Category Archives: Authors

London: not as liveable as I’d like

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By Tyler Brûlé
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b423b1b4-532e-11df-813e-00144feab49a.html
Published: May 1 2010 01:29 | Last updated: May 1 2010 01:29

By London standards, I’m a high-rise resident. I live in a duplex on the top floor of a period building in the heart of central London and from my terrace I have views of the BT Tower, the twinkling westbound approach to Heathrow and the rooftops of Marylebone.

As spring kicks into gear I throw the doors open most mornings to create a bit of indoor-outdoor living (weather permitting) and I like to take the sun before the clouds start to settle some time just after 9.30. I could almost go so far as to call it penthouse-living except, this being London, my penthouse is a somewhat vertically challenged three to four storeys above the streets of W1.

In spite of the Lilliputian proportions, it’s a tall building by Marylebone standards and stands out among its neighbours. It shares airspace with the dishes and antennae bristling on top of the Chinese embassy and has views into a handsome apartment across the street belonging to a couple I never see on the street below but frequently glimpse acting out scenes of cosy domestic bliss. On days when the skies are big and bright, the southerly views make it feel connected to the warm plains of the Iberian peninsula; when the heavens are grey and low it all becomes damp and Dickensian.

Last Saturday I arrived back in London after a 10-day Asian tour and, bright skies and warm breezes aside, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been dropped into a shabby chapter from Oliver Twist. Heathrow was its usual dysfunctional self with the added feature of a fire alarm that shut down the arrivals area and broken public announcement system that left passengers arriving from Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore wondering if they’d all been detained by HM Customs or were about to be burnt to a crisp. At the taxi rank outside Terminal 3 cabbies were hot and bothered and not budging from their comfy seats whether to help elderly Canadian couples load their luggage, or bewildered mothers heave children and prams into passenger compartments.

As we bounced and bumped our way into central London, my post-flight mood was best captured by various political party campaign posters for the general election beside airline billboards promoting the electric delights of Asia. Was I being to asked to vote for parties ill-equipped to take their game on to a global stage or vote with my feet and return to countries that are already speeding past the UK? Voters in the UK have a buffet of choices (a purée of policies, soundbite-size candidates and pickled promises) before them but none is particularly appetising. Much was made of the three parties’ manifestos but there’s little to convince voters that they’re supporting a group of individuals who will lead them boldly into the future with a worldview to match.

Spend two days in Seoul and London starts to look and feel like a sleepy, stagnant backwater. At Incheon airport you can spy UK designers flying in to work on high-profile projects for South Korea’s biggest technology players. At the headquarters of a major financial services company the chief executive is meeting a Pritzker prize-winning architect to embark on the creation of a concert hall for his credit-card holders. Beneath the streets, rails are being laid for an expanding metro system and stations are being overhauled into gleaming hubs to serve the citizens of one of the hardest working capital cities in the world. At the Park Hyatt Seoul staff deliver a level of service that’s mirrored across a variety of sectors in South Korea’s economy. As the nation becomes less competitive as a manufacturer its financial, retail, transport and technology companies are all sharpening their skills to take their respective games global. Even Mayor Oh’s promise to make his city greener or more design-minded seems to be coming good.

When I first travelled to South Korea seven years ago I found it grey, a little grumpy and largely unattractive. In less than a decade it’s fashioned itself into a major passenger and logistics hub, is home to some of the best hotels in the world and crackles around the clock. Korea Inc’s executives want to work and learn from the best and leaders at both the local and national level have embraced the liveability mantra to retain and attract talent.

As I crossed Oxford Street on Saturday afternoon there was little of this sort of crackle – just a lot of crack. Up and down the street tummies were hanging out over jeans, food was being stuffed into faces, and bums were falling out of trousers. Was this a nation at rest and play on a gorgeous spring day? Perhaps. Was this also a fleeting snapshot of a nation that’s lost its dignity and sense of pride? For sure.

As a chronic low-scorer on global liveability surveys it’s surprising that none of the UK’s political party strategists have embraced a message that’s become central to leaders elsewhere. A manifesto for “A More Liveable UK” would surely be a vote and inward-investment winner.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle

tylerbrule@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/brule

Asia’s first Master of Wine

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FT, Published: March 5 2010 22:45 | Last updated: March 5 2010 22:45

What wine would do justice to the explosive taste of fried chilli prawns? How about beef satay, or chicken in a spicy coconut sauce? Now imagine you are in Singapore or Malaysia and that all three dishes, plus half a dozen more besides, are set before you. How could you possibly match wine to such a panoply of competing and powerful flavours?

Korean-born Jeannie Cho Lee, the only Asian among the world’s 279 Masters of Wine, spent two years trying to puzzle out precisely that. She travelled to 10 Asian food cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Mumbai – sampling dishes and figuring out which wines, if any, would make a worthy addition to an already sumptuous table. The resulting book, Asian Palate, published in November, is an attempt to understand food in its own context and to suggest appropriate wine without imposing alien tastes on some of the world’s complex cuisines.

“I wanted to see how wine fits in to our Asian food culture,” she says when I meet her in a private dining room in the China Club, a Hong Kong club that eschews the stuffiness of more traditional establishments. “I think food is place-driven,” she says, drawing a parallel with what wine experts refer to as the terroir to denote the characteristics that a grape draws from its geography. “It is the entire environment from which that particular ingredient comes from, the climate, the weather, the soil, even the people. It is the same with food,” she says. “I wanted to look at how to introduce wine to a table without disrespecting the harmony and the integrity of the dishes.”

Lee, who grew up eating Korean food cooked by her mother in the US and who now lives in Hong Kong, says the starting point must be a true love of Asian food. “I have an Asian palate,” she says. “My familiar tastes are of dried squid, salted anchovies, pungent soybean paste. You need to love the chewiness of intestines, the gelatinous and chewy texture of chicken feet and to appreciate jellyfish. You need to love that very soft mushy texture of sea cucumber and sea urchin. You can’t tell someone to like that.”

Lee’s love of wine began in Oxford, where she spent a year as part of her degree. She remembers being served “two or three clarets and perhaps a white wine to start”. Her interest piqued, she began to explore the wines of France and Italy and, when she returned to New York, she attended the famous Windows on the World Wine School, then on the top two floors of the World Trade Center. After moving to Hong Kong with her husband – whom she met at wine school – she continued to study, now with the UK-based Wine & Spirits Education Trust. At that time, wine taxes were high in Hong Kong – they were cut to zero in February 2008, transforming the city into Asia’s wine capital – and there wasn’t much of a wine culture. Lee pushed on, taking detailed tasting notes of every wine she came across in her job as a food and wine writer. By 2005, she felt ready to sit the daunting Master of Wine examination, a four-day test that includes four theoretical papers as well as a rigorous assault course of blind tasting, held annually in Sydney, London and Napa Valley. “I thought, ‘It’s a wine exam. How difficult can it be?’ ” she recalls. Like most first-timers, she failed. Second time around, in 2008, she cracked it.

Armed with that distinction, she set off on her 10-city quest to pair wine with Asian food. But she was determined not to force one culture on to another. Some food, she concluded, was simply better enjoyed without wine. “If you want chilli crabs in Singapore, whether the chilli or the black pepper crabs, perhaps it is better to have something thirst-quenching, like a beer, or cold water or some lemonade.” She understands why some Japanese chefs stick to rice-based sake, refusing to serve wine with their food, even though wine became popular in Japan a generation before it took hold in Hong Kong and mainland China. “Wine comes with unique flavours. It can intrude or take away from the balance of the food,” she says.

Her approach is to recommend wines in keeping with the flavours already present. “I would never suggest a sweet wine in northern China even though it would go well with the food in theory, because it is not culturally part of the local palate,” she says. But in Thailand, where a typical meal might include coconut, fresh fruit or sweet tea, she is comfortable recommending a medium-sweet wine. For Thai cuisine, her tips include an off-dry Riesling, an aromatic Alsace Gewürztraminer and an Austrian Grüner Veltliner.

In the same way, with spicy Sichuan food, often bobbing in red hot chilli-pepper oil, her training tells her that the tannins in red wine fight, and exaggerate, the spicy flavours. “You’re thinking to temper that with a white. But a lot of Asians want that taste to linger. So people who want that pungent taste to go on and on naturally reach for the red.” Whether white or red, her tip for Sichuan fare is for something with a lot of personality and not too expensive, since the grape will always lose the battle against the chilli.

Her sensibility to local tastes aside, she says some Asian food goes extraordinarily well with wine. She raves about the combination of sushi and vintage champagne, particularly if the fish is white and served with salt as opposed to soy sauce. Her preference is for something such as a 1996 Blanc de Blancs from Salon. For fattier tuna, she suggests a delicate, textured Pinot Noir. Tempura goes well with light-bodied reds with modest tannins or medium to full-bodied whites with crisp acidity.

Her native Korean food, packed with a range of flavours, demands versatile wines with refreshing acidity such as Sauvignon Blanc or a fruity Pinot Noir. Her tips for Indian food include a Sauvignon Blanc/ Semillon blend, old world full-bodied whites from Alsace or Rhône and, more surprisingly, a Rioja.

But the biggest challenge in pairing wine with Asian cuisine, she says, is the fact that Asians share their food, rather than ordering one dish at a time. “We are very communal and we like to dig in. We like to have different texture, bite and flavour combination with each mouthful. You dabble in and out of different flavours.”

That makes it impossible to match one wine with one flavour. One suggestion is to open a few different wines to cater for the variety of food on offer. Alternatively, the wine can be selected with one or two highlighted dishes in mind.

Her final piece of advice is not to have exaggerated expectations. “A wine is not going to make a meal so much better,” she says, “Asian flavours and the intensity of those flavours are already so high.” In the long run, she says, Asians will themselves gradually work out how best to incorporate the flavours of wine into their age-old cuisines. Their discoveries may shock and delight.

A Nation of Racist Dwarfs

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Kim Jong-il’s regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought.
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.single.html
By Christopher Hitchens|Posted Monday, Feb. 1, 2010, at 10:01 AM ET

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial “minder” whom I’ll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world’s most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he’d heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more “total” than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state. But I was preoccupied, as are most of the country’s few visitors, by the more imposing and exotic forms of totalitarianism on offer: by the giant mausoleums and parades that seemed to fuse classical Stalinism with a contorted form of the deferential, patriarchal Confucian ethos.
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Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire wrote that those trying to master a new language always begin by translating it back into the tongue they already know. And I was limiting myself (and ill-serving my readers) in using the pre-existing imagery of Stalinism and Eastern deference. I have recently donned the bifocals provided by B.R. Myers in his electrifying new book The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, and I understand now that I got the picture either upside down or inside out. The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian “military first” mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Consider: Even in the days of communism, there were reports from Eastern Bloc and Cuban diplomats about the paranoid character of the system (which had no concept of deterrence and told its own people that it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in bad faith) and also about its intense hatred of foreigners. A black Cuban diplomat was almost lynched when he tried to show his family the sights of Pyongyang. North Korean women who return pregnant from China—the regime’s main ally and protector—are forced to submit to abortions. Wall posters and banners depicting all Japanese as barbarians are only equaled by the ways in which Americans are caricatured as hook-nosed monsters. (The illustrations in this book are an education in themselves.) The United States and its partners make up in aid for the huge shortfall in North Korea’s food production, but there is not a hint of acknowledgement of this by the authorities, who tell their captive subjects that the bags of grain stenciled with the Stars and Stripes are tribute paid by a frightened America to the Dear Leader.

Myers also points out that many of the slogans employed and displayed by the North Korean state are borrowed directly—this really does count as some kind of irony—from the kamikaze ideology of Japanese imperialism. Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.

The regime cannot rule by terror alone, and now all it has left is its race-based military ideology. Small wonder that each “negotiation” with it is more humiliating than the previous one. As Myers points out, we cannot expect it to bargain away its very raison d’etre.

All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the “wider” society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more “authentically” Korean.
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Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Green initiatives

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In November in Seoul, at The Economist Conferences Business Roundtable with the South Korean government, President Lee Myung-bak and his full team of economic ministers and other top officials all harped a good deal on green themes. I append the relevant section of the summary that I wrote for participants. You’ll note a degree of scepticism.

Songdo, the subject of the article that Michael links to, is probably a lost cause by now for the poor spoonbills. (For a broader and more positive view of this project overall, from a source which one might have expected to be critical, see http://www.japanfocus.org/-David-McNeill/3247.)

Then there is Saemangeum: mother of all white elephants, and politically the purest pork. They built the world’s longest sea-wall, at vast expense and here again destroying wetland bird habitats. Yet after almost 20 years, nothing has been done with it because no one can agree what the ruddy thing is for! Some links:

Birdskorea.org | Visit Korea (A casino now, forsooth!) | Joongang Ilbo

Now we have the Four Rivers Restoration Project (4RRP), which is ploughing ahead despite many serious concerns. These are summarized in an article I wrote last May; also appended here, if I may, since it is not in the public domain.

An excellent piece on the 4RRP is this by James Card:

His opening paragraph reads as follows:

The Korean peninsula was once called geum-su-gang-san, “a land of embroidered rivers and mountains.” Before South Korea industrialized in the postwar years, the rivers were wild-running freestone streams barreling down the mountains and turning into sandy shallow rivers edged by wetlands as they reached the sea. In her 1898 book Korea and Her Neighbors, 19th-century travel writer Isabella Bird described the upper Namhan River as “where pure emerald water laps gently upon crags festooned with roses and honeysuckle, or in fairy bays on pebbly beaches and white sand.”

That world is long gone now…

Finally, ecological doubletalk is only one instance of how ideology befuddles the brain and skews policy. There is also egalitarian doubletalk, whose progeny is Sejong City: like Saemangeum an ill-considered pork-barrel scheme on whose purpose no one agrees, and a political hot potato which will waste time and money for years to come, belying its website name: http://www.happycity.go.kr/.  Here are two views: JoongAng Ilbo | Hankyoreh

—————————–

Conference Summary

A major theme was what President Lee called the “new national vision” of low carbon green growth. (So new, indeed, that it hardly figured in his campaign for office in 2007.) Strategy and finance minister Yoon Jeung-hyun outlined the “Green Growth Five-Year Plan”, dating only from July, whereby Korea “will invest two percent of the GDP as public spending on green growth between 2009 and 2013.” Similarly, according to the only recently appointed knowledge economy minister Choi Kyunghwan, five ‘green tech industries’ are among 17 ‘new growth engines’ announced in January; the other 12 being in ‘high-tech convergence industries’ and ‘value-added service industries.’ (More on services in the following section.)

Minister Choi, who is also a member of the national assembly, admitted that he had recently expressed the fear that South Korea plans to go green too fast. In his view public consensus is missing. Moreover his brief includes being in charge of industry, so he fights their corner. (MKE is the new name for what used to be the ministry of commerce, industry and energy or MOCIE: arguably a more accurate moniker than the trendy new one, with its aura of IT.) Kim Hyung-Kook, who chairs the presidential committee on green growth, conceded that for a country whose emissions had more than doubled since 1990, going green would be hard. He saw his committee as open to foreigners, and a ginger group to the rest of government.

The US$18bn Four Rivers Restoration Project (4RRP) was little mentioned, despite its being the most tangible project in this field as well as a major focus of public debate. Many view it as a covert rebranding of President Lee’s former ‘grand canal’ scheme, which he had pitched more for logistical than green reasons (though few were convinced) and reluctantly dropped. In sum, despite right-on rhetoric and good intentions, doubts remain about both the depth of this new conversion to eco-friendliness, and just how green some aspects of it really are.

…

As participants left, they may have noticed posters and preparations in the Hyatt for an event next day: the 2009 International Forum for Green Growth and Saemangeum Project. This is about the world’s longest sea-wall (33km) and largest polder on Korea’s southwest coast, not yet complete after nearly 20 years and some US$7.5bn. No one agrees what to do with the site; plans have altered several times, while critics claim it is bad for the environment.

An editorial on October 21st in the JoongAng Ilbo, Seoul’s leading daily, linked this to other currently planned large-scale projects under the headline: “Prudent Policy, Please.” Besides the Four Rivers project, this also alludes to the main hot potato of current political debate: a US$18bn plan to move half the government to a new administrative city 160km south of Seoul. (Interestingly this went unmentioned in the Roundtable.) Even if modified as seems likely into a scientific or educational complex instead, this will still be an costly distraction.

____________________

Brief for Oxford Analytica. Edited version published 22 May 2009.
Some slight updating.

SOUTH KOREA:
Rivers restoration project rekindles canal controversy
SUBJECT: The Lee Myung-bak administration’s environmental infrastructure plans.

SIGNIFICANCE: Critics claim the government’s ideas are environmentally unsound, and a ploy to resurrect the president’s dream of a nationwide canal network via the back door.

ANALYSIS: On April 27 President Lee Myung-bak presided at the launch of an interim plan to upgrade South Korea’s four major rivers: the Han, Nakdong, Geum and Yeongsan. This is to be finalized by end-May, with work starting in September after the rainy season.

The four river restoration project (4RRP) is a core part of a 50 trillion won (37 billion dollar) ‘Green New Deal’ announced earlier this year. Costing 14 trillion won, the 4RRP aims to:

  • Provide more and better water. Two new dams and 13 reservoirs are to store an extra 1.25 billion cubic metres of fresh water by 2012.
  • This, and dredging the river beds, are also meant to improve control of seasonal flooding. The latter has worsened since the 1970s, possibly because of the effects of industrialisation.
  • Amenities will include 1,411 kilometres of new cycling paths, sprucing up cultural relics near the river banks, and general riparian beautification for leisure and tourism purposes.
  • It is hoped thereby to create some 190,000 jobs directly and more indirectly, boosting local economies along the rivers and contributing to more balanced regional development.
  • New photovoltaic and small hydropower plants on or near the four rivers, as well as larger green spaces, are supposed to reduce carbon emissions by 100,000 tons annually.

Canal redux? On February 26 prime minister Han Seung-soo said “there should be no more controversy over this project,” calling it “the backbone of our Green New Deal plan.”

However, this has not silenced claims that the 4RRP is essentially a covert bid to revive Lee Myung-bak’s pet project for a ‘Grand Korean Waterway’ (GKW): a 540 kilometre cross-country canal linking Seoul to the port of Busan in the southeast, costing 16 trillion won.

Mountainous and densely populated, South Korea has high logistics costs. But few experts supported the GKW, fearing rather a white elephant and ecological harm. Yet Lee persisted,  until forced to drop the idea last June amidst a deepening political crisis caused by protests against US beef imports and complaints that he was riding roughshod over public opinion.

Water shortage. Among the varied aims of the 4RRP, water shortage is a growing problem. Though South Korea’s yearly rainfall of 1,274 millimetres is 30% above the global average, its dense population means per capita water supply will fall to 1,199 cubic metres by 2025; the UN regards 2,000 as the safe minimum. Yet daily consumption per head at 397 litres is the highest in OECD, suggesting a need for action at the demand as well as the supply end.

Protest. Environmental NGOs are influential in South Korea. Their record includes:

  • Holding up for several years construction of the world’s longest seawall (see below).
  • Delaying the last section of the KTX high speed rail link from Seoul to Busan, now set to open finally in 2010. On April 23 the Supreme Court convicted Venerable Jiyu, a Buddhist nun, for obstructing this; most famously in a 120-day hunger strike in 2005 against a planned 13 kilometre tunnel near her monastery, said to threaten the habitat of a rare salamander.

Green? Ecological NGOs are predictably sceptical of the 4RRP and its green credentials:

  • Birds Korea (BK) claims that the plans to dredge rivers and build dams, weirs and bicycle paths will breach obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, to both of which South Korea is a signatory.
  • BK also argues that vegetated riverbanks, appropriately supported, would be stronger and cheaper to maintain than concrete, as well as more attractive for biodiversity and recreation.
  • Or again, silting and stagnation from dams will harm rather than help water quality. Tap water potability has become a public concern in recent years; bottled water sales have soared despite official insistence that mains water is safe to drink. Water quality and quantity and flood control alike would be better guaranteed by restoring natural flood-plain wetlands.
  • Conversely, a construction-focused approach will disturb and restrict water flows, destroy natural river beds and edges, reduce biodiversity and risk long-term ecological damage.

Bulldozer. Relatedly, critics query the underlying perspective and priorities of this project:

  • President Lee is a former CEO of Hyundai’s construction arm. Nicknamed ‘bulldozer’, he is viewed as espousing an old-school view of development as covering nature with concrete.
  • The construction sector, accounting for nearly 20% of GDP, is suffering in the downturn. This affords an excuse for public works projects as Keynesian stimulus, and for job creation. On this basis the 4RRP, like the GKW before it, is popular in most of the localities affected, with hopes of regeneration and new employment outweighing environmental concerns.
  • In Lee’s favour, his controversial removal of a raised motorway to restore a long-hidden stream while mayor of Seoul is now applauded as much improving the capital’s amenities.

Exempt? There is disquiet that no full feasibility studies have been done. Indeed, a 1999 law mandating such a survey for all projects costing over 50 billion won was recently amended to exempt works for “natural disaster prevention” – as the 4RRP is classified – from this.

Canal reduced. Similar unease affects another canal project, predating the GKW and still going ahead. On May 6 President Lee visited the site of the 18 kilometre Gyeongin canal. By 2011 this will connect the Han river in Seoul with the port of Incheon on the Yellow (West) Sea for cargo ships of up to 4,000 tons.

Conceived in the 1990s, this idea was abandoned five years ago amid doubts that it could be economic. In 2003 the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) criticised officials for fudging a cost-benefit analyis by the Korea Development Institute (KDI) to make it look viable. Lee revived the 2 billion dollar project, but doubts persist and KDI’s study remains unpublished.

Green growth. More broadly, on May 12 the Presidential Committee on Green Growth said 12.6 trillion won will be invested by 2013 in green technologies, to create half a million jobs.  4.2 trillion won will be spent on Internet infrastructure, green IT products, and low-carbon transit systems, while R&D into other various green technologies, such as high-efficiency solar batteries and hybrid vehicles, will receive 8.4 trillion won.

Seawall saga. If precedent is any guide, two relevant cases point in opposite directions:

  • Confounding early scepticism, upgrading of the Han river in Seoul – initally for the 1988 Olympics – has been a success. The river now is far cleaner and more attractive than before.
  • However, the main recent precedent for large-scale nature-remaking is discouraging. At 33 kilometres, Saemangeum on the southwest coast is the world’s longest seawall, infilling an estuary and adding 400 square kilometres of reclaimed land. This remains controversial:
  • Begun in 1991, the wall was not finished till 2006. Environmentalists opposed it, saying it would destroy some of East Asia’s most important wetlands, crucial for migratory birds. In 2007 the RSPB, a British bird protection body, reported that seabirds were starving there.
  • Conceived mainly to boost and placate the neglected Jeolla region, which complained at missing out on major development projects, Saemangeum’s precise purpose has never been agreed or clarified. Talk variously of industrial or agricultural uses has come to little so far.
  • Last year the area was designated a free economic zone (FEZ), again to no visible effect.
  • In March the central and provincial governments agreed to make Saemangeum a “model green vacation spot”, international tourist resort, or even “a Korean Dubai”. This latest twist appears no better thought out, nor more likely to succeed, than its many predecessors.
  • – as witness that by October the state-run Korea Rural Community Corp. (KRC) was touting the wholly different concept of an “eco-friendly manufacturing hub.”

CONCLUSION: Lee’s river restoration plan is ambitious and far-reaching. Confidence that it will actually achieve its diverse goals would be higher if feasibility studies had preceded it. If this goes ahead but proves to have little or negative impact, especially on the environment, this will only cement the president’s reputation for bulldozing projects without consultation, and could work against the ruling party in 2012’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

________________________

Michael Rank had written:

If you’re interested in development vs conservation, “cities of the future” and “ecological doubletalk” in Korea you may be interested in this:

http://tinyurl.com/yl7ldsv

Michael Rank

The Caged Bird Sings – A review of The Old Garden

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Myers-t.html

Hwang Sok-yong. Photo by Park Jae-Hong

Hwang Sok-yong. Photo by Park Jae-Hong

THE OLD GARDEN
By Hwang Sok-yong
Translated by Jay Oh
539 pp. Seven Stories Press. $30

One must never speak ill of nonchronological storytelling in America, where it is considered innately more serious than the other kind. But it is worth pondering the fact that flashbacks are nowhere more common than in North Korea. A writer will start with a woman getting a medal, say, then explain how she got there; this approach leaves less room for intellectual uncertainty and divergent responses. I make the point because although Hwang Sok-yong’s “Old Garden” was written south of the 38th parallel, it resembles a North Korean narrative in structural as in ideological ways. This is not a good thing. If I never read another mournful account of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it will be too soon.
Park Jae-Hong

“The Old Garden” begins interestingly enough. The description of a former political prisoner’s first day of freedom after almost 20 years, when the mere sight of open space exhausts him, is vivid and moving. (Hwang, one of South Korea’s most famous novelists, was himself a dissident who served prison time after an unsanctioned visit to the North.) Unfortunately the protagonist, Hyun Woo, soon learns that his lover and comrade Yoon Hee has died of cancer, whereupon the novel starts going back and forth in time. We read her letters to him, his cards to her, and so on. Much of this correspondence is of the implausible kind in which the recipient is reminded in great detail of shared experiences, but the transition to Yoon Hee’s notebooks from the 1980s does not help matters. To recount the student movement’s struggle against Chun Doo Hwan in such a disjointed and meandering fashion is to take all the drama out of it.

Jay Oh’s translation is basically functional, but it feels too youthful and distinctly American. The standard Korean expression for “24 hours a day” is rendered into English as “24/7,” a word meaning “shy” becomes “totally embarrassed,” and so on; this is hardly how a middle-aged man emerging from a long prison term would express himself. Other characters are made to swear in ways that could not seem less Korean: “Jesus, my mouth is watering.” The original at least has more gravitas — but that’s about it. Especially baffling is the author’s choice of a narrator. Hyun Woo is a man for whom “everything is unexciting and ordinary,” and he obviously wants us to feel the same way.

Indeed, the students’ opposition to the Chun regime is taken so much for granted that they barely seem to think at all, let alone engage in moral or philosophical debate. Does Hwang know how fatuous they sound? His later novel “The Guest” (which preceded this one into English translation) is a more nuanced affair, but here there is little sign of a critical or ironic distance between the author and his characters. When Hyun Woo says the Kwangju massacre of 1980 made him realize “our enemy was not the North,” we are evidently to agree that this was the only possible conclusion. And when another man explains his newfound sympathy for Pyongyang with the words “I just decided to be on their side, O.K.?” (the Valley Girl tones of the translation are not always inappropriate), we are to feel something other than the urge to hurl him across the DMZ. Yoon Hee, who is clearly the author’s favorite, grows more insufferable with every page. Having chosen to live in West Berlin, she is horrified when East Germany collapses, and worries that North Korea may follow suit. “This is not the solution. At least they had the correct beginning, didn’t they?”

The striving for simplicity and emotionality among students bewildered by long reading lists is, as the historian Ernst Nolte once wrote, “almost disgustingly easy to explain.” Harder to understand is why a man of Hwang’s age and experience would want to present this striving as something the world needs more of. (According to the publisher, Hwang is organizing a “peace train” that will go from Paris through North to South Korea — though I suspect he wants to stay on until Stockholm.) Having studied in Seoul in the mid-1980s, and witnessed the bravery of the demonstrators on many occasions, I was ready to like Hwang’s characters for helping to end military rule. Alas, he has so little apparent respect for the ensuing bourgeois democracy that he describes them cursing the transition to it. The hunch that we are dealing here with an ideology even sillier than Marxism is confirmed in one of Yoon Hee’s lines: “It’s a fight that has continued for over a hundred years since we opened up the port.” In other words, Korea’s problems began when it ceased to be the Hermit Kingdom. The penny drops: this is how the students could have fought so heroically against a pro-American dictator in Seoul, yet found so little cause to criticize the paranoid nationalist thugs in Pyongyang. “The Old Garden” thus raises an interesting question despite itself. Should we admire these people for making South Korea less like North Korea, if they were aiming for the opposite effect?

B. R. Myers, the author of “A Reader’s Manifesto,” is a researcher at Dongseo University in South Korea. His forthcoming book, “The Cleanest Race,” is about North Korea’s worldview.

Finally, laid to rest in Pyongyang

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By Michael Rank
http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KH14Dg01.html

LONDON – There can be no lonelier grave anywhere on Earth. Amid fields close to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, lie the remains of Flight Lieutenant Desmond Hinton, a British fighter pilot who flew for the United States Air Force as a member of United Nations forces in the Korean War.

Hinton is officially listed as missing in action (MIA), but his brother David, himself a retired Royal Air Force pilot, traced records of how and where Desmond died and managed to visit his grave in highly secretive North Korea.

“I was very close to my brother who was very much my role model and a father figure to me. I have never stopped missing him every single one of the 57 years since he died,” said David Hinton of Desmond, who was just 29 when he was shot down, leaving a widow and two small children.

David, now 77, is 12 years younger than Desmond, who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II for shooting down two Japanese Zero fighter aircraft over Burma (now Myanmar). Having survived that ordeal, Desmond Hinton was one of 41 RAF officers seconded to the USAF during the Korean War.

“A tour lasted about three months. They were short of replacements, so Desmond offered to do a second tour and it was on his second tour that he was shot down and killed,” said David. “There’s an old maxim in the armed forces, ‘Never volunteer,'” he added with a wry smile.

David discovered in RAF archives a graphic report of how his brother died on January 2, 1952.

F/Lt [Flight Lieutenant] DFW Hinton had been ordered to undertake an interdiction and reconnaissance mission in the area of Sunan-Pyongyang with three other aircraft from his unit … After making a bomb run on railroad tracks just north of Sunan, he called the other members of his flight saying he was hit and on fire.

The aircraft was then seen to crash into the ground and explode on impact. The remaining three aircraft flew over the wreckage of F/Lt Hinton’s aircraft for 15 minutes, but returned to their home base after seeing no evidence that F/Lt Hinton was alive. Sadly, F/Lt Hinton is still reported as missing.

From this account, David had a good idea of where his brother had gone down in his F84e Thunderjet, over the Sunan area of Pyongyang which is now the location of the city’s airport.

He managed to buy a US military map of North Korea, and contacted the Foreign Office in London in the hope that the recently opened British Embassy in Pyongyang would be willing to ask the North Koreans if they could provide any further evidence concerning his brother’s fate. The British ambassador David Slinn and his colleague Jim Warren were only too happy to help, and found the North Koreans surprisingly cooperative.

It turned out that despite the North Korean government’s reputation of being deeply xenophobic, the remains of Desmond Hinton, who was fighting for the hated “Yankee imperialists”, had been given a decent burial close to where his body fell to ground.

David was therefore determined to pay his respects to his brother at his grave and in 2004 embarked on a remarkable journey to North Korea, taking the train from Beijing to Pyongyang.

Despite bitterness still evident in North Korea over the Korean War, he was treated as an honored guest and enjoyed the rare distinction of being accompanied during his visit by a senior Korean People’s Army officer, Colonel Kwak Chol-hui, who is director of Negotiations for Remains at the armistice site at Panmunjom.

The grave consists simply of a mound of earth surrounded by a white picket fence, without any inscription. It lies close to a narrow footpath on a hillside 200 meters from the road, near the village of Kuso-ri and 2.5 kilometers east of Pyongyang airport.

David was told that not long before his visit, his brother’s remains had been moved about 50 meters to a more accessible location.

He was introduced at the grave to two witnesses to Desmond’s crash, a Mr Ri and Mr Han, local villagers who were only 13-years old at the time but appeared to have perfect recollections of the event. “They told how the aircraft passed directly over their houses at very low level and they were at the crashed aircraft within minutes,” David said.

He asked his hosts if they could dig up a piece of Desmond’s clothing, and was deeply moved when he was presented with part of his flying suit.

He would have loved to have been given Desmond’s identity disc too, but was told this had been taken by Chinese troops who were fighting with the North Koreans against the US and other forces.

David gave a short speech at the grave, thanking Colonel Kwak and the ambassador for making his visit possible, while the head of the village promised to tend the grave and paint the fence regularly.

As a former RAF officer, David was also anxious to fix the position of the grave. “I went to the memorial to the Great Leader Kim Il-sung near the village in sight of the grave and took a compass bearing. The grave bears 160 degrees, 500 meters from the obelisk,” he noted in his diary.

He was also taken to the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom, where Colonel Kwak hosted a formal lunch and told him that Dear Leader Kim Jong-il had been made aware of and had approved his visit.

Reflecting the importance that North Korea attached to his visit, it was even reported by the official news agency KCNA, but for personal reasons David has not spoken about it until now.

The current British ambassador to North Korea, Peter Hughes, is aware of this lonely grave and said in an e-mailed statement: “Staff from this embassy visit the grave regularly to ensure it is kept in good order, and we carry out a small service there on Remembrance Day each year. I presided over the last such ceremony on November 9, 2008.”

Desmond Hinton’s grave is the only known one of its kind, but there has been one much larger-scale, much more official attempt to trace servicemen missing in action in North Korea.

In the 1990s, during a mild thaw in the frigid history of US-North Korean relations, the countries reached agreement on permitting American experts to search for the remains of US troops missing in North Korea.

More than 8,000 American troops are listed as MIA in the Korean War – far more than in the Vietnam War – but results from this unprecedented US-North Korean joint project were modest.

It “resulted in the recovery of 225 probable US remains; 27 have been identified to date and returned to their families for burial in US soil”, according to the US Department of Defense.

David Hinton is content for his brother’s remains to stay in North Korea, and he is now planning to visit Desmond’s grave again later this year.

There is every indication that the North Koreans are looking forward to welcoming him again, suggesting that despite its recent missile launches and atomic bomb test, Pyongyang has a human face after all.

Michael Rank is a former Reuters correspondent in China, now working in London.

Roh Moo-hyun

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Obituary commissioned by The Guardian. Completed 24 May 2009. Edited version published on
25 May 2009 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/24/roh-moo-hyun-obituary

Combative South Korean president who challenged the old elite

Aidan Foster-Carter

Roh Moo-hyun, who ended his life on Saturday aged 62, was a South Korean president who broke the mould – though in the end the mould broke him. Born in poverty, his tenure in the Blue House (2003-08) antagonized the Seoul elite and Washington while disappointing his fans. Dismay grew as a corruption scandal enveloped him, finally driving him to jump from a clifftop near his home early in the morning after leaving a suicide note on his computer.

Roh never lost his roots in Korea’s rural southeast. The youngest child of a poor farmer, his nickname was ‘stone bean’: small but tough. His first-grade teacher said he had many talents – above all in presenting his opinions. Unable to afford college, he worked on building sites while studying at night for South Korea’s formidable bar examination. Passing this in 1975 – a remarkable feat for a non-graduate – he was briefly a judge before practising as a lawyer. In 1971 he had married his childhood sweetheart Kwon Yang-sook, from the same area and background; her father was once jailed as pro-communist. They have a son and a daughter.

At first more upwardly mobile than political – with a comfortable tax practice, he joined the local yacht club – in 1980 Roh defended students tortured on trumped-up charges by Seoul’s then military dictators. By his own account, the sight of torn-out toenails radicalized him. Now specializing in human rights cases, he was briefly jailed in 1987: the year democracy was restored. Elected to the national assembly for the port city of Pusan, he gained national fame for sharply grilling generals and tycoons, in sessions broadcast live on television. Such irreverence struck a fresh note in a country still in fear of the military and in awe of elites.

A spell in the wilderness followed. When his mentor Kim Young-sam allied with generals to win the presidency in 1993, a disgusted Roh threw in his lot with YS’s rival, the long-time dissident Kim Dae-jung. Regional antagonism between the southeast and DJ’s southwest made the latter a losing ticket in Pusan, but Roh doggedly ran and lost three times. His down to earth image as a principled if quixotic loser inspired his supporters to form Nosamo (We Love Roh), South Korea’s first ever political fan club, which blossomed as the Internet grew.

Kim Dae-jung won the presidency in 1997, and Roh served briefly as fisheries minister. Yet he was still a political outsider when the ruling party decided to choose its next candidate – South Korean presidents serve a single five-year term – via the country’s first ever primaries. To elite consternation, a bandwagon began to roll, delivering Roh the nomination. Insiders tried to deselect him; at one point he trailed third in the polls. But on the day in December 2002 he narrowly defeated a stiff conservative former judge. Koreans wanted a change.

In office Roh proved divisive. The establishment hated him, and he them. Shunning and at one point suing the conservative print dailies, Roh favoured left-leaning online news sites like Ohmynews. He promoted the radical 386 generation: in their 30s, at college in the 1980s and born in the 1960s. Populist and anti-American, the 386ers sounded a new assertive note. Roh himself, who unusually had never visited the US before (though he wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln), riposted by saying he did not see why he should go just to kowtow.

But the left were soon disappointed. Roh sent troops to Iraq, and in 2007 signed a free trade accord (still unratified) with the US, in the teeth of fierce street protests: a Korean speciality. If Iraq was a sop to Bush so that Roh could continue a ‘sunshine’ policy of engaging North Korea, the FTA seemed a real change of heart, rejecting the old ‘fortress Korea’ mentality.

Policies apart, Roh’s style grated. His mouth tended to run away with him. This spontaneity, refreshing at first, was often combative, could be crude and lacked gravitas. He admitted that on official trips – including the first ever Korean state visit to the UK, in 2004 – he packed ramyon (instant noodles); all that foreign nosh was uncongenial. Having no English small-talk was a problem too: by the time you beckoned the interpreter, the moment had passed.

At home Roh was forever upsetting applecarts, not least his own. Within weeks of becoming president, he wondered aloud if he was up to the job and suggested a referendum on his rule. In March 2004 he got one – as the first South Korean president ever to be impeached, which a simple apology could have prevented. A popular backlash in his favour then gave his party a majority in elections in April. In May the Constitutional Court threw out his impeachment. Roh, and Korea, bounced back from an unnerving roller-coaster largely of his own making.

Thus it continued. In 2007 as his term drew to a close, after years of antagonizing the Right on issues ranging from collaboration with past dictatorships to restricting elite schools, Roh startled friend and foe alike by proposing an alliance with the conservative opposition. The latter rejected this. Their candidate Lee Myung-bak, a formaer Hyundai CEO and mayor of Seoul, won a landslide in December 2007’s presidential election – over a centre-left which by then was desperate to distance itself from Roh, seen as a bungling, mercurial liability.

Still, at least he was clean. Scorning Seoul, Roh retired to a new house in his native village, where he grew organic rice, drank with the locals and blogged. In recent months this idyll darkened. A bribery scandal involving a Pusan shoemaker (a local supplier to Nike), Park Yeon-cha, was said to implicate Roh’s family. On April 7 Roh admitted his wife took money from Park to settle a debt. On April 30 he was driven to Seoul for a grilling that lasted till the small hours. Amid rumours from a suspiciously leaky prosecutor’s office – political bias is alleged – that Roh solicited $6 million from Park, he feared indictment, humiliation and jail. His death has halted this, sparing his family; but the full truth may now never be known.

“Discard me”, Roh wrote in his blog. For all his flaws, future history will judge him less harshly than that. His very weakness helped democracy. No emperor, he delegated and did not abuse power markedly. The economy grew at a fair clip, even if he had no clear vision for it – except a failed bid to move the capital from Seoul so as to promote regional equality.

His finest hour came in October 2007. Solemnly walking across the Demilitarized Zone, he drove on Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong-il whose results belied low expectations, launching wide-ranging business deals with the North. For a few months the two Koreas met daily and cooperated concretely. Roh’s successor Lee junked all this, just as in 2003 George W Bush brusquely ditched Bill Clinton’s outreach to North Korea. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Perhaps sunshine was appeasement, but does anyone have a better idea?

An odd mix of Candide-like innocence and often misplaced guile, Roh Moo-hyun could be a fool – and a hypocrite if he was not after all squeaky-clean. Yet he was a breath of fresh air, and his street-smart instincts did not lack vision. His end is a tragedy, for him and for Korea.

Roh Moo-hyun, politician; born August 6 1946, died May 23 2009.

Obituary: Roh Moo-hyun

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By Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/571c01b4-4859-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 17:07 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:07

Roh Moo-hyun, who committed suicide on Saturday, was devastated by an enquiry into his probity and had written on his blog of his shame at losing his reputation as South Korea’s only clean president. He was 62.

Prosecutors had been investigating payments of nearly $6m from a shoemaking tycoon to members of the family of Mr Roh, a leftist who left office last year. Even though prosecutors had not charged Mr Roh with corruption or tax evasion, by the time he threw himself from a mountainside, he was distraught about the damage to his reputation.

“I have lost the right to say anything about democracy, progress and justice. I fell into an abyss which I cannot escape,” he wrote earlier this month.

Within South Korea, Mr Roh’s supporters are portraying the case as a politically motivated assault by right-wingers. Although the sums involved are large, they are small by the standards of previous Korean presidents and the money is less clearly linked to direct political influence than in earlier scandals.

Mr Roh is popular mainly among Korea’s young people, who are sick of the traditional political caste. After his presidency, his home village became a pilgrimage site for day-trippers.

Of Mr Roh’s four predecessors, two were jailed for graft and the sons of two others were imprisoned on similar counts. Mr Roh was widely viewed as a highly principled man in a corrupt system. Many Koreans are viewing his suicide as an attempt to free his family from a painful investigation. If that was his motive, it worked.

Mr Roh was born to a poor farming family in Gimhae, south-east Korea in 1946. In a country where political success has normally been the preserve of graduates from Seoul’s top three universities, Mr Roh was an unusual autodidact who had spent nine years getting himself through the national bar exam.

He forged his reputation defending unionists and democracy activists during the turbulent democracy struggle of 1980s when the country was riven by bloody protests. In 1987, he spent three weeks in prison for supporting an illegal strike.

He entered parliament a year later and, ironically enough, gained stardom in a parliamentary hearing on the corruption of a former president, Chun Doo-hwan.

He became the protégé of Kim Dae-jung, president from 1998 to 2003, serving as his fisheries’ minister.

Although not expected to win the 2002 presidential election, he rode to victory on a wave of anti-Americanism, partly fired by the death of two Korean schoolgirls killed in an accident with a US military vehicle. He had campaigned on a platform of fighting corruption and reforming the mighty conglomerates that dominate the economy.

On becoming president, Mr Roh became well-known on the international stage for continuing Mr Kim’s “Sunshine Policy” of engagement with North Korea. Most famously he visited Pyongyang for a summit in 2007 and signed a raft of co-operation deals.

Mr Roh’s strategy was marred by the test of a North Korean nuclear weapon in 2006. However his diplomacy appeared to be paying dividends by the end of 2007 when international inspectors agreed North Korea was disabling its atomic facilities.

At heart a proud Korean nationalist, he was criticised for being too curt in some of his dealings with the US and Japan, the old imperial overlord.

On the domestic front, his presidency was marked by feuding, owing to his lack of a deep political support base. He was impeached in 2004 after publicly supporting his own party, contravening the constitutional neutrality of the president. He was reinstated after two months.

His government forged a trade deal with Washington, that has run into trouble under his successor, Lee Myung-bak.

He retired to the village of Bongha to work in an organisation dedicated to traditional farming methods. But the bribery scandal shattered his pursuit of rural tranquillity.

“Because of the state I am in, I cannot do anything. I cannot even write or read a book,” he wrote in his suicide note.

In the note, he also hankered after a return to nature.

“Do not be sad. Are not life and death all part of nature? … Please cremate me and leave a small tombstone near my home. I have thought about this for a long time.”

Additional reporting by Kang Buseong

Thousands in Korea mourn Roh’s death

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By Song Jung-a and Christian Oliver in Seoul
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f848bf9c-485d-11de-8870-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 24 2009 13:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 17:15

Tens of thousands of mourners gathered across South Korea to pay their final respects to Roh Moo-hyun, a former president who committed suicide at the weekend as he faced a growing corruption scandal.

Shortly after dawn on Saturday, Mr Roh, 62, went hiking on a mountain behind his home in Bongha, a village in the south-east of the peninsula. Police said he jumped from a cliff-face near the summit and suffered severe head injuries. He left a brief suicide note to his family.

South Koreans were stunned by the sudden death of Mr Roh, famed abroad for his attempts to build a rapprochement with communist North Korea. “This is hard to believe,” said Lee Myung-bak, the president. “It’s very sad and lamentable.”

Mr Roh, who left office in February 2008, had complained he was suffering from intense stress because of a scandal involving alleged corruption during his presidency. Prosecutors summoned him last month for an investigation into allegations that his family received $6m from a businessman while he was in office. His family has also been grilled.

Mr Roh’s supporters claimed the investigation was politically motivated to undermine the opposition and that the prosecutors’ probe into his family drove him to take his own life. The government on Sunday said the case against Mr Roh was closed but analysts speculate his suicide still threatens to catalyse the country’s political tensions.

Thousands of people queued up to burn incense and bow before a make-shift altar erected to Mr Roh in downtown Seoul. As Mr Roh was fond of smoking, many mourners left a cigarette rather than an incense stick. State radio reported 10,000 mourners had visited Bongha by Sunday morning.

“I am lost for words. His death is a great loss for the country,” said Kim Jae-suk, a 52-year-old housewife waiting for her turn in the tearful crowd gathered at the altar.

Mr Roh’s death came as prosecutors were due to decide whether to charge him. Mr Roh admitted his wife had taken money from a businessman to pay family debts. He had issued a public apology, but the scandal dealt a blow to his image as a clean politician in a rotten system.

Mr Roh, a former human rights lawyer, was elected in 2002 on a promise to reform powerful conglomerates, fight corruption, improve relations with Pyongyang and make Seoul more independent from the US, its long-standing military ally.

However, his five-year term proved turbulent, marked by political infighting and scandals. Mr Roh was impeached by lawmakers in early 2004 over a breach of election rules but was two months later reinstated after the Constitutional Court overturned the move.

His death may rekindle tensions between predominantly young liberals and older conservatives in South Korea, where President Lee, a conservative former businessman, came to power last year after a decade of liberal rule.

“A controversy is flaring up over whether the prosecutors were responsible for his death. If the government fails to handle this well, then the probe could be seen as a political revenge against Mr Roh. In that case, it will be a huge political burden for Mr Lee,” said Ham Sung-deuk, a politics professor at Korea University.

Seoul food aims for top table

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By Christian Oliver
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b56f1ae0-417d-11de-bdb7-00144feabdc0.html
Published: May 15 2009 19:28 | Last updated: May 15 2009 19:28

Across the world, every octopus should be quaking in his rock-pool; Korean chefs are going global.

By 2017, we will not just be dialling out for pizza Margherita and chicken korma, we will be hankering after tongue twisters such as samgyeopsal and doenjang-jjigae – sizzling pork-belly and spicy bean-paste stew. Those of a hardier constitution may even have tried dog soup and wriggling tentacles.

As part of an ambitious national branding scheme intended to awaken the world to the joys of an undiscovered hermit kingdom, South Korea’s government says it is planning to make its cuisine one of the world’s top five over the next eight years.

It is a very Korean goal. Koreans love league tables and outstripping performance targets. It is why they do so well. But the desire to produce one of the world’s top five cuisines also illustrates Korea’s peculiar tendency of seeking to quantify the unquantifiable.

The culture ministry does have a more quantifiable target of increasing Korean restaurants worldwide about sevenfold. The fluid strategy involves a sort of Korean Michelin star scheme, Korean cooking classes at Cordon Bleu schools and tweaking recipes to suit international palates.

Even if that works, is Korea then in the world’s top five? Who will measure such a subjective notion? If one starts counting restaurants, should you include the thousands of restaurants that serve dishes from all over the world, including the odd Korean dish?

Then there is the prickly issue of food from a region, not a country. Korea might claim victory over Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria on restaurant count but, in the real food wars, has fermented cabbage really defeated tajine and couscous?

None of this matters. It is an output target and not to be questioned. Much of this Korean love of pecking orders hails back to the educational system. Fear of nepotism means Koreans prefer that exams be reduced to “right” and “wrong” questions, partly explaining why the humanities are so weak. You may flunk exams but at least the mark did not depend on the whim of an arbitrary or corrupt examiner. Ranking people or things has become overly acceptable because it was seen as fair at school.

Korean officials now maintain the illusion that league tables can nail subjective issues. Their graphs can reflect their own opinions about certain themes, rather than objective data collection. The culture of statistics is pervasive and the otherwise truculent domestic press whimpers before them. An international survey ranking Korea only 50th in mothers’ welfare received wide but bizarrely uncritical coverage.

Korea’s culture ministry concedes there is no real ranking system for foods but wants random people surveyed in 2017 to say Korean food is in their top five. As with many things presented as statistics in Korea, it is ultimately a question of raw emotion.