한국 중화학공업 신화의 역사화—1950년대 3대기간산업공장으로 본 중화학공업의 연속성—

Abstract

This article challenges the prevailing public narrative of South Korea’s economic growth, which overemphasizes the Park Chung Hee regime of the 1960s-70s―especially the Five-Year Economic Development Plans and the promotion of heavy and chemical industry (HCI). In that narrative, the 1950s are reduced to a mere ‘foundation-building’ phase defined by foreign aid and consumer-goods manufacturing, and the historical continuity of economic policy and industrial planning has remained underexamined. To address this gap, this study focuses on the construction and policy support of three flagship ‘key-industry’ plants from the postwar reconstruction period―Mun’gyǒng Cement, Inch’ǒn Plate Glass, and Ch’ungju Fertilizer―and examines their points of continuity with the HCI expansion of the 1960s-70s. These plants were the product of a state initiative that combined foreign aid with domestic policy finance to prioritize the basic segments of heavy and chemical industry, and they were simultaneously earmarked for planned privatization under a principle of private ownership and management. The Korea Development Bank’s credit allocation in the late 1950s shifted toward producer-goods sectors―especially chemicals and ceramics―thereby propelling faster growth in cement, fertilizer, and glass than in consumer-goods industries. This configuration of policy finance and industrial design generated unintended consequences―rapid capital accumulation by a small circle of entrepreneurs and the entrenchment of monopolistic structures―yet it also established the institutional and technological groundwork that fed into the 1960s development plans and the full-scale HCI push of the 1970s. Taken together, this analysis moves beyond Park-centered heroic narratives of the 1970s HCI drive, showing instead that it unfolded as a continuous process grounded in the policy, financial, and technological accumulations of the 1950s. Methodologically, it identifies the core weakness of growth accounts subordinated to the Park ‘myth’ as their built-in discontinuity, and seeks―on the basis of historical rigor―to restore a sense of continuity across critical junctures in contemporary Korean history. A full normative critique of developmentalism lies beyond this article’s scope; here the focus is on narrative continuity, empirically reconstructing 1950s industrial policy to enlarge the historical context of South Korea’s economic development.