He use this way to clear away societal obstacles and mobilize scarce resources for this dirigisme path economic development, his political strategy centered on guided democracy and state corporatism in which both civil society and political society were reorganized, controlled and orchestrated by the state for the sake of efficiency, stability and regime security. His social modernization strategy supplemented his economic and political strategies by making the South Korean people the targets of spiritual reform and resource mobilization by the state.
• Civil society was reorganized and mobilized for national harmony and economic prosperity along the military ideals of order, discipline, and collectivism. These three strategies of economic nationalism, guided democracy, and corporatist social mobilization made Park's modernization a classic.
• Alexander Gerschenkron once termed the "advantages of historical backwardness" to beat the developed countries in the international marketplace and catch up on modernization. To be sure, Park's threefold modernization strategies were reactive action to cope with Korea's state of underdevelopment. (His choice of goals and strategies was constrained by dominant societal interests, underlying coalitional dynamics and state-society power structures.)
But such mandates did not in themselves decide the content of Park's approach to modernization. Nor were societal groups and their coalitional dynamics accountable for his choice of strategy. They shaped the range of strategic options, but not his choices within that range of options.