B00BY4HXME EBOK (26 page)

Leftist activists played a major role in the pro-democracy movement that in 1987 brought an end to decades of authoritarianism in South Korea. However, soon after this triumph, the more radical factions of the nascent South Korean radical Left suffered two major blows.

First, between 1989 and 1990, the Communist bloc disintegrated. It instantly became clear that neither the Soviet Union nor Eastern Europe were what South Korean student radicals somehow believed them to be, namely a paradise of workers’ rights, general well-being, and true democracy, lands where happy peoples enjoyed an eternal bliss of a near-perfect social system.

Second, in the mid-1990s, the dramatic increases in contact and interaction with North Korea (both direct and indirect, via China) made it impossible to dismiss reports of North Korea’s destitution as “fabrications of the reactionary forces” and “lies of CIA-paid hacks.” It began to dawn on South Korean leftists that North Korea was a very poor Third World country run by an authoritarian government (they still cannot make themselves utter the word “dictatorship” when talking about the Kim dynasty). Up until now, many of South Korea’s self-styled “progressive intellectuals” have remained remarkably willing to overlook even the most repulsive features of the Pyongyang regime, while being unforgiving when it comes to abuses committed by the South Korean military dictators.
Nonetheless, their initial enthusiasm for a Juche utopia vanished by the mid-1990s.

In the heyday of South Korean student radicalism, during the late 1980s, a vocal minority of activists believed that the country should be unified under some version of Leninist Socialism, more or less similar to the then-current North Korean system. The majority, however, preferred a less radical solution and talked of a confederative state where both parts of Korea would keep their peculiarities whilst moving toward a compromise in social and political terms. Theoretically, the South Korean Left, including its moderate factions, still prefers a confederation, obviously in the hope that within such a confederation a sufficiently “progressive” (read: non-market) model could prevail somehow.

Meanwhile, the mainstream also moved far away from the anti-Communism of former times while discovering important reasons to be skeptical about the prospect of unification as it had been understood before. Since the mid-1990s a growing number of younger South Koreans have began to quietly entertain doubts as to whether unification at the first opportunity would be such a good idea.

This ongoing shift of opinions reflected changes in South Korean society. The number of people in the South who have ever had direct personal connection with the North is dwindling. As of 2010, people born before 1940 constituted merely 9.8 percent of South Korea’s population.
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They are the only people, however, who might possibly have some first hand memories of the North or North Korean relatives and family members.

The bitter German experience also played a major role in the reassessment of a once rosy attitude toward the unification. News from Germany made Seoul decision makers and the general public realize that the unification of the North and South would be vastly more expensive than anybody had imagined. The difference in per capita income between East and West Germany was 1:2 or 1:3, while in Korea, even if one believes the most optimistic estimate, the ratio is 1:15 (pessimists think it is closer to 1:40). The ratio of the population is also less favorable than in Germany. Taking into consideration the ongoing German troubles, well known in Seoul, this sounds like a recipe for disaster.

The generational shift contributed to changes as well. The politically active youngsters of the 1980s (now in their 40s or even early 50s) wanted unification because they were both leftist and nationalist. Their fathers (now in their 60s and older) wanted unification because they were anti-Communist and nationalist. However, the youngest generation—the 386ers’ children and younger siblings—are different. Born in the 1980s and 1990s, they are less nationalistic, less anti-American, more pro-market, and, most significantly, they do not really see North Korea as a part of their national community and tend to associate unification with economic hardship, not with the realization of some great national dream.

This slow-motion decline of the once-universal enthusiasm for unification is reflected by public opinion polls. In 1994 91.6 percent of South Koreans said they considered unification “necessary.” In 2007, according to a poll conducted by Seoul National University, the number of such people shrank to 63.8 percent.

It is especially important that age matters: the younger a South Korean is, the less likely he or she will be enthusiastic about unification. A 2010 Seoul National University study of attitudes about unification indicated that 48.8 percent of South Koreans in their 20s said that “unification is necessary.” These youngest participants actually constitute the only age group where the unification idea was supported only by a minority. Among people in their 30s, 55.4 percent of the participants agreed that “unification is necessary,” and among those over 50, 67.3 percent favored unification.
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This is not a surprise—everybody who interacts with younger South Koreans is aware that serious doubts about unification are common and indeed almost universal in this milieu. These people know that unification will be very expensive, and they do not quite understand why they should pay this money.

Even older people are having doubts these days. A Korean businessman in his early 70s, himself born in what is now North Korea, and with a long experience of interacting with Northerners because of his manifold business projects, recently described his feeling about the unification to the present author: “Well, the Northerners say they are so happy under the wise guidance of their Dear General. Let them be happy there, if they like
it so much. They are so different from us by now. Even their physical appearance is different, they are so short! So, the later we’ll have unification, the better. In a hundred years, perhaps.”

It is remarkable that nowadays even supporters of unification seldom rely on nationalist or other idealism-driven rhetoric—obviously on assumption that such idealism is unlikely to be shared by their compatriots. Instead, they talk about the economic advantages of unification, which will give the South Korean economy access to the “cheap labor and rich mineral resources” of the North. Irrespective of whether such statements are true, they clearly reek of a quasi-colonial attitude toward the supposed “brethren”—and this attitude does not bode well for North Koreans’ post-unification future.

However, there is one interesting peculiarity: these changes in public opinion are seldom reflected in public discourse. This silence is understandable. All “ideological packages” that exist in South Korea include ethnic nationalism as a key ingredient and the idea of unification is an inseparable part of all varieties of Korean nationalism. For any Korean public figure it would be politically suicidal to openly question the need of eventual unification. Any good Korean citizen, regardless of his/her views on any other issue, is expected to believe in the shared historic destiny of the North and South. This contradiction between professed beliefs and actual feelings makes many people look for excuses that would justify postponing unification into a distant undetermined future—but without falling into the heresy of openly challenging the need for unification as such.

Against such a backdrop, in late 1997, Kim Dae Jung, a lifelong dissenter and pro-democracy activist, was elected president of South Korea. His campaign was based on a critique of the old right-leaning establishment. Kim Dae Jung promised more social security, a softer policy in dealing with North Korea, and a harsher approach to big business. Aging Kim Dae Jung was old enough to belong to the generation of the 386ers’ parents, but
the “386 generation” embraced his candidacy with much enthusiasm. The next elections in 2002 were won by another candidate who clearly associated himself with the South Korean nationalist left—Roh Moo Hyun, a former human rights lawyer and pro-democracy activist.

The conservative South Korean media sometimes described both presidents as if they were closet Communists. This was clearly not the case, and their opinions on the economy or welfare were not that much different from that of German Social Democrats or the British Labor Party (even though they and their supporters were remarkably nationalist by the current standards of the European Left). However, in dealing with the North, the left-leaning administrations were prepared to jettison the old hard line. To an extent their approach reflected the ideological biases of the 386ers, some of whom held important jobs in both administrations. At the same time this soft approach reflected the increasingly strong doubts the average South Korean had with regard to a German-style unification-by-absorption.

This is how the Sunshine Policy was born. This policy was launched by Kim Dae Jung’s government in 1997 and continued by Roh throughout his term of 2002–2008. The stated goal of the Sunshine Policy was to encourage the gradual evolution of North Korea through unilateral aid and political concessions. 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 belief that a soft approach would persuade the North to institute large-scale reforms, more or less similar to those undertaken in China and Vietnam, thus opening the way to a gradual and manageable unification, perhaps through some form of a North-South confederation. An important aspect of the underlying assumptions of this policy was a belief (in all probability, erroneous) that reform would prolong the existence of the North Korean state and make possible a gradual elimination of the huge economic and social gap between the two Koreas.
As Korea expert Aidan Foster-Carter has noted, “Despite the rhetoric of unification, the immediate aim [of the “Sunshine” policy] was to retain two states, but encourage them to get on better.”
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After 1997 the South began to provide the starving North with considerable amounts of aid, but the breakthrough in relations between the two Koreas was achieved in September 2000, when President Kim Dae Jung went to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong Il in the first-ever intra-Korean summit. Kim Dae Jung had to pay a political as well as financial price to achieve this success—it was later discovered that North Korea demanded a payment of $500 million as a preliminary condition for accepting the proposed summit. The payment was promptly delivered, and only then did the summit take place.

These concessions annoyed South Korean rightists, who often claim that “Kim Dae Jung paid $500 million in order to purchase a Nobel Peace Prize for himself.” Indeed, the South Korean president became the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2000, “for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular.” There might be some kernel of truth in these accusations since Kim Dae Jung, being a lifelong politician, never forgot about self-promotion. But at the same time, the 2000 summit did open channels for a truly astonishing increase in inter-Korean exchanges.

As we remember, between 1996 and 2001, the United States and Japan were among the main providers of food aid to North Korea. By 2002 the United States dramatically reduced its aid after the “second nuclear crisis,” while the South significantly increased its own aid to the North. During the period between 2002 and 2007, the North received 5.1 million metric tons of overseas food aid—some 850,000 tons in an average year. South Korea shipped to the North 2.41 million metric tons of food aid (nearly half of the total—47.1 percent). During the same years, China provided 1.60 million metric tons (31.3 percent of the total amount of foreign aid) while the United States shipped 0.57 million metric tons (11.2 percent).
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The combined contribution of all other countries was marginal—yet another reminder of the essentially policy-motivated nature of the “humanitarian” aid to North Korea. Actually, the South Korean contribution
was even larger than the figures suggest, since in the years of sunshine it also shipped huge quantities of chemical fertilizer (between 200,000 and 350,000 tons a year throughout 2000–2007, or some 35 percent to 45 percent of all fertilizer used in North Korean agriculture). Without these shipments, North Korean harvests would have been far lower.
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A great number of North-South economic projects, big and small, were launched during the years of 1998 through 2008. Most of them were officially described as “cooperative projects,” but in actuality they tended to be lopsided. South Korean companies that dealt with the North were directly and indirectly subsidized by the South Korean government.

Among these projects three were of special importance—the K
ǔ
mgang Mountain tourist zone, the Kaes
ŏ
ng industrial zone, and the Kaes
ŏ
ng City Tours. All these projects were politically acceptable for North Korea’s leader, always worried about the possible political consequences of unrestricted interaction between Northerners and Southerners.

From this point of view, the K
ǔ
mgang Mountain tourist zone, the first of the “Big Three” projects, can be seen as an ideal undertaking. It is, essentially, a fenced-off ghetto for South Korean tourists and hence politically safe.

The project was conceived as early as 1989, when Chung Ju-yung, the founding chairman of Hyundai Group, the largest South Korean business conglomerate, first met with the Pyongyang leaders, including Kim Il Sung himself. Chung Ju-yung was born in what is now North Korea, and in the last years of his long and eventful life he demonstrated a sentimental attachment to his native land. This seems to be the reason why his Hyundai Group (or, to be more exact, its Asan subsidiary) took on all three major intra-Korean projects.