Dynasty Ascendant
“I THINK THEY [SAMSUNG] are mimicking exactly the old ways,” Jisoo Lee,
a corporate governance lawyer who’d tussled with Samsung at shareholder
meetings, told me over coffee after I’d first talked with Henry. He gave me
a comparison that Koreans often make.
“If you look at the first king of [Korea’s] Yi dynasty, Taejo, he had
eight sons, and there was this battle between the fifth and the youngest
son,” he said. “The fifth son later became the third king of the Yi dynasty.
But he had to fight against his father’s decision to make the youngest son
the crown prince.”
He then made a comparison to North Korea. After the dictator Kim
Jong Un rose to power when his father died in December 2011, he
conducted purges. He ordered the execution of his prominent uncle. Later,
his half-brother was assassinated with VX, a deadly nerve agent used in
chemical warfare, as he was boarding an airplane in Malaysia.
A dynastic battle within Samsung started growing as Samsung’s rising
corporate kings turned to another aristocratic tool of alliance: marriage.
B.C. had five daughters and three sons, and almost all of them married
into influential families in the 1950s and 1960s. His oldest son married the
daughter of an insurance executive and provincial governor; his second son
married the daughter of a Japanese businessman; his third son, the future
Chairman Lee Kun-hee, married a woman named Hong Ra-hee, who was
the daughter of a presidential cabinet member named Hong Jin-ki.
The marriage of Lee Kun-hee to Hong Jin-ki’s daughter established a
blood union between the families. They confided in each other for decades,
and the relationship gave Samsung a line to the government’s major power
players.