The South China Morning Post recently ran a fascinating piece by Geoffrey Cain and Max Kim. Its premise, as stated in the first sentence, was as follows: “The family-run conglomerates that power South Korea’s economy have long been above listening to individual shareholders – or ants. But as the scandals mount, and take down presidents, those ants are fighting back.”
We’ve written frequently at this site, of course, about those South Korean conglomerates – known as chaebols – that are notorious for their outsized power and corruption and for the perverse fact that the power is in the hands of families that own small percentages of these behemoths and not in the hands of shareholders.
Just as a certain 2016 presidential candidate called ordinary Americans who work hard and pay taxes “deplorables,” the people who actually inject their own cash into these companies – and are therefore, technically, their owners – are called “ants.”
Cain and Kim noted a couple of the high-profile corruption trials and convictions that have taken place in the last year or so and that we’ve written about here. But they added this highly interesting point: “In fried chicken and beer joints, in coffee shops in Seoul’s financial district of Yeouido, and in mobile app chats where investors circulate industry gossip, individual shareholders – known as ‘ants’ in investment circles – are getting rowdy and putting up a fight.”
About time. To some of us, the passivity of chaebol shareholders has never made a great deal of sense. It can only be understood as a cultural thing, a sign of the near-reverence with which the chaebol families have long been regarded. After the Korean War, these families founded these companies, and these companies, in turn, raised South Korea up from an impoverished Third World land to an economic powerhouse. Hence the family patriarchs came to be viewed as virtual royalty.
But no more. “Corporate shareholder meetings have stretched for more than a dozen hours,” wrote Cain and Kim, “as shareholders barrage CEOs with questions; others have stormed the microphone, only to be removed by security.” They quote one “ant’s” summing-up of the way South Koreans have been trained to think about these things: “Finance is like the written word of ancient times,” he said. “It is the privilege of the ruling class. It is the preserve of the elite.” Well, if these signs of revolt are portents of a new era, then that kind of old-fashioned deference to a handful of powerful clans may well be on the way out. Which, it has to be said, is a healthy sign for South Korean democracy.