Issue The plan frames 2025 as the start of a new national era centred on citizens' happiness

Summary

The plan arranges modern Korean history as a sequence of systems named after the years 1919, 1948, 1961, 1987 and 1997. Each system is paired with a guiding idea, running from the democratic republic and anti-communism through developmentalism and procedural democracy to neoliberal globalisation. Against this sequence the plan proposes that 2025 opens a new system whose core is the happiness of citizens and a democracy of sovereign citizens. It describes the administration's historical task as building on earlier gains in growth and poverty reduction and in human rights and democracy, while adding growth combined with less inequality. This periodisation is the plan's own framing, and it is used to argue that solving the problems of the new phase should become a national goal.