Middle-class Mythbreaking
In considering South Korea’s miraculous post-war economic growth, it has been customary to view the emergence of the middle class as among factors that helped overturn the long period of authoritarian rule and usher in the democratic transition of the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly, since the candlelight protests of 2016, it has been common to point to a new grassroots political resurgence that some observers have likened to a new democratic revolution.
Myungji Yang’s innovative new study challenges such assumptions, outlining the state’s manipulative role in advancing a narrative of social change premised on a depiction of middle-class prosperity that was more myth than reality. Widespread middle-class identity was often more aspirational than actual, particularly for salaried and selfemployed workers. Also, the middle class has been increasingly split into winners and losers, with the former benefiting from a “selective and exclusionary” process fueled by real-estate speculation and preferential state-led policies. Through a history of three stages of social development — the Park Chung-hee era, the Gangnam real-estate boom of the 1980s to 1990s, and the post-1997 financial crisis to the present — Yang explains persuasively the rise of middle-class alienation, disaffection and anti-elite sentiment — trends that may, at some point, lead to a challenge to the democratic values and norms at the heart of South Korea’s recent history.
Intersection between domestic politics, security policy and debates about the past.
Global Asia.