This year marks the 20th anniversary of the June 10 civil uprising of 1987 and the 10th year since the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. We have prepared a series of contributions from prominent foreign scholars to analyze the significant changes that Korea has undergone during the past two decades. We hope our readers can gain some insights into the nation's future from these articles. - Ed.

Being an external and intermittent observer of South Korean society, and being deeply skeptical of both the Malthusian gloom and doom and the counter-Malthusian fear of decline and decay, I am baffled why more people aren't welcoming the demographic transformations I have discussed as the maturing of South Korean society. Population growth certainly is not an unalloyed good, as Malthus was right to stress. Neither is economic growth.

Avner Offer's "The Challenge of Affluence" shows convincingly that economic growth beyond a certain level - and one which South Korea has long surpassed - does not appreciably enhance, and may in fact erode, quality of life. It is difficult for me to believe that Seoul's concrete jungle and traffic jams represent the telos of either Korean civilization or human progress. To me, at least, they are aesthetic blights and social disasters. Why would it be so terrible to have fewer South Koreans? There will be more space for people and fewer cars on the road. What would ordinary people be giving up if the economy were to enter a steady-state level? In the age of global warming and impending environmental catastrophes, what we least need is a single-minded stress on economic growth that systematically undervalues clean air, healthy living, and leisurely pursuits. What are human beings for? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, policymakers who obsessively worry about population and economic decline strike me as people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The counter-Malthusian nightmare is problematic also because it projects the present into the future. It is not an accident that countries with the lowest fertility rates are relatively affluent societies with traditional, patriarchal gender roles: South Korea and Japan, Italy and Spain, Hong Kong and Ukraine. The impending shortage of labor force can easily be overcome by a greater incorporation of women into the labor force. Although it may be counter-intuitive, working women and more children are not incompatible. A more egalitarian household division of labor (that is, men engaged in more housework and childcare) and accessible and affordable childcare facilities will go a long way towards avoiding at once the shortage of workers and babies. Changing the current arrangements will ineluctably shift the course of South Korea and thereby avert the counter-Malthusian scenario.

Possible scenarios: Multiethnic Korea? Collective suicide?

Social scientists are notoriously poor prognosticators. Yet trends and developments and their possible permutations provide vantage points from or against which readers can make sense of the present and the future. In this spirit, let me suggest two possible trends in the next decade or so beyond the fairly likely near-term developments I have discussed: declining population growth and possible population decline, as well as the aging of society and the potential counter-Malthusian catastrophe.

One trend that is already discernible is the making of multicultural Korea. South Korea has long viewed itself as a culturally and ethnically homogeneous society, much like its neighbor Japan (although I am skeptical of the latter claim, as the title of my 2001 book "Multiethnic Japan" makes clear). Whether we turn to the myth of Tangun as the origin of Korean people and civilization or the post-Korean War tendency to proscribe or at least devalue international or mixed marriage, South Koreans religiously stress their cultural and ethnic purity and homogeneity.

In fact, in the past two decades a quiet revolution has taken place. South Korea is rapidly transforming into a multicultural, even multiethnic, society. The major source is the steady rise in the number of international or mixed marriages. The proportion of international marriages to total marriages in South Korea has grown from just 1.2 percent in 1990 to 13.6 percent in 2005. The growth has been especially pronounced since the mid-1990s. Two main streams of foreigners are migrant workers and "picture brides." The shortage of labor, which will most likely become more acute in the near future, has already led to a growing influx of workers from abroad. Labor power, however, cannot be extricated from labor. As much as the host society may wish migrant workers to be temporary - and migrant workers by and large intend to return home - they often end up staying, as diasporic Koreans have done from China to Brazil. The construction of a multiethnic Korea may therefore be a direct result of decline in the labor force.

More striking is the influx of picture brides, women who almost always hail from other Asian countries to become betrothed to rural, farming men. In fact, over a third of rural men in 2005 married foreigners, primarily ethnic Koreans from China but also Filipinas, Vietnamese, and other eastern and central Asians. Picture brides represent the flip side of the South Korean economic miracle. Urbanization and industrialization have depleted the countryside of young women, who tend to seek better educational and employment opportunities, as well as much more fashionable lifestyles, in cities. The grinding, unglamorous life of family farming repels many South Korean women and therefore has led to a shortage of brides in the countryside. This situation is exacerbated by the strong South Korean preference for sons. The normal sex ratio at birth (the number of male births per 100 female births) is around 105, but South Korea's ratios since the late 1980s have ranged between 108 and 116. Picture-bride unions are thus seen as a necessity in rural areas, and an inevitable consequence of intermarriage is the growing number of bi-ethnic children. It is these children, along with the expected increase in the number of foreign migrant workers, who may well constitute the foundation of a multiethnic South Korea. On a more speculative note, declining fertility is at once a cause and a consequence of the cultural and social transformation of South Korea: the collective anomie of South Korean society. Anomie refers to the absence of norms or goals, leading to lives without purpose and individual malaise. As the pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim suggested in his classic "Suicide" (1897), anomie is a consequence of rapid social and economic change.

However one may wish to describe South Korea from the Korean War (1950-1953) to the Seoul Olympics (1988), anomie is certainly not one. There is nothing like war to concentrate the mind, and the threat from North Korea seemed imminent and omnipresent. Whether in the single-minded pursuit of economic enrichment (or escape from poverty) or the profoundly meaningful struggle for democracy (post-Korean War intellectual history is, in a sense, a series of antigovernmental proclamations and demonstrations), South Korean lives were not lacking in purpose. Indeed, there was a surfeit of meaning, making it, at least for outsiders, a cauldron of serious, life-and-death discussions and debates. The future in the post-Korean War era was imminent; politics and history, meaning and purpose, saturated everyday life.

In the post-Olympic, post-democratization, post-development era, South Korea has achieved a state of economic enrichment and political democracy that went wildly beyond the dream of all but a few exceptionally optimistic people in the immediate postwar years. Yet economic growth has obliterated traditional social supports, whether the extended, extensive family or intrusive neighbors and community, and severed social life from nature. Consider social and family life purely from a demographic perspective. I have, I think, 20-30 first cousins on each side. My daughter, at least on her Korean side, has none. The enhancement of nuclear family life makes it at once a haven in the heartless world and a crucible of unbound ambition. Stripped of a rich, tangled, complex family and community life - precisely at a time when the end of ideology coincides with the decline of communist threat - what remain are the ideology of economic enrichment and the survival of the educationally fittest. I recall talking to a South Korean reporter who was a correspondent in Paris. He was shocked that a child working at a bakery expressed his desire to be a baker when he grew up. He remarked that, in South Korea, almost all the boys would have said that they would like to be the president of a large company or something to that effect. The royal road of individual ambition is educational attainment; in the age of one-child or two-children families, the concentration of parental resources and attention falls heavily on the shoulders of children. For their parents and grandparents, university life may have been a dream; for many South Korean children today, it is a grim duty. Should it be surprising that, according to a study by the Presidential Committee on the Aging Society and Population Policy, only 17 percent of teenagers thought that people should get married and that only 27 percent said that they should have children? If low fertility has contributed to the educational rat race, then the rat race may very well turn into a march of lemmings. In the insistent demand for educational attainment, we see the anomie in the era of population decline in a nutshell.

My claim about South Korean anomie finds ready refutations, of course. South Korean Christian missionaries have become notorious for their zeal (though religion is likely to be the rare source of rapture and redemption in the hermeneutically impoverished life in contemporary South Korea). Hiking and mountaineering have become popular (though nature continued to be tamed and mountains razed). There are social movements, whether to prevent environmental degradation or human rights abuses (though articulated principally on the Internet). What is most striking is that the nation has become plugged into the internet, finding virtual or on-line communities. The lonely crowd of anomic South Koreans, in other words, seeks meaning in electronically mediated communication. It is not surprising that collective suicide pacts should rely not on traditional friendship networks but on electronically mediated communities. The medium very well may be the message here.

By John Lie

2007.08.06