Anchoring the unanchorable: the survival turn of the developmental state in an era of demographic contraction and the instrumentalization of South Korea’s Regional Universities

Abstract In June 2026, facing the world’s most extreme demographic contraction, in which local extinction has been institutionalized as a formal category of governance, South Korea launched two flagship regional-university revitalization policies in quick succession, establishing regional universities as the linchpin of local survival. The article takes as its case these two policies, the Package Support for Flagship National Universities (“Making Ten Seoul National Universities”) and the Specialized Leading University Project (FIRST), together with the governance apparatus in which they are embedded, and combines the “What’s the Problem Represented to Be” (WPR) approach with an institutional cartography of governance. It argues that the East Asian developmental state has taken a survival turn instead of withering away: the state retains the organization of growth and fuses it with the organization of survival, redeploying growth instruments as technologies of survival for chosen institutions while steering the remainder toward managed contraction. The article terms this fusion developmental survivalism , whose operating mechanism is a developmental triage in which the state adjudicates which institutions are entitled to continue existing, strengthening flagship national universities while slimming down private universities through instruments such as paying for slimming. The apparatus embeds three structural tensions: anchor logic versus the reality of extinction (anchoring the unanchorable); devolution versus recentralization (centralized decentralization); and the promise of balance versus selection and concentration. As an extreme and vanguard case, South Korea offers a transferable conceptual lens for understanding how the state–university relationship is reconfigured under contraction, with direct relevance for China and other ageing societies confronting an enrollment cliff.