Korea in 2022

Written by jh Tuesday, 09 February 2010 00:00

It is March 29^th, 2022.  It is the tenth anniversary of Korean reunification.

 People are remembering, and celebrating, in Jeju, Chongjin, and everywhere in between.  President Park Moon Su is giving speeches in Seoul and Pyongyang.  In the latter city, the Citizens Starvation Memorial is covered in flowers.  In Seoul, American president Marco Rubio will address the crowd as well.  For most Korean children, Reunification Day is a peaceful Spring holiday. 

 Many remember the events of 2009 and 2010, when in the months prior to Kim Jong-il’s death, some journalists were pessimistic about world reunification reaction.  In News Blaze, commentator Ivan Silic asserted that major powers wanted the peninsula to stay divided.  A Korea Herald editorial took a milder view, opining that while American interests would be served by reunification,  Chinese and Japanese ones would not.  Neither mentioned the possibility that the country could become reunited as soon as it did.

 When Kim died of pancreatic cancer in May 2010, his youngest son Kim Jong-un, as expected, assumed power.  Although the Reuters news agency had previously recorded his description as an “intelligent and thoughtful man,” Western observers did not know to what extent that was true.  During the younger Kim’s Swiss education, he had seen the modern world, become aware of the misery caused by his father’s regime, and vowed, secretly, to free his country to the extent his opportunities allowed.  He successfully concealed this attitude until after he was installed. 

 In July 2010, “Brilliant Comrade” Kim Jong-un announced that all North Korean citizens with close relatives in the South could cross the border to visit them.  The logistics were chaotic – over a million people with claims of varying legitimacy applied in person in Pyongyang alone – but within a week chaos at the new Temporary Journey Offices had died down, helped by Kim’s deployment of thousands of People’s Armed Forces soldiers to facilitate the process.  In August, the Republic of Korea welcomed half a million, who became the summer’s news story.  The effect on the South went beyond the 500,000 guests – there were so many family reunions that work absenteeism reached all-time national highs.  Yet all but the most severe employers took a remarkably relaxed attitude.

 All visitors were required to return by October 1.  Some returned sooner, and told all the people they knew about life on the other side.  Many returned that day.  Some did not.  By then, though, the mood of the North Korean people had changed permanently.  They were ready for freedom they not only knew was nearby but could now graphically describe and understand.  Although the military continued to guard the borders, their resolve was weakening, as even soldiers are human beings with families, ears, and relatives.  On October 5, to the roaring applause of hundreds of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology students, Kim announced that radio and television access to the outside world would now be allowed.  He also stated that citizens visiting South Korean relatives could stay abroad indefinitely.

 The next few weeks were, to that point, the headiest in national history.  Between radio, TV, and reports from travelers, almost all North Koreans knew what they had been missing.  They organized protests about their living conditions, and almost held a general strike.  Students marched in the streets for Internet access.  Everybody wanted more food.  The army was called out to maintain order, but when Kim was told some students had been shot, he ordered that no soldier shall fire on unarmed citizens.  Photographs of that time are reminiscent of those of American 1960s student protests – one young man even reenacted what Berkeley students had done over 40 years before, by putting flowers in soldiers’ rifle barrels. 

 So where would the food come from?  On November 18^th, one week before the American Thanksgiving holiday, Kim called President Obama and made a bold offer:  In exchange for $2 billion in aid, made up of $1 billion in food and $1 billion in seeds, plants, and farm equipment, North Korea would destroy its entire nuclear capability in front of international inspectors.  After five days of working out specifics, the American Congress approved the bill, with the Senate voting 100-0 and the House, with one member very ill, concurring 434-0.  Deliveries started before Christmas, were distributed by the North Korean army, and saved an estimated 10,000 lives that winter and many more in the years to follow. 

 Changes continued during 2011.  Kim Jong-un announced 50% reductions over the next two years to the People’s Armed Forces and the Ministry of People’s Security.  Many soldiers were assigned to farm duty.    North Koreans with good work records were allowed to apply for exit visas.  Government torture was banned.  And late in summer, with exceptions only for a few sites Kim considered offensive and inflammatory, Internet access was legalized.  That year Kim also survived two assassination attempts.  The first, at the Triumphal Arch, involved two disaffected soldiers with machine guns approaching Kim and his personal guards.  Twenty meters away they were questioned, and started shooting – only fast action by Kim’s guards stopped the effort, which ended with both assailants dying on the scene.  The second, also on the street, was a poorly planned knife attack which was easily aborted, and two days later the attacker was publicly hung. 

 Early next year it became clear to Kim that the best for the people would be a merger with the South.   In February 2012, he traveled to Seoul to meet with President Lee Myung-bak.  He offered Lee his country.  Lee, and the National Assembly, agreed within days.  The announcement was made, the details were worked out, and on March 29, 2012, the Republic of Korea had nine new provinces.  The maps and globes all over the country, in schools, in government buildings, and on paper, showing Korea as one nation, were finally correct. 

 Lee, along with Kim in the new position of Reunification Minister, directed the integration.   Former Northern citizens were allowed to exchange their KPW won for KRW, which, although suffering on the foreign exchange market by reaching 1,711 to the US dollar in 2013, reached its pre-unification level of 884 three years later and has been slowly strengthening ever since – at press time, about 650 won buys one dollar (or 1,242 for one euro, and 1,626 per pound). 

 The largest Korean reunification-related endeavor involved one of the largest military construction brigade efforts in history.  With no significant foreign threat, the country needed nowhere near the combined total of 1.9 million active armed services personnel, not to mention 9.2 million reservists, but before mustering them out, they put three-fourths of them to work in the North, where for the rest of their tours they built roads, motorways, subways, sewers, railroad tracks, cellular phone towers, and much more.  Most prominent were the extension of KTX service to Pyongyang, Wonsan, Hamhung, and Chongjin, completed ahead of schedule in 2015, and the first maglev train segment, between Busan, Seoul and Pyongyang, in 2020.. 

 State-sponsored reunification work kept unemployment rates for the combined country around 4% for the decade, compared with America’s and the Eurozone’s 9.8% and 9.2% respective figures.  In contrast to the continuing American and European problems of discouraged jobless, people unhappily choosing non-working lifestyles, and part-time jobs for people wanting to work full time, few Koreans could not find full employment in the 2010s.  The government also used its formidable bully-pulpit power to encourage those in the South to “eat less – send it north instead”;  they did, and by 2015, between that effort, improved farm outputs, and more imports, starvation in the North dropped to American levels.  In what was rumored to be a rare near-unanimous decision, Kim Jong-un received the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.

 Major countries have reacted consistently positively to reunification.  The United States, which signed a lease to maintain two Korean bases, is rid of a dangerous destabilizing country, freeing military and humanitarian resources for elsewhere.  China, which in no uncertain terms told the changing North Korea it did not want refugees streaming over its border, now has no threat of war or nuclear incidents from the other side.  Japan has expanded trading with the new larger Korea, and appears to hope that in a generation or so, helped by its symbolic 2016 official concession of Dokdo, it can be in a true friendship with this country, with which it has more in common, geographically and culturally, than any other.  Russia was never concerned with the previous order too much, as Korea borders only 16.5km of its remote northeastern territory (in fact, in 2011 an unnamed Russian diplomat, after enjoying Jack Daniels at an American embassy party, was said to joke that a nuclear attack on Vladivostok would “much improve it”), but now it has a growing trading partner that much closer.     

 So how were such commentators as Ivan Silic wrong?  They looked to the past, not to the future.  Silic claimed the combined army would bother other countries, without realizing Korea would not need one anywhere near that size.  Silic and the Korea Herald staff both claimed China preferred North Korea as a buffer, and indeed China was providing it significant aid, but how much of a problem would a liberal democracy, also a major trading partner (including 25 million Korean cars sold in China in 2019) and a country with a far smaller military force than before, be? 

 Silic also wrote that America could have easily displaced the North Korean government.  That did not happen since its rise as a true threat coincided with American disgust over the trauma of Vietnam.  When that mood had faded, Kim Jong-un’s father had formed a very well-defended and well-armed country, more akin to Switzerland than anything that could be dislodged in a “matter of hours.”  Silic also did not realize that what he called North Korea’s being “something like a good friend to the US,” as shown by former president Clinton’s 2009 visit to negotiate freedom of two captured American journalists, had always been solely an effort to placate such an intractable and dangerous country,  similar to America’s conferring Most Favored Nation trading status on the USSR during the late Cold War.  Indeed, the American State Department had been known to do much more than that to rescue its citizens from trouble abroad, many times. 

 As for the territorial designs Silic saw Japan having on Korea, he did not see that Korea was, for decades before reunification, already “very hard to control and impossible to invade.”  Additionally, 2022 marks the 77^th year since any two industrialized countries have gone to war;  if Japan actually did such a thing it would get a very poor response from, among many others, its critical trading partner and military ally across the Pacific.  While the Korea Herald staff may or may not have judged correctly in saying Japan preferred a split peninsula, they did not mention Japan not only would take no action against reunification but would profit financially from a larger republic.  As for Germany, when Silic mentioned that country’s indifference to Korean issues he must have forgotten that since about 1980, over forty years ago now, continental European countries have consistently ignored most actions, both good and bad, of other countries.  As it turned out, German attitude actually went the other way;  as Germany, which experienced its own reunification with similar joys and problems, has been closer to and more appreciative of Korea. 

 So now, with no significant enemies and the most potent list of friends of any country on the planet, Korea is entering its Golden Age.   It is prosperous and on the technological forefront.  It is education-based, with foreign English teachers, accepted by the vast majority of Koreans, now all over the former North as well.  It is also benefiting from America’s reverse brain drain in other fields, and interest in Korean language and culture at American business schools trails only Chinese.  The border with China is functioning, with less pressure on the other side now that Liaoning and Jilin provinces have been named China’s latest Special Economic Zones.  Tourism is increasing, as word of low prices, cities and sights undiscovered by Westerners, and tolerant, friendly people has reached the rest of the modern world, along with its rail connections with the rest of Eurasia. 

 Currently, it is time for Koreans to look inside to their culture of stress and overwork, and avoid making the Japanese mistakes of insularity, economically unneeded jobs, and too little consumption.  Yet the 23 million person gulag, outlasted only by Cuba as a Cold War remnant, is consigned to history.  And as they celebrate today in Seoul, Pyongyang, and elsewhere Hangul is spoken, the world is cheering with them.

 Jim Huntington is a former project manager and adjunct business professor now teaching at Wanju County elementary and middle schools.

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