I’ve never been to South Korea, but I have a good friend who is ethnically Korean from China. He spends roughly half of each year living in Seoul and the other half in Beijing.
Through casual chats with him, I’ve also learned a bit about the situation in Korea.
Overall, South Korea’s current standard of living is still slightly higher than China’s, but not by much. Especially in agriculture, South Korea lags behind.
In fact, in the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea was not even as developed as North Korea.
North Korea fell seriously behind due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Similarly, South Korea’s temporary prosperity stems in part from the United States allocating portions of Japanese industry to it.
Of course, South Koreans are also hardworking, which is an internal factor.
However, in the long term, I believe South Korea will return to its historical norm: existing as a friendly neighboring country on China’s periphery.
To be frank, the train of the next industrial revolution has already started, and currently there is only one passenger on it: China. The United States is running hard, trying to jump onto this train.
Other countries can only watch.
South Korea’s position is difficult. Its key industries overlap entirely with China’s, and as a resource-poor peninsula nation, once its industrial products are outcompeted by China, South Korea’s decline would be extremely rapid.
China is massive—its land area is almost 100 times that of South Korea, and its population is 28 times larger.
Size Matters.
This makes a real difference. For example, heavy industry requires enormous amounts of electricity.
China could easily allocate a land area equal to South Korea’s to build solar or wind power generation.
With a large population, the absolute number of talented individuals is also higher.
Just look at past International Math Olympiads: while most champions come from China or the U.S., if you examine the award photos, you can only tell which team is which by the national flags.
The same applies to artificial intelligence.
Only China and the U.S. are truly competing, and the focus is on whose Chinese talent is stronger.
Recently, as China has developed rapidly, more and more talent—especially from the U.S.—has been returning to their homeland.
Optimistically, in ten years, China will completely surpass South Korea in both quality and quantity.
South Korea’s best path is to be pro-China, but as a puppet regime under U.S. influence, it is in a difficult position.
Once China fully defeats the U.S., things might develop differently.
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Recently, South Korea’s KBS aired a documentary titled “Talent War — China’s Obsession with Engineering”, which sparked heated discussion in Korea and drew enough attention that even people in China took notice.
I don’t understand Korean, so I used AI to extract the audio and translate it into Chinese.
(By the way, this was done with an open-source audio-to-text AI from Alibaba, locally deployed. It’s pretty powerful—about 19 times faster than OpenAI’s Whisper model. I’ve been using it regularly.)
After skimming through the documentary, I found it somewhat lacking in depth, but it seems to have triggered unease, anxiety, and even fear among Koreans.
I think Koreans might simply not understand China very well—what the film presented was nothing more than basic facts.
One Korean professor’s remark, however, I quite agree with. He said: “The fact that Korean people are surprised by China’s situation—that’s what truly surprises me.”
