Korea Focus - February 2012

people will increasingly look at the winners as well as the entire society with deep hatred.

In this sense, it is noteworthy that the nation’s leading conglomerates, including Samsung, Hyundai, SK and LG, have drastically increased their year-end charitable donations and expanded their on-site campaigns for the underprivileged. In another attention-getting change, chairmen of local conglomerates are more actively establishing public foundations and stepping up social contribution activities.

But these moves cannot be the fundamental measures for dealing with the era of “new poverty.” The large conglomerates, or chaebol, will have to discard their pre-modern and anti-market practices, such as window dressing in accounting, irregular wealth inheritance, embezzlement of company funds, creation of slush funds, family-owned business structures, sacrifice of small and medium-sized companies, and unfair relationships with suppliers and subcontractors. But irregularities, corruption and greed of chaebol companies still continue to make newspaper headlines.

Korea’s chaebol, with a lot of blemishes and weaknesses, may have mistaken their sporadic charitable donations and good deeds for publicity purposes for noblesse oblige. Ironically, the chaebol companies have a tendency of coexisting with anti-capitalist and progressive forces, apparently due to their “original sin.” Chaebol’s decision to “sleep with the enemy,” as seen in their frequent cash donations to progressive activist groups and paid advertisements in left-leaning media, appears to be their own survival strategy. In the eyes of our country’s progressive and leftist forces, chaebol are both a pushover and a host.

These unprincipled, abnormal and extrinsic approaches cannot fundamentally