The Korean Society of Culture Industry held a dinner-served cultural forum at the Prima Hotel located in Seoul's Cheongdam-dong on Friday, September 23rd. The first part of the event was hosted by Lee Jin-sook, the Communications Director of MBC, with a complimentary message from the President of the Korean Society of Culture Industry and a special lecture from Park Se-il, a professor at Seoul National University. During the second part, Back Sun-jin of April and May, also the President of the Korea Singers and Songwriters Association, hosted a salon music show. Professor Park Se-il, the guest speaker invited for the day, gave a lecture titled Asking the Way of Korea.

Professor Park first stated his view that what Korea needs at the moment is advancement and reunification, and gave a message to Korea, a country currently on its way to becoming an advanced country from a developed country, that "Time does not give solutions for Korea becoming an advanced country." He insisted that although Korea has a history of falling down to a second-place nation in East Asia by losing the initiative to surrounding nations in East Asia, it has now become a developed country with a GDP of over US$20,000 and must become the key nation of the world by quickly stepping in as an advanced country.

Professor Park continued on by arguing that in order for Korea to become an advanced country, it must change its welfare populism and the people's level of mindset. Since Korea has placed itself as a developed country, the people have demanded excessive welfare benefits which led to politicians' unreasonable welfare populism, and by observing the situations in Argentina as well as Greece and the US, both which have faced economic crises due to the recent excessive welfare policies. He presented a question on whether drastic measures of welfare can lead to becoming an advanced country. Professor Park mentioned that the level of the welfare budget in Korea is set to be 86 trillion won per year despite the large amount of national defense expenditures, and the government has established a budget plan for welfare to be 50% of the annual national budget until the year 2050. He also gave a rather negative view that with this kind of excessive welfare budget arrangement, the economic crisis similar to the above-mentioned countries might occur in Korea, a country on its way to becoming an advanced country.

He expressed his opinion that in order to become an advanced country, politicians must eliminate the blind spot of welfare, thus making practical use of the welfare budget for more efficiency instead of implementing excessive welfare populism policy. And also, if they can avoid overlapping the same people receiving the same benefits rather than giving unconditional welfare benefit by improving the awareness of the people who are benefited from welfare, the budget is more than enough without any increase needed.

The military risk that Professor Park mentioned is as follows: If North Korea becomes incorporated into China due its economic crisis, the new Korean border will then become the current ceasefire line. And with this situation, China, which is preparing for expansion of its maritime territories, will deploy its warships on both the eastern and western coasts forcing Korea and Japan to also increase their military force, which would cause insecurity in East Asia. To present the grounds for his opinion, he mentioned that China is the one and only country in the world that has astronomically increased its military expenditures, and warned that with its Gini coefficient - an index that shows the domestic distribution level, having exceeded 0.5 which is the riot risk level, there is a possibility that the government of China might create situations that can divert its people's interests elsewhere.

Professor Park claimed that in order to prevent this insecurity in East Asia, reunification is the utmost priority and for that reunification, the strong will of the Korean people towards reunification, diplomacy capability, and policies that can win the North Korean people's heart are in need. And regarding the people's concern on the economic crisis that might arise due to reunification-related expenditures, he noted that with the development of the North Korean regions based on its abundant natural resources and labor, the economic recession can be overcome without much trouble.

Professor Park finished his lecture by saying that now Korea must achieve reunification with its economic power as the 13th in the world economy rank, and also develop into the number one nation in the world, so that our descendants of the next century can be proud of us living in the 21st century.