Dai Taojiang
In 2018, the World Inequality Lab, a group of 100 economic researchers, published its first Global Inequality Report, predicting that if the trend of wealth concentration continues to be ignored, by 2050, forty percent of the world's wealth will be concentrated in the hands of one percent of the population, and the global gap between rich and poor will regress to what it was two centuries ago.
The gap between rich and poor is a global problem, and South Korea is no exception. Despite the impact of the Asian financial crisis and the subprime credit crisis, data show that the share of income of the top 10 percent of South Korea's wealthy has still grown from 29 percent in the 1980s to 44 percent in 2016, a trend that has not stopped in the past five years. In other words, ten percent of South Koreans hold half of the country's income, leaving the remaining ninety percent struggling for survival. The gap between rich and poor is another social hot issue after the feminist movement, and Korean mass entertainment culture is also keen to make a big fuss here, the Korean drama "Castle in the Sky" in 2018, the film "Parasite" that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020 and the TV series "The Penthouse" that began airing in the same year, the gap between rich and poor has always been the core contradiction of these popular works that have created various ratings records. The same is true of Netflix's recently launched Korean original drama "Squid Games".
As a standardized product on the assembly line of the film and television industry, "Squid Game" has achieved commercial success, the trailer is like a combination of the Japanese movie "As God Says" and the American movie "The Hunger Games" - the rich people watch the poor fight each other in children's games for entertainment; the main film makes people smell a hint of "Parasite" - not counting the fierce and evil rich and the poor who are not perfect Interact closely, showing the typical image of some Korean poor people, while crying about the helplessness of poverty with the loudest voice. Indict the sins of the rich in the softest voice.
Ready Player One
The old man numbered 001 in "Squid Games" is the participant and host of the game, and can be called the "number one player" in the true sense. The old man seems out of place because of his age in the crowd, and the foreshadowing in the play suggests that his identity is complicated, but with the endorsement of the cruel Korean social reality, neither the play nor the audience have doubts about him for the first time. Participating in the game of squid requires two conditions, one is to be poor and have sufficient motivation, and the other is not to be afraid of death. South Korea's "Daily Economic News" quoted the Korea Institute of Economic Research as a report that based on 2018, the poverty rate of the elderly over 65 years old in South Korea reached 43.4%, ranking first among the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and three times the average level of the organization; the suicide rate of the elderly in South Korea ranked first in the world. The conditions for the two competitions are fully occupied by the elderly in South Korea.
Wu Yinan ,001 player (played by Oh Yong-so)
The suicide rate of the elderly in South Korea is as high as 8 per 1,000, and the problem of suicide among the elderly is also the main reason why the suicide rate in South Korea has remained high in the global ranking for a long time. The main reason for the elderly in South Korea to go to the brink of extinction is poverty. The lack of an effective social welfare guarantee system, the lack of dignified old age and the concept of family, which do not want to be a burden on their children, combine to force the elderly to a dead end.
It was not until June 1981, when the Korean National Assembly passed the Welfare Act for the Elderly, that the welfare protection of the elderly in Korea could be based on the law. Although South Korea has put forward the slogan of building a welfare society since the time of the Park Chung-hee government, successive governments have always regarded economic development as the primary goal, social welfare security has not been included in the must-take into account, and the continuation of the Confucian tradition of old-age care in the official context is regarded as an internal family problem rather than a social problem. The late welfare law for the elderly has been revised several times, and the welfare is still mainly reflected in the "small favor" of providing a free physical examination for the elderly over 65 years old every two years and taking public transportation free of charge, and the application for pensions stipulated by law has strict restrictions, only citizens who benefit from public insurance or labor insurance and other national annuities during their employment can enjoy pensions in old age, while eligible Korean citizens only account for a quarter of the entire population, and only 8% of the elderly in South Korea meet the conditions for receiving pensions. The vast majority of korean elderly people lack systematic social security.
At present, a large part of the elderly in South Korea are "meritorious warriors" who worked fifteen hours a day for the South Korean economy, and some of them suffered "early layoffs" in the Asian financial crisis at the end of the last century, and began to retire at the age of 55 with severance pay. Due to the lack of sound economic planning, many people quickly spend their severance payments and fall into poverty. Due to the lack of economic security and the lack of ability to plan for a pension life, many Elderly Koreans rely on re-entry into the labor market to solve economic problems, and the employment rate of 65-year-olds in South Korea is 9.4%, ranking second in the world (Iceland ranks first, but the reasons are very different from South Korea). However, high employment rates do not mean high incomes, and the elderly labor force still inevitably slides to the brink of poverty.
At the same time, for the elderly in South Korea, family pension is not necessarily an option. On the one hand, with the continuous change of family concepts, some young people do not believe that supporting the elderly is a responsibility that families must bear, and the proportion of people holding this concept is still increasing every year. On the other hand, in the environment of the gap between the rich and the poor, the vast majority of families are not rich, and many poor elderly people need to rely on the low-income household subsidy provided by the government to survive, and one of the conditions for receiving the subsidy is to live alone, and living with the children is regarded as family support, and the government no longer pays subsidies. 53.2% of the elderly in South Korea live alone, close to the proportion of elderly poor people.
The rate of ageing in South Korea is 1.7 times the average for OECD members, and the number of people is increasing at 290,000 per year, and the number of elderly people in South Korea is expected to reach 37.3% by 2050, which means that there will be a large number of elderly poor people in South Korea. As a mirror of South Korea's external display of social reality, the image of the elderly living alone in Korean dramas is not uncommon, and most of them appear as gentle and wise elderly figures, and often sudden illness provides some necessary dramatic conflicts for the hero and heroine to smooth the path of love. In the process of literary and artistic processing, there is always intentional or unintentional avoidance of showing the poverty of the elderly, even the "Squid Game" that does the exhibition of the poor does not have a real sense of the poor elderly, when the number one player unveils the identity of the player, the problem of poverty in South Korea is once again invisible from the audience's eyes, and people forget the old man in reality after recalling the identity of the old gangster in the play.
Gambling Apocalypse
The Swiss, who speculated in the Wall Street stock market in the early days, summed up a set of twelve Zurich speculative laws, the first of which was "if you are not worried about the speculation you are engaged in, then you must not take enough risks", a law that has a more blunt statement, "The only way out of poverty is to take risks." "The law of speculation in Zurich may not fully explain the behavior of Wall Street capitalists, but it can explain from one side why gambling is more prevalent among the poor. The logic of the squid game clearly follows this law, either take away 45.6 billion or die, it is a huge gamble, and the protagonist in the play is also set to become a gambler.
Lee Jeong-jae as Cheng Qixun
Gambling is one of the most important means of attracting overseas tourists in South Korea, and 23 casinos throughout South Korea are open to foreigners, and Koreans can only enter and exit one casino in Gangwon-do Casino. South Korea has strict control over gambling in its own country, and the criminal law adopts the principle of personalism, stipulating that participation in gambling for profit can be fined up to 5 million won, habitual gamblers can be fined 20 million won and sentenced to three years in prison, and Koreans may also be punished for gambling overseas. "Squid Game" is similar to the Korean gambling industry as a whole, taking the lives of its compatriots to accept foreign guests to harvest money. Unable to reject the high profits of the gambling industry, South Korea has opened up offline betting on horse racing, racing, rowing and other competitive sports to adults in the past two decades, especially horse racing, which was once regarded as the next gold-sucking project after China's "Korean restriction order" in 2016, which brought about 200 billion won in taxes to the South Korean government every year.
Behind the horse racing boom is the prevalence of horse betting. On the one hand, the temptation of taxation, on the other hand, the ruling philosophy of the patriarchal state to regulate the behavior of the people, South Korea does not allow the people to gamble big and hurt themselves but indulges in small gambling pleasures, making the social evaluation of gambling behavior between right and wrong gray area, coupled with the speculative psychology spawned by the environment of serious imbalance between rich and poor in society, resulting in the gambling addiction rate of Korean citizens two to three times higher than in other countries. During the pandemic, the number of online gambling addicts in South Korea tripled. Similar speculation is the speculation that is very popular among young people to speculate in virtual currencies. However, the South Korean government's official tone on these problems is to blame the Internet for all problems and avoid talking about the social problems behind speculation. "Squid Game" also shows the gambling problem as the protagonist's flaw, and makes a logical preparation for the protagonist to participate in the game. It may be a personal problem for one person to bet on a sum of money with his life, and 456 people joining the squid game must be a social problem. The first squid game was held in 1988 and has been going on for more than three decades, but no one cares, and the gap between rich and poor and the social problems it derives seem to be the same.
City in the Sky
Many viewers are dissatisfied with "Squid Game" because the male protagonist is flat, lack of growth from beginning to end, the charm of the character depends on the actor's strong support, the 47-year-old age and his experience and the character's behavior logic are biased, if it is a young man, it may make sense. However, if the male protagonist is replaced by a young man, then his hair Xiao Cao Shangyou can't just study hard to enter Seoul National University, which was still called "Seoul National University" at that time, after all, relying on the cold window to study the title of the gold list has long been an old story in South Korea more than twenty years ago.
Park Hae-so as Cho Sang-woo
In 1980, Chun Doo-hwan, then president of South Korea, began to adjust the educational structure through administrative means, banning all extracurricular private education and training institutions in order to reduce the economic burden on families, make children of disadvantaged classes have more equitable educational opportunities, and promote South Korea's fertility rate in disguise. This policy has suffered a double fire and ice among the rich and poor groups, with the rich who can afford to buy better educational resources for their children expressing dissatisfaction, believing that government measures restrict the freedom of their descendants to have better development opportunities, and the civilian class widely supports this policy – it is worth mentioning that the mandatory unification of school uniforms in the squid game is also a part of the policy, and uniform clothing eliminates student differentiation and helps students get a more equal experience.
However, with the change of the king flag in Cheongwatai City, the policy was also loosened in the 1990s, and the spring breeze of Korean cram schools was blown again, and the further education was no longer dependent on the students' own strength, and the wealth held by the family gradually became a stronger guarantee for further education. In an era when purchasing power determines the right to education, education is no longer a ladder to achieve class leaps, and changing life through education has become a dream that never returns for a generation. South Korea has always been a society composed of "four edges" of blood, geography, academic relationship and teacher relationship, and Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University, which make up the "SKY University", may not be higher than other universities in South Korea in the world university rankings, but it has always been a gathering place for Korean elites. Half of South Korea's wealth is in the hands of a few, and half of South Korea's leadership is in the hands of SKY Alumni. When education is no longer a ladder, it becomes another door, another brick, to consolidate class barriers, and resources are firmly grasped in a particular group and achieve a closed loop of mobility.
Unlike blood and geography, education, especially modern education, flows with the blood of liberal thinking, and this kind of thinking that has dominated the world since human civilization entered modern history gives people the illusion of "the harder you work, the luckier", so that the elite groups that have benefited and succeeded in education ignore the help provided by the socially advantageous resource groups they are in, and attribute their personal success to their own efforts. When class mobility becomes the purpose of education, learning becomes the tool of the jin, the maximization of instrumental rationality naturally takes root in the consciousness of a generation and becomes the most efficient mode of thinking. Just as Cao Shangyou, who once entered the elite group and was beaten back to his original form, showed selfishness in the course of the game, when instrumental rationality became the universal will of the elite, the elite-dominated countries had no incentive to change the current situation of serious inequality between the rich and the poor.
Richard Wilkinson, a British professor of social epidemiology, has pointed out that the gap between rich and poor in society leads to social problems such as increased crime rates, lack of trust among citizens, and increased prevalence of mental illness, and most of the negative effects are directly on the population that has fallen into poverty, and has little impact on families engaged in elite occupations and the rich. In other words, if a person is confident that he has the conditions to avoid falling into poverty, then the gap between rich and poor may not be a problem for him. Most Squid Game viewers may have similar thoughts. As a product of the film and television industry assembly line, "Squid Game" places the audience and the rich people who manipulate the game on the same perspective to watch the killing and get entertainment, so that the audience has the illusion that they are not one of the 456 people, and disrupts the audience's thinking with flat characters who lack growth, old-fashioned and uncreative plots and excessive marketing, ignoring the real reasons for the desperate efforts of the poor. And the real squid game is happening in reality, the rich are not kind to the rich, and the poor are desperate with their peers in the rules set by the rich.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Ding Xiao