A Geopolitical Economy of Heavy Industrialization and Second Tier City Growth in South Korea: Evidence from the ‘Four Core Plants Plan’

Abstract

In this article, we examine heavy industrialization and second tier urbanization in South Korea during the 1970s from a geopolitical economic perspective. We highlight the crucial, spatially complex geopolitical process of forming transnational class alliances, embedded in Cold War geopolitics, which has been neglected within state-centric developmental state theories and approaches to urbanization. Specifically, we trace the changes in the state’s original developmental plan for promoting the machinery industry in the southeast region during the 1960s and 1970s. We show how Hyundai, one of the most dominant chaebols, grew to exercise decisive influence over the state’s developmental strategy and became a powerhouse in the Korean economy, particularly in the city of Ulsan. Based on a case study of the Four Core Plants Plan, we show that the success of Hyundai was not an outcome of the effectiveness of the state’s developmental policy but was, ironically, due to the failure of the government’s original plan. The successful substitution of Hyundai’s own strategy for the state’s plan, which contributed enormously to the growth of Ulsan, would have been impossible without Hyundai’s enrollment into the transnational geopolitical economic alliance spurred by US military projects in Asia.

Geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia: Themes, concepts, and geographies

“…(On the latter, see also Sum, 2015. ) In recent work on East Asia, Glassman, and Young-Jin Choi have likewise employed the term GPE in a way that-while largely anchored in a Gramscian approach-foregrounds some of the specifically geopolitical determinants of East Asian industrialization, as part of a broader geographical political economy (Choi and Glassman, 2018;Glassman, 2011;Glassman and Choi, 2014). In particular, building on the work of Jung-en Woo (1991;Woo-Cumings 1998), Vivek Chibber (1999, and Bruce Cumings (1984Cumings ( , 1999Cumings ( , 2005, Glassman and Choi suggest that the geopolitics of war in East Asia-and not merely the broad spatial dimensions of political economy-need to be foregrounded if we wish to understand phenomena such as the highly differential industrial development trajectories of countries such as South Korea, Thailand, and Philippines.…”

“…Several years ago, a small group of us who have been involved in the study of these kinds of geographical and historical issues, particularly Bae-Gyoon Park, Jinn-yuh Hsu, Jamie Doucette, Young-Jin Choi, and myself (see, e.g. Doucette and Riel Mu¨ller, 2016;Glassman, 2011;Glassman and Choi, 2014;Hsu, 2011Hsu, , 2012Hsu, , 2017Park, 2005Park, , 2011Park et al, 2014)-formed a loosely structured research network to promote workshops and joint projects exploring both past and present geographies of East Asian development. We chose the term ''geopolitical economy'' to summarize the general interests of researchers in the network, and have organized a series of conferences, roundtables, and workshops expressing our interest in furthering geopolitical economic approaches to the study of East Asia.…”