“The Koreans...are the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world,”
James Bond’s nemesis Goldfinger says in the Ian Fleming novel (but not the
film adaptation), explaining why he hired Korean henchman Oddjob,
whose famous top hat could slice through a marble statue.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
An aged Korean woman pauses during her search for salvageable materials in
Seoul, South Korea, 1950. For much of its history, South Korea was a poor
nation with low prospects for development, devastated by the Korean War of
1950 to 1953.B.C. built his first fortune using political savvy, and by playing into a
sudden postwar boom. He established political links to South Korea’s first
president, Syngman Rhee, and was awarded a crucial but difficult-to-get
government license as a foreign currency recipient, allowing him to
embrace an economic growth model called import substitution, importing
raw materials like wool and transforming them into finished products like
clothing.
In the 1950s, people began using the word chaebol, or “wealth clan,” to
describe family empires like Samsung and Hyundai. The Chinese
characters for the Korean word are the same as those used in the Japanese