KOREA Impossible to Possible 2008 Edition Copyright 2008 Published by Korean Culture and Information Service Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism 15, Hyojaro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea Telephone: 82-2-398-1910-9 Fax: 82-2-398-1882 All rights reserved Korean Culture and Information Service Printed in Seoul ISBN 978-89-7375-043-6 03340 Korean Government Publication Number 11-1371030-000015-01 For further information about Korea, please visit: www.korea.net
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Impossible to Possible
FOREWORD
The history of human beings has been based on different people's encounters and conversations. Exchanges between different people enriched cultures and developed civilization worldwide. Korea has long cultivated rich and peaceful relations with other countries, awarding itself the nickname the Land of the Morning Calm. The early 20th century, however, shattered the peaceful culture of Korea. Japan's imperialist occupation of the Korean peninsula tortured our people and left wounds on our history. Even after Korea’s liberation in 1945, the country’s recovery process from the destruction of its culture and institutions was long and painful. Still worse, only five years after liberation from Japan, the country suffered the heartbreak of the Korean War, which left the peninsula divided into north and south. The state of war persists even through today. In the ashes of the war, Korea completely recreated itself to overcome its tortured history. The nation ran forward, through political whirlwinds and economic slumps. The unprecedented miracle of the Han River led to economic development and industrialization. Many Korean people sacrificed their lives to usher in an era of democracy. In the 21st century, Korean people have been charged with the mission to continue to move ahead. Our neighbors ask us to contribute to world peace and prosperity through dialogue and exchange. Korea's development is largely
attributable to learning from the experience of other countries. Now, it is high time that we pay back what we owe our allies. "Korea: Impossible to Possible," a collection of well-known international authors writing about Korea's development over the past 60 years, is part of the Korean government's efforts to listen to outside perceptions and opinions about my country. Through their contributions, I’ve seen that these authors haven’t shied away from using tough words
when they felt it necessary
to describe
Korea’s development. This is something that I appreciated very much. Third-party perspectives oftentimes help us to recognize overlooked details. We will sincerely listen to the authors’valuable advice contained herein and try harder to open up Korean society to the outside world. I believe the authors could not wholly express all their thoughts about Korea in the limited space provided. However, this book will work as an initiative. We hope to see Korea approaching a wider range of its neighbors in the near future. Thank you very much.
October 2008
Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism
CONTENTS
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I. The Changing Face of the Republic of Korea
044
II. Views from Abroad
046
The Republic at Sixty Guy Sorman _ South Korea at Sixty M. S. Gorbachev _ Republic of Korea: An Important Partner to Russia in Southeast Asia Zhang Yunling _ A Miraculous Six Decades Kazuo Ogoura _ Korea: Past, Present and Future
082
Still Growing Peter J. Katzenstein _ Advantages of Adversity: South Korea at Sixty Jeffrey D. Jones _ Korea-U.S. Economic Cooperation: 60 Years of Passion, Conflict & Profit Shi Yuanhua _ Heading Towards a New Miracle Creation and Glory: In Celebration of 60th Anniversary of Korea Sandip Kumar Mishra _ Service Sector of Korea in Global Knowledge Economy: Challenges and Prospects
118
A Changing Society Carter J. Echkert _ Seoul in the 1970s Michael Breen _ New Country, New Lives: How Life Has Changed for Koreans in the Past Sixty Years
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Education, Culture and the Arts Horace H. Underwood _ Teaching the World: Korean Education Becomes Global Education _ Melissa Chiu Korean Fine Arts Roger Garcia _ Korean Cinema
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International Relations Donald P. Gregg _ Ties with the Eastern Bloc: The Presidency of Roh Tae-woo (1988-1993) Kishore Mahbubani _ The Paradox of Korea: Strong Yet Vulnerable Fen Osler Hampson _ Global Order and the Future of Regional Security Louis T. Dechert _ Korea’s Growth Seen from Abroad: Successful NationBuilding
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North and South, 60 Years On Marcus Noland _ Inter-Korean Economic Relations at 60 Selig S. Harrison _ Towards a Stable Confederacy John Rich _ Beyond All Expectations Andrei Lankov _ Exclusive Dreams: Two Koreas in Search of Unification
KOREA Impossible to Possible
I
The Changing Face of the Republic of Korea
1 •
The foundation of the Republic of Korea. (Aug. 15, 1948)
2 1
3
2•
Korean Citizens celebrate the country's independence on August 15 from its Japanese colonial rulers. (Aug. 15, 1945)
3 •
The country’s first democratic elections are held. (May 10, 1948)
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U.S. sailors unload presents that will be given to orphans.(May 5, 1953)
2•
Refugees use an ox cart to carry their belongings.
3•
War refugees suffering from hunger.
4•
A U.S. soldier chats with elderly Koreans and some children during the war.
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oldiers hoist the Korean national S flag after retaking Seoul.(Sept. 28, 1950)
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oldiers heading to the frontline pass S refugees from across the border.
3•
lementary students during the E Korean War 2 1
3
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he construction of the Gyeongbu T Expressway, which started on Feb.1, 1968, connecting Seoul and Busan, was completed on July 7, 1970.
2•
fter the war, wigs became a major A industry well into the 1960s.
3•
orkers try to restore the Han River W Bridge after the Korean War. 2 1
3
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The Saemaeul Movement, or New Community Movement, is launched. (Sept. 1971)
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The textile industry became the country's main light industry in the 1970s.
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Young people play guitar on a train in the 1970s.
3•
view of Posco Steel mill in the A 1970s. Posco Steel is responsible for making Korea a leader in the global steel market. 2 1
3
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1 •
Gwangju Pro-Democracy uprising, 1980.
2•
Large ships under construction in the Daewoo shipyard in the 1980s.
3 •
Samsung Electronics first full-color TV factory in 1980.
4 •
Doosung, an oil prospecting ship built by Korea National Oil Corp. in 1983.
1 2
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3 4
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Opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
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2 1 3
Bulguksa, the Temple of the Land Buddha, sits mid-slope on Mt. Tohamsan. UNESCO designated the temple as a world heritage site in 1995.
3 •
A counter in January 1998 for buying gold as the country tries to recover from the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
2•
South and North Korea officially joined the United Nations in 1991.
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1 •
The first inter Korean summit meeting between former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and the North’s leader Kim Jong-il on June 15, 2000.
2 •
North Korean Workers at the Gaeseong Industrial Complex.
3 •
The Mt. Geumgangsan tour started in 1998. The picture is the scene of Bodeokam temple in the mountain.
4•
The Gaeseong tour, which started in 2007, is a one-day overland tour. The picture is the scene of Seonjukgyo bridge. 1 2
3 4
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1•
itizens cheer the national team at C the 2002 World Cup in front of Seoul City Hall.
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he mother and the son who cheer T the Korean soccer team.
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The Red Devils, the official cheering squad of South Korea's national football team.
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Koreans still like to recall the victorious moment of the 2002 Korea-Japan FIFA World Cup when the Korean national team advanced to the semi-final 2 1
3 4
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1•
Semiconductor Research Center of Samsung Electronics. Samsung's 64 Gigabyte NAND Flash memory.
2•
Korea’s next generation nuclear fusion facility KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Reactor).
3•
Gwangyang Port, a logistics hub for Northeast Asia in southwest Korea.
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he Gyeongbu and Honam lines of T the KTX, Korea’s high-speed train that was launched on April 30, 2004, after 12 years of construction work.
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G Electronics developed and L launched the world’s biggest liquidcrystal display, or LCD, television on Sept. 6, 2004. 1
3 4
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1•
J eju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes have been registered as a UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2007.
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foreigner learns how to make A pottery at the world ceramic Biennale held in Gyeonggi province.
3•
“ The More the Better” by Korean video artist Paik Nam-june. 2 1
3
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1•
Cheonggye stream, which was restored and opened to the public for the first time in 47 years, attracted 10 million visitors in its first two months.(Oct. 1, 2005)
2•
he 4th Green Energy Expo held T in Daegu, Korea.
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Wind power generators on Mt. Taebaek. Wind power is in the spotlight because of the low carbon, green growth movement.
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The hydrogen automobile which becomes known as the environmental automobile. 2 1
3 4
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1•
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gives a lecture in front of a plaque of UN flags.
2•
The country’s first astronaut Yi So-yeon inside the space shuttle before launch in April 2008.
3 •
Seven-hundred gamers from 73 countries participate at the 2007 World Cyber Games, an international e-sports event.
4•
A performance of a Korean B-boy in 2008 - Korean B-boys are known for mixing breakdance routines with different art genres like ballet and musical.
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Nanta, Korea’s first non-verbal stage show that features a mixture of traditional Korean percussion and dance.
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1•
summit meeting at the AsiaA Pacific Economic Cooperation in Busan.(Nov. 12, 2005)
2•
he 17th president, Lee MyungT bak waves after taking the oath of office.(Feb. 25, 2008)
3•
outh Korea's Kim Yu-na S performs during the women's short program at the World Figure Skating Championships in Tokyo March 23, 2007.
4•
orean swimmer Park Tae-hwan, K who won the gold medal in the men’s 400-meter freestyle swim at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
5•
Korean weightlifter Jang Mi-ran sets world records by winning the gold medal at the + 73-kilogram class at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
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Children run along the garden square located in front of City Hall during the Seoul Festival in May 2008.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
II
Views from Abroad The Republic at Sixty
Guy Sorman M. S. Gorbachev Zhang Yunling Kazuo Ogoura
Still Growing
Peter J. Katzenstein Jeffrey D. Jones Shi Yuanhua Sandip Kumar Mishra
A Changing Society
Carter J. Echkert Michael Breen
Education, Culture and the Arts Horace H. Underwood Melissa Chiu Roger Garcia International Relations
Donald P. Gregg Kishore Mahbubani Fen Osler Hampson Louis T. Dechert
North and South, 60 Years On
Marcus Noland Selig S. Harrison John Rich Andrei Lankov
KOREA Impossible to Possible
THE REPUBLIC AT SIXTY 46
South Korea at Sixty
S
outh Korea at sixty in the Western eye has an image problem due to the Bengali Nobel prize winner,
Rabindranath Tagore, an influential poet and a world traveler. After he visited Seoul in the early twentieth century, Tagore wrote a poem called “The Land of the Morning Calm”. The poem became famous the world over and the name took. South Korea became known globally as Morning Calm and the West still perceives the country this way. These days, the name feels inaccurate, to say the least. This motivated former President Kim Dae-jung to rekindle the country’s reputation, not as calm but as dynamic, so far with limited success: dynamism lacks any specific Korean flavor.
Calm or dynamic Within South Korea, the debate still lingers as how best to represent the country on the international stage. South Korean officials and their public relations advisers can often be heard complaining that they lack the equivalent of the Japanese Fuji mountain, the French Eiffel Tower or the American Statue of Liberty. Whenever consulted on this matter, I suggest the well known crossed-legged Boddhisatva, which can be admired in the National Museum of Korea , as the South Korean logo and icon. This Buddha, reminiscent of the Thinker by the French sculptor Rodin, has no competitor; I think that through its unique aesthetics and transcendental strength it could convey the spirit of the nation. My suggestion, however, has never been taken into consideration. Isn’t it dynamic enough? Or is it too Buddhist in a
Western consumers who esteem Samsung cell phones are not sure whether they are Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. Hyundai cars have found their niche on the world market because they are perceived as reliable and not too expensive; but they are not grasped as Korean the way a Mercedes car is bought because it is German.
country where religions are so diverse? So far, the logo problem
Guy Sorman
for South Korea remains unsolved; probably it cannot be solved easily while Korean identity is not that easy to describe nor to understand, at least for non-Koreans. It cannot be denied that in spite of the outstanding global success of South Korean brands, many buyers of these brands hardly know they are made in Korea. Western consumers who esteem Samsung cell phones are not sure whether they are Korean, Chinese, or Japanese. Hyundai cars have found their niche on the world market because they are perceived as reliable and not too expensive; but they are not grasped as Korean the way a Mercedes car is bought because it is German. South Korea as a trademark, in spite of recent progress due to its leading export companies, is still moderately acknowledged. Is this weak brand recognition due to insufficient efforts to promote South Korea as such? To a certain extent, yes, South Korean governments never packaged the Korean identity as a clear message nor promoted it in a systematic way, as Japan did in the 60s and still does. True enough, the message escapes easy definition. How to promote Korea when the country itself is divided? How to promote modern South Korea alone as it is so different from ancient Korea? How to send a unifying message when the South Korean people are so greatly diversified by region and religion?
Guy Sorman is a French journalist, economist, philosopher and author of twenty books on contemporary affairs, covering the five continents. He is a regular columnist for Le Figaro in France, the Wall Street Journal and City Journal in the United States, and other publications around the world. Mr. Sorman taught economics at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences from 1970 to 2000. He has held several public offices, including advisor to the prime minister of France (1995-1997) and deputy mayor of Boulonge, near Paris. He was appointed by President Lee Myung-bak as a member of the Global Advisors and Friends of Korea in June 2008.
The solution to these dilemmas could very well emerge from the artistic world. South Korea now is popular abroad not only thanks to its industrial exports; artists do play a decisive
47
role. Beware of the ambiguities however. The so-called Korean Wave is carrying American rock music to an enthusiastic Chinese audience: the music is played by Koreans but it is hardly related to Pansori. Korean television sitcoms may be closer to the true Korean soul; we know how they have been useful in bringing together the Japanese and the South Koreans in a more thorough way than many years of diligent diplomacy. Eventually, I consider that to really understand the South Korean identity, the South Korean movies and contemporary art have been more revealing than pop entertainment. Im Kwon-taek’s “Painted Fire”, Kim Jee-woon’s “A Tale of Two Sisters”, Park Chan-wook’s, “Old Boy”, have brought to an international audience a unique civilization, Asian but definitely not Chinese and definitely not Japanese. These movies have produced in the West a culture shock comparable to the European discovery of Japanese prints in the late 19th century. In fine arts, similarly, the video art pioneer Paik Nam June and his follower Jheon Soo-cheon have opened the eyes of art lovers everywhere; thanks to these artists, South Korea has been discovered as if it were a new continent. Korea was there but we,
Korea needs a new national symbol. Pictured is UNESCO World Heritage site, Seokguram, located in Gyeongju, Gyeongsangbuk-do Province.
48
in the West, could hardly see it. Can these artists, to whom I shall add the writer I Munyeol, help us understand who is South Korea at sixty? It is the Morning Calm and Dynamism simultaneously. When Jheon Soocheon displays his installations in Seoul , Venice , Paris or New York, ancient funeral statuettes in a contemporary light, he connects the oldest tradition with cutting edge modernity: like I Mun-yeol’s novel , “Hail to the Emperor”, he makes evident the continuity from Shamanism to Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and the postmodern nihilism of Old Boy. Because of this outstanding continuity, we celebrate South Korea’s sixtieth birthday today as well as its 3000-year-old civilization. This is a reason why, when visiting the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, I regret that it does not incorporate the most recent creation of contemporary artists: the continuity would be for all to see. It would make clear that South Korea does not lack identity but does suffer from a still weak identity promotion policy. What use would be such a policy? It would convey some economic benefits. Strong national brands sell: world consumers buy French perfumes because they are French, Germans cars because they are German, Japanese technology because it is Japanese. Korean products sell for many reasons but rarely because they are Korean. Among industrial advanced nations, South Korea, so far, has not yet built a decisive cultural advantage.
Rising expectations In sixty years, however, South Korea went from one of the poorest countries on earth to one of the most successful. Its civilization alone would not have permitted such progress if the right strategy had not been followed, a free market economy and a progressive shift from enlightened despotism to full-blown democracy. For the younger generation who takes South Korea’s
49
present status for granted, it is difficult to imagine a different evolution. But a glance at the neighboring countries which benefit from superior basic resources show how communism could bring nations to their knees. History has thus proven that South Korean leaders made the right choices at an early stage when liberal democracy did not necessarily look like a winning choice: whatever the rational (resist North Korea? emulate Japan? follow the United States?), South Korea had it right. This needs to be reaffirmed as Korean society at sixty doesn’t escape the turmoil which goes with maturity. Is South Korea in a crisis? Of course it is; only stagnant nations mired in poverty, under despotic regimes, ignore crisis. Because it is an actual democracy, and a modern economy, South Korea has entered into the cycle of rising expectation: only when life is improving do you start wondering why it is not improving more rapidly. When free speech is allowed, why not become vociferous? As seen from abroad, especially from Western Europe, the street demonstrations and strikes which take place in South Korea do no surprise us: we have lived through those kind of events before and we still live with them. In democratic countries, elections never fully solve social conflicts; the purpose of elections is to quiet those conflicts so that they would not degenerate into civil war. What we now see in South Korea is business as usual in Western democracies. Are South Koreans disappointed with democracy? This is common as well: democracy is always disappointing while people expect too much of it. It is an imperfect regime but it is non-violent and it doesn’t pretend to dictate individual life. Maybe South Koreans are not yet accustomed to the inherent modesty of democratic institutions. They also are not fully reconciled
no nation is
with the
imperfections of the free market economy. Free market economy brought South Koreans out of poverty; this was hardly debated when the growth rate hovered around ten percent. When the growth rate plummets to four percent, enthusiasm for the
50
A slower growth rate generates social frustration from the less educated toward the better educated, from the less paid toward the wealthy entrepreneurs. The search for scapegoats (the Americans, the chaebols), and a fiery nationalism, close to jingoism, take root easily when expectations are not met.
market tends to decline. The very high growth rate could absorb many imperfections of the system such as required long work hours, unequal redistribution, brutal exodus from traditional activities to mass industry. But a slower growth rate underlines these imperfections : hard work is less well-tolerated, the gap between rich and poor, between regular and irregular workers fall under harsher scrutiny. A slower growth rate generates social frustration from the less educated toward the better educated, from the less paid toward the wealthy entrepreneurs. The search for scapegoats (the Americans, the chaebols), and a fiery nationalism, close to jingoism, take root easily when expectations are not met. Shall we conclude that South Korea is in a crisis, or in a transition? It seems to me as a transition travails to the next stage when South Korea will become a major global player on the world scene.
Global player South Korea at sixty has unique resources that remain untapped: its civilization as mentioned above is the most evident. By promoting its cultural resources, from its museums to its cuisine, by pursuing the globalization of its economy, South Korea could be better recognized as a global player. A stronger economy, more cultural value would bring a stronger diplomatic position; South Korea does not need to remain dwarfed between China and Japan. More global clout would make reunification easier against those who do not want it. Not only against North Korea,
51
Paik Nam-june’s video artwork on display at the Gwangmyeong Cycle Race Dome Stadium in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi-do Province.
which is an economic midget but against China and Japan as well; those two countries are not enthusiastic about Korea’s reunification. The goal of a unified Korea, which is now closer than ever, could be the ambition of a new generation, the success of the present administration and a tremendous booster for the Korean economy. How will it happen? It is anybody’s guess but , based on my knowledge of North Korea and my memories of Russia , I bet on an implosion of North Korea under the stress of mass poverty . The North Korean people are no longer ignorant of the global reality . Many in South Korea fear the cost of this reunification; but the benefits in terms of market opportunities, and new work force, would rapidly offset the costs. Moreover it would bring peace in North East Asia, which remains unstable and very much depending on the good will of the U.S. military. A stronger and larger Korea could balance its influence between Japan and China with the ultimate goal of a North East Asian economic zone, following the lines of the European Union. Such a grand design could become the new national ambition of the South Koreans and overcome short-term domestic conflicts or short-sighted nationalism. This grand design should not exclude some significant changes within South Korean society. Among those, education 52
comes first. South Korean schools, colleges and universities are still very much in the grip of a traditional system which goes back to the Confucianist rote. This authoritarian pedagogy was perhaps well-geared to the first stage of South Korean industrialization when it required an obedient workforce. But in a transition toward a more high-tech and service-oriented economy, South Korea needs a more initiative-based workforce and more entrepreneurship-minded individuals; this requires a fundamental shift in the education style, toward a more individualistic and less Confucianist type of students-teachers relationship. A more open education would be able to retain in South Korea many of its best students who now emigrate to the United States; it would also attract students and scholars from other parts of the world, not only from the Asia Pacific region. A whiff of cosmopolitism would enhance the creativity of the Korean education and its Rand’s performance. More and better educated, Koreans would produce less “irregular” workers, while most of the these “irregular” workers presently suffer from a lack of proper education. Better educated Koreans will be more ready to understand the harsh process of destructive creation, which is the core of rapid economic development: adaptation through education should be the Korean answer to the challenges of globalization. This adaptation will not be a smooth nor an instantaneous process; no country so far has been able to strike an easy balance between the flexibility requirements of the global market and the collective desire for stability. Some turmoil will happen that cannot be avoided, but more open political debates, better public explanations, better education and constant negotiations should lead to more consensual solutions. To achieve such a delicate balance between competition and social stability, South Korea should not necessarily follow other models, be it Japan, the United States or Europe. There is room for creativity in a still
53
young State: South Korean economists, state officials, union leaders, and entrepreneurs could experiment with new solutions such as a competitive welfare system, permanent training, negative income tax for the poorest, and social flexisecurity (flexibility for the employers, security for the employees) mechanisms as now practiced in Scandinavia. Beyond these still to be created public institutions, governments, at the national and local levels, should focus on the quality of life in Korea. The Korean people have worked, and still work, hard; they deserve reliable health care, special attention to the old and retired, safety and a more beautiful environment. The beautification of Seoul under the leadership of former mayor and now President Lee Myung-bak and his successor Oh Se-hoon has demonstrated that government officials can make a difference in the daily life of the Korean people. This is a model to be followed.
Korea in sixty years I have no doubt about Korea’s economic or diplomatic status in sixty years from now. But I wonder what Korean will mean then? All nations today are torn apart between their ancestors’ roots and fusion into a global melting pot. Most probably, the recent nationalistic outbursts among young Koreans express a disarray towards these contradictory trends. The tension between local and global will only increase as more Koreans will live abroad or be exposed to diverse cultural experiences. Moreover, more foreigners will come and live in Korea; Korea cannot escape
Koreans who always defined themselves through their bloodline and family history, will then be compelled to change their self definition: a Korean in the future could well be Korean by its culture without being Korean by its genetic origin. 54
immigration and its developing economy will need immigrant workers, at the top as well as at the bottom of the economic scale. Will this confrontation between Koreans and foreigners, abroad and at home, be smooth and easy? Will xenophobia prevail, or intermarriages? Probably, both will happen, like in the rest of the world. Koreans who always defined themselves through their bloodline and family history, will then be compelled to change their self definition: a Korean in the future could well be Korean by its culture without being Korean by its genetic origin. Moreover, a Korean could be Korean and something else simultaneously. This is not to be feared: we are all shifting from a world dominated by the cult of our ancestors, to a world based on shared identity. Many Koreans will remain Korean and become global citizens as well; and many global citizens could become Korean by choice.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
THE REPUBLIC AT SIXTY 56
Republic of Korea: An Important Partner to Russia in Southeast Asia
S
ixty years may seem like a short period of time compared to the vast history of the world. But for the Republic of Korea
and for its citizens, it has been full of meaningful events. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the Republic of Korea was the center of the Cold War dispute between two great nations resulting in great bloodshed between its own citizens. The final result was the division of a once unified nation into two separate nations; one to a nation called the Republic of Korea, and one to a nation called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It was not easy to settle this political clash, and consequently, it took considerable time for these two nations to move on to the next round. Despite these hardships, despite the remaining influence of the Japanese dictatorial occupation; and even despite the disastrous ruins remaining from bloody war, the Republic of Korea found strength in itself and took a relatively short period of time to escape from the third world label to what can now be called a contemporary economy and a developed social-political system. Heading towards this new label brought results that were admirable even to itself. These admirable results include the country’s rise to an important position in the world economy and the rise to higher level of influence in international relations between other countries. The reconstruction of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War created an atmosphere that made a pathway to a deep relationship with our nation. I remember June 1990, when in a hotel called Vermont in San Francisco near the end of my visit to
Despite these hardships, despite the remaining influence of the Japanese dictatorial occupation; and even despite of the disastrous ruins remaining from bloody war, the Republic of Korea found strength in itself and took a relatively short period of time to escape from the third world label to what can now be called as a contemporary economy and a developed social-political system.
the U.S., we met with the president of the Republic of Korea, Roh Tae-woo. He had come from South Korea with the sole purpose
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
of meeting us. We discussed all of the problems associated with the Korean Peninsula, and came to an agreed conclusion to engage in a diplomatic relationship, which was carried out effectively in a speedy manner. Soon after, I had the privilege of meeting with President Roh Tae-woo two more times; once in December in Moscow, when the South Korean president officially visited our country, and once in April 1991 in the exotic Island of Jeju in the southeastern part of Korea. During our stay, the president invited me to visit the Korean Peninsula once again on my return flight from Japan. While looking over East Asia’s situation at the time, and the position Korea had inside of this East Asian pool of countries, we decided that the agreement we had made was beneficial for both countries. During this visit, I had a chance to marvel at President Roh Tae-woo’s immense political capabilities to steer the Republic of Korea in such a crucial time of its history. The exchange we had with the Republic of South Korea during this time had a deep effect on all the countries surrounding the Korean Peninsula. After this followed the establishment of Korea’s relations with China, the acceptance of both Koreas to the UN, and other important roads such as the possibility for South Korea to push forward in a peaceful democratic union with North Korea and an enabling of a direct dialogue between the two governments were opened.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1985 until its collapse in 1991. Gorbachev's attempts at reform perestroika and glasnost as well as summit conferences with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, contributed to the end of the Cold War. The summit meeting between Gorbachev and Roh Tae-woo, the-then president of the Republic of Korea, in 1990 in San Francisco paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. Gorbachev is currently the leader of the Union of Social-Democrats.
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Summit meeting between President Roh Tae-woo and Mikhail Gorbachev, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The road ahead was not a simple one; many serious rows of obstacles were required to be overcome, the biggest of which was the nuclear missile ambition of North Korea. This ambition drew the interest of many powerful nations into East Asia. The final proposed solution was the six-party talks (the two Korean governments, China, U.S., Russia, and Japan) which allowed for a neat compromise that took consideration of all sides. Russia, in my opinion, was different somewhat from the rest of the powerful nations in that its interest solely lay in the formation of a united, democratic, and peaceful Korea that would play its own rightful role in international relations. It is inevitable to talk about Russia and Korea in terms of culture and economy. Even before the diplomatic establishment, we had a positive outlook in these areas. For example, the Soviet Union, ignoring the counteractive position that North Korea had to the Olympic Games held in Seoul, took a broad stance by taking part in the event. To add to this, the representatives from our trade union were already successfully carrying out their business affairs in Seoul. From the South Korean side, a great active interest in economic relations with our country was working with Hyundai and its CEO Chung Ju-young. I met with him in Moscow, where he came several times with a helper by 58
the name of Lee Myung-bak, who at that time was still a young man. He would later become the future president of South Korea. His excellent abilities in matters of grand business affairs, his accumulated experiences in politics in the National Assembly, and the awareness of his responsibilities as a mayor of Seoul brought him the trust and respect from all levels of the Korean Republic. The results from last year’s presidential election reflect this truth.
A
fter the establishment of diplomatic relations, trade between our countries grew exponentially. Brand names
such as Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Daewoo found prominence in our markets and became known to all Russians. This lively trade between our countries synthesized a strong tie in the cultural sphere and also influenced our scientific/technological spheres. For example, enormous three-sided projects were carried out in the areas of transportation, electricity, and market infrastructures. The foundations that made these projects possible were the awareness of the scientific/technological potential and the natural resources of Russia combined with the dynamic and vast business experiences of the Korean entrepreneurs. Although the economic crisis of Russia in the 1990s interrupted its actualization, today, the economical foundation and cooperation of both countries is far in its process toward materialization. It is a very crucial time where not a moment can be wasted. In relation to myself, after the fall of the USSR and the Soviet Union, my relationship with South Korea did not deteriorate. In short, I have been invited several times to Korea by my friends, have met with its leaders and with the members of the parliament, and have consulted with the representatives of gigantic corporations with a wide amount of communication. I had a very close relationship with the previous president of South Korea, the man that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
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Construction is under way for a planned East Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline (4,700 km).
Kim Dae-jung. With him in June of the year 2006, we attended a forum in the city of Gwangju. The forum was held for former Nobel Peace Prize winners both in honor of the 30th anniversary of the May 15th Democratic Uprising and for a peaceful Korean Peninsula. The introductory speech for the attendees of the forum was held by the UN Secretary General of that time, Kofi Annan, while the opening ceremony was officiated by the President of South Korea Roh Moo-hyun. The Korean problem takes an important place both in the activity and future value of socio-economic funds and in politological research. In the last years, with the support of
After the establishment of diplomatic relations, trade between our countries grew exponentially. Brand names such as Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Daewoo found prominence in our markets and became known to all Russians. 60
Korean funds and the participation of leaders in the RussianKorean field, two projects were completed: “The Relationship between Russian and Korea” (2003) and “The Question of Korea in the Inter-racial Atmosphere of East Asia” (2005). In these projects we were firmly able to visualize through solidly documented back-up files, the historical root cause of the current problem and the future solution of the Korean Peninsula and of East Asia. All of the experiences that I had with the enhancement of our relations with South Korea equal with that of our technical analysis, and without a doubt, South Korea takes an important place as our valuable partner in East Asia. I hope that Korea will have big successes in all areas, especially in socio-economic development. I also hope that Korea will solve its national problems and come to a unified and peaceful conclusion that will bring the divided peninsula to an agreed union.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
THE REPUBLIC AT SIXTY 62
A Miraculous Six Decades
W
hereas ancient Korea was established several thousand years ago, the Republic of Korea was established just 60
years ago. The Peninsula was split after the World War II. The Republic of Korea was established in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was set up in the north. The South Korea became a newly born country thereafter. Whenever South Korea is mentioned, people show their respect to this country. South Korea worked a miracle in its development process and changed into a modern and developed country, from a poor and laggard one. The South Korean experience of modernization attracted the eyes and praise of the whole world. Under the new situation, South Korea has set up a new development goal and is trying to achieve an upgrade. Can South Korea achieve its new goal? Koreans are a people of great enterprise, with an innovative spirit and lofty goals. Although the Koreans’ new journey is full of challenges, we still have reasons to believe that South Korea will make more impressive achievements in its new development.
A brilliant achievement in four strides The realization of economic modernization is an important goal for the construction of South Korea. South Korea's modernization process, which lasted from early 1960s to the late 1990s, took four great strides. The first stride was to achieve wealth and get rid of poverty. The government played a significant role in this process.
During this period, South Korea realized its dream of being a powerful nation. The gross national product ranks the 11th in the world. The per capita gross national product surpassed 10,000 U.S. dollars. South Korea joined OECD and became a member of the developed countries’ club.
President Park Chung Hee built up a government leadership
Zhang Yunling
system similar to a military headquarters. This government directly designed, organized and operated the economic development; organized and mobilized the necessary resources in the economic development and promoted the implementation of the economic plans and projects. South Korea established the strategies of industrialization development and export orientation, and carried out its economic development from the low end, i.e. to develop a laborintensive export processing industry by using cheap labor resources. South Korea not only created employment, but also increased foreign exchange earnings, and realized the initial capital accumulation in its modern industry development. After several years of development, South Korea's laborintensive products, such as wigs, luggage, clothing, plywood and so on, entered the international market and became brand goods which are popular world-wide today. By 1970, South Korea's national income per capita grew from 60 U.S. dollars to 250 U.S. dollars. The per capita income quadrupled. The second stride was to develop modern large-scale industries, develop the export vigorously and achieve a good standard of living. On the basis of the first stride of successful development, South Korea further set new development goals, i.e. developing the capital intensive industry, laying solid
Zhang Yunling, born on May 8, 1945, is the Director of Academy Division of International Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and Professor of International Economics. He was the Director of the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies, CASS and a member of Foreign Relations Committee, National Committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. His major books include: International Environment for China in the Coming 1015 years (2003), East Asian Cooperation: Searching for an Integrated Approach (2004). East Asian Regionalism and China (2006).
foundations for industrial modernization, enhancing the international competitiveness of products, quadrupling the per capita income again, and realizing that good standard of living.
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During this period, the government continued to play a leading role in economic development and gave strong support to the development of big industries. After 10 years’ effort, South Korea made prominent progress in the development of heavy chemical, steel, shipbuilding and other heavy industries. The automobile industry was also built up. During this period, South Korea achieved a fast growth in its foreign trade and became very competitive in the areas of steel, shipbuilding, chemical or even automobile industries. In 10 years, South Korea's gross domestic production increased by nearly 7.5 times and per capita national income grew by 6.7 times. Thus South Korea entered the ranks of middle-income countries and achieved a decent standard of living. The third stride was to achieve steady economic growth, reduce direct government intervention, carry out reform of the economic system, and develop marketability and internationalization. After economic development achieved a certain foundation, how to make further enhancements was a new situation that South Korean encountered. In this case, further insistence on excessive government intervention in the economy would become an obstacle to future economic development. Therefore, since the 1990s, the government has carried out
The Hyundai shipyard, the biggest in the world, produces 40 to 60 ships a year.
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marketability, privatization and internationalization reform. The enterprises began to carry out structural adjustment and substantially to increase foreign investment. Although such an adjustment was painful, South Korea was successful. The fourth stride was to promote innovation, strengthen internationalization strategies and step into the ranks of developed countries. The South Korean economy entered a new period of development on the basis of marketability, privatization and internationalization adjustment from the 1990s. South Korean Enterprises increased the innovation dynamics in electronics and telecommunications, while large scale development of foreign investment, industrial restructuring and transfer was carried out to open up new space for development. During this period, South Korea realized its dream of being a powerful nation. The gross national product ranks the 11th in the world. The per capita gross national product surpassed 10,000 U.S. dollars. South Korea joined OECD and became a member of the developed countries’ club. South Korea's economic modernization is a success and its rapid economic growth has been described as "the Han River miracle". As a rising leader in the emerging economies, South Korea helped formed Asia's "four little dragons" together with Singapore, China's Hong Kong and Taiwan. Today, the Korean people are ambitious and want to be ranked among the developed economies in the world.
The experiences and lessons South Korea, once a backward country which obtained such a great success in a short time, has had a lot of experiences and has learned some important lessons during the development process. The major experience is its scientific planning and its determination to stick to economic modernization. Outsiders
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thought that South Korea’s political situation was too unstable for its economy to take off. The coup, the murdering of leaders, large-scale mass demonstrations and so on took place during this period. However, one thing is very clear. Despite the changing of regimes, each Korean government regarded the realization of modernization and national rejuvenation as its goal. The government carried out its five-year plan from the 1960s up to the mid-1990s, when the industrialization was completed. The early 60s to the late 70s was a period of industrialization and the establishment of a modern industrial foundation. Park Chung Hee was in power during this period and political stability was easily maintained. A coup took place in the early 1980s. The political situation was basically stable for more than 10 years thereafter. So South Korea could develop large-scale industries that were more competitive. During this period, South Korea pursued a government-led economic model and the government played an important role in the entire process. The government's scientific planning and a strong organization were a vital guarantee for the establishment of a modern industrial system within a very short period of time. Of course, there were contradictions between South Korea's authoritarian political system and the modernization of the development process. The government-led management would also result in serious intervention, causing system corruptions that were the main causes of Korean political turmoil and mass movements. For example, Park Chung Hee employed “constitutional reform and restoration� to stop the activities of political parties and suppressed mass movements to safeguard his centralized power system when he was in power. The said measures resulted in a confrontation between the government and society, produced contradictions among political interest groups and
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In the fast-growing period, Koreans usually valued the speed and underestimated the quality. Many roads and bridges suffered quality problems. Many big potatoes in Daewoo, Hyundai, Samsung and GoldStar groups had been sentenced to jail for transferring funds illegally.
brought about the tragedy of political change. Moreover, some large industrial groups which grew up with the support of the government colluded with senior government officials and banks in making credit fraud, transferring funds and carrying out illegal activities. In the fast-growing period, Koreans usually valued the speed and underestimated the quality. Many roads and bridges suffered quality problems. Many big potatoes in Daewoo, Hyundai, Samsung and GoldStar groups had been sentenced to jail for transferring funds illegally. It now appears that there would be less social turmoil if South Korea's political reform and economic structural adjustment would have been carried out earlier, and if some proper reform adjustment were employed rather than suppressing measures to solve the problems in its high-speed economic growth. Of course, South Korea enjoyed a peaceful transition from an authoritarian system to a democratic system and did not experience serious social turmoil. However, the long delayed and unsolved political and social division and their tremendous cost were also considerable. The second experience of South Korea's development is to develop a major strategy and to form large industrial groups. There are two pillars of modern industry. The first is the large enterprise groups and the second is the small and medium enterprises. Large enterprise groups are the backbones of developing large-scale industries and major products. But the development of large enterprise groups is not an easy thing. It
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Korea’s first hypersonic speed airplane released at Korea Aerospace Industries in Sacheon, Gyeongsangnam-do Province.
needs capital, technology and time. Without direct and strong government support, the large enterprise groups are very difficult to develop in developing countries like South Korea which began from a very low starting point. There would be no South Korean rapid take-off of steel, shipbuilding, automobile, electric appliance and electronic industry if there were no large enterprises like “aircraft carriers". These large "aircraft carriers" became the backbone industries in upgrading the level of South Korean industries and made South Korea stand in the front row in the world in the areas of steel production, shipbuilding, telecommunications and electronic products. However, the large enterprises strategy has a lot of problems. First of all, they excessively rely on policy in the development of enterprises, for they can get full policy support and enough credit funds. The large enterprises use government's policy support and the trust to carry on expanding, and thus cause a credit crisis. For example, during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, a chain of huge bad debts drew South Korea into a serious crisis and South Korea's economy was severely damaged. As large enterprise groups resided in the monopolistic position, the policy favored large enterprise groups, small and medium enterprises’ development was slow, and the operation of market mechanism was hampered. South Korea’s marketability and 68
internationalization strategy, which started in the 1990s, made painstaking efforts to resolve this problem, but the price was also huge. Modern large enterprise groups have strong control ability. If there is no perfect supervision system, it will lead to their monopoly in the market and corruption in their systems. Now, the South Korean government has made new efforts regarding these problems and has achieved progress. The third experience of South Korea's economic development is vigorously promoting technological innovation. Business vitality and competitiveness come from constant innovation. South Korea is successful in promoting economic innovation. The most important in enterprise innovation is the people. A backward country usually has less talent. In order to produce and introduce innovative talent, South Korea has taken a strategy of attracting overseas personnel. From the beginning of the 1960s, the government has adopted preferential policies to the introduction of modern technology professionals, and management personnel. Due to a series of comprehensive measures, a large number of South Koreans studying abroad returned home. They were given important positions and assigned to important posts in the government and companies. These people brought South Korea advanced technical knowledge and new management concepts and methods, which played a key role in the promotion of South Korean scientific technology and management. At the same time, the South Korean government formulated preferential policies to raise large amounts of money, and actively supported the government and university research institutions, and the group of companies engaged in researching and developing. The government encouraged companies to promote new technology innovation through the development of scientific and technological innovation and take the innovation as the core method to enhance the international competitiveness of Korean products. Through unremitting efforts, South Korea
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has become a powerful scientific and technological country from a country which mainly depended on production of low-end products. South Korea seized the opportunities of the world electronics industry and became a major provider of semiconductors, storages, flat-panel TVs and network mobile phones. South Korea produced competitive cars, high-speed trains and so on by importing technology and by becoming independent. Up to the late 1990s, South Korea's research and development accounted for 3 percent of its gross domestic product, reaching the level of developed countries. Of course, the scientific and technological innovation system led by the government and large groups has some shortcomings, i.e. large investment, low efficiency, quick success, false research results, big group monopoly and a lack of innovation. South Korea's experience indicated that although the government played the vital role in the support of research innovation organization, the government's support must be able to encourage open competition and build a vigorous innovation system. Large groups are the core forces in innovation, especially for high-tech, which needs huge investment and research forces. However, innovation is stifled if it is monopolized by large groups. SMEs are the most dynamic components in technological innovation and reform. The innovation of small and medium enterprises will be suppressed and the economy will lack in flexibility if there is no competition or open markets.
China and South Korea relations For complex reasons, China and South Korea hadn’t established diplomatic relations until 1992. However, during the short period of 16 years, the trade and economic relationship between two countries has greatly developed. At present, China is the largest trade partner of South Korea, and also the largest investment
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market. At present, trade between China and South Korea has passed 150 billion U.S. dollars and expected to reach 200 billion U.S. dollars. Actually, this will be attained by 2010. As a neighbor, the development of China’s market has a special meaning to Korea. In early 1994, many companies noticed the importance of the market of China and began to invest in large quantities. After the economic crisis in 1997, the adjustment of the industrial structure became an important strategy for getting over the crisis and rejuvenated its economy. The economic crisis didn’t spread to China directly and the economy was still growing. And it definitely became the dreamland for the South Korean companies to transform production and expand industry. Therefore, the investment of South Korea in China expanded dramatically. After China’s entry into the WTO, South Korea’s investment in China kept expanding due to the prospects of China’s economy. Some big companies, like Hyundai, expanded its capability of producing in China. The Chinese and South Korean economies complement each other. The fast growing trade investment played an active role in the economic development of the two countries. Especially, the economic ties on the basis of investment-trade share the close internal connection for the economic development of the two countries. Noticeably, China’s investment in South Korea has also been increasing in recent years. Although the absolute amount of the investment is small, it has increased rapidly. China ranks No.3 in foreign direct
At present, China is the largest trade partner of South Korea, and also the largest investment market. At present, trade between China and South Korea had passed 150 billion U.S. dollars and expected to reach 200 billion U.S. dollars. 71
investment in South Korea. It is estimated that the China’s investment will grow more rapidly with the strategy of “go-out policy” of China. China has a large amount of deficit in the trade with South Korea. Now, China is the largest country of foreign trade surplus origin, and South Korea is China's second largest source of trade deficit after Taiwan. This situation is mainly caused by the unbalanced structure of the investment and trade. Statistics show that the South Korea’s investments in China have mutual promotion ties. South Korea’s investments drove the development of exports, including chemistry, plastics, chemical fiber, electrons, electric devices, cars and machines. Of course, South Korea’s investments in China dramatically promoted China’s exports. Especially in the labor intensive industrial investment, the rate of export is very high and it will be of great advantage to China to make its exports more competitive. At present time, the South Korean companies investing in China are facing a new challenge. Due to the increasing cost of labor in China, as well as the local companies’ higher competition and the change of the export environment of market, they face the pressure of technological innovation. But this is inevitable,
Korea-China summit meeting.
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and it is good for the South Korean companies to restructure. There is enormous room for economic development and cooperation between China and South Korea. China’s great potentiality in development and active creativity in the technology are the advantage for the two countries to strengthen economic and trade ties. Of course, in order to lay the foundation for long-term development, the two countries need to strengthen the system of cooperation. For example, the governments and companies should further strengthen the cooperation mechanisms between the two countries and speed up preparations for a bilateral free-trade zone process in particular. Reviewing the past 60 years, the Korean people deserve to be proud of their achievements; and to look forward to the future. The Korean people are ambitious to achieve new development blueprints. To quote former President Kim Youngsam, who opened South Korea democratization process, to finish this article: “In the hope of a beautiful dream and an ideal future, we will create a new Korea.�
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
THE REPUBLIC AT SIXTY 74
Korea: Past, Present and Future
Korea as a Model of Economic Development Korea, with its distinguished pattern of economic development, has proved itself a good model for many developing countries. Apart from Japan, Korea is indeed a unique example of a nonWestern country becoming a member of the OECD as a major trading nation. What, then, are the principal factors contributing to this success in Korean economics? The most predominant factor was the effectiveness of the “triangle� formed by the government, industries and financial institutions. The Chaebols, the banking sector, and the government formed a solid triangle of economic development. This triangle would not have led to shining results however, had it not been for certain favourable external factors. The rapid economic development of Japan as well as Japanese economic and technical cooperation contributed significantly to the early stages of Korean economic development. Then came the waves of globalization. The exportled pattern of growth of the Korean economy rode successfully on the waves of globalization and Korean development was, in turn, an aspect of the globalization (in the sense of growing interdependence)of the world economy. The Korean economy based on this triangle, however, became the victim of its own success. This was witnessed very clearly during the so-called Asian economic crisis of the late 1990’s. The solid triangle had led to the excessive dependence on the short-term capital from abroad and had left intact the structural rigidity of the economy.
The Chaebols, the banking sector, and the government formed a solid triangle of economic development. This triangle would not have led to shining results however, had it not been for certain favourable external factors.
Here again, however, Korea demonstrated itself to be a
Kazuo Ogoura
good example of a developing country overcoming external financial difficulties combined with internal rigidities. The courageous opening of the Korean financial as well as commodity markets to foreign investors and traders, coupled with the restructuring of Chaebols and of the labour market, contributed a great deal to Korea’s efforts to overcome the crisis. More than the introduction of various new economic measures, however, what should be emulated by developing countries is the political skill of appealing to national solidarity and the determination to restore international credibility by faithfully observing the IMF’s “conditionalities”. Looking back at the history of Korean economic development over the last thirty years or so, one might today wonder whether Korea can become another model of economic progress in the coming decade and, in that connection, what major tasks remain ahead. If Korea can become, for the third time, a good model of development for other similarly placed economies of the world, it appears that Korea should, at least, be able to deal successfully with the following problems or tasks. The first is the growing income gap between the rich and the poor, not only inside the Korean society itself, but all around the world. To what extent the Korean government will be able to provide an effective safety-net to the underprivileged is a serious
Kazuo Ogoura is president of the Japan Foundation, and a former Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea, and France. Graduated from the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law and the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he served in various positions, including DirectorGeneral of Cultural Affairs Department (1989-92), Director-General of Economic Affairs Bureau (1992-94), Deputy ViceMinister for Foreign Affairs and Japanese G7/G8 Sherpa (1995-97). He is also an Invited Professor of International Politics in the Economics and Business Department of Aoyama Gakuin University (2003-).
problem to be tackled, particularly in view of the rapid demographic changes of the Korean society.
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Second is the question of agriculture. It is likely that the farm subsidies and the international competitiveness of Korean agriculture could become serious obstacles for Korea in its efforts to promote free trade agreements with its trading partners. In other words, Korea, instead of asking for various types of exceptions for its agriculture, can make use of the opportunities of free trade negotiations as an instrument to carry out the structural reform of its own agriculture. The third task will be the dismantling of its developing country status. Korea has, so far, in various trade and other areas-such as the imports of rice or green house emission control-advanced the argument that Korea still remains a developing country. In view of Korea’s latest economic progress, this argument has increasingly been viewed in the international community as more or less outdated. One might argue in this connection, that Korea wanted to retain its developing country status in preparation for the reintegration of the much poorer North Korea. Though politically understandable, this argument is likely to be viewed in the international community as an excuse to avoid shouldering more international responsibilities and may weaken international financial support for reintegration. All in all, what lies now before Korea as the great task for the future is the de-Koreanization of its own economy, in the sense of further integrating its economy with that of the rest of the world, thereby contributing significantly to the sustainable growth of the world economy.
Korean Political Development After the presidency of Syngman Rhee Korea experienced for a long period of time, military, authoritarian governments. How should we assess such regimes in the light of the contemporary political situation in Korea? The military shouldered political responsibility due to the
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need for a government-initiated development strategy and to the security requirement in face of the threat from the North. Here again, however, the Korean political process was linked to international circumstances, particularly the East-West confrontation. The prolongation of the military regimes was, therefore, linked both to domestic and international factors. Strategic consideration, both economic and politico-military, weighed heavily on the political process in Korea. One should not, however, lose sight of the activities of the democratic forces which were not negligible even under the military governments. Student movements, labour union activities and the political opposition of Kim Dae-jung and other political personalities, however troublesome they may have been to the successive military governments, paved the way for transition from military to civil governments. In other words, the democratic forces that survived the Park government, checked the pattern of the Chun Doo Hwan presidency which ended after one term, and it paved the way for the presidency of Roh Taewoo, who came from the military but became president by being elected through proper process. In other words, both the Chun and Roh regimes could be considered as transitional governments which paved the way for a more democratic political process. The Kim Young-sam government can be remembered as one that played a decisive role in cracking the fusion of politics and economics. During this period, the roles of political parties were consolidated and, in the true sense of the word, democratic forces were integrated into the institutionalized political process.
The military shouldered political responsibility due to the need for a government-initiated development strategy and to the security requirement in face of the threat from the North. 77
This process was completed when Kim Dae-jung, long considered the symbol of opposition, was elected president. His presidency was also significant, as people from the Jeollanam-do region, traditionally viewed as “outsiders” in the political process, took over the centre stage of Korean politics. Kim Dae-jung’s presidency, however, did not destroy the traditional respect for authority, whether it may be political or academic. Active for a long time as an outsider politician, Kim and his group of politicians tried to project the image of responsible politicians as soon as they took over the helm of the presidency. In this process they relied upon, rather than destroyed, the traditional aura of authority attached to the position of presidency, ministership, or professorship. This aura of traditional authority attached to the presidency, and other “titles” or positions was politically targeted during the Roh Moo-hyun presidency. In fact, Roh’s presidency was a quiet revolution, in the sense of destroying the traditional authority attached to the various political positions. The thread of populism that ran deep and wide during the period of Roh’s presidency cannot entirely be attributed to the Internet psychology of the people. The trend of such populism should be understood in the wider historical context of Korean politics, namely, the degree of the maturity of the democratic process. This implies that the immediate national task in Korean politics can be said to lie in the growth of healthy, sound opposition parties which can present practical alternatives instead of having recourse to regionalism or populism.
Korean Diplomacy The most important diplomatic issue for Korea after the “Korean War”, has been the international aspect of the North Korean problem: namely, how to secure international support for Korean security and, at the same time, obtain the blessings of the major powers for easing tension with the North.
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These two objectives have to be pursued with careful balance, particularly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The creation of the six-party conference is an important device to “internationalize” the North Korean problem, thereby securing the delicate balance between containment of the North and rapprochement with it. Despite occasional frictions with the U.S., the Republic of Korea has, in general, deployed skillful diplomacy through which the Korean government has obtained international support both for its “soft” policy towards the North and “pressure diplomacy” against it. There are some signs, however, that may disturb the delicate balance of soft and hard policies towards the North. This is related to growing nationalism (in the ethnic sense)in Korea. The revival of a strong ethnic identity with the North (particularly among young people)presents the risk of giving rise to frustration over American policies towards the Far East as well as its troop presence. There is also the danger that such nationalism be canalized or diverted, consciously or inadvertently, toward an anti-Japanese movement. The U.S. and Japan should view the rise of Korean nationalism with cool but sympathetic eyes, because Korea, which faces the gigantic task of reunification, has a strong need of ethnic nationalism. The U.S. and Japan should stay “cool” at the time of occasional eruptions of such Korean nationalism. At the same time, the Korean government should refrain from canalizing or diverting the anti-government sentiment of the people towards outside targets such as the U.S. or Japan. The promotion of the free trade agreement or new economic accords with these two countries may help mitigate such risks of political diversion. In relation to the free trade agreements, there is the issue of building an East Asian Association or Community. One has to note, above everything else, that an East Asian Community is already in the making in the “functional” sense of the word. The degree of the
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Automobile exports.
interdependence of trade among East Asian countries (Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, and the ASEAN nations)has already exceeded the degree of interdependence among NAFTA countries and has, more or less, reached the level of the European Union at the beginning of the1970’s. In addition to trade relations, East Asian countries (Korea, Japan and China)have expanded tourism among themselves and have also rapidly increased student exchanges. The life-styles of the young people in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the coastal areas of China have witnessed a certain “cultural” affinity, as evidenced by the popularity of Korean TV dramas and Japanese fashions. Such trends towards an East Asian Community should be welcomed and encouraged by Korea for several reasons. Firstly, moves towards building an East Asian Community will help hold in check the rise of China-centralism and the parochial nationalism of East Asian nations. Secondly, it can help strengthen the sense of international responsibility for China to act as a responsible major power in the world. Finally, efforts to build an East Asian Community will help form a vision of a stable, peaceful East Asian politico-military
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geography after the Korean reintegration. There are, however, a few tasks that Korea must deal with in the process of forming an East Asian Community. First of all, Korea must soften the “colonial” mentality of fanning antiJapanese sentiment, for the sake of consolidating national unity or identity. As Korean society becomes more and more mature both politically and economically, freedom of expression, even on the issues concerning Japan, is expected to be secured socially and politically, not to mention legally. In this connection it should be pointed out that “protest diplomacy” (to sever the channel of communication itself as a means of manifesting protest) should not be utilized except in an emergency, as lack of communication increases the risk of misunderstanding and gives rise to the sense of detachment in the minds of potential friends.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Advantages of Adversity: South Korea at Sixty
STILL GROWING
I
t is a great honor to be invited to contribute a short paper to this commemorative volume marking a milestone in Korean
history. But how should we judge a span of six decades? South Korea is one year older than my country of birth, West Germany, and three years younger than I am. Not long ago reaching sixty yeas of age was for an individual the mark of having reached a ripe old age. Adapting a quip from American song writer and satirist Tom Lehrer it is true that “at my age Mozart had been dead for 28 years.” Today for an individual sixty lies in that undefined zone of middle and old age. Not for Korea. Korea is Asia’s Poland. Lodged between two ancient civilizational states, and forever fiercely protective of its autonomy and endowed with a clear sense of self, Korea marks its national history in long centuries not short decades. Koreans have suffered more than most other people during the second half of the 20th century. The suffering during the Korean war made headlines all over the world. After the war ended in a stalemate peace, Koreans suffered through the trauma of national partition, as did Vietnam and Germany which are now reunited. South Korea’s economic miracle was not made by efficient markets operating in peace. The South Korean story over the last six decades reminds us instead of the advantages of adversity. Vulnerability was the central condition which set South Korea onto the course of making one of the most remarkable economic runs in the history of capitalism. Looking at the photographs of the South Korean countryside and of Seoul at the
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And I remember South Korean journalists angrily and politely posing tough questions to a top IMF official at a meeting at the Smithsonian Institution that I had a chance to attend in the winter of 1997 in Washington, D.C.
end of the Korean war, and traveling by bus through the South Korean countryside and walking around downtown Seoul, as I did
Peter J. Katzenstein
earlier this year, leaves an indelible impression of the indomitable will of the South Korean people to better their once miserable lives and of the efficaciousness of South Korean institutions of making the escape from poverty possible. War it turned out was both, a source of terrible human suffering and an incubator for something dramatically new in Korea’s history and in the history of capitalism. South Korea’s phenomenal accomplishments are worth noting. But they are not unique. Taiwan became South Korea’s twin at least in the eyes of scholars studying the process of rapid economic advancement in East Asia. And Taiwan, like South Korea, was also extremely vulnerable. Vietnam took a somewhat different path, through many decades of a prolonged war of national liberation, against France first and then against the U.S., before experiencing unification under Communist rule, followed soon by the Sino-Vietnam border war of 1979 and eventual living under China’s growing economic shadow. Although Vietnam’s move to rapid economic take-off is occurring only now, in the wake of China’s economic ascendancy, the long runup is marked by at times extreme vulnerability to that nation’s survival.
Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Katzenstein is Presidentelect of the American Political Science Association (2008-09). In 1987 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science. He was the recipient of the 1974 Helen Dwight Reid Award of the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in international relations; and of the American Political Science Association's 1986 Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in the United States on international affairs.
These economic miracles are thus rooted in one common condition, often extreme vulnerability, and show one common institutional feature, the existence of a strong, developmental state, intent on leading the nation rapidly to high and self-
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Workers weld metal beams at a construction site at Incheon International Airport.
sustaining economic growth. Variations in the character of the state and state-economy linkages are considerable. This is illustrated well by South Korea’s more centralized and Taiwan’s more decentralized pattern of organization and development. But in all cases the underlying condition of vulnerability and a strong developmental state gave the initial impetus to different ways of coping with adversity. One should not think of the underlying condition of vulnerability and developmental statism as something that economic advancement of the 1960s and 1970s eliminated. In the South Korean case, it is true of course that the freezing of the military situation along the DMZ into a permanent stalemate eventually led to a normalization of South Korean life and a diminution of the sense of vulnerability. Yet South Korea remained exposed to typically venomous threats shouted from up North and six thousand North Korean pieces of artillery trained on Seoul. And a new kind of vulnerability came with the embracing of export-led growth as the guiding doctrine for the South Korean economy starting in the early 1960s. Although for several decades world markets were kind to South Korea, world markets can create their own tsunamis as financial markets did in 1997. An IMF bail-out of historic proportion saved South Korea but at what, initially, looked like 84
intolerable foreign interference. I remember seeing newspaper pictures of South Korean housewives donating their jewelry at street corners to help raise capital to pay for the melt down in South Korean reserves. And I remember South Korean journalists angrily and politely posing tough questions to a top IMF official at a meeting at the Smithsonian Institution that I had a chance to attend in the winter of 1997 in Washington DC. That selfsacrifice and that anger were tokens of an economic nationalism that defeated handily any attempt of Wall Street bankers eager to finally buy into South Korean industry on a large scale. South Korea was rocked by the crisis. But vulnerability galvanized an underlying economic nationalism that became a crucial ingredient in the defense of South Korean autonomy.
I
n Western Europe, under less harsh conditions, vulnerability helped produce similarly beneficial outcomes. If one arrays
countries by their quality of life, based on about 200 indicators of well-being, most of the small European states
Scandinavia,
the Low Countries, Austria and Switzerland, and recently also Ireland and Finland
typically show up in the top ten. The
secret of their success lies in a perception of vulnerability to outside influence. That vulnerability has taken different forms market disruptions brought about by economic collapse in the 1930s, the experience or threat of Nazi occupation, the threat of Communist aggression, Findlandization, or in the case of Ireland British neglect followed by the subsidies that accompanied EU membership. The social, political, institutional and policy consequences of vulnerability differed from those we see in East and Southeast Asia. Instead of developmental states, in Western Europe it was democratic corporatism that came to express and shape the collective power and will of the people. Vulnerability was a crucial factor to generate an ideology of social partnership that brought the owners of capital, workers and farmers into the same national boat. And it taught the different and normally
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quarreling political parties and factions that pulling on the same oar was going to be more advantageous in the end than fighting over the spoils of capitalism in a dog-eat-dog form of distributional struggle.
O
ne obvious difference between the West European and East Asian pattern is the fact that the small European
states of North West Europe were democratic throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This was not true of the succession of developmental states that stepped onto the stage of regional and global capitalism in Asia: South Korea and Taiwan, most of the Southeast Asian Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs), China, and now Vietnam. The latter two remain firmly committed, at least for now, to a Leninist form of capitalism. They are unwilling to cede authoritarian political control to match the liberalizing impetus of their economic policies. In sharp contrast, South Korea, Taiwan and many, though by no means all, of the NICs have made remarkably peaceful political transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. In the case of South Korea, democracy is rambunctious and noisy. Democratic politics in Seoul is not a sport for the fainthearted. But during the last two decades South Korea has undeniably become democratic, with vigorously contested elections and a vibrant civil society and social movement politics. While liberal theory and policy prescriptions that seek to advance a liberal agenda are bound to be disappointed in the short-term, in the long-run, the South Korean case suggests, setting markets free and making space for economic advancement will create a middle class that eventually will demand more than a good paycheck. This is both the promise that South Korea holds and the threat that South Korean history poses to its big Chinese “brother� in the North. South Korea’s economic take-off to long-term, sustained
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economic growth fits into a pattern of delayed industrialization with distinctive characteristics not anticipated by liberal theory. It was an economic historian, Alexander Gerschenkron, who observed that delayed industrialization was marked by specific institutional characteristic. Compared to the British economy which was the first to industrialize, the continental economies which came later had to compete on different terms. Markets were no longer as free as they had had been when Britain entered on the stage. Instead the late comers had less time and less freedom to find their way. Concentration of industrial and financial capital and protectionism were the result. Late European industrializers, starting with France and continuing with Germany, Italy, other countries and eventually Russia, evolved different types of capitalisms than the one that had emerged initially on the British isles. Late-late industrializers, starting with Japan and later encompassing in succession the economies of East and Southeast Asia were operating under still different sets of rules. While it is true that the initial cohort of late and late-late industrializers concentrated economic and political power to compensate for their vulnerability in freely operating markets, somewhere along the way the Gerschenkronian model stopped working. Instead of late-late development contemporary capitalism is looking for a new label to characterize the great transformation that we are witnessing in East Asia. Compressed industrialization differs from South Korea’s late-late development pattern by one basic condition
the
disjointed co-occurrence of the old and decrepit with the new
Technological shortcuts, juxtaposition of opposites and political contradictions create a potential for enormous political volatility as a concomitant of compressed development. 87
The Korea Stock Exchange building in Yeouido, Seoul.
and super modern. Donkeys pull their carts in front of gleaming skyscrapers. Beggars can be found napping in front of sumptuously luxurious villas. Ancient machinery sits under one roof with the most advanced computer controlled machining center. Doctors attend to the hungry and the obese. The young are beholden to tradition-bound ways and mores and fully engaged with a free-wheeling transnational consumption culture. The rapidity of late-late development has given way to the simultaneity of compressed development. Technological shortcuts, juxtaposition of opposites and political contradictions create a potential for enormous political volatility as a concomitant of compressed development. It is true that South Korea’s late-late industrialization patterns no longer provides many navigational tools that might help China, Vietnam or India to sail in new, uncharted waters.
B
ut South Korea’s history teaches an enduring lesson of a different sort
how to live with great vulnerabilities. For
six decades now it has danced on the top of a volcano, marked by periods of calm and quiet as well as periodic, unpredictable eruptions. Compressed development, especially in China, creates enormous opportunities. But it will undoubtedly also create
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violent eruptions. South Korea is condemned to live dangerously, as it has in the more recent past and throughout history. Vulnerability is not an exceptional but a habitual condition. In the last six decades South Korea has made the most of it. This is not a unique gift of the Korean nation. It is a condition that many nation states have no choice but to accept and live with. South Korea’s economic evolution thus fits into a broader pattern in world politics. As South Koreans look back at the last six decades, they have much to be proud of. And as they look around the world, they can see many national experiments from which they can learn. Vulnerability and the possibility to learn from others augur well for the next 60 years of exploiting the advantages of adversity.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Korea-U.S. Economic Cooperation:
60 Years of Passion, Conflict & Profit
STILL GROWING
T
he economic relationship between Korea and the U.S. has been one marked by compassion, neglect, reliance, passion,
controversy, frustration and profit. Like the personality of both nations, it has been emotionally driven, not always based on economic considerations and to a very large extent overshadowed by a U.S. obsession for Japan and China, two markets which dwarf Korea, but which are rarely as profitable for U.S. companies.
The Beginning The economic relationship with Korea really began during and immediately after the Korean War. The earliest memories of Korea and America had its roots in chocolate bars, milk and flour. U.S. aid flooded into Korea in the form of food supplies thanks in large part to large U.S. surpluses with nowhere to go. America’s farmers profited from large doses of aid that poured into Korea often making it difficult for Korean farmers to compete, but making food supplies for Koreans relatively easy to obtain under the circumstances of war and devastation. Once the immediate crisis of food was resolved, the large amounts of food aid discontinued, but economic planning and strategic investments continued through U.S. aid programs. The remnants of these programs are still evident in the twin buildings now occupied by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the U.S. Embassy which were the previous headquarters of the U.S. Aid Program which helped Korea with basic economic planning and the establishment of strategic industries needed to get Korea’s
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As the Korean economy grew in the 70’s and 80’s so did U.S. investment in important industries for Korea in the form of joint ventures and the licensing of critical technology.
economy moving.
Jeffrey D. Jones
This early beginning is responsible in large part for the gratitude Korea’s older generation feel toward American generosity. It is difficult to forget the hand that feeds and protects, notwithstanding that a certain amount of resentment builds because of this dependence. Subsequent generations of Korea did not experience this direct aid from America that had immediate visible results and they are able to look more objectively at the U.S. economic relationship analyzing it with a greater need for mutuality and benefit for Korea. Given the size and dominance of the U.S. economy, there is a healthy dose of cynicism in the “mutual benefit” analysis with an assumption that as the historically weaker of the two, Korea always ended up with the short side. As the Korean economy grew in the 70’s and 80’s so did U.S. investment in important industries for Korea in the form of joint ventures and the licensing of critical technology. The U.S. remained the largest foreign investor in Korea throughout this period investing in important projects which boosted economic performance, international competitiveness and exports. Yet Japan and subsequently China always were the recipients of much bigger investments given the size and potential of their economies. It was difficult for U.S. managers located in or
Jeffrey D. Jones served five terms as President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea and three terms as President of the Seoul Club. He organized and presently serves as chairman of a nonprofit foundation, Partners for the Future, providing scholarships, job training, aid and other assistance to the unemployed and their families in Korea. Jones serves as advisor to several organizations and government agencies in Korea including the Foreign Investment Advisory Council of Seoul City and the International Advisory Board of the Federation of Korean Industries.
responsible for Korea to capture the attention of corporate leaders to increase investment in Korea. Profitability has always been relatively good for U.S. companies in Korea, but the hope of bigger profits in Japan and
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An exclusive port for Hanjin Shipping near Long Beach Port in California, U.S..
China often overshadowed the real profitability of Korea. This remains true today.
Trade Frictions There was continuous pressure from the U.S. to open and liberalize Korea’s markets, which went largely ignored until the early 90’s when true liberalization of Korea’s economy began and for the first time it became possible for foreign companies to have wholly owned subsidiaries in Korea. This continuous trade pressure or trade frictions as they were often referred to created some resentment in the minds of the public and many officials and was often the source of conflict between the two governments. Throughout the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s, however, the military and strategic alliance between Korea and the U.S. was the primary focus of the two governments and to a certain extent the general public of both nations often leaving the economic potential between the two countries ignored. The requirement that U.S. companies had to enter the Korea market as joint venture partners with Korea firms also acted as a serious impediment to significant investment and building stronger economic ties with Korea. 92
The Opening Once joint ventures with local partners were no longer the required form of doing business in Korea, U.S. companies began to look more seriously at Korea’s market with much greater potential. The post economic boom of the ‘88 Olympics was taking affect and U.S. companies began to take Korea much more seriously. Korea was beginning to shed its “Mash” image deeply embedded in the minds of the U.S. public from the extremely popular U.S. television series about the Korean War. Just as this activity was beginning to take serious hold, Korea entered the financial crisis in late 1997 which came to be known as the “IMF” crisis and this marked the beginning of significant investment in Korea by U.S. companies. Failing Korean companies with significant assets and sparkling new factories caught the eye of U.S. investors and U.S. companies began flooding into Korea. This era also marked the beginning of private equity investments in Korea in addition to the traditional strategic investment that heretofore had been Korea’s sole source of investment. The beginnings of private equity investment following the IMF crisis also sparked a new round of criticism and resentment from the Korean public toward U.S. investment. The public and press criticized such groups for their excessive profits taking advantage of companies that faced difficulty. Profits became labeled as inappropriate and excessive as the economy recovered. Representative of the “evil” of private equity has been the very successful Lone Star Funds who have come to symbolize all of the bad that is conceivable of private equity. To this day, Lone Star struggles in Korea to liquidate a significant investment while NGOs and other groups seek to prevent Lone Star from taking any profits outside of Korea. This incident has unfortunately dampened the investment environment in Korea and has resulted in a significant decrease in U.S. investments coming to Korea.
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Economic Integration The integration of the U.S. and Korean economies began very early in the 60’s and 70’s by an early reliance in the U.S. on cheap imports from Korea and on Korea’s reliance on financing provided by U.S. financial institutions. This initially started with U.S. imports of garments and then shifted to electronics and other consumer items. It was not unusual to find retail establishments such as K-Mart and other mass marketers in the U.S. with stores filled with Made in Korea labels. As Korea continued to improve, wage levels eroded the competiveness of these products, which migrated to China, but still with the previous Korean owners. U.S. financial firms financed the burgeoning investment by Korean firms in semiconductors, shipbuilding, steel, automobiles and overseas construction. Over the years, Korean products improved in quality and image such that today, Samsung and LG have replaced Sony as the television of choice for U.S. consumers. Hyundai and Kia are making inroads into the U.S. market capturing a large slice of U.S. car sales and opening plants in Alabama and Georgia. Chipmakers have similarly established large facilities in the U.S. and with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”), Korean firms began securing an increasing share of the U.S. market by putting plants in Mexico generating increased sales in the U.S.
Immigrants This integration of the U.S. and Korean economies is also very apparent in the larger cities in the U.S. Korean immigrants to Los Angeles and New York began to have a significant impact on the quality of life in these cities through their hard work and sacrifices, particularly in the inner cities which were deteriorating as suburban flight was leaving the inner city to the very poor with little or no services. Korean immigrants braved the difficult
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conditions and began to invest in small businesses in these inner cities which helped to generate much needed activity and a renewal of hope for the inner city. The Korean immigrants were an example of thrift and hard work to not only other immigrants, but to the original inhabitants, and while some resentment of the Korean profit taking was generated, their enthusiasm and example was also infectious on the residents who were also inspired to work harder and invest in their communities. The Korean laundry, gas station or deli have become fixtures of cities in America and with their success, the Korean operators are now being replaced by newer waves of immigrants as the second generation of Korean immigrants move on to investment banking and other more profitable occupations in the U.S. In addition to immigrants, foreign student populations have also had a positive economic impact across a wide swath of America. The Koreans have the largest population of foreign students in the U.S. following closely behind China and India despite having a population a fraction of either China or India. Korean students have infiltrated both the public and private school system in the U.S., which has contributed to an improvement in the quality of education for U.S. students because of the increased competition. The number of Korean students in America and their tremendous study habits have helped to keep these institutions academically progressing and also kept them financially healthy. It is not unusual to find the Dean’s Roll at most top universities filled with Kims, Lees and
The Koreans have the largest population of foreign students in the U.S. following closely behind China and India despite having a population a fraction of either China or India. 95
Parks. The large number of Korean doctorates and significant population of Korean students studying in the U.S. have created a common bond between Korea and U.S. investors and this large student population has had a tremendous impact in helping Korea understand U.S. culture much better than American understanding Korean culture, which has made economic cooperation much easier for Americans in Korea.
KORUS FTA Both countries now face a tremendous opportunity to further improve the integration and cooperation of their economic activity with the ratification of the Korea U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA). The KORUS FTA is the most significant trade agreement for the U.S. since NAFTA and is clearly a real positive for the Korean economy that will lead to greater prosperity for Korea. The KORUS FTA will eventually be ratified by both countries despite the politics that surround the agreement in an election year. Once the treaty is ratified by the legislatures of both countries, a significant and new chapter of economic cooperation will become possible. Leading financial firms are predicting that within 30 years, the U.S. and Korea will
Kim Jong-hoon, the Minister for Trade, shaking hands with Wendy Cutler, the chief U.S. negotiator for the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement in Seoul.
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be number one and number two on the globe in per capita gross domestic production. This is a dream that most Koreas today can not accept as a probable reality. It can and will occur with the KORUS FTA and we must hope that the legislatures of both countries have the wisdom and maturity to do the right thing for the citizens of their respective countries.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Heading Towards a New Miracle Creation and Glory: In Celebration of 60th Anniversary of Korea
STILL GROWING
T
he Republic of Korea met its 60th anniversary this year. For 60 years, Korea went through a major historical change and
the Koreans who survived the hardship created the term “the miracle of Han River” which drew the world’s attention. Korea as a nation started the “collecting gold” campaign and the people who survived the “banking crisis” drew attention from all over the world. Korea’s past 60 years were years of success as well as development and miracles. The economic development of Korea laid the foundation for China’s economic development. For 36 years since 1910, Korea, under the control of Japan, went through an extreme time of hardship and difficulty. However, the Korean people did not give in to Japan’s bloody oppression and persistently pursued independence. Most particularly, a large part of the independence took place in China and therefore had the support of China. The 3.1 campaign and April of 1919 had a profound effect on enabling Korean governors to establish a temporary government in Shanghai, and this had an important effect on the relationship between Korea and China for three reasons. From a democratic perspective, it was a symbol, a personification, and a standard for Korea’s anti-Japanese independence campaign. From a democratic perspective, this was an attempt by the Koreans to escape the oppression and try to establish a Republic. From a China-Korea relationship perspective, this became evidence of the development of a friendship between Korea and China. The combatitive mind and the accomplishments that the temporary Korean government
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The GNI per person and GDP from 1953 to 2007 increased from U.S.$ 67 to U.S.$ 20,045 (300 times) and U.S.$ 1.3billion to U.S.$ 969.9 billion respectively (750 times).
showed to China for 27 years became the innate basis in
Shi Yuanhua
establishing today’s Korean government and citizens. Furthermore, it became the central political basis for the friendly relationship between Korea and China. Thereafter, Korea experienced hardship in the separation of its nation when it was divided by the U.S. and the Soviet Union and even now, the Korean Peninsula is still divided. However, within 60 years, through the experience of hardship and persistent effort, South Korea developed from a literally nonexistent, indigent, poor country to a leading developed country. It has developed into a country with economic, political, and cultural strengths. Recently, Korean movies, dramas, music and dance centralized as the “Korean wave” have spread throughout the world and reflected a beautiful image of Korea to the world. Based on the statistics, Korea has undergone many historical changes over the past 60 years. Korea now has developed into a lead trader in exporting mobile phones, motor vehicles and chips. The GNI per person and GDP from 1953 to 2007 increased from U.S.$ 67 to U.S.$ 20,045 (300 times) and U.S.$ 1.3billion to U.S.$ 969.9 billion respectively (750 times). Total exports increased from 1948 to 2007 of U.S.$ 20million to 371.4 billion (17,000times) while imports increased from U.S.$
Born in Wuxi city of Jiangsu Province in 1949, Shi Yuanhua is the professor of the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University. He is also the director of Center for Korean Studies at the university. Shi is the author of a number of books on China’s diplomatic history, Korea’s independence movement and other Northeast Asia issues including The Diplomatic History of the Republic of China, Korean Independence movement and China, and etc. He has also published hundreds of papers on academic journals in domestic and abroad.
280 million to U.S.$ 356.8 billion (1,715 times). The rapid economic development in Korea had a profound effect on the quality of life of the Korean citizens. The birth rate decreased from 4.53 in 1970 to 1.26 in 2007. In 1949, 2 people out of every thousand owned a mobile phone, but in 2007, 9 out
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Korean factory in China.
of 10 people owned a mobile phone. The vehicle industry which previously did not focus on motor vehicles, buses, and freight cars developed into focusing on cars. And the 44,000 cars owned in 1974 increased to 15.496 million cars, which reflects one car per household. These statistics reflect the amazing speed that Korea has developed within the last 60 years. The Koreans were able to achieve the nation’s independence and strength through persistence and effort, and as a result, was able to receive people’s praise and respect from all over the world. Currently, Korea is experiencing a historical change which can be described as a “fourth change.” The first was changing from a developing country to a leading developed country; second was changing from an unstable republic to a stable republic; third was changing from a nation that depended on the U.S. to an independent self-standing country; fourth involves changing from a separated country into a united country. The newly elected President Lee Myung-bak is focusing on this issue in search of establishing a “new Han River miracle.” Economically, Korea is in a changing phase from a developing country into a developed country; however, the income per capita is progressing from U.S.$ 20,000 to U.S.$ 40,000. Unlike the previous political, elite, military, and common presidents, President Lee is what can be referred to as a “CEO 100
President.” With a nickname of “Bulldozer” and “The Myth of Salaryman,” President Lee has established policies and goals focused on economic development. President Lee established a “747 policy” which means that each year, the Korean economy would increase by 7% and increase the Korean people’s income to U.S.$ 40,000 within 10 years and make Korea the 7th ranking economic country (currently 11th). By enabling the diffusion ratio of house to 115%, he promised an area of two houses per household. President Lee stated, “The developed country that we dream of is a country that achieves a balance between individual happiness and the nation’s development, a country that achieves a balance between material wealth and innate development, a country that has wealthy citizens, encompassing society, strong nation, and receives respect from all over the world.
I
n order to achieve such goal, President Lee set “low carbon green growth” as the center of the vision and established
strategies in order to establish a miracle on the peninsula, following a Han River miracle. It was an attempt to establish a paradigm for the nation’s development focused on creating more jobs through green technology and energy. In order to avoid the energy crisis and set a foundation for green growth, President Lee promised that he would “raise the remaining 5% energy development rate up to 18% throughout his term and at least to 50% by 2050 therefore creating a country independent of energy. Furthermore, he promised to increase the renewable energy rate from the current 2% to at least 11% by 2030, 20% by 2050. Increase the investment into research and development for greenery technology by twice as much, and ultimately aim to become the leading developed country in the green technology market with 3 quadrillion worth by 2020. In other words, even if the price of oil falls in the future, there is a necessity to separate the country from the oil dependent era.
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P
olitically, Korea is entering a new era of democratic progress after a process of popular election for three generations.
President Lee stated, “If the past 60 years have been a time which involved basic freedom, the next 60 years should be a time to achieve developed freedom, and only then will the establishment of the Republic of Korea be complete.” In order to become a leading developed country, President Lee stated that “first and formerly, the basics need to be observed.” In other words, it is important to ensure that the gaps are filled, which may have been overlooked in the fast-paced development stage. President Lee’s political development goals are as follows: “Global Korea”: President Lee stated that Korea has the resources for a leading country and for the next 10 years will make a “Universal Korea” and a “country that will be active and recognized globally.” Additionally, he stated that policies will be developed to enable easier access into and out of Korea in order to allow global people to work in Korea, and added that although the land is small, the soul of Korea will be large. “A Leading Korea”: President Lee announced to make Korea one of the top leaders. The first step will include law and rules, as the major key to a leading country is in its law and rules, with no exceptions, even to the president. “Balanced Korea” President Lee announced “a change within balance” and emphasized the importance of Korea’s long lost values and the need to re-find them. He also emphasized that providing trust is a society’s capital and there will be a need to raise the trust of the Korean society to the standards of a developed country. Additionally, by focusing on “individual happiness”, he promised to increase the standards of living by developing education, culture, social security, etc, in order to give a chance for people to find the opportunity to develop themselves in Korea. “Highly efficient Korea”: Making an efficient government is 102
one of President Lee’s top priorities. President Lee announced a new re-organization in government to ensure the new government would be efficient by “starting off with a thin organizational structure.” In regards to foreign policy, Korea has been regarded as a co-follower to the U.S., therefore often did not have a separate foreign policy. With the basis of a developing economy and increasing comprehensive national power, Korea has commenced a “autonomous balanced” diplomacy in the inter-state relations and the Korean-U.S. alliance has started to alter from an asymmetric relation to an equal and mutual benefit relation. Korea is currently facing a historic mission of establishing an independent and autonomous state, and therefore President Lee Myung-bak cannot cease or give up his diplomatic efforts to improve upon a new alliance relation in the 21st century, by the means of altering from an asymmetric relation to an equal and mutual benefit relation. Furthermore, between Northeast Asia’s multilateral alliance system and the U.S. based alliance system, Korea is at a neutral stance. And it is discreet by not joining the Korean-U.S. missile defense system and the U.S.-Japan-AustraliaIndia’s Asian-pacific security system within the Northeast Asia international relations. President Lee stated that importance will be added in rebuilding the relationship with the U.S. as well as developing relations with China, Japan, and Russia. President Lee plans to focus on developing Korea and China relations. Last April when President Lee visited China, he was able to raise the relationship of the two countries by
He also emphasized that providing trust is a society’s capital and there will be a need to raise the trust of the Korean society to the standards of a developed country. 103
establishing a strategic conversation system and a strategic cooperative partnership. During the Olympics, President Lee visited China and Hu Jintao, the head of state, paid a visit to Korea. Frequent talks and a joint cooperative relation between the two summits will clarify the strategic cooperative partnership, and through specific measures the likelihood of implementation will increase. In regards to the North-South issue, Korea is currently facing a possible transition from a divided country into a united country. Ensuring smoother North-South relations and ultimately unity is the government’s goal. President Lee has continuously showed kindness and generosity to the North, attended a sixparty meeting in order to communicate with the North more effectively and to discourage the use of the nuclear weapons. Furthermore, he emphasized that disabling nuclear weapons was the main focus and differed from former president Roh by adjusting and researching the North-South economic assistance program, previously established by President Roh’s government. He also addressed the “disarming nuclear weapons, independence, 3000.” This meant that only if the North renounces its nuclear weapons will the large scale economic provision for the North starts, thereby helping the income per person to increase up to U.S.$ 3000, and developing and modernizing highways, railroads, providing access to international financial institutions, etc through provision of U.S.$ 40 billion from development funds.
I
n celebration of the 60th anniversary, President Lee stated that 80 million Koreans in the North and South need to be united.
He went on to state that the future belongs to the dreamer, and that a dream by an individual may only be a dream, but a dream led by 80 million people can be reality. President Lee stated if Korea is united, the blocked roads will be opened, and imported goods from Busan can be transported through rail to Europe,
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Russia, and the Mediterranean. Additionally, he stated that “through the six-party meetings and international help, they will establish a North Korea economic aid program that will start achieving a universal economic society in Korea.� Korea which is currently facing a historical change is facing the challenge of creating a new glory and making new initiatives. The Korean government is facing major responsibilities from various areas. President Lee emphasized that Korea must not lose the current opportunity to become a leading country. A space rocket uses 90% of the fuel when it is launched, and once in space, hardly any fuel is used. President Lee stated that if we exceed the U.S.$ 30,000 line, it will be easier to reach the U.S.$ 40,000 and U.S.$ 50,000 line. Under President Lee’s effective guidance, the Korean citizens will be able to make Korea into a much stronger, more beautiful, and a North-South united country.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Service Sector of Korea in Global Knowledge Economy:
Challenges and Prospects
STILL GROWING
Knowledge Economy and Service Sector: In the modern era, the global economy has strong orientation toward becoming a knowledge economy. Knowledge economy does not mean narrowly high-technologies or Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) only. In a broader sense, it means how effectively an economy is able to tap and use the potential of the growing stock of knowledge and advances in ICTs. At more definitional level, the knowledge economy means a knowledge is created, acquired, transmitted and used more effectively by enterprises, organizations, individuals and communities for greater economic and social development. The new era of knowledge economy substantially depends on favorable economic incentive and institutional regime as well as educational system geared up to encourage creativity, risk taking and innovation. Although, all the sectors of an economy should be enriched, improvised and transformed to play a critical role in the era of knowledge economy, the service sector is more directly linked with the emergence of global knowledge economy. In the new era, the service sector has become the main engine of economic growth across the world. In the age of information revolution, around 67 percent of global output is now driven by the service sector. The countries which have been global leader in manufacturing era have been gradually but decisively orienting their economies towards more competitiveness in the service sector. Average contribution of services sector in the economies of the OECD countries is 73 percent, whereas it is 77 percent in
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The performance of the service sector of Korea in the age of global knowledge economy has not been very satisfactory in comparison to its contribution in economies of other OECD countries.
the case of the U.S.. The service sector has not only emerged as the highest contributor to the GDP of these economies but also a
Sandip Kumar Mishra
source of higher employment generation.
Service Sector in Korea: The performance of service sector of Korea in the age of global knowledge economy has not been very satisfactory in comparison to its contribution in economies of other OECD countries. The service sector in Korean economy contributes only around 55-60 percent in the GDP of the country and unfortunately the growth in the sector has been sluggish in the last decade. The average real growth rate of the manufacturing sector in Korea between 2000 and 2007 has been 8.17 percent, whereas corresponding figure for the service sector has been 4.33 percent. The productivity of the Korean service sector has also been low in comparison to other OECD countries. It has been far more serious problem as service sector productivity of Korea has been around half of the United States or Britain. In some services, Korea’s productivity has been only one-fourth of that of the
Sandip Kumar Mishra is an Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi, India. He specialized in Korean Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and went through Korean language training at the Yonsei University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Fast Eastern Studies, Kyungnam University and Kim Dae-jung Presidential Library and Museum.
OECD countries. The low productivity is a problem which affects not only service sector of Korea but has also been a big challenge for the manufacturing sector. In a report of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and the OECD, Korea’s overall labor productivity per hour stood at $20.4 in 2006, substantially lower than the $50.4 for the U.S. and the OECD average of $38. Basically, Korea was ranked 4th lowest among the 30 member
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OECD countries. However, the labor productivity in the service industries has been much lower. According to the Statistics Research Institute (RSI), “Using labor productivity, value created by one employee during a one-year period, in the manufacturing industry with the baseline set at 100 in 1985, the services sector efficiency stood at 378 in 2005, substantially lower than the U.S. figure of 1,014.” It is important to note that service sector labor productivity of Japan and average of Britain, France and other European countries have been 1,083 and 928, respectively. There are studies saying that the low productivity of the service sector of Koreans might bring down the productivity of the entire economy, a phenomenon which is called ‘Baumol’s disease’. Although there are significant problem areas in the service sector of Korean economy, it contributes enormously to the employment generation in the country. In 2007, around 75.2 percent labor force in Korea was employed in the service sector. Korean IT sector has also been a very important silver line while interrogating status of service sector in Korea. Korea is known to be an IT superpower with high internet penetration and
Samsung Electronics releases Europe’s first terrestrial DMB, or Digital Mobile Broadcasting mobile phones.
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advanced IT technology. More than three quarters of all households in Korea have high-speed Internet connections, which is higher than any other country in the world. As one of the major components of service sector, IT accounts for 15 percent of GDP and 39 percent of total exports. Korea’s strong manufacturing sector is also significant as it provides a solid foundation to Korean efforts to excel in the service sector as well. It provides a strong possibility for a manufacturing-service sector continuum, which would be beneficial for both the sectors.
Challenges and Prospects The Korean development strategy has been so far a spectacular success story of economic growth led by the manufacturing sector and the policy of export-led growth. However, in recent years it is being threatened by increased competition from lowwage economies as well as the fast rise of knowledge as the principal source of competitiveness and economic growth. Korea needs to concentrate on the service sector and try to integrate it with its success in manufacturing sector. Korea needs to focus on improving productivity of its service sector by raising the effectiveness of investment in education, information, infrastructure and R&D. Korea’s investment in these sectors has been one of the highest as percentage of GDP among all the OECD countries. However, the country is not able to get full advantage of it, because of lack of economic incentive and insufficient or misplaced institutional regimes. Korea needs to improve conditions for generation and exploitation of knowledge and information such as intellectual property rights and the regulatory framework about IT to emerge as a key player in the new era of the global economy. Another area which needs attention is to ensure sufficient competition, flexibility and diversity of economic activities which sometimes do not happen because of the dominance of big Chaebols in the country. Korea could also work on more proper allocation of investment in the
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R&D and education and streamline them to make them more productive. The next challenge for the Korean service sector would be its seamless integration with the global system. Although, it is important to think about inviting more trade and foreign investment in Korean service sector, equally important is to go beyond by its integration with the world knowledge pool and services. In this regard, it would be important for Korea to venture into joint research projects with foreign research institutions and universities. The process would also lead to more exchanges of researchers and professors of Korea with the outside world. Korea should also attempt to improve its participation in the international organizations and institutions, especially those which are playing the key roles in setting up rules and norms of international business and trade, such as World Trade Organization (WTO), International Standards Association (ISA) and OECD. In this regard, role of English language should also be underlined along with other foreign languages. The Korean service sector is also marred by its limitation to offer its service products to a wider range of consumers in English. It is important to accept that English language has become the main language of global trade and business in present era. If Korea strives to become an important source of exports in not only manufacturing goods but also services, it is essential to overcome language barriers. The exports of Korean manufactured goods have strong presence in the world market because these exports are less affected by the language skills of producers but a service exporter has to be more careful about the language skills to reach in every nook and corner of the world. The two main pillars for achieving the goal of Dynamic Korea in the service sector are innovation and integration with global knowledge economy in future. On both the fronts, it
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would be important to acquire and improve English and other foreign language skills. Many of the Korean service sector products such as IT, Internet games, movies and dramas are at par or sometimes better than their foreign counterparts, but they have not been able to reach to a wider consumers because they could not be accessed in English. For example, Daum or Naver provide, arguably, better services than Yahoo or Hotmail, but they could not be accessed in English and it becomes their limitation in realizing their vast potential business prospects. Similarly, the English language could also play a vital role in integrating Korean R&D with outside world. Korea which invested 27.3 trillion won or 3 percent of GDP in R&D in 2006 plans to further increase it up to 5 percent of its GDP by 2012. But the R&D of Korea should necessarily have close cooperation, coordination and integration with the world knowledge pool to provide optimum results. The role of state in the Korean economic success has been very pivotal in past and it would again be critical in transforming Korean economy in the new era by strengthening service sector and introducing structural reform required for the manufacturing-service continuum. By unleashing the creative power of markets and ensuring rule of law, transparency, accountability, and a conducive legal and financial system, state can provide better environment for innovation and entrepreneurship in Korea. The first phase of Korean economic success in manufacturing era was led by huge Chaebols but in second phase the key players would be small and medium
At present Korea spends around 14 percent of GDP on education which is relatively quite high. However, there is need to more focused approach emphasizing educational quality, creativity and integration with larger world knowledge pool. 111
Professor Oh Jun-ho of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology with his humanoid robot “Albert Hubo” on ABC’s “Good Morning America”.
enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs are, if not more, equally significant for providing boost to the service sector. These SMEs could complement the large Korean Chaebols and provide them productive innovation and supporting services in the process of Korea diversifying toward a more knowledgebased and service-oriented economy. Although, R&D expenditure in Korea is high, private sector contribution in overall R&D spending is around 75 percent and the government share is merely 23 percent. Since the government share is less in overall R&D, private sectors’ share is monopolized by big business houses Chaebols and SMEs find it very difficult to get benefit from overall R&D spending in the country. To help SMEs, government needs to give them a more flexible bankruptcy law, development of financial infrastructure to support their credit and more importantly have better provision for their venture capital. Around 34 percent of the venture capital industry in Korea 112
is funded by the government and around 10 percent by foreign venture capitals. By having easy access to credit especially by defining collateral while lending them, government could help SMEs to prosper and as in most of the advanced economies of the world, they would play an important role in deepening the process of creation and diversifying of service sector in the country. The service sector in Korea has not only to balance between big business houses and SMEs but also needs to be more inclusive. The nature of knowledge economy makes it more challenging for government to restrict ‘digital divide’ which is more prone to take place when knowledge and information become the key variables for success in business and which could be more easily monopolized by a small section of the country. Furthermore, Korea has to keep the possibility open by its proactive polity that a new kind of entrepreneurship comes out from the all strata of the society by minimizing the digital divide. Korea needs to concentrate on the few other key areas also and should adopt a comprehensive structural reform package on the line of needs of knowledge economy such as flexible, inclusive, transparent and market-driven economy which would ensure support for innovation at the individual as well institutional levels. The new structure of economy would provide better level-playing field to participants without discriminating them on the basis of their size, capital or orientation. Education would also be important in enabling people to venture into more innovative arena of economy. At present Korea spends around 14 percent of GDP on education which is relatively quite high. However, there is need to more focused approach emphasizing educational quality, creativity and integration with larger world knowledge pool. The goal of education should be focused on inculcating innovation and entrepreneurship skill in individuals which would be the main engine of growth of service sector in the country. Moreover the
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reform should be based on better coordination among state, business and society.
Role of Government: Considering the significance of the service sector in the entire economy, Korean government has already taken steps to overcome sluggishness of the sector and to ensure the country’s sustainability in growth and employment. Government has taken various policy measures to promote service sector of economy. The Korean government ventured into the ‘Brain Korea-21’ project to provide a concentrated fund and help a specific center of higher learning to invest in cutting-edge research and improvisation. Korea also started a ‘three-year strategy, to promote knowledge-based economy in the country. The previous government of Korea also began a comprehensive three-phase plans to upgrade competitiveness service sector and there have been some positive assessments of these efforts. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a renowned economist, wrote in 2002 that Korean efforts to become a hub of global knowledge economy has been paying off and “Korea is on its way to become a high-tech service sector economy”. However, improvement in the service sector of Korea has not been satisfactory in terms of its pace and extent. As mentioned in the beginning of the article, it still suffers from low productivity and low competitiveness. The new government in Korea under the leadership of Lee Myung-bak has taken a more fundamental and comprehensive approach to catapult Korean service sector in the age of global knowledge economy. With the establishment of a new ministry by the name of Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Korea has made a serious attempt to have some structural change in the Korean economy by having coordination and integration in steps related to new knowledge economy. It would also facilitate the service sector by making it more business-friendly and open-market oriented. Under the aegis of the Ministry, Korea plans to develop
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It is not a linear process for a country which has been a leader in manufacturing era of economy to overnight transform itself into a service sector giant.
a comprehensive mid-to-long term vision to identify as well as strengthen new engines of economic growth. In the vision, search and support to the next-generation industries and strengthening of the service sector are the two areas which have been rightly highlighted. It is important that SMEs have been recognized by the new government as the backbone of the economy and government has promised to assist entrepreneurs in starting up as well as operating these SMEs. Korea has also been negotiating FTAs with the U.S. and EU and envisioned to have similar FTAs with China, Japan, ASEAN and other emerging economic countries such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. Korea is also working on its financial sector reforms and making efforts to invite investment banking in the country. Korea wants to become a leader in the Bio-Nano-Information (BNI) technologies and government has launched ‘New IT Strategy’ in which 280 billion won would be spent in training of qualified experts in the field, in addition to overall 3.5 trillion won earmarked for the new strategy. In August 2008, the National Science and Technology Committee outlined initiative named ‘577 initiative’. In the initiative, government would spend 5 percent of GDP in R&D from 2008 to 2012 and the fund would be provided to the top seven science and technology areas on priority basis which would result into making Korea one of the seven leaders in the field of science and technology in the world. More specifically, the new administration has disclosed the first phase of its plan to advance the service sector on April 28, 2008 and announce the second and third phases in September and December this year which would be addressing most of the challenges and opportunities of
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the service sector of Korea in the global knowledge economy.
Concluding Remarks The question is not whether Korea can, but rather how Korea would be able to strengthen its position in the global knowledge economy on the basis of reform in the economy to build a more vibrant, competitive and proactive service sector. Korea has done it once and there is no doubt that Korea can do it again by its drive to innovate and move up in the value chain. A sustained Korean endeavor to perform well in the upcoming sectors of the global economy would gradually pull Korea again as one of the leaders of these sectors. Korean service sector has rightly got strong governmental support from the new administration which is committed to improve Korean productivity and competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. However, the improvement of the Korean performance in the service sector of economy would be a process in which not only government initiatives but also strong willingness on the part of business, role of individual and societal supports, all them would be crucial. It is not a linear process for a country which has been a leader in manufacturing era of economy to overnight
Visitors test the LG laptop and PDA mobile phones with WiMAX technology at an LG kiosk.
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transform itself into a service sector giant. However, sustained efforts on the part of state, business, individual and society would definitely make it possible in the case of Korea. Moreover, it is also very much possible for Korea to work on evolving a manufacturing-service
sector
continuum
and
their
complementarities could help each other to evolve to their potential in the new age of global economy.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Seoul in the 1970s
A CHANGING SOCIETY
S
everal years ago I had an occasion to visit North Korea for the first time. I entered the country from China, crossing the
Tuman River, and spent a couple of days in the city of Rajin, where the North Koreans were trying at that time to develop an international free-trade zone. I have many indelible memories of that trip, but one of the things that initially struck me was how similar in many ways the country seemed to South Korea in the late 1960s and 1970s, when I had lived in Seoul. The poverty in both cases was palpable, and there was a certain shabby, gray, improvised quality to the dress of the people and architecture, which often looked broken down or half-finished. Even though Seoul was of course the capital of the South and a far more cosmopolitan place than Rajin, in the 1960s and 1970s many parts of it were even dirtier and more dilapidated than anything I later saw in that northern city. Indeed, Seoul in the late 1960s still had the feeling of a city that was trying to recover from the ravages of the devastating war that had ended in 1953. Jeeps left over from the war were in fact still being used for private transportation, and beggars, some with maimed or missing limbs, visible victims of the war, were not uncommon sights on the streets in those days. Despite such similarities, the two places were actually very different. In the north the economic crises of the 1990s had taken their toll, and Rajin was a grim, almost somnolent city. The local factories were for the most part closed, and there was little human activity of any kind, economic or otherwise. In the center of town a motley collection of people, mainly old men and
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Even though Seoul was of course the capital of the South and a far more cosmopolitan place than Rajin, in the 1960s and 1970s many parts of it were even dirtier and more dilapidated than anything I later saw in that northern city.
soldiers apparently on leave, sat quietly and expressionless on
Carter J. Eckert
benches warming themselves in the spring sun. Off to the side a makeshift (and technically illegal) market that had sprung up in the wake of economic problems and failures in the official food distribution system seemed relatively subdued as markets go. One had the sense of a people with little to look forward to and little enthusiasm or energy to tackle even the routine aspects of daily life. The general impoverishment appeared deadening and hopeless, a depressing, pitiful sight to behold. Seoul in the 1960s and 1970s also had a decidedly impoverished look. And of course the whole country, especially after 1972 and the establishment of the Yusin state, toiled under the weight of a strict, authoritarian government that brooked little political dissent. But the poverty of the south never seemed deadening or hopeless. Quite the opposite. For the vast majority of the people who were not directly engaged in the political struggles of the period, the 1960s and 1970s offered new opportunities and enticements. Hope and change were in the air. Except from 4 a.m. to midnight, when a security curfew was in effect, Seoul was a dynamic, bustling city, its streets literally teeming with people actively pursuing their interests and pleasures. Even after the midnight curfew, Seoul’s nightlife often continued behind shuttered storefronts in numerous (and illegal)
Carter J. Eckert is Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean history at Harvard University. For eleven years, from 1993 to 2004, Eckert served as the director of the Korea Institute at Harvard. Eckert is the author of a number of books and articles, including Offspring of Empire: The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism , which received the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association, as well as the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is also a co-author of Korea Old and New: A History, a widelyused university textbook on Korean history.
bars and restaurants. The fact is that Seoul, as well as the rest of South Korea, was undergoing a profound transformation in the 1970s. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the country was
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experiencing the most far-reaching socioeconomic transformation in its long history, and one of the greatest socioeconomic changes in the history of the world itself. The contours and statistics of this great transformation have been studied by many scholars and are well known. Here in what follows I will only briefly note the impact of some of these changes on the landscape and everyday life of the capital city, as I personally experienced them between 1969 and 1977. The look of Seoul in the 1960s and 1970s was actually very different from what it is today. Before the late 1970s, Seoul’s everyday life was concentrated north of the Han River. The area we know as Gangnam today was to a great extent still countryside, composed largely of fields and paddies. The main business district was centered in Mugyodong, with many bars and restaurants catering to the business community running along the Cheonggyecheon street, where today the beautifully restored Cheonggye stream begins its eastward flow. Groups of students from the major universities flocked to Jongno 2-ga in the evenings, where they drank makkeolli at long, low tables and sang to the rhythmic tapping of chopsticks. Often short of
Seoul in the 1970s.
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money to pay the bill, one of the students in the group invariably left his watch, a prized possession in those days, with the manager of the drinking establishment, to be reclaimed at a later date when he could return with the necessary cash. Myeong dong, as it had been for decades reaching back even into the colonial era, was the main gathering place for intellectuals and artists of many stripes, as well as for the city’s most sophisticated residents. Here, spreading out in all directions from what was then the National Theatre, one could trace a fascinating network of small streets, in some cases barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. On these streets one found a wide assortment of small shops, restaurants, and watering holes, including the second-floor OB Cabin, where virtually all the popular singers of that day performed live at one time or another. Today, with the city having expanded not only south of the river but virtually all the way to the port of Incheon, it is hard to grasp how small and compact the city of the early 1970s was. All the areas mentioned above are roughly contiguous with each other, and one could without too much effort traverse the whole center of the city in a single long walk. Only the few and the wealthy had private cars, and there were as yet no subways, so for longer distances within the city most people relied on the bus system or shared taxis with others going in roughly the same direction (hapseong). Getting from one place to another, especially by bus, could be a daunting and messy business. The various buses tended to arrive in waves, all belching out large gusts of polluting exhaust fumes that were impossible to avoid inhaling, but that was only the first hurdle faced by would-be passengers. Bus and taxi queues did not exist, and the appearance of a bus or taxi often unleashed a stampede of social Darwinian proportions, as everyone rushed and struggled to board at the same time. Once the harried and exhausted young bus girls who were
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in those days responsible for collecting the fares finally managed to pull the doors shut and the bus took off, one often found oneself standing in an overstuffed space, holding on for dear life to the hand-straps hanging from the ceiling or even on to other nearby passengers, as the bus rattled and shook its way to the next stop at breakneck speed. One finally tumbled out of the bus at one’s destination feeling squeezed, disheveled and lucky to have survived. During the summer rainy season bus rides became even more of a challenge. As one moved away from the center of the city, many streets in those days were still unpaved, and both buses and passengers had to contend not only with pounding rains but with streets that were thick with mud. Considering the ordeal that a bus ride entailed in those years, it is remarkable how matter-offactly, even good-naturedly, people accepted it as a regular part of everyday urban life, and how, even given all the hassle and chaotic competition for a seat, people often showed great kindness and generosity to fellow passengers who were too old or too weak to stand, or who needed assistance of some kind.
U
npaved streets were not a problem in the city’s center, but lighting was another matter. Seoul in the 1970s was still a
relatively dark city at night. To conserve electricity, the larger office buildings turned off most of their lights at night, and neon signs were scarce. On the outer margins of the city, as in much of the deep countryside, one found places with virtually no lights at all, where candles were still used in place of electricity. Only when a North Korean Red Cross delegation made a historic visit to Seoul in the early 1970s were all the lights of the city, including all the central office buildings, left on at night as part of an official strategy to impress the North Koreans with the South’s high level of economic development. Even though the lighting was contrived and temporary, at the time it was astonishing to see the city so brightly lit. Today, of course, even
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This monochromatic landscape was reinforced by the ubiquitous black suits of the city’s politicians and professional classes, the black uniforms worn by middle- and high-school students, and the chauffeured black sedans used by the city’s elite.
that level of urban brightness would pale in comparison to the glittering night lights of contemporary Seoul. There are many other aspects of Seoul in the 1970s that one might cite to highlight the great transformation of the city that has since taken place. Seoul in those days, like the country as a whole, had few trees and green areas to clean the air and add color to what was essentially a black and grey city. This monochromatic landscape was reinforced by the ubiquitous black suits of the city’s politicians and professional classes, the black uniforms worn by middle- and high-school students, and the chauffeured black sedans used by the city’s elite. It was also reinforced by the pervasive militarism of the time, which was punctuated by periodic air-raid drills and anti-communist banners strung across the streets, and exemplified by the ubiquitous presence of uniformed soldiers on duty or on leave in the streets and students in military drill clothes. Women were by no means absent from the city scene, but their roles were far more limited than today, and relations between the sexes were also considerably more formal and restricted. The easy familiarity, displays of affection, and public dating one sees on the streets of Seoul today between young men and women was the exception, not the rule. Seoul was then very much a city of men, and a city for the benefit and pleasure of men, with women remaining largely in the background in subordinate or service roles of one kind or another. Foreigners were even more difficult to find than women on the streets of Seoul in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like today,
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the large American military presence at Yongsan was seldom seen or felt in the city’s center, and there were at that time still few foreign tourists or businessmen coming into South Korea on a regular basis. Japanese visitors, so common a sight today, were particularly rare because of the strained relations that existed between the two countries at that time. I remember once seeing in the early 1970s a Japanese businessmen emerge from his hotel in traditional Japanese dress for an evening stroll in Myeongdong. Almost immediately an unfriendly crowd began to gather around him, and he quickly scooted back inside his hotel, not to appear again. In 1970 the old colonial Chosun Hotel, originally opened in 1914, was renovated and re-opened as Seoul’s first international luxury hotel. Its opening was a grand affair, presided over by President Park Chung Hee and First Lady Yuk Young-soo, and it was a watershed event with respect to South Korea’s growing internationalization. At the time, however, the new Chosun stood out from its humble surroundings like an alien spacecraft that had happened to land in the middle of Seoul, and the renovation project itself had required strong government support even to get off the ground. In retrospect, of course, the Chosun can now be seen as one of the earliest symbols of a future South Korea that would come to be one of major powerhouses of the world economy and a magnet for international corporations.
I
nside the Chosun Hotel in 1970 one found many of the goods and conveniences of modern life that were for the most part
still not available to most South Koreans, including such things as telephones, air-conditioning, refrigerators, music systems, and private baths. Public baths in those days, for example, were for most Seoulites a necessity, not the optional and luxurious health-spas they are today, and they also provided beginning jobs for poor and relatively uneducated young Koreans from the countryside seeking employment in the capital. Despite their
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deep love for music, few South Koreans could also in those days afford to pay for the technology to listen to music in their homes. Like the public baths, which served an important need in the general populace, public tearooms, often specializing in certain types of music, including Western classical music, provided a place where Koreans, for the price of a cup of coffee or tea, could listen to and request their favorite pieces of music for an hour, or, if they chose, for the whole day. Korean-made commodities were only just starting to appear in stores, and still had none of the appeal or status for Korean consumers that foreign-made products (especially American or Japanese) held. American goods that had found their way from the Yongsan army exchange (PX) into the Korean black market were much in demand, especially among city’s elite, and one could find numerous places throughout the city, including the great markets of Namdaemun and Dongdaemun and the side alleys of Myeongdong, where such items could be purchased at a premium from very savvy, grandmother-like ladies, who invariably drove a hard bargain. Even today on certain side streets one can occasionally still encounter these entrepreneurial grandmothers selling their PX wares, including on one of the same streets in Myeongdong where they had flourished in the 1970s. But in a world where South Korea ranks as the 12th largest economy, such scenes today seem little more than quaint residues of a bygone era. It is impossible to pinpoint a precise moment of change in the 1970s that marked the development of what we know today as the modern, contemporary city of Seoul. The changes were all too numerous, swift, and simultaneous. But the movement in population from the center of the city to the areas south of the Han river in the mid-late 1970s seems in retrospect a clear harbinger of things to come. The development of Gangnam coincided with the growth not only of the economy per se but also of a new, increasingly affluent middle class that would, a
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decade later, also help transform the authoritarian political landscape and secure South Korean democracy. Some of the first new middle-class apartment complexes to arise were on the islet of Yeouido in the middle of the Han River, and living there in the 1970s one could see before one’s eyes the socioeconomic transformation that was taking place. As the apartment complexes developed and the apartments began to fill rapidly with more and more Koreanmade goods and appliances, so too did new communities develop with their own shops and stores, including what were Seoul’s first supermarkets. For the first time one began to see large numbers of children who could be described as chubby, and leisure activities and fads such as bicycling, swimming, and bowling began to proliferate in quick succession within the new communities. By the time I returned to the United States in 1977, the new communities were spreading rapidly south of the river, and their residents were just beginning to acquire their own Korean-made Hyundai cars for personal use.
T
he changes of course have continued, not only in the Gangnam area but in the old center of the city as well.
Occasionally on trips back to Seoul, I find myself in the Chinese restaurant on the top floor of the Chosun Hotel, whose great glass windows look out across the city, as they did in the 1970s. But the view before me is now utterly different. The basic
Like the public baths, which served an important need in the general populace, public tearooms, often specializing in certain types of music, including Western classical music, provided a place where Koreans, for the price of a cup of coffee or tea, could listen to and request their favorite pieces of music for an hour, or, if they chose, for the whole day. 126
gridlines of the old city are still there, marked by the ancient palaces and old neighborhoods. But the skyline has been totally altered by gleaming towers of steel and glass, and the stark ambience of the 1970s city has been softened by affluence, colors, greenery, and a more open political atmosphere. The hotel itself, which once dominated the landscape around it, now seems almost quietly tucked away, one of countless great hotels and buildings in the city. Looking out the windows, I am able for a fleeting moment to recapture in my mind’s eye the cityscape I remember from the 1970s, but it quickly dissolves before the overwhelming reality of the present. I feel humbled by the power of time, but also grateful to be able to feel that power and to be able to chronicle it as a historian of this remarkable country.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
New Country, New Lives:
How Life Has Changed for Koreans in the Past Sixty Years
A CHANGING SOCIETY
O
ne day in the early autumn of 1945, in the uncertain period between the end of World War Two and the formal
establishment of North and South Korea as separate countries, 24-year-old Lee Kie-hong, then unemployed, was strolling past Ewha Girl’s High School, near the modern-day location of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, when someone called out to him. “Hey, man. “Do you speak English?” An American soldier billeted at the school had noticed the English-language tabloid under his arm. “Yes,” he said. “I can speak English.” Actually, he could read English but had never experienced conversation with a native speaker. A group of ten young soldiers surrounded him and excitedly peppered him with questions. “What is your name?” one asked. “Where do you come from?” said another. “How come you speak English?” A brilliant student from a poor Cholla village, Lee had studied English at a prestigious school in Hiroshima. “Hiroshima? Wow! How did you escape the atomic bomb?” Towards the end of the war, Lee and his fellow students were doing more work in a nearby munitions plant than in the classroom. Lee had sneaked away to avoid air raids, protected from police scrutiny by the prestige that went with his school ID. He didn’t know an atomic bomb had landed on the city. A few days later, his limited conversational ability notwithstanding, Lee’s new friends arranged for him to be hired as an interpreter. He became the only Korean on the personal
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“Just think of it,” he said, reflecting decades later, in the summer of 2008, on the chance encounter with American GIs. “There I was walking down the street and I step unexpectedly into an extraordinary life.”
staff of the American military governor. During the power
Michael Breen
transfer conferences, he relayed a request from the departing Japanese administrators for safe passage for hundreds of thousands of Japanese, which was granted. He later went on to study in the United States and returned to Seoul to work in government, where he became the planning director responsible for distributing U.S. aid and later the author of Korea’s First FiveYear Plan. In May 1961, when the military staged a takeover, he was in Washington preparing a state visit for the ousted Prime Minister, John M. Chang. In a White House meeting with President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, Lee asked if the U.S. could use troops to stop the coup. Bundy said they could not act without a formal request from the Korean government. With the premier hiding in a convent and his cabinet scattered, no such appeal came. Lee and a colleague kept this conversation secret when they returned to Korea to find that they were among a handful of bureaucrats the new junta considered competent enough to retain their jobs. His experience reflected the uncertainty of the time sixty years ago when the Republic of Korea was founded. “Just think of it,” he said, reflecting decades later, in the summer of 2008, on the
Michael Breen is the Chairman of Insight Communications, a PR consulting firm which he founded in Seoul in 2005. He first came to Korea in 1982 as a foreign correspondent. He was the Seoul correspondent for The Washington Times for eight years, and for The Guardian for four years. He left journalism to start consulting on North Korea and later went into in public relations. He is the author of The Koreans (St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader (John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
chance encounter with American GIs. “There I was walking down the street and I step unexpectedly into an extraordinary life.” With Japanese no longer useful, the rare facility with English helped Lee and others like him. But fortune also shone on the uneducated, like Chung Ju-young, a peasant boy who went on to found the nation-building Hyundai Group. Other business
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people were handed companies owned by departing Japanese. For the 20 million Koreans in the South, including several millions recently returned from overseas exile or forced labor, luck went both ways in such unstable times. Many young Koreans, both those who had succeeded in Japanese schooling and others whose anti-Japanese parents had either refused or been too poor to send them to school, were drawn to leftist ideas and suffered when the anti-communist right took power. Those who had benefitted during Japanese rule such as business people and bureaucrats, both the diligent who sought to get on and the less scrupulous such as police and others who preyed on Koreans, for example, torturing men suspected of dissent, and rounding up girls for Japanese military brothels, risked being branded as collaborators. Such was the uncertainty that permeated every household about the precarious situation of the country and their own circumstances. We may imagine elderly Koreans at that time, conducting a similar exercise as the one we are doing and looking back to 1888 and their youth. He would have remembered a different Korea, one less developed
for Korea by the end of the
Japanese rule would have appeared in many regards as modern and industrialized
and wobbling towards the 20th century, but
socially more stable.
D
espite centuries of buffeting between its larger neighbors, Koreans had remained a distinct people. In part they
remained so because of language, theirs, with its roots in the Altaic linguistic family of inner Asia, differing from those of their neighbors. It was rendered in Chinese characters, but its spoken form was unintelligible to Chinese and Japanese. For centuries, a rigid caste system headed by scholarly gentlemen schooled in Confucian ethics, who considered keeping up appearances more important than actual work, had stifled the populace. Education provided the only way out from the middle to upper class in the
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A panoramic view of the area around the Han River.
form of the government service examination. Each family carefully preserved its genealogical chart, which traced male offspring only, hence the preference for boys. The upper class yangban read books on ethics and fancied themselves as artists, amateur, mind you, because being a professional musician, dancer or painter was the job of lower class “performers.� Poetry was also important. If yours was bad, your chances of becoming a bureaucrat were almost nil. Some local literature had protest themes as did some pansori balladry, Korea’s version of the blues. The Confucian principles of righteousness, service to the king, filial piety, deference to elders and social superiors, and benevolence to those younger and inferior underscored social behavior in Korean society. The people believed that the king ruled through the mandate of heaven. Instability in the form of political upheaval and natural disasters suggested that heaven was unhappy. With modern science and medicine yet to reach Korean shores, the people were also suspicious and employed peculiar remedies for illness. Many elements in this thumbnail description of Korea over a century ago years may resonate with outsiders who are
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familiar with Koreans today. But if these patterns remain, they do so in moral echoes. For example, modern Koreans still have excessive expectation of leadership and disruption casts a moral shadow. In 1995, when a bridge over the Han River and a luxurious department store collapsed within weeks of each other, killing hundreds, then-President Kim Young-sam made a television apology for his “moral failings.” Also, Koreans remain hierarchical. They have an instinct for someone’s social position relative to their own because the language requires it. They use different verb forms and even nouns depending whether the person is above or below. But in substance, change has been enormous. Through the Japanese rule, there was a social revolution. The caste system was overturned, with butchers, previously untouchable, now, for example, able to send their children to school. The royal family and aristocracy, who had stood by limp-wristed as the country was signed over to foreign control, lost their claim to superiority. People looked to religious figures, and in particular to Christians for leadership. As the Americans withdrew after the established of the Republic, the prospects for South Koreans looked bleak. Per capita income in 1948 was $86, on a par with Sudan. In his book Troubled Tiger about Korean development, author Mark Clifford cites this assessment by a U.S. military official: “There are virtually no Koreans with the technical training and experience required to take advantage of Korea’s resources and effect an improvement over its rice-economy status.” He reckoned the
Despite centuries of buffeting between its larger neighbors, Koreans had remained a distinct people. In part they remained so because of language, theirs, with its roots in the Altaic linguistic family of inner Asia, differing from those of their neighbors. 132
country would become a “bull-cart economy” and that the nonfarming half of the population would face famine. Then came war and things got much worse. The new South Korean army often fought courageously, but it suffered from inexperience and corruption. Cadets at the military academy, poor boys destined for a bright future, were bussed to the front and ordered by incompetent senior officers to rush at hills. Their ranks were decimated within days, depriving the army of hundreds of young officers.
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he war immediately brought the Americans back, supported by a number of other non-communist nations fighting under
the flag of the United Nations Command. These forces saved South Korea. Refugees poured south and didn’t stop until they reached Busan, where they piled into squalid refugee camps and built shacks on the hillsides with stones and flattened American army oil drums. But amid chaos, South Koreans, whose country at one point was reduced to greater Busan, recovered their dignity. Schools started quickly and commerce began from the streets. Perhaps the most telling symbol of their hopeful dependence was the construction along the airport road in Busan of hoardings to conceal the squalor of the refugee camps from the view of visiting dignitaries. Officials didn’t want to make visiting foreigners, who held the key to their survival, feel sick. As many as three million North Koreans and 500,000 South Koreans are believed to have died from causes related to the war. In addition, there were 900,000 Chinese dead and wounded. Over 33,000 Americans, 1,000 British and 4,000 other nationalities were killed. According to South Korean figures, 129,000 civilians were killed during the North Korean occupation of the South, 84,000 kidnapped, and 200,000 press-ganged into the northern military. (It is possible that some of these people went voluntarily, but their families may believe, or have found it wiser to assume, that they were unwilling.) The economies of
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both sides were pulverized. The North was flattened by U.S. bombing and industry everywhere was wrecked. Of those who survived in South Korea, some five million were homeless, 300,000 women were widowed, 100,000 children orphaned, millions of families separated. One million North Korean refugees added to the pressure. Tens of thousands of schools and other buildings were destroyed. Damage was assessed at $3 billion which in 1953 was a considerable sum. Over forty percent of manufacturing facilities and fifty percent of mines had been damaged or destroyed. Inflation was rampant. Taking 1947 as the base of one hundred, the wholesale price index grew from 334 in 1950 to 5,951 in 1953. The retail price index similarly rose from 331 in 1950 to 4,329 in 1953.
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mid the violence of the civil war and the reprisals as one side and then the other took control, any lingering ideas of
Korean brotherhood disappeared. Even today, most Koreans who experienced the war are firm in their hatred of the other side. Life for most Koreans in the 1950s was a struggle for survival. “Have you eaten rice?� became the common greeting. An increasing number of people wore western suits, but many still wore traditional white cotton clothes. The country was sustained by U.S. economic aid. Over two million tons of wheat and barley each year helped save Koreans from starvation and cotton, sugar, and wool boosted manufacturing industries sufficiently to supply consumer goods, laying a foundation for the rapid industrialization throughout the 1970s. The government muddled through. Its leaders focused on how to raise funds for the ruling party, and its bureaucrats, whose salaries covered about 20 percent of basic living expenses, looked for handouts and the next meal. The Americans came to rely on a small group of officials from wealthy families who did not worry about their salaries and resisted using their positions to enrich themselves. They tried to
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People enjoy the slopes of “High 1” Resort in Gangwondo Province.
interest colleagues and ministers in forward-looking plans, but were met with cynicism
it’s hard to consider a growth plan
for beyond next week when you’re worried where dinner is going to come from
until U.S. officials warned that aid might be
reduced if there was no evidence of long-term planning. In 1957, four cabinet members jointly presented the idea of a Five-Year Plan to President Syngman Rhee. After listening for an hour, the crusty old independence activist said, “You ministers are talking about five-year plans. That sounds like Stalin’s idea.” From then, the concept was taboo. If leadership held the country back, people still managed to move forward. By the end of the 1950s, the measure of progress was that people only went seriously hungry in the late spring before the barley harvest. Then, in 1960, the Rhee government collapsed in the face of protests following a rigged election. The country was ruled for nine months by a democratic government headed by Prime Minister John M. Chang. But this administration lacked real strength and was replaced in May 1961 by the military regime of Park Chung Hee, an army general. Park and his fellow coupmakers mostly came from peasant backgrounds. They were an unusual group of men who had been trained as young officers in
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Of those who survived in South Korea, some five million were homeless, 300,000 women were widowed, 100,000 children orphaned, millions of families separated. One million North Korean refugees added to the pressure.
the Japanese military. Theirs was in some regards a Marxist outlook. Indeed, as Park Chung Hee’s brother had been executed as a communist, the U.S. government first feared that there had been a communist coup in Korea. As nationalistic Koreans, they had a vision of a strong military-led country in which business and labor served the interests of the state. They were suspicious of capitalism and of the rich, and contemptuous of civilian politicians. On taking power, Park passed a law that allowed him to effectively punish anyone who had become rich since the end of the war. A few days later, the chairman of the Samsung Group, Lee Byung-chul, who Park regarded as the country’s leading businessmen, announced he was donating his wealth to the government. Other business figures followed suit. Over 4,000 alleged criminals were rounded up by the military and under a new morality campaign alleged smugglers of banned items such as foreign cigarettes and coffee. A short while later, Park unveiled the country’s First Five-Year Plan. Thus Koreans were ushered into a new era, one in which, they were made to sacrifice and suffer. But such was the promise of development that, if they resisted without good moral cause, such as that provided by religion or political dissent, they risked guilt and social condemnation, for the prevailing ethic was that their blood, sweat and tears was in the service, not of an authoritarian regime, but of nation-building. They also risked punishment and failure. The executive branch was able to wreck or take over businesses whose leaders upset it and manipulate the media and judiciary to ruin careers and lives.
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South Korea’s vigorous anti-communism was instilled through education and reinforced by propaganda and information control and a total ban on all Marxist literature or study. The irony is that its own growth was centrally controlled and very socialist in nature. At this time per capita income was still the same as the Sudan and behind India and Pakistan. The homeless still slept in the streets, beggars still operated, and people starved to death each spring. Most vehicles on the street were official cars, military jeeps and delivery trucks. Only a handful of rich people had private cars. Few houses had running water and electricity.
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hat is took a hard nut like Park, cracking the whip, to kickstart economic growth is not surprising. It is anyone’s guess
where the republic would be today without his type of leadership. But it is clear that the dramatic growth that took place, and with it the transformation in the lives and experience of Koreans, would not have happened at that time without such a strongman directing it. Viewed close up, the story of this development was not one of Japanese-style decisions based on consensus. Rather it was one of struggle
both within and
between the various key sectors of society. If the business people battled among themselves, they also battled with the bureaucrats, and so on. Such is the fractious nature of Koreans that such battles still seem to be a part of the fabric today. It no longer takes a strongman to pull everybody together in a common endeavor. As society becomes more sophisticated, law plays an ever more important role. But that fractiousness and mistrust remains. But, in another irony, this quality lies behind the vibrancy of modern Korea democracy. Already, in just five democratic presidential elections in the last twenty years, oppositionists have won twice. Since the war, Koreans have moved off the farms and become city dwellers. During the war, the main cities swelled
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with the influx of refugees from North Korea. These new South Koreans had come with nothing and started completely anew. Many worked in markets. Seoul’s Dongdaemun Market, for example, was dominated by North Koreans. From the start of Park’s rule, as manufacturing industries grew, people moved into the cities looking for jobs and to attend colleges, leaving their parents in the villages and their older brothers to manage the farms. In many ways, they brought the ways of the village with them, giving many city neighborhoods a rural feel. People sold their wares on the pavement. They wandered across the roads without a thought for traffic. The accident rate was predictably high. As indication of the level of education, the government ran advertisements teaching housewives to turn off taps after they had finished washing vegetables. Meanwhile, most people, with the exception of democratic activists, appear to have accepted the course the country was taking. It was a tough approach to rapid economic development with the objective being to build up a strong industrial base so that the country may defend itself against North Korea. The objective, we should note, was not the happiness of the citizenry. South Koreans would have to wait for the 20th century before the country began to make that subtle shift. Under Park, his successor Chun Doo Hwan(1981-88), and even the first democratically elected presidents from 1988 onwards, improvement in the lives of the citizenry, both material and in terms of rights, were, one could argue, a by-product, rather than the purpose of Korea’s growth policies. But the citizenry recognized the benefits of growth. Organizations that could have criticized and pressured government tended to fall into line. Media, for example, took a top-down approach to their readers, seeing their role as to educate rather than reflect their views. The first consumer groups, which grew out of women’s organizations, did not focus on the variety, safety, quality and price of products, but rather on
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perceived national interest, promoting, for example, resistance to foreign products in order to support Korean companies.
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he dislocation caused by the migration into cities and by the rapid disappearance of old ways made Koreans open to new
communities and sources of comfort. There was organization down to the block level and even today in apartment complexes, there are annual elections to choose block leaders. Now, of course, rather than delivering policy from on high, their role is to keep their constituents happy by coming up with better ways to dispose of garbage and how to lobby to get an ATM machine in the local supermarket. Announcements are frequently made through the speakers in each apartment, a level of intrusion that most citizens appear to take for granted. But the dislocation gap was primarily filled by the country’s Protestant churches who stepped into this gap with extraordinary zeal. Wherever churches operated, in rented floors of commercial buildings, in makeshift premises, and in converted homes, they placed a cross on the roof that was lit up in red at night, creating vibrant evidence in the night-time cityscape of their growing influence. As apartment complexes spread across cities, so churchgoers would proudly put stickers on their doors of their respective churches. The founding pastor of the Full
Students of L’Ecole de Seoul participate in a parade in an assortment of masks and costumes.
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Gospel Church, on Yeouido Islet in Seoul decided against creating new churches in neighborhoods, preferring instead to expand his one church and hold services through the day on Sunday to accommodate the growing congregation. The numbers swelled in home groups, mostly composed of housewives, who met once a week to study a Bible text and pray for sick members and for their husbands’ promotions. When the numbers approached twenty, a cell split into two. In the days before most Seoulites had their own cars, cell groups would buy their own van and, on Sundays, an army of vans would deliver group members to the church which was eventually rebuilt to resemble an indoor stadium. By the time it reached half a million members, the church was boasting the largest single congregation in the history of Christendom.
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he other side of this story, the emptying out of the countryside, would have enormous implications for the
villages and farms of Korea, where for centuries people had developed their values and work habits. Extended families often lived in the same village. Each had its small school where children were taught Confucian ethics. The patterns of bursts of activity at planting and harvest and periods of inactivity, when the men drank and gambled, as well as the joyous moments of group activity and the willingness to be told what to do, such as when everyone piled in to re-thatch one family’s roof. Such patterns, if you look, remain with Koreans today. Consider the statistics. In 1960, some 63 percent of Koreans lived in the countryside with 28 percent in cities and 9 percent in towns. By the end of the decade, that combined number in cities and towns was already 50 percent. By 2005, only 10.2 percent of the population remained in the villages. But there was concern at the time that while the country remained committed to industrialization, it was losing its traditions. But, if there is a sentimental concern for the farmer (expressed in
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The first consumer groups, which grew out of women’s organizations, did not focus on the variety, safety, quality and price of products, but rather on perceived national interest, promoting, for example, resistance to foreign products in order to support Korean companies.
opposition to foreign agricultural imports even if it does mean Koreans pay high prices for their food), there was no romance about rural life in the hearts of them men driving the economic miracle. Indeed, it was because they knew the reality of the farmer’s lot, that the new leadership was bent on improving it. Park Chung Hee created the Saemaul (New Village) Movement to modernize agriculture and raise rural living standards through a combination of self-help projects and government funding. This program began with a cement surplus in 1970. Park ordered that every village be given 335 free bags. The following year, villages which were deemed to have used them well (about half), were given another five hundred bags and a ton of steel. The biggest visible change in the countryside, and indeed in the cities, was the removal of the traditional thatched roofs. Although they kept homes cool in summer and warm in winter, Park considered them a symbol of backwardness. He ordered them replaced with corrugated metal, and later with tiles. This coercive program
officials would forcibly remove the roofs
from the homes of people who resisted
changed the face of
Korea forever, and to date there has been almost zero interest in reviving it. Today the villages of Korea are going through a new type of revolution, one that challenges the historical homogeneity of Koreans and their view of the significance of ethnicity. Young bachelors and not-so-young bachelors have found in recent years that women were not enthusiastic about a life on the farm. In
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search of brides, farmers have turned to China and southeast Asia with the result that now one in eight marriages is international. The change which economic development has wrought in the lives of Koreans is truly remarkable. Koreans are healthier than ever before in their history. If a Korean from sixty years ago stepped into a modern apartment, she would not know what most of the everyday items were for, let alone how to use them. Baby strollers have replaced the old blankets mothers used to carry their babies. Koreans once slept on mattresses on the floor. Now most have beds. Even the kitchen sink would be a novelty, having made its appearance for ordinary Koreans in the ‘60s. “Where’s the kimchi?” she might ask. It’s now stored in special freezers, rather than in the old earthenware pots buried in the frozen ground. The biggest surprises would come in the bathroom. In the first wave of modernization, if you bathed at home you did so in a bathroom with walls and floor tiled in porcelain, which had various sized bowls, some for washing clothes, a tap and a shower attachment or hose. For that reason, many people went to wash in communal bathhouses. Now many apartments have two bathrooms, one with a bath and the other with a shower cubicle. Most homes now also have sit-down toilets, a Western import that was once so foreign to Koreans that they would sometimes climb up on the seat and squat over the bowl. The diet has also changed. Many people, especially the young, opt for cereal and toast for breakfast instead of rice and kimchi. A varied diet means that people are much taller than they used to be. Parents have full wardrobes, separately his and hers. Even in the ‘80s, Korean men would wear work suits if they went out with their family on Sunday because it was all they had. Now they’re in fashionable-length shorts and sandals and the suits are for work only. Where once their grandparents were concerned with the
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next meal, modern Koreans are concerned with wellbeing, looking at ways to quit smoking, exercise more, and eat what is good for them. At the same time, they are still heavy social drinkers, with the middle class having moved on from beer and the local liquor, soju, to Chilean, Australian and French wine. The lifestyle has moved in the span of two generations from pre- to post-industrialization with all the anxieties and concerns, once buried, ignored, or non-existent that such change entails. In acknowledging the 60th birthday of a country like South Korea, it is appropriate to draw attention most of all to its people. This is not a country that prided itself on ideology or system. It was not guided by a Constitution created by Founding Fathers. Nor was it able to depend on oil, gold, or sheer size. In fact, the country is small, over-crowded and devoid of resources. The acknowledgement, from today’s Koreans and from outside observers, must be to those hard-working, badgered people whose dreams and loyalties, and whose sweat and tears drove Korea’s economic growth in the Park era and its democratic development in later years. In the long history of the Korean people, they are the greatest generation, and in the short history of the Republic of Korea, their country’s most magnificent resource. Throughout their working lives, among the burdens they faced was insecurity about their country and their own worth. This was variously expressed in nationalistic outbursts, which still occur, and in withdrawal and self-criticism. It is something that is hard to capture and define, but it is something that young Koreans do not feel. They stand on the willing shoulders of the growth generation and, for that reason alone, are able to look the world in the face and say with pride, “I am a Korean.”
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Teaching the World:
Korean Education Becomes Global Education
EDUCATION, CULTURE AND THE ARTS
Introduction: For the first fifty years of its existence, the Republic of Korea was in the role of "student," learning from the world, sending its best and brightest people overseas to study and return. True, Korea learned from the world very well, bringing home economic development, political democracy, and high technology. But Korea's position was that of a country learning from others. In the past ten years Korea has changed its position in global education and has begun to take the role of teacher as well as learner. While the process is incomplete, and one can hope that Korea will never cease to learn the best that the world has to offer, learning is no longer just a one-way street, with foreign knowledge coming into the "hermit kingdom." Korea has had two decades of favorable world publicity, including the democracy movement of 1987, the 1988 Olympics, OPEC membership, the 2002 World Cup, and the cultural impact of the Korean Wave. Students of the world are coming to Korea to learn the latest technology, successful business methods, art, architecture and culture. The Republic of Korea in the 21st century, 60 years after its establishment as a poor and undeveloped country, is now a well-known and well-respected member of the international community of nations and is truly beginning to "teach the world."
Beginnings: The frog in the well Korea is proud of its 5000 years of history; it is not surprising that this long history continues to influence Korean life.
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After the Korean War, the number of Korean students going overseas grew to a flood. In fact, the expertise brought back to Korea by students who had earned doctorates in the U.S. is widely credited with helping Korea's growth and economic development from the 1960s onward.
Education has its own tradition, and Korea's educational system has reflected Korean geography, Korean culture, and Korean
Horace H. Underwood
history. Centuries ago in the Unified Silla Dynasty, Korea was thoroughly internationalized and integrated into the Chinese world culture of Tang China. Leading Korean scholars and poets communicated with and traveled to Tang China and considered themselves part of the Chinese cultural and educational world. Later, in the Goryeo Dynasty that harmonious relationship was disrupted by the military power of the Mongol occupation. The Joseon Dynasty from its beginnings in 1392 sought to cut off foreign political and military influence in Korea by cutting off all contact with the outside world; thus began 500 years of the "Hermit Kingdom." This period solidified the importance of the Korean nation, the homogeneity of the Korean people, and the necessity of resistance to foreigners. During the Joseon Dynasty Confucianism and the Chinese classics became the fundamental basis of education, but such dominance of a foreign (Chinese) philosophy was not accompanied by any openness to other foreign ideas or people. When Korea was finally "opened" to the west in the 1880s, Korean culture received a great shock which resulted in the opening of Korean education as well. That opening from the very beginning took the form of Korean students going out of Korea to study. As early as 1885, Seo Jai-pil (who used the English
Horace H. Underwood served six years as Executive Director of the Fulbright program in Korea prior to his retirement in 2004. Previously Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University, Underwood spent most of his professional life working in Korea and in international education. The son of missionary parents, he grew up in Korea and, after earning his Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, he returned to Korea to teach. From 1971 to 2004 he was on the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University.
name Philip Jaisohn) became the first "study abroad" student, going eventually to George Washington University in
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Washington, DC. He was followed by a long series of famous individuals, including Syngman Rhee, Paik Nak-jun (L. George Paik, later president of Yonsei University), and a host of other students starting in the 1890s. They attended institutions such as Roanoke College and Randolph-Macon University, smaller institutions which welcomed Korean students, as well as more well-known places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Education had been supremely important in Korea for at least 500 years, of course, as the Confucian ideology and civilian politics of Korea had combined to make education the primary means of advancement and success in society. The Confucian emphasis on education continued after the opening of Korea (and in fact continues to this very day) and led to a strong desire to acquire the new knowledge demonstrated by the more powerful nations of the west. Thus, Korean students demonstrated their adherence to Korea and to Korean ideology by the very fact of their seeking to study abroad. The number of Koreans studying abroad remained quite small, however, until after the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948. As the new Republic of Korea poured scarce resources into education for all citizens at the elementary level, so also at a higher level students sought the best education possible, which at that time was overseas. After the Korean War, the number of Korean students going overseas grew to a flood. In fact, the expertise brought back to Korea by students who had earned doctorates in the U.S. is widely credited with helping Korea's growth and economic development from the 1960s onward. The number of Koreans studying abroad continued to grow throughout the following decades, reaching 39,000 degreeseeking students in the U.S. alone as early as 1990, according to "Open Doors," the annual U.S. statistical book of international students in America. Including language study, short-term study, and study in other countries, the number of Korean students
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Foreign students enrolled at Yonsei University’s Korean language program learn, traditional memorial service for ancestors.
abroad may have been as high as 100,000 even then. More recently, Korea has been listed in Open Doors as third in university enrollment in the U.S., just behind China and India (which have immensely larger populations.) If pre-university education is included, the Republic of Korea has more foreign students in the United States than any other country in the world. In addition, unlike the early years when Korea was desperately poor, most of these students choose to return to Korea on completion of their studies. Certainly this has raised the level of internationalization in Korea and has helped create personal links between Koreans and people and countries around the world. Nonetheless, all this internationalization of education took place in a manner that is uniquely Korean. This immense flood of internationalization for Korea was entirely a one-way process students went OUT of Korea, but few international students came into Korea. Korean internationalization was a one-way process, outbound only.
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This situation was, as mentioned above, a reflection of history, economics, and culture. Korea's profound belief in a homogeneous Korean nation had discouraged any belief that foreigners should be encouraged to study in Korea. The economics of a poor war-ravaged country were such that few foreigners considered Korea to have much worth studying. The culture of Korean isolation meant that Koreans considered themselves to be like "A Frog in a Well." This well-known Korean image is clear and emotionally satisfying; Koreans automatically "know" that the solution for the frog's problem (the problem of seeing only a small patch of water and a small patch of sky) is to go out of the well. Thinking of the problem of Korean education as a "frog in a well" effectively prevented Koreans from thinking that another solution for the frog is to invite other frogs into the well. Thus Korean students (the "frogs") went out of the well (Korea) in immense numbers, but at first very few Korean educators thought it important to establish programs to invite foreign people to learn from or in Korea. There are many examples of the imbalance of "one-way internationalization." For instance, there were 39,000 Koreans studying in the U.S. in 1990, yes, but there were only 410 Americans studying in Korea that year, only 1% as many. As late as 1998, while 87% of the non-medical faculty of Yonsei University had doctorates from outside of Korea, only two of the 600 tenured faculty were non-Korean. Exchange programs throughout Korea were imbalanced, as more Korean students wanted to study overseas than there were foreign students who wanted to study in Korea. Despite fear of an "invasion" of foreign
The internationalization of education in the Republic of Korea is turning out to be a remarkable modification of 500 years of history and culture in just 10 years. 148
universities, in fact no branch campus of any non-Korean university was able to establish itself in Korea. There had always been a small trickle of foreigners who wanted to learn about Korea - missionaries, U.S. Army veterans, Peace Corps volunteers - but their numbers were always small, very small. Korean internationalization was "one-way" internationalization.
Beginning to teach the world The process whereby Korea has come to "teach the world" began with that small trickle of missionaries, military, and peace corps alumni. A few Korean universities in Seoul, typically private universities with Christian backgrounds, began soon after the Korean War to open programs for international students. Yonsei University's "Korean Language Institute" opened in 1959, originally to teach the Korean language to foreign missionaries, but soon growing into an important early institution for foreigners to learn about Korea. In 1966 Yonsei began an "International Division" for incoming exchange students, though the number of students was very small (never more than 10 per year for the first 20 years). In the 1970s the leader in receiving international students was Ewha Womans University, partially because Ewha had a small international dormitory which could provide housing for incoming students (the issue of housing for incoming international students and scholars has continued to be a major issue to the present day, particularly for programs and universities located in a crowded city like Seoul.) In 1985 Yonsei University greatly expanded its international program, beginning a Summer Program which had 61 students the very first year (six times as many as ever before). Though at that time Yonsei was the clear leader in international education, similar programs were also being started by other universities (Sogang University, Korea University) and those early institutions were joined by many other summer and academic year programs for international
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students. In the meantime, while most international scholarship programs focused on providing funds for Korean students to study overseas (largely in the United States), a few programs such as the Fulbright program also provided funds for American students coming to Korea for research. Fulbright Korea's goal has long been to achieve a rough balance between the flow of Korean grantees going to the U.S. and U.S. grantees coming to Korea. The list of American scholars of Korean studies who have benefited from Fulbright grants is a roll call of the leading academics in the field, and Fulbright continues to this day to provide funding for Americans who want to learn from Korea. In 1987 Yonsei University began the first full academic degree program in Korea with instruction in English, the master's programs of the Graduate School of International Studies. As it turns out, I was the first Associate Dean of the Yonsei GSIS. Enrollment in the GSIS at first was mostly Koreans (the GSIS had a student enrollment quota from the Ministry of Education) but the availability of graduate education in English drew more and
Fifty-five Saudi students on scholarships provided by the Saudi Arabian government pose during an orientation at Kyung Hee University.
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more students until soon the number of international students was equal to the number of Korean students. By the late 1980s Korea's economic miracle had become widely known throughout the world, and so the number of international students wishing to study Korean business and economics easily exceeded the number studying Korean history and culture. In 1996 the Republic of Korea Ministry of Education made substantial grants to universities for the development of "international human resources," and another seven Graduate Schools of International Studies were opened in Korea, attracting more international graduate students. Throughout Korea, universities were welcoming international students by establishing special summer programs, academic year exchange programs, and graduate programs. By 1998, ten years ago, Korea had begun to teach the world.
Korea internationalizes A number of Korean presidents have spoken of the importance of internationalization, but often the concept appeared to be more words than action. The emphasis of President Kim Young-sam on "globalization" was never put into practice on the governmental level, and when President Kim Dae-jung included "openness to foreign culture" as one of Korea's goals for the new millennium in 2000, many people looked at the goal critically. But even though it is easy to become critical of "one-way" internationalization and of the "words-only" nature of goals, in fact over the decade since 1998 there has been a genuine change in Korean universities. Indeed, Korean universities seem to be changing faster than Korean society as a whole. These changes have been taking place in Korean universities without much public fanfare, debate, or consensus. The number of international students, international agreements, and genuine international programs has quietly grown and influenced all of academe. The internationalization of education
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in the Republic of Korea is turning out to be a remarkable modification of 500 years of history and culture in just 10 years. Perhaps the most remarkable development in the internationalization of Korean education, the change easiest to see on Korean campuses, has been the growth in the number of international students in Korea. While American universities have been holding "study abroad" fairs in Korea for many years, hoping to attract some of the excellent Korean students to study in the U.S., Korea has begun holding its own "study abroad" fairs in recent years, particularly in China and Vietnam, recruiting international students to come learn in Korea, as well as recruiting and welcoming students from countries around the world. As a result, there is no longer any Korean university without a contingent of foreign students, a situation unimaginable in previous years. The number of international students in Korea has grown from only a few hundred ten years ago (and most of them in short-term study such as exchange programs or language study) to a situation where there are thousands of international students in Korea, mostly in graduate degree programs. International students in Korea are not limited to the major "SKY" universities (Yonsei now has several thousand international students in a dozen different programs) or even other Seoul universities like Sogang University (803 international students) or the University of Seoul (178 international students) but are found in provincial universities as well, with large groups of international students now attending universities such as Kyungpook National University (1103 international students), Pusan University of Foreign Studies (456 international students), Dong-Eui University (330 international students), and the University of Ulsan (242 international students). Even a smaller provincial university opened at the behest of President Chun Doo -hwan in the 1980s, Daejeon University, now has 109 international students. This June when a group of American
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With the growth in the number of international students in Korea there has been a matching and equally important growth in the profession of "international educational administrator" in Korean universities.
international educators visited KAIST, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the university emphasized the value of the excellent international students who are enrolled in the degree programs of KAIST, learning about Korea's advanced science and technology. Indeed, with the decline of the college-age population in Korea and the tendency of Koreans to go overseas for graduate study, many Korean institutions are discovering (as U.S. universities have discovered before them) that international graduate students, particularly in science and engineering, make the difference between a weak department and a strong graduate program. Government policy has also played an important role in increasing the number of international students. While most of the actual program management is handled by the individual universities, changes in government attitude have had a major effect on the campus atmosphere toward international education and have given encouragement to campus initiatives for the growth in the number of international students. In 2004 the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development promulgated the "Study Korea Project," which signaled a fundamental change in many decades of Korean government policy towards international education. The Study Korea Project said specifically and emphatically, "the focus of Korean governmental policies regarding international education is geared to 'recruiting foreign students to Korea,' rather than sending Korean students abroad." As part of this new model of in-bound international education, the Ministry set a goal of having 50,000
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international students in Korea by the year 2010. In August, 2008, what is now the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology had to set a new goal of 100,000 international students by the year 2012, because the old goal of 50,000 had already been met in 2007, three years ahead of schedule. The Republic of Korea government has not only made a dramatic change in policy regarding international education, it is backing up the new policies with funding. Korean universities are to be given grants to help them in offering more courses taught in English and more Korean-language preparatory programs for international students. Government scholarships are to be increased again, from a low level of 50 per year before the Study Korea Program began in 2004 to as many as 3000 by the year 2012. Korean Education Centers to encourage "Study in Korea" are being opened in China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. With the growth in the number of international students in Korea there has been a matching and equally important growth in the profession of "international educational administrator" in Korean universities. Ten years ago the "international" function of many Korean universities was handled by a single staff member at a desk in the university planning office, functioning as international secretary and protocol officer for the university president. Now every Korean university has a real international office with staff. Because of the Korean administrative system, the majority of the policy-makers in such international offices are faculty members who are serving only two-year terms while remaining in their academic departments. These faculty members have universally received their doctoral degrees from overseas universities and are therefore sometimes quite comfortable internationally, but their limited two-year commitment to international education makes it difficult for international programs in Korean universities to maintain continuity or achieve professionalism. Since most Korean government ministers serve in their positions even less
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than a year, the government is in no position to offer such continuity or international professionalism on behalf of the universities. Professionalism is found instead at the university staff level, the non-teaching staff who do the majority of the day-today management and program administration for international offices. Ten years ago it was extremely difficult to find competent international people who were fluent in a foreign language and who could serve at the staff level. Today such people are on the staff of every Korean university, mostly young staff members (though some are already in their 40's) who have studied foreign languages, traveled overseas, learned the needs of international students, and grown in their specialized profession as international administrators. Fulbright Korea has promoted the growth of such staff by its support of the "International Education Administrator" (IEA) program, which each year sends a small number of Korean international office staff members to visit American universities and learn from their American international office counterparts.
International students experiment in the “Auto ID Lab,� a high-speed data transmission lab at the Information and Communications University.
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Such staff members return to help their universities do a better job in recruiting, orienting, retaining, and helping international students. They also form the core of KAIE (Korean Association of International Educators), a professional group of international staff members in Korean university international offices. The several hundred members of KAIE provide each other with training in international program administration, orientation, visa processes, study abroad issues, housing, communications, and all the myriad other issues that must be solved for any country to receive international students. There are many other examples of internationalization that could not have been found ten years ago. For example, one major conference for international education is the annual "NAFSA" conference in the U.S., where over 8000 people, representatives of international offices of universities around the world, gather to meet and learn from each other and arrange study abroad programs. In 1990 there was not a single Korean at the NAFSA annual conference, and even in 1998 there were only a few Korean educators in attendance. At the 2008 conference the number of Koreans at the NAFSA conference had grown to over 100, with more than 40 separate Korean universities sending representatives or staffing a booth in the conference exhibition hall in Washington, D.C. Koreans now attend other educational conferences around the world, including KASCON (Korean American Student Convention), EAIE (European Association of International Educators) and the Study Korea recruiting fairs held throughout Southeast Asia.
Particularly in the last decade, Korea has begun in a serious way to welcome the world's frogs, to recruit and teach international students and to develop a broad range of two-way international programs. 156
An excellent example of the complete role reversal of Korea from a learning country to a teaching country can be seen in the number of Christian missionaries going in and out of Korea. For a century, foreign missionaries came to Korea to teach, and Korean Christians learned. As the Korean church grew under the religious freedoms of the Republic of Korea, the number of foreign missionaries declined dramatically. As the Korean economy grew under the economic freedoms of the Republic of Korea, the ability of the Korean church to support Korean missionaries grew dramatically. Now Korea is a country sending 15,000 missionaries overseas, second only to the United States as a sending country. Not all learning is in an academic context, and again in this case people around the world are learning from Korea. As a further indicator of Korea teaching the world, Korean faculty teach at a great number of major educational institutions around the world. I used to visit universities in the United States to arrange exchange programs for Korean students. I found that every college and university I visited in America had Korean professors on the faculty, not only teaching Korean culture and language, but in business, science, engineering and other fields. While some of those Korean faculty had lived in the U.S. for years, in the last decade there has been a dramatic growth in requests from American and world universities for Korean faculty to teach in their growing Korean studies programs. Korean studies as an academic field has become important around the world, and the need for professors of Korean studies has outgrown the supply. In a final example of "learning from Korea," consider one small program of Fulbright Korea. The Fulbright program in Korea has for many years sent Korean scholars to the U.S. for study and research, and brought American scholars to Korea to teach, but that somewhat "developing nation" model has in recent years given way to a balanced model where not only do American
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Foreign exchange students and Korean students study in a library in Yeungnam University.
students and scholars come to Korea to learn, but Korean professors are sent by Fulbright to American universities to teach. Korea has much to teach, and the world has discovered that there is much to learn from Korea.
Conclusion: It is always satisfying to see Korea's development and economic growth; Korea is a rich country now, within the ranks of "rich countries" by every guideline including the United Nations' ranking of national economies. As Korea is now a rich country, it is symbolic and appropriate that the international relationships of its university education system should change from an emphasis on one-way study abroad to a two-way mutual exchange of learning, an exchange of people and ideas with other countries to the benefit of both. Many Koreans will no doubt still, like the frog in the well, leave Korea to see and learn from what the world has to offer. But Korea also has much to offer the world. Particularly in the last decade, Korea has begun in a serious way to welcome the world's frogs, to recruit and teach international students and to develop a broad range of two-way international programs. The Korean economy has been successful internationally for many years; Korea's higher education institutions are now
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becoming successful internationally as well. The success of Korean students in world universities, the success of Korean faculty teaching in world universities, the success of Korean professional international staff in managing international programs, the success of Korean universities in attracting international students, all these mean that Korea is in the process of aligning its international educational practices with world needs and standards. With such alignment and development, Korea can indeed, now and in the future, teach the world.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Korean Fine Arts
EDUCATION, CULTURE AND THE ARTS
I
n the last sixty years, Korean artists have made an important contribution to our understanding of art and culture in a
changing world. Today, perhaps more than ever before, these artists are receiving the international attention they deserve. They have been able to achieve this due to their own individual creativity but also because of the infrastructure for contemporary art in Korea
one of the most extensive in the
region. This includes 25,000 students enrolled at art schools, 12 museums showing contemporary art, 30 contemporary art spaces, 3 biennials and 300 commercial galleries. This ecology of arts organizations supported by the public and private sector has provided a substantial platform for Korean artists. When we think of important Korean artists it is always a difficult task to single out some over others. However, two artists who immediately come to mind as having enormous influence over their generation are Nam Jun Paik (b.1932-2006) and Lee U Fan (b.1936). Both forged their careers in Korea and abroad beginning in the 1960s and are considered key art historical figures. Few other artists in Asia have benefited from this recognition. They paved the way for a younger crop of artists who burst onto the international stage in the late 1990s when the art world became more internationalized. Artists Kim Sooja, Lee Bul, Atta Kim and Do Ho Suh have become regular participants in the increasingly complex international art circuit. Korea’s international presence was forged with the establishment of a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale thirteen years ago. This provided a significant opportunity for
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Korea’s international presence was forged with the establishment of a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale thirteen years ago. This provided a significant opportunity for international audiences to see Korean art in an international context.
international audiences to see Korean art in an international
Melissa Chiu
context. These exhibitions have included works by Michael Joo and Bahc Yiso. The development of home-grown biennials in Busan, Gwangju and Seoul where international art is imported for local audiences has been significant to a domestic understanding of contemporary art. For some years, Korea played host to the most biennials in any Asian nation. Korea has long been known as one of the most “wired” countries in the world. With access to new technologies, artists are able to play one of the leading roles in creating art that forges a relationship with technology. Media City Seoul allows us to see this first hand while individual artists, U Ram Choe, Jun Bum Park, Jung Yeondoo and Young-Hae Chang are gaining an increasing amount of international attention for their work in this field. Contemporary alternative art spaces are also more numerous in Seoul than in any other Asian city. Spaces such as Ssamzie, Pool and Loop have played a role as incubators for artistic experimentation for over a decade now.
A
sia Society’s first exhibition of Korean art was in 1968 and we have continued to show traditional and contemporary
Korean art over the decades. Recognizing the importance of Korea within the region, Asia Society launched a center in Seoul
Melissa Chiu is Museum Director of the Asia Society in New York where she has worked since 2001. Previously, she was Founding Director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia(1996-2001). As a leading authority on Asian contemporary art, she has curated nearly 30 exhibitions and has published extensively in the field. Her recent book is Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China, Charta, 2007. She has been a visiting professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY and Rhode Island School of Design as well as lecturing at numerous American universities including Harvard University.
this year-- one of ten centers in the United States and Asia. We are looking forward to developing a presence in Korea that allows us to discuss both Korea and Asia’s importance in the twentyfirst century.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Korean Cinema
EDUCATION, CULTURE AND THE ARTS
T
he rise of Asia in the late 20th century has been seen mostly in economic terms
the strength of its manufacturing
industries, a demand for infrastructure development, the emergence of a middle class, increasing disposable incomes, vast consumer markets and greater trade flows. These factors have all characterised Asia as the continent of the 21st Century. But there has also been a dynamic growth of popular culture in Asia and the globalization of trade has been followed by cultural intercourse. While Hollywood films and American TV shows dominate most territories, Asian pop culture has reached beyond traditional domestic and regional markets. For example, Japanese manga and anime (think Pokemon for starters); Hong Kong action films (Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li among others); and Korean TV soap operas have all found international audiences. More recently Hong Kong movie stars have been followed to Hollywood by Korean stars like Rain (in Speed Racer) and Yunjin Kim (in the very popular Lost television series). “Asian faces have been on the rise for awhile,” notes Chris Lee, previously president of Sony’s Tristar Studio and producer of
Superman Returns (2007) and the Tom Cruise film, Valkyrie (2008). “I actually believe video games Asian looking character faces
with their largely
have changed the perception of
what the hero and heroine are supposed to look like. Hollywood is increasingly looking for stars who matter in foreign territories to put in their movies.” Hong Kong cinema dominated the Asian industry in the 1980s but when its markets declined in the 1990s, its talent
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The years 1996 - 2000 cannot be underestimated in their importance. From the establishment of the Pusan International Film Festival in 1996 (now the major film festival in Asia), to the first films by a battalion of young directors, Korean cinema has been in the ascendant.
either went to Hollywood or the industry re-invented itself using
Roger Garcia
the mainland Chinese hinterland to go global, a process that took almost a decade to succeed (largely with Hong Kong producer Bill Kong initiating a series of historical action epics with
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and others). As Hong Kong cinema re-strategized, a “new” Asian film industry emerged Korea. Korea has a long and rich tradition of filmmaking, notably with Na Woon-gyu's Arirang that initiated the “golden age of silent cinema” in the late 1920s; and between 1955-1969 when the filmmaking center of Chungmuro was vibrant, and movie companies and stars drove the industry. These were the years of the “greats”
Kim Ki-young (whose 1955 Yang Sang Province
helped bring about this new era), Shin Sang-ok, Im Kwon-taek, Lee Man-hee and Chung Chang-wha among others. Like their peers in the region they began as apprentices and became masters of their craft. They showed versatility over a range of genres, from romances through historical epics and biopics to action. They worked in an industry striving to meet audience
Roger Garcia was director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival and is now a writer, producer and film festival consultant. He has been published by Variety, Far East Economic Review, Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema and the British Film Institute among many others. As producer he has worked in Hollywood, U.S. television, and on independent films in Asia. He is program consultant for film festivals in the United States and Europe.
demand in an emerging modernised, cosmopolitan society. Their filmographies, like the studio directors of Hollywood, Hong Kong and Japan, are prolific. Im Kwon-taek for example, completed his one hundredth film last year. While the foundations laid by this “golden age” were eroded by stricter government requirements in the 1970s, the ground was cleared for a new cinema during the reforms of the 1980s. The censorship system was liberalized to gradually
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remove strictures on political expression, and the closed distribution system was opened up to more foreign imports while retaining a screen quota system for local products. During this decade, Korean cinema began to attract notice on the international scene. For example, Im Kwon-taek’s Mandala (1981) and other films were shown at international film festivals throughout the 1980s. In the transitional era of the late 1980s and early 1990s, filmmakers like Jang Sun-woo and Park Kwang-su provided the first step towards the new Korean cinema. Park’s Chilsu and
Mansu (1988) expressed frustrations with contemporary society and its references to political prisoners and arranged marriages were ground-breaking. Just one decade separates Chilsu and Mansu from Shiri but the difference seems like light years. In Shiri the depiction of North Korean terrorists departed from the usual stereotypes and reflected the new freedom to discuss sensitive political issues. Equally important, Kang Je-gyu’s film proved that the local industry could produce a well-made action thriller comparable to some Hollywood products. In 1999, Shiri was the biggest box office hit to date with 6.2 million admissions nationwide. This
A crowd of people mill around the stage at Haeundae Beach in Busan for the 11th Pusan International Film Festival.
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was well above the previous local and foreign box office record holders, Im Kwon-taek’s Sopyonje (one million) and Titanic (4.7 million). With Shiri we witness the maturing of an ambitous industry.
T
he road to Shiri had its ups and downs, but what is remarkable in this journey through the 1990s was the
industry’s resilience. It rebounded from an all-time low of 16% of the local market share in 1993 (when foreign imports increased after distribution was liberalized). It turned the Asian financial crisis of 1997 to its advantage. When big corporations pulled out of the film business, venture capital companies stepped in to fund the debut of young filmmakers. This combination of money and talent rebuilt the industry and propelled it into the 21st Century. The years 1996 - 2000 cannot be underestimated in their importance. From the establishment of the Pusan International Film Festival in 1996 (now the major film festival in Asia), to the first films by a battalion of young directors, Korean cinema has been in the ascendant. Tom Quinn, Senior Vice President of New York-based Magnolia Pictures (U.S. distributor of several landmark Asian films including Thai actioner Ong Bak and Bong Joon-ho’s alltime Korean hit The Host) believes, “The real watershed moment for Korean cinema was at the turn of the millennium when four unique and different filmmakers emerged as major talents. They were Lee Chang-dong with Peppermint Candy, Kang Je-gyu with Shiri, Park Chan-wook with JSA, and Kim Ki-duk with The Isle. Within a two year period each of these films found both critical and financial success domestically, as well as abroad. While other territories such as Denmark have managed similar feats in recent memory, Korea’s success was something far more stellar. Overnight it had become a self sustaining territory with the kind of box office that could maintain a multi faceted industry with
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Kim Ki-duk’s film, “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring” (2003), opens the Gwangju International Film Festival.
an ability to cater to the mainstream, as well as push the aesthetic envelope. It was an entire industry with stars, auteurs, themes, genres.” Unlike their immediate predecessors, these filmmakers were striving to make personally ambitious films with a commercial appeal. Mark Siegmund of the Seoul Film Commission has observed Korean cinema on the ground since 1999, “The younger generation, who didn’t have to go to the streets to fight for democracy started to concentrate more on the individual, on leisure including entertainment and cultural ‘consumption.’ Korean Cinema was young, fresh, innovative, exciting to watch. Always surprising.” A new society was emerging in Korea, one that had been through the IMF crisis and its cinema was now focused not so much on the past as on the future. Maggie Lee, Asia Chief Critic at the respected trade journal Hollywood Reporter looks at the regional popularity of Korean cinema at this time in the perspective of Hong Kong cinema. “Most pioneers of the Korean Wave grew up watching Hong Kong films of the golden ‘80s, so there are actually recognizable elements in those films that the Hong Kong and Taiwanese audience could identify with. At the same time, Hong Kong was
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KOFIC is unique in Asia for its breadth of support activities that encompass overseas promotion, grants for local production, operating a studio and school, participating in film investment funds, and training programs. KOFIC has for the outside world, become an important point of contact and information on current developments in the local industry.
only making safe bets like triad and cop films, so the variety of Korean genres filled a vacuum. Korean lifestyle and youth culture as seen through the movies seemed so fresh and cute. Korean romantic comedies like My Sassy Girl, Bungee Jumping Of Their
Own and love stories with a fantasy twist, like Il Mare, Ditto were very popular. There are many reasons for this. The scripts were really original, and the budgets were much higher compared to what Hong Kong companies would spend on romance or melodrama. Korean stars were not only gorgeous, they really had charisma and acting chops.� As interest in these high quality productions increased, local sales companies such as Mirovision sprung up. Korean films could now be aggressively marketed as distinct product rather than sold through foreign intermediaries. At the same time the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation which had been in operation since 1973 was re-structured and re-named the Korean Film Council. KOFIC is unique in Asia for its breadth of support activities that encompass overseas promotion, grants for local production, operating a studio and school, participating in film investment funds, and training programs. KOFIC has for the outside world, become an important point of contact and information on current developments in the local industry. The years between 2001 and 2006 are marked by films that broke box office records and expansion into regional markets. Kwak Jae-yong’s My Sassy Girl (2001) was a romantic
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comedy based on an internet novel. It recorded a high 4.9 million admissions at home and then became a very big hit around Asia, catching a craze for all things Korean in the region and a total box office of U.S.$26 million, including U.S.$14 million in Hong Kong, a staggering amount for the small territory. That same year, Friend recorded 8.2 million admissions and a total box office revenue of U.S.$44 million, a record until The
Host in 2006. The blockbuster hits made the Korean cinema seem unstoppable. Silmido (2003), a thriller about the training of a group to assassinate North Korean president Kim Il-sung in the 1960s was the first film to cross 10 million admissions. In early 2004, it vied with Kang Je-gyu’s Korean War actioner, Tae Guk
Gi. Stars and advanced special effects helped bring its total ticket sales to almost 12 million.
S
uccess was not only confined to local blockbusters. In 2003 Kim Ki-duk’s low budget Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
and
Spring, a quiet film about a Buddhist monk going through the seasons of his life, did not do well at home but grossed almost U.S.$10 million overseas, an international record until The Host. The industry hit its high point in 2005 and 2006. 2005 is remembered for the record volume of foreign sales as film exports totalled some U.S.$76 million. Japan accounted for U.S.$60 million of those sales and Korean films came only second
Korean films for most of these years had now captured 50% to 60% of the local market, beating Hollywood for the first time in decades. Helped by the new multiplexes that had been built around the country, revenues between 1999 and 2003 more than doubled from U.S.$276 million in 1999 to U.S.$671 million in 2003. 168
Movie poster of The Host and Secret Sunshine.
to Hollywood in the number of foreign films released. The dramas A Time to Remember (2005) and Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow (2006) each earned U.S.$26 million at the box office in Japan. Maggie Lee of The Hollywood Reporter distinguishes between audiences in Japan and the rest of the region, and emphasizes the importance of Korean TV dramas. “While supporters of the Korean Wave all over Asia were young audiences, in Japan it is predominantly middle-aged housewives who were and are still hooked on Korean (TV) drama. The films that did well in Japan were usually ones which starred their favorite soap heroes, like Bae Yong-jun or Lee Byun-hyun or Won Bin.” Could 2006 top even the balmy days of 2005? The answer came early in the year with gay menage-à-trois period costumer
The King and The Clown which set a record of 12.3 million admissions. However that record did not last long when the summer release of Bong Joon-ho’s mutant monster movie The
Host set a new record of 13 million tickets. At this point, Korean films commanded a box office share of around 65% of the domestic market, one of the highest in the world. Korean films for most of these years had now captured 50% to 60% of the local market, beating Hollywood for the first
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To date The Host remains the most successful Korean film ever with a box office gross of around U.S.$90 million of which about one-third is from international.
time in decades. Helped by the new multiplexes that had been built around the country, revenues between 1999 and 2003 more than doubled from U.S.$276 million in 1999 to U.S.$671 million in 2003. There seemed to be no end to the creativity of the industry’s talents. Stars like Jeon Do-yeon, Bae Yong-joon and Lee Byung-hun were established in their careers and their popularity was spreading. Moon So-ri won a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her stunning portrayal of a woman with cerebral palsy in Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (2002). Korean films were also doing well on the international film festival circuit. Bong Joon-ho’s police procedural Memories of Murder announced a distinctive talent. Park Chan-wook emerged as perhaps the major auteur of the new generation with a series of films that are highlighted by the powerful Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance and the intriguing DMZ drama JSA, culminating with the internationally acclaimed 2004 Cannes film festival winner
Old Boy. The latter film is based on a Japanese manga about a man who seeks revenge for his mysterious imprisonment. Baroque, outrageous, visually exciting with an iconic performance by Choi Min-sik, the film was at that time the most talked about Korean film around the world. Despite these successes however, the downturn began in 2007. The inflow of capital into the film industry led to higher production but lower returns as more films competed for exhibition space. Japanese cinema had also ramped up production, making some 600 films in 2006. With so many local films looking for release in Japan, there was little space for
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Korean films and the bottom fell out of that market. To cap it all, the screen quota system was reduced from 106-146 to 73 days a year for local films. The downbeat mood was compounded by the 2007 release of the English language monster movie shot in Los Angeles and Seoul, D War (aka Dragon Wars ). Though successful at home, its performance overseas was disappointing. But there is still good cause for optimism. The 2008 release of Kim Ji-woon’s The Good The Bad and The Weird could be seen as one step out of the doldrums. Its updating of a 1960s’ Korean sub-genre of Manchurian westerns is a smart move to create a fast moving, witty action film that could appeal to commercial Western audiences (whose taste in Asian cinema is mostly action) but whose main target is the Asian region. With its China locations, mix of Hong Kong action style and Italian spaghetti western rambunctiousness, and popular stars, it exists as exciting a piece of filmmaking as anything done in the world of cinema today. Korea’s impressive track record on the international film festival circuit continues. In 2008 for example, Hong Sang-soo’
Night and Day competed in the Berlin international film festival, while Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine won best actress award for Jeon Do-yeon at the Cannes International Film Festival.
O
verseas, The Host did well in the most difficult market, the U.S.. Tom Quinn of Magnolia Pictures had to face the
conundrum that as a foreign film with subtitles, The Host was in the art house category where the audience is averse to genre fare. And young genre movie fans in the U.S. rarely watch foreign subtitled films. “So instead of trying to sell the most valuable genre element
the monster
to what would’ve been an
unreceptive theatrical audience,” Quinn explains, “we focused most of our campaign on the critical acclaim and a story about family. So we were actually able to sell the film theatrically as an art film. Consequently it performed like an art film, almost out
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Director Park Chan-wook wins the Grand Prix award for "Old Boy" at the Cannes International Film Festival.
grossing Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
and Spring
for the top North American spot for any Korean film of all time. Because of the solid theatrical gross we were then able to position the DVD across all major retailers and solicit a younger audience who buys DVDs. It was essentially a two-prong sell.” To date The Host remains the most successful Korean film ever with a box office gross of around U.S.$90 million of which about onethird is from international. Moreover, the intrinsic values of Korea’s films and industry bode well for the future. Hollywood, largely through the efforts of Korean-American producer Roy Lee, has bought up to 15 Korean films (and counting) for American remakes. Only a portion of these films will make it to the screen but it shows that Korean films still have some of the best ideas in the world that can transcend national boundaries. Chris Lee explains, "It has not been lost on Hollywood that Korea is now the Number Five territory in the world in terms of box office. When you compare the kind of returns seen by local
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movies like The Host and King and the Clown , Korean productions
whether they become remakes or are made as
co-productions are just part of Hollywood's relentless pursuit of emerging markets." The Korean film industry has indeed come a long way. The advances of the past decade in particular have given the nation an industry whose business and creativity have earned the respect and recognition of the international community. The Korean film industry is on a par with the top producing nations, with a host of talent and some of the most exciting films to have come out of Asia in recent years, and its domestic market is still one of the best in the world. With the increased activity of Hollywood in Asia, it is now perhaps not so much a question of national Asian cinemas “going Hollywood” as Hollywood “going Asian.” As that happens, the Korean industry with its solid infrastructure and creative spirit will be there as a major player.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Ties with the Eastern Bloc: The Presidency of Roh Tae-woo (1988-1993)
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
O
ne of the joys of living in a democracy derives from the fact that all citizens have the ability to look back at their
country’s history and render their personal verdicts on what have been the successes and failures of past leaders, both civilian and military. Of all the countries in Asia, citizens of the Republic of Korea do this most freely and fully. This is a healthy and constructive process, and collective judgments on past leaders tend to change with the passage of time, the accumulation of factual knowledge, and the gradual fading of prejudice or bias. Having been invited to write an article on some aspect of the Republic of Korea’s first 60 years, I have chosen to write on the presidency of Roh Tae-woo, because from my foreign perspective he deserves a more sympathetic and positive evaluation than he has thus far received from his fellow citizens. In 1987, the heavy-handed presidency of Chun Doo Hwan was coming to an end. Violent street demonstrations took place demanding that future presidents be elected directly by popular vote. The country wanted an end to military leadership and manipulated elections. President Chun arranged for Roh TaeWoo, a former general, to be the nominee of the ruling party. Shortly thereafter, in late June 1987, Roh made a speech that signaled the end of authoritarian rule in Korea. Roh stated that the Korean people, for the first time since the presidential election of 1972, would be able to vote directly for their candidate of choice. As a presidential candidate, Roh was opposed by Kim Daejung and Kim Young-sam, both popular civilian leaders. Neither
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Roh decided to make central objectives of his presidency the establishment of diplomatic relations with all his neighbors, entry into the United Nations, and the start of some sort of dialogue with North Korea.
of these opponents was willing to support the other’s candidacy,
Donald P. Gregg
and so a close, three-way election took place. Roh won by a very narrow margin, gaining only 36.6 percent of the total popular votes. Roh’s election in the fall of 1987 was thus not particularly popular
the stream of public sentiment was running rapidly
toward full civilian leadership
but here was one last general to
be contended with for five years. As president, Roh moved quickly to change the atmosphere in South Korea. Press censorship diminished rapidly, and the national focus shifted to the 1988 Olympic Games, which ran peacefully and efficiently in a variety of handsome sites along the Han River. South Korea’s international image suddenly changed from that of a country constantly threatened by war to a place where major international conferences and festivals could be successfully planned and executed. In establishing his administration at the Blue House, Roh made a key decision that was central to many of the successes he achieved in his presidency. He appointed as his national security advisor Kim Chong-hwi, an American-educated professor at Korea’s National Defense University. Kim was highly intelligent, an astute observer of the international scene, and a man who had the full confidence of his president. President Roh kept Kim in place for his entire five year term. This gave Roh’s foreign policy a sense of direction and continuity that has not been matched by some of Korea’s other presidents. The highly successful 1988 Olympic Games brought home to the Roh administration a deep anomaly in South Korea’s
Donald Phinney Gregg served as the U.S. Ambassador to Korea from September 1989 to 1993. While ambassador, his efforts were directed toward helping the U.S.Korea relationship mature from a military alliance into an economic and political partnership. Gregg was also active in support of U.S.Korea business activities. In August 1982, he was asked by then Vice President George Bush to become his National Security Advisor, supporting the Vice President in the areas of foreign policy, defense and intelligence. During his service with Vice President Bush, Gregg traveled to 65 countries including Korea. . In March 1993, Gregg retired from a 43-year career in the United States government to become the president and chairman of The Korea Society.
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Roh Tae-woo and Boris Yeltsin, former presidents of Korea and Russia, during a Korea-Russia Joint Conference.
international position. Many of the countries that were happy to send their athletes to compete in Seoul did not recognize South Korea diplomatically. Neither China nor the then-Soviet Union recognized Seoul, and only one country from Eastern Europe had an embassy in that city. South Korea was not a member of the United Nations, nor was North Korea, and China had been adamantly opposed to Seoul’s entry into UN membership. Roh decided to make central objectives of his presidency the establishment of diplomatic relations with all his neighbors, entry into the United Nations, and the start of some sort of dialogue with North Korea. Former German chancellor Willy Brandt was a greatly admired figure in South Korea, and his astute diplomatic maneuvers in bringing about the establishment of diplomatic ties between East and West Germany had been closely observed. Brandt had called his diplomacy “Ostpolitic,” and Roh, tipping his hat to Brandt, called his plan “Nordpolitic.” In October 1989, former chancellor Brandt paid his first and only visit to South Korea. As a German he was deeply interested in South Korea’s status as part of a divided people. He spoke freely and fully about his policy of “Ostpolitic,” in which he sought to establish relations with members of the Warsaw Pact, before directly reaching out to East Germany. I am certain that Brandt’s visit was a real inspiration to President Roh and his key
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advisors as they sought to gain recognition from North Korea’s neighbors and supporters, just as Brandt had done in seeking to establish better relations with East Germany. Brandt visited the DMZ on the last full day of his visit, and at dinner that night was visibly shocked by what he had seen earlier in the day. Describing the DMZ as “a time warp,” Brandt said he felt that it was a far worse barrier than the Berlin Wall. He said, “we hate the wall, and draw graffiti on it, but at least we can pass through its gates, and television and telephone lines are not blocked.” Brandt was of the opinion that Korean unification would be a more difficult and demanding process DMZ was such a hermetic barrier
because the
than the German
reunification process would be after the removal of the Berlin Wall. Brandt was immediately asked when he thought the Berlin Wall would come down. His response was short and direct: “not in my lifetime,” he replied. In fact the Berlin Wall came down less than 60 days later. I believe that seminal event also contributed to President Roh’s determination to pursue “Nordpolitic” with the greatest possible speed.
A
key ingredient in implementing “Nordpolitic” was the strong support President Roh received from U.S. President
George H.W. Bush. The two presidents first met in October 1989 in Washington, D.C., and their relationship got off to a strong start. Roh was anxious to gain diplomatic recognition from the USSR and China, and important groundwork was laid during that October meeting. President Bush had met Soviet President Gorbachev several years earlier and had a well-established relationship with him. He was also fully familiar with the Chinese leadership, due to his previous service in Beijing and later trips he had made while serving as vice president. Bush was fully supportive of Roh’s objectives. The two presidents respected each other and also enjoyed playing tennis together. On June 4th 1990, President Roh met President Gorbachev
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in San Francisco, at a meeting that President Bush had helped to arrange. Two days later, Roh met with Bush in Washington to discuss further diplomatic steps to be taken. As a result, Seoul and Moscow announced formal diplomatic relations on December 30, 1990. Chinese recognition of South Korea followed in 1992, again with strong American support. Washington also worked to get the Chinese to drop their long-standing opposition to either North or South Korea joining the United Nations. Both Koreas are now active UN members.
M
y term as U.S. ambassador to Seoul started in September 1989. One month after my arrival, six Korean college
students broke into the embassy residence, and did extensive damage before being arrested by Korean police. The students were acting in protest against American pressure to open the Korean beef market to foreign imports. (This is still a difficult issue 19 years later.) This incident sensitized me to the volatility of student protests in Korea, as did the fact that the threat of student riots prevented me from ever making a public appearance on a Korean university campus during my entire tour of duty as ambassador. This volatility was attributed by many to North Korean influence among radical student groups. In 1989, South Korea and the U.S. were becoming increasingly concerned about a nascent nuclear weapons program in North Korea. In discussions with national security advisor Kim Chong-hwi, it became clear to us both that the unacknowledged but widely known presence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea would make it very difficult to pursue a policy of denuclearization in North Korea. We both recognized that as soon as pressure was applied to North Korea about its secret nuclear weapons program, the presence of U.S. weapons in the South would become an issue. The U.S. had a long-standing policy of “neither confirm nor deny� (NCND) regarding all nuclear deployments, but this would have been
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utterly useless in the face of the determined student protests that would be certain to arise. I knew, from long association with the U.S. military, that we would not move any weapons system under pressure from a foreign country, and informally asked Kim if he thought that his government might agree to the idea of removing the U.S. weapons before they became an issue. After suitable checking at Blue House, Kim replied, equally informally, that he thought such an idea could be discussed. A highly sensitive but extremely sensible series of discussions then took place over the next several months involving Blue House, the U.S. Embassy, two successive commanders of U.S. Forces Korea, and the Department of State. All concerned saw the wisdom of removing the weapons ‘ahead of necessity,’ and all recognized and respected the pragmatism of their counterparts. The constructive tone of these discussions was particularly striking to me, as in the mid-1970s I had served as CIA station chief in Seoul. At that time, Park Chung Hee was president, and he was losing faith in the U.S.-ROK alliance. Park had sent over 300,000 South Korean troops to help America in Vietnam, only to see us withdraw from that tragic war in defeat. He had real doubts as to our ‘staying power’ in Asia, and as a consequence had started a secret nuclear weapons program of his own. It would have been unthinkable at that time to have even considered discussing the removal of any U.S. weapons system from South Korea. Park would have taken such an idea as evidence of the weakness of the U.S. as an ally. In striking contrast to what Park’s attitude would have
Korea was the most generous Asian supporter of the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation, far surpassing Japan. President Bush extended his personal thanks to President Roh for extending this vital support to Desert Storm during a visit to Seoul in early 1992. 179
been, President Roh Tae-woo recognized that our willingness to discuss with him the issue of nuclear weapons on the peninsula was a reflection of the strength of the U.S. ROK alliance and an indication of our trust and confidence in him. In the fall of 1990, I was able to send a message to Washington saying that the president of Korea and the commander of U.S. forces in Korea both recommended the removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Korea. About twelve months later, President George H.W. Bush announced that all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons were being withdrawn from deployment outside the continental limits of the U.S. On December 18, 1991, President Roh announced that there were no nuclear weapons in South Korea. This announcement was made at the same time that North and South Korea were signing two major agreements; a “Basic Agreement” designed to open the way to “reconciliation, nonaggression, exchanges and cooperation,” and a “Joint Declaration” calling for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Inter Korean prime minister meeting.
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These two agreements, though neither has been fully implemented, are still significant parts of the process of healing between Seoul and Pyongyang and stand as monuments to the effectiveness and sagacity of Roh Tae-woo’s presidency. During his tenure, eight inter-Korean prime ministerial meetings were held, and the prospects of significant North-South reconciliation reached a higher level than ever before.
P
resident Roh also demonstrated his commitment to the U.S.ROK alliance by the strong support he extended to the U.S.
as it prepared to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1990. During “Desert Shield,” the long logistical build-up to the U.S. attack on Iraq, Korea was the first foreign nation to offer a commercial airliner to be used in transporting U.S. troops to the battle zone. Korea also offered generous financial support to the costly U.S. operation and sent a significant detachment of non-combat troops once the actual fighting (“Desert Storm”) began in January 1991. Korea was the most generous Asian supporter of the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation, far surpassing Japan. President Bush extended his personal thanks to President Roh for extending this vital support to Desert Storm during a visit to Seoul in early 1992. The two presidents showed great respect and affection for each other in their final meeting as presidents of their countries. By the end of President Roh’s term as president, Nordpolitic had succeeded beyond all expectations. Russia, China and virtually every country in Eastern Europe had recognized Seoul. Russian President Boris Yeltsin came to Seoul shortly after President Bush’s visit and opened a new era in relations between Seoul and Moscow. Just before he left office, President Roh convened a Blue House meeting for all of the newly-arrived ambassadors. He was generous enough to include me in what was a very gracious and substantive meeting that typified to me President Roh’s highly effective presidential style.
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While I am not at all confident in assessing why Roh Tae-woo is not more respected than he is, I feel quite confident in asserting that over time his standing in the history of modern Korea will rise significantly.
When one thinks over the Republic of Korea’s first sixty years, it is striking to calculate the number of key events that took place during President Roh’s term in office. The Olympics were successfully conducted and vastly enhanced Korea’s international reputation. American tactical nuclear weapons were quietly removed from South Korea, enhancing the chances for improved North-South dialogue. Russia, China and many Eastern European countries established embassies in Seoul. Both North and South Korea joined the United Nations. Relations between North and South Korea achieved new levels of mutual agreement that was translated into exchanges. Lastly, Korea enhanced its standing as a strong U.S. ally by its exemplary support to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Why then, is president Roh held in such low esteem today by the South Korean people? A major contributing factor is that both president Roh, and his predecessor, Chun Doo Hwan, were jailed during the presidency of Kim Young-sam for financial irregularities particularly the accumulation of huge ‘slush funds’
during
their presidencies. Roh was far more contrite than Chun when he went to jail, which may contribute to the general feeling among Koreans I have talked to that he was weak or indecisive. Chun, who remains in vigorous good health, and moves around the country with a large entourage, tipping lavishly, and acting presidential, remains a far more popular figure than Roh, who has not been in good health for the past several years. It is very difficult for a foreigner to completely fathom why Koreans feel as they do about their presidents. The answer lies in
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the hearts and minds of the Korean people, and they have never been asked in a systematic way to express their feelings. My central speculation about Roh’s lack of popularity centers on the fact that the Korean people find him to be an anomalous figure. He was a general, elected at a time when Koreans were yearning for civilian rule. This placed a cloud over Roh’s presidency from its very beginning. But then, Roh did not act like a general. He did not shout or bluster, and stressed the powers of diplomacy in his Nordpolitic Policy. There were no major crises during Roh’s presidency. Relations with Washington were excellent, and Korea’s economy continued to expand. The election of Kim Young-sam, in late 1992, ran smoothly, and the transition from military to civilian rule in South Korea was successfully completed.
O
ne of Roh’s major achievements as president was the progress made toward reconciliation with North Korea,
which had reached a high water mark at the end of 1991. Tragically this progress was not maintained. The key to the signing of the “Basic Agreement” and the “Joint Declaration” had been the cancellation of the 1992 Team Spirit training exercise. This annual spring exercise, which the North Koreans feared and resented, involved sending thousands of U.S. troops to South Korea where training exercises were held to repel a simulated North Korean attack on the South. At the annual Security Consultation Meeting held at the Pentagon in the fall of 1992, the Team Spirit exercise was reinstated for March 1993. This decision was immediately denounced by North Korea, and the pace of North-South contacts slowed dramatically. Kim Young Sam, inaugurated in February 1993, quickly gave indications that he would take a somewhat harder line toward North Korea than had President Roh. The following month, North Korea went on a ‘semi-war’ footing when Team Spirit was held, and on March 13, 1993, Pyongyang announced that it was withdrawing from the
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South and North Korean players hold a unification flag after a scoreless exhibition match in Seoul.
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North-South relations steadily worsened until mid-1994, when only the emergency visit of former President Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang averted a major military crisis. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung died shortly after Carter’s visit, and Kim Jong-il’s accession to power ushered in a new chapter of North-South relations with which President Roh had no direct connection. I believe that these events now serve to obscure from Koreans’ collective memory the great progress that was made between Seoul and Pyongyang during President Roh’s presidency. Koreans now remember the ‘Sunshine policy’ of Kim Dae-jung, and the first North-South summit meeting held in June 2000. While I am not at all confident in assessing why Roh Taewoo is not more respected than he is, I feel quite confident in asserting that over time his standing in the history of modern Korea will rise significantly. South Korea’s rise from ‘economic basket case’ to one of the top-dozen economies in the world has come so quickly that it is still difficult to sort out the policies and
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people who have made the most significant contributions to this astonishing process. As time passes, and perspectives lengthen, I am sure that Roh Tae-woo will come to be seen as a quietly effective president who smoothly sheparded Korea from military to civilian rule, strengthened the U.S.-ROK alliance and left his country in far better shape than it was when he took office. As an admiring foreigner who has been in contact with Koreans since 1952, I believe that the three presidents who have done most to bring South Korea to its present powerful position are Park Chung Hee, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Tae-woo.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
The Paradox of Korea: Strong Yet Vulnerable
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
T
he Republic of Korea was born as an unlucky country. After the brutal Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1910 to
19451 and the immensely destructive Korean War, few would have expected South Korea to emerge as an economic miracle. But it did and is now widely admired and respected all over the world for its economic achievements. However, the paradox of South Korea is that it is both one of the strongest and also one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. The goal of this essay is to try and understand this paradox and to suggest how Korea might overcome this paradox. The overwhelming strength of South Korea is in the economic field. One of the comparisons I frequently make is between the Philippines and South Korea. In the 1950s, the Philippines was seen as the great hope of Asia. It had a close relationship with America, access to American markets and a well educated elite. By contrast, South Korea was seen as a basket case and doomed to eternal poverty. Hence, the conventional wisdom of that era predicted that Philippines would emerge as an economic success story. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Some simple statistics illustrate well how dramatically the fortunes of South Korea and the Philippines have reversed. In 1960, the GDP of Philippines was U.S.$6.9 billion while that of South Korea was U.S.$1.5 billion. The GDP of the Philippines was almost five times larger. By 2007, the respective figures were U.S.$ 144.1 billion and U.S.$969.8 billion. The South Korean GDP had become almost seven times larger. What happened? Why did South
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By contrast, South Korea was seen as a basket case and doomed to eternal poverty. Hence, the conventional wisdom of that era predicted that Philippines would emerge as an economic success story.
Korea succeed when the Philippines failed? The reasons are too complex to be explored in a brief essay like this but a few
Kishore Mahbubani
examples can be mentioned. South Korea had to fight for its survival while the Philippines did not have to. South Korea faced the constant threat of a North Korean invasion. But there were also deeper reasons. The Philippines’ elite which controlled most of the land and wealth, was more interested in protecting its own welfare rather than the welfare of the population. By contrast, South Korea undertook key land reform programs in 1945 and 19502 and in doing so created an economy that benefited both the elite and the masses. In addition, as the distinguished Harvard scholar, Ezra Vogel, pointed out in his famous study of the four tigers, After World War II, only the governments of South Korea and Singapore consciously studied the Japanese experience in detail, but the main outlines of the Japanese strategy were well understood by all four of the little dragons. They all knew that Japan began with labor-intensive industries and used the income from exports in this sector to purchase new equipment, while upgrading its training and technology in sectors where
Kishore Mahbubani was appointed the first Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy on 16 August 2004. Currently, he is the Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY SPP) of the National University of Singapore. He served in the Singapore Foreign Service from 1971 to 2004. He was Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998 and he also served twice as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN.
productivity gains would allow higher wages. They all saw the crucial role of government in guiding these changes. Having the Japanese model provided both the confidence that they too
1
Source: http://www.lifeinkorea.com/information/history2.cfm
2
Source: http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/006/J0415T/j0415t05.htm
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With hindsight,the rapid economic development of South Korea seems almost inevitable. But it is vital to remember how weak and vulnerable Korea seemed in the early years.
could succeed and a perspective on how to proceed. (Vogel 1991, 91)3 Leadership was also a key factor. While South Korea is understandingly questioning the legacy of President Park Chung Hee it is also clear that a lot of the rapid growth took place under his stewardship. The Korean economy grew at an average of 9.3 per cent per annum4 during the period of his presidency from 1962 to 1979. By contrast, his equivalent in the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos, emerged as a powerful symbol of what incompetent rule looks like. Both he and his wife were reported to have amassed huge fortunes which were kept overseas and never invested in the Philippines. With hindsight, the rapid economic development of South Korea seems almost inevitable. But it is vital to remember how weak and vulnerable Korea seemed in the early years. In The Koreans, Michael Breen describes a foreign scholar’s conversation with Korean students in the 1980s: “There weren’t many foreigners on campus and people always asked me where I was from and what I was studying. I’d say, ‘I’m studying Korean thought’ and they’d give me a puzzled look and say, ‘But we have no thought.’” I was personally present and indeed fought for South Korea’s cause when South Korea was diplomatically weak and experienced one of its most humiliating diplomatic defeats. This happened at the Summit Meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Sri Lanka in August 1976. The Cold War was then at its peak. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for global influence. NAM, whose membership
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comprised most third world countries, was one vital arena where the competition took place. As part of the Cold War competition, both South and North Korea sought membership in NAM. After protracted negotiations, NAM reached a consensus that both North and South Korea should be admitted in Sri Lanka. However, the pro-Soviet members of the movement were cleverer than the pro-American members of the movement. They said that both should be admitted sequentially and not simultaneously, and in alphabetical order, namely Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) followed by the Republic of Korea (ROK). In good faith, the pro-American members accepted the compromise. Hence, DPRK was admitted as a member first. However, as soon as it was admitted, DPRK (as a member) immediately objected to ROK’s admission. This was a clear act of duplicity. When Singapore tried to protest loudly against this duplicity, a senior Tanzanian official who chaired the meeting (and who may have been an accomplice to this duplicity), refused to even allow Singapore to protest. Others tried to protest also and failed. Some day, South Korea should try to recall and remember those who tried to help it when it was relatively weak. Gratitude is not the norm in international affairs but South Korea could try to defy the norm. Fortunately, South Korea had the last laugh in international recognition in standing and prestige. The country that was refused entry into NAM became the second East Asian country to be admitted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1996. The OECD does not really do that much but admission into its ranks is nonetheless a global
3
Vogel, Ezra F. 1991. The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4
Source: http://kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/166.pdf
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recognition that the country has arrived. Very few countries today can ever dream of being admitted into the OECD. The fact that South Korea was admitted was indeed a major accomplishment.
S
imilarly, South Korea’s ability to become the second Asian country to host the prestigious Olympics in September-
October 19885 was also a clear signal that South Korea had arrived as a member of the first league in international rankings. The games were a great success. With all these international accomplishments, it is not surprising that South Korea is recognized as one of the strongest countries in the world. How then can it be perceived as one of the most vulnerable countries of the world? The meaning of this paradox may become clearer when one looks at South Korea’s most recent major international accomplishment: the election of Ban Ki-moon as the UN Secretary-General in 2006. The UN made an excellent choice in choosing him. He is a brilliant and accomplished diplomat.
A cultural promotion project between Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
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However, having served as Ambassador to the UN for over ten years, I also know that permanent members of the UN Security Council have a firm policy of never electing UN SecretaryGenerals from strong countries as a representative from a strong country could be less pliable to their dictates. This international weakness of South Korea springs from the geopolitical constraints it faces. The continued division of the Korean peninsula represents probably the last living legacy of the Cold War era. Many expected that with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, Korea would also be reunified soon. However, after almost two decades, the reunification of Korea seems less and less imminent. It is true that having watched the costs of German reunification, South Korea is also worried about the financial costs of reunification. But even if South Korea decided today that reunification was desirable, it is not certain that it would happen soon. The Korean Peninsula, which was a geopolitical pawn for most of the 20th Century, continues to remain a geopolitical pawn even though the geopolitical context has changed significantly. In the early phase of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China supported North Korea and America supported South Korea. Things changed after the Sino-Soviet split emerged but during the Cold War, this gave North Korea an additional advantage as it could play the Soviet Union off against China. Fortunately, all the great powers wanted stability on the Korean peninsula. This allowed South Korea to enjoy rapid economic growth under a stable geopolitical architecture. In the post Cold War era, North Korea should have emerged as a loser. It lost one patron, the Soviet Union. Then, in a humiliating blow to North Korea, China established diplomatic
5
http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/past/index_uk.asp?OLGT=1&OLGY= 1988
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relations with South Korea on 24th August 1992 while North Korea failed to gain a similar breakthrough with America. However, the isolation of North Korea also forced it to turn to desperate measures, including exploring the nuclear option. In 1994, the U.S. came close to bombing North Korea. This could have sparked a major war in the Korean peninsula. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed in Washington D.C. There is no doubt that South Korea enjoys enormous respect and standing in Washington D.C. Its success is also greatly admired. But it is also true that no great power puts the interest of its smaller ally ahead of its own interests. Indeed, the strategic concerns of small allies are often ignored. The Bush Administration demonstrated this clearly on 29th January 2002 when President Bush made his famous speech about the “axis of evil�. Initially, he wanted to name three Islamic countries in this axis, namely Iran, Iraq and Syria. But he was advised to include a non-Islamic country. Hence, as an afterthought, North Korea was included in the axis of evil and Syria was dropped.
S
ome day, South Koreans should do some intensive research to find out whether any policymaker in Washington D.C.
seriously thought of the implications for South Korea when President Bush decided to mention North Korea. Did anyone mention to him that he could endanger South Korea? It is likely that no one did. If so, it illustrates well how South Korea can become an inadvertent geopolitical pawn because the remark triggered a new crisis in the Korean Peninsula without South Korea being consulted. There is also no doubt that in the geopolitical contest between South and North Korea, South Korea is far more powerful. Many view North Korea as a potential failed state. Yet, with very few diplomatic cards, North Korea has often played its cards brilliantly and occasionally it has made Washington D.C. dance to its tune. This takes great skill. What is remarkable is
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how the Bush administration, which adopted a belligerent attitude toward North Korea, began to realize that its only options were diplomatic after North Korea detonated a small nuclear device on 9th October 2006. The new geopolitical contest developing in the world will be between China and America. No one can tell how this contest will play out. Will America allow China to emerge peacefully (as Germany and Japan did after World War II) or will it try to contain China (as it did with the Soviet Union)? The likelihood is that it will be a mix of both elements. When this happens, the Korean Peninsula will occupy a permanent place in the new SinoAmerican geopolitical chessboard. Fortunately, some geopolitical events have also worked to the benefit of South Korea. The biggest recent geopolitical accident was the 9/11 attack on America. When that happened, America shifted its strategic sights to the Islamic world and China became a huge geopolitical winner. But China also used this geopolitical window brilliantly to prove its usefulness and relevance to America. One key area where the Bush Administration has truly appreciated the help of Beijing was on the Korean Peninsula. Many senior American figures recognize that the recent breakthroughs in the discussions with North Korea could not have happened without China’s help. To reciprocate the goodwill, Washington D.C. was happy to apply pressure on President Chen Shui Bian of Taiwan who was aggravating Beijing with his pro-independence tendencies. Hence so far, the recent positive trends in Sino-American
Some day, South Koreans should do some intensive research to find out whether any policymaker in Washington D.C. seriously thought of the implications for South Korea when President Bush decided to mention North Korea. 193
relations have been beneficial to the Korean Peninsula. After the crises in 1994 and 2006, the situation on the Korean Peninsula looks relatively stable. But there is a lot of wisdom contained in an ancient Sri Lankan proverb: “when the elephants fight, the grass suffers but when the elephants make love, the grass also suffers.” As the Korean Peninsula represents some valuable grass in the current geopolitical competition, it is vital for South Korea to pay careful attention to every twist and turn in the geopolitical games involving America, China, Japan and lately, Russia again. In the economic field, South Korea remains strong but in the geopolitical sphere, it remains vulnerable. The challenge for South Korea in the future is to manage this paradox. South Korea will have to continue its recent record of skilled diplomacy as a new geopolitical game emerges. Fortunately, South Korea enjoys good relations with both Washington D.C. and Beijing. The good relationships enabled South Korea to pull one of its successful diplomatic coups: the simultaneous admission of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong during South Korea’s chairmanship of APEC in 1991. As an APEC senior official then, I remember being amazed that South Korea could pull this off. One of the cardinal rules of good diplomacy is that it is good to have maximum number of options. This should be one of South Korea’s key goals to help compensate for its geopolitical vulnerability. Hence, despite the troubled history of Japan-Korea relations, it would be wise for South Korea to keep relations with Japan on an even keel. This creates an additional diplomatic option. ASEAN provides another equally valuable diplomatic option. Many Koreans are puzzled by ASEAN’s diplomatic success and pay far less attention to ASEAN than they do to European Union. In doing so, the Koreans fail to understand that ASEAN can be far more valuable to South Korea than the EU can be. The
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Participants at the ASEAN Plus Three (Japan-China-Korea) forum pose for a photograph.
EU is an economic giant but it is a geopolitical dwarf. Witness the failed record of the EU in North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus. By contrast, ASEAN is an economic dwarf but a major geopolitical actor. Since South Korea’s vulnerabilities are in the geopolitical and not economic areas, ASEAN can be more useful to South Korea than the EU.
S
outh Korea has paid some attention to ASEAN but it has never ranked it as a major diplomatic priority. By nature, the
Koreans respect strength, not weakness. Hence, they find it difficult to respect ASEAN. But the paradox here is that ASEAN’s strength lies in its weakness. ASEAN’s relative weakness enables it to be seen as a non-threatening partner by all major powers, including America, China, India and Japan. Hence, all the major rising powers are happy that ASEAN provides the only credible diplomatic platform for all great powers to meet in the AsiaPacific regions. China is clearly the most powerful skilled geopolitical actor in the world today. It runs circles around the other great powers.
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Korean enterprise in China.
One sign of its geopolitical competence was its early recognition of the strategic value of ASEAN. Hence, China became the first great power to propose, negotiate and conclude a Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN. All this was done in record time. Japanese diplomats told me that this stunning diplomatic achievement by China came as a “bolt from the blue” to Japan. South Korea could also try to match China’s geopolitical record by working for an equally close relationship with ASEAN. Recently, Australia made a foolish proposal to bypass ASEAN in a new Asia-Pacific arrangement. This demonstrated how poor the geopolitical thinking is in Canberra as compared to Beijing. The poor geopolitical thinking in Canberra also illustrates well another geopolitical challenge that South Korea faces. With its membership of OECD, South Korea has also become a virtual member of the Western community. This membership brings many global rewards but it also brings geopolitical risks. The geopolitical thinking in the West ignores one major reality: we
South Korea’s main challenge is to display the same exceptional skill in the geopolitical arena that it has demonstrated in the economic sphere. 196
are reaching the end of the era of Western domination in history. Hence, there have been many Western geopolitical failures, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East and Georgia. There will be significant cultural pressures upon South Korea to follow the Western lead on many geopolitical issues. But in geopolitics, geography trumps culture. One of the delicate balancing acts that South Korea will have to manage is between the cultural pulls of the west and the geographical pulls of the east. Despite these many challenges, I remain confident that South Korea will do well. By any standards, South Korea has emerged as one of the most successful countries in the world. Success does not come easily. It is a result of hard work and exceptional skills. South Korea’s main challenge is to display the same exceptional skill in the geopolitical arena that it has demonstrated in the economic sphere.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Global Order and the Future of Regional Security
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
T
he people of South Korea are not alone in believing that perceptions of global security have changed radically over
the past 20 years.1 The Cold War bipolar system gave way to an early post-Cold War upsurge in both internal conflicts and in attention to conflict management. In the immediate post-Cold War period, the world’s attention shifted from tracking superpower rivalry, counting nuclear warheads and arguing over “Star Wars” (as U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was called in the press) to witnessing regular outbreaks of civil war on nearly every continent. Global security was redefined in regional, local or functional terms, and the tasks undertaken to provide security widened to protecting civilians from massacre from their own governments as well as shoring up weak or failing states. Security became increasingly divisible. This period was followed in turn by a short interval of successful international peacemaking just prior to the events of 9-11. The experiences in Mozambique, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland seemed to argue for a strong role for outside third parties, often identified simply as the “international community,” in helping to settle internal conflicts and to guarantee settlements between states as well. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and the ensuing reprisal against Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies, there was a partial return to the concept of global security focused on counter-terrorism and coping with failed (or failing) states, which were viewed by many as breeding grounds for terrorists, dealers in weapons and drugs, and other
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For Asia’s leaders, including Korea’s own leadership, many of these broader security issues have long been a continuing source of preoccupation and concern alongside more “traditional” kinds of security threats.
international miscreants. At the same time, there was a growing awareness of the potentially destabilizing effects of poverty,
Fen Osler Hampson
trade and investment, nation-building, disease, climate change, and loss of biodiversity, and increasing support for including these issues, as well as issues affecting human security, as factors in global security. For Asia’s leaders, including Korea’s own leadership, many of these broader security issues have long been a continuing source of preoccupation and concern alongside more “traditional” kinds of security threats. With these changes has come lively debate about the locus of capacity and legitimacy in global security affairs. Given an environment of ever-broadening security challenges as well as fresh questions about the sustainability of successful peacemaking, there is mounting concern about the availability of leadership and resources to counteract and manage conflict at the regional as well as national and global levels in the international system. This issue is especially pertinent at a time of preoccupation and reappraisals in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and other global security providers as a result of the heavy costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and related
Fen Osler Hampson is a professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Canada. Hampson has taught academic courses on international affairs at Harvard, Georgetown and Carleton Universities. He has also served as a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and done consultancy work on the War-torn Societies Project for the United Nations.
instability in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Pakistan. In
1
This discussion paper is based on the work of an ongoing research project on Regional Security Capacity and Global Conflict Management, which is supported by the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, and the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.
199
particular, the prospect of a U.S. reassessment of its priorities and potential retrenchment from overseas burdens under a new U.S. administration, which will take office in January 2009, raises the question of what alternative sources of leadership may assert themselves at the global, regional and sub-regional levels. Such alternatives could potentially take advantage of potential security vacuums that might emerge or, more likely, simply develop their own trajectories independent of and without reference to the values and preferences of the leading nations of the Atlantic Alliance. Russia’s recent invasion of the territory of Georgia/South Ossetia is a case in point. The Western alliance can no longer take its primacy for granted as great power politics reasserts itself in Russia’s relations with its immediate neighbors. At the same time, the global ‘order’ based on key bodies such as the UN system and the Bretton Woods institutions is challenged by old charters, outdated leadership roles, normative disharmony, and lumbering bureaucracies. These bodies face existential challenges to their authority and even survival while the global security field is increasingly crowded with other actors so-called coalitions of the willing, new collective defense and collective security bodies, non-official actors, private security companies, and long-standing regional organizations focused on
The Six-Party Talks (2008.7.12). Envoys to the North Korean nuclear talks meet in Beijing.
200
economic integration, security cooperation and conflict management. Several recent reports have noted the downward trend in the outbreak and lethality of warfare.2 As welcome as these trends are, they may obscure another circumstance: the persistence of conflicts
some quite low-level
in various
parts of the world, for instance Afghanistan-Pakistan, Sudan and its neighbors, Iraq, Iran, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and the ongoing tensions (albeit somewhat reduced as a result of recent progress in the six party talks) in the Korean Peninsula. For several decades now, the Korean conflict has been characterized by what some call a “cold peace.” At one level, the key interests of North and South Korea are not as contradictory as they once were and the risks of war have been substantially reduced by improving relations between the two countries. For many outsiders, however, the reality of a peaceful vision of the future continues to remain elusive and many aspects of the conflict largely remain “intractable.” The problem is not simply one of settling the current conflict or addressing “legacy” issues of the past, but also of determining North Korea’s own future, how to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and chart a course towards a new regional security order meets a number of core objectives: the prevention of future crises that could lead to war on the Korean Peninsula, the prevention of the instabilities resulting from the collapse of the North Korean regime, and the prevention of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula. Towards the end of the 1990s, U.S. and South Korean policies appeared to move generally in the same direction as the Clinton Administration tried to engage North Korea’s leaders in dialogue and diplomacy. However, there was a clear divergence
2
Mack, Andrew, ed., Human Security Report 2005 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Hewitt, Joseph, John Wilkenfeld, and Ted Robert Gurr, Peace and Conflict 2008 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).
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in policies during the early years of the administration of President George W. Bush. President Bush went out of his way to distance himself from policies of the previous Clinton administration which had worked closely with South Korean’s leaders to engage North Korea. In labeling North Korea’s regime as part of an “axis of evil” alongside Iraq and Iran, U.S. relations reached an all time low. But the deep chill in U.S.-North Korean relations moved closer to room temperature towards the end of the Bush presidency as the six party talks with North Korea gained momentum and North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program. However, U.S. demands that Pyongyang verify its commitments to suspend plutonium reprocessing remain a serious point of contention and there is always the risk that relations could quickly deteriorate if either side fumbles.
U
nlike some other parts of the globe, the continued U.S. military presence and strategic alliances with key countries
in the region, like South Korea and Japan, are positive and stabilizing and generally seen to be so. The United States is an important counterweight to China’s rapidly growing military and economic clout and muscle. And if Russia, which is clearly beginning to flex its own muscles, starts to play a greater geostrategic role in northeast Asia, including on the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. presence is likely to be even more critical to regional stability. Even so, there will continue to be some tension between the U.S. view of the requirements for stability and local views, especially those states in the region who aspire for greater regional control or influence over how security challenges are defined and responses organized. Invariably, some countries in the region may feel that they have a better understanding of conflicts in their regional neighborhood. Another factor may be the selective attention to Asia-Pacific regional security issues by the United States in recent times with the next U.S. administration.
202
a trend that may continue
U.S. engagement with the security challenges of the AsiaPacific region, including Northeast Asia, is also likely to remain hostage to continued U.S. preoccupation with the politics and security of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it will be important for the next U.S. administration to reinforce its security commitments in the AsiaPacific region and to remain fully engaged in the ongoing sixparty talks with North Korea. At the same time, the new U.S. administration will have to be sensitive to regional aspirations and concerns by strengthening diplomatic dialogue with key countries in the region, including South Korea, encouraging regional actors to define their own priorities, and supporting the design and development of regional institutional mechanisms and norms for managing the region’s security challenges. Over 10 years ago, two leading American political scientists, David Lake and Patrick Morgan, argued that regions had become more salient as components of international politics; the post-Cold War period offered an opening to more cooperative regional orders; and in dealing with the world’s regions, powerful states had to recognize that regions are different and require foreign policies tailored to those differences.3 More recently, others have asserted that security threats are regional rather than global, and that the identification of threats comes from within societies and states rather than from a global or out-of-region origin. The stark reality is that security challenges on the Korean Peninsula have both regional and global impacts and consequences. These and other continuing challenges in the Northeast Asian region invite a combination of both regional and global efforts at conflict management in which the United States and its key allies are fully engaged and committed players.
3
David A. Lake and Patrick M. Morgan, Eds., Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Korea’s Growth Seen from Abroad: Successful Nation-Building
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
T
he historian C.V. Wedgwood once remarked, “We know the end before we consider the beginning, and we can never
wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” I offer my comments and conclusions as one who was present at the embattled beginning of the Republic of Korea (ROK), and blessed, thus far, to see its present circumstances and future promise. In undertaking this consideration of “Korea’s Growth at 60 Years as Seen from Abroad,” I acknowledge that I am a soldier. In this light I view Korea at 60. As I complete this appraisal, contemporaneous events attesting to the often termed miraculous survival and record shattering successes of the Republic of Korea are handily available: hour by hour Korean athletes triumphantly mount the dais in Beijing and the proud strains of Aegukka waft through the capitol city of an ancient regional foe of thousands of years, as other regional powers and allies watch, or, occasionally, share in Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards. Broadening the horizon beyond China and the 2008 Olympics, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Kimoon, is an honored Korean; the recently elected President of the ROK, Lee Myung-bak, is the former head of one of the world’s leading industrial and commercial firms, presiding over a nation which leads the world in shipbuilding, electronics, and peacekeeping operations. He proposes imaginative breath-taking commercial projects on a scale of multi-continental land-linking from the English Channel to the Port of Busan. Astronaut Yi Soyeon returned from the orbiting Space Station in April. There is a
204
Yet, in 2008 the Republic of Vietnam no longer exists and the Republic of Korea is a leading world nation, one committed to freedom and democracy.
revival of pride among the citizens of South Korea. And, the citizens of South Korea continue to charitably feed and sustain
Louis Tarleton Dechert, Sr.
fellow Koreans enslaved in North Korea. In contrast, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains bankrupt, starving its population, with the single accomplishment of having exploded a nuclear device built in large part directly proportional to the emaciated bodies of its starving citizenry. I spent thirteen months in the 1950-53 phase of the Korea War, four years in the Vietnam War1, three years in Border Patrol and security missions in the Federal Republic of Germany while it was in the first decade of recovery from the destruction which it brought upon itself in World War II, and, in all, many years overseas in Cold War locales. Within the past decade I was finally able to formalize the question which first partially arose in my mind, in Vietnam, in 1975: the United States had spent eight times or more of our national treasury, two to three times and many lives (our most precious resource), and very nearly four times as much time involved in assisting the Republic of Vietnam as we did in assisting the ROK. Yet, in 2008 the Republic of Vietnam no
1
Louis Tarleton Dechert, Sr., is a former President of the National Korean War Veterans Association. He retired from the United States Army, in the rank of LTC, in 1973. Dechert began his Army career in 1950 leaving college to enlist in the U.S. Army early in the Korean War. Years later he graduated with a BA from Park College, an MBA, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and was accepted for the PhD program in Latin American Studies, of the University of Texas. Dechert’s exemplary Army career spanned twenty-three active duty years while he valiantly served his nation.
In my last tour of active combat duty I was the G3 for the 1st Field Force Vietnam (IFFV), with the ROK forces contingent under operational control. Thus I was able to see the transformation of the ROK Armed Forces and observe them as one of the elite combat forces to serve Freedom in the Vietnam War.
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The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.’s West Potomac Park.
longer exists and the Republic of Korea is a leading world nation, one committed to freedom and democracy. What made the
difference? The answer must be: the Korean People. And that is the major perspective
NATION-BUILDING
which I follow
in my review of Korea’s Growth Seen from Abroad.
A
n author in 1977 expressed the following thoughts about the nature and character of the Korean people. “Vigorous
and outgoing, certainly
but far more aggressed against than
aggressing. Invaded often, but hardly ever themselves invaders, the Koreans constitute the classic case of a people of spirit and individuality boxed in, and battered this way and that, by an environment and neighbors none of their own making. “China and Japan have the normal complement of sins to their records, but surely none are more longstanding in each than how they have allowed their attitudes to and uses of that landbridge between themselves, the Korean Peninsula, to traduce and mulct that peninsula’s people.”2 One of the world’s most ancient people groups, extremely cultish, Koreans experienced again and again intrusions, ravages, and destruction at the hands of traditional regional and territorial powers of China and Japan as they maneuvered against one another for dominance. It is entirely probable that a major
206
enduring consequence of these happenstances of history accounts for the modern successes in the building of a new Korea. Concerning the building of the nation after ca1970, one historian concludes, “
while they (China and/or Japan) slowly
smothered and finally snuffed out Korean independence, the Koreans had at last begun to develop a true national consciousness, the first prerequisite for the building of a modern state.�3 At the end of the first three years of the Korea War4 the two exhausted parts of the Korean Peninsula (the North and the South, according to U.S.-USSR agreements,1948) were in considerably worse condition than they had found themselves in 1948 when the two geographical governments and capitols were established. Aside from physical devastation by the fire power expended by the parties to the conflict, millions of Koreans, North and South, had been killed, hundreds of thousands of northerners had fled to the South and taken up residence there, and governmental, educa-tional, medical, financial, diplomatic institutions and organizational structure, along with virtually all infrastructure, had been obliterated. In addition, several million Koreans conscripted for gang labor abroad by the Japanese and Chinese were still scattered about the Asian world.
2
Michael Keon, Korean Phoenix: A Nation from the Ashes, Prentice-Hall International, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1977, p. 10.
3
Han Woo Keun, The History of Korea, The Eul-Yoo Publishing Company, Seoul, 1970, pp. 414-15.
4
Historically, technically, and actually, the Korea War continues interrupted by a ceasefire. Minimizing or obscuring this fact may severely handicap any appraisal of what the Republic of Korea has accomplished, 1948-2008. Valid ceasefires are defined by virtually every military institution in the world as the temporary cessation of hostilities. Fiftyfive years hardly qualifies as temporary. In the Vietnam War, for example, U.S. Forces observed a Christmas Ceasefire each year, after 1965.
207
Right or wrong, and to varying extents, the fact is that the governments and people of the ROK and USA exhibit unique and distinctive relationship characteristics.
The North had the USSR, Communist China, and the world-wide Communist Party in its various applications (Comintern5 and Warsaw Pact6, as two examples) to fill the void. In the South, in the beginning of 1948, the sole assets were a staunch anti-communist President Syngman Rhee, and the weak rebuilding process of the ROK Army.
T
wo matters of consequence occurred which, I believe, formed the basis from which all the elements of today’s
ROK success flow. First, the stubborn Rhee virtually extorted a promise from the United States in the form of a mutual security alliance. From this Alliance, still strong and in effect 55 years later, the rebuilding of the ROK Army proceeded. The second matter of consequence was initially a concept of the Americans, later of the UN, and today universally acknowledged as a key geopolitical concept: the conceptualization of undeveloped, third world, and finally developing nations. After World War I the world expected that the lot of the inhabitants of each nation would remain, or return to, what it was before that conflict. However, after World War II, a world concept, more or less modeled after the American concept, gradually developed concerning what were initially categorized as undeveloped nations. Whatever the evolutions and changes in terminology over time, the concept has remained and is strong today: each nation and its people are entitled to develop to their highest potential and the developed nations have a universal responsibility to assist them in doing so. There are numerous regional
208
development, policy, trade, monetary, and aid organizations modeling assistance from the developed nations of the world helping those still under development. The UN has several development agencies also engaged in these enterprises. In fact, the decade of the sixties was designated by the UN as the Development Decade.7 Thus, President Rhee and his scattered supporters were presented with a nation-developing/building philosophy (although not characterized by that phrase then or now) which in ultimate terms would become the channel for the national consciousness which had evolved through the years of trials and sufferings undergone by the Korean people.8 As a later ROK President would observe, “Our past history seems at first glance to be more a record of misfortune than glory, but we also find in our past a strong inspiration, and we value even the misfortunes for the strong sense of determination they have nourished in our people’s hearts.”9 Again, the situation in South Vietnam, at its founding has been described as “
Korea’s emergence from colonialism was
5
”The Comintern (Com munist Intern ational, also known as the Third International) was an international Communist organization founded in Moscow in March 1919. The International intended to fight ‘by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State’.” Wikipedia
6
”Officially named the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance (Russian: Translit.: Dogovor o druzhbe, sotrudnichestve i vzaimnoy pomoshchi), the Warsaw Pact was an organization of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe.”ibid.
7
Keon, op cit., p. 33.
8
Han, op cit., FN#3.
9
Park, Jung Hee, To Build a Nation, Acropolis Books, Ltd., Washington, 1971, p. 70.
209
an out-of-the-frying pan-into the fire operation; everywhere, social, administrative, commercial, and industrial vacuum or destitution prevailed.”10 In some respects the ROK in July 1953 began again with some less obvious favorable factors. Rhee’s desperate pragmatic stubbornness had locked-in American support. American leadership in the fledgling UN would be an advantage for several years. In addition, the U.S. initiation of unilateral mammoth reconstruction programs, such as the Marshall Plan, would challenge other world powers as well as modeling such assistance pacts. Thus, the ROK was to undertake the nation-building process with a reliable source of developed world techniques, technical assistance, and foreign aid, as well as assistance of all sorts flowing from the U.S. relationship
including military
training, equipping, and assistance. The author Keon, earlier referenced, has an insight into aid arrangements which is subtle, but which has been an assumption for U.S. military assistance since at least 1969. He writes (in 1977), “Because the so-called ‘developed countries’ have been the overwhelming providers of the materials and expertise (and even the goals) of development, it is assumed that the power plants, irrigation systems, and health schemes developed through
Establishment of the ROK-U.S. Combined Forces Command.
210
such aid must not only imitate those of donor nations, but also that sociopolitical structures and values within the ‘developing countries’ should be much like those of the ‘developed countries’.”11 In 1983, as assistance programs for under-developed nations and developing nations were beginning to gain realistic momentum, Mr. George Champion, Former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1961-1969) provided a comment which I believe perfectly describes the aptness of the Korean people: “there are many who believe that money isn’t the primary need of these countries and that true progress will be made through improved education and training; the strength of a nation is a
multiple of the character, energy, and ability of its people, not its natural resources.”12
R
ight or wrong, and to varying extents, the fact is that the governments and people of the ROK and USA exhibit unique
and distinctive relationship characteristics. Human effort can only accomplish so much, never mind the lofty intentions and human and material resources brought to the task. In the case of South Korea, the tasks were so monstrous that even the determined Rhee and his impoverished citizens, along with their American helpers, could only wrest minimal progress. It is probable that at the onset they realized very little of the true magnitude of what they had to accomplish: Nation-building! In the years 1953 through to President Rhee’s ejection from office in 1960, the Korean people worked day and night in
10 Keon, op cit., p. 36. 11 Keon, ibid., p. 7 12 George Champion, Foreign Debts: A Proposal for U.S. Banks, p 28, the Wall Street Journal, Jan 11, 1983.
211
myriad programs and projects, in virtual misery. And at the end of the Rhee era they were still among the most impoverished in the world. I have been fortunate to have been a frequent visitor to the ROK and an active participant in many aspects of Korean government and military life for the past several years. During this time I was able to talk with Korean men and women from all walks and professions who lived and worked building their nation,1953-1960, and later under President Park Chung Hee’s leadership (1961-1979)
actually my contemporaries, albeit
half a world away at the time. The common thread of remembrance in virtually all of their comments was of the absolute deadening, mind-numbing exhaustion of the hard work, the burdens of hours and exhausting experiences in absolute grinding poverty, seemingly without end.
D
uring the Korea War period extending from 1950 to 1953, most of the hard labor in supporting the front-line fighting
forces was performed by men assigned to the Korean Service Corps (KSC). Almost to a man, American soldiers, airmen, and Marines still remember and comment on the sheer wearying stamina of the KSC men equipped with A-frames on their backs carrying incredible loads up and down the mountains of the peninsula at all hours in all weather conditions. Many a GI has remarked about seeing men with A-frames carrying large refrigerators (or similar loads) on their backs, often at a trot and uphill! Those recollections of the Koreans by soldiers fighting the war best describe the entire nation of Korea, 1953-1979. The Korean people literally built their nation by the sweat of their brow and muscle power. The world still marvels at the labor required to build the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of the Nile, and similar works.
212
I suggest that the sheer labor of the Korean people, 1953-1998, building a leading Nation from virtually nothing, which has become the envy of much of the world, must also rank as one of the modern world’s marvels. Today, I find that many appear to take for granted what we see Korea 2008 to be
oft exclaiming “A miracle!” by
means of explanation. Granting that the Almighty eternally does miraculous things, Korea 2008 represents what human, Korean, men and women, did by blood, sacrifice, and terrible demanding physical effort, during the years 1961-1979 in particular, marginally assisted13 by U.S. aid and assistance. The Almighty worked by creating the national spirit in the individual Koreans and then providing human leadership equal to the tasks. Sadly it has been my reasoned observation that the youth of Korea today have not impressed me as fully realizing and appreciating what was done by their elders. The on-going demands of nation-building may come to stultification and the Republic of Korea may consequently fall into the discard of nations which tried but failed, for whatever reasons, should this trend fail to be reversed. All of my foregoing discussion brings me to conclude my appraisal discussing the working out and direction of American military assistance to the ROK and the effects which made Nation-Building possible.
13 U.S. Aid has never been constant to any recipients due to the annual appropriate processes of the U.S. Congress and the annual budget actions of White House Budget officials. Additionally, in Korea 19531954, U.S. Aid initially was a transference/diversion of the military appropriations already spent or being spent for supporting all of the UN forces to reconstruction and other aid for the ROK. After 1960, U.S. aid gradually expanded, plateaued, and then leveled of at a lower level. In the six decades under review, huge cost increases of military hardware caused proportionately larger expenditures for fewer total items. In more recent years, the ROK has undertaken the manufacture of many large end-item weapons, under contract with U.S..
213
Too much sunshine results in sunburn, sunstroke, and possibly heatstroke. The antidote to those injuries is sun screen lotion.
As addressed, there are several characteristics that our two governments hold in common. In order to provide a better understanding of the oft inferred stops and starts and detours of the ROK nation-development, consider the American experience: “We need to remind ourselves of our own perilous, protracted effort to implant the torch of liberty in America. We need to recall that American Colonists began their resistance to harsher British colonial laws in 1763; that 12 years later the shot rang out at Lexington; that eight years of bitter struggle followed before the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the Revolutionary War; that six more years were consumed in our endeavor to forge a document of government which has stood the test of time, including a civil war. It took 26 years to forge our Nation Freedom worth fighting for is worth the time and tears to build.”14 The Republic of Korea has built a Nation comparable to the United States in some sixty years, accomplishing
with U.S.
assistance and support of their nation-building programs and objectives
what it took the U.S. itself over 200 years to
accomplish! Before leaving this point
and to reinforce the
conclusions to my earlier question WHAT MADE THE
DIFFERENCE? (See discussion, page 200)
it was President John
F. Kennedy’s stated objective (to the Special Group Counterinsurgency,1961) to support the Republic of Vietnam(RVN) to the extent that the RVN would develop within 40 years to equal what the U.S. had accomplished in 200 years. U.S.-ROK nation-building efforts 1950 through 1998 recognized what the U.S.-RVN efforts did not: when nationbuilding activities are to be applied in the presence of an active
214
hostile neighboring power, successful progress can only be made when there is a sufficiently powerful shield of deployed military strength and police and paramilitary elements
including a
national combined intelligence effort. ortunately, during the years 1954-1979, in particular, the
F
ROK had leaders who recognized that fact. During that span
of time, there were: the so-called Second Korean War (19661969); the attack on the Blue House (President’s Residence) by North Korean infiltrators across the DMZ to assassinate President Park (Jan. 17-20, 1968); the Pueblo Seizure (Jan. 23, 1968); the shooting down of a U.S. Navy EC-121M aircraft over open seas with 31 U.S. KIA (April 15, 1969); and Operation Paul Bunyan “Tree / Hatchet Incident” (Aug. 18,1976), perhaps the closest that the U.S.-ROK-UN Command has come to all-out war since July 27,1953. 15 During the period 1960-1975 the U.S. was concurrently engaged in the Vietnam War, as were the Armed Forces of the ROK for the later part of the period. On October 9, 1983, an assassination was attempted against then President Chun Doo Hwan and a large delegation of ROK Government Ministers during a visit to Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). Twenty-one persons were killed and forty-six wounded. Almost all the killed and wounded were Koreans. The Korean CIA later established that the assassins were agents of North Korea. Finally, on Oct. 9, 2006, the North
14 General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, Armed Forces Day Speech, ca1966, message to the Army. Private excerpted copy, Colonel Louis T Dechert.
15 Major Daniel P Bolger, Scenes from an Unfinished War: Low-Intensity Conflict in Korea, 1966 -1969, Leavenworth Papers Number 19, Combat Studies Institute, 1991. Global Security.Org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/paul_bu nyan.htm, Operation Paul Bunyan. “Tree / Hatchet Incident” 18 August 1976, Alexandria, VA, current.
215
British veterans of the Korean War visit the UN Park in Busan on the invitation of the Ministry of Patriots and Veteran Affairs.
Koreans exploded a nuclear device, demonstrating a new dimension of aggression.16 In more recent years Korea chose leaders who were at the least partially ill-informed/advised concerning the nature of the security threats and the active deterrence roles/operations of the U.S.-ROK-UN Commands. Particularly after 1998 the political leadership of the ROK became almost myopic in cultivating and apparently attracting/supporting/serving the North Koreans with whom the ROK is at war. A visionary policy termed the Sunshine Policy was announced and applied, often appearing to be antimilitary and anti-U.S..
E
lements of the Korean population, keying on the public antiAmerican attitudes of ROK Governmental elements, began
to conduct media events and demonstrations against Americans and U.S. Forces in Korea. It appears, to many, that the tumult of that decade of induced anti-Americanism has led to an element of disrespect for the RVN Armed forces, the universal conscription, and ROK military accomplishments in building and preserving the nation. During the Sunshine Policy it would have been well if the ROK political leadership had learned more about sunshine and applied that knowledge. Too much sunshine results in sunburn,
216
sunstroke, and possibly heatstroke. The antidote to those injuries is sun screen lotion. In the nation-building situation in which the ROK is engaged, the national armed forces and allied forces provide that sun screen, extending the simile. The recently elected government of President Lee Myung-bak appears to have pragmatically learned and is applying that lesson. Generally nations are built, grow and prosper as Lines of Communication (LOC)
sea, air, river, canals, railroads,
highways, pipelines, power lines, radio, television, telecommunications
expand. That was President Kennedy’s
development plan for the RVN, as noted earlier. In a developing scenario, 1946 through the present time, many of the underdeveloped states start with essentially nothing. Nationally, this was the case with America, post 1776; and it certainly was the case of Korea in 1948, and even more so in 1953. In America, infrastructure development required educated engineers. Unfortunately all the established higher education institutions at the time were founded and existed first and foremost for religious instruction. For this reason the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was first established. America’s political leadership realized that educated engineers as well as other educated skills were essential to development. Military trained engineers built the LOC, and American commerce and industry followed. Examples are many. Two might be easily cited: Lewis and Clark were military engineers, and their Corps of Discovery was a U.S. Army formation, posted by President Jefferson to extend American Lines of Communication west from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. And, the
16 See FN# 4 and subtended discussion. “While gentlemen cry peace,” the Korean Peninsula is at peace only in the only most elastic technical definition of peace. While the ROK longs for peace and reunification and daily offers acts of good will to fulfill those longings, the DPRK clearly follows the Communist stated philosophy that peace is only war by another means.
217
first transcontinental railroad construction and completion, 1853-1869, was constructed mainly by civil war veterans and their officers, with thousands of Chinese laborers employed on the west to east construction portion. The ROK has likewise been well served by the officers and armed forces trained since 1953 to protect and serve their nation. Whatever tasks remain for the ROK to forge ahead with nation-building it may depend upon its armed forces to be completely equal to the challenges. I think that the Republic of Korea will survive and thrive well into the future. The mainstay of that survival, and even of the possible peace treaty and reunification, will be the professionally trained and equipped ROK Armed Forces who serve with pride in their great nation. They may be depended upon
as they proved in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon,
and in many other dangerous sites
to do their best for the
Republic. It has been a pleasure and great personal and professional reward serving with them. Several months ago I was moved to provide my vision of what I then termed The Real Korea War Veterans Memorial. I close with that vision.
The Republic of Korea today is itself a memorial to American and Korean sacrifices which is written not in stone but on living hearts in our flesh and blood, and as such is the Supreme Korea War Veterans Memorial. For this reason, if no other, we must take every measure, devise and carry out every plan, and work until we can work no longer to build up, then build up again, and then again, our mutual alliance. Should our alliance fail because it progressively grew gray, then feeble, then went on life support, and finally disappear, then I suggest to you that something of our mutual national bodies will have died. Something which has energized us to accomplish the best there is 218
through the past few years will have been excised. And, just as surely as our physical bodies will perish when the heart is ripped from them, the very essence of mutual accomplishment shall leave us, orphans as it were, to try to make our individual ways — rather than the allied way — in a hostile world. Korea is great not because the U.S. is great; the U.S. is better, or great, because Korea is great. That is the kind of relationships we have between ourselves and the ROK, my fellow veterans of Korea. We must preserve, defend, and ever build higher our relationship.
219
KOREA Impossible to Possible
Inter-Korean Economic Relations at 60
NORTH AND SOUTH, 60 YEARS ON
T
he Korean Peninsula presents a remarkable “natural experiment� for social scientists. Under Japanese occupation,
some of the most advanced industrial facilities in Asia were developed in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula; the south was the breadbasket. At the time of the partition in 1945 into zones of Soviet and American military occupation, in the north and south, respectively, levels of per capita income and human capital in the north exceeded those attained in the south. In 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea in a bid to forcibly unify the peninsula, drawing the U.S. and China into the conflict. Most of the capital stock was destroyed as armies from both sides twice traversed nearly the entire length of the peninsula. There was considerable population movement as well, mostly from the North to the South, and it is impossible to ascertain with any precision the capacities of the two countries when hostilities ended in 1953 with the original borders more or less re-established. The two Korean states subsequently not only pursued divergent development strategies but also pushed those strategies to extremes. South Korea not only adopted a capitalist system but also went on to pioneer an outward-oriented development strategy, emphasizing international trade as a catalyst. North Korea, in contrast, not only chose central planning but also intentionally time-phased its plans to frustrate linkages with those of other fraternally allied socialist states and in doing so created the world’s most autarkic economy, notable in the degree to which markets were repressed.
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The number of South Koreans visiting the North has grown from less than 3,000 to roughly a quarter-million, though sadly, the number of North Koreans visiting the South is far, far fewer.
Over the past five decades economic performance in South
Marcus Noland
Korea has been nothing short of spectacular. Between 1963 when a wide-ranging economic reform program was initiated and 1997 when the country experienced a financial crisis, real per capita income growth averaged more than six percent annually in purchasing power adjusted terms. At the start of that period the country’s income level was lower than that of Bolivia and Mozambique; by the end it was higher than that of Greece and Portugal. As astonishing as South Korea’s economic performance has been, its political development has been as impressive, if not more so: In the space of a single decade between 1987 and 1997, leadership of the South Korean government went from an authoritarian strongman (General Chun Doo Hwan) to his elected but hand-picked successor (General Roh Tae-woo) to an elected centrist civilian politician (Kim Young-sam) to a former dissident (Kim Dae-jung). South Korea is arguably the premier global success story of the past half century. In stark contrast, North Korea experienced a famine during the 1990s that killed perhaps 600,000 to 1 million people out of a pre-famine population of roughly 22 million, making it one of the 20th century’s worst. This disaster was very much the product of the country’s political system, an anachronistic Stalinist dynasty that has systematically denied its populace the most elemental human, civil, and political rights. Despite the historic economic integration of the two parts
Marcus Noland is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States and has held research or teaching positions at Yale University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California and Tokyo University, etc. He is unique among American economists in having devoted serious scholarly effort to the problems of North Korea and the prospects for Korean unification. He won the 200001 Ohira Memorial Award for his book Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas.
of the peninsula, for the first half century following partition,
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economic interaction between North and South Korea was tightly circumscribed. However, over the past decade, driven by developments in both the North and the South, there has been a substantial expansion in inter-Korean exchange. Careful data analysis suggests that the North Korean economy bottomed out in 1998 at the end of the famine period, and began a slow process of recovery from 1999 on. In 1998, following the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung, South Korea launched the “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with the North. Since then there has been a tremendous expansion of inter-Korean exchange. Two-way trade has expanded from $222 million in 1998 to $1.8 billion in 2007. Officially, aid has risen from $47 million to $306 million, the figure is even larger if other forms of transfers are counted. The number of South Koreans visiting the North has grown from less than 3,000 to roughly a quartermillion, though sadly, the number of North Koreans visiting the South is far, far fewer. A consensus has emerged in South Korea about the desirability of economic engagement with the North. At issue are the terms of that engagement. Given the decades of enmity and distrust, it is not surprising, indeed appropriate, that the initial cooperation projects, most prominently the Mt. Kumgang tourism project and the Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC), were in effect “loss
North Korean laborers working at a shoe-making company in the Gaeseong Industrial Complex.
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leaders” extended by the larger, wealthier partner to signal benign intentions toward the smaller, poorer, less secure state. Both projects are enclaves near the border, fenced off, literally and figuratively, from the rest of North Korea, operating on a mix of public and private financing. It appears that North Korea is sufficiently comfortable with these arrangements to replicate them elsewhere, for example in the form of a Mt. Paekdu tourism venture (on the Chinese border) and Gaeseong-like industrial enclaves in Haeju and elsewhere. The industrial parks are justifiable insofar as the most natural South Korean investors in the North are small- and medium-sized industrial enterprises which are increasingly uncompetitive in South Korea, but could remain viable given access to lower wage North Korean labor. Extending the provision of physical infrastructure and effective political guarantees for these small enterprises makes a certain sense, particularly if the alternative is for these firms to move their operations to China or Vietnam. KIC has expanded rapidly, now housing enterprises employing roughly 30,000 workers, and is beginning to open to foreign as well as South Korean investors. Yet even these enclave projects have encountered their share of setbacks; the operation of the Mt. Kumgang project has been at least temporarily disrupted by the July 2008 shooting there of a South Korean tourist.
I
n the long-run, it would be desirable to broaden the modalities of engagement beyond publicly-subsidized enclaves. The
“Sunshine Policy” derived its name from Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the Sun in which the Sun and Wind compete to see which can strip the coat off a traveler. While the Wind fruitlessly attempts to blow away the coat off, the Sun uses its warmth to induce the traveler to disrobe. Analogously, engagement was originally conceived as an instrument: the point was to encourage sufficient systemic evolution within North Korea to establish a meaningful basis for reconciliation and,
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ultimately, national unification. While this means that North must feel secure to reform, ultimately the success of the policy must be judged on how effectively it has encouraged the evolution of North Korea in constructive directions. The problem, of course, is moral hazard. Proffering aid which may help address real needs in North Korea and make the regime feel more secure
may also discourage precisely the
long-run evolution in the North Korean system that the policy seeks. Not all forms of engagement are equally commendable. One can think of a number of criteria for the evaluation of specific integration policies or projects. Perhaps the simplest is the division between humanitarian and development assistance. North Korea’s chronic food emergency is once again intensifying, a product of economic and political mismanagement, bad weather, and rising global food prices. Under such circumstances, it would seem reasonable to divorce humanitarian assistance from politics, and South Korea has offered aid.
L
ong-term development assistance is a different matter, however, and placing a greater emphasis on policy
conditionality and reciprocity would be warranted. Experience the world over is that support is most effective when coupled with domestic reform. In the absence of reform, aid may have little impact, or may even perversely encourage temporizing behavior by reluctant authorities. To the extent that North Koreans have any interactions with foreigners, it is often with government agencies or NGOs. Given the North Korean milieu, it is quite natural for North Koreans to think of such engagement as a form of political bargaining. But an important long-run task of engagement is to educate North Koreans about the functioning of market economics, and to reorient their conception of engagement away from one-way resource transfers or political tribute and toward mutually beneficial exchange. Private sector involvement is
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The notion that the road to riches is through the efficient transparent provision of services is a lesson that North Korean officials should be encouraged to learn.
important to promote this learning and bring the discipline of the market to the engagement process. South Korea should commit to the principle that engagement should be done on efficient, transparent terms. The fundamental issue is that as long as the state maintains direct and indirect influence over specific capital allocation decisions by financial intermediaries, it will be tempted to use this influence to promote its policy toward the North. Cooperation projects should minimize discretionary state involvement either directly or indirectly through public sector financial institutions or other state-owned enterprises. Subsidization of engagement with the North can be justified from a social standpoint (it may promote evolutionary economic and political change in the North) but it should be clear, limited, and transparent, and implemented as neutrally as possible with respect to specific projects and firms. The simplest way of accomplishing this would be to put provisions into the tax code that would create an incentive for South Korean firms to invest in the North instead of moving operations off-shore to other destinations such as China and Southeast Asia. In contrast to implicit hidden subsidies and political quid pro quos should be delivered through the public-sector financial institutions, this approach would be a way to capture the possible social benefits of engagement with the North on the basis of microeconomic efficient behavior of private firms. Market-compatible engagement would have the added benefit of encouraging learning on the part of the North Koreans. The notion that the road to riches is through the efficient transparent provision of
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services is a lesson that North Korean officials should be encouraged to learn. Lastly, a successful engagement strategy should incorporate a multilateral dimension. Multilateral cooperation not only reduces the chances that North Korea will play the interests of outside parties against one another, but will also provide additional resources for the tremendous investment ultimately required for North Korea to successfully integrate into the global economy. International financial institutions such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have a role to play in this process as providers of non-politicized technical assistance and policy advice, as well as capital. The ongoing Six Party Talks, if ultimately successful, could spawn regional economics initiatives as well, including the development of Northeast Asian transport and energy links, as well as facilitating cooperation on other transnational issues such as the environment and drug trafficking, embedding the process of inter-Korean reconciliation in a broader regional fabric.
A
s in the Aesop’s fable from whence it drew its name, Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy” was originally conceived as an
instrument: the purpose was to encourage enough internal change within North Korea to establish a meaningful basis for reconciliation and, ultimately, national unification. An alternative view regards engagement less as a tactic to achieve a transformative goal, than as a goal in and of itself, a stance into which the Roh Moo-hyun government appeared to drift. The answer to the question of which of these conceptions of engagement
as a means or as an end
prevails in the
coming years, will have a profound impact on not only the nature of North-South relations, but on North and South Korea themselves. From this long-term perspective, the controversies that have marked the early days the Lee Myung-bak administration
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Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai Group leads a herd of cattle.
and its new “coexistence and co-prosperity� policy should not be overdone. It is not surprising that the North Koreans have signaled unhappiness over what they rightly regard as the hardening of South Korean government policy under the new government. But engagement should and will continue because it is consistent with the fundamental interests of both Korean states. In the South it reflects the strong desire of the South Korean people to assist North Korea and hedge against the risks of instability and collapse. And the North, whatever its short-run tactical maneuvering, will require South Korean support for the foreseeable future. The current dispute is not over engagement itself, but the terms on which it will proceed.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Towards a Stable Confederacy
NORTH AND SOUTH, 60 YEARS ON
W
hen North Korea’s President, Kim Il Sung, died in July, 1994, after ruling with an iron hand for five decades,
South Korea’s business, military and political elite was deeply divided over how to respond. Hawks argued that the North Korean system would collapse after half a century of one-man rule and economic mismanagement. Pointing to the example of West Germany’s absorption of East Germany, they called for efforts to destabilize the Communist regime as a prelude to the absorption of the North by the South. Moderates countered successfully that a German-style absorption would be too expensive for the South to bear. In the ensuing four years, a consensus developed that the prudent course for the South would be to come to terms with Kim Il Sung’s son and heir, Kim Jong-il; help him to sustain his regime economically, and promote North-South economic cooperation that would gradually make the economic systems of the North and South more compatible, setting the stage for eventual reunification on terms acceptable to both sides. This consensus became the basis for the Sunshine Policy of President Kim Dae-jung, who took office in 1998, and of his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, who stepped down in 2007. As articulated by Kim, the Sunshine Policy would set the stage for gradual steps toward a loose confederation that would lead, in time, to full integration of the two systems. 1 However, as the economic gap between the North and South has widened, hopes for a German-style absorption of the North have resurfaced in the South.
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In predicting a collapse, many observers who compare North Korea to East Germany ignore the cultural and historical differences that set the two cases apart.
Roh Moo-hyun, beset with economic problems and facing opposition to the Sunshine Policy from the Bush Administration
Selig S. Harrison
in Washington, failed to move toward a confederation, and the advent of a new conservative president in 2008, Lee Myung-bak, has left the future of North-South relations uncertain. This essay will focus on two critical factors that will condition the prospects for a confederation leading to eventual unification: whether or not North Korea will collapse, as the advocates of absorption predict, and whether South Korea will maintain a military alliance with the United States that impedes unification.
I In predicting a collapse, many observers who compare North Korea to East Germany ignore the cultural and historical differences that set the two cases apart. In East Germany, the Soviet occupation imposed an alien totalitarian model in a cultural environment more hospitable to democratic concepts. In Korea, the Confucian ethos and the traditions of absolute centralized rule that go with it have facilitated totalitarianism in the North and authoritarian rule in the South. Together with the power of nationalism, these basic differences explain why the
1
Selig S. Harrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 2002, pp. 8086, for Kim’s Proposal and a modified version advanced by Roh Tae-woo for a “Korean Commonwealth.”
Selig S. Harrison is a Senior Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy. He has specialized in South Asia and East Asia for 57 years as a journalist and scholar and is the author of five books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia. He has visited North Korea 10 times, most recently in September 2006. From 1974 to 1996, as a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he pursued investigative assignments every year in a variety of countries, where he worked as a journalist, such as India, Pakistan, Iran, China, Japan and the two Koreas.
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fate suffered by the East European Communist states is not likely to be repeated in North Korea.
K
im Il Sung consciously attempted to wrap himself in the mantle of the Confucian virtues. The tightly controlled
system that he founded has lasted longer than any other twentieth-century dictatorship because he carried over traditions of centralized authority inherited from the Confucian-influenced Korean dynasties of the past. The North’s system is much more in tune with long-established Korean political norms than the hopeful democratic transition initiated in 1987 in the South after three decades of authoritarian rule under Syngman Rhee and a series of U.S. supported generals. The unifying power of nationalism and the Confucian legacy of absolute centralized rule help explain why North Korea has held together for the past five decades and is not likely to collapse. But another crucial factor contributed to its stability during four of these five decades: the massive and wide-ranging economic subsidies provided by the Soviet Union and China. The sudden termination of these subsidies following the end of the Cold War triggered a precipitous decline in the North Korean
Panmunjeom is now ajoint security area managed by the UN Command and North Korean guards.
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economy that has imposed unprecedented strains on the political system. As economic hardship has increased, so has a long-standing policy struggle between pragmatic technocrats and Workers’ Party ideologues over whether to move toward market-oriented economic reforms and a liberalization of foreign economic policy designed to stimulate foreign trade and investment. The outcome of this struggle and the success of North Korea in dealing with its economic problems will undoubtedly have a critical impact on its political cohesion. Many predictions of an imminent collapse rest on the incorrect perception of a monolithic North Korean leadership implacably resistant to economic reform. In reality, however, behind the façade of a monolithic power structure, the struggle between reformers and the Old Guard has been steadily growing in intensity. Even before the loss of Soviet and Chinese aid, the pressures for reform were starting to build up. Ironically, however, they were unable to make much headway in liberalizing the domestic economy until the food crisis starting in 1995 led to the widespread, spontaneous eruption of private farm markets. Faced with a breakdown in its machinery of government food procurement and distribution, the Kim Jong-il regime had two options: close down the private markets by force or look the other way. Kim Jong-il chose to look the other way. In doing so, he sided with reform minded officials who argued that the private markets would not only ease the food shortage for some sections of the population but would also jump-start movement toward a market economy. Since 1996, there has been a steady increase in the number of private markets, together with a diversification of their merchandise, which now embraces consumer goods as well as farm produce. Yet no Workers’ Party doctrinal pronouncements have acknowledged or legitimized this significant sea change in North Korean economic life. Kim Jong-il is presiding over a process that might be called “reform by stealth”. He is
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The unifying power of nationalism and the Confucian legacy of absolute centralized rule help explain why North Korea has held together for the past five decades and is not likely to collapse. But another crucial factor contributed to its stability during four of these five decades: the massive and wide-ranging economic subsidies provided by the Soviet Union and China.
tacitly encouraging change in the dome-stic economy with-out incurring the political costs of confronting the Old Guard in a formal doctrinal debate. At the same time, he is openly sponsoring newly flexible polic-ies toward South Korean and foreign investment as part of the broader moves toward greater openness that were symbolized by the June 2000 and October 2007 North-South summits. By all conventional economic indicators, North Korea is a hopeless basket case, destined for inevitable collapse under the weight of its economic problems unless the pace of systematic remedial action is greatly accelerated. Pointing to the experience of Romania, however, Marcus Noland suggests “caution in drawing too deterministic a link between economic hardship and political failure.” In Noland’s analysis, “between the extremes of reform and collapse lies muddling through.”2 Predictions of a collapse are often based on an either-or dichotomy: Kim Jong-il either proves to be a strong leader and pushes through systematic economic reforms or is so weak that the economy continues to stagnate, discontent grows, and rampant factionalism brings down the entire structure of the North Korean state. But the reality may well lie in a more nuanced assessment. Kim Jong-il is not a charismatic leader like his father and is not even attempting to emulate the Kim Il Sung leadership model. He has created a new constitutional structure
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in which the armed forces provide his personal power base and have replaced the Workers’ Party as the focus of political authority. North Korea has already had a bloodless military coup. Thus, a stable transition from the Kim Jong-il regime to a successor regime could well occur without rampant factionalism, since the armed forces leadership would continue to provide the power base and political anchorage for the new leadership as it does for Kim Jong-il. It is precisely because he does not have his father’s charisma or monolithic personal control that Kim Jong-il is pursuing a cautious course of “reform by stealth.” Pyongyang is a jungle of turf fights between contending interest groups and ideological battles between hawks and doves seeking to influence Kim’s policy decisions. Nevertheless, his measured reform process is likely to gain momentum during his tenure and set the stage for a more formal doctrinal shift to pragmatic economic polices either under his leadership or that of his successors. For the foreseeable future, regardless of the pace of reform, Kim Jong-il is needed as a legitimizing symbol of continuity with the Kim Il Sung era and is not likely to be replaced.
II Will a new consensus develop in the South for support of sustained progress toward a confederation? In my view, this is unlikely so long as the U.S.-South Korean alliance continues in its present form. During the decades since 1945, the polarization of Korea along Cold War lines constituted a built-in barrier to reunification. Nevertheless, the division of the peninsula, while making Korea itself militarily unstable, defused the peninsula temporarily as a flashpoint of regional instability. The Sino-
2
Marcus Noland, “Why North Korea Will Muddle Through,” Foreign Affairs 76 (July-August 1997): 115-16
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Japanese competition for dominance in Korea that had persisted throughout history subsided in the face of the entrenched U.S. and Soviet presence in the two Koreas. In the post-Cold War environment, however, a divided Korea is likely to become a focus of international conflict involving not only the neighbouring powers but also the United States. For example, if the United States maintains a continuing military presence in the South, China is likely to view the maintenance of a separate North Korea as critical to its security, and the danger of a U.S.-China conflict over Korea will grow, especially if the United States and Japan continue to define the threat from China as a principal raison d’être for their alliance. The U.S. interest in a stable Northeast Asia would thus be served by the emergence of a strong, reunified Korea that could serve as a neutral buffer state, forestalling a repetition of past Korea-centred major power rivalries in the region.
T
o pursue this interest, the United States would have to reshape its policies in the peninsula so that it does not stand
in the way of movement toward a loose confederation, as it does now, while at the same time doing what it can to promote such movement. This would require, above all, a basic redefinition of the role of U.S. forces in Korea that would induce the South to move more rapidly toward accommodation with the North. In its present form, the U.S. military presence sustains a climate of indefinite confrontation. The United States has an open-ended commitment to one side in a civil war. It is providing a massive economic subsidy that enables its ally to minimize the sacrifices that would otherwise be necessary for the maintenance of the conflict. The South’s upper-and middle-income minority, in particular, has acquired a vested interest in the status quo. Without its U.S. subsidy, Seoul, which now spends an average of U.S. $13 billion per year for defence, would have to double or triple its military budget to
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North Korean students practice for a parade for September 9, which marks the establishment of the country.
replace the conventional forces deployed for its defence by the United States, not to mention the much higher outlays that independent nuclear forces would require. In addition to the direct cost of its forces in Korea, averaging U.S. $2 billion per year, the United States spends more than U.S. $40 billion annually to maintain the overall U.S. force structure in East Asia and the western Pacific on which its capability to intervene in Korea depends. So long as the South regards this U.S. economic cushion as an entitlement, it will be under no compulsion to pursue a modus vivendi with the North. Despite the end of the Cold War, the role of U.S. forces in Korea has not changed to keep pace with geopolitical realignments in Korea. The U.S. military presence in the South was a response to the projection of Soviet and Chinese military power on the side of the North. Now Russia no longer has a security commitment to the North. While retaining a nominal security commitment to Pyongyang and keeping up economic aid, China has in reality moved steadily closer to Seoul. Both Moscow and Beijing are increasingly attempting to play the role of honest broker between the North and South. That is what they want the United States to do, and that is what the North also wants the United States to do.
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While retaining a nominal security commitment to Pyongyang and keeping up economic aid, China has in reality moved steadily closer to Seoul. Both Moscow and Beijing are increasingly attempting to play the role of honest broker between the North and South.
What would a redefinition of the U.S. military role mean in concrete terms? In essence, the mission of U.S. forces would no longer be limited to the defence of the South but would be broadened to embrace the deterrence of aggression by either the North or the South against the other. In its new role as a stabilizer and balancer in Korea, the United States would provide the security umbrella necessary for stable progress toward a loose confederation, helping promote a climate of mutual trust.
North Korean cheerleaders at the Summer Universiade Daegu 2003.
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Conceivably, U.S. forces could remain for a limited period following the establishment of a confederation. North Korea, for its part, has left such a possibility open. Kim Byong-hong, policy planning chief in the foreign ministry, told me on 7 May 1998 that “Korea is surrounded by big powers
Russia, China, and
Japan. We must think of the impact of the withdrawal of U.S. troops on the balance of power in the region. It is possible that if U.S. troops pull out of Korea, Japan will rearm immediately.” A day earlier, Kim Yong-nam, then Foreign Minister and now chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly, said more obliquely that “the United States is standing in the way of a confederation, but it would be in your interest to help us work for one because it would enhance stability in the region, and the United States can advance its interests in both halves of Korea if it were confederated.”
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Beyond All Expectations
NORTH AND SOUTH, 60 YEARS ON
I
n my years living in Korea, before, during and after the war I got to know many of them, and I liked them. The ones I got to
know best were two young men (boys really) whom we had hired to drive our jeeps. They were extremely intelligent, observed the work of our cameramen, and soon learned to shoot film themselves. Postwar, when most NBC staffers returned to Japan or the USA, we hired the two young (You Young-sang and Lim Youn Chul) as “stringers�, meaning we paid them for sending us film when newsworthy events happened. Then the Vietnam War came and NBC needed cameramen to cover that. With some worries about their safety, I sent them to Saigon. They both succeeded magnificently, so much so that soon whenever NBC cameramen went to Vietnam they asked to be able to work with the Koreans. They went to the top among our cameramen and both and successful careers with NBC News. Until World War
I had never met a Korean, then I signed up in
the Navy for study at the U.S. Naval Japanese Language School at Boulder, Colorado. Most of our instructors were either former missionaries or businessmen who had lived in Japan. There was only one Korean there, a pleasant young man named Choi. He was fluent in Japanese and at first we thought he was Japanese, but we soon learned that he was Korean. It was Choi who made that clear, and it was Choi who taught us, during off hours, about the twentieth century relations between Japan and Korea. It was after four combat landings in the Pacific and three years later before I reached Tokyo as a correspondent for international News Service. Two years after that I got my first
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After I got ashore I realized that back then all Koreans spoke Japanese by order of the Japanese occupiers. I took the easy road and conversed in Japanese with the Koreans. It really didn’t matter because after a few years most of the Koreans began speaking English.
glimpse of the Korean hills as my boat from Japan entered the
John Rich
spectacular harbor at Busan. After I got ashore I realized that back then all Koreans spoke Japanese by order of the Japanese occupiers. I took the easy road and conversed in Japanese with the Koreans. It really didn’t matter because after a few years most of the Koreans began speaking English. When I arrived Korea was very different from post-war Japan that I had seen. It was more unsettled, more confusing. The American military forces, the twenty fourth corps, arrived late from Okinawa. The Cairo Conference among Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek agreed that Korea would become a free and independent country “in due course”. The situation in Korea, as one might say, was uncertain and confused. The “in due course”, is still waiting to happen. Soviet forces arrived in Korea well ahead of the Americans but they halted, as it had been agreed, near the thirty eighth parallel. That decision had been taken by diplomats drawing a line on a map which did not take into account features such as rivers and mountains, and other obstacles that the line crossed. The Russians were to take the surrender of the Japanese forces north of that line and the Americans doing the same to the south. In effect, most of the industrialization of Korea was north of the line and the south was mainly agricultural. Arriving at
Peabody Award winning reporter John Rick has participated in or reported on all of America’s 20th century wars since World War . Rich was in Tokyo when the Korean War began and went to Korea the first week of the fighting. For the next three years he covered the war, a longer period than any other American news correspondent. In December 1950 he had left I.N.S and joined NBC News. After the armistice signing in Korea, Rich spent a year on a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He now lives in the house, on the coast of Maine, where he was born August 5, 1917.
Busan my first task was to find a way to get to Seoul. A train seemed to be the only answer. I found one and boarded it. The facilities aboard it were extremely primitive. The car I rode in held mostly American soldiers and at one stop (probably Daegu),
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some GI’s at the station threw aboard several “blitzcans” of water, the only liquid we had for the whole trip. Water was not the only shortage. As we approached Seoul and darkness fell, we realized that the train’s headlight (if indeed it had one), was not working. We chugged into Seoul’s railroad station in complete darkness. I was booked at the Chosun Hotel and soon became an acquaintance of the genial English-speaking manager whom we called Joe Minh. Later, to our horror, when the North Koreans occupied Seoul in June 1950, Joe Minh was seized and taken north, and unfortunately his fate is still unknown. At the time I reached Korea the Americans and Soviets were beginning their onsite “conference” to decide just how Korea was to become “independent”. I was there when the Soviet delegation arrived in Seoul, by train, from the north to begin the deliberations. It ended in complete failure. The Soviets and the Americans could not even agree on whom among the Korea people they would negotiate with to decide the fate of the Korean Peninsula. The talks ended and the Soviets went north. I was in South Korea at the voting in Korea’s first election when Syngman Rhee won the presidency and the new Republic of Korea government was formed. U.S. Army forces withdrew completely from Korea, leaving only a small military advisory group of about five hundred men.
M
eanwhile the Soviets began equipping and training North Korean forces with T-34 Tanks and Yak Fighter Planes. The
attack from the north on June 25th, 1950, caught the South Koreans and Americans by surprise. The next three years witnessed a brutal war up and down the Korean Peninsula. Almost no place was untouched and millions were left dead and wounded on both sides. Needless to say South Korea was in a very sorry state when the Armistice Agreement was signed in July, 1953. The economy was in a shambles. There were almost
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no factories anywhere. There were difficult times but American aid continued to come in. It took a few years for the Koreans to get organized but then I began to see factories begin to rise, and in the ports, shipyards beginning to turn out impressive vessels. Korea was on its way. Korea soon had a civilian airline. Korea moved outward, set up embassies and consulates abroad and learned how to operate in the world economy. In the first weeks of the war what little army South Korea had was shattered. I saw and took pictures of South Korean conscripts being prepared for battle. They were handed an American rifle, given some verbal instructions on how it worked, and then allowed nine practice shots at a target. From there they went straight into the front lines. I saw that South Korean army again in Vietnam. What a contrast. The Koreans returned the compliment and sent a division to help the Americans. It was a crack military force. It was the equal of almost any army anywhere. A well-trained and wellled fighting force. The Korean miracle had begun and was well underway. It has grown and succeeded beyond all expectations, economic, industrial, technological, political and military. South Korea has built a prosperous state that now even gives foreign aid to other poor and struggling nations. Truly a miracle.
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KOREA Impossible to Possible
Exclusive Dreams: Two Koreas in Search of Unification
NORTH AND SOUTH, 60 YEARS ON
O
n the 15th of August, 1948 the Republic of Korea was proclaimed in Seoul. Then, just a few short days later, on
September 9, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was officially established in Pyongyang. Thus, two rival Korean states were born. The division was brought about by many factors, superpower rivalry being the most important one, although conflict between the Korean Left and Right also greatly contributed to the tragedy. From the very beginning, neither side was willing to accept the division as permanent. The 1948 ROK Constitution clearly and unequivocally stated that the entire Korean Peninsula should be seen as ROK territory. The DPRK Constitution not only contained a similar claim (with the DPRK, naturally, being presented as the only legitimate government of both North and South), but it also went one step further: according to the 1948 North Korean Constitution, Seoul was claimed to be the DPRK’s capital city. Pyongyang was at the time considered as merely the provisional headquarters of the North Korean government (only in 1972 was Pyongyang finally declared to be the capital of the North). Neither side made a secret of its willingness to unify the country, by force if necessary, and each side was ready to accept unification strictly on its own terms. In the late 1940s the South Korean government did talk about a “northern expedition”, but it was the North where immediate unification by force became the most important task on the political agenda. Since the Soviets controlled the North in the 1940s, such an operation would be impossible without
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Only in January 1950, thanks to the successful Soviet nuclear test and the Communist victory in China, did Stalin change his mind and reluctantly approve the invasion plan.
Moscow’s explicit permission and support. From 1948 onwards,
Andrei Lankov
North Korea’s diplomats worked hard to obtain this permission from Stalin. The Soviet dictator was initially unenthusiastic: he did not want to risk a world war over some small peninsula in East Asia. Only in January 1950, thanks to the successful Soviet nuclear test and the Communist victory in China, did Stalin change his mind and reluctantly approve the invasion plan. However, the attempt to conquer the South by force came to naught. The North Koreans scored some impressive military success at first, but were eventually driven back and barely avoided a disastrous defeat. The Korean War led to widespread destruction and great loss of life, but the country remained divided. After the war, both Seoul and Pyongyang remained committed to unification, but this commitment became largely theoretical. By the mid-1950s, the Cold War reached its climax, the boundaries between the two rival camps solidified, and it was clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the U.S. wished any serious confrontation to redevelop in Korea. In a world driven by superpower politics, few people hoped that unification would be possible any time soon, so the rival
Andrei Lankov was born in 1963 in Leningrad (now Petersburg), then USSR. He graduated from the Leningrad State University in 1986, majoring in Chinese and Korean studies. He taught Korean history at the Australian National University and since 2004 is teaching at the Kookmin University in Seoul. He has published a number of books on Korean history, including “North of the DMZ” and "From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: Formation of North Korea” as well as a large number of articles, both in academic journals and general media.
governments concentrated on economic development instead. Initially, the North held a considerable advantage: it inherited some 80-90% of the colonial era industrial potential. The estimated per capita GNP of the North in 1960 was $172 , compared to $85 in the South1. The late 1960s saw a short-term revival of the militant
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In a world driven by superpower politics, few people hoped that unification would be possible any time soon, so the rival governments concentrated on economic development instead.
stance of the North. The feud between China and the Soviet Union, which reached its height by the mid-60s, allowed North Korea to acquire considerable autonomy within the Communist camp, so the Pyongyang leaders came to believe they would be able to take over the South even if the Soviets and Chinese would not directly support such an undertaking. This time, their major hopes were pinned on fermenting internal discontent in the South (obviously, under the influence of the events in Vietnam). This hope was encouraged by frequent outbursts of political turmoil within South Korea
like, for example, the
April Revolution of 1960 or the mass rallies against the KoreaJapan Treaty of 1965. In the late 1960s, the North Korean Special Forces undertook a string of large-scale operations in the South. The most notorious of these was an unsuccessful raid in 1968 on the Blue House, the residence of the ROK president. Around the same time Pyongyang also attempted to ignite Vietnamese-style guerrilla warfare by landing commando units on the South Korean coast. However, these attempts also ended in failure: the South Korean public was decidedly unsympathetic towards the North Korean dream of “red unification”.
D
isappointed at the failure of their militant strategy, the North Koreans agreed to begin negotiations with the
South. The results of secret talks were made public in 1972 when Seoul and Pyongyang published the “July 4 Joint Declaration”. The Declaration stated that both sides were committed to the “three principles of unification”. According to these principles,
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Children at a nursery school in Unsan in famine-struck North Korea.
unification should be reached independently, peacefully, and on the basis of national solidarity. The Declaration was widely welcomed at the time as a sign of Korea’s move towards peaceful co-existence. This, however, was not really the case, as was demonstrated by subsequent lapses into the confrontational approach (including, for example, a 1983 assassination attempt against the then ROK President and his top politicians, engineered by North Korean agents in Rangoon, Burma). Nonetheless, the “July 4 Declaration” was a sign of change. From that time onwards, the two Korean regimes began to gradually move away from their old unconditional hostility and towards a measure of cooperation. This intraKorean cooperation, the politicians usually insisted, was the best and safest road to eventual unification. For all practical purposes, meanwhile, this was just a convenient fiction, driven by the political need to pay lip service to the unification ideal which had been firmly enshrined in the ideologies of the rival states. Unification in fact remained elusive. However, the new paradigm
1
Hamm Taik-young. Arming the Two Koreas: State, Capital and Military Power. Routledge, 1999, p.131.
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permitted a diffusion of tension on the peninsula and also facilitated some limited exchanges between the two sections of the divided nation. Around the same time, the economic balance between the two countries began to undergo a dramatic reversal. From the early 1960s the South Korean economy entered an extended period of record growth which is sometimes described as the “Korean economic miracle�. Meanwhile, the North Korean economy, once modeled upon the Soviet patterns of the Stalin era, began to stagnate. As a result, around 1970 the South overtook the North economically. The economic gap between the two halves of Korea has been growing ever since, reaching almost unbelievable proportions. In 2007, the Bank of Korea estimated that per capita GNP in the North was seventeen times below the South Korean level. However, this estimate is widely seen as excessively optimistic such that many experts believe that the actual gap is 1:35, if not higher2. However, even if the optimists are correct, a 1:17 ratio is still the world’s largest per capita economic gap between countries which share a land
Two thousands tons of rice aid from the South is shipped for transfer to the North.
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border. This economic disparity creates huge inequalities between the two Koreas, and this inequality in turn greatly influences their relations.
T
he late 1980s saw a short-lived revival of the unification dream, this time in the South. Communist Eastern Europe
was falling like house of cards. The dictatorships in Rumania and Albania, the two closest analogues to the North Korean regime, collapsed in a matter of days. Finally, in 1989-90 a bloodless revolution led to an unexpected unification of Germany. North Korea seemed to be destined for a similar transformation from within, and this was widely anticipated in the South, whose economic superiority was clear to everybody. Around this time, contacts between two governments intensified, and this led to some new high-profile agreements, including Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression and Exchanges and Cooperation between the South and the North (1991) and the Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (1992). However, the hopes for German-style unification did not last long. By the mid-1990s the mood in Seoul changed completely. First, it became clear that North Korea, unlike the countries of Eastern Europe, was not going to collapse any time soon. In the early 1990s, North Korea lost the Soviet aid which was instrumental in keeping its economy afloat. This let to a near collapse of the state-run economy. In 1996-99 the country also experienced a disastrous famine. Nonetheless, Kim Jong II’s government survived and remained in control of the country. Second, the German experience made the Seoul decision-makers realize that the unification of the North and South would be
2
For a critical assesment of the different estimates, see: 이종석. 북한 국민 소득 재평가. 경제와 정책,, #143 (March 2008).
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This economic disparity creates huge inequalities between the two Koreas, and this inequality in turn greatly influences their relations.
more expensive and painful than anybody had ever imagined. Thus, the entire paradigm changed once again. Unification as the supreme national goal still remains accepted universally, even though from the late 1990s one can easily see a decline in commitment to this stated goal among the youngest generation of South Koreans. However, under the new circumstances Seoul was not in a great hurry to reach this goal. A prolonged period of peaceful co-existence and collaboration came to be seen as a necessary first step on the way to complete unification. Such was the background which led to a switch to the “Sunshine Policy”. This policy was launched by Kim Dae Jung’s government in 1997. It was continued by President Roh Moohyun throughout 2002-2008, during which time it was formally re-named the “Policy for Peace and Prosperity”, but the old name was also still used widely. The major goal of this policy was to encourage the gradual evolution of North Korea. The policy’s name refers to one of Aesop’s fables, “the North Wind and the Sun”. In the fable, the North Wind and the Sun argue about who is able to remove a cloak from a traveler. The North Wind blows hard but fails to succeed, since the traveler wraps his cloak even more tightly to protect himself. The Sun, however, warms the air, thus forcing the traveler to remove the unnecessary cloak. The policy was based on the assumption that a soft approach will persuade the North to institute large-scale social and economic reforms, more or less similar to that undertaken in China or Vietnam. An important part of the underlying assumptions in this policy was a belief that reform would prolong the existence of the North Korean state and make possible a gradual elimination of the huge economic and social gap
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between the two Koreas. As Aidan Foster-Carter noted, “Despite the rhetoric of unification, the immediate aim [of the “Sunsine policy”] was to retain two states, but encourage them to get on better”.3
W
as the “Sunshine Policy” successful and, if so, to what degree? Perhaps, this question has no clear-cut answer
and will thus be disputed by generations of historians. The critics of the policy insist that it essentially saved the North Korean dictatorial regime from collapse. This opinion was expressed by Nicholas Ebrestadt who wrote in 2004: “What thus seems beyond dispute is that the upsurge of Western aid for the DPRK under “Sunshine” and “engagement” policy played a role possibly an instrumental role
in reducing the risk of economic
collapse and increasing the odds of survival for the North Korean state.”4 It is often implied by the critics that the survival of the Kim family regime prolonged the suffering of the North Korean people.5 They also say that unconditional aid from the South, instead of bringing about beneficial reforms, actually led to an opposite result: since the Pyongyang elite can now count on aid, it has even less incentive to reform itself. Meanwhile, the supporters of the “Sunshine Line” point at the considerable improvement in the relations between the two Koreas and to the explosive growth in their economic exchanges and political contacts. They also allege that the “Sunshine Policy” helped to decrease the risk of war and created conditions which rendered
3
Aidan Foster-Carter. Towards the endgame. The World Today. London: Vol. 58, Iss. 12 (Dec. 2002.); p. 23
4
Nicholas Eberstadt. The Persistence of North Korea: What has been keeping Pyongyang afloat? Policy Review, #147 (October & November 2004)
5
For example: Jasper Becker. Dancing With the Dictator. New York Times. New York, N.Y.: Jun. 9, 2005.
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large-scale aid possible (aid which, they continue, has saved many lives). Indeed, the “Sunshine Policy” made possible an unprecedented increase in political exchanges between the two sides. The most important of these contacts took place in 2002 when ROK President Kim Dae-jung met the DPRK Defense council chairman Kim Jong-il. This was the first ever summit between the heads of the two Korean states. The next summit took place in 2007, once again in Pyongyang. All these events occurred against the backdrop of the humanitarian disaster in the North. In the late 1990s, North Korea experienced a famine of unprecedented proportions. It is estimated that between 600,000 and 900,000 people starved to death throughout 1996-99.6 The famine was over by 2000, largely thanks to massive outside aid, however the underlying problems unfortunately persist. The collectivized North Korean agriculture cannot produce enough food to meet even the most basic demands of the country’s population, and in recent years there was no palpable improvement in food production. In recent years South Korea has become a major food provider, shipping about 400,000 metric tons of food every year (roughly 8% of the entire annual demand). Apart from food aid, a number of government agencies and NGOs are also involved in providing all kinds of humanitarian aid and development assistance to North Korea. There was also a dramatic growth in the volume of intraKorean economic exchange as well. This exchange is usually described as “economic cooperation,” but this description is somewhat misleading: so far, the profitability of these undertakings for the South Korean side remains doubtful. Nonetheless, one should not judge these projects from a purely economic point of view, since most of them are likely to have long-term political consequences. The last 15 years have been times of explosive growth in
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South Korean civic groups ship 800 tons of fertilizers onto the Russian Svetlana ready to head for the North.
the scale of intra-Korean trade. Until the mid-1990s, such trade was virtually absent. By 2003 the volume of this trade reached $0.72 billion, while in 2007 the volume of trade and other economic exchanges increased to $1.8 billion. In the recent years South Korea has been the second largest trade partner of the North.7
C
urrently, there are three major joint undertakings between the two sides. In the Geumgang Mountains, South Korean
tourists frequent a resort which is located in one of the most famed scenic parts of the country. The resort is for the exclusive use of the South Koreans, and their interactions with North Koreans are kept to a bare minimum. Many critics of the project therefore describe it disapprovingly as a “money pump” which keeps the North Korean regime provided with monetary funds.
6
For a detailed summary of the events which led to the Great Famine as well as analysis of its impact, see: Haggard, Stephan, and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
7
남북교역 2007년 평가. 서울: KITA, 2008, p.5.
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Despite of all caveats, Koreans of the North and South still see themselves as one nation, and this perception, if it does not materially fade, will eventually decide their fate.
This is partially true, but it is also true that without the trailblazing Geumgang (in operation since 1998) no other projects would be conceivable. Indeed, two more recent projects are remarkably less restrictive. One of those projects is the Gaeseong city tours. Gaeseong, the capital of Korea during the Koryo dynasty (9181392) and the site of numerous historical monuments, is located just across the DMZ, some 50 km away from Seoul. Since 2007, three hundred South Korean tourists have been allowed to visit the city every day. The tours are heavily controlled, but still give visitors an unprecedented opportunity to glimpse North Korean life. Meanwhile, the population of this, one of North Korea’s largest cities, also sees busloads of well-dressed, well-fed, and tall South Koreans whose behavior and image clearly contradicts the official propaganda. Since 2004 South Korean companies have also began to operate in the Gaeseong Industrial Park, located just across the DMZ. As of February 2008, there were 68 South Korean companies operating in Gaeseong. These companies employed 23,529 North Korean workers as well as 884 South Korean managers and technicians.8 The South Korean investors hope to cash in on the cheap labor provided by the North Korean side. The official minimum wage in Gaeseong, as of 2007 was a mere $57 (and even part of this measly sum is pocketed by the authorities), while the actual amount paid was only marginally higher 9. This might sound an abysmally low figure, but one should remember that the Gaeseong Industrial Park still provides the best paid regular jobs in North Korea, and its employees are
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envied in their neighborhoods. In Gaeseong, a large number of North and South Koreans work together for the first time in 60 years. The North Koreans not only learn modern technical skills, but they also have ample opportunity to observe their Southern compatriots. No doubt they come to conclusions which are very different from what they are told by the official propaganda, and in the long run this will have a great impact on the internal situation in North Korea.
N
evertheless, by 2006-2007 one could see that Korean society was feeling a growing dissatisfaction about the
results of the “Sunshine Policy”. The policy failed to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea. More importantly, the long-expected Chinese-style reforms did not eventuate. On the contrary, once the North Korean government began to slowly recover from the severe famine of the late 1990s, it undertook attempts to restore the old system of a centrally planned economy and omnipresent political control. Unfortunately, such policies are quite rational if judged from the point of view of Pyongyang’s decision-makers. The North Korean elite is afraid that even moderate liberalization and relaxation of political control will have a devastating effect on political stability. The mere existence of an affluent South makes the situation in Korea very different from that of China or Vietnam where communist authoritarian regimes do not directly face living proof of their systems’ past inefficiencies. If the North Korean populace learns the true magnitude of the gap between North and South, the Pyongyang government’s legitimacy will be severely damaged, and a crisis might follow (much like occurred
8
중소기업중회,《개성공단 정부지원 축소로 입주차질》 《통일한국》 , , p.45
9
The Gaeseong North-South Korean Industrial Complex. CRS Report for the Congress. Washington, Congressional Research Service, 2008, p.9.
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in East Germany). Hence, instead of being engaged in dangerous reformist activity, the North Korean leadership prefers to do everything possible to keep the situation under control and, logically enough, they use South Korean aid to maintain the status quo. For example, a large amount of aid is used to feed the army, police and bureaucracy whose support is vital to the regime’s internal stability. This means that in the foreseeable future all Seoul governments will face an uneasy dilemma. If substantial and unconditional aid is provided, the North Korean elite will use it largely to increase its own grip over the people. If aid is not provided, many more North Koreans will starve to death, while the regime will still be able to maintain control. In both situations, the yawning gulf between the two Korean economies is likely to get even wider. Lee Myung-bak’s government, in power since February 2008, decided to test another approach to the North which, it is widely hoped, will help to break away from the vicious cycle described above. While basically willing to provide aid, it also stated that aid should come with certain conditions attached. Ideally, such an approach will make it more difficult for the North to use the South Korean aid to maintain the privileged life-style of the ruling elite.
A
s a part of this new approach, President Lee proposed the “3000 vision” plan. In essence, this plan envisions large-
scale aid being delivered to the North if the North Korean government chooses to abandon its nuclear weapons. If such a proposal is accepted, the South promises to increase the per capita income in the North to $3000 within a decade. Unfortunately, this particular proposal does not appear to be realistic, since the North is very unlikely to accept a deal which includes de-nuclearization as an essential part of the package. However, the underlying conditional approach to aid seems to be the main line of Seoul’s strategy in dealing with the North over
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the next few years of Lee Myung-bak’s government. Unification, the long-term stated dream and goal of both Koreas, therefore remains elusive. In the new situation, the South Korean public seems to be loosing interest in the goal, and is definitely not in a special hurry to reach it. Meanwhile, the North Korean decision-makers are quietly but decisively opposed to it. The North Korean commoners might want unification, but they have no means of exercising influence on government policy. And, last but not least, the great powers, including the increasingly important and influential China, are not very supportive of unification either: they judge that a divided Korea will serve their interests better. All in all the situation does not sound encouraging. However, there is reason to hope. It seems that in the long run the fate of Korea will be decided not by negotiations between the two Korean governments, but by social changes and domestic developments within both countries and in particular, within North Korea itself. In the recent decade or so, the North Korean populace has learned a lot about the lifestyle of the South. The exchanges conducted as a part of the “Sunshine Policy” played some role in these changes, but in most cases the information has filtered through the remarkably porous border with China. There are political changes as well. The Pyongyang government’s ability to control its people is clearly in decline. There might be still a long way to go, but it seems that sooner or later the North Koreans will be able to express their feelings and dreams, and there is little doubt that these dreams have the potential to become the leading force for national unification. As history had demonstrated a number of times, very often the complicated diplomatic constructions and calculations of power elites are swept away by the force of popular feeling. Despite of all caveats, Koreans of the North and South still see themselves as one nation, and this perception, if it does not materially fade, will eventually decide their fate.
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