http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bfd390f6-63dd-11e3-b70d-00144feabdc0.html

Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s first leader, reportedly took such exception to the boyfriend of his daughter Kyung Hui that he had him expelled from university and despatched to the distant city of Wonsan.

Undaunted, Jang Song Thaek eventually returned to Pyongyang to claim Ms Kim’s hand in marriage, and began his rise to the highest level of the state apparatus. Reportedly purged from the central party in the late 1970s and again in 2003, Jang seemed to bounce back stronger from each setback, developing a reputation as the great survivor of North Korean politics.

Jang’s summary execution – reported by state media on Friday – marked a spectacular demise for a man seen until recently as the most powerful adviser to Kim Jong Un. It also raised questions about the potential for further instability in the court of the world’s youngest national leader.

Describing him as “despicable human scum”, state media said Jang had been put to death immediately after his conviction for treason by a military tribunal, where he confessed to having plotted a coup against Mr Kim.

“I was going to stage the coup by using army officers who had close ties with me,” Jang was reported as saying. “It was my intention to . . . become premier when the economy goes totally bankrupt and the state is on the verge of collapse.”

As vice-chairman of the powerful national defence commission and head of the ruling party’s administration department, Jang was seen by some analysts as a regent to the inexperienced ruler, and was shown frequently by his side at official events.

Yet that same media footage contained hints of an overly confident attitude that may have prompted his demise. During a big speech by Mr Kim in January, as other top officials sat ramrod straight in rapt attention, Jang slouched casually to one side. On a day of site visits two months earlier, he was shown strolling behind his nephew with one hand in his pocket, and later flanking him with both hands behind his back – a gesture of superiority in Korean culture.

“Jang tried hard to create [an] illusion about him by projecting himself internally and externally as a special being on a par with [Mr Kim],” state media said.
Some analysts have portrayed Jang’s demise as a natural step in Mr Kim’s assertion of power as he replaces an older generation of officials with new ones who will owe their positions to him. South Korean intelligence suggests he has overseen the replacement of about 100 of the top 218 party and military officials.

By ousting and shaming Jang so publicly – including vivid coverage on domestic television and the front page of the national Rodong Sinmun newspaper – Mr Kim appears to be seeking to demonstrate his absolute authority to the broader population, as well. “This is about flexing muscle,” says John Delury, a professor at Seoul’s Yonsei university. In recent days, state media has begun referring to him as uidaehan ryongdoja, or “great leader” – a title also used by his father and grandfather.

But the lurid detailing of Jang’s alleged crimes comes with risks. “Nobody can now say there isn’t factionalism in North Korea – there is clearly a form of intra-regime factionalism, and the window on that has now been opened to the ordinary North Korean people,” says Sokeel Park, research director at Liberty in North Korea, a non-governmental group.

Rather than present Jang’s as an isolated case of counter-revolutionary thought, state media described an extended network of senior dissenters. It also drew attention to rampant high-level corruption, as it condemned Jang for illicitly profiting from the country’s abundant natural resources.

Moreover, by describing Jang as expecting North Korean economic collapse, state media has indicated doubts at the highest level about Mr Kim’s promise to drive national development and raise living standards. In a speech in 2012, the leader said he would ensure the people “will never have to tighten their belts again”.

“There is now an explicit linking of the regime’s legitimacy with being able to deliver for the average person,” Mr Delury says.

Visitors to Pyongyang report conspicuous signs of greater prosperity, such as better stocked shops and more cars on the streets, as well as a spurt in construction activity. But this increase in consumption and state expenditure could prove dangerous, says Rüdiger Frank at the University of Vienna.

“The sudden increase in unproductive state spending without [major] reforms suggests that the North Korean state is living on its reserves,” Mr Frank wrote this week. “Once they are depleted, trouble is inevitable.”

Under Mr Kim, North Korea has experimented with allowing more autonomy in agricultural and manufacturing production, and announced new special economic zones to attract foreign investment. It has also maintained the policy of turning a blind eye to the thriving informal markets that have filled the gap left by the defunct state distribution system.

But the condemnation of the “reformist” Jang, “influenced by the capitalist way of thinking”, bodes ill for any hopes of sweeping structural change in North Korea.

“He was willing to listen . . . he was interested in the South Korean economy,” says Moon Chung-in, a former South Korean presidential adviser who met Jang three times. Even during a heavy late-night drinking session in 2002, Jang “never lost his composure”, Mr Moon recalls.

“I was surprised to see him accused of these counter-revolutionary acts . . . he was very prudent, unassuming. He was always trying to stay in the shadows.”

By Maya Jaggi
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4cc3df70-f632-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0.html

Paju Bookcity, a 21st-century hub for the South Korean book trade less than an hour’s drive from Seoul, appears oddly deserted under limpid blue skies. But amid its understated eco-architecture are keys to understanding not just this harmonious, riverside industrial estate but also moves by South Korea to turn hardbacks into soft power.

At the library of Youlhwadang Publishers, designed by London-based architect Florian Beigel, an alcove holds authors’ portraits alongside sepia cameos of the publisher’s ancestors. Yi Ki-ung, Youlhwadang’s president and Paju Bookcity’s chief visionary, wants neglected values reinstated as guiding principles in industry.

“Korea has such a painful history,” Yi, a youthful man in his seventies, tells me in his office, where visitors leave their shoes at the door. “So much of our cultural heritage has been damaged. We have to rebuild it.”

A print workshop nearby is a museum for hot metal presses. Visitors are gifted a metal character – a reminder of the moveable type Koreans invented in 1377, more than half a century before the printing revolution of the Gutenberg Bible in Europe.

Korea’s long history of the printed word is a source of immense national pride. Hangeul, the phonetic alphabet invented by King Sejong the Great in the 1440s, is now sported on designer ties. Paju Bookcity flags a pillar of Korean identity to a world more familiar with K-pop and kimchi (pickled cabbage). Located beside the river Han (of the tiger economy’s “miracle on the Han”), the city is designed to recover not only a heritage suppressed during Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945 but also values eclipsed in the rush to growth after the Korean war of the early 1950s. This national self-questioning was brought to a head by the Sewol ferry disaster this April, which president Park Geun-hye blamed on “long-running evils”.

When Paju Bookcity was dreamt up around the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics by seven publishers who went hiking in the capital’s peaks, the government had little interest in investing in books. As construction began in 1999, aid for the private initiative was limited to tax breaks, infrastructure and “demilitarising” the dirt-cheap swampland 30km north of Seoul – close to the North Korean border – that was all the publishers could afford.

“This was the promised land,” Yi says with a gleam in his eye. “Nobody wanted to come. I had the foresight.” The city has grown to some 300 publishers, printers and related businesses, employing about 10,000 people. Paju Booksori, its literary festival, declares itself Asia’s biggest, with 450,000 visitors a year. A children’s book festival is thriving. Both receive government funds. “When we first wanted to build Paju, the government wanted to make money off us,” Yi says. “Now it approves.”

A statue in Seoul of King Sejong, who invented the Korean alphabet in the 15th century

This change of heart accords with today’s policy of “cultural prosperity”, as manufacturing and export-led growth have faltered. “In the 21st century, culture is power,” president Park declared in her inaugural speech in February last year, vowing to “ignite the engine of a creative economy”. In 2013, South Korea recorded a trade surplus in cultural products and services for the second year running – and around double that of 2012, according to Bank of Korea. This is largely down to the hallyu , the South Korean cultural wave that engulfed east Asia at the turn of the century (not least as an alternative to Hollywood dominance) and rippled across continents. At the crest were TV serials such as Dae Jang-geum (Jewel in the Palace) of 2003. Just as the government poured funds into film then, it has now woken up to literature’s soft-power potential – for a fraction of the outlay. The South Korean book industry – the world’s 10th-largest by number of titles, and supreme in children’s books – is experiencing an export push.

“Korea is renowned for the Korean wave. But there is less interest in traditional culture,” Yoo Jin-ryong, South Korea’s minister of culture, said ruefully on an official visit to the UK in early April. He spoke to me after a recital by South Korean soprano Sumi Jo for guests from the London Book Fair. South Korea was this year’s market focus, following government drives at book fairs in Frankfurt in 2005, Beijing in 2012 and Tokyo in 2013.

“Building an economy without culture is like building a house on the sand,” Yoo tells me. “Korean society developed economically far too quickly. In our spiritual foundations, we have experienced a huge sense of loss.”

A thoughtful man and a former civil servant, Yoo points out that in past centuries, Korean officials were chosen for their skills as poets. “There is a fallacy in the west that Korea is only about economic development,” he says. “We decided that our long history and cultural traditions are important for the world to get to know.”
. . .
One motive may be to reclaim human values after the putative “Asian” ones touted by authoritarian regimes. But it is also a pragmatic strategy for extending the Korean wave, with its “spillover” effect. For every $100 of cultural exports, the government calculates there is a further $412 of knock-on consumer spending. Incoming tourists reached a record 12.2m in 2013, through a hallyu effect among fans of K-pop and K-drama. Amid fears that the wave is flagging, literature is gaining credit as a fount of “creative content”: the TV dramas that began the wave were based on historical novels. “For hallyu to be sustainable,” Yoo says, “we need to create new stories that are entertaining. That is why we promote literature.”

Soft power stems from the attractiveness of a country’s culture and values, according to Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who coined the term in 1990. In getting what you want, he wrote, “seduction is always more effective than coercion”. Such use of literature is not new. Frances Stonor Saunders’ book Who Paid the Piper? detailed a covert US Central Intelligence Agency books programme during the cultural cold war. The agency distributed 10m books behind the Iron Curtain from the 1950s to the 1990s. Among its secret weapons was Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, published by the CIA in Russian and smuggled into the Soviet Union – as revealed in The Zhivago Affair by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.

Soft power can allow tiny but talented players with beefy neighbours to punch above their weight. “For a country as small as Korea, boosting economic power and military forces will be of limited success,” the culture minister says. “So pursuing cultural power is a very important goal for us.” Other small Asian powers, including Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, are watching Seoul’s book strategy keenly.
. . .
Gangnam, Seoul’s flashily affluent southside district, is best known for “Gangnam Style” by K-pop star Psy, the first pop video to score 1bn YouTube hits. But I went south of the river in search of the quieter arts of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI), created by the Ministry of Culture in 2001 from an existing translation fund. A training institute for translators, the LTI has seen its annual budget rise from $5m to $8m in two years. The institute’s president, Kim Seong-Kon, says hallyu paved the way for “K-lit”. The LTI gives $2m a year in grants to translators and foreign publishers, so far supporting 930 titles in 30 languages. More than 100 Korean titles a year are published around the world as a result. Kim, whose father was an interpreter on a US military base, says the main target is English – a global lingua franca.

The national prestige accruing from recent international successes has caught the attention of Seoul in the same way that the “Pamuk effect” galvanised Turkish translations after novelist Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel prize in 2006. Kyung-sook Shin’s Please Look After Mother (“Mom” in the US edition), the tale of a country woman who goes missing in Seoul train station, has been published in 34 countries. It was bought by publisher Knopf for six figures, became a New York Times bestseller and won the Man Asian Literary Prize for 2011. Sun-mi Hwang’s The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, a philosophical tale for all ages about breaking free of the battery farm, has also taken off, and its Korean anime spin-off was released in the UK in March. These two women join a posse of Korean authors who have found acclaim in English, including Kim Young-sam, Yi Mun-Yol, Gong Ji-young, Han Kang and Jung-myung Lee.

“I feel I have been drilling for oil for 10 years, and my gusher just came in,” says Barbara Zitwer, the New York-based literary agent who, together with her Korean co-agent Joseph Lee, spotted many of these writers. “Please Look After Mom was the breakthrough book.” Although she credits the LTI with providing sample translations, Zitwer sold the novels on her own synopses with short extracts and uses her own stable of translators.

It is a reminder that government agencies, which tend to measure quantity rather than quality, are seldom the best judges of literary potential. Commercial literature might even clash with the image a government wants to project. Popular genres such as crime fiction, surprisingly, are still scorned in Korean literary circles, despite the global respect for Scandinavian works.

“The best thing the government can do for the literary world is to keep supporting it and leave it alone,” Hwang Sok-yong, the revered Korean novelist, tells me in a café in Insadong, the old Seoul district of calligraphers’ suppliers. Hwang, whose novel The Shadow of Arms dissects the black market in arms during the Vietnam war, in which he fought, says: “Every time we have a new administration, they interfere in culture. They change the personnel and try to impose their political colour.”

Purist: novelist Hwang Sok-yong opposes government interference in culture

As building work continues at Paju Bookcity, to incorporate the film industry, the hope is eerie calm will give way to a cultural buzz. There is government help with infrastructure. But Lee Sang, director of the Paju book festival, wants regulations stifling the industrial complex to be lifted. Burgeoning bookshop cafés, made legal only last year, can still “serve drinks but not food”.

Culture minister Yoo knows “the Korean wave wasn’t created by government” but “flowed organically”. Music and drama gained an edge precisely when censorship was lifted. As the government wakes up to the power of the book, it also needs to keep its distance. “Too much government help spoils you,” Paju Bookcity’s Yi nods sagely. “I’d like them to give us a fishing rod, not fish.”
——————————————-

When soft power backfires

One literary thriller making waves illustrates both the potential and limitations of literary soft power.

The Investigation by Jung-myung Lee is set in a Japanese prison in 1944. It focuses on a fictitious friendship between a Korean prisoner and a Japanese guard, but it alludes to real atrocities, including Japanese medical experiments on prisoners of war. The novel was acquired by a Japanese publisher more than a year ago, but cool relations between Seoul and Tokyo, and caution over the mood of Japan’s reading public, have, says Lee’s agent in Seoul, suspended publication indefinitely.

Lee had hoped his novel could be “a bridge to bring Japanese and Korean people closer”. “Japanese children don’t study their history, and politicians try to remove historical guilt from textbooks,” he says. “But they can’t apologise before they know what happened. Knowledge is the first step.”

The case may highlight the danger of a backlash abroad following too strenuous a push. Yoo Jin-ryong, the South Korean culture minister, puts his faith in reciprocity: “We want to go to countries where the Korean wave is prominent and introduce their cultures into Korea too.”

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?
by Park Wan-suh
translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen J Epstein
Columbia University Press, £17, 248 pages
Source: Weekend FT, 3/4 Oct 2009 (not available on the internet)

One of Korea’s foremost authors, Park Wan-suh has published more than 20 books. Who ate up all the Shinga?, written in 1992 but only recently translated, sits somewhere between novel and autobiography, and tells the story of the author’s upbringing during one of the most turbulent years in her country’s history

From a child’s perspective, Park shows Japan’s colonial occupation reaching into the remotest parts of the countryside. The writer’s adolescent years then find her family caught in the ideological crossfire of the civil war, first praised then persecuted for their leftist sympathies. The struggle of an entire people seems concentrated in the figure of Park’s headstrong mother.

Lyrical in its descriptions of village life, this gripping book is weitten with a confessional chattiness that contrasts with the hardships it describes.

AT.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d91c082a-7d61-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html
By Laura Battle

Published: July 31 2009 23:17 | Last updated: July 31 2009 23:17

Were Unsuk Chin in any other arts profession, her name would be familiar – already a brand, perhaps – but as a composer, even as one of the foremost composers in the world, she remains an elusive figure.

Within this rarefied field – that of contemporary classical music – Chin is admired and celebrated, but this was not always the case. In her early life in South Korea, and for much of her later development in Berlin, where she has lived since 1988, her search for recognition proved arduous and protracted. Each piece of music has required a significant investment of time and labour – not that you’d guess: many are characterised by glassy, delicate and often lyrical sequences that unravel in a stream-of-consciousness style – and premieres of Chin’s music are few and far between. This year, however, three new works have come to fruition.

When I arrive at her elegant Charlottenburg apartment Chin admits that life has been “a bit hyper” recently. Today is no exception: not so much because of work, more to do with the fact that it’s her 48th birthday. I’ve caught her between family lunch with her husband, the Finnish pianist Maris Gothoni, and their young son, and a soirée she is throwing later that evening. We seat ourselves rather awkwardly at the dining table and Chin prepares herself as if for interrogation: her career has largely developed without media interference, and one senses she prefers it that way. But this season the glare of the public eye will be hard to avoid.

A recording of her Violin Concerto, which scooped the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in 2004, has just been released, and this month sees the premiere of her new Cello Concerto at the Proms in London. That Chin is one of five female composers to have new work presented during the festival is happy coincidence: the piece was originally scheduled for 2007, although it was hatched, like so many of the best ideas, at a party a number of years earlier. The cellist Alban Gerhardt and violinist Lisa Batiashvili “came round to this flat with Brahms’s Double Concerto, I think. It was the first time I’d heard [Gerhardt] play and I promised immediately, ‘I will write a cello concerto for you!’ But then he had to wait another seven years!” Chin adds, with a nervous volley of laughter.

Unlike her two previous concertos, where the solo part floats and flirts with its accompaniment, she describes the cello here as being “in conflict” with the orchestra: “I’ve put much more personal energy into this work, the cello has to hold the whole piece the whole time, and the soloist has a very strong psychological role,” Chin explains. It is clearly a highly developed work and, judging from Gerhardt’s rehearsal blog, fiendishly difficult to play: “Many passages are incredibly fast,” he wrote on July 10. “If I get lost in them, I will be lost. Arghhhh!”

This emphasis on speed and complexity seems to reflect Chin’s interest in musical virtuosity. As a young girl in South Korea she dreamt of becoming a concert pianist, learning western-style harmony by accompanying services at Presbyterian churches where her father ministered. But the family was poor and tuition funds were not available to the second daughter. “It was also very difficult to get records at that time but we had a small transistor radio and I listened to music every day, I was crazy for it.” This was the 1970s, under Park Chung-hee’s repressive regime, and Chin’s perception of western culture was shaped by her obsession with the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Once at Seoul National University, and now determined to compose, Chin was in thrall to the new wave of European composers: Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono et al. “It was quite strange, a Korean composer learning this Darmstadt avant-garde style in Korea, and I always felt that this was not my music.” Still, it was this interest that inspired her self-exile to Hamburg, where she sought the tutelage of Hungarian composer György Ligeti. It was her first trip abroad, and a “culture shock” initially, but the hard work had only just begun. “I think everyone knows, [Ligeti] was extremely difficult,” Chin begins, before detailing how he dismissed her work as derivative and “destroyed” her self-esteem – to the extent that she felt unable to compose for three years.

In spite of Ligeti’s disciplinarian approach, his influence would, in the end, prove valuable and long-lasting. Alice in Wonderland, Chin’s first full-blown opera, explored a theme that Ligeti suggested before his death. But although the great master haunts the piece, Chin’s soundscape is very much her own. There were boos from the first-night audience in Munich in 2007 – “They came in evening dresses and diamonds and I think they were expecting Aida or something” – but her score received favourable reviews, even if Achim Freyer’s po-faced, expressionist production did not. In any case, she was undeterred by the experience and plans to start work on Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Chin seems to have an omnivorous taste for styles and genres, and I notice that the room is dominated by two massive floor-mounted speakers, some sophisticated hi-fi equipment and piles of CDs. “There are so many composers who are almost autistic and have no communication with the outside world, and I think that’s problematic,” she explains, “I seldom have time to go to concerts but I have a very good connection with publishers and I always have recordings sent of new works.” Gérard Grisey, George Benjamin and Jukka Tiensuu are cited as composers she admires but they sit alongside a range of other artists.

“I like pop music from the 1980s very much. I was always impressed by Michael Jackson, for example, that he could compose a melody for just two bars, with two harmonies, and could win millions of people through this small act. It’s fantastic and we can’t do that,” she says, speaking for classical composers. However, although there are chord sequences and melodic hooks in her own music that speak directly to the layman, Chin denies that popular music has influenced her work. Her next work, the Sheng Concerto, pays its respects to a tradition of Asian folk music.

“This is my first piece for a non-western instrument but I use the sheng very carefully; I’ve limited the sheng’s role and I wrap the orchestra around it.”

Chin first heard the sheng, a wind instrument capable of organ-like clarity and sustain, as a young girl, but had overlooked its potential until a chance encounter with the specialist Wu Wei. As with Gerhardt, Chin was so bowled over that she promised a concerto on the spot, and Wu is to perform the work at premieres in Tokyo and Los Angeles in the autumn.

This season will conclude with a new piece for the Ensemble Modern and further engagements with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, where Chin is composer in residence. Since her appointment in 2006, she has quietly achieved great things there, not least the performance of more than 50 Korean premieres, including Boulez’s Notations and Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. I wonder aloud if the role has explored her own connection to both eastern and western cultures but her reply is evasive, and even a little disapproving: “For me, there is no border between western or Asian or Korean music. For me, music is music.”

Cello Concerto premieres at Prom 38, Royal Albert Hall, London, on August 13; www.bbc.co.uk/proms