950s that propelled the growth of the American economy, so Kim should be credited for constructing the “information superhighway” in Korea that has dramatically transformed the country.

In 1995, Kim expanded the Ministry of Information and Communications and ordered it to implement the Korean Information Infrastructure project, a program to build a high-speed internet infrastructure that would link almost all the homes in the country. At the time, only 1 percent of Koreans had access to the internet. Within five years, half of them were connected as broadband was rolled out across the country. Now nearly all households can enjoy the advantages of the world’s fastest internet system.

The Kim administration identified one great advantage that Korea had in adopting the internet: its highly concentrated urban population of apartment dwellers that made linking household up relatively easy compared to other countries. Population density also reduced the costs of building the infrastructure.

The Kim administration also had the foresight of combining government leadership in setting up a public sector network, while encouraging private sector involvement through deregulation that helped further expand the internet. Telecom companies adopted new technologies, such as fibre optic systems, to stay competitive with each other.

The visionary project has had an immense impact on many aspects of the Korean economy and society, although most Koreans now take their benefits for granted. For example, the fast internet infrastructure has promoted innovations in the IT sector, where Korea is a global leader.

The wide availability of broadband fuelled the rapid domestic growth and adoption of smartphones and other digital mobile devices, which laid the foundation for surging exports that has made Samsung Electronics the world’s largest supplier of smartphones.

Korea’s development of apps is also considered even more advanced than in the U.S., where internet speeds are slower, because local digital devices can handle and process more of them.

It can even be argued that success of the Korean wave, or Hallyu, is based on Korea having an excellent internet infrastructure. The ubiquitous presence of internet connections even in the public transport systems such as buses and subways has vastly increase the exposure of music, television shows and movies to a local audience. This has created an intensely a competitive environment that has fine-tuned these cultural products and has made them more appealing to overseas consumers.

In many respects, the creation of a high-speed internet infrastructure reflected President Kim’s policy of segyehwa, or globalization/internationalization, and its results dramatically show that it met that goal. Korea is now known worldwide for its digital-related industries and their global reach has probably even exceeded initial expectations when the project was launched.

So as you enjoy the wide variety of your digital activities today, you should know that YS was the man who helped make them possible.

John Burton, a former Korea correspondent for

the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent

journalist and media consultant. He can

be reached at johnburtonft@yahoo.com.