Category Archives: Korea

A week ago, LaurenceJarvikOnline noted the forthcoming appearance of a new book by former World Bank senior economist William Easterly with the provocative title, White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006): “An informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste, futility, and hubris of the West’s efforts to date to improve the lot of the so-called developing world, with constructive suggestions on how to move forward.”

The ironies are many: We preach a gospel of freedom and individual accountability, yet we intrude in the inner workings of other countries through bloated aid bureaucracies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that are accountable to no one for the effects of their prescriptions. We take credit for the economic success stories of the last fifty years, like South Korea and Taiwan, when in fact we deserve very little. However, we reject all accountability for pouring more than half a trillion dollars into Africa and other regions and trying one “big new idea” after another, to no avail. Most of the places in which we’ve meddled are in fact no better off or are even worse off than they were before. Could it be that we don’t know as much as we think we do about the magic spells that will open the door to the road to wealth?

Jarvik also tracks down Easterly’s scathing review last year of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, by Jeffrey Sachs (Penguin, 2005):

The climax of The End of Poverty is Sachs’s far-reaching plan to end world poverty — a sort of Great Leap Forward. His characteristically comprehensive approach to eliminating world poverty derives from his conviction that everything depends on everything else — that, for instance, you cannot cure poverty in Africa without beating AIDS, which requires infrastructure, which requires stable government, and so forth.

Social reformers have found two ways to respond to this complexity; Karl Popper summed them up best a half-century ago as “utopian social engineering” versus “piecemeal democratic reform.” Sachs is the intellectual leader of the utopian camp. To end world poverty once and for all, he offers a detailed Big Plan that covers just about everything, in mind-numbing technical jargon, from planting nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil fertility, to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS, to specially programmed cell phones to provide real-time data to health planners, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations and so on. Sachs proposes that the U.N. secretary general personally run the overall plan, coordinating the actions of thousands of officials in six U.N. agencies, U.N. country teams, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Sachs’s Big Plan would launch poor countries out of a “poverty trap” and end world poverty by 2025, as the book’s title advertises. The world’s rich countries would pay for a large share of the Big Plan — somehow doing an exact financial “Needs Assessment,” seeing how much poor country governments can pay and then having rich donors pay the rest. The donors will fill what he calls the “financing gap” by doubling donor-nation foreign aid in 2006, then nearly doubling it again by 2015.

What’s the alternative? The piecemeal reform approach (which his book opposes) would humbly acknowledge that nobody can fully grasp the complexity of the political, social, technological, ecological and economic systems that underlie poverty. It would eschew the arrogance that “we” know exactly how to fix “them.” It would shy away from the hubris of what he labels the “breathtaking opportunity” that “we” have to spread democracy, technology, prosperity and perpetual peace to the entire planet. Large-scale crash programs, especially by outsiders, often produce unintended consequences. The simple dreams at the top run afoul of insufficient knowledge of the complex realities at the bottom. The Big Plans are impossible to evaluate scientifically afterward. Nor can you hold any specific agency accountable for their success or failure. Piecemeal reform, by contrast, motivates specific actors to take small steps, one at a time, then tests whether that small step made poor people better off, holds accountable the agency that implemented the small step, and considers the next small step.

What’s the evidence on how well the two approaches work? Sachs pays surprisingly little attention to the history of aid approaches and results…. Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today’s dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it’s fair to say this approach has not been a great success. (By the way, utopian social engineering does not just fail for the left; in Iraq, it’s not working too well now for the right either.)

Meanwhile, some piecemeal interventions have brought success. Vaccination campaigns, oral rehydration therapy to prevent diarrhea and other aid-financed health programs have likely contributed to a fall in infant mortality in every region, including Africa. Aid projects have probably helped increase access to primary and secondary education, clean water and sanitation. Perhaps it is also easier to hold aid agencies accountable for results in these tangible areas.

Fareed Zakaria puts the latest Palestinian elections in broader context in a Newsweek column headlined Caught by Surprise. Again.

Rulers like Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein often used Islamic groups to discredit the secular opposition. Decades of repression, incompetence and stagnation ensured that citizens got increasingly unhappy with their regimes. And the only organized, untainted alternative was the Islamic movement.

Consider Hamas. It was founded as a sister group of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Initially it was a “quietist” group, accepting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as a fact and simply working to improve the conditions of Palestinians within it. Both Israel and Jordan tacitly supported the group during that period, because they saw it as a way of dividing the Palestinians. They also probably believed it could never come to power. But they worked tirelessly to destroy the PLO and its successor, Fatah, a secular, Soviet-styled revolutionary outfit. (Remember that in the 1970s, even the United States thought that conservative Islamic groups were allies against left-wing revolutionary ones, which is why we funded the mujahedin in Afghanistan.)

But the man who truly opened the space for Hamas was Yasir Arafat. Arafat created one of the most ill-disciplined, corrupt and ineffective organizations ever to be taken seriously on the world stage. Despite the pull of loyalty in tough conditions, Palestinians were losing faith in Fatah through the 1990s. Hamas, meanwhile, became more political, radical and organized. It provided health, education and other social-welfare services. And it stood up for its people.

Such problems extend far beyond the Middle East. To my mind, the central problem in the world today is bad government, ranging from relatively mild ruling party inertia and corruption in countries like Canada and Japan (to pick two who recently voted for reform), to hopelessly failed states like North Korea or Zimbabwe. At least democracies have the potential to clean house periodically. But elections don’t guarantee the next government will be any better.

A lot of the real dirtball regimes are hangovers from the Cold War, still riding the turbid waves of their enabling ideologies, while their backers keep lowering the bar while telling themselves things could be even worse. In their days, at least Arafat, Assad, and Nasser were secular. At least Ceausescu, Hoxha, and Mao were anti-Soviet. At least Kim Il-sung, Ne Win, and Pol Pot were anticapitalist. At least Papa Doc, Pinochet, and Somoza were anticommunist.

And we’re still doing that today. People console themselves that Kyrgyzstan’s Bakiyev, Tajikistan’s Rakhmonov, and Uzbekistan’s Karimov are at least anti-Islamist (and so is Turkmenistan’s Niyazov, though he may be his own kind of autotheocrat). Others applaud Castro, Chavez, and Evo Morales for at least being anti-American. Until accountability matters more than ideology, we’ll never make any progress toward inducing bad governments to clean up their acts.

(Yes, I know, it’s not just enabling ideologies, it’s also enabling vital resources–oil, natural gas, diamonds, whatever–that provide excuses for others to tolerate unconscionable behavior by oppressive governments.)

On 14 January, Asahi Shimbun profiled a wildly successful, independent-minded, Japan-resident Korean, Kwak Choong Yang.

When entrepreneur Kwak Choong Yang was growing up in Japan, it is unlikely he could ever have imagined what would be happening here today. Though just a dozen or so years ago, many Japanese had negative perceptions of Korea, now they can’t seem to get enough of all things Korean, and interest in the country’s culture has never been stronger.

“True, some zainichi (Korean residents in Japan) are offended by all this. But we should welcome the fact that there is so much interest in our cultural roots,” says Kwak, a second-generation Korean resident in Japan. The 49-year-old set up a publishing business eight years ago and has been introducing Korean culture to Japan….

It was before World War II that Kwak’s father, aged 7 and all alone, arrived in Japan, where a relative lived. He worked his way up from the mines to management consultancy, the field in which he built a fortune.

Although the young Kwak grew up in comfort in Osaka, discrimination weighed heavily upon him. He was shocked when he secretly read about the “nationality clause” at the junior high school library. He realized there were restrictions on the jobs zainichi could hold in public service. He is still haunted by the memory of running out of a high school classroom after he announced his real name instead of his common name in Japanese. Kwak is therefore respectful of fellow zainichi who are grappling with discrimination.

“Even so, I want to tell people it’s fun being a zainichi,” he says. “Denial won’t achieve anything. We shouldn’t fear the changes surrounding the zainichi community.”…

Kwak takes a liberal approach not only to the gender of his staff, but also to his employees’ academic backgrounds.

He has hired high school graduates, and his company has no age-based retirement policy.

“I see myself as a dropout,” he says. “I feel afraid of clean-cut companies where 5,000 people wearing the same suits work. So it was really no use creating a similar, stifling organization. My employees don’t call me ‘president’ anyway.”

via Japundit

Korea-based blogger Oranckay puts the Hwang Woo Suk cloning fiasco in larger societal context. Here’s a small sampling.

IMHO, just how it was that Hwang was able to have his way with the country is far more important than that of what possibly could have been going on inside his head. History is full of con artists and psychopaths, but few ever enjoy the status bestowed on Hwang and figuring out how he was able to deify himself is of more critical importance. If someone robs a bank, you don’t ask why he did it. There have always been bank robbers and there always will be. The important question is how he did it and how he got away with it, and in this case the bank shares a lot of the blame.

Naturally, however, one does wonder what Hwang’s problem is. The best quote I’ve seen (was in the international media but I can’t find it) is that he might have been trying to “fake it ’till you make it.” He needed lots of money and lots of eggs, and maybe he figured that he could really pull it off before the lies caught up with him once he had what he needed to work with….

How was he able to get away with it for so long?

Put simply, I think Korean society as a whole has itself to blame for the international embarrassment. It got really hard to question him once he published the 2005 article then went to speak at a conference in the U.S., saying upon his return to Korea that he’d gone to “the heart of America” and “planted a Korean flag on the top of the hill of bioscience.”…

As I mentioned briefly in a piece I wrote for the Kyunghyang Shinmun, I actually find reason for hope in all of this. Others have noted reasons such as the fact that in the end, the media, or some of it, did get the truth out for all to see; that the Korean scientific community got to the bottom of the matter on its own; and, ironically, I think Korea has reason to be encouraged by the fact that the rest of the world fell for Hwang’s fabrications. Most countries only get to do international mail order fraud. 10 or 15 years ago if a group of Korean scientists had said they’d cloned stem cells they’d have been laughed at. Korea might be given more scrutiny next time around, but the world believed that Korea has the potential to make landmark scientific breakthroughs and was willing to be fooled. That would not have been the case not too long ago, and I think the world expects more of Korea than most of the Korean public realizes. The international scientific community will not be tricked so easily the next time, but then neither will Korea.

via Hunjangûi karûchi’m, who notes that Hwang has now received a job offer from Clonaid, the Raelian outfit.

We [young men drafted from Korea] worked on a huge military ship, camouflaging it from the American planes. When they took it off dry dock we finished the top and the inside. This work had to be done deep in the bottom of the ship. The workers banged away with rivets and machinery, making huge noises that reverberated inside the ship. Those workers went down in the morning and came out late at night. They never saw the sun. The black dust flew around in there and covered them with soot, so they were all black–their whole bodies, all black.

The officer on board ship chose me to be his deputy and ordered me to take refreshments to the other officers and guards. Because of that, I didn’t suffer too badly. Part of my job was to deliver lunches to the Japanese guards. In their box lunch they had white rice and other tasty things, but even so, these bosses were so spoiled that they complained about the quality of their food. They yelled, “This is not fit for human consumption. Not even pigs would eat this!” They actually tossed it to me, and yelled, “Here, you eat this.”

When they did that, I shared it with my friends because they were really starving. The rest I stashed away, dried it, hid it, so I could take it with me when I got ready to escape. I did this for several months.

Prisoners of war worked there also, mixed in with us. These prisoners were mostly British, captured in Singapore. You could tell they had been starved–they were just skin and bones. They looked so emaciated that even we, who were hungry, thought they looked starved. They were brought to the ship in shackles, then the shackles were taken off. They scrounged in the garbage cans for any scraps of food.

I felt so sorry for them that I shared cigarettes in secret. They said to me, thank you, thank you, so many times that I felt embarrassed for the little I could do. If I had been caught, of course, my own life would be in danger. Although we couldn’t really communicate, whenever they saw me they smiled, laughed, and called out. There is no question that some things that one human being should never do to another had been done by those Japanese.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), p. 125

Life for the Japanese changed overnight [after the liberation of Korea in 1945]. In our Chongju area, our people policed themselves, and treated the Japanese well. The Japanese went to live in shelters or schools, and went out during the day to find jobs. We ourselves hired a Japanese woman as our maid.

One man who had been the middle-school principal was reduced to living at the shelter and going out during the day to seek work. One day two boys saw him and they thought he looked familiar. When they got close and recognized their former principal, old habits took over. They automatically stopped and gave him their respectful bow, even though he now dressed as a rag picker. He returned their bow, and right there shed tears, to think that the boys still respected who he was, not what he had become.

As for me, one day, walking toward Toktal village to visit Grandmother, I noticed a Japanese family trudging dejectedly along the road in the opposite way, toward Chongju city. I gasped when I recognized the school principal and his family from Chonch’on where we had lived earlier. They had been our friends. I didn’t know what to do. I hung my head and pretended I didn’t see them. To this day I am ashamed that I couldn’t even greet them.

In our north part of the country, when the Japanese packed up to leave, no one really knew how to rule in their place. People tried to police themselves and in some areas it worked better than others. Where we lived, in Chongju, it was calm and orderly. Much later I learned that terrible things happened in some places, especially in Hamgyong Province to the northeast near the Russian border. Anti-Japanese nationalists let out all their frustrations, and also the Korean communists, who had been biding their time, became militant. Cruel guerrilla attacks made everyone nervous. Nobody really knew who was in charge.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 143-144

CHIN MYONGHUI, (f) b. 1932, housewife, South Hamgyong Province:
My father had lived in both Russia and Japan. When he returned to Korea, he got a job teaching in Wonsan, South Hamgyong Province, and became principal, which was very unusual for a Korean. Almost always, school principals were Japanese.

Because of Father’s high position, we lived in a Japanese neighborhood and my best friends were Japanese. I did not know or use any Korean language at all, not speaking or reading or writing.

After liberation, the Koreans said my father was pro-Japanese, a running dog, because he was so high up. They almost lynched him. Then the Russian army came, and they wanted someone who could speak Russian to help them out. Father said no. So because of these two events, he fled to south Korea, leaving the rest of the family in the north. Later we made our own way to the south.

KIM P. [ANONYMOUS], (f) b. 1931, housewife:
When the war ended, everyone stopped using Japanese and started speaking Korean again. I was young, and I had never spoken Korean in my entire life. Since I didn’t know a single word of Korean, I repeated the sixth grade just to learn to speak my own native language.

YU TOKHUI, (f) b. 1931, housewife, South Ch’ungch’ong Province:
I noticed that the Second World War upset the entire social order of our village. My uncle had many servants and they all knew their places, but when the war required the young men to be drafted into the Japanese army, every young man was taken, servants and yangban, all went together, and it blurred the hierarchy. Everybody’s fate was the same, so they all became equal. Because of that, after the war, many of the servants moved out of Uncle’s house and moved to other cities. The old order crumbled.

PAK SONGP’IL, (m) b. 1917, fisherman, South Kyongsang Province:
On August 15, I finished ferrying doctors out to the troop ship in the Pusan harbor, docked my boat, and went upstairs in the office building. I had no idea what had happened. I saw the Japanese workers in the office wailing, banging on the desks, banging the floor. I can see them today in my mind. These very ones who had been so sure they were invincible. The next thing they did was drink themselves into a stupor. They went crazy. It was the tragedy of a nation in defeat.

SOURCE: Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, by Hildi Kang (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 145-146