ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses the changing nature of the country’s political system. Chinese Confucianism shaped Korea’s political and philosophical thought and a Korean strand of Confucianism played a central role in the nation’s view of how society should be governed and educated. Korean electronics companies entered the international home entertainment and computers markets with Samsung opening television assembly plants in Portugal, the US, Japan and Britain, as well as buying stakes in Orion, the main radio and television factory in Hungary. The protests at Kwangju drew together the issues facing the Korean government at different times in the 1980s. The elections which took place in 1987 and 1988 were a significant step towards a different type of politics, and South Korea was more democratic at the end of the 1980s than it had been at the start of the decade.