The Government Picked Him, Then Myth Forgot

The willpower narrative around Chung Ju-yung is a useful lie.

Chung did not industrialize South Korea through force of personality — South Korea's government industrialized itself through Chung.

Park Chung-hee took power in 1961 and decided South Korea would become an industrial economy or perish trying. The nation had virtually no manufacturing base, no capital, no natural resources worth mentioning. It had a location on the peninsula between Japan and China and a population willing to work for wages that would make Western competitors irrelevant.

He did not believe in free markets sorting out who would industrialize South Korea. He selected champions. Men who would receive state contracts, preferential access to credit from state-controlled banks, protection from foreign competition, and implicit guarantees of government support in exchange for hitting production targets and delivering jobs. Hyundai was not the only recipient of this arrangement, but it was the one that worked.

When you tell the story of Chung Ju-yung, you are not telling the story of individual will overcoming obstacles—you are telling the story of a man who was placed inside a machine that had already decided he would win.

Once chosen, he had access to capital that private businessmen could not touch, contracts that competitors could not bid on. A state apparatus that would not let him fail. A man working relentlessly inside a state-protected monopoly with guaranteed government contracts is not the same as a man working relentlessly in an open market. The determination is identical, but the outcome is incomparably different.