ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the socioeconomic structures developed during Korea’s modernization drive that helped bolster the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan: industrial complexes and higher education. By highlighting the differential impact of modernization structures, it shows that socioeconomic development acted as a “double-edged sword” by stabilizing the dictator at first, but destabilizing the dictatorship over time. South Korea is hailed as an exemplary case of modernization theory for having developed economically under authoritarian rule before making its transition to democracy. The Korean economy began to rapidly expand in the 1960s under Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship and maintained an annual growth rate of eight percent through the 1980s under his successor, Chun Doo Hwan. Korea was largely an agrarian society prior to Japanese colonization. Industrialization first began under colonial rule, but it was a strategy designed primarily to buttress the Japanese Imperial Empire and its war effort during World War II.