On December 5, 2014, a Korean Air flight preparing to leave New York for Seoul returned to the gate because an executive was angry about a packet of macadamia nuts.
Cho Hyun-ah, then a Korean Air vice-president and the daughter of the airline group’s chairman, had been served the nuts in their unopened packet rather than on a plate. She berated the cabin crew and ordered the chief flight attendant removed from the aircraft.
The episode delayed an international flight and eventually led to Cho’s conviction for obstructing aviation safety. But the reason the incident became a national scandal was not simply that a wealthy passenger had behaved badly.
To many South Koreans, the incident embodied gapjil: the abuse of power by someone who knows that the person below them cannot safely fight back.
Cho was not just an executive. She was an heir to one of South Korea’s family-controlled conglomerates, known as chaebols. These corporate empires include Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG, Lotte and dozens of smaller groups. They manufacture semiconductors, cars, ships, chemicals, appliances and batteries. Their affiliates operate department stores, hotels, insurance companies, construction firms, hospitals and financial services.
Chaebols helped transform South Korea from a war-ravaged, impoverished country into an industrial and technological power.
They also concentrated control over enormous parts of the economy in the hands of a few families.
This is the central contradiction of the chaebol system. The relationship between the state and selected business groups allowed South Korea to industrialise with extraordinary speed. But the same system encouraged excessive borrowing, political favouritism, opaque ownership, weak shareholder protection and an economy divided between a small number of globally competitive giants and a much larger population of less productive firms.
The chaebols did not merely capture the South Korean economy.
South Korea helped create them.
The Bag of Nuts That Exposed a Power Structure
The Korean Air incident became internationally known as “nut rage.” In South Korea, however, it was understood as part of a much broader problem.
The word gapjil comes from the Korean term gap, traditionally used in contracts to identify the party with greater bargaining power. It describes the humiliating or coercive behaviour that can arise when a boss, customer, landlord or corporate buyer knows that the weaker party has few realistic alternatives.
A senior executive shouting at an employee is not unique to South Korea. What made Cho Hyun-ah’s conduct especially provocative was the perception that her authority had been inherited rather than earned. She belonged to the third generation of the family behind Hanjin Group, Korean Air’s controlling conglomerate.
The flight attendant could not respond to her as one employee might respond to an unreasonable colleague. Cho represented the family standing above the formal corporate hierarchy.
Other chaebol-family scandals have reinforced this impression. Executives and heirs from prominent groups have faced allegations or convictions involving bribery, assault, embezzlement, tax offences and illegal succession arrangements. Some received suspended sentences. Others were later pardoned on the grounds that their business leadership was important to the national economy.
South Koreans even developed an informal expression for what appeared to be a recurring judicial outcome: the “three-five rule,” referring to a three-year sentence suspended for five years. It was never a formal legal rule, but it reflected the popular belief that the leaders of economically indispensable companies were treated differently from ordinary citizens.
Yet the arrogance of individual heirs is only the most visible symptom.
The deeper issue is the structure that allows a family to exercise lasting control over a network of publicly traded companies, suppliers and employees—sometimes while owning only a relatively small portion of the economic value involved.
To understand how that structure emerged, it is necessary to define what a chaebol actually is.
What Is a Chaebol?
A chaebol is a large South Korean business group composed of numerous legally separate companies that remain under the influence of a founding family.
Samsung, for example, is not a single corporation. Samsung Electronics, Samsung C&T, Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Heavy Industries and the group’s other affiliates have separate accounts, boards and shareholders.
They are nevertheless connected through ownership relationships, commercial ties, executive appointments and the influence of the Lee family.
This distinguishes a chaebol from a conventional corporation in which control broadly follows direct share ownership. A chaebol family may hold a limited direct stake across the complete group while preserving influence through strategically owned affiliates, holding companies and shares that group companies possess in one another.
It also distinguishes chaebols from ordinary conglomerates. A conglomerate may operate in several unrelated industries, but its structure is generally organised beneath an identifiable parent company. Chaebols have historically relied on more complicated networks in which control can move through several affiliated firms.
The OECD’s analysis of South Korea’s large business groups emphasises that their greatest economic problem is not simply their size. It is the concentration of managerial control in founding families whose voting influence can be much greater than their direct financial ownership.
Chaebols are also different from Japan’s keiretsu. Japanese business groups are often connected through banks and cross-shareholdings, but they generally rely more heavily on professional management. Hereditary family leadership remains a defining feature of the Korean model.
The founder builds the group. The next generation expands it. A third generation may inherit control over companies partly owned by pension funds, foreign investors and ordinary shareholders.
This arrangement was not created through private entrepreneurship alone. It was shaped by a state that needed to build industrial capacity quickly and decided to concentrate scarce resources behind a selected group of firms.
Why South Korea Built Its Economy Around Chaebols
When the Korean War ended in 1953, South Korea was devastated.
Factories, roads and power systems had been damaged or destroyed. Domestic savings were scarce. The country had limited natural resources, weak technological capabilities and little foreign currency with which to buy industrial machinery.
During the 1950s, the government initially pursued import substitution, protecting domestic production so that Korean businesses could replace goods previously purchased from abroad. Foreign aid, especially from the United States, helped keep the economy functioning.
Some businesses that would later become chaebols were already emerging. Samsung began as a trading company before expanding into sugar refining and textiles. Hyundai grew from construction. LG’s predecessors entered chemicals and consumer electronics.
Their transformation into national industrial champions accelerated after General Park Chung-hee seized power in a military coup in 1961.
Park believed that South Korea could not wait for ordinary market forces to produce the industries it needed. Private capital was too scarce, domestic demand was too limited and the technological gap with advanced economies was too large.
His government adopted a far more aggressive model of state-directed, export-led development. Through successive five-year plans, it selected priority sectors, controlled access to credit and pushed firms towards international markets.
The banking system was central to this strategy. By exercising control over commercial banks, the government could decide which companies received loans and on what terms. It also guaranteed some foreign borrowing, provided tax advantages, restricted competing imports and issued licences that favoured selected businesses.
The transition was not merely from state planning to private capitalism. It was a partnership in which the government directed capital and the chaebols executed industrial projects.
As the World Bank’s research on South Korea’s transition to export-led growth shows, the shift involved both economic policy and a political bargain between state officials and business leaders.
Support came with expectations. Companies were pushed to meet export targets, enter difficult industries and compete abroad. Those that performed well could receive additional credit. Those that failed risked losing government support or being absorbed by stronger groups.
In later decades, the government directed chaebols into steel, shipbuilding, automobiles, machinery, petrochemicals and electronics. These were industries requiring levels of capital, technology and scale that South Korea’s fragmented private sector could not easily have assembled on its own.
This was capitalism, but not laissez-faire capitalism.
The state was not simply enforcing rules and allowing markets to decide. It was choosing industries, allocating credit and constructing national champions.
The Economic Miracle the Chaebols Helped Create
The strategy worked remarkably well.
South Korea’s exports, industrial output and incomes rose at rates few countries have matched. Firms that began in construction, food processing or textiles developed the ability to manufacture ships, cars, televisions, memory chips and smartphones for global markets.
The country built ports, roads, power plants and industrial cities. It acquired foreign technology, trained engineers and created supply chains capable of producing increasingly sophisticated goods.
Chaebols were particularly suited to this stage of development because their scale allowed them to mobilise capital across multiple businesses. Profits from one affiliate could support investment in another. A group could coordinate construction, finance, manufacturing and exports without relying on mature markets or independent suppliers that did not yet exist.
They were also willing to enter sectors that carried enormous risks. Building a shipyard or semiconductor plant requires large investments long before revenue appears. In a poor country with limited private financing, concentrating resources could achieve what a more dispersed system could not.
South Korea’s industrial policy was not a story of subsidies producing nothing but politically protected failures. It generated real capabilities.
The country became a global leader in shipbuilding, consumer electronics, automobiles, batteries and semiconductors. Samsung, Hyundai and LG became internationally recognised companies rather than protected domestic firms surviving behind tariff barriers.
Modern World Bank research on South Korea’s innovation system describes the country’s transformation as a progression from technology adoption and manufacturing catch-up towards research-intensive, innovation-led growth.
Chaebols drove much of that progression. They funded laboratories, developed international distribution networks and gave South Korea the scale to compete against established American, European and Japanese corporations.
Their success also helped the country recover from later shocks. Exports from large business groups remained crucial after the 1997 financial crisis and during subsequent global downturns.
The problem was not that the chaebols produced no economic value.
The problem was that the system rewarded expansion so generously that growth itself became difficult to discipline.
When the Development Model Became a Debt Machine
The close relationship between the government, banks and chaebols changed corporate incentives.
If a conglomerate believed that the state considered it strategically important, borrowing became less risky. Banks had reasons to continue lending. Creditors could assume that government support would prevent a major failure. Executives could pursue scale and market share without facing the full consequences of poor investment decisions.
Chaebols expanded into more and more industries, sometimes regardless of whether they possessed a genuine competitive advantage.
A business group might own an electronics manufacturer, a construction company, a department store, an insurance firm, a hotel chain and a petrochemical producer. Diversification reduced dependence on any single industry, but it also made the groups difficult to manage and almost impossible for outsiders to evaluate.
Affiliates sometimes guaranteed one another’s debts. A weak company could survive because another company in the same group supported it. Banks could continue lending because they believed the broader conglomerate—or the government behind it—would absorb the loss.
This encouraged an economy built around leverage.
Profitability became less important than access to credit. Political relationships could matter as much as operating efficiency. Expansion continued even when the returns did not justify the debt.
For years, rapid national growth concealed the vulnerabilities. As long as exports increased and fresh capital remained available, chaebols could refinance their obligations and continue investing.
But once confidence collapsed, the same connections that had helped the groups expand allowed financial distress to spread across affiliates, banks and the national economy.
The warning signs appeared before the full crisis. Hanbo Steel collapsed in early 1997 under billions of dollars in debt, exposing corruption involving bankers, executives and political figures.
It was not an isolated corporate failure.
It was evidence that South Korea’s development model had become dangerously dependent on credit, political access and the assumption that large groups would always be protected.
The 1997 Crisis and the Fall of Daewoo
In 1997, financial panic spread across East and Southeast Asia.
Foreign lenders withdrew capital. Currencies fell. Companies that had borrowed heavily in foreign currencies suddenly found their debts far more difficult to repay.
South Korea was especially vulnerable because its corporate sector had accumulated extraordinary leverage. According to an International Monetary Fund retrospective on the Korean crisis, the average debt ratio of the country’s 30 largest chaebols was estimated at roughly 570 per cent by the end of 1997.
The crisis destroyed the belief that size guaranteed survival.
Numerous large business groups failed or were broken apart. Banks were left with enormous bad loans. South Korea sought an international rescue package, and the government accepted extensive financial and corporate reforms.
The most dramatic casualty was Daewoo.
Founded by Kim Woo-choong, Daewoo had grown into one of South Korea’s largest conglomerates through relentless borrowing and expansion. It manufactured cars, ships, electronics and machinery while operating construction and trading businesses around the world.
Even as the financial crisis exposed the weakness of the chaebol model, Daewoo continued expanding. Kim believed the group could grow its way out of trouble.
It could not.
By 1999, Daewoo collapsed under debts commonly estimated at more than $50 billion. Its failure was among the largest corporate bankruptcies the world had seen. The group was dismantled, creditors absorbed enormous losses and Kim fled the country before eventually returning to face prosecution.
Daewoo demonstrated how the chaebol system could privatise control while socialising risk. Founding families directed expansion, but when a systemically important group failed, the damage spread to banks, workers, suppliers, investors and taxpayers.
The crisis prompted serious reforms. Debt guarantees between affiliates were restricted. Disclosure requirements were strengthened. Weak groups were restructured. Banks became more commercially oriented. Foreign investors gained a larger role in Korean capital markets.
Corporate leverage fell substantially.
But although the crisis changed how chaebols were financed, it did not eliminate the families’ control over the strongest surviving groups.
Why Family Control Survived the Crisis
Post-crisis reform altered the corporate landscape.
Some chaebols disappeared. Others sold subsidiaries and concentrated on their strongest businesses. Accounting became more transparent, boards gained additional outside directors and the government restricted some of the cross-guarantees that had allowed risk to travel through entire groups.
South Korea also opened its markets more widely to international capital. Foreign investors became major shareholders in companies such as Samsung Electronics, creating pressure for better disclosure and stronger returns.
The chaebols that survived were generally leaner and financially stronger than their predecessors.
Yet family control persisted because it did not depend exclusively on direct majority ownership.
A founding family did not need to own more than half of every affiliate. It needed to control a few strategically important companies positioned at the centre of the group. Those companies could hold shares in other affiliates, which in turn held stakes elsewhere.
The family could also influence boards, management appointments and major transactions through its status within the organisation.
The government faced another problem: the surviving chaebols were more important than ever.
After weaker groups collapsed, economic power became concentrated among the largest and most successful conglomerates. Samsung grew into a global semiconductor and electronics leader. Hyundai became one of the world’s largest automotive groups. SK and LG expanded in technology, chemicals, energy and telecommunications.
Breaking up these groups might have weakened family control, but it also risked disrupting exports, employment, investment and strategically important industries.
Reform therefore concentrated on restraining the chaebols without destroying them.
That compromise improved some areas of governance while leaving the fundamental control structure largely intact.
How Chaebol Families Can Control More Than They Own
The central governance problem inside a chaebol is the separation between economic ownership and managerial control.
Imagine that a family owns a significant stake in Company A. Company A owns part of Company B. Company B owns part of Company C. By controlling Company A, the family may influence Companies B and C without personally owning a large share of either.
Historically, some groups made these chains even more complicated through circular shareholding, in which Company A owned part of Company B, Company B owned part of Company C and Company C owned part of Company A.
South Korea has introduced rules to restrict or unwind many such arrangements, but complex affiliate ownership remains an important source of influence.
This structure creates conflicts between controlling families and outside shareholders.
A transaction that benefits the group’s controlling family may not benefit every affiliate equally. A profitable listed company might buy services from another family-linked business at an inflated price. A merger might transfer value from one set of shareholders to a company more favourable to the heir’s succession plans. A promising contract might be directed towards a privately controlled affiliate rather than a publicly traded company.
These practices are often described as tunnelling: moving resources or opportunities out of a company in ways that benefit controlling insiders.
The outside shareholders bear part of the cost, but they have limited ability to challenge a family that effectively controls the board.
This is why the chaebol debate is not merely about billionaires possessing too much wealth. It is about who controls publicly listed companies and whose interests those companies are expected to serve.
A family may see the entire chaebol as one inherited empire.
Minority shareholders see legally separate companies in which they have invested their own money.
The conflict between those two perspectives lies at the heart of South Korea’s corporate-governance problem.
The Korea Discount
South Korean companies have long traded at lower valuations than many comparable businesses in other markets. This persistent undervaluation is commonly called the “Korea discount.”
There is no single cause.
Geopolitical risk from North Korea matters. Some Korean industries are cyclical and capital-intensive. Companies have historically held large amounts of cash, paid relatively modest dividends and maintained complicated structures that make them difficult to analyse.
But corporate governance is a central part of the explanation.
Investors may be reluctant to pay a high price for shares if they believe that management will prioritise a controlling family, affiliated company or succession strategy over the interests of all shareholders.
A company can be profitable and technologically advanced while still deserving a lower valuation if investors doubt that its profits will reach them.
The chaebol structure magnifies that concern. Related-party transactions, duplicate listings, unfavourable mergers and the use of treasury shares can all weaken the position of minority investors.
Inheritance tax adds another complication. South Korea has imposed one of the developed world’s highest headline inheritance-tax burdens, particularly when controlling shares are transferred. Supporters argue that the tax limits dynastic wealth. Critics contend that it encourages families to pursue complicated succession strategies and may reduce their incentive to support higher company valuations before a transfer.
The evidence does not justify claiming that every chaebol family deliberately suppresses its share price. However, the OECD’s 2024 review of the Korean economy acknowledged that the interaction between inheritance taxation, control and market valuation can create distorted incentives.
In 2024, the government launched its Corporate Value-Up Program, encouraging listed companies to assess their valuation, establish improvement plans and communicate more clearly with investors.
The programme attempted to reproduce elements of Japan’s corporate-governance revival, but participation was voluntary. Companies could publish ambitious plans, modest plans or no plans at all.
That made Value-Up a useful signal of political intent, but not a decisive solution.
The more significant changes arrived later through revisions to South Korea’s Commercial Act.
How Chaebol Dominance Affects Suppliers and Smaller Firms
The power of chaebols does not end with their own subsidiaries.
Thousands of smaller companies depend on them as customers.
For an independent supplier, winning a contract with Samsung, Hyundai or another major group can provide stable orders, prestige and access to global supply chains. It can also create an extreme dependency.
If one conglomerate accounts for much of a supplier’s revenue, the buyer gains enormous bargaining power. It may demand lower prices, detailed cost information, faster production or exclusive access to technology.
A supplier may formally have the right to refuse.
Economically, it may have nowhere else to go.
Hyundai and Kia together dominate South Korea’s domestic automotive market. Their scale allows them to coordinate large supplier networks and compete internationally. It can also leave component manufacturers dependent on the purchasing decisions of a single corporate group.
Similar concerns have emerged in electronics, retail and other sectors. Smaller firms have complained about delayed payments, forced price reductions, technology appropriation and being required to absorb promotional expenses.
Not every relationship between a chaebol and a supplier is abusive. Large groups can transfer technology, provide financing and help smaller businesses reach international markets.
The structural imbalance nevertheless remains.
South Korea has an unusually large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, but many struggle to become independent, productive competitors. The OECD has found that Korean SMEs are dramatically less productive than large firms, with the gap much wider than in many other developed economies.
This creates a divided business system.
At the top are globally competitive conglomerates capable of investing billions in research, manufacturing and international expansion.
Below them is a vast SME sector employing most Korean workers but often operating with lower productivity, weaker bargaining power and less capacity to invest.
Chaebol dominance does not explain every weakness in the SME economy. Regulations, service-sector inefficiency, limited competition and policies that discourage firms from growing beyond official size thresholds also matter.
But when a few giant groups occupy the most profitable parts of the economy, smaller firms find it harder to scale into independent challengers.
South Korea’s Two-Tier Labour Market
The divide between chaebols and smaller firms produces an equally important divide between workers.
Jobs in large Korean companies generally offer higher salaries, larger bonuses, stronger benefits, better training and greater security than jobs in smaller businesses.
These positions are therefore intensely competitive.
Yet they are relatively scarce. A Korea Development Institute study found that establishments with at least 300 workers employed only around 14 per cent of South Korea’s workforce in 2021—an exceptionally low share among advanced economies.
Most Koreans work outside the chaebol core.
This creates a labour market in which people with similar qualifications can experience very different working lives depending on the size and status of their employer.
Workers at major corporations may receive strong legal protections, predictable career progression and generous compensation. Workers at smaller firms are more likely to face lower pay, longer hours, weaker benefits or non-regular contracts.
The gap shapes decisions long before people enter the workplace.
Students compete fiercely for prestigious universities partly because degrees from elite institutions improve access to a limited number of high-status employers. Graduates may spend years preparing for recruitment examinations rather than accepting positions in smaller companies perceived as offering poorer careers.
The result is an economy that can simultaneously produce highly educated young adults and struggle to match their qualifications with desirable work.
The OECD Economic Survey of Korea 2026 points to high educational attainment alongside persistent overqualification and labour-market segmentation. The problem is not simply that young Koreans lack skills. It is that the supply of respected, secure and well-paid jobs has not kept pace with the number of people educated to compete for them.
This division also has wider social consequences.
Uncertain work and long career preparation can delay financial independence, marriage and family formation. Women may face particularly difficult choices when career advancement depends on continuous service in workplaces that remain demanding and hierarchical.
Chaebols are not solely responsible for South Korea’s demographic crisis, educational pressure or long working hours.
But the scarcity of opportunities outside a small number of elite employers intensifies all three.
The development model created world-class companies without creating enough world-class jobs across the wider economy.
Why Reform Is So Difficult
Criticising the chaebols is easy.
Replacing what they do is not.
Samsung and SK are central to South Korea’s semiconductor industry. Hyundai is a major global carmaker. LG is important in batteries, electronics and chemicals. Korean shipbuilders occupy a strategic position in world trade and defence supply chains.
These companies support exports, research spending, tax revenue, skilled employment and entire networks of suppliers.
A government that weakens them carelessly could damage the national economy.
This gives chaebol families a powerful defence. They can present reforms affecting their control as threats to investment, jobs and international competitiveness.
Sometimes that warning is self-serving. Sometimes it is true.
The groups also possess resources that potential challengers lack. They can hire leading law firms, fund research, advertise across major media platforms and maintain extensive relationships with officials and institutions.
That does not mean every politician, journalist, lawyer or academic is controlled by chaebols. It means economic concentration shapes incentives.
A law firm challenging a conglomerate must consider the future business it may lose. A supplier reporting unfair treatment must consider whether other group companies will stop purchasing from it. A government confronting a major exporter must consider the reaction of workers, investors and financial markets.
Workers can themselves resist radical restructuring. Employment at a successful chaebol may provide a level of pay and security unavailable elsewhere. Employees who dislike family control may still fear that breaking up the group would endanger their livelihoods.
There is also a legitimate economic question about coordination.
Some chaebol advantages come from abuses of power. Others come from the ability to organise capital, technology and production across industries. Forcing every affiliate apart could weaken both.
The real reform challenge is therefore more difficult than choosing between preserving the chaebols and destroying them.
South Korea must separate productive scale from hereditary privilege.
It must preserve the ability of large businesses to invest and compete while reducing the ability of controlling families to extract private benefits from public companies.
Is South Korea Finally Changing the Rules?
For decades, South Korean presidents have promised chaebol reform.
Results have been mixed.
Governments introduced restrictions on cross-shareholding, strengthened disclosure, prosecuted executives and increased the formal independence of corporate boards. Yet enforcement was inconsistent, ownership structures adapted and convicted business leaders sometimes returned to management.
The Corporate Value-Up Program marked another attempt to improve governance by encouraging companies to explain how they would increase shareholder returns and close the Korea discount.
Its voluntary nature limited its force.
More consequential reforms followed after President Lee Jae Myung took office in 2025. In July that year, parliament expanded the duties of corporate directors so that they were expected to consider the interests of shareholders rather than focusing solely on the company as an abstract legal entity.
The change directly addressed a recurring chaebol defence. Boards had often argued that transactions benefiting the wider group served the company, even when minority shareholders suffered.
Further reforms strengthened audit oversight and the role of independent directors.
In February 2026, parliament passed another major amendment requiring listed companies to cancel newly acquired treasury shares within a specified period.
Treasury shares are shares that a company buys back from the market. In many countries, buybacks either return value to shareholders or lead to the shares being cancelled.
In South Korea, retained treasury shares could become tools in contests over corporate control. Although they carried no voting rights while held by the company, they could later be transferred to friendly parties, helping existing management defend itself from challengers.
Mandatory cancellation closes one of the mechanisms through which control could be reinforced without delivering equivalent value to shareholders.
These legal changes do not end the chaebol system. Their impact will depend on courts, regulators, boards and investors.
An early test emerged in 2026 when activist investor Flashlight Capital Partners targeted Samsung-affiliated security company S1. The fund accused the company’s board of prioritising Samsung Group’s interests over those of other shareholders and sought independent directors, clearer executive disclosures and a strategy for using excess cash.
The importance of the dispute extends beyond one company.
It asks whether South Korea’s new rules will genuinely change how boards behave—or simply add new language to a system still dominated by controlling groups.
Reform is no longer accurately described as impossible. South Korea has adopted some of its most significant corporate-governance changes in decades.
But passing laws is easier than changing institutions.
The chaebol families retain influence. Their companies remain economically indispensable. Courts must decide what fair treatment of shareholders means in practice, and investors must be willing to challenge transactions rather than merely complain about them.
South Korea has begun changing the rules.
Whether it can change the balance of power remains uncertain.
The Real Lesson of the Chaebol System
It is tempting to tell the chaebol story as a simple battle between heroic workers and corrupt billionaires.
The reality is more uncomfortable.
Chaebols helped build modern South Korea. They mobilised capital when capital was scarce, entered industries private markets might have avoided and developed the manufacturing capabilities that made the country prosperous.
Their achievements are real.
So are the costs.
The state-business partnership concentrated resources because concentration was useful. It allowed South Korea to industrialise faster than a fragmented market might have permitted. But privileges created for national development gradually became mechanisms of private family control.
Temporary support became institutional dependence.
Entrepreneurial founders became hereditary dynasties.
Companies that were once instruments of national policy became powerful enough to influence the policies meant to regulate them.
South Korea’s challenge is not to punish large companies for being successful. Nor is it to dismantle industrial capabilities that took generations to build.
It is to ensure that corporate scale no longer places families above shareholders, buyers above suppliers or executives above the law.
The packet of macadamia nuts mattered because it revealed how power behaves when it expects obedience.
A flight returned to the gate because one heir demanded it. An employee knelt because resisting seemed more dangerous than complying.
The same imbalance appears in more consequential forms when a supplier accepts an unfair contract, a board approves a questionable transaction or a politician decides that an executive is too important to imprison.
The chaebols helped create the economic miracle on the Han River.
The next stage of South Korea’s development depends on whether the country can keep what made those companies productive while dismantling what made their power hereditary, opaque and unaccountable.
Last Updated on July 21, 2026 by Aseem Gupta