Koreans are always proud of being the first or the best at things. Having the lowest birthrate in the entire world, however, is a “best” that is really the worst.
Recently on a trip to Korea I held a meet-up where I invited my YouTube subscribers to a meeting. There, before I launched into a presentation about my latest book, I took a moment to — what shall I say? — excoriate the group on the low birthrate and with it, the high marriage age, and the overall low marriage rate.
I thought it might be useful for me as a “grandfatherly figure” — indeed, the comments on my YouTube channel often say that I remind people of a Korean grandfather — to admonish them to get married and have children. I appealed to their cultural traditions and to their sense of patriotism — “for the sake of the country!” I don’t think people will get married for the sake of the country, but “any port in a storm” — I tried everything I could think of.
I don’t think it did much good, but it brought about an interesting discussion in the comments after I posted that segment on my YouTube channel.
There was not a consensus that the low birthrate was a problem. Some think the lower population is a good thing. And some said there is nothing to be done about it — we’ve reached a point of “no return” — that the levels of birthrate and the percentage of the population who are unmarried is at such a level that Korea will not be able to recover to a level of higher population growth.
Some talked of opening to immigrants as the answer, others talked of immigrants as a bad solution. And some talked of technology taking up the slack — use of robotics and other tech as the fill-in for lower population growth.
No one argued that the low birthrate was not statistically proven. Schools are closing, colleges are dwindling in enrollment numbers even as they capitalize on Korea’s advantages in education by appealing to “yuhaksaeng” — students from other countries. Personally, I had a chance a few years ago to substitute for three weeks for a colleague who was off work to have surgery, and thereby I lectured to six classes of foreign students, yuhaksaeng. Several universities are successful at recruiting students from Southeast Asia, Central Asian and elsewhere around the world. I saw students for Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and a scattering of other countries.
Then there is the marriage immigration issue, with large numbers of brides who have immigrated to marry mostly farmers, many of them from Vietnam, Philippines and elsewhere. So, immigration is already providing some of the answers. There is a question about how much more immigration will be welcome in Korea and what it will do to the culture and society.
I carefully used the term “brainwashing” to say that Korea has been so committed to the social good epitomized in the slogan of “having two children and raising them well.” There are two elements of that brainwashing, or social conformity — having two children, and the materialistic initiative of raising them well. Everyone who talks of the topic cites the costs of raising children, and the expense of education. Of course, the brainwashing is apparent there, too — it is universally accepted that students need tutoring outside of school hours. Finland is a good example of how that is not true — they have the highest standard of education, and they do not do the “hagwon” thing the way they do in Korea, Japan and China.
I registered my optimism in the discussion, citing how I have personally witnessed Korea’s ability to solve problems — the poverty of the 1960s, the population “problem” of the 1970s, the selective abortion of female fetuses in the 1990s — all these problems Korea has risen above. I expressed my optimism that Korea will solve this problem as well.
But exactly how it will be done, I don’t know. I suppose that some couples will have multiple children — 4, 6, 8, 10. I know a few families (three, to be exact) in Korea that did not accept the social brainwashing of limiting children to one or two. Those families suffered through terrible social opprobrium twenty, thirty years ago. Now, they are considered heroes! Newspaper reporters seek them out to publish their stories.
As I stand back and look at Korea today, it is unrecognizable from the Korea I first knew in 1965. Not only in a material or economic sense, but in so many social measures, particularly the family. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, we’ve burned the ships — Korea will never again have the population figures it once had, and I’ve got faith in Koreans that they will handle the new world well, but I do not know what it will look like. Good luck in your brave new world.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Korea: lowest birthrate in world
19
0
11.03.2024
Koreans are always proud of being the first or the best at things. Having the lowest birthrate in the entire world, however, is a “best” that is really the worst.
Recently on a trip to Korea I held a meet-up where I invited my YouTube subscribers to a meeting. There, before I launched into a presentation about my latest book, I took a moment to — what shall I say? — excoriate the group on the low birthrate and with it, the high marriage age, and the overall low marriage rate.
I thought it might be useful for me as a “grandfatherly figure” — indeed, the comments on my YouTube channel often say that I remind people of a Korean grandfather — to admonish them to get married and have children. I appealed to their cultural traditions and to their sense of patriotism — “for the sake of the country!” I don’t think people will get married for the sake of the country, but “any port in a storm” — I tried everything I could think of.
I don’t think it did much good, but it brought about an interesting discussion in the comments after I posted that segment on my YouTube channel.
There was not a consensus that the low birthrate was a problem. Some think the lower population is a good thing. And........
© The Korea Times
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
