ABSTRACT
A relatively stable and productive family farming system in South Korea not only sustained the thousands-year-old national history of flourishing cultural and sociopolitical traditions but also prepared social conditions for rapid capitalist industrialization in the latter part of the twentieth century. In immediate postliberation South Korea, internal rural class conflict, American political interests, and even the brief occupation by North Korea (with a land redistribution policy) of a majority of South Korean villages coalesced to make society-wide land reform inevitable.5 As elsewhere, the land reform measure of distributing land according to the size of each peasant household (i.e. the number of family members) presupposed a typical family farming system. While not clearly expected, the society-wide restoration of sound family farming later turned out to be an indispensable societal precondition for sustained capitalist industrialization. The formation of the highly competent urban workforce of South Korea may have not been possible without various forms of investment made by family members for their city-bound children and siblings. Accelerated capitalist industrialization, however, has failed to help South Korean agriculture renovate itself into an economically viable, modernized production system. It only has helped to induce an internal social dissolution of the family farming system. In a situation where the most attractive economic and social opportunities are almost exclusively found in urban sectors, farming has become a social object for pity in whose future neither urban people nor farmers themselves would invest economic resources and mental energy. An inevitable consequence has been ever widening rural-urban disparities in both economic and sociocultural terms. Such rural-urban inequalities, in turn, have intensified the urban exodus of desperate rural individuals and families, and the flight of rural poverty into urban areas, has sometimes deceptively reduced the ruralurban gap. As most South Korean villagers have considered leaving the village a rather ideal form of reaction to rural economic and social decay, they have usually hesitated to launch staunch political struggles against the state or urban capitalists. The urgent situation caused by the Uruguay Round was a clear exception as almost the entire peasant population and their city-dwelling family members and relatives, accounting for an overwhelming majority of the national population, collectively erupted against the prospect of the very demise of family farming and its social environs under the oncoming global free trade system for agricultural and other products. Such collective anger, however, failed to develop into a sustainable alternative for agricultural production and rural life. This chapter examines the rural social conditions and consequences of South Korea’s compressed capitalist industrialization by focusing on the dynamic
structural changes of the rural-urban relationship in recent decades. First, I attempt to specify the peasant contribution to capitalist industrialization in terms of various social transition costs pertaining to the quick formation of a competent industrial proletariat. Second, the recent social reproductive crisis of the family farming class is analyzed as a consequence of the urban-biased social and economic changes accompanying successful industrialization. Third, overall rural-urban economic disparities are evaluated in terms of the changing income levels of rural and urban households in order to clarify whether rural people, as is occasionally argued, have been economically catching up with urban people despite worsening conditions in agricultural production and rural life. Fourth, the social and political responses of peasants to the worsening conditions of production and living and the widening rural-urban disparities are delineated, with particular attention paid to inter-generational differences (or similarities) in rural-to-urban exodus. In lieu of a conclusion, the social impact of recent international economic pressures is discussed by touching on the chaebol-peasant class conflict and the state policy for international economic competitiveness.
