South Korea’s coming chaebol turn to unification

In whispered conversations amidst executives behind the closed doors of corporate offices; amidst researchers at water fountains in strategy think tanks; and amidst political movers and shakers under the stained flaps of late-night soju tents; a new line of thinking on North Korea is gaining traction. North Korea may be more than a security liability or geopolitical puzzle—it may be the last great business opportunity of the Korean Peninsula.

Yes - what a weird time to be talking about unification! Seoul has just wound up a media circus of global attention with its constitutional crisis; there’s an election of mediocre middling candidates to get underway; and very soon Trump will be banging on the door of his ATM like a cashless marine past curfew in 1990s Itaewon. Tarry a while and read on, it actually makes sense.

South Korea’s economy is heavily reliant on exports and activity is highly concentrated in a few conglomerates. It is feeling the squeeze. The global trade environment is becoming more protectionist with the United States’ tightening of technology exports, trade controls, and of course, tariffs. Meanwhile, Chinese firms are rapidly moving up the value chain in key industries, including in semiconductors, batteries, shipping, infrastructure, and electric vehicles—eroding South Korea’s once-comfortable lead.

South Korea faces sluggish growth, a declining birth rate, and rising generational discontent over inequality and housing. Political instability, including frequent scandals and politicization of the prosecution and courts, has further eroded the predictability of policy and long-term economic planning.

There’s growing skepticism toward the political class, and a rising tide of anti-chaebol sentiment among younger voters. After all, the chaebol are moving jobs off shore to make money at the cost of Gen-Z and every small business owner. Dissatisfaction is growing and the politicians and the chaebol are the targets. For the chaebol, accustomed to operating within a relatively stable system that favored their interests, the ground is rapidly shifting.

The chaebol are looking for a new narrative—one that allows them to appear nation-building, even patriotic. Amidst growing political turmoil in Seoul and the fracturing of South Korea’s long-standing development consensus, the country’s corporate giants—the chaebol—are beginning to look north.

For decades, unification with North Korea was a politically sensitive, diplomatically fraught, and largely abstract concept. So abstract, that an administration could label its central policy as “the audacious initiative” and the public wouldn’t give two f&^ks.

But as global trade restrictions tighten, China’s industrial growth crowds South Korea out of traditional markets, and domestic disillusionment deepens, unification is being reconsidered—not as a national project, but as an economic one. And not necessarily by the state, but by the corporate interests that have long dominated the South Korean economy.

In this environment, North Korea is being reimagined. Not as a hostile neighbor, but as a controlled frontier—a space to be developed, integrated, and ultimately absorbed.

The language of unification is being co-opted, not by peace activists or minjok nationalists, but by technocrats and business strategists. Unification is less and less a topic of progressives (there’s plenty of problems regarding inequality in South Korea without thinking about the North), and increasingly a topic for conservatives (money, money, money). The economic rationale is straightforward. North Korea offers:

• State-backed infrastructure projects: Unification would require massive investment in roads, rail, housing, telecom, energy, and sanitation. All of this would be government-funded—meaning predictable transfer of public funds to private coffers.

  You know every presidential administration has a “national” project that fills chaebol coffers - Sejong City, Incheon Airport, Incheon Bridge, Haeundae Bridge, Songdo International City, Four Rivers Project, KTX, Seoul (and Busan) Subway Expansions, and the Saemangeum Seawall Project. The scale of unification with North Korea would dwarf all of these - it would dwarf anything South Korea has seen since the post-war rebuilding.

• Cheap labor: Wages in the North are a fraction of those in the South, and while automation is rising, the demand for low-cost manufacturing and construction labor still exists, particularly in heavy industries and infrastructure projects. AND what about the Gen-Z unemployed turning to political extremism in the South? Give them jobs up North and that problem disappears!

• New markets: With a population of over 25 million and virtually no consumer economy to speak of, North Korea represents a blank slate. Beyond North Korea lies millions of more consumers in neighboring Chinese provinces.

• Access to resources and corridors: North Korea holds untapped mineral reserves and, just as importantly, offers geographic access to the Eurasian landmass. A rail corridor connecting South Korea to China and Russia via the North would fundamentally alter the logistics map of Northeast Asia.

In short, North Korea is a chaebol wet dream: a terrain where state power and private profit would align with minimal public accountability. Now, we’ve heard this before, I can hear you say.

During the early 2000s, the Roh Moo-hyun administration sought to shift South Korean public perception of unification with North Korea from being a financial burden to a strategic opportunity. Building on the Sunshine Policy of his predecessor, Roh emphasized the economic potential of inter-Korean cooperation, particularly through joint projects like the Kaesong Industrial Complex and proposed transportation links across the DMZ.

Roh’s administration framed unification not merely as a humanitarian or nationalistic goal, but as a catalyst for expanding South Korea’s economic reach into the Eurasian continent via North Korea’s geographic corridor to China and Russia. This approach aimed to reframe unification as a long-term investment in regional integration and growth.

There’s a difference today. Ideology in Korean politics is dead. Its last throes were the pathetic attempt of Yoon to paint China and North Korea as the impetus for a poorly timed and coordinated coup attempt. Nobody was buying this excuse outside that uncle everyone has, who used to work for a chaebol, then sold cars, now drives a taxi, and always falls asleep on the couch after lunch. Then the bored Gen-Zs joined in because, well because when you have no job, no prospect of a house, and no future, what are you going to do? Sure it was raucous and captured a few soundbites, but the ideological impetus was empty.

The greatest division in Korea today is less about ideology and more about economics. In much the same way as occurred in other democracies, the “left” doesn’t really care about workers or the working class, they care about ensuring their in-group has access to power in order to make money. The “right” doesn’t care about traditional values or rights, they care about ensuring their in-group has access to power in order to make money. All the issues that divided Korea’s politics by ideology in the past - North Korea Korea, unification, the U.S. alliance, China, Japan, chaebol reform, worker’s rights, and conscription have fizzled out, like soju thrown on the barbecue to check the heat.

Ideology is dead in domestic politics - all that’s left are two broad groups fighting for power and playing to the extremist elements when it suits them.

The driving force that unites progressives and conservatives is holding onto power and profit - and this explains the emerging chaebol interest in the North is not just economic—it is also a hedge.

Unification offers a grand project that could temporarily mute demands for political, structural, regulatory, and constitutional reform. It is a long-term play, but it carries echoes of past development models where public funds were used to fuel private sector growth under the banner of national interest. Remember when during the IMF Crisis, citizens were asked to turn in their gold to pay off the national debt? Well, your politicians want that sort of commitment so they don’t lose their jobs and graft.

Unification as an economic fix does assume a level of geopolitical stability that doesn’t currently exist. China and the United States have strategic stakes in the status quo. Japan remains wary. Russia disinterested. BUT, a blundering Trump administration, a more strategic China, a cautious Japan, and a still disinterested Russia, may be the bricks that fall into place to lay the foundations.

And if not, there are a myriad of diplomatic solutions that have never been followed because of political division in Seoul, concern in Washington, and caution in Beijing. Not all of them need to end the Kim Jong-un regime - and solutions that see amnesties and disbursements of state property to the ruling elite could even be welcomed in Pyongyang.

The chaebol turn to unification is not about peace. It is about profit. And while that may sound cynical, it also reflects a core truth of South Korea’s post-war development and mercantilist diplomacy: capitalism, not ideology, has always led the way.

If the current political crisis continues to deepen, and if global economic pressures persist, the idea of North Korea as South Korea’s last frontier may shift from boardroom fantasy to policy blueprint.

In that future, unification will not be negotiated by diplomats. It will be planned, engineered, constructed and sold by financiers. It will be monetized in the boardroom by chaebol executives—one infrastructure contract at a time.