South Korea might be a wealthy nation with some of the world’s most well-known tech firms and pop culture, but its success did not occur overnight or without considerable hardship. Covering everything from war, elections, coups, uprisings, global conglomerates, a football World Cup, Olympics and K-Pop, Ramon Pacheco Pardo’s Shrimp to Whale is a brisk modern history of the East Asian nation’s tumultuous rise from the ashes of colonialism, war, and poverty in the 20th century.
The book’s title is taken from an old Korean perception that Korea was a shrimp among whales geopolitically, surrounded by much larger neighbors like China, Japan, and Russia. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, this proved to be true as Korea was exploited, colonized, and then partitioned into North and South Korea under the influence of foreign nations. Then, a brutal three-year war between the two Koreas involving other nations like the US and China took place in 1950, caused millions of civilian and military deaths and destroyed cities. After the war ended in 1953, South Korea faced a bleak future, impoverished with a GDP per capita of US$67 (not a typo) and high illiteracy rate.
Strongman Rhee Syngman, who first came to power by winning an election in 1948 that led to the formal creation of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), oversaw the nation’s gradual recovery from the war, but also entrenched an authoritarian system that was to remain intact until the 1980s.
South Korea thus went from a democracy at its founding to an authoritarian state interspersed with elections and coups and protests, a rocky political history that in Pardo’s clear flow does not get bogged down in details. Each president of South Korea and an overview of his or her rule is provided, which enables readers to see a clear path in how the nation progressed gradually to a modern democracy while shedding its authoritarian past.
Other notable leaders include Park Jung-hee, who came to power in a coup in 1961 as a general before being assassinated in 1979; Roh Tae-woo, whose reign began in 1988 with the nation’s transition into a full democracy; and Kim Dae-jung, whose “Sunshine Policy” in the late 1990s led to widening exchanges with North Korea and the first-ever inter-Korean summit.
Meanwhile, showing that even leaders are not untouchable in modern South Korea, several former presidents have been tried for corruption, with one, Roo Moo-hyun, tragically committing suicide, while another president Park Geun-hye was impeached during her reign for corruption in 2016.
In addition to political development, South Korea also becomes a major export and industrial powerhouse, in no small part due to its chaebols, or traditional family-run conglomerates, such as Samsung and Hyundai. While these are mentioned in the book, the coverage of the economy is somewhat sparse compared to political, geopolitical, and societal developments.
As South Korea progressed, its northern neighbor and fellow Koreans continued to go the other way, becoming more isolated and destitute under an authoritarian regime led by the Kim dynasty. There are brief moments of solidarity, such as the “Sunshine Policy” under South Korea’s Kim Dae-jung and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il which established economic, tourism and family reunion exchanges, but these dried up over the last decade. As a result, relations between the two, which are still technically at war, remain precarious.
However, no account of South Korea could be complete without mentioning its impressive soft power gained from its pop culture, comprising world-famous K-Pop bands, Korean movies, TV dramas, and authors, which first conquered Asia, and then much of the world. Yet even here, there is a practical aspect to its development, which was fostered and supported by the country’s authorities who wanted Korean movies and music to spread overseas and attract the wallets of foreign consumers.
The book covers events up until 2022 during the Covid pandemic so it is quite contemporary, but its brevity means a number of events get condensed and there is often an extremely bullish tone. The author’s enthusiasm for South Korea certainly flows through the pages, but this also leads to a lack of rigor in comparison to other works with a more strictly historical or journalistic focus. While major political and societal scandals are mentioned, there is not much focus on the country’s significant challenges such as having one of the world’s lowest birthrates and substantial economic inequality.
It remains to be seen if the country can continue to shine as brightly as portrayed by Pardo, but Shrimp to Whale is an enjoyable read that does well to describe how South Korea became an improbable “whale” from its humble beginnings during the mid-20th century.