South Korea's economic miracle

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An eyewitness account of how a poor, war-ravaged nation became a global economic powerhouse. We hear the memories of Dr Kongdan Oh, who grew up in South Korea in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Korean War. The country had been left devastated by the conflict. Then, in the early 1960s, South Korea's new military leader, General Park Chung-hee, launched an ambitious national drive for rapid economic growth. For many, it marked the start of South Korea's economic transformation.

Photo: South Korean labourers balancing baskets of coal, while working inside the grounds of a factory. Busan, 1967 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex
0:40.2	Last.
0:41.3	All this week as countries around the world consider how to rebuild their economies after COVID-19,
0:47.2	witness history is looking back at previous attempts to reimagine society in the wake of
0:52.1	a crisis or moment of change.
0:54.8	And today we hear from a woman who witnessed the start of South Korea's transformation
0:59.9	from impoverished war-avaged nation in the 1950s to a global economic powerhouse.
1:07.0	It was bloody miserable time.
1:13.0	First of all, so many people were killed and wounded and missing.
1:16.0	And everybody was starving.
1:19.0	And there are a lot of orphans and malnutrition people on the streets.
1:25.0	Dr. Kong Dan O is a renowned South Korean academic and specialist on Asia,
1:29.6	currently at the Institute for Defence Analysis in the United States. But back in the 1950s she was a
1:35.8	young girl, the daughter of an academic growing up in South Korea amid the desolation
1:41.2	caused by the Korean War, a war which had lasted for years,
	...

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