Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 96

Note: The documents on the following pages were selected for the following reasons:
1) to understand South Korea’s impressive economic and technological development; 2)
recognize the importance of accessing knowledge from reputable sources (the documents were
written by some of the most highly regarded scholars of Korean Studies in the United States); 3)
provide students with accessible, accurate, and interesting information appropriate for high
school students of World History and Economics.
Korean Economic Development
Document A - Carter J. Eckert, et al. Korea Old and New: A History.1990. 397-398, 407-8.
“While the credit and responsibility for South Korean development ultimately rests with the
Koreans themselves, the influence of foreign powers in shaping the country’s economy has been
extraordinary….It was the Japanese colonialism [1910-1945] that ultimately laid the foundation
for a modern transformation of the economy. To be sure, colonial development was geared to
Japa nese, rather than Korean, goals and needs. But the changes effected were nevertheless
historic. The first and most important point…is that the United States since 1945 has been the
decisive factor in the creation and maintenance of a political environment on the Korean
peninsula in which South Korea’s particular capitalist development has taken place….In addition
to insuring a political environment conducive to capitalist development, the U.S. has directly or
indirectly sought to foster economic growth in South Korea….American policy makers have
also tended to see the development of a strong capitalist in Korea (and elsewhere) as an integral
part of their anticommunist strategy and have consequently provided South Korea with large
amounts of the two things they needed the most: capital and technology. Between 1946 and 1976
the U.S. supplied a total of $12.6 billion in economic and military assistance to South Korea –
more dollars per capita of aid than to any other foreign country except South Vietnam and
Israel….The influx of American capital into South Korea has been accompanied by a
corresponding flow of American technology and technical expertise.
[Korea’s] essential homogeneity and historically based sense of cultural attainment helped pave
the way for modern Korean nationalism, which gradually developed in reaction to foreign
imperialism and occupation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism, in
particular, intensified nascent nationalist feeling by providing a clear external enemy and by
leaving many Koreans with a passionate post-colonial resolve to match or outdo the economic
achievements of their former colonial overlords….the continued strong sense of national unity
and destiny and the catalytic bitterness and anger (han in Korean) of the colonial experience –
have been consciously and effectively harnessed in the service of economic growth by South
Korea’s developmental state.
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