Is Seoul ‘sucking all the good’ from South Korea? Here’s why rural areas are emptying out

SEOUL: Before Bon Tai came to South Korea for agricultural work, he was cautioned that the job could be gruelling, the bosses demanding, and the locals possibly xenophobic.
But it was a risk he had to take. “Because I earned so little in Cambodia,” says the 34-year-old, who arrived in 2015.
Even now, there are reports of abuse and discrimination against foreign workers. For example, a Thomson Reuters Foundation investigation concluded in June that a seasonal worker scheme South Korea has was like modern slavery.
Playgrounds, meanwhile, are falling silent in the provinces as the number of children dwindles.
“Here in Danyang (county), there used to be about 30 elementary schools, but now there are only about 10,” says Son Youn-seok, dean of academic affairs at Gagok Elementary School, which currently has only five sixth-graders.
With a vanishing populace, 89 out of the country’s 228 administrative districts also face the risk of “extinction”. “Some parts of Korea (don’t have) enough people to make one local government,” says Myongji University professor of public administration Choi Hyunsun.
These are some of the threads running through South Korea as people flock to the Seoul metropolitan area in pursuit of better prospects, often at the cost of delaying marriage and having children.
WATCH: Is Seoul to blame for South Korea’s population crisis? (45:37)
In June, President Yoon Seuk-yeol declared the current demographic trends as a “national emergency”.
As the population crisis becomes an existential one in the countryside, the programme Insight examines the ramifications of South Korea’s internal migration, whether the magnetism of Seoul is to blame and the efforts to address the rural-urban divide.
In the nation with the world’s lowest fertility rate, signs of life in its countryside, from businesses to eateries to houses, are slowly fading.
School closures are particularly telling: Between 2017 and 2022, 193 schools closed. Nearly 90 per cent of them were outside the greater Seoul area.
“It’s becoming a reality in regional areas that decades have passed without hearing the sound of children being born,” says Han Byung-do, a politician representing Iksan City.
Over in Danyang, when Son was transferred to Gagok Elementary School in 2022, there were about 18 pupils in the main school — in contrast to the days when each classroom had 18 pupils, with around 100 pupils in the school.
Now he is unsure how many pupils will even be in first grade next year.
Education is also a key driver of internal migration in South Korea. Last year, a record 92,000 people moved to Seoul for academic reasons.
For one thing, the nation’s top universities — Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University (the SKY universities) — are in the capital. They admit the top 2 per cent of students who take the annual college entrance exam.
Between 2015 and 2021, youths aged 15 to 34 accounted for 78.5 per cent of the internal migration to the greater Seoul area. Even those graduating in rural areas have little incentive to stay put given the limited job opportunities.
These woes are not confined to areas far from Seoul. Villages in Gyeonggi province, which surrounds the capital, are also experiencing population decline.
Take, for example, Maegok-ri, where 76-year-old Yoon Chang-joong resides. “In the countryside, like (in) Maegok-ri, the average age is typically over 65 years,” he says. “Most (of the young) people have left for the cities.”
In fact, only one household in his village has young children. The other family with children moved to Okjeong New Town in Gyeonggi in July.
The ageing issue hit home for Yoon when he had pneumonia last year — without a car, it takes the elderly in Maegok-ri around two hours to reach a university hospital by bus.
But even regional cities are losing out to Seoul in economies of scale that support infrastructure such as public transport, medical services, education and cultural facilities, says Woo Myungje, a University of Seoul associate professor of urban planning and design.
As the capital becomes more desirable to live in, it perpetuates the cycle of depopulation elsewhere, which leads to a critical shortage of workers.
In the city of Ansan, 73-year-old Park Jung-ryul finds himself farming from dawn to dusk owing to its ageing population. “It’s tough to find workers,” he says. “The youngest people here are in their 60s.”
He feels sad about the lack of young South Koreans in farming. And he has every reason to: It poses huge challenges to local agriculture and may potentially endanger South Korea’s food sovereignty.
It was in this same city where Bon Tai managed to find an “easy-going boss”, Ji Tae-seung, who welcomed any help he could get for his farm.
“Nowadays, nearly all the farm workers are migrant workers, since there are no Koreans doing (this work),” Ji laments.
For many South Korean workers, the goal is Seoul. Former elementary school teacher Min Sangki, for instance, moved there this year after transitioning to a career in information technology development.
“I did look within Gwangju (in the Honam region) for opportunities as a developer,” says the 35-year-old. “But it was difficult to (find) the type of job that aligned with what I wanted.”
In the capital, he resides in a “goshiwon”, a single-occupancy room — as compact as 3.5 square metres — originally designed for students taking exams.
“It’s uncomfortable,” he says ruefully. “I’m paying the same amount of money (for) a place that’s about one tenth of the size of my original home.”
Yet, he had little choice but to uproot himself. Nearly 60 per cent of large companies — comprising more than 300 employees — in South Korea are found in the greater Seoul area.
“Geographically, Seoul and Seoul’s people suck all the good things from all over the Korean territory,” says Kim Seiwan, a professor of economics at Ewha Womans University.
Fashion designer Kim Heda is another who moved to Seoul. Originally from Taebaek, a city in the rural province of Gangwon, she set up her own studio where she sells custom-made clothing.
“Since the lights are on long into the night, and everyone grinds (away), I naturally felt that I, too, had to … keep up with the competition,” she says. “I had a mindset of … sleeping less and achieving more.”
Today, 11 years after her move to Seoul, the 31-year-old still feels the strains of city life. And she has put off thoughts of marriage and starting a family.
“I put so much time and effort into my work it’s hard to think about children,” she says.
Over the past decade, South Korea’s marriage numbers have dropped by 40 per cent. In the capital, its fertility rate of 0.55 last year was the lowest in the country.
Even as Seoul’s opportunities draw young South Koreans, it seems that the high-pressure, high-cost environment curbs their desire to settle down and grow the family.
It is not only Seoul that is posing a demographic problem. The Seoul metropolitan area includes Incheon and Gyeonggi, occupying nearly an eighth of the country’s land area but containing more than half of the population now.
In response, the government has plotted the development of Sejong City as the new administrative capital to alleviate congestion in the Seoul metropolitan area. Construction began in 2007, with a target completion date of 2030.
But the government may have to change mindsets too.
When Lee Dong-hyun’s parents sent him from Gangwon to a high school in Gyeonggi, it was in the hope that he would gain entry to one of the SKY universities.
The 19-year-old now has earned a place on Korea University’s Sejong campus. But he feels “like a failure” as many of his classmates were accepted into university campuses in Seoul.
Detractors of the Sejong strategy say it may lead to further expansion of the capital region, instead of promoting balanced national development.
Recent statistics show population growth in both Sejong — now home to around 400,000 people — and the Seoul metropolitan area.
“I wonder if Sejong City was more effective in absorbing populations from other regions, rather than dispersing population from the capital region,” Woo muses.
While rural populations are in decline across the modern world, the speed of the drop-off in South Korea is raising eyebrows.
“It took hundreds of years for cities to develop in the West, while cities in South Korea developed … in just a couple of decades,” Woo points out.
Amid such rapid urbanisation and the fall-off in the birth rate, South Korea is set to become a super-aged society as early as next year.
Not only are rural areas struggling to cope, but local governments also lack the means to adequately fund infrastructure and services owing to insufficient tax revenue, according to Kim Seiwan.
There may be a glimmer of hope, however. Some city folk are packing up and moving to the countryside, embracing a trend known as “kwichon”.
Park Young-ja, for example, moved to Chungcheongbuk province 15 years ago and has not looked back. Her adult children have followed suit.
“My eldest daughter is living in Bundang. My second daughter now lives in Danyang. My son’s family came down to the countryside here after living in Seoul,” she shares. “He’s very satisfied with his life here.
“In the city, … you can’t keep up with city housing prices. And working life is from dawn until late at night. You come home at 11 p.m. (or) midnight, with traffic jams and everything.”
The 70-year-old helps young people adjust themselves to life in the countryside. And the “kwichon” trend is now “discussed as solutions that are part of the balanced national development policy”, says Woo.
To combat rural extinction, the government has allocated 1 trillion won (S$979 million) per year for a period of 10 years to revitalise depopulated areas and entice young people to live and work there.
Local governments have proposed various projects to boost tourism, attract companies, remodel old houses and build educational facilities.
“If the government offers big tax benefits … and incentives to hire personnel from these regions, corporations will move there,” says Han the legislator.
The Yoon administration is also setting up a population planning and strategy ministry to tackle the low birth rate and ageing population. Solutions beyond financial incentives will be required, however, as money alone has not really helped the stork.
“We have to modify the fundamentals of the social system for females, the working conditions, the education facilities and so on,” says Kim Seiwan.
Time is also of the essence, adds Han. “If we enact these policies in three or five years’ time, the situation will snowball into something much worse.”
The programme Insight airs on Thursdays at 9 p.m. Watch this episode here.