Debriefing Korea

chicken & ginseng soup

seoul

For Spring Break, I had the unique privilege of traveling to South Korea on a scholarship program generously funded by the Korea Foundation. I met 75 other students from all over the country (hello to my sisters from Arkansas, Alabama, and upstate New York, and Minnesota)! After 24 hours of traveling, I made it from Boston to Seoul on a Saturday night. For the next 8 days, I had a packed schedule filled with seeing Seoul: eating traditional Korean food, learning Taekwondo, Korean drumming, and Korean traditional dance, listening to lectures at Yonsei University, and navigating the high-tech subway system. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of the Korean students I met, and the liveliness of Seoul. It rivals New York for sure.

When I applied for this program, I mentioned my fascination with South Korea's dramatic economic development - its rise as as one of the four "Asian Tigers." (Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are the other three) We spent a week or so talking about this last term in Intro to Comparative Politics (Mr. Polazzo's class, college style). The story, the "Miracle of the Han River," is that through leveraging a cheap labor force and Export Oriented Industrialization (and lots of US investment), Korea managed to switch from an agricultural economy to a highly advanced, globalized one in less than 20 years. A devasted, post-war Korea has become the 13th largest economy in the world. Holy crap.

Last week, I saw this in action. Of course Seoul is bustling, and Samsumg and LG logos are everywhere, but I saw this "Tiger" in the place I would least expect: at the Demilitarized Zone. We spent our third day in South Korea at the border between North and South Korea, where a cease-fire has been maintained for 57 years (this year marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the war). We were given briefings by the UN Security Council officers, bused around to see The Bridge of No Return (where POWs were exchanged), and crawled through the Third Tunnel of Aggression (allegedly designed by North Korea to attack Seoul). Through all of this, I felt the military intensity, and complexity of the situation. But there's more.

As we stared at North Korea from the large window of the museum at the Third Tunnel, I saw a line of cars at a distance move towards North Korea. It was like watching a silent film (I think, although I've never actually seen a silent film)  - the cars made no noise, they looked more like toy cars than anything. Who were they?

None other than South Korean business people headed for the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Set up in 2002 and expected to be completed by 2012, this complex employs around 40,000 North Koreans for an average of $57/month - half the cost of comparable Chinese labor, and 5% of what it would cost in South Korea (Newsweek 2006). One hour away from Seoul, in communist North Korea, lies an intensely capitalist hub.

I could not believe irony of the conflict. Here I was, pretty thoroughly briefed about the nuclear threat of North Korea, and reminded that "the war is not over," as cars waltzed right through the border on their personal runway to capitalize on cheap labor. Can we call this the military-industrial complex? To some extent, South Korea is repeating a familiar process: staying competitive with cheap labor. But this is North Korea we're talking about, and while many Koreans I met (and many people I know in general) condemn the North Korean government, South Korea is committed to setting up factories across the border.

I am torn. To what extent should politics and economics overlap? Is it an issue that some of the South Korean students I met say that they, like many people, just "don't care" for North Korea? "In high school, we learned that North Korea was our friend, but in the military, I learned how to kill them. Now I just don't care." I want everyone to have a living wage, and so what does that mean for North Koreans? 60 years after the war, does reunification look more and more unlikely?

Unfortunately, I don't have nearly the expertise or knowledge needed to fully assess the situation. I was in South Korea for 9 days, and I learned so much, but there's so much more. I am honored to have had this experience, and it definitely left me more concerned and aware of international issues. Best Spring Break yet, definitely worth not sleeping this week, and being swamped in the weeks to come.