The Odd Couple a Special Report on the Koreas L September 27Th 2008
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The odd couple A special report on the Koreas l September 27th 2008 KKoreasSRep.inddoreasSRep.indd 1 117/9/087/9/08 118:28:398:28:39 The Economist September 27th 2008 A special report on the Koreas 1 The odd couple Also in this section The Bulldozer Enters stage right; trips head•over•heels. Page 3 The export juggernaut Heavy industry is South Korea’s sweet spot. Page 5 Reformed characters The chaebol have mostly learnt their lesson, but some lapses continue. Page 7 Survival of the ttest North Korean society is turbulent and in ux. Page 8 Jaw•jaw The international consequences of North Korea, and all the talk about it. Page 11 Koreans want their international standing to match the south’s Contested grounds economic success. They may have to wait until the peninsula is unied, Of history wars and peace parks. Page 12 says Dominic Ziegler Half•nished T THE heart of North•East Asia sits a erage are three inches (7cm) taller than What Lee Myung•bak still needs to do. Afailed state with the worst human• their poorer neighbours. Half a century Page 13 rights record on Earth. The regime main• ago South Korea’s economy was on a par tains its grip by putting one in 20 of its pop• with Upper Volta’s. Today its citizens have ulation in military uniform. One in 40 has an average income per person of $20,000. spent time in the gulag. Mobile phones They enjoy the highest penetration of and the internet are forbidden, except for broadband internet on Earth, along with a Acknowledgments the elite, and radio and television sets are popular culture of television shows and The author wants to thank all those who gave made to tune only to government stations. music that has become a highly bankable generously of their time and expertise in the Unauthorised travel within the country is Asian export known as the Korean wave. preparation of this report. In addition to banned, at least in principle. Food short• South Korea’s success is often called the those named in the text, they include Ste• ages are chronic, and a decade ago the re• miracle on the Han, after the river that phen Bosworth, Choi Kang, Yoichi Funabashi, gime’s malign neglect created a famine runs through the 23m•strong capital, Seoul. Jim Hoare, Hur Kyung•wook, Hyun Jung•taik, that killed between 600,000 and 1m peo• Yet a more obvious explanation is the Jung Ku•hyun, Erica Kang, Ki Won•kang, J.R. ple. The famine still casts a long shadow, sweat and the tears of a people with a pas• Kim, Minyoung Kim, Kim Tae•hyo, Kim Young• and not just through malnutrition and sion for work and self•improvement, cou• sun, Catherine Lee, C.S. Lee, Lee Hye•min, stunted growth; recent studies of refugees pled with generally enlightened economic Jay Y. Lee, Park Yong•man, Tomohiko Tani• have pieced together a picture of a popula• policies since the 1960soften in the face of guchi, Roland Villinger, David Wol and tion that, in wide swathes, remains trau• what is now known as the Washington Shigeo Yamada. matisedand there are fears that famine consensus. As well as a modern economy, conditions might be returning. this impassioned people has also fash• A list of sources is at Now fresh uncertainties have arisen ioned a constitutional democracy out of a www.economist.com/specialreports with reports that North Korea’s dictator, military dictatorship, again with sweat Kim Jong Il, may be seriously ill. That has and tears and not a little blood. underlined how little the outside world The regime in the north tries hard to An audio interview with the author is at knows about North Korea. What to do keep its citizens in the dark about the www.economist.com/audiovideo about this failed state, which happens also south’s success, and in South Korea six de• to possess the material for nuclear bombs, cades of separation have done much to More articles about the Koreas are at is likely to be the region’s single biggest weaken the blood ties which, in both www.economist.com/northkorea challenge over the coming years. states’ ocial rhetoric, are supposedly un• Slap next to all this sits the epitome of breakable. Reunication of the peninsula www.economist.com/southkorea globalisation’s success, whose men on av• remains a hallowed goal on either side. Yet 1 2 A special report on the Koreas The Economist September 27th 2008 2 for most people in the south, North Korea good reason to start building them up now. is not just another country but another Yet there are also plenty of pressing home• No taste for procreation 1 planet. Some 10,000 North Korean defec• grown reasons for more economic growth. Total fertility rate, % tors now live in the south, but despite ef• The most important of these is a dramatic North Japan Taiwan forts by the government and others they plunge in fertility. Today’s birth rate is ex• Korea South Hong live mostly on the fringes, despised by traordinarily low, and heading lower. This China Korea Kong many South Koreans and ill•qualied for is an Asia•wide trend, but South Korea’s 7 decent jobs. The Crossing, a lm with a has fallen more than most. The total fertil• 6 star cast released in Seoul this summer, au• ity rate of South Korean women (ie, the av• 5 thentically recreates everyday life in the erage number of births they can expect) 4 north and explores why its citizens are dri• has dropped to just 1.26 (see chart 1), down 3 ven to leave their homeland. Yet it was from 4.5 in 1970 and 1.5 in 2000. That is 2 quickly eased out at the box oce. South roughly half the rate at which a population 1 Korea is ill•prepared, psychologically, polit• replaces itself. In other words, the child• 0 ically and economically, for the unication bearing generation 25 years from now will 1955 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 2000 05 10 Sources: UN Population Division; national statistics presumed to follow the eventual collapse be roughly half the size of the current one. of the north. Even Japan, famous for its dearth of chil• The cost of such a collapse scarcely dren, has a higher fertility rate, at 1.3. tion: changing fertility patterns mean that bears thinking aboutand South Koreans For South Korean women, as for those 2,500 years of East Asian family tradition for the most part are trying their best not to elsewhere in Asia, this appears to be a stand to come to an end with the region’s do so. The task would make West Ger• good thing, o ering them greater security rising generation. What will it do to peo• many’s absorption of East Germany look and more autonomy than ever before ple if many, perhaps most, of them will no like a doddle. South Korea is merely a mid• within a Confucian family structure that longer have brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts dle•income country, with only a minimal has historically been hierarchical and or even cousins? As Mr Eberstadt points social safety net to o er its own people, let male•dominated. Even better, South Ko• out, when family structures atrophyeven alone abject North Koreans, who are per• rea’s mortality rate has also fallen steeply, in a country such as South Korea where haps 15 times poorer than their southern and people can now expect to live 30 years children are treated as fondly as they are in counterparts (whereas East Germans were longer than they did at the start of the Italysturdy institutional alternatives will two or three times poorer than West Ger• country’s modernisation in 1960. quickly need to be found to take on the role mans at the time of unication). Yet the fall in the fertility rate may re• now played by family networks. So unication, if and when it comes, ect dissatisfactions too: notably, over the As the South Korean population ages, will require South Korea to eld huge re• diculties faced by women who want the country’s high savings rate is almost sources, however much help it might get both to work and to raise a family. Almost bound to decline, which will have an e ect from international institutions. That is a everyone still gets married in South Korea. on both what the economy can invest and In other words, the fertility rate is falling what the government can raise in taxes. As because more women are postponing it is, the country’s national pension marriage to nearer the end of their repro• scheme and a long•term•care scheme for ductive lives. That is partly because the the old are only two decades old, and their burden of raising children still falls heavily funding structure is not geared to South Ko• on women, whereas men are consumed rea’s expected demographic transforma• with work, which in South Korea, as in Ja• tion over the coming quarter•century, pan, entails long hours and drinking ses• which will involve a rapidly ageing society, sions late into the night. a shrinking workforce and a population in Also as in Japan, companies, despite absolute decline. some improvement, still discriminate heavily against women, especially those In search of a miracle with children. Just one•third of South Kore• Until now most of the debate about such an women go back to work after having matters has concentrated on Japan, where children, half the OECD average.