If you liked this article, please click "Follow" in the top right. Thank you for your support and encouragement, and hope to bring you a comfortable reading experience.
Can you believe it? South Korea, once known as one of the "Four Asian Tigers," is now riddled with holes.
The medical reform has triggered mass strikes due to the interests of all parties, the erotic industry is difficult to control, and South Korea is rushing towards the abyss of collapse.
For South Korea, the existing world order is no longer able to eradicate South Korea, and tearing it down and starting over may become the only way out for South Korea.
What kind of problems is South Korea facing today, and how does this relate to the country's composition?
Peach flooding
When it comes to South Korea, the keywords that come to people's minds are nothing more than "Samsung", "Korean idols" and some "local culture" that has been stolen from China and transformed into packaging.
After all, more than 70 years ago, our ancestors fought on the Korean Peninsula, but the weak South Korean army was not the protagonist of that war, and the real opponent of the volunteer army was always the invincible US army.
As the bridgehead of the Cold War, South Korea developed rapidly with the support of the United States and became a developed country.
And the "Korean Wave" has also swept the world, and even today, South Korea's boy and girl groups occupy a huge market in the world entertainment field, and even China ten years ago could not resist the invasion and assimilation of the Korean Wave.
But behind the high prosperity, South Korean society has long been riddled with holes, just like South Korea's developed plastic surgery industry, no matter how advanced the technology is, under the delicate face, the original DNA will not be changed by a cosmetic surgery.
In today's world, there are many countries where the sex trade is legalized, and it is divided into limited legal and fully legal.
For example, the United Kingdom has banned the opening of brothels and allowed private sex transactions, while the Netherlands, across the sea from the United Kingdom, has completely liberalized restrictions, the sex trade is legal and regulated, and its capital Amsterdam also has the most famous red light district in the world.
In fact, it is not surprising that the West has opened up to the erotic industry, after all, it is completely in line with the more unrestrained ideological characteristics of the West.
However, in the relatively conservative East Asian cultural circle, except for China, which has always insisted on cracking down on pornography, gambling and drugs, South Korea and Japan have extremely ambiguous attitudes towards the erotic industry.
Although the Japanese government has always insisted that the sex trade is illegal in Japan, the more than $70 billion a year generated by the Japanese custom industry has forced the government to turn a blind eye, after all, it cannot get along with money, and the Japanese custom industry has indeed become world-famous.
However, the Japanese custom industry is also good in marketing, and in fact, South Korea's peach industry is the best in Asia.
As in Japan, sex trafficking is also illegal in South Korea.
However, according to statistics, the annual transaction volume of South Korea's peach industry reaches 14 trillion won, accounting for more than 4% of South Korea's total GDP, and the number of employees is as high as more than one million.
What's even more staggering is that the Han River, known as the mother river of South Korea, has been tested by professional institutions and found that the content of Viagra in the river water is as high as 80%.
And behind the astonishing data, the savagery and darkness of South Korea's peach industry are also creepy.
In March 2020, the "Room N" incident was exposed, and people intuitively saw the dark side of Korean society for the first time.
This is a rare case of mass sexual exploitation, in which the main culprit, Zhao Zhubin, approached the victim on the pretext of "impersonating a police officer" and "introducing a high-paying part-time job", obtained the victim's personal information and the contact information of relatives and friends, and coerced and enticed them to take large-scale photos.
Immediately afterwards, Zhao Zhubin posted the photo on the foreign communication software Telegram to induce more lustful people to join it.
In order to join the photo and video sharing group established by Cho Jubin, many people do not hesitate to pay tens or even millions of won for "entrance fees".
In order to avoid police search, Zhao Zhubin constantly created group chats and disbanded group chats, so it was called "Room N".
If the victim tries to get out of his hands, Cho will threaten to "tell his relatives and friends what happened" and lock them up in his clutches.
And in this process, there is not a single male netizen who exposes the crime, they just try to improve their viewing level and try to enjoy more services, they seem to have become Zhao Zhubin's accomplices, the exploiters of "Room N".
Justice is sometimes late, but never absent.
The "Room N" incident was finally exposed by two female college students who were undercover, and Moon Jae-in ordered a thorough investigation into the matter, and the truth was finally revealed.
The police intervened to investigate and found that at least 74 women were victims of room N, including even underage girls.
Popular outrage swept through the Blue House like a flood, and the main culprit, Cho Ju-bin, became the first criminal in South Korea to be publicly displayed for a sex crime, and was sentenced to 42 years in prison.
And Room N is just the tip of the iceberg of South Korea's peachy industry, and under the water, I don't know how many "Room N" are still operating silently, and when the tide of public opinion subsides, they will still be rampant.
The South Korean government has changed one term after another, and politicians are busy leaning against each other, and at the same time, they are worried that a thorough investigation of the peach industry will touch the interests of special classes, so they are naturally reluctant to do such a thankless task.
It is rare to meet a president with such a conscience and backbone as Moon Jae-in, and he will be reluctantly resigned under the encirclement and suppression of chaebols and opposition parties, and in the absence of state coercive intervention, it is a foregone conclusion that eroticism will be rampant in South Korea.
But the uncontrollable peach industry is far from the biggest problem facing South Korea.
Whose cake has been moved by health care reform
If South Korea's peach industry grew savagely because of the government's laissez-faire, then South Korea's medical care has become chaotic and disorderly due to government intervention.
On February 6 this year, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration enacted a series of public health reform packages.
Among them, it is worth noting that the South Korean government has asked Korean medical schools to expand their enrollment from next year, and plans to expand the number of students from 3,058 to 5,058, and this number will continue to increase year by year.
Yoon's move is the first of its kind in 27 years, as the number of medical school admissions in South Korea has been tightly controlled, with no expansion since 1998 and even a small reduction in the number of places between 2000 and 2006 to today's 3,058.
Of course, Yoon Suk-yeol's move is by no means to improve people's livelihood, but for the sake of popular support.
At the beginning of this year, South Korea held parliamentary elections as usual, and Lee Jae-myung, who experienced a hunger strike and assassination last year, led the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) to a strong momentum, crushing Yoon's National Power Party in the polls.
In order to salvage the disastrous approval rate, Yoon Suk-yeol can only make this decision and open the medical treatment that the people are most concerned about, so as to please voters and reverse the decline.
As the saying goes, persimmons have to be pinched softly, Yin Xiyue never expected that he would encounter a hard stubble this time.
A week after the reform plan was announced, a strike storm ensued by a joint brew of South Korean doctors.
First of all, all the doctors of the five major hospitals in Seoul, who are the leaders of the Korean medical community, collectively submitted their resignations on February 19 and stopped working at 6 am on the 20th.
Subsequently, a total of 715 doctors from 23 hospitals submitted their resignations to participate in the strike movement.
Not only that, but the health care reform turmoil has also spread to the academic community, with more than 11,000 medical students from 34 medical schools applying for suspension, including many interns.
Professors at 40 medical universities have also submitted their resignations to join their students in fighting against government reforms.
The turmoil has brought South Korea's healthcare system to a near paralysis, preventing many surgeries from being carried out as scheduled, and bringing countless patients' families into the fray, adding fuel to an already complex situation.
As many news outlets added fuel to the story, public opinion took on the sidelines of one-sided accusations against the striking doctors, believing that they were detrimental to the public interest.
But in reality, it is the South Korean government and the chaebols behind the exploitation that are really to blame, because the root of South Korea's health care problems is a structural imbalance.
A professor at Seoul National University Hospital said, "We don't lack doctors, what we lack is reasonable distribution." ”
Because private medical institutions account for more than 90% of the entire medical system in South Korea, this is destined to be dominated by market-oriented competition, and hospitals focus on profit rather than treating patients and saving lives.
As we all know, South Korea's cosmetic surgery industry is highly developed, and dermatology, ophthalmology and plastic surgery are the main profit owners of hospitals, and the salaries of doctors in related departments are naturally much higher than those in basic medical departments such as obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics.
According to statistics, the number of plastic surgeons in South Korea has doubled in the past decade, and the number of dermatologists has increased by 40%, and many medical students are mostly reluctant to work in lower-margin basic medical care after graduation, resulting in a shortage of doctors in these departments.
Because of this, the Yoon Suk-yeol government's health care reform plan is tantamount to scratching the itch in the eyes of the medical community, expanding the enrollment of medical students will not solve the structural problems of South Korea's medical care, and under the framework dominated by the private sector, it will also cause serious involution, and hospitals will only further cut doctors' salaries in order to increase profits.
In addition, educational resources will be diluted, and the level of competence of medical school graduates may decline overall.
In the end, with the defeat of the National Power Party in the National Assembly election in early April, the Yoon Suk-yeol government had to give in to the medical profession and announced on April 19 that it would adjust the medical reform plan, and the health care reform turmoil was about to come to an end.
After two months of tossing, the problem is still not solved, everything is back to the original state, and South Korea has become numb in this back-and-forth.
The quagmire of Korean society
Whether it is the peach-colored industry, which has been repeatedly banned, or the structural imbalance of the medical system, the reason why these problems are difficult to cure is that Korean society, which is congenitally deficient and acquired, is the problem itself.
Unlike China or other third world countries, South Korea was not founded on its own through independence movements, but was a product of the US-Soviet struggle for hegemony from the beginning.
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union established a country in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula with the 38th parallel as the boundary, and Syngman Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea with the support of the United States, which was a veritable puppet government.
After the outbreak of the Korean War, a large number of U.S. troops were stationed in South Korea, and in order to meet the physiological needs of American soldiers, the South Korean government followed Japan's example and encouraged women to join the peach industry, and also trained them to learn English, and the number of sex workers who provided services to the U.S. military reached 17,000 at its peak.
The South Korean government's move to sell its national dignity in this way is all aimed at currying favor with the United States in exchange for American assistance and protection.
To this day, there are still 12 major U.S. military bases scattered throughout South Korea, and the military expenses are mainly borne by South Korea, and the wartime command of the South Korean military is also controlled by the Americans.
In other words, South Korea is still a country with no military autonomy, and every move is under the control of the United States, which is South Korea's congenital defect.
As South Korea entered the stage of development, during the administration of Park Chung-hee in the sixties of the last century, in order to create an "export-oriented" industrial system, the Park Chung-hee government took the initiative to loosen the restrictions on South Korean private capital and help the development of private enterprises through various policies and resource tilts.
While the expansion of the private sector has certainly boosted South Korea's economy and catapulted it into one of the "Asian Tigers", the government's constraints on companies have also been weakened.
Eventually, the private sector gradually developed into a modern chaebol, and the anti-customer became the de facto controller of the state.
According to Forbes magazine in 2017, the top 10 chaebols in South Korea contribute 81.2% of South Korea's GDP in a year, in other words, 80% of all South Korea's wealth is in the hands of chaebols.
In capitalist countries, absolute capital is equivalent to absolute power, and the government is dispensable in South Korea, because the will of the chaebol is even above the law, which is the acquired deformity of South Korea.
Under these circumstances, successive South Korean governments are struggling, and any reform may affect the interests of the chaebols or the Americans, and will eventually have to be hastily ended.
Because of this, the presidency of South Korea is arguably one of the most dangerous professions in the world, with presidents who have been assassinated, arrested and imprisoned, or forced to commit suicide.
For today's South Korea, unless it undergoes a radical upheaval that overturns everything that exists and reinvents the existing order, slow death will be the only outcome for South Korea.
This article was originally written by "On History and the Present", and has been opened for the whole network to protect rights, and may not be reproduced without authorization, and infringement must be investigated.