An allegory

The commentary about Squid Game has emphasized the economic precariousness in which so many Koreans live. Household debt in South Korea is over 100 percent of the country’s GDP. Housing is expensive while secure jobs are scarce. A few years ago, young people started referring to their country as Hell Chosun, a place where they simply couldn’t get ahead. Competition is ruthless for spots at the top universities and choice positions in the leading conglomerates known as chaebols. The resulting inequality has become a major theme in Korean culture, which came to the attention of global audiences in 2019 with the popular movie Parasite.

All of this is true. But here’s a more radical interpretation.

Squid Game reflects a deeper anxiety about South Korea’s place in the world and what it took to rise from a poor Third World country to one of the top global economies. In a strange way, the show is about globalization but has cleverly concealed its critical message to reach a global audience.

In 1960, South Korea’s per capita GDP was comparable to that of Ghana or Haiti. In the early 1960s, 40 percent of the population lived in absolute poverty. In that first decade after the end of the Korean War, North Korea was the more economically advanced half of the peninsula.

It was at this point, when South Korea was near the bottom of the global economic ladder, that it became a contestant in a ruthless global competition similar to the fictional Squid Game. Like most of its fellow competitors, South Korea was impoverished. It was willing to do almost anything to succeed. And it knew that the rules of the game were rigged against cooperation. In fact, the only way to win the game was to bend the rules.

Spoiler alert: In the space of little more than a single generation, South Korea became a wealthy country. Indeed, in 1996, it joined the club of wealthy countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

How did South Korea come out on top of this global Squid Game?

To win, South Koreans engaged in a series of collective sacrifices. They sacrificed democracy -- and the lives of a number of democracy activists -- during the years that dictator Park Chung-Hee presided over the Miracle on the Han. They sacrificed the environment, which was trashed during the rapid industrialization of the country.

And they sacrificed free time and overall well-being. In Korea, as in Japanese, there’s a word for “to die from overwork” (kwarosa). Once, when I asked a Korean activist friend when she was going to take a vacation, she looked bewildered. Vacation, she informed me, was when you rested in the hospital after going there to recover from work-related exhaustion.

Education was one major strategy to lift South Korea out of poverty. In 1945, the country’s literacy rate was only 22 percent, one of the lowest in the world. By 1970, it was nearly 90 percent. In the 1970s, South Korean universities came to be known as ‘monuments of cow skeletons’, for farmers would do anything to send their children to the cities for education, even to the point of selling their cows and their land and taking out loans. In this way, the countryside sacrificed for the good of an emerging urban elite.

In addition to suffering themselves, South Koreans also took advantage of the suffering of others. Just as Japanese conglomerates profited from assisting the United States in the Korean War, South Korean companies like Hyundai and Hanjin got a big lift from US contracts during the Vietnam War.

To get to the front of the line, South Korea also took shortcuts. With its famous ppali-ppali (fast-fast) approach to development, Korea rushed buildings, bridges, and transportation projects to their completion. In several infamous examples, the corners that construction companies cut led to horrific infrastructure disasters like the Seongsu Bridge collapse in 1994 and the Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995.

But Korea also broke the rules in smart ways. Instead of being content with supplying the world with raw materials, the South Korean government subsidized the creation of new industries that would become globally competitive. For instance, without any history of modern shipbuilding, South Korea became a leader in the industry in the 1970s and recently regained the number one spot. In this way, South Korea gamed globalization, figuring out a way to build an export powerhouse from an unpromising resource base.

The other contestants in the global Squid Game, the ones who failed to play the game as successfully as South Korea, were not eliminated from the competition. But people nevertheless died as a result of those decisions. In countries that became stuck in cycles of debt and poverty, millions and millions of people lost their lives because of hunger, disease, and conflict.

So, Squid Game may well be a hyperviolent entertainment, but the loss of life is actually quite tepid when compared to the losses sustained during the real-world Squid Gameof globalization.

Excepted: ‘The Real Meaning of Squid Game’

Counterpunch.org