ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters firmly evince that South Koreans’ familism has been critically linked to the dynamism and complexity of modernity cultivated since the mid-twentieth century. Familial influence has been so pervasive in most of the modern social projects pursued by South Koreans and their state that the country may be called one of familial modernity. Since such influence rarely receives open ideological justifications at the societal level, South Koreans continue to find themselves in an awkward position – namely, their pride in compressed achievement of various developmental goals is plagued by an uneasiness about how they have made it happen. More seriously, the familial basis of their compressed modernity has been directly responsible for various crisis tendencies across diverse social, economic, and political realms. In proportion to the extent to which South Koreans’ familism has facilitated such abridged but comprehensive transformations, it also tends to cause grave costs and generate fundamental problems to South Korean society. Not coincidentally, every family-dependent dimension of compressed modernity hitherto examined – i.e. ideological integration, education, social welfare, proletarianization, rural development, and industrial organization – appears vulnerable in terms of long-term sustainability. “Crisis” is an ordinarily used term for describing the state of these social concerns. South Koreans, consciously indulged in familial values and interests, have derogatorily seen themselves as “familial egoists” (gajokjuuija). According to Barrett and McIntosh, modern society as a sum of family-centered individuals (or a sum of “anti-social” families) has an inherent tendency to produce communal crisis.1 The perspective of South Korean media and intellectuals, when they so frequently deplore a “crisis of community,” is basically the same. Families usually deal with one another through market competition in housing, education, marriage, etc., and communitarian interaction is scarce in most urban neighborhoods. The presence of weak and vulnerable social groups such as single mothers, handicapped persons, orphans, and lonely elderly, as far as these groups are perceived as “unrelated” by familial relationship categories, automatically becomes a nuisance to the comfort of the individual family, and thus they are avoided by all measures. Neighbors’ gatherings are too often for anticommunitarian, not communitarian, causes – for instance, protests against a
nearby construction of what they call “detestable facilities” (hyeomo siseol) including welfare facilities for the handicapped, orphans, ill elders, etc. Yet the anti-social or family-centered orientation of South Koreans does not guarantee them a harmonious life within their families. Familial norms and expectations are so diverse across gender and generation that family life itself has been a crucial source of alienation for almost every member of society. In particular, rapidly increasing numbers of the elderly and youth have been practically disenfranchised from familial solidarity and protection, paving the way for extremely high rates of suicide by depressed elderly and crime by youth. A built-in or normal crisis haunts accidentally pluralist families and their society (Chapter 2). The educational crisis has pressed numerous South Korean families to embark on what is popularly called “education emigration” to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Many of these families often express anger and frustration at the stressful educational competition and inhumane school culture in South Korea, but their departure rarely liberates them from habitually excessive educational concerns. It should be noted that many of the educational emigrants simply fear the possibility of their children’s failing the college entrance examination in South Korea and thus look for easier ways to make them college students elsewhere. South Korean educational emigrants have replicated the culture of extreme educational competition in their destinations by flocking, both legally and illegally, to the most competitive local schools, sending children to after-school cramming institutions, and even bribing teachers for favoritism. Educational emigration is a costly option beyond the reach of poor families. These poor families are frustrated by the marketized structure of educational competition (i.e. a serious impact of private institutional learning on educational performance) by which their financial destitution is inevitably translated into their children’s educational disadvantage. They are also frustrated by the phenomenon of “collapse of the classroom,” (the teacher’s complete loss of control over pupils’ attitude to study), which has a much higher prevalence in economically poorer districts and cities. Conversely, middle-and upper-class families are increasingly concerned about whether their children’s educational environment is being contaminated by the presence of poor people’s children. The disturbingly fast expansion of economic inequalities since the national economic crisis of 1997-8 also implies that poor families in rapidly increasingly numbers have been disenfranchised from the educational competition system which is the hallmark of the post-liberation class mobility system (Chapter 3). The welfare crisis (or failure) is usually recognized in terms of the family crisis. There is every indication that South Koreans are desperately seeking to avoid family relations and their attendant burdens. Literally shocking trends are statistically documented regarding low fertility, divorce, separation, suicide, family abandonment, marriage deferral, etc. In particular, South Korea’s fertility rate, one of the lowest in the world, has suddenly awakened conservative bureaucrats, industrialists, and intellectuals to the public responsibility for sharing familial the burden of childrearing. Ultimately, since the minimum demographic basis for sustained economic development is being seriously threatened, the
nuclear family – as far as it reproduces, preferably, two or more children – has been elevated from a moral culprit responsible for many unhealthy social tendencies to a policy objective for various supportive measures. “Family welfare,” a euphemism for the timeworn conservative policy of transferring all the burdens of supporting children, the elderly, and the handicapped on to families, is now being redefined as a progressive cause for protecting needy families.2 However, few experts are optimistic that such policy shifts will meaningfully alleviate, still less reverse, the multifaceted family crisis within a foreseeable future. If familysupportive policies do not generate desirable outcomes in stabilizing family structure and restoring fertility – or, more strictly, if the economic instrumentality of family-supportive policies becomes suspect – the conservative elite would not mind rescinding them because the task of supporting families itself is not their main goal (Chapter 4). The family crisis has been accompanied by an increasing participation of both married and unmarried women in the labor market. More and more women seriously consider paid work an alternative to family life. The neoliberal restructuring of the job market, by which temporary employment has become a pervasive norm, appears much less detrimental to women than men because only an exceptional minority of the former have enjoyed the secure status of permanent employees. However, even the market for temporary employees has been adversely affected by a sustained oversupply of casual job-seekers vis-à-vis a structural stagnation of the grassroots economy (seomin gyeongje). Paradoxically, the decreasing labor absorption capacity of South Korea’s globally competitive heavy and high-tech industries is a primary basis for their competitiveness. Thus, a resumption of high economic growth, whether in the short or long run, is far from a sufficient condition for the improvement of most South Koreans’ living conditions. Wage labor, while entered by more and more women as an alternative life course, is not going to offer them a sustained opportunity for humane life outside family. A Catch-22 situation ensues because these women cannot withdraw into their already deserted or dissolved families. The social and economic buffering function of family is rapidly waning alongside the demographic structural crisis of family (Chapter 5). At the core of the rural crisis is a wholesale reproductive crisis affecting farming families. Their reproductive crisis is double-sided. The distribution of rural families across different life-cycle stages of familial reproduction shows that a majority of them have lost any potential for demographic expansion and just await the days of their dissolution. Even those relatively young families with reproductive capacity are extremely hesitant about giving birth to children, training them to become farmers or persuading them to marry farmers. All too clearly, family-based peasantry is rapidly lapsing into history, while no alternative mode of rural production and reproduction is yet being envisioned. Under this familial and, for that matter, social crisis, the impending full-scale opening-up of the rice market is feared as nothing less than a death knell to agrarian South Korea. This prospect cannot but accelerate the rural exodus. But the urban economy, which has developed at the sacrifice of the rural economy and society,
is not prepared to deal with any more supplies of rural labor. In fact, “labor shedding” is its most recent scheme for competitiveness (Chapter 6). In the wake of the national economic crisis in the late 1990s, “familial capitalism” was subjected to unreserved criticisms both domestically and internationally. It was unmistakably clear that family-based business expansion, hereditary corporate management, and even feuds among siblings over corporate ownership had all contributed to the financial collapse of numerous business conglomerates called chaebol, and ultimately to the meltdown of the entire national economy. The familial ownership and management of industrial enterprises had been very much instrumental to the rent-based structure of profit accumulation implicitly induced by the developmental state, but its long-term costs in terms of unprofessional, risky, and legally problematic business practices were too grave. When the entire national economy was forced to the brink of bankruptcy by such erroneous business practices, the rescue regime of Kim Dae-Jung had to give up on many chaebol conglomerates. Bankruptcy protection – i.e. preferential bail-out of financially insolvent firms by state-controlled banks – used to be one of the main benefits offered to the corporate partners of the developmental state, but its impracticality then meant an inevitable simultaneous demise of numerous overambitiously and/or inefficiently run enterprises. Most chaebol conglomerates have survived the IMF era without shedding their familial structure of ownership and management. Despite a recent argument that familial control can be a source of corporate agility and competitiveness, it is the very weak spot being targeted by global speculative funds for possible swallowing (Chapter 7).3
