What should our elites do for the country?

Cho Yoon-je

The author is professor emeritus at Sogang University and a member of the Monetary Policy Board of the Bank of Korea.

Unfortunately, Korea’s contemporary elites could not inherit decent legacies from their forefathers. Foreigners who visited Korea at the end of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) poignantly criticized the noble class at the time — called the yangban — for their inexorably laidback lifestyle. In her 1898 book “Korea and Her Neighbours,” a travelogue by Isabella Bird Bishop — an English explorer, photographer and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society — compared the yangban class to “leaches” engrossed in exploiting the commoners and slaves for their lazy life. While doing nothing, the ruling class — senior government officials, in particular — often accused members of the underprivileged class of falsely accumulating their wealth to take it away from them. As a result, the commoners had no motivation whatsoever to save money, which led to a critical delay in amassing capital for the economic development of the country. She even observed that no noble tribes in other countries let their servants hold the reins like in Joseon. Yangbans didn’t have to serve in the army or pay taxes.

In Mokminsimseo, a book by “Dasan” Jeong Yak-yong (1762-1836) — one of the greatest neo-Confucian scholars in the late Joseon Dynasty — the author accused greedy officials of trying to plunder the property of commoners. Yangbans didn’t go to the battlefields to protect the lives of their subjects, in sharp contrast with their counterparts in the West. When Korea was invaded by foreign countries in the past, commoners and Buddhist monks instead raised or joined militias to fight the enemies. Even after suffering 35 years of pitiful colonization by Japan in the first half of the 20th century, the ruling class in Korea did not change much. According to “Made in Korea,” a memoir by the late Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai Group, he volunteered to deliver newspapers to the military outposts in the frontline to help boost the morale of South Korean soldiers and went to coastline cities and islands in South Sea to help prevent a public commotion during the 1950-53 Korean War.

On a July day during the war, Chung visited the office of the Democratic Party in Busan to learn about the situation of the war. But he was utterly disappointed to see politicians “drinking beers and playing Go games after taking off their jackets as if nothing had happened.” Later, he heard the rumors that they were ready to flee to Japan if the situation got worse, he wrote.

However, Korean elites didn’t always do badly. The exception was a generation stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s. Their selfless devotion helped the country transform into the 10th largest economy through amazing industrialization and democratization. Such achievements owe much to all the blood, sweat and tears of the people. But you cannot ignore the less than 10 percent elites who chose the right direction for the country and their future generations.

What about our elites today? Given the hard path our society has taken over the past 30 years, I wonder if they really did their fair share. Due to the old systems of our society, friction and distortions take place everywhere. Despite the fast aging of our population and the swift digital revolution, our labor-management and education systems have not changed much from the past manufacturing-based ones during the high-growth period. That causes Korean production facilities to move to other countries, deepens the dual structure in the labor market, routinizes early retirement and worsens the mismatch between demand and supply for jobs. But elites in our political circles, officialdom, companies and the education field have been sitting on their hands without the courage to fix it.

Our society’s reward and punishment systems are no different. At the current pace, we can hardly foster talent or raise expertise and efficiency across the board. Different from the developing era, competitors of our current elites are the elites of advanced countries. Without knowledge, expertise, morality and insights on par with them, our elites cannot lead the country.

In an epochal watershed moment like today — characterized by the ongoing U.S.-China rivalry, the rebalancing of powers between the West and the East and the realignment of the international order taking place rapidly — mature perspectives about global affairs are needed most. As we don’t have promising models to follow now, we must have enough creativity to chart a new path on our own. Without a thorough analysis of the past and the present — and without ceaseless endeavors to learn from the past in order to lead a new world — we can hardly groom ingenuity.

Looking back, Korean elites could play their due role when they were not confined to the precious few and when they were wide open to competition. Our elites in the 1960s were not the elites of the past, as most of them were descendants of poor farmers. We must be wary of the alarming consolidation of our elites today. Members of the current elite class must deeply reflect on what roles they must play to weather this turbulent era rather than just wasting time fighting over what will be forgotten just a month later.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.