Just some notes from my lectures at Korea University…..
Korea’s four leading industries are shipping, automobiles,
steel, and chemicals. It has an
extremely low birth rate (1.22 children born to each woman). A decade ago it had the lowest birth rate in
the history of the world, which was 1.08.
This is going to cause problems for the country as laborers will be
scarce. To further exacerbate this, 80%
of Koreans are college educated, so finding workers to do the grunt work will
be an increasing challenge. About the
birth rate, our professor commented, “A human being has two arms (to work with)
and one mouth (you have to feed it).
Realizing that they need those arms (workers), the government which used
to discourage big families is now paying a subsidy to parents who have a third
child.
The fact that the nation was obviously using selective
gendering to perpetuate their Confucian ideal of bringing male heirs into the
world has screwed up their male/female ratio so that men in rural areas are
having problems finding brides. Interestingly,
our professor who gave this presentation was skirting the abortion issue even
though the figures clearly demonstrate that selective abortion was quite common
a few years ago, although evidently the Koreans have realized the problems
stemming from this and have mended their ways.
Korea recently became the 7th country to join the “20/50
Club” – meaning they have a $20,000 per capita income for a population of over 50
million.
We had a good lecture about Inter-Korean relations and the
North Korean nuclear problem, but it’s too complicated to summarize here, as is
the presentation on the history of Korean/American diplomacy. Suffice it to say that the future of both
relationships is uncertain but the general tone was cautiously optimistic.
The summary of the lecture on the Korean educational system
is as follows: President Obama is crazy
to want to emulate their system because the Koreans score well on tests due to “cram
schools” that their students attend after regular school, often until the wee
hours of the morning. The whole system
is a test factory and the suicide rate is high.
Ironically, so much emphasis is put on passing the tests with high
enough marks to get into one of the top colleges that its common for the
students, once they get into college, to stop studying and just party.
One of our professors told us an interesting story about how
his family tried to arrange his marriage and set him up with 15 different
potential brides, none of whom filled the bill.
Just as he was getting ready to go to America to pursue his graduate
degree his mom was in the beauty parlor lamenting that her son couldn’t find a
suitable bride and someone in the shop said, “I know a girl.” He met her, liked what he saw, went to her
parents and presented his transcripts to show he had a high GPA, and two weeks
later they were engaged. This is the
same professor who held up his book saying, “Here’s my book on Korean sociology”
(throws book down on table) “It’s out of print.” Well, you had to be there, but it was
funny.
Finally, we had a lecture on “Hallyu” or the Korean
Wave. It’s really amazing what they’ve
done through social media. After
generations of being second to the Japanese, now the Koreans have throngs of
young Japanese girls who are hot for Korea – all because of “K-Pop” – Korean popular
culture which has spread like wildfire over the world, mostly through YouTube. The lecture was entitled “From B2C to B2B:
Selling Korean Pop Music in the Age of New Social Media” and was about how you
no longer sell music to customers (the “C”) but business sell the music to
other businesses like i-Tunes and YouTube. You make gillions of dollars off of
it and it’s cheaper to produce online. In
the process, it’s become really, really cool to be Korean. Our professor said that the Japanese girls
are hot for Korea because of “post-colonial melancholy” which he boiled down to
one sentence: “Japanese girls hate
Japanese men.”
The above lectures were all presented by Korean faculty
members of local Seoul universities. The
rest of our lectures were all given during our trip around Korea by Dr. Mark
Peterson of Brigham Young University, an expert on Korean studies.
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