The Hyundai Founder Who Put a Country on His Back

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/75c1d491c2a02532

On june sixteenth, nineteen ninety eight, an eighty two year old man climbed into the lead vehicle of a convoy of fifty truc loaded with cattle. Behind him were
Five hundred cows raised on a farm he'd reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. As the cows passed, Buddhist monks chanted, and women in traditional handbok dresses lined the road waving as the convoy of the
rolled through the last village before the razor wire barrier separating North and South Korea. The man in the lead vehicle was Chengju Young, the founder of Hondae. He was the first South Korean civilian to cross the border since the country was split in half. Four months later, he came back with
Five hundred and one cows, one thousand and one cows total, one for the cow that he had stolen from his father sixty five years earlier.
And one thousand for interest. Cheng was so determined to change his situation that as a teenager he stole a cow so he could sell it to buy a train ticket out of the farming village where he was born in what is now North Korea. He left in the middle of the night.
told no one, not even his father, and arrived in Seoul with only a sixth grade education and no connections. In order to survive, he swept floors, hauled freight on the docks, ran a rice shop, and even fixed cars. Of course, this was all before he built Hyundai, but
You can start to see the type of person he was. While many people think of Hondae as a car company, at its peak, it accounted for sixteen percent of South Korea's entire economic output. It built the highways that connected the country, the ships that carried its goods,
And the cars that so famously announced Korea's arrival to the world. Zhu Young wasn't an inventor or a theorist. What he was, more than anything, was a force. He was a person who could not be stopped.
Welcome to Outliers. I'm your host, Shane Parish.
Today we're gonna explore the incredible life of Cheng Ju Young, and it's one of the crazi I have ever heard in my life. This is the story of a man who refused to be stopped, no matter the circumstances, no matter the obstacles, he simply would not quit. He was so poor at one point, he's eating tree bark.
and so rich near the end of his life that he's in the top ten in the world. And in between these, he created entire industries and put an entire country on his back.
One quick note before we get started. This is a longer episode, and I kinda like this format. It lets me go below the surface, beyond the sound bites, into the mindset and details that really matter. Let's dive in.
In the village where Chengju Young was born, the children ran home from school during the day to go to the bathroom because their family needed the feces. Human waste was the primary fertilizer for the dry fields, and in a bad year, a few extra contributions from a small child could mean the difference between eating through the winter and not.
Chung was born in 1915 in a small northeast corner of what is now known as North Korea. At the time, it was just Korea, and Korea did not belong to the Koreans. Five years earlier, Japan had taken the whole Korean peninsula, and what they did to the farmers was
Brutal. Japan seized the land through a paperwork trick. Korean farmers held their land by custom, not by deeds, so when the colonial government demanded written proof of ownership, most of them had none. Overnight, everything changed.
Suddenly, they were landless. By the time Chung was a teenager, Japanese settlers owned more than half the farmland in Korea. Korean families now worked as tenants on the same land they had once owned. Rent,
took more than half of the harvest. Taxes took around a quarter. A family kept maybe a quarter of what they grew, and that wasn't enough to survive on. Japan shipped the best crops home, rice especially, to feed its own population.
Koreans ended up eating sour gram.
A coarse grain they had previously used to feed their cattle. Historians later measured heights from the nineteen twenties to the nineteen fifties. The average Korean kept getting shorter, year after year, a little smaller than before. Chunks.
Father farmed about three and a half acres. That sounds pretty manageable until you realize those fields had to feed a family of ten through winter using farming techniques that hadn't changed in centuries. In a good year, the harvest lasted through long winter and into spring. In a bad year, the food ran out halfway. And there were a lot of bad years.
Here's how Chung describes it himself. Back in those days, farming families were so poor that words cannot capture their suffering and destruction. After harsh winters, we would completely run out of food by the time spring arrived. From then on, we barely managed to stay alive by eating tree bark and grassroots.
and wild herb. He had to eat tree bark just to survive. That's crazy, but it gets worse. Chung recalled his parents' arguments.
I still vividly remember that my parents' arguments were always about food. Their arguments would become more and more heated until the table was overturned and the food ended up on the floor. Under Japanese colonial rule. Cheng inherited two things from his parents. Let's start with his father. The man knew one thing, how to work.
Chung described him as a man who farmed from birth to death head to toe.
He didn't say much, Cheng wrote, even when working beside him all day, I heard him speak at most three or four words. His father's total assets, as his son recorded them, were a healthy body and a diligent character. He worked from sunup to sundown every single day, with no exceptions and no holidays. As the eldest son, Chung was expressed.
inspected beside him in the fields after school until dark. In Korean life, the eldest son was the pillar. If the pillar fell, the whole house fell. His father understood this in his bones and organized his entire life around it. By seventh grade, Chung was no longer in school at all. He was farming full time. His father was training him
patiently and relentlessly to become exactly
what he himself was. From his mother, he got something else. She was ferociously competitive. If the other woman in the village weeded one row, she weeded two. If they wove a certain amount of silk, she would not stop until she had outproduced every one of them.
Chung absorbed all of it, the work ethic from his father, the refusal to lose from his mother, but in Cheng they fused into one. Later in life, he would describe himself as having an addiction to proving limits wrong. He took deep, genuine joy in being able to say, I did, when everyone around him was telling him he can't.
But something darker was happening in those fields. Chung was not just learning from his father. He was watching him fail. The hardest working man Chung knew could not feed his family through the winter.
The discipline that should have been enough wasn't.
And the boy noticed While working these rows, he thought to himself
Will I always be a farmer and never straighten my crooked back? A farmer who will never feel full for even a day.
A life like this to suffer, like my toiling father, is that all there is? It was not all there is, but getting out would cost him more than he knew.
Cheng ran away from home four times. His father caught him the first three times and dragged him back. The fourth time, Cheng slipped out in darkness and never returned.
The first time he was sixteen, he had just finished elementary school when he read a newspaper article about construction work in Shen, a port city on the far northeast coast of what is now North Korea. It was a four day boat ride away. He had no money for the boat, so he decided to walk.
250 kilometers through the mountains. He made it. He found work on a construction site and labored for two months before his father showed up and ordered him home. But something had shifted in him. For the first time in his life, he had earned his own wage and found his own way. He had felt what it was like to do real physical work and get paid for it.
He went home with his father, but he went home a different person than the one who had left. The second time he was seventeen, and the destination was Seoul, the center of everything. He set out with two companions, and on the road a man promised them employment and stole their money instead. Penniless and stranded, they gave up, and his father found them.
at his grandfather's house along the route. Getting conned was humiliating, but it was also an education. It would make Chung unusually careful about who he trusted for the rest of his life. The third attempt is the one that became legend. To finance it, Chung stole one of his father's cows
sold it for seventy one, and bought a train ticket to Seoul.
And you need to understand what a cow meant in poor Korean farming household in the 1930s. A cow wasn't just livestock. A cow plowed the fields and hauled goods. A cow represented years of accumulated savings and food. Selling it was the equivalent of mortgaging the farm's future, and Chung did it without.
Telling his father. He reached Seoul, enrolled in a bookkeeping academy, and set out to become an accountant. Things went well for about two months.
And then his father found him. What happened next is one of the most devastating passages in Chung's autobiography. His father crouched down in front of him, in the dirt, and wept.
And then he said this.
Are there any parents in this world who don't want their children to be successful? If you are successful enough to bring your parents and siblings to soul and look after them, why would this old man hold you back?
But you better not forget what you are.
Just a farm boy who only finished the sixth grade. I hear Sol is crawling with unemployed graduates of vocational schools, but you? What are you? A nobody.
And a nobody like you isn't going to make it. You will throw our family out into the streets, blindly chasing after this stupid dream. I am old now.
So you need to be responsible for looking out.
for the family. Since you refuse, we're going to have to turn to begging.
Sit with that for a second because the father was not wrong. This was Korea in the 1930s, in the middle of a global depression. Seoul was full of unemployed men, most of them far more educated than Chung. And here was his eldest son, the designated pillar of the family, a teenager with a sixth.
grade education who had stolen the family cow to attend a school he could barely afford. Cheng's father saw the situation with painful clarity.
The sun saw farther, but neither of them knew that yet.
Chung later wrote.
Even today.
I get a lump in my throat when I recall my weeping father crouched down as he uttered these words.
He went home with his father and threw himself into the farmer, trying to repay his guilt through effort. He resolved to accept his fate and be the best farmer he could be. He even bought land to expand the family's holdings. He was going to be the pillar his father needed him to be. But then another bad harvest hit. The food ran out and
again and his parents started fighting. Chung wrote, I murmured, I can't take this anymore. Any fleeting resolution to remain on that farm evaporated. I was determined to go to Seoul
And succeed. The fourth attempt was the one that worked.
He left at night without a word, with a friend he was fleeing a forced marriage.
Two young men slipping out of their old lives in the same darkness, each escaping a different trap. This time Chung did not steal, he borrowed the train fare from a friend. He hated owing anyone anything, even briefly, but he hated the alternative even more. This time his father
Did not come looking for him. And here's the thing most people miss about this sequence. It's not a story about a restless young man who wanted more.
It's a story about guilt. Every time Chung ran, he knew it was costing his family. Every time his father dragged him back, the debt got heavier. And by the fourth escape, that guilt was welded to him. He carried it for the rest of his life. Sixty-five years later, when he drove a thousand and one cows across the demilitarized zone.
He was still trying to pay it off. For now, though, Chengju Young was 19 years old, alone in the largest city in Korea, with borrowed money in his pocket and a sixth grade education to his name.
He had escaped, but the question was
Now what? Sol was not what he imagined. His biography describes it with no romance at all. He started at Inchant Harbor, working the docks as a day labor hauling freight. When the dock work dried up, he moved to construction. When that ended, he went to a starch syrup factory. He took whatever job would keep him fed for another week, and he was
always looking for something better. As he later reflected, the sad reality of farming is that no matter how much one struggles, the payoff never equals the amount of work put in. What he was discovering now was that the city was not automatically better. It was just differently
Brutal. The work was there, but it was crushing, and the margin between making it and not making it was razor thin. He was still just barely scraping by. And it was during this stretch, sleeping in a bunkhouse, that Chung encountered something that would stay with him for the rest of his life. And it was, of all things,
An insect. The bunkhouse was infested with bed bugs. The workers tried everything to escape them. They moved off the floor and slept on the dining room tables instead. They put pots of water under the table legs so the bugs couldn't climb up. It worked for a night or two.
And then one evening they turned on the lights and saw the bed rugs crawling along the walls. They had climbed all the way to the ceiling, and they were dropping down from above directly onto their sleeping bodies. Here's how Chung described the moment in his autobiography.
And it's remarkable. To this day, I cannot forget the shiver down my spine that I felt back then. This made me stop in my tracks and think. Even bed bugs think long and hard and use every bit of energy they have to achieve their goal. And ultimately
They succeed. I'm no bed bug. I'm a man. These bedbugs can surely teach a man a few lessons. If these bed bugs can do it,
Why can't we men do it? We just need to stick to it and not quit.
We need to emulate these bed bugs. He added, Whenever I tell people that it was the bed bugs that taught me nothing is impossible if one puts in one's best effort, they think I'm exaggerating. But this really is the truth.
You could hear that and think it's a cute anecdote.
An old billionaire looking back and giving credit to an unlikely teacher. But I think it's a bit more than that. I think the bedbug story tells you exactly how his mind worked. He was lying in a bunkhouse, exhausted, bitten,
Broke, still carrying all this guilt from running away. And instead of seeing pests, he saw a philosophy. The bugs didn't stop.
They didn't accept the obstacle. They found another route. The lesson he drew was not complicated. Don't stop.
When the path is blocked keep going until the thing is done. And he would apply this principle for the rest of his life.
First.
To entire industries and eventually to an entire country. He landed a position as a delivery boy at a rice shop. Part of his pay was a bag of rice every month, and he later said this was the first time he felt like he had made it because he knew he would not go hungry again. But there was one problem.
When the owner hired him, he asked Chung if he could ride a bicycle.
Cheng, of course, said yes, but it was a lie. And it was the first recorded instance that I could find of Chung Ju Yung agreeing to do something he had absolutely no idea how to do, and then figuring it out afterward. It would certainly not be the last.
He taught himself to ride a bike within days, and then he went to work on the shop itself. He was the first to arrive every morning. He swept the entrance, he sprinkled water on dry days to keep the dust down. He did everything he could think of to make the shop run better.
than it had before he had walked in. The owner's son was lazy, which probably made Chung's intensity stand out even more sharply. And the owner noticed. Six months later, when the owner became ill, he handed Chung this store. The first thing Chung did was to rename it. He called it the I'm gonna get this wrong.
So g you can laugh at my pronunciation, but he called it the
Kunjil Rice Store, which translates into number one in Seoul. Think about that for a second. Six months before he was a delivery boy, and now he had just taken over the shop through pure force of will and almost pathological frugality and the
First thing he did was rename it number one in Seoul. You can see where his mind was already operating. The ambition had nothing to do with rice. And here's what I think happened during these years and why they matter to everything that comes next.
Chung had almost nothing. He had no money. He had no education. He had no connections. But what he did have was work ethic and his frugality. He was doing the things anyone could do, the things the shop owner's son could have been doing, but chose not to do. The things that you could do with a willingness to show up and nothing else. The things you do when you're desperate.
Not when you're comfortable. By nineteen thirty eight, he was his own boss. He had a business, he had customers, and he was growing. He started hiring friends to deliver all the rice he was selling. He would later write that this brief window was the only time in his life he ever felt rich.
Which seems almost incomprehensible given that by nineteen ninety six he was the ninth richest person. But that tells you something important about how he was wired. Things did not stay stable for long. In nineteen thirty nine, Japanese colonial authorities imposed rice rationing. They requisitioned every private rice shop in the country.
Korean private rice trading was effectively
Finished overnight. Years of work.
Gone. Not because he had failed, but because someone with more power decided he was not allowed to keep what he had built. It was the first time the world would take something from him, but it would not be the last. The next year he was back in business.
Chung took out a 3,000 one loan and bought an existing car repair shop. There was one small problem. He had no idea how to fix cars. As he put it later, it just seemed like a good business. So he handled the customer service side and learned the trade from his mechanic friends, which is another way of saying he talked to people and watched them carefully.
That had been his method since the rice shop, and it would stay his method for the next six decades. He noticed something almost immediately, and it came hidden inside a customer complaint. Sol had only a handful of auto repair shops at the time, and they were all terrible. They all overcharged, they were slow and unreliable. The average shop took time.
ten days to return a car. Ten days in a city where car was one of the most valuable things a person could own.
Chung saw the problem and solution immediately. Customers didn't actually mind the price. What they couldn't stand was losing their car for ten days. So he built the entire shop around speed. His shop averaged three days for a repair job, and he charged a premium for it, and customers gladly lined up around the block.
The volume his shop was doing meant his mechanics got more practice than anyone else in Seoul, which made them improve faster, which brought in more customers, which made them finish still faster. It was a virtuous circle, and Chung was spinning it deliberately. He also personally memorized every single auto part in a car, every single one.
That detail is going to matter later in a way that neither he nor anyone else could have guessed. Business was booming, but then a fire destroyed everything. The shop
the customers' cars inside of it, everything was gone. Chung was left holding debt on a business that no longer existed and on vehicles that had been reduced to ash. His first move was to turn to his employees and say, Hey, it's okay. The building was old anyway. And then he went straight back to his lender.
The argument he made was so direct that I want you to hear it exactly as he says it in the book. The fire burned everything down. Now I have nothing but debt.
If I stop now, there's no way I can pay you back. Sir, I beg you, give me another chance to set this right. He's not really asking for sympathy here, he's not explaining away the loss, but
And he's not really blaming anybody else. He's simply telling the lender very calmly that the lender has two options. Option one, write off the original loan and lose everything. Option two, lend more money and
Maybe get it all back. The lender said yes. Chung rebuilt the shop from scratch, and this time he grew it aggressively. By 1943, what had been a 20 person operation was up to 70. He was not just repairing cars anymore, he was building a real business with systems, with a staff, and a reputation as the fastest and most reliable shop in Seoul.
But of course, nothing stays good for long in this story. The Japanese intervened
Again. The war was escalating and the colonial government was stripping Korea of anything that could feed the imperial war machine. They forced a merger of Cheng's auto shop into a steel plant. He got fifty thousand yen in compensation, and just like that, he was starting over one more time. Later in life, reflecting on the fire and everything else,
Chung distilled the whole experience into what became his most famous line. There are trials, but there are no failures. The idea was not that adversity could be avoided. It was that adversity could always be converted into an education, and education is never really a loss.
By refusing to use the word failure, he was refusing to accept the finality the word carried. He changed the language, and by changing the language, he changed his own emotional response before it could even set in. The rice shop being seized was not a failure, it was preparation for the auto business.
The auto shop burning down was not a failure. It was the argument that got him a second loan. The wartime merger was not a failure. It was 50,000 yen and a set of skills he would carry into whatever came next. And what came next is Handae. By 1943, Cheng Ju Yung was 28 years old. He had built two businesses and lost them both.
He had been wiped out more times than most people will be in their entire lives.
But he did not stop, he did not slow down, he did not accept the given pace of things. When the path was blocked he found another path. He went up the wall, across the ceiling, and
and dropped onto his target from above. And he was just getting started. After the war ended and Korea was liberated from Japan in August of nineteen forty five.
Chung went back into the auto repair business. He was servicing vehicles, making a living, and steadily rebuilding after everything the Japanese had taken from him. And at some point during this stretch, his mother came to visit him in Seoul.
He was taking her around the city on a trolley, showing her how far he had come from the farm. At one point he gestured toward the grand headquarters of what had become the Japanese government general, one of the most imposing buildings in the city, and he told her, Mother.
One day I'll become the richest man in Seoul and live in a house even bigger than
Than that. His mother, who you will remember, was not a woman known for letting anyone have the last word told him.
Now listen up, Farm Boy, you came here with just your two balls.
You, the wealthiest man in Seoul can
Get your head out of the clouds. You have a life to live. Chunk's response was simple.
No.
I'm going to make it. So much for a mother believing in their son. But now we're at the fun part. Everything he had built so far was about to get channeled into something much larger. Something that would eventually carry his name around the world, and it would nearly kill the company before anyone outside Soul had even heard of it.
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The first thing he did was name it. He named the company Honda, which in Korean means modern.
Think about the audacity of that game. Korea in 1947 was anything but modern. It was a country just emerging from 35 years of colonial rule, shattered and impoverished, and spoiler alert, about to be made worse by a civil war. There was almost nothing modern about it.
But Chung did not name things after what they currently were. He named them after what he intended them to become. He had done this already when he called a rice shop number one in Seoul, and now he was doing it on an even
bigger scale. The name was a promisory note. Korea was free from Japan. Korea could now become modern, and Chung was going to be the one to build it. For a while, he was running both the auto shop and his new construction outfit at the same time. And the pivot from one to the other
happened in a way that was pure chum. He was sitting in a government office one day waiting to submit a bid for some automotive work when he watched a construction company come in and collect payment for a completed job. The amount of money that changed hands just simply floored him. It was so much larger than anything he was dealing with in auto repair that the math
broke something in his head. He was back on the farm in a sense. He was doing exactly what his father had done, working incredibly hard day after day in a business where the payoff was linear. It was never going to equal the effort. It wasn't that the auto repair business was a bad business, it was that construction was a vastly better business.
Construction contracts paid ten to forty times what auto repair did. You could work just as hard in construction, but for a radically different payoff. His partners thought he was crazy.
They were a small but capable auto operation, and they knew nothing about construction. But Chunk had worked on construction sites during his runaway years as a teenager, and he figured he understood the work well enough to learn the rest. He also understood something about himself that his partners did not, as he put it, too.
Success is ninety percent determination and ten percent confidence.
So he merged the auto shop into the new venture and went all in on Honda engineering and construction. He was betting everything on a business he barely knew in a country that was about to be engulfed by war. On June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty, North Korea forces crossed the thirty eighth parallel and invaded the Korean War.
had begun. Chung abandoned his construction projects and fled to Seoul as the North Korean Army advanced.
He moved his family south to Buzon, the port city at the southern tip of the peninsula, and he set up a new headquarters there. He could have waited the war out, and he could have hunkered down and just tried to survive. But we all know by now that that was not how Cheng Ju Yung operated. He needed business.
Any business. And Busan had something very specific to offer, which was the US eighth Army. The Americans had a massive presence in the city, and they needed housing, roads, and the infrastructure of a semi-permanent occupying force. Somebody was going to build it.
And Chung intended for that somebody to be him. His younger brother became crucial here. The brother was proficient in English and had built good relationships with the American engineers. And in a country where almost nobody could communicate directly with Americans, that was a massive competitive.
Through his brother's connections and through relentless, consistent delivery on every job they took, Hondae became the construction firm the Americans started to turn to first. Chung understood the American military's priorities the same way he had understood his first auto customers' priorities back in Seoul.
It was the same insight applied to a different buyer. Speed and reliability mattered more than cost. Do what you say you will do when you say you will do it. The Americans didn't want excuses, they wanted results.
And Chung had been delivering results since he swept the floor of that rice shop. There's one early job from this period that tells you almost everything about how Cheng was going to operate for the next forty years. In December of nineteen fifty two, President Eisenhower visited Korea.
US military authorities wanted the graves of fallen UN troops at a military ceremony to be covered with green grass for the visit. That was the specification.
Green grass. But there was one problem and it was a
Big one. It was the middle of a Korean winter. Green grass in a Korean winter was not just difficult, it was darn near impossible. Anyone else would have asked for a deadline extension or explained the situation and requested more time. But Chung transplanted green barley instead.
The graves were green, the job was done on time, and the Americans were satisfied. Chun didn't argue with the constraint. He did not explain why the constraint was unreasonable.
He simply reframed it. And that willingness to redefine the constraint rather than be defeated by it, and then to execute fast became Hondae's entire operating signature. It is the bedbug lesson all over again. When the path is blocked, find another path, go up the wall, across the ceiling, and drop.
onto the target from above.
war, it turned out was good for the construction business. Honda
Grew steadily through the conflict, building for the Americans, learning from the Americans, accumulating capability with every contract. But Cheng also understood that wars end. So even while fighting was still going on, he started to look for civilian projects. The Korean economy was shattered, government contracts were scarce.
And the margins were razor thin.
It didn't matter. He had Honda bid on all of them. He was not chasing a windfall. He was building a company. He was building a reputation. And every contract he completed, no matter how small, no matter how unprofitable, was another deposit in a bank account that he believed would pay compound returns for decades.
When the armistice was signed in July of nineteen fifty three, Chung was thirty seven years old. He was running a construction firm in a country that was about to need more building than perhaps any nation in history. Everything above ground had been level. The roads, the bridges, the factories, the power plants, all of it had to be rebuilt.
The only question was who was going to rebuild it. Chung intended for that person?
To be him. In April of 1953, three months before the armistice was even signed, the Korean government awarded Honda its biggest contract yet.
The job was to restore the Glorian Bridge.
A major crossing that had been destroyed during the war. The government wanted it to rebuild fast, not just for civilian traffic, but to move forces against guerrilla fighters still operating in the area. The contract was worth more than half a million one, and Honda had twenty six months to deliver. This was the biggest job.
Chung had ever won. Not only did it have the most money, it had the most visibility. When the contract came through, he celebrated. Honda was about to enter the big leagues of Korean construction. But as the lesson goes, never count your money when you're sitting at the table. The celebration would prove premature.
The problem started almost immediately. Only the bare skeleton of the old bridge remained, which meant almost everything had to be built from scratch and flowing water ten meters deep.
And Honda had never done anything close to this scale. When Chung's engineers tried to figure out what equipment they needed, they quickly discovered that the right equipment could simply not be found anywhere in the war torn country. What they had to work with was a twenty ton crane, a concrete mixer, and a compressor.
Everything else had to be done by hand. They were just getting started when the floods came.
The water swept away their scaffolding and they had to start over. Then came the inflation, and the inflation is what nearly destroyed the company. When Chunk signed the contract, a unit of oil cost seven won. By the time the bridge was finished, two years later, it cost 45. A single sack of rice went from less than half a won to 41.
That's not a typo. That is nearly a hundredfold increase. Every material, every wage, every
Supply cost him more and more each month.
And the price of everything was climbing so fast that planning became almost meaningless. Chung had accounted for inflation when he bit on the job. He had expected it to be significant. He thought it might be a hundred percent. He was still off by a factor of 10. And here was the trap.
The contract Chung had signed was a fixed price contract. The government was going to pay him the agreed amount, and not a single one more. It did not matter that the world had changed underneath him. The contract would not adjust. So the losses started piling up, compounding weaknesses.
by week with no ceiling in sight. Every day the bridge was not finished was the day the hole got deeper.
Workers stopped getting paid. Some even went on strike. And then the creditors came. They did not knock politely. They showed up at Chung's office demanding their money, and when they didn't get it, they came to his home. Cheng's son was a small boy at the time, and his first clear memory of childhood was creditors breaking into the family house with an axe.
Can you imagine? That's crazy. Chung carried that for the rest of his life. The fact that the pressures he had taken on had reached through the walls of his home and touched the people he was supposed to protect. His top people came to him with a proposal.
They were his brothers and his brothers in law. They had staked their own lives on Hyundai, and they told him stop, stop building this cursed bridge. We're losing more money by the hour. The losses are already near catastrophic, and continuing will only make them worse. So
Any other firm would quit.
cut our losses and survive. We need to walk away. But
Chun didn't know how to stop, so he refused.
And his response tells you exactly who this man was, not just as a businessman, but as a human being under extreme duress.
He said, quote, You mean you want me to take down our sign? If you're suggesting that we stop construction at this point, you're basically saying we close down our business. Trust is everything to a businessman. The moment you lose trust, it's all over. It's my dream to create the
best construction company in the Republic of Korea, and you're telling me to abandon it all?
Whatever happens, we're going to finish this job.
We have to. His brothers were telling him the rational thing. Stop.
The math is clear. You're bleeding out every day you continue to bleed more.
Just walk away. And Chunk heard them. He understood the math. He was not a fool, but he was calculating something that they were not. He was calculating the value of the name. The name Hyundai and its reputation. The trust he had spent years building, contract by contract, starting with the Americans in Busant, starting before that.
with the auto shop and starting even before that with the rice shop where he arrived first every morning and swept the entire entrance before anyone asked him to. If he walked away from a job, any job, in his eyes, his reputation and credibility would be destroyed. His brothers were so moved by his refusal to quit.
that they went home and sold their houses. When Chung found out, he burst into tears. Then he sold the land under his original auto repair shop, the place where Han Dai had been born. Together the family raised almost a million won and put every last penny of it into this one project. They went all in.
And when that ran out, they borrowed more at interest rates as high as eighteen percent.
Huh.
month. Let that number sink in for a second. 18% per month. Not per year. Per month. That is the kind of interest rate you accept when you believe one of two things. Either that you will finish fast enough that the interest won't matter, or that the alternative to borrowing is worse than any interest rate. Chang found himself in the second
category. In May of nineteen fifty five.
The bridge was finished. The final accounting was brutal. The contract paid Hyundai five hundred and forty seven thousand eight hundred one, which had seemed like an astronomical sum when they signed it two years earlier.
But the project had left them six hundred and fifty thousand one in debt.
They'd spent more than twice what they earned. His competitors were merciless. What would a sixth grade dropout know about construction? And here's the part that gets me.
Chung kind of agreed with them. He didn't blame bad luck. He didn't blame the government for the fixed price contract. He didn't blame the floods. He didn't blame the creditors who had broken into his house with an axe. He blamed himself.
He had not understood the riverbed conditions. He had not known what equipment the job truly required. He had rushed into a bid far beyond his capability without understanding what came after winning it. There was a line from a Chinese classic he returned to often after this nightmare.
The root of failure is planted the moment you achieve your goal. His goal had been to win the bid, he had won it, he had celebrated, and he had not been prepared for what came next. He would not make that mistake again. But he also would not call the bridge a complete failure. He had finished it, he had kept his word, he had
He had not defaulted on the contract and he had not abandoned the project. And importantly, he had not cut a single corner.
He just took the loss. There may be periods of hardship, Chung believed, but never complete failure. The bridge was hardship. It was not failure. And the difference between those two worlds, in his mind, was the difference between a company that survived and a company that disappeared.
What happened next is crazy. Someone had been watching the whole time. While Chung was selling the land under his own company to pay for a bridge that was costing him more every day, while his brothers were selling their houses and while creditors were coming at him with an axe the Korean government was pay very close attention.
They had watched Hondae take a job that was clearly too big. They had watched the floods wipe out the scaffolding and they had watched the inflation gut the contract. They had watched Chung refuse to quit when every rational calculation said he should. And they had watched him deliver exact what he said he would.
In the time frame he said he would do it. When the Ministry of the Interior assigned credit scores to the country's construction firms after the war, Honda's was the highest in Korea.
Not because they had made money, they had lost a fortune. They got the highest score specifically because they had finished on time.
In a country full of contractors who overpromised and underdelivered, who walked away constantly from jobs, the moment the math worked against them, Honda had done what it said it would do. They were the clean shirt in a closet full of dirty ones. And when the government contracts started flowing, Honda won them. Cheng would later tell a group of businessmen who came to him looking for capital.
Trust is everything to a businessman. The moment you lose trust, it's all over. If I have to choose between reputation and money, I will always take reputation. He believed it because he lived it.
The bridge was proof. He had chosen reputation over money at a cost that would have destroyed most people. And the reputation had paid him back many times over by the time he said that. The bridge also taught him something specific and operational. He had gone into the biggest job of his life without the right tools. Even worse, he hadn't known
what the right tools were. He could not read the conditions of the riverbed. He could not assess what equipment the job demanded. He had been guessing, and the guesses had almost killed his company. He swore it would never happen again. So he set up a dedicated heavy equipment office inside Hyundai. Its only job was to acquire, repair, and remodel
every piece of construction machinery they could get their hands on. And if they could not buy the machine, they would build it from scratch. This is where something interesting starts to happen. Chung catches a bit of a break. And the break is actually the return on something he had invested in years earlier without really knowing he was investing.
Because of his wartime work with the Americans, they were the only Korean construction company registered as direct customer of the US eighth Army. If a competitor wanted to buy high tech American equipment, they had to go through a middleman and pay a markup. Honda bought direct. And here's where the auto shop pays off.
Those years Chung had spent memorizing every single auto part. The years his partners had thought were beneath him gave him an edge his competitors did not have. He could look at a piece of American construction equipment and know exactly what it was worth. The other construction bosses in Korea were just guessing, but he knew.
Nothing in life had ever been wasted. Every phase was quietly funding the next one. In nineteen fifty seven, Hyundai won the contract to restore the Han River Bridge in Seoul. This was the same bridge that had been destroyed in the opening hours of the Korean War, and the symbolism was hard to miss. The newspapers called it.
The greatest construction project of the time. And it was one of the largest projects announced since the war. Honda finished it in months. The Gorian Bridge had gotten the attention of the government, but the Han River Bridge got the attention of the entire country.
Hondae was now countered among the top five construction companies in Korea, out of more than a thousand. And then Hondae just kept building bridge after bridge. They would go on to build
thirteen bridges across the Han River alone, including Korea's first suspension bridge and its first cable state bridge. Every one of them was a deposit into the account Chung had been filling since the day he swept that rice photo shop. This was now his pattern, and it would repeat for the rest of his career. He would take a contract that looked
Punishing on paper, finish it no matter what, and use the trust he earned from finishing to win the next contract, which was always bigger.
He was doing the same thing he had done since the Rice Shop, just at a larger denomination. Take what you have, even if what you have is only your willingness to show up first and leave last and work hardest and convert it into something more valuable than money. Because money follows trust. Trust does not follow money.
Here's what you have to understand about where Korea was in 1960. The country had a per capita income of about eighty dollars a year. That put it on the same level as Ghana and Sudan, and slightly behind India. People were sleeping and starving in the streets of Seoul.
Private cars were a novelty. Electricity and running water were luxuries. A group of the US State Department experts after studying Korea's prospects in depth concluded that Korea was an economic basket case that would always depend on American handouts for its existence.
The world bank was no kinder. Not that these experts are actually right very often. When they rank the Asian countries most likely to industrialize, Burma and the Philippines were near the top. Korea was near the bottom. Nobody outside of Korea and very few people inside it believed the country could become anything other than a permanent
Charity case. Remember that, because what Chung did next only makes sense when you understand how desperate things were. Honda had been doing US Army construction work since the war. Quick jobs, simple specs, get it done fast. But in the late 1950s, the nature of the American work changed. The US military started building permanent facilities.
to Americans, real buildings with real specifications, documents running hundreds of pages with equipment clauses that had to be met exactly quality requirements that had to be demonstrated, and engineering tolerances no Korean company had ever been asked to hit.
Chung and his employees could barely read a page of them.
And this is where you get a glimpse of kind of what separated Chung from almost everyone else running a company in Korea at the time. He had zero shame about not knowing things. None. Maybe it was his lack of formal education, and maybe it was just how he was wired. But in a culture where hierarchy and saving face mattered enormously, Chung would ask.
Anyone.
anything, regardless of their rank or age or whether the question made him look foolish. His attitude was simple and he drilled it into every one of his employees. It is not shameful to ask about something you do not know, even if you have to ask somebody younger or a lower rank than yourself. He had a line for it that cut right to the point.
Fixed thinking is what makes fools. Pretending you knew something you did not, performing competence instead of actually acquiring it, that was the real stupidity.
And Chung had no patience for it. He wrote, Not receiving formal education does not mean one is lacking in wisdom. It's a mistake to think that broad and deep knowledge can only be obtained through formal schooling. So Honda asked the Americans about everything, no matter how basic.
They asked the technicians how to read the blueprints, how to meet the specifications, how to operate the equipment, how to sequence the work.
And on every work site where the Americans were present, Chung rotated as many of his own workers through as possible. So they could absorb everything from their counterparts on how to do it the American way. Each site became a classroom and each contract was a new semester. And when they still didn't know what something was, they just figured it out.
During one paving project at the Osan Airbase, the specifications called for a batch plant to mix concrete properly. Cheng had never seen a batch plant. He didn't know what one was, so he sent a subordinate to another construction site to find out what one looked like. The man came back with a description.
Chung drew up the plans himself and had his engineers build one from scratch. On another job, he needed to lift a 110-ton gate into place, but he did not have a crane big enough, so he used two 60-ton cranes in unison. It violated standard practice, but it worked. And this went on for years.
Chung wrote that he never had enough English speakers to translate properly. They always struggled to constantly find the equipment to match the specs. And the gap between what the Americans expected and what the Korean companies could deliver was at times humiliating.
But
They kept learning one day at a time, one foot in front of the other.
Every technique, every standard, every procedure, and slowly through sheer stubbornness and a refusal to stop asking questions, Honda went from being unable to read the American spec manuals to planning entire projects using those same standards. Cheng later described the whole Korean construction.
industry is being dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into modern times by the demand of the US Army work.
the American military, without ever intending to, had become the most effective vocational school Korean construction ever had. Now
To understand how Chung ran all of this day to day, you have to understand just what was driving him. And it's easy to hear what I'm about to describe and conclude that he was just a control freak, but he wasn't. Or at least that's the wrong way to frame it. What drove Chung's management style was not a need of control.
It was a need to compete. He was aware at times that Korea had to compete with Japan and had to compete with every other industrializing nature, or the country was never going to climb out of the hole it was in. The State Department had written Korea off. The World Bank had put it at the bottom of the list. And Chung kind of took that personally.
He saw it as his responsibility, as a point of national honor to prove them wrong. And that meant every work site, every project, every single day had to be run at maximum intensity. His country could not afford anything less. Chung did not manage from behind a desk.
Every morning first thing he went straight to the nearest work site. He believed that a person in a position of authority is a role model for everything. If a CEO does not lead by example and merely orders workers around, his words will fall on deaf ears. He visited the heavy equipment yard at least once a day.
Often twice. And the second visit was the whole point. Here's how it worked. He would arrive in the morning, everyone would be working hard, braced for the boss. They knew his reputation and wanted to impress him. He would inspect, nod, and then leave.
And the workers would relax, the pressure valve would release, and they would slow down just a little.
The coast was clear, and then the boss would come back. The people who had been lounging would scramble to their stations. Chung took quiet satisfaction in this. He believed the standard was not something he performed for an audience.
This standard was the standard all the time. You worked at full capacity whether someone was watching you or not. And if you didn't, the solution was to make sure someone was always watching.
He called the project supervisors at all hours of the day and night to ask if certain tasks had been completed. He gave his workers less time than they needed to finish a job, deliberately, because he believed that
people used as much time as they were given. Get it done by tomorrow morning was typical. Only if fire falls on their feet will people quickly the work they are instructed to do, he observed. If he felt someone was not carrying their load, he fired them.
On the spot.
Once he fell asleep on a train headed to a work site outside Seoul and missed the stop, he got off at the next station, hiked back
and arrived at the middle of the night. And instead of waiting until morning, he immediately started inspecting the work and quizzing the sleepy workers and supervisors about what they had accomplished that day. Nobody could believe he would show up at that hour. Behind his back, sometimes to his face, his workers called him the Tiger.
because he could appear out of nowhere and pounce on the unsuspecting. Chung seemed to enjoy the nickname. It kept people on their toes. He admitted it freely.
I was a tough boss for everyone everywhere.
I know I must have hurt the feelings of many, as growling was the only way I knew how to speak to them.
Later in life he was sorry about that. But he was also certain that the constant pressure, the relentless inspections, the refusal to accept anything less than full speed were what made Hondae into what it became.
The company absorbed his personality. It became fast, relentless, and allergic to excuses.
Which is another way of saying it became him. There was one more piece to how Chung built Honda, and I think it had to do with who he let in the door. In Korea at the time, hiring was a patronage system, who you knew mattered more than what you could do.
Chung rejected that system completely. He based hiring decisions on individual competence, not personal connections.
Now, in a Confucian society built on networks of obligation, that was pretty radical. And it created problems because government bureaucrats were constantly trying to pressure Chung to hire their sons. In Korea, refusing a well placed official could cost you permanence.
It could cost you approvals.
And contracts.
But Chung found a way around this that was clever. He told his brother, who handled hiring, to give bureaucrat's son a particularly difficult English language test. Tests that essentially guaranteed failure. And then Chung could tell the fathers in good conscience that he had no problem at all.
all hiring their boys. The boys had simply been unable to pass the company's entrance exam.
In a Confucian society that had used competitive examinations for centuries to determine, the officials who had themselves gotten their own positions through exactly that kind of exam had no
acceptable response. They could not argue with their own logic.
And Cheng wasn't only using the English test to filter out nepotism. He actually needed English speakers desperately because he had his eye on international businesses long before most Korean companies understood what that even meant. English tests were required at Honda years before the rest of Korea caught on.
Everything depended on having the right people. The learning he was doing and absorbing American methods, building machines that had never been seen before, from descriptions brought back by subordinates, all of it required people who could actually learn, people who were hungry and smart and willing to be humiliated in
In the process of getting better, he needed people who could pass a hard test, people who like him had no shame about not knowing, and no quit in them once they started learning.
That was the machine he was building. And when President Park Chenghee paid a surprise visit to Hyundai construction site years later,
What he found was not a chairman sitting behind a polished desk. He found Chung sleeping on the ground with his workers. Chung had spent the night on the site. By the time Park arrived at dawn, he was already up and working alongside the crew. Park was after all a man who valued commitment above almost everything else.
When Hyundai started building its first major fertilizer plant in the early nineteen sixties, the Germans showed up to handle the work Korean hands weren't trusted to touch. A German engineering firm had been brought in to do the advanced welding.
the precision engineering, the systems no Korean company yet knew how to build. And the Germans did not think much of their Korean counterparts. They set a rule on the job side. Honday workers were not permitted to weld more than eighteen meters a day. That was the ceiling. It is that number that tells you exactly where a country sits in the world.
At the time Korea was not being asked to build, they were being allowed to assist, and the Germans were very clear about the difference. Chung admitted that it was humiliating, but he also understood it was the price of admission, the same way it had been with the Americans.
So he did what he always did. He watched, he asked questions, he put his workers shoulder to shoulder with the Germans and told them to absorb.
Everything, the techniques, the sequencing, the standards for materials, the tolerances that were unlike anything any Korean construction firm had ever encountered before. He drilled the purpose of it into everyone at Honda. The point of this project is not to finish this project, the point is to learn.
everything they could from the Germans. That is exactly what happened. The next projects Hyundai 1 were bigger and more complex, but each one required less and less foreign help.
The learning was compounding. The same pattern played out in power generation, and this is where you can actually watch the ceiling start to move. At first, the Korean government did not trust domestic companies with the power plants at all. American firms were given the entire contract for each new plant, even though welders were imported from overseas.
Korean companies were simply not considered capable of the work. But Honda kept pushing plant after plant, each time climbing one more rung up the technical ladder, each time taking more and more of the work. And in 1962, finally something shifted.
Hanai built a power plant with only limited guidance from their foreign partners. And for the first time, their work was not merely tolerated.
Instead, it was praised by the same foreign engineers who a few years earlier didn't trust them with anything critical. Cheng was thrilled, and I don't think that's too strong of a word. That was the moment Hondae escaped the labor of being a subcontractor. They were joint partners with world class companies on massive projects.
For a man with a sixth grade education running a company in one of the poorest countries on earth, that recognition was worth more than any profit margin. And he kept pushing because Cheng always kept pushing. Eventually, Hondae became the first Korean company to build a nuclear power plant. Think about that for a second.
From a company that could not read an American spec manual in nineteen fifty seven to a company whose welders were rationed by foreign engineers in the early sixties to a company that was building nuclear power plants.
By the end of the decade, the South Korean government did something that would have been unthinkable only ten years earlier.
They announced that from now on.
Only domestic companies would be hired to build the country's power plants.
The apprenticeship was over.
Korea was going to build for itself.
And none of it happened by accident. It happened because companies like Honda, led by Chung, had refused to accept the foreign engineers' assessment of what Koreans were capable of. If they had, foreign firms would have dominated Korean construction indefinitely. Korea would have stayed a client state.
paying outsiders to build its own country. Instead, Korean companies took the expertise they had painstakingly gathered from American bases, from German engineering, and from every condescending supervisor and every humiliating ceiling, and used it to build their own nation.
Chung had a single question he asked every time his subordinate told him something.
Couldn't be done. His people came to know it as both a challenge and a philosophy. How can you know it's impossible if you haven't tried it?
The question was not rhetorical. It was a demand. Show me the evidence that this cannot be done. Show me that you have actually attempted it and failed it, not that you have imagined failing it and decided not to start.
Chung did not believe in impossibility as a starting position. He believed in it
Only reluctantly as a conclusion you were allowed to reach only after you had exhausted everything.
every other alternative.
And in his experience, most people gave up long before they had exhausted anything. In roughly fifteen years, Chung had gone from a man fleeing Seoul with his family in nineteen fifty, scrambling for scraps of American military work in Busan, to the head of one of the top construction companies in Korea.
He was building bridges, dams, power plants, industrial facilities. He had dragged an entire industry and in some real sense an entire country from devastation towards something that looked like modern times.
But he was not done, not even close, because his ambition was no longer to build the best construction company in Korea.
It was to build the best construction company.
In the world.
And the world was going to require a level of a dacity that would make the Gorient Bridge look like a warm-up.
By the early nineteen sixties, eighty percent of Honda's revenue was coming from the Korean government. That's even worse than it sounds when you realize governments kept getting overthrown.
After the war, Korean politics were as chaotic as it gets. Every time a new government took power, private business was the first thing it came for. Each new administration would accuse successful companies of being too cozy with the previous regime.
So contracts would be rescinded and fines would be levied. Sometimes people even went to jail. Chang had watched it happen twice already. After one regime collapsed, the intern government canceled all government construction contracts overnight, and the entire industry crashed into recession.
Then came a military coup, and the cycle started all over again.
Hondae managed to survive these purges partly because they had been less politically connected than their competitors.
And partly, as Chung noted with some dark humor, because they were the poorest of the bunch.
Honda had been repeatedly denied government loans they desperately wanted, and that failure turned out to be a blessing in disguise. In a way, their bad luck had become their proof of innocence. There was another reason too. Government budgets were not growing.
The US military projects that had been Honda's bread and butter were drying up as the Americans got pulled deeper into Vietnam.
Chung came to a blunt conclusion. I foresaw that if our construction industry did not make inroads into the foreign market, it would soon reach a dead end. Or to put it another way, Chung decided that Korea was not big enough for him. So Honda started bidding on international contracts.
And they lost every single one. But Chung didn't care. He didn't expect to win. Not yet. What he was doing was what he had always done. He was learning how the game was played. How did international bidding work?
What did the specifications look like? What were the best competitors bidding and why? In late 1964, he sent one of his younger brothers to Thailand to scout for opportunities. The brother found a project that fit a ninety-eight kilometer highway through dense jungle connecting two major cities.
When he asked if Honda could bid, he was told they would first need to buy two million dollars worth of equipment. So he called Seoul and the Korean government granted them credit for the entire amount immediately.
No other government in the world backed its contractors that aggressively at the time. Under the new administration, Korean companies could count on low interest government guaranteed loans for any reasonable export venture. Honda submitted a bet of$5.2 million and beat out 29 companies.
From sixteen countries. The news was front page in Seoul. And when the project's engineers boarded the first plane to Thailand, the Korean broadcasting system put it live on TV for the nation.
Think about that for a second. The first time a Korean construction company sent its people abroad to build something, the entire country watched it happen live on television.
It was a frog leaving the well in real time with the entire pond watching.
President Park called the contract vindication of his economic policies, proof that Korea was finally earning real foreign credibility.
But the celebration was premature.
The project ran into trouble almost immediately. Honda had tried to save money by buying secondhand equipment, including Japanese trucks left over from the Second World War. The trucks broke down constantly, and then the monsoons came. Honda had assumed they could just keep building through the rainy season. They were wrong.
The pavement they laid in the heavy rain buckled, floods washed out entire sections. They had to redo enormous parts of the road. For the second time in the company's history, the board started talking about walking away. It was the Goron Bridge all over again, the same shape in a different country. The losses were piling up.
The equipment was failing and the workers were even starting to strike.
And Chung's lieutenants came to them with the rational argument.
Let's cut our losses.
And survive. Chunk shut it down immediately.
But this time his argument was slightly different.
He said, A contract is a contract. Even if we are in dire monetary straits, we have to build Thailand the high quality expressway they're expecting within the time we have. That's why we are here. We cannot and will not just cut and run. We have to finish what we started for the good of Hondae brand and for the good.
of the country. If Hondi quit.
After becoming the first Korean company ever to take an overseas project, they would be kicking the ladder away from every Korean construction company that came after them. The whole industry would be branded as unreliable. The frog would crawl back into the well and the door would close behind it.
He called abandoning the project an act of national treason. The board never raised the idea again.
They finished the highway and they lost three million dollars. And Chung
typically reframe the failure, calling the experience a coming of age initiation. What Hondae walked away with was the ability to build highways to international standards. They had learned asphalt concrete production. They had learned international specifications. They had learned how to operate
the modern equipment under foreign conditions, and all of it paid for in money and humiliation. And all of it was about to be turned into something much bigger back home.
But first there was Vietnam.
In the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War was heating up, and Cheng saw what most Korean executives did not.
American forces and their allies needed someone to build them things, and they needed them
Fast. Cheng sent one of his brothers to Saigon. The brother rekindled the company's old contracts with the US military, set up offices, and started picking up every construction contract he could find.
Hondae built military camps, they dredged rivers, they helped customers construct an American naval base. They even ran a laundry and dry cleaning service on the side because if you can move men and equipment into a war zone, you might as well make money on the laundry too.
The risk
match the opportunity. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, Honai workers were dredging the Mekong River with enemy fire coming in all around them. These were not soldiers. They were construction workers. They were men with shovels and machines working through one of the most violent moments of the entire war.
Because they had a contract to finish, and Chung had taught them what finishing a contract meant.
The Korean civilian involvement in Vietnam ended up being enormous, 23,000 Korean workers in total. Their earnings accounted for 10% of Korea's entire foreign exchange in 1966, and nearly 20% in 1967. After five years of work in Vietnam,
More than six hundred and sixty million dollars in foreign currency had been flowed back into the Korean economy.
President Park was delighted.
Hanai alone accumulated hundreds millions of dollars from Vietnam construction contracts. Cheng didn't know that this money was going to become the seed capital for the most audacious bet of his entire life.
What he did know was that his company was piling up cash and capability at a rate that had been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Each contract was bigger than the last. Each new theater of operations taught them something they had not known before.
The frog was no longer in the well.
Other projects followed.
Bridges, military bases, and military housing in Guam, and even Alaska.
A harbour dredging project in Australia, a hydroelectric plant in Papua New Guinea. Hana was no longer a Korean construction company doing some work abroad. It was becoming a force.
across the entire Pacific Rim. And while all of that was happening overseas back home in Korea,
Two enormous projects were about to land in Cheng's lap.
One was a dam and the other was a highway. And together they were going to change not just Honda,
But Korea itself.
There's a moment in Chung's autobiography where he reflects on how his motivations chang over time, and it might be the most important admission he ever made about himself.
Because the entire shape of what happens from here on out depends on it. When he left the farm for Seoul as a boy, Chung admits he was not thinking about Korea. He didn't care about Korea. He was thinking about himself.
Who could blame him? He wanted to keep himself fed, and once he had a family, to keep that family under a roof. Up until now his motivation was personal survival and personal advancement. He was honest about it.
But somewhere along the way, something shifted.
And he pinpointed the moment as the Korean War. As Honda grew from a small outfit into building things the country could actually depend on, Chung started to see work differently.
He began to believe that Honda could grow as a company while also helping Korea grow as a country. And in his mind, those two things stopped being separate. They became the same thing.
He was adamant looking back that without a shift in how he saw his work, he never could have grown Hondae into what it became.
Now this shift sounds like the kind of thing every successful executive says in a memoir, but in Chung's case you can actually watch it change his behavior in real time. And it changed his behavior in a way that made him deeply unpopular with every other construction company in Korea.
He became obsessed with cutting costs on government projects.
His conviction about this went
beyond strategy. He had a real moral position. He said, after luxury comes corruption. I've never seen a country prosper with a leader
Who enjoys.
Luxury. What was true for countries, he believed, was true for companies. That might sound like common sense, but in the Korean construction industry of the 1960s, the incentive structure ran in the exact opposite direction. The standard playbook was to look at a government contract and ask, how do we maximize our profit by any means possible?
Companies inflated costs. They routed transport along longer paths just to bill for higher shipping costs. They padded estimates. They billed for elaborate extras that did not even exist. Everybody did it. That was how the game worked. Chung wanted to play a different game.
He realized that lowering his margins meant the government saved money, which meant the government could fund more projects, which meant more work for everyone, including him, because he would always bid the lowest. He was playing the long game.
and most of his competitors were playing the short game. And then he made it worse for them. He started proposing alternative construction plans for projects the government had already awarded to other companies. If Honai could find a cheaper, faster way to build something, Chung would submit the alternative plan and lobby for the original one to be thrown out.
This drove his competitors insane. It drove the government officials insane. Their view was simple. The government designed the project, the construction company bit on it, the construction company built it, and the construction company kept its mouth shut. Chung was not keeping his mouth shut.
And here's the thing that his competitors didn't understand at the time. By behaving this way, Chung was making Hyundai regime proof. Other Korean companies won contracts through political relationships. They prospered as long as their patrons held office, but the moment the political one shifted,
And in Korea they shifted constantly, those companies were cast aside. Their entire value proposition had changed.
Hyundai's value proposition was different.
It was what they could do cheaper and faster than anyone else.
And any government, regardless of ideology, could see the logic in that. The company that built high quality things cheaper still got hired. As Chung would later put it, we're not
We may not have always been on good terms with every administration, but Honda has helped the government by cutting costs through continued research. This is why Hyundai was ultimately recognized as being indispensable to Korea's economic growth. Indispensable is a word people use loosely. Cheng had earned it.
He had spent years building a company that no Korean government could afford to punish because no Korean government could afford to do without it.
The shift from personal ambition to national ambition had not just changed how Chung thought about his work, it changed the structural position of his company inside his country. And that position was about to be tested by the
Two biggest projects of his career. The Korean government had been trying to build a dam across the Soyan River since 1957.
Ten years later, they still hadn't even started.
The site was sixty five miles south of Seoul. The dam was supposed to provide hydroelectric power, water, and flood control, but technical, the location, and ballooning cost estimates kept stalling the project year after year. By late nineteen sixty, President Park was losing patience.
The Ministry of Construction had brought in one of Japan's most prestigious engineering firms, Nippon Koi, to design it. They recommended a conventional concrete gravity dam. It would be the strongest type possible, it would last for centuries, and most of the profits would flow back to Japan.
It was simply assumed by the Korean government, as much as anyone else, that no Korean company could handle a project this large and complicated in such inhospitable terrain. So with the cost estimates piling up and no progress in sight, President Park call Cheng In and asked him what he thought of the Japanese plan.
Chung studied it carefully and then did something unexpected. He told the president that Japanese were wrong.
His counter proposal was an earthen dam, a zone filled dam built from rock and gravel pulled out of the surrounding mountains. He said it would cost thirty percent less than the concrete design, and it was actually better suit to the terrain. He had based the conclusion on a French design dam he had studied while Honda was working on the highway project in Thailand.
For dams over a hundred meters tall, earthen construction was more cost effective than concrete, and it was believed to be just as safe.
The Japanese were furious. Nipong Koi's lead negotiator, a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, confronted Cheng directly in the meeting that followed.
Chung, what do you know about dams? Where did you study dams? Our design team is made up of Tokyo University graduates who have designed dams around the world. Do you mean that a man who completed only elementary school knows more than we do about dam construction? Cheng did not reply.
He had spent his entire life being asked some version of that exact question. He had learned a long time ago that you do not answer that question with words, you answer it with results.
So he sat there, quietly, and let the question hang in the air.
The Korean officials were just as furious as the Japanese. The Ministry of Construction and the Water Resources Department had already signed off on the Japanese design. What was this? A local construction company contradicting the
expert opinions of both its own government and one of the most respected engineering firms in the world.
Cheng later compared his behavior to poking at a tiger's nostril and getting oneself killed.
The meeting broke up in disarray. When the final proposal reached the president, the ministry officials recommended the concrete dam and barely mentioned Chung's alternative proposal, dismissing it as unsafe.
And then Park asked one important question that no one had yet considered. He asked about national security. Korea was still technically at war with the North. The DMZ was only a few dozen miles away.
And if the North Koreans bombed a concrete dam, Park said the strike would blow a massive hole in the structure and millions of gallons of water would surge toward downtown Seoul. An earthen dam, on the other hand, would be more likely to simply collapse if struck.
The collapse would create a natural barrier. The water would escape much more slowly. From a national security standpoint, did the earthen design not make more sense?
The room went quiet.
The Tokyo University graduates, the Ministry of Construction, the Water Resources Department, none of them had an answer. Park sent the whole group back to study the question. Two months later they came back with their conclusion.
Chung had been right.
On every count.
The earthen dam was just as safe, it was significantly cheaper, and in the event of an attack the concrete design they had been pushing could have been catastrophic for the people of Seoul.
The dam broke ground in nineteen sixty seven with Hondae as the contractor. He was finished later at a cost thirty percent below.
the original estimates. It became the largest rockfill dam in Asia.
The National Academy of Engineering of Korea later called it a magnificent dam constructed by our own technologies and our own hands in the economically deprived period of the early nineteen seventies. There is one last detail that Chung tells about the project, and I love it.
When the dedication ceremony was held, Chung watched it on television. As he watched the same ministry officials who had fought him tooth and nail the whole time, the ones who had dismissed his proposal as unsafe and tried to bury it in the report to the president, stand in front of the cameras and explain how they
rejected the Japanese design and replaced it with something better.
Chung never corrected the record in public.
He did not need to.
He knew
And that was enough. In 1964, President Park visited West Germany and saw the Autobahn, and it changed how he thought about his own country.
Park came home and looked at South Korea with new eyes he saw a country connected by haphazard roads that were slow and unreliable, and a railway system that was both expensive and overloaded. His logic was simple. Let's build an expressway and goods and people will move faster.
Raw materials will reach factories sooner. Ports will connect to inland cities.
Everything in South Korea accelerates.
As he told Chung, we just have to get it done no matter who tries to oppose us.
And plenty of people did try to oppose them.
When the first cost estimates came out, opposition erupted from every direction. The World Bank told the Korean government the project was economically and technologically infeasible and would add little to Korea's development.
The Korean legislature agreed the country was simply too poor to afford it.
Park did not see it that way.
The expressway, he argued, would be a better investment of our limited funds than railroads and harbors for solving our transportation bottleneck. And beyond economics, he believed building the road would give the Korean people a new confidence that they can do whatever they want.
So in November of nineteen sixty seven, Park summoned Cheng to the Blue House. It was their first private face to face meeting. Park knew about Honda's expressway experience in Thailand and wanted to know what Cheng thought.
Then he asked him for a cost estimate. Starting the next day, Chung and a team spent three weeks driving the entire route between Seoul and Busan, measuring everything, surveying, flying over the train in the air. And what Chung saw was that the engineers who had originally planned the road had not actually studied the ground they were going to build on.
They had relied on textbooks and theory, the map,
Not the territory. They had proposed pushing the highway in almost a straight line from city to city, ploughing through mountains at enormous cost. Cheng proposed something different. Dig fewer tunnels, build the road around the mountains where you could increase the incline of certain stretches slightly above the standard maximum grade.
The result would be a highway that could be built faster and for less money. Park had asked four other groups for the same estimate.
When the numbers came in, the ministry of construction said it would cost sixty five billion one. The Army Corps of Engineers said forty nine billion, and the ministry of finance said thirty three billion.
Chang said.
twenty eight billion.
Less than half of the ministry's construction number. The ministry of construction publicly mocked him for it. Park asked Chung if the project could actually be done at that price. Chung's answer was four words.
I can do it. Park gave Honda the lead role. They would organize a consortium of 17 firms to construct the highway, and Hondae itself would be assigned the most difficult stretches, roughly two fifths of the entire project. On February 1st, 1968, construction began with the sound of blasting.
Cheng said he would remember the excitement of that moment for the rest of his life. The scale was staggering. The expressway would run four hundred and twenty eight kilometers down the entire spine of the country.
Honda alone spent over eight million dollars to buy nineteen hundred pieces of heavy equipment for the project. The entire nation of Korea at the time owned only fourteen hundred such machines. Cheng was buying more equipment for one project than existed in the entire country.
He barely slept. He literally moved to the construction sites. He brought a cot. When he was being driven around in his Jeep inspecting progress, he would close his eyes for a few minutes at a time as the Jeep bounced over unpaved roads. That was his sleep schedule. The moment workers saw his Jeep approaching, they would come to attention.
He drilled a single belief into the workforce. If you are diligent for a day, you will sleep comfortably for a night. If you are diligent for a month, the quality of your life will noticeably improve. If you are diligent for a month,
Two years, ten years, your whole life, your accomplishments will be recognized by all.
President Park was nearly as obsessed as Chung. Every day a situation report was placed on his bedside table, and every morning he would call Chung.
He was constantly in the air over construction sites in his helicopter. A former engineer who worked closely with President Park in those days described him as a conductor of an orchestra with the helicopter as his baton.
If Park did not have an answer on Tuesday, he would be back with one on Thursday.
There is one incident from this project that became legend, and it tells you why Chung and Park ended up trusting each other so completely. On every Honda project, Chung had an ironclad rule.
Construction trucks had the right-of-way over everything and everyone on the work site.
There were no exceptions. Even Cheng, the CEO, yielded to a dump truck.
One day, President Park was riding through the construction zone in his Jeep. The local police chief saw a Hondae dump truck coming and jumped out of his car to wave it off the road so the president could pass.
Park, who knew Chung's rule, directed his own driver to yield to the truck instead. The dump truck driver became known on the project as the man more powerful than the president. But the road was punishing the men who built it.
Several workers died in landslides and caveens. The most dangerous stretch required blasting a four kilometer tunnel through unstable rock. On a good day they advanced two meters. On a bad day less than thirty centimeters. There were thirteen separate cave ins in the Tanji Tunnel alone.
And then something strange happened.
Workers started saying there were evil spirits in a particular tree near the construction site. More and more men refused to work near it, and an army officer cut the tree down to end the superstition. The next morning the officer was in a serious accident. More workers walked off.
Chung had to double the wages and was still short of hands. To keep this schedule on track, he had no choice but to mechanize even further.
With two months left until the deadline, a site manager came to Chung with a desperate plan. If they switched to high strength cement that set in twelve hours instead of a week, they could compress ninety days of work into twenty five.
The cement was far more expensive and had never been used at this scale in Korea. Chung's answer?
If I have to choose between reputation and money, I'll always take reputation. Finishing on time is how we protect our reputation and honor.
Let's give it a shot.
On july seventh, nineteen seventy, the opening ceremony was held on schedule, two years and five months of construction, nearly a year ahead of the original date.
President Park was triumphant. How much energy do our people have? How much technology do we have? We will test our nation's potential with this expressway. The road changed South Korea exactly the way Park believed it would. Before the highway, the train ride from Seoul to Busan took fifteen hours.
The expressway cut it to four. In his first year, three point seven million vehicles used it. It connected the main ports to the factories in the inland cities. It became the artery through which the entire economy flowed. And the Honda estimate of 28 billion won, the number of
the ministry of construction had publicly mocked, when you ingested it for inflation, it turned out to be almost exactly right.
The other companies had been the ones who didn't know what they were talking about. Chung finished his portion of the work with a modest profit.
But the real prize wasn't the profit. It was the friendship that he created with President Park that would last until Park's assassination in nineteen seventy nine.
Chung became a frequent visitor at the Blue House, joining Park on Thursday evenings for informal dinners in the private second floor quarters. They would sit for hours in casual clothes, drinking, talking about Korea's future. Park took to calling Chung his Minister of Construction. A mutual friend said both men believed in the same thing.
They both believed in the power of human will.
They both believed in Korea's economic future had to be built on the back of that will.
And both of them also believe just as deeply in using Western technology to do it.
In many ways, Park became a second father to Chung. They shared an absolute conviction that Korea's destiny was something you built with your hands, not something you waited for. Chung was now fifty four years old, and in many ways, he was just getting started. Chung, who had started his career fixing other people's cars, decided it was time to start making his own.
Cars mattered to him in a way that went beyond business. A car has upward of 30,000 parts, and building one doesn't just create jobs in the factory. It sends ripples through the entire economy. In Cheng's view, a country that could build a car could build anything. And wherever that car was exported, people saw the nation that had made it.
He put it memorably, cars are like national flags with wheels.
If we make good cars and export them, they drive around the world spreading Korea's technology and level of industrialization. And Korea desperately needed that kind of visibility.
But two recent attempts by other Korean companies to assemble cars had already failed. Most of the country's industrialists had concluded that entering the car business was premature. The smart money went into making auto parts, not actual cars.
Cars. When Chung announced that Honda was going to build cars, the Korean business community was stunned. Chung was undeterred.
In 1966, he heard that a team from Ford was visiting Korea, evaluating potential partners for an assembly joint venture.
Hondae was not on their list, and that made sense because at the time Hondae was a construction company.
Chung moved in anyway. He called his brother who was in the United States negotiating a loan for the cement plant. The cement could wait, get to Ford's headquarters, and negotiate an automobile assembly contract.
His brother asked him how he was supposed to convince one of the largest car companies on earth to partner with a Korean construction firm that had never made an auto part or cars. Cheng gave the answer he always gave. Have you tried? They managed to get the Ford executives to come to the Hyundai office. Chung began trying to
talking him through the parts of a car in detail from his decades old memory. He remembered all the parts, and only now it was suddenly paying off in a conference room with Ford.
Ford had planned three days of interviews with various candidates, and Cheng ended the interview process in two hours. Ford chose Hyundai. In December of 1967, he established the Hyundai Motor Company as a separate entity from Hyundai construction. He picked Yilzan as the factory site, because it was a port city with deep water harbor.
They would soon be connected to every major Korean city by his new highway, and from which Hana could both import equipment and eventually export cars. The initial assembly plant went from groundbreaking to full scale operations in under six months, which set a record for any Ford assembly factory anywhere in the world.
I wish we could build that fast today.
But the arrangement with Ford was what
every developing country auto industry look like in that era. Knockdown kits shipped from abroad, local assembly.
Foreign partners keep all the design and engineering. Ford's terms kept Honai permanently dependent on them. They were parts assemblers, not partners. The break point came when Ford proposed what they called a world car project. Under the plan, Hondae would build four designed engines that would be mounted on chassis made in Australia with the
With transmissions made in Japan. To Cheng, this was a national insult. How could Honda or Korea build?
any stature as a car manufacturer by participating anonymously in some grab bag assembly scheme.
Ford was being imperialistic as he saw it. And then Ford's president for international operations
flew to Seoul and proposed the next step, absorbing Honda Motor Company entirely into Ford. And that was a step too far. Chung lost it. I'll never take down a single Hyundai sign with my own hands.
Even if a business is struggling and everything seems hopeless, I will make it work. Not once have I ever packed up and quit halfway through.
Quitting is not in my dictionary.
This guy had so much fight in him. You don't walk away from things. Remember the bridge, the Thailand Highway. The name is worth more than the money. But they couldn't just make their own cars from scratch. At least not yet.
They still needed a technical partner, but just as with the Germans earlier, they would learn all they could from them.
They searched the world for one who would hand over technology without demanding control.
They talk to General Motors.
As one of Chung's brothers put it, we wanted to run the company our way, but GM wanted to run the company their way.
That was the point of disagreement. They approached Volkswagen. They proached Alp Romeo. Same problem. Nobody wanted to give Honda the independence Honda was demanding. And honestly, from their perspective, why would they?
Honda could easily turn around and compete with them in their own markets.
Finally, Honda turned to Japan, their former colonizers of all people.
Mitsubishi was trying to expand and compete with the bigger Japanese firms, Toyota and Nissan. They offered Honda a pure technical licensing agreement, no financial partnership, just licensing fees. Honda could build its own cars under its own name.
using Mitsubishi engine and transmission designs. Now they needed someone to design the car.
They flew to Europe and made two critical hires.
Gorghetto Giorgio of Ital Design who had styled cars for Elf, Romeo, and Fiat would design the exterior.
And George Turnbull, who had just resigned as the president of British Leland over a policy dispute, was brought in to run the operation. Turnbull was invited to Korea for a tour and was immediately taken with Chung. His first impression was vivid. That man is so bright, it's unbelievable. He's practical to the point where it hurts.
He must have taught himself finance, but
And he's a great motivator. He put the fear of God into people.
Turnbull was hired as vice president in February of nineteen seventy four. He brought in more engineers, and they came up with a simple and unglamorous design. That was fine. They weren't building a luxury car, they were building Korea's first national car. And then came the construction of the plant.
Turnbull arrived at Ulsen and was told where the factory would be built. His engineers looked at the site and informed Chung that he had chosen a swamp.
Cheng was unmoved. This is where he wanted his factory, so they drained the swamp. Then it was winter, and the concrete pilings for the factory walls cracked repeatedly in the extreme cold. Cheng was unmoved again. Some of the equipment was installed before the factory walls were even in place. Turnbull, the conservative British executive, could barely believe what he was watching.
Normally putting a car into production took four years. Honda did it in two.
Chung made frequent inspection trips down to Olsen. He would leave Seoul at four in the morning with one or two assistants for the long drive south. He liked to say on those drives that he was driving on his road, and he was happy.
By nineteen seventy six, the plant was complete and the first cars rolled off the assembly line. Cheng named the model Pony.
He hadn't done anything.
Any market research. Chang and his company had simply designed and built the car they thought the Korean people should have.
President Park guaranteed the financing, Honda built it, it was Korea's first national car.
And then Chung did something that surprised even Turnbull. Within weeks of the first pony rolling off the line, Chung announced that Hondae was going to export 5,000 of them overseas.
Turnbull was horrified. The Koreans might buy a car of unproven quality because they didn't really have an alternative, but foreign buyers did. If foreign buyers rejected the pony, Hondae's reputation would be damaged for years.
Chun didn't care. He had promised President Park that he would export and he was going to export. And what he did next is genius.
He was not going to send all the cars to one test market. He was going to spread them across several countries in several different parts of the world. Nigeria, Taiwan, Peru, Ecuador, Saudi Arabia. They all had different climates and different road conditions and different customer expectations.
So why did he do this? Because he wanted to learn. He would do his market research after the cars were built. He would learn, as he always had by doing. The results were educational, to put it mildly. In the tropical heat of Nigeria, the vinyl roofs peeled off like banana skins. In Saudi Arabia, the sun faded the paint.
In multiple countries the cars had serious mechanical problems, especially with steering and brakes, because the roads they were driven on weren't paved. But Hanai was forced to upgrade the quality of the cars significantly and probably much sooner than they would have been forced to if they had stayed inside the protected Korean market.
One of the main limiters of potential is the fear of embarrassment. People don't take risks because they fear looking embarrassed, but Chung proved that if you're willing to endure temporary embarrassment, you can gain a long-term advantage.
It wasn't failure, it was learning. And while all of this was happening, Chung was already thinking bigger, much bigger. In the mid nineteen seventies, the total car market in Korea was about thirty thousand units a year. Chang announced plans to build a new factory with capability for three hundred thousand cars a year, ten times the size of the entire Korean market.
His colleagues thought
Not for the first time that he had lost his mind. Where were they going to find three hundred thousand buyers? Cheng's answer was that the Korean market was going to grow enormously as the country emerged from poverty, and the new car was going to be designed mostly for export anyway. And he had a target in mind.
General Motors was simultaneously building a new factory for their own world car program, and GM's targeted production was, of course, three hundred thousand units. GM's construction costs was three billion dollars. So Chung studied GM's plans and came to two conclusions.
First, Honda was going to match Jam's capacity. Second, they were going to do it for one.
Tenth the cost. He personally reviewed every aspect of the plant design with his engineers. The bricks in the factory walls were reduced in width.
The window sills which required expensive imported wood were made narrower. The windows used slightly thinner glass, every cost that could be shaved, chung shaved, in only a way that a man who was forced to eat bark to survive could.
The factory opened in nineteen eighty. It was functional, if not beautiful. It produced the targeted number of cars, and it did exactly what Chung had estimated three hundred million dollars, one tenth of what GM spent. Honda was ready to take on the world. And in nineteen eighty six they did.
The Honda Excel, a redesigned subcompact priced at four thousand nine hundred and ninety five dollars, launched in the American market. No other car in its class was anywhere close to that price. It was aimed at used car buyers who could now afford a new car for the same money. The fit and finish were not perfect.
Nobody claimed they were selling a premium vehicle, but in the getway you pay for market, the Excel was instantly recognized as a good deal.
First year sales were projected at one hundred thousand and came in at one hundred and sixty eight thousand units in nineteen eighty seven, sales hit two hundred and sixty four thousand units. The Excel was rated the number one imported car in America both years. No car company in history had ever achieved that kind of initial success in the American market.
Thanks to Chung, Korea had built its own car and sold it in the most competitive automobile market on earth. In nineteen sixty eight, President Park designated shipbuilding as a national priority. He asked the country's major conglomerates to step forward. Samsung passed, LG passed, only Chung said yes.
And of course, he had no idea how to actually build the ship.
But his reasoning was practical, as always. Building ships, he explained, is similar to combining civil engineering, architecture, mechanical facilities, and electrical work from the construction industry.
Everyone else looked at shipbuilding and saw a new industry, and Chung looked at it and saw the same industry he was already in just rearranged. But shipbuilding required a staggering amount of capital. A world class shipyard would cost roughly nine hundred million dollars, and Korea's shipbuilding capacity at the time was
Virtually Zilch, the largest vessel ever built in the entire country, was seventeen thousand tons.
Never one to think small, Cheng had something else in mind. He wanted to build two hundred and sixty thousand ton supertankers, fifteen times larger than anything Korea had ever produced before. He went to the Americans for the loan.
They said no. He went to the Japanese. They looked at the proposal and concluded that Korean technology was too primitive and said no. Cheng went back to President Park and told them the truth. Nobody would lend them the money. And Park turned to one of his vice prime ministers in the middle of the room and said, Well,
Reject all of Chairman Chung's business proposals going forward. Make sure the government never does any business with him again. And then he went quiet.
A long silence, long enough that Chung had no idea what was coming next. And then Park spoke again. You knew this was going to be difficult. If you already considered all of this and still went forward, you need to do it, no matter what.
Now go try Europe.
Chung got on another plane.
He carried it one belief with him that would sustain through everything that followed. Conviction creates indomitable efforts. This is the key to miracles. Conviction is contagious. In Europe,
He connected with a British engineering firm called Appledor, the promised shipyard blueprints in six months. He also found a Scottish shiard where Hondae engineers could train, but to get the loans insured, he needed to prove that someone would actually buy ships from a shipyard that did not exist yet. And for that, he needed a bank.
So he went to Barclays and they told him what everyone else had told him. Korea had no experience or expertise. The answer was no. And then Chung did something I genuinely love. He pulled out a 500-won Korean banknote, slid it across the table. On the bill was a picture of a ship. It was a turtle ship, the Ironclad Warship.
Korea had used to defeat the Japanese Navy four centuries earlier. His argument was that Barclays did not actually know who they were dealing with. This small country they were dismissing had a maritime tradition they had never bothered to learn about. Koreans had built ironclad warships before any European nation had thought of it.
And then he made the larger argument. Don't you know that the person who thinks a job is possible is the one who's going to get it done? A job can be done only by people who truly believe that it can be done. If someone else in Korea believed that they could build a shipyard, they would already be here sitting in front of you, but they're not here only.
Because they don't believe it's possible. I'm here because I know it is.
Conviction is contagious.
It worked, they agreed. But there was still a catch. Chung needed a buyer. He needed somebody willing to sign a purchase order for ships that would be built in a shipyard that did not exist, by a company that had never built a ship.
So we started carrying three items with him everywhere he went. A photograph of a desolute beach showing pine trees and thatched houses, a map and blueprints for a two hundred and sixty thousand ton tanker. His pitch was pretty simple. If you buy the ship, I will build a shipyard on this sand and I will deliver it to you. If you're thinking this sounds a bit crazy.
He'd agree with you. He admitted he wouldn't have blamed anyone for thinking he was crazy. But what he needed was to find someone even crazier than himself.
And eventually he found someone. A Greek shipping magnate named George Levanost looked at the photographs of the empty beach, looked at the blueprints, and signed a purchase order for two oil tankers. Then he handed Chung a check for 1.4 billion won. There was one detail Chung had not mentioned to anyone. They didn't actually own the beach in the photograph.
They bought it the moment the money came in. And then came the building. When Chung got back to Korea with the contract in hand, many of his executives were uneasy. If this venture failed, it would likely bankrupt the entire company. Chung's response was vintage Chung. What's the big deal? A ship has an engine inside, an exterior made of steel.
Ships resemble power plants, which Honda has built many times. The conventional approach would have been to build the shipyard first and then start building the ships. That was sensible, but it was slow. Chung did the math. Five years of occurring interest on their current loads would bankrupt them before they ever launched a vessel. He told his team over and over.
Loans beget interest. Interest begets more interest. Time is the greatest enemy of construction firms.
Speed.
Mattered.
So I kid you not.
Hondae would build the shipyard and the ships at the same time. After a lavish groundbreaking ceremony, in March of nineteen seventy two, more than twenty two hundred workers started working on land reclamation, the construction berth, a training facility, and two oil tankers.
All at the same time.
Nobody at Honai had ever built a ship.
They learned as they did it.
And when I say they learned as they did it, I mean that literally. At one point the conditions of the European loon required them to buy a Goliath crane from a German manufacturer. They ordered the crane. They knew they needed one. They were not entirely sure what one even looked like.
When it was time to wire the first ship, they realized that it did not have wiring diagrams. The engineer assigned to the job had never worked on a ship before, so they improvised. Entire sections of the ship got assembled incorrectly and had to be dismantled and reassembled. But construction never stopped.
It always continued. At one point the ships outpaced the shipyards. The forward section of one of the tankers was completed before the Goliath crane from Germany had even arrived. They needed the crane to move the massive section into position, and they didn't have it. Anyone else would have waited, but
Chung ordered the section to be placed on a trailer and rolled into place, with a bulldozer pulling in the opposite direction to keep the trailer under tension. No experienced shipbuilder would have ever attempted anything this crazy because it violated every standard, but it worked. Honai squeezed everything it could out of its workforce.
A typical Japanese shipbuilder at the time had twenty percent of its workers in engineering and technical suit. Honda had eleven. The Japanese had fourteen percent in supervisory roles. Honda had seven. That meant eighty-two percent of Honda's people were doing actual hands on work compared to sixty.
eight percent at the Japanese competitors.
This was Chung's philosophy made operational. Less overhead, more output. Workers got up at dawn, splashed water on their faces, and worked until they fell asleep in their shoes. They ordered materials for six ships and received enough for twelve.
And before the first two ships were even finished, more orders started coming in because Honda had ruthlessly underbid the competition by fifteen percent to win them, which meant that before they had launched a single vessel or finis building the shipyard, they already had a backlog. Chung was now racing to finish the first two ships just to make room for the next four.
Two years and three months after Chung had broken ground on an empty beach, the first stage of the shipyard was complete.
It could build ships up to seven hundred thousand tons. It was the largest shipyard on Earth. In June of nineteen seventy four, President and Miss Park were invited to the christening of the two tankers. The first ship launched was the two hundred and sixty thousand ton Atlantic Baron. Park's confidence in Chung had been vindicated.
Korea was now in the shipbuilding business. It was a glorious day. British journalist Simon Winchester visited the Olsen factory years later and could not help comparing it to the empty shipyards of his own country. What impressed him most was the pace. A ship order placed at Honai took half the time it would take in a European yard.
And at a price a good ten percent lower than the nearest price competition. British engineers who worked there confirmed it. One of them, Tony Robins, said, You couldn't believe what they do. They break all the rules. Their equipment is old. They make their own tools. Nobody else would use them. And then he added
They deliver what we asked for on time.
I don't understand it, but whatever it is they do, it works.
Another British engineer, David Gregg, described the morning routine. It's a very military oriented society. In the morning you go there and you will have a line of people and they'll all be standing at attention to get a work assignment. Once a week the director of the division would address the workers through a loudspeaker.
The message was always the same. We expect the best. We are Koreans. Show the world we are Koreans.
Just as things were starting to go well, the world collapsed. In nineteen seventy three, OPEC raised oil prices, which triggered a global recession. Demand for oil supertankers evaporated overnight.
Livinos abruptly canceled his contract for the two ships and forfeited his two million dollar down payment. The Japanese and Hong Kong orders got canceled too. Honda had just learned how to build ships that nobody wanted.
His board urged him to stop building the abandoned vessels, but Chung, of course, refused. If they stopped, they would lose everything they had already invested, and they would have to lay off the men who had slept in their shoes for two years building that shipyard.
And he would not do it. He finished the ships nobody wanted and then created Hondae Merchant Marine to buy them himself. Here was his logic. Korea was paying foreign firms to transport its imported oil. That money was flowing out of the country every day. So Cheng went to President Park, who very quickly introduced new regulations requiring all crude oil shipped.
Two Korean refineries to be carried on Korean vessels.
And of course, Chung was the only one with Korean vessels. Cheng now used his own ships, which broke what had been a foreign monopoly on Korean energy transport. Within a few years, Honda Merchant Marine was one of the largest shipping companies in the world.
And when the market for large ships eventually recovered, Honda was perfectly positioned. They had the technology,
They had the skilled workforce, and they had the shipyard and the fleet. Competitors could not match them on price or speed. A wave of British technicians, many of them from Britain's stagnating shipbuilding industry, moved to Olsen as contract workers. Reporter Simon Winchester noticed the irony first. British shipbuilders whose own yard set in
empty were now flying to Korea to teach at a shipyard that could not build fast enough to meet world demand. The man who could not be stopped had found a way again.
The path was blocked, so he went up a wall across the ceiling, and dropped onto his target from above.
The bed bugs in that bunkhouse had taught him well. The same oil shock that destroyed Honai's shipbuilding business was about to hand them the biggest contract on earth. By the mid-1970s, the OPEC nations were staggeringly rich. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf states had cash reserves that dwarfed their infrastructure.
They needed ports, highways, military installations, and entire cities from scratch. And they needed somebody to build them. This was exactly the opportunity Chung had been building towards since Thailand. But the competition was ferocious. The world's biggest and best construction firms were all chasing the same enormous contracts.
Companies with decades of experience, deeper pockets, and real relationships. Chung did not care. He had been underestimated all of his life.
He sent his brother to the Middle East to look for business. And at the traditional New Year's gathering with his senior executives in early 1976, he made his position clear. We have suffered the pain of deciding on stability or adventure. We have concluded that we will accept the challenge of major adventure called the Middle East.
The first project was a training shipyard for the Iranian Navy, and it taught Honda immediately that this was not Thailand. The temperatures were extreme. The construction site was desolate. Koreans were not welcomed by the local population. The design and construction specs were far more rigid than any
anything they had seen in South East Asia. One Hanai crew leader reported back to them from Iran, The conditions here are impossible, but we are surviving. I know we can make it here. They completed the project, and then Cheng went after the real prize, Jabel.
Jabel was a fishing village on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government was determined to transform it into an industrial mega city. The specific project on offer was an open sea tanker terminal and harbor facility so vast that
Construction experts around the world were calling it one of the engineering wonders of the age. The terminal would berth four oil super tankers simultaneously, twelve kilometers out in the open sea. Honda had no experience designing or building anything even remotely like this.
Chung personally took control of the bidding process. And this is where the story takes a turn that almost defies belief. Nobody at Hondae knew how much it would cost to build an open sea tanker terminal. Cheng worked out an estimate, and one of his senior aides, a man called Chung Cap Wan, looked at the numbers and told him the bid was too low.
They would lose money. They were entering a region they barely knew, building something they had never built.

Wan urged Chung to raise the bid by a hundred million dollars, but Chung refused. No, we have to secure this project. Otherwise I cannot face President Park.
Capuan was sent to submit the bid at the ceremony, but Capwan, still convinced that his boss had made a catastrophic error, decided on his own without telling anybody to raise Honda's bid by$60 million. He submitted a bid of$131 million.
Which is higher than the number Chung had authorized. The bids were opened, and the Saudi Minister of Communications read them out.
When he got to the American firm Brown and Root, the number he announced was nine hundred and three.
million dollars.
Cap ones?
Heart stopped.
He had overbid, he had just raised the number against direct orders. He had just lost his country, a contract the size of which had never been awarded to a construction company before. His career was over. He later admitted he seriously considered drowning himself in the Persian Gulf.
But then the minister made a clarification. Brown and Root's bid covered only the marine portion of the project. Honda's bid at nine hundred and thirty one million covered the entire scope of work. The two numbers were not comparable. Hondae had one. When Chung walked over and came
congratulated Capwan. Still assuming his original lower number had been submitted, Kapwan confessed what he had done.
Cheng was furious. He turned and walked away.
But the contract was signed. At nine hundred and thirty one million dollars, it was roughly half the Korean government's entire annual budget. It was the single largest construction contract ever awarded to any company in the history of the world. Cheng later commented with a wry smile.
I was glad that Cap Wan did not have to kill himself and that our country earned an additional sixty million dollars. Cheng was not done negotiating. After winning the contract, a Saudi official told him that it was customary to pay a five percent commission on all such projects. Cheng resisted.
The official got angry and told him that he had the power to rescind the entire contract if the fee was not paid. Cheng offered two percent. The official who had never encountered that kind of a dacity in dealings with his government agreed. Chung had saved millions of dollars before the first shovel hit the sand. Now they had to
actually build it. The technical scope was staggering. The terminal required installing 89 steel jackets into the seabed, each one the size of a 10-story building, each one weighing 500 tons. Each pair of adjacent jackets had to be positioned at 20 meter intervals with a margin of air
No more than five.
centimeters. More than 15,000 concrete piles, each sixty meters long, were driven into the seabed. Each one was struck more than five thousand times with a remote steam hammer. Chen insisted that every bit of material for Jabel would be manufactured at Honda Heavy Industries back in South Korea.
and shipped it all to Saudi Arabia. He was stitching together two mega industrial projects across the Indian Ocean. The eighty-nine steel jackets were loaded onto barges and were sent on a twelve thousand kilometer thirty-five day voyage through often stormy seas to the Gulf.
And he did not insure any of it. His subordinates thought this was lunacy. If a single shipment was lost at sea, the financial damage would be catastrophic. Cheng's reasoning was rational. Even if the cargo were insured, insurance companies would require long investigations before payout. By the time they paid, Honda would be in breach of contract with the Saudis.
And would lose the whole project anyway. Insurance, he concluded, was a psychological comfort in this case, not actual protection. Instead, he designed a way to seal the ends of the jackets and the pipes to create huge air pockets that would keep them floating if they went overboard. If anything fell into the ocean,
A trailing ship could retrieve them from the surface.
Nineteen shipments were made across the Indian Ocean. Only two minor incidents occurred. The men who actually built Jabai lived in conditions that made the expressway in Thailand look like the four seasons. At peak, nearly ten thousand Koreans were on site working ten hours a day, seven days a week.
Their families had to stay behind in Korea. Most workers saw home only once a year. Wages were doubled what they could have earned back home, which is why they came. But the heat was extreme. The isolation was total, and the cultural gulf between Korean workers and their Saudi hosts was vast. One Honda manager who
named Park Kwan volunteered for Saudi Arabia straight out of college in nineteen seventy seven. His reasons are telling. I wanted to go for several reasons. Yes, it was a good opportunity to make money, but it was much more than that. To me, it was an opportunity to serve my country. I wanted to help build careers so my children would have a better life.
He spent three years in the desert.
His first visit home came after a full year on the job. Honda flew in Korean cooks to make traditional food. They built recreational facilities, they did what they could. But the reality was that all of these men were living on the other side of the world, building something no Korean had ever built, and they would not see their families for months at a time.
The intensity of the Korean work ethic became legendary in the Gulf.
A brown and root engineer who worked alongside Honda Cruz wrote a poem about them in the style of Kipling. The poem went like this When we're hungry, they smile. When we're tired, they get up.
When we're sleeping.
They hustle. And it ended with a warning. It's not good for Brown and Ruder's health to bustle with the Honda style.
Chung made his unannounced inspection visits here too, same as he had done at every other Hondaye site in the company's history. His eyes scanned everything. One manager noted that Chung was particularly obsessed with storage facilities. Doesn't matter how creatively you arrange things, you will always find a better way.
On one visit he discovered the project accounts were being kept in expensive ledger books. He ordered them immediately replaced with cheaper ones. The man was managing a billion dollar project in the desert, and he was worried about the price of the notebooks. That was chunk.
But the inspections were not only about cost. After reviewing plans and progress, Chung always made a point of spending time with the workers, regardless of rank.
He would play sports with them. He would wrestle them. He often won. What mattered was that the workers saw the chairman in the dirt with them, the same way President Park had found him sleeping on the ground at a construction site years earlier. The message was the same as the one he had been sending since the rice shop.
We're in this together. I work beside you. In February of 1979, the Jabale Harbor was officially open. Honda had finished 10 months ahead of schedule.
Total.
The total labor was two and a half million mandates. It would later be described as the largest scale project since the Normandy landings in World War II. The numbers that followed tell the rest of the story. Honda earned two billion dollars in gross income from foreign construction projects in nineteen seventy-nine alone,
It was now the fourth largest construction company in the world. Revenue had grown over a hundredfold in five years. Nearly three hundred thousand Korean workers from two dozen companies had been sent to the Middle East between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen seventy nine.
But Honda outpaced every other Korean company in both the size of its projects and the size of its profits. One senior Honai executive captured the scale of what had just happened.
It was the first time in our five thousand year history that Korea was making big money. The president of the Korean exchange bank called Cheng personally after the capital started flowing home. He told Chung that the deposits coming from Jabel were the single largest amount of foreign currency the Republic of Korea had received since its founding.
For more than two years, every single month, Honda was sending tens of millions of dollars back to South Korea. That money became a decisive factor in stabilizing the country's currency during a period of severe economic strain. Cheng had always resented the accusation that Honda had grown fat on domestic government contracts.
The Middle East became his answer to those critics. No Korean government connections helped you win a contract in Saudi Arabia. You won on price, on capability, and on a willingness to do what the competition would not do. Honda had all three. The man with a sixth grade education who could not read an American blueprint in 1957.
was now running the largest construction project in history halfway around the world.
People had started calling him the bulldozer.
He accepted the name, and in a way he kind of liked it, but with one correction.
He was not reckless, he was not impulsive.
He was, as he put it himself, the
The Thinking Bulldozer. He wrote, If you search for a method, it will come to you. If you can't come up with a method, it's because you didn't think hard enough. Before starting any project, I spend an enormous amount of time and effort thinking, analyzing, and planning every detail. When it's time to implement these plans, it may look like I'm working off the cuff.
Or even being reckless. But if I hadn't sat down first and planned everything out, the Honai group of today would never have existed.
By the mid nineteen eighties, Hondae was doing over ten billion dollars in annual sales and was the largest company in Korea. Cheng was approaching seventy.
And he was nowhere near finished. But there was a gap between what Korea had become and how the world saw it. Korea had built the highways, the ships, and was now selling cars in America.
It was an economic force by any measurable standard, but the world still treated it like a pawn in the Cold War, and much of that world still shunned it because of its history and proximity to communist states. Despite everything Korea had achieved, the world still didn't take it seriously.
South Korea needed a stage. So in October of nineteen seventy nine, just three weeks after Presidential Park's assassination, the mayor of Seoul formally announced that the city would bid for the nineteen eighty eight Olympics. The reaction in Korea was a mess.
The economic planning board opposed it. South Korea was in an economic downturn and the investment required was going to be staggering. Even the mayor himself started having second thoughts, and most government officials quietly pulled back from the effort because they knew their reputations would be dragged down with whatever happened next. Their calculus was ugly either way.
Korea would probably lose the bid to Japan, which would be embarrassing, or Korea would somehow win the bid and then fail to deliver on the games, which would be much worse.
Somebody had to take the lead effort, and nobody wanted to. The mayor publicly asked a business leader to take the job. Chung got the call.
And just like that, he was named chairman of the Olympic Bidding Committee. He approached it the same way he approached every other big job he had ever taken on. This was a chance to show the world what modern Korea actually looked like, which was the same promise he had made when he named his company Hondae forty years earlier.
The bidding session took place at the eighty fourth session of the International Olympic Committee in Baden Baden, Germany, in September of nineteen eighty one. The choice came down to Sol or Nagoya.
Everyone assumed Nikoya would win. Korea was still considered a backward country, possibly even incapable of hosting an event this size.
Japan had already hosted the Olympics in nineteen sixty four and knew what it was doing. The Japanese delegation was so confident of victory that they actually scheduled their victory banquet before the vote had been taken. And instead of spending their time selling the committee on the merits of Nikoya, they spent much of the time disparaging Sol.
Chung did the opposite of all of that. He rented three houses in Baden Baden as his base of operations and pressed Honda's Frankfurt office into service as backup. His team compiled personal dossiers on every IOC delegate, and over the next ten days he met with each one of them, one by one.
He lobbied representatives from developing nations to support one of their own. He lobbied the developed nations to support the underdog, and he kept emphasizing one simple fact.
Sol's facilities were already 60% complete, Nagoya's plans were still on paper. Then the Japanese tried to sabotage the Korean bid. They planted a question through a Soviet gymnastics official asking whether Korea was even financially stable enough to host the games.
But Korea had brought Yu Chan soon with them, the former deputy minister for economic planning. He dismantled the question on the spot and exposed the Japanese for having planted it. It was a tactical disaster. And then there was the gift question.
The Japanese handed out expensive watches to the IOC members. Chung thought of that kind of extravagance was going to read like an attempt to buy the vote. So he did something different. He had fresh flowers delivered to each delegate's room every single morning, with a personal note of appreciation attached. The softer approach worked. Sol won.
fifty two to twenty seven. Chung called it the miracle of Baden Baden.
Korea then spent close to six billion dollars on the games themselves, and you could see the country's ambition in every line item. There were new stadiums and athletic fields and housing for all athletes. There was a new subway system, which Honda built. There was a new highway called the Olympic Expressway, which Honda also built. The Han River got cleaned up.
Parks went in along the waterfront, and the south side of the river was open for development and quickly became Seoul's most expensive real estate.
On september seventeenth, nineteen eighty eight, the games opened. Over one hundred and fifty thousand visitors attended. It was the largest Olympics in history. Korea threw its coming out party and the whole world came. To understand Cheng, you have to understand how he ran his family.
He had eight sons and one daughter, and every one of his sons shared the same middle name, Mong. It's the Korean word for dream.
They were in a very literal sense the living trademark of the company. From the time they were children, Chung expected every one of them to join the business, and every one of them did. He was strict with his kids in a way that most of us would find extreme. He gave them a very small allowance.
He would not let them be driven to school in the family cars. They took the bus just like everyone else.
His reasoning was characteristically blunt. You will only appreciate the happiness of riding in a car you bought.
with your own effort if you first experienced the inconvenience of a crowd bus as a child. Every morning at six o'clock all of his sons and their wives arrived at the family home for a traditional breakfast of soup, rice, and fresh fruit.
The sons and Chung would sit together and discuss business while the wives met in the adjacent room to discuss family matters. At seven sharp, Chung would gather his sons and lead them out of the house, and then all of them would walk two and a half miles to Hyundai headquarters in downtown Seoul in silence. There was no conversation, there was no small talk, and
Just a formation of men moving through the city toward the company they all worked for.
Chung did this every working day for nearly thirty years. His wife, Brun Jun Suk,
held the whole family together while Cheng was out building the empire. And there's a story about her that tells you almost everything you need to know about the kind of woman she was. One night two thieke into the Cheng household. They went into her room, tied her up, put a quilt over her head, and demanded her valuables.
She calmly threw the quills off and said to them, You seem to know whose house you are breaking into. I'm not going to make any noise, so let's talk and try to find a compromise. The thieves, startled, became a lot less aggressive. She gave them a watch she had been saving as a wedding gift for one of her sons, along with a small amount of cash.
The thie demanded to see the American dollars she had hidden away and the golden rice bowl they believed she must own. She replied calmly that they had never seen any dollars in the house and she had never known anyone in Korea who ate out of golden rice bowls Frustrated, the thieves left. After they were gone, she walked into the next room and woke up her husband.
She had concealed his presence in the house the entire time.
The family did not escape tragedy. Cheng's eldest son, Mong Pil, was killed in a car accident on the expressway, which was the very highway his father had built. His fourth son struggled for years with depression and the pressures of running one of Handai's subsidiaries. In nineteen ninety, he took his own life.
These losses devastated Cheng, but he did what he always did. He kept going. In his final years, as his health started to decline, Cheng divided the Handai amongst his six surviving sons. Each one received at least one company. The unified empire that he had spent a lifetime building would not survive him as a single.
Entity. But the fragments, all of them, would carry his name across the world. There's a pattern in Chung's life that you've probably picked up on by now. He builds something, someone or something takes it from him, and he builds something else, something bigger. The Japanese took his rice shop, the Japanese took his auto shop, inflation nearly took Handai during the Korean Bridge.
The oil crisis nearly took the shiard, and every single time Chung's response was exactly the same. He refused to stop. But in early nineteen nineties, something different happened.
This time the force that came for him was not a foreign colonizer or a global market or an inflationary shock.
It was his own government. Cheng had always had an uneasy relationship with Korean politics. He had survived multiple regime changes, watched governments rise and fall, and paid tribute to every single president who held the office during his career. Not because he wanted to, but because that was how the system worked. He later confessed this publicly.
He and other major Korean business leaders had been making regular payments to Korean presidents as a matter of routine for decades. Under Park Chenghee, it was roughly five hundred million won,
twice a year. Under the presidents who followed PARC, the payments continued. Every major company did it.
It was the operating system of Korea at the time, and everyone inside the system understood the rules. But when President Ro Taewoo took power in the late nineteen eighties, the rules changed. Ro started curbing business expansion, restricting cut it, and trying to force major companies to narrow their operations. Chung saw these policies as dangerous.
And anti business at a moment when Korean companies needed to be expanding, not contracting. And he said so. And he did it publicly.
and loudly. He criticized the Roe government for how it was handling the economy. He said there was no credible political leaders in Korea. In Korean politics at the time, and politics today, frankly, you did not say these things about the sitting president walk away unscathed.
And Ro did not let them.
The government charged Chung with tax evasion over stock transfers he had used to reorganize his holdings, which was a practice that every major Korean conglomerate was using. The government came after him for hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes, and they threatened to cut off Honda's access to bank loans, which would have been a death sentence for the company. Cheng fought back.
But eventually he was forced to pay$181 million. But something inside him shifted. In January of 1992, at the age of 76, Cheng Juyung announced that he was running for president of Korea. His reasoning was direct. We have a pessimistic future with the present economy, and I have to do something about it.
He believed very sincerely that running a government was no different than running a company. What Korean needed was sound planning, efficient management, rational allocation of resources, and tight fiscal controls. And those were all things that Chung had spent his entire life doing. If he could build highways and shiards and cars,
He could build a better government. He founded the United People's Party. An army of Hyundai employees joined the campaign. In the March National Assembly elections, the brand new party won 31 seats. Not bad for a party that had not existed a few months earlier. Chung campaigned tirelessly, crisscrossing
Korea in his helicopter making the same case to anyone that would listen. The government had grown too large, it was interfering too much in business, it had lost control of the economy, and it was bankrupt of ideas. In the December presidential election,
Chung ran against Kim Jong Sam of the ruling party and the veteran
Opposition leader Kim De Jung.
When the votes were counted, Kim Young Sam won the
With forty-two percent. Kim De Jung came in second with thirty-four percent, and Cheng received sixteen percent. He had lost, and it was one of the very few fights in his entire career that actually ended in defeat.
The consequences were immediate and severe. Kim Jung Sam's new govern charged Cheng with illegal campaign financing, alleging that corporate funds from Honda heavy industries had been funneled into the campaign. Cheng was interrogated for twelve hours. More than a hundred Hondae executives were simultaneously under indictment.
The Korean development bank froze Honda's loans, tax audits multiplied, government contracts dried up.
One analyst at the time said no government official would even go out for a drink with Honai executives anymore. Of course, Cheng was convicted.
He received a three year suspended sentence and he never actually served prison time.
The court cited his advanced age, his contributions to national development, and his ongoing business activities. He later admitted a truth that he had always known but.
Probably underestimated. There is one thing I fear the most as a business leader, regime change. Whether it's a couple d'etat or a democratic election, private businesses are always the first target. The presidential run had probably been doomed from the start, but it was sincere.
No person had done more to build Korea. The man who had built the highways and the shipyards and the nuclear power plants genuinely believed that he could build a better government, and the country he had built punished him for asking to try. But here's the irony. They cannot actually punish him. Sure, they could in optics, but not in any meaningful way.
He had been convicted and he was supposed to go to prison, but he couldn't because he was too important to the Korean economy to be really punished. On june sixteenth, nineteen ninety eight, Cheng Juyung, now eighty-two years old, climbed into the lead vehicle of a convoy of fifty trucks. Every truck was loaded with cattle.
Five hundred head of Korean Hanu beef cows.
All of them raised on his beloved Seison farm, the farm he had reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. The convoy rolled north toward the most heavily militarized border on earth. Cheng was the first South Korean civilian to cross the DMZ since the division of Korea. Four months later in October he came back with five hundred and one more.
One thousand and one cows total.
One cow for the one he had stolen from his father sixty five years earlier, and one thousand more for interest. The man who had run away from a peasant firm with nothing had returned as the richest person in Korea to pay back a debt conscience that had been accruing for most of a century, in the only currency that made sense.
Chung came home from that trip physically exhausted. He was frail, and his health was failing.
But he was also proud. He had accomplished something that diplomats have been unable to accomplish for decades. He had opened a door that two governments in a world of cold war politics had not been able to open. He had built
A commercial bridge, however briefly between the two halves of a divided nation, his divided nation. Cheng died in a hospital he had built.
The hospital was in a city connected to the rest of the country by a highway that he had paved. The city was in a nation whose economic miracle bore his fingerprints on nearly every beam and rivet, and the date was march twenty first, two thousand one. He was eighty five years old. Five of his sons were at his bedside.
When Cheng was born in 1915, Korea was a Japanese colony. The economy was agrarian. Rural poverty was almost universal per capital income, somewhere between$50 and$80. When he died in 2001, South Korea was the world's 11th largest economy.
Per capita GDP was roughly$11,000. That is a hundred and forty fold increase in a single human lifetime. Cheng did not build that alone. Millions of Korean workers, dozens of other entrepreneurs, and several presidents all contributed, but no single private individual had a larger hand in what happened.
In his living room was a piece of calligraphy he did himself that read Diligence will overcome all difficulties. As far as anyone could tell, that was his most deeply held belief, a description of how he actually lived each day.
One of his senior executives described what it was like to work for him in the early years.
I worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week for sixteen years.
No holidays. If the chairman was working, so were we.
We didn't mind, however. We learned from the chairman, we respected him. He was always very demanding, but he was a good teacher.
Any honest accounting of Chung has to hold several truths at once. He was a genuine believer in equality, but he also ran his company like a tyrant. He believed all workers were equals, but he could be ferocious with those who disappointed him.
He championed Korean self reliance while being dependent at various times on government patronage. He publicly denounced corruption while having paid tribute to every president who held office during his career. He built institutions that lifted millions of people out of poverty while presiding over labor conditions that ground many of his workers down.
It's true of any of us that if you hold a microscope up there are all of these contradictions. Cheng Ju Young was not a saint, he was a builder.
And the distinction matters. In the final pages of his autobiography, Chung wrote, I have lived my entire life driven solely by the satisfaction derived from hard work. I buried myself in work because I enjoyed the very act of working, and having lived thus my soul became one with work.
And then he wrote this.
I feel an infinite sense of pride that I've contributed my share to this country's breakthrough. Here's the detail that stays with me, and this is the detail I want to leave you with. Chung's father died in nineteen forty six, before the shipyard, before the expressway, before Hyundai was even anything other than a small outfit with a hopeful name.
and a sixth grade dropout running it.
The man who had wept in the dirt in a soul bookkeeping academy and told his teenage son he was a nobody never lived to see what his son became. And Chung was still thinking about him decades later. In the introduction to a section of his autobiography about the Seizon Farm, he had reclaimed in the Yellow Sea he wrote
I am overwhelmed with grief that my father has passed away before seeing this place, but I console myself in the belief that were he here to be looking down from heaven, he would be heartened to behold the vast farm created by the son of a man who lived his entire life as a poor farmer.
Because in the end, after all the highways and the ships and the cars and the billions of dollars and the political disasters and the cattle drives across the DMZ, after the Olympics and after the desert, and after the shipyard, and after the dam and the bridge and the rice shop and the bed bugs and the bicycle, he did not know how to ride.
After all of it.
Cheng Jiang was still thinking about his father.
Still trying to prove something to a man who had wept in front of him in a bookkeeping academy in Seoul and called him a nobody. He was not nobody.
He was Chang Jiu Yang.
Any help build the modern world.
Thank you for listening and learning with me.