Pen/Insular_Notes

Hankyoreh on the projected disparity in the gender ratio in the South Korean population:

The number of females per 100 males aged 25-34 was 95 in 2000, but the figure will draw toward a downward curve, with 94 in 2010, 91 in 2015 and 88 in 2020, according to the NSO data. This ratio will hit its nadir in 2020 and start to grow, but still will not climb above 90 until 2030. It is highly possible that a problem of so-called “single wild goose males” will be a serious social problem for some time.

Obviously there is a very clear solution to this problem that is already being practised on a large scale throughout rural Korea - import women from poorer countries. However, I have some more radical solutions which may be of use if things get really bad:

1. Full acceptance of homosexuality as a legitimate and natural life choice in Korean society, thus alleviating the need for many men to find girlfriends and marry when they don’t really want to.

2. More sex changes. Obviously this could be self-defeating if there were as many or more women who wanted to change into biological men as there were men wanting to become women.

3. Clone women. So South Korea is a world leader in the field of cloning and er… alright that’s a crap idea.

I wonder whether far right Tokyo governor and professional crow-hater Shintaro Ishihara may fall foul of the UK’s new law against ‘glorifying terrorism’ on his next visit to London? It seems he has written and produced a new film - titled ‘For Those We Love’ - on the kamikaze pilots of WWII, that is rather keen to show them in a good light as patriotic heroes (thus helping to overcome Japan’s terrible tendency toward masochistic history^tm). As the Hankyoreh notes:

…the film’s political message is simultaneously suggestive and clear, with lines like “We shall meet in death at Yasukuni Shrine,” or “We were right to start a war to liberate Asia from the whites.”

Of course, Shintaro Ishihara is having none of the comparison between kamikaze and suicide bombers:

“[It is] not a glorification of the kamikaze. It’s an ensemble youth drama with an antiwar message,” he continued. “There are those foreigners who confuse the kamikaze pilots with suicide bombers, but I want them to know that they are completely different.”

Fair enough then, it’s just a misunderstanding of us stupid foreigners.

The Guardian’s arts blog has something to say about it too, and points out that:

Hearteningly, For Those We Love seems to have had the opposite effect: despite a strong opening weekend, in which it trailed only Spider-Man 3 and Kitaro, a local kiddie fantasy, it has not only provoked disquiet among both younger audience members and those who lived through the Japanese defeat, but has also drawn uncomfortable parallels between its heroes and the similarly unquestioning, ideology-driven suicide bombers of today.

Somehow, I have a feeling it’s not going to be winning any prizes at Cannes.

UPDATE: An illustrated version of Kim Do-hyeong’s Hankyoreh article is up at the Japan Focus site.

It’s as I suspected: all the mainstream presidential hopefuls are conservatives and the Hankyoreh newspaper has the statistics to prove it… They commissioned (an admittedly rather silly) survey that gives the hopefuls a score, with anything over 5.5 indicating a general conservative leaning:

Of potential candidates from the non-GNP party circle, Rep. Chung Dong-young, the former head of the Uri Party, is most conservative in economic policy with a score of 6.8 in the field, and the independent lawmaker Chun Jung-bae is most conservative in social policy in this group with a 5.7 in that area. Sohn Hak-kyu, the former Gyeonggi Provincial Governor, earned a 7.4 in economic policy and had an overall score of 7.1, making him the most conservative among current non-GNP members.

Particularly interesting to note that Sohn Hak-kyu (favoured by some on the left as the only way to stave off a disastrous return to the bad old conservative days of the past) gets the same score for economic conservatism (7.4) as Lee Myung-bak - the guy he’s supposed to be saving Korea from. I would like to have seen what the survey made of Im Chong-in, but unfortunately he wasn’t included - presumably he hasn’t officially declared an interest in standing.

Of course this irrefutable proof won’t actually stop certain other Korean newspapers describing people like Chun Jung-bae (Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae) or other wannabe Roh Moo-hyun replacements as ‘leftwing’.

By the way, whatever the ‘Markov chain Monte Carlo method’ is, it sounds like the coolest thing ever to hit the world of political science. I wonder if it’s served with a martini?

In this second post on the possibility of a progressive unity candidate in this year’s Korean presidential elections I’m going to look at the position of DLP left faction All Together [다함께]. Unlike some other radical left groups, they have recently argued in favour of a united progressive presidential candidate and the possibility of bringing left-leaning former Uri Party members in to the DLP, or even considering having them stand as a candidate.

However, in a recent leaflet (pdf) on the issue, All Together has put forward three basic prerequisites that such a unity candidate (and potential new members) must fulfill, which exclude the two most talked about possible leftward Uri Party defectors - Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae and Kim Kŭnt’ae. I’ll quote the important part of this leaflet below:

First, they must be opposed to neoliberalism. This excludes both Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae, who has argued that “we should accept the positive aspects of neoliberalism,” and Kim Kŭnt’ae, who has called the Korea-US FTA “positive” and argued only that “it should be finalised by the next government”.

In addition, both Ch’ŏn as floor leader of the Uri Party and Kim as Minister of Justice supported a reform of the labour laws that expanded the number of non-regular workers and promoted neoliberal restructuring. The Uri Party’s 386 ‘Reform Faction’ (개혁파) are exactly the same. They have supported the core neoliberal policies [of the Roh government], so their criticism of neoliberalism does not hold water.

Second, they must be opposed to war and support peace on the Korean peninsula. Just expressing support for the ‘Sunshine Policy’ - as a section of the rightwing Grand National Party do - is not enough. They must also be against US pressure on North Korea and above all they must be against the deployment of Korean troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. DLP national assembly member No Hoech’an has also put forward opposition to the deployment of troops in Iraq as a core requirement for any potential unity candidate.

As a result Kim Kŭnt’ae and Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae are once again excluded, as they voted for the deployment of troops to Iraq in 2004. While claiming that they personally opposed the Iraq war, they indirectly supported the passing of the bill to send Korean troops to Iraq by attending the National Assembly to make up the required numbers for a quorum. The same goes for the Uri Party ‘Reform Faction’ who have praised the decision to send Korean troops to Lebanon under the guise of ‘UN Peacekeeping Forces’. Talking about peace and opposition to war while supporting Bush’s wars that have turned places all over the world into horrific battlefields amounts to shocking hypocrisy reminiscent of the Grand National Party’s slogan of ‘nuclear-free peace’ [in relation to the North Korean nuclear issue].

The only establishment politician who passes the two criteria outlined above is [independent, former Uri Party] assembly member Im Chong-in. Therefore, the third criterion is that they cannot be a part of the mainstream political forces, whether it’s the GNP, Uri Party or one of their mutations. These are the very people who have based themselves on powerful vested interests and promoted neoliberal and pro-war policies.

The real progressive camp - progressive NGOs, the Democratic Labour Party, labour and civic groups and a section of the individual [activists] - should unite together on the basis of these criteria.

By the way, Andy’s South Korean Politics blog provides a useful aggregation of all the latest news on er… South Korean politics from the websites of the main English language newspapers in Korea.

There, at the top of the slope, the basilica of Sacré Coeur de Jésus was slothfully nearing completion, in a sort of fake-Hindu, monumentally bourgeois style. Hard by the stone-yards here, young radical thinkers had put up a statue of the young Chavalier de la Barre who had been burnt by the inquisition. (Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 22)

A souvenir from my recent visit to France for the AKSE conference - the first time I actually made it into Paris (shameful really, being Londoner). Typically, my lovely digital camera decided to die on me and left me relying on my cameraphone. That would have been ok were it not for the fact that said camphone seems to have had a life-changing experience a few months ago and has been on acid ever since. Somehow though, Sacre Coeur just looks better this, maybe because it is a hallucinatory fantasy in the first place.

Strange that the BBC has started talking about ‘foreign forces’ in Afghanistan rather than British troops, NATO troops or US-led coalition troops. I don’t suppose it’s because they’re reporting yet another case where presumably British or US warplanes have bombed a village killing tens of civilians. If they carry on like this the ever-so-grateful Afghan people will turn against them.

Ooops, too late.

(Just noticed that Lenin₂ got there before me and in greater detail, as usual.)

It seems that a debate is beginning to open up within the ‘progressive camp’ (진보진영) in South Korea on the best way to approach the upcoming presidential elections set for December. I want to try to cover this debate a bit here as it develops, so, time allowing, this will be the first of a series of posts on what the South Korean left is doing in the run up to the elections.

Although I am not a natural optimist, one thing that I have realised about South Korean politics is that things can change very rapidly in a way that is just not possible in the UK or US. When I was in Seoul last autumn and mentioned to Korean friends that is seemed as though rightwing Grand National Party hopeful Lee Myung-bak was sure to be the next president they were much more optimistic about things changing and stressed that a year is a very, very long time indeed in Korean politics.

All the talk at the moment is of the possibility of fielding some sort of left unity candidate, whose politics I assume might lie somewhere between those of the Democratic Labour Party (민노당) and Roh Moo-hyun’s now semi-defunct Uri Party (열린우리당 - which to my mind seemed to be an attempt at a sort of ’social liberal’ party). If it does manage to achieve this the South Korean left would be able to teach the French radical left a thing or two. There, the non-liberal left consistently scores around 10 percent but is fragmented across three or four parties (as it was in the recent first round of presidential elections). But of course, the really big question is, what sort of unity candidate and who will actually get on board when it comes to the crunch? This thorny problem has already caused a rather interesting disagreement between too well-known left intellectuals in Korea*: Hwang Sok-yong and Pak Noja.

On the one hand, Hwang sees the current Korean conjuncture as being a crossroads between the possibility of becoming an (democratically) ‘advanced society’ or remaining stuck within the framework of the Cold War. His key observation is thus:

Even a child knows that both the Grand National Party and the Uri Party are conservative parties, but we are not yet in the era of a [truly] progressive/reformist party (혁신정당).

And this leads him to advocate some sort of pan-progressive candidate that would unite the Uri Party (or remnants of it) and the Democratic Labour Party - basically a sort of old-fashioned popular front between the ‘progressive’ sector of the South Korean bourgeoisie and the (reformist) representatives of the workers in the form of the DLP. Hwang has even mentioned former Kyonggi Province governor Sohn Hak-kyu, who recently defected from the rightwing Grand National Party as a possible unity candidate.

Pak Noja is distinctly unimpressed by this idea, leading him to wonder what Hwang’s criteria are for something being ‘progressive’. He also points out that if the main criterion is the attitude of politicians toward reconciliation with the North then there are considerable numbers of rightwing GNP politicians who are perfectly happy to continue the current sunshine policies since they dream of turning the North into a ‘happy hunting ground’ for South Korean capital in need of cheap labour. He goes on to note the other failings of the liberals/centrists who might form the right side of any such ‘progressive’ unity coalition: their failure to get rid of the National Security Law; their jailing of trade unionists; their reliance on Chaebol money and their support for the ‘war on terror’ and more specifically Bush’s disaster in Iraq. Finally, Pak writes:

If you put your faith in ‘progress’ while ignoring class, I fear you will be disappointed once again.

* Actually both of them have spent much of their time outside of Korea in the last few years.

Saw a great film yesterday on the Koreans of Kazakhstan: Koryo Saram - The Unreliable People. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in diasporas (Korea or otherwise) and questions of culture, identity and nationality. Very thought-provoking and moving stuff. The film is still in postproduction but to find out about screenings and DVD availability you can sign up for the mailing list at the website.

One unlikely fact I found out at the screening and post-film Q&A with the director David Chung was the existence of Korean-speaking Kurds in Kazakhstan. It seems that quite a few young Kurds worked on Korean-run collective farms in the 1950s and so picked up the language of their co-workers - an ‘archaic’ dialect of Korean that is called Koryo mar. Kazakhstan is one of the more ethnically diverse countries in the world (partly thanks to comrade Stalin) with some 100 recognised ethnic groups including Russians, Ukrainians, Koreans, Germans, Kurds, Uighurs, Greeks and of course Kazakhs.

See also the quite comprehensive Wikipedia page on the Koryo Saram, which solved for me the mystery of why the surname of one of the people appearing in the film was pronounced ‘Kan’. This surname does exist in Korea, but it is extremely rare with a population of only a few thousand. It turns out however, that the Russianised versions of the much more common surnames Kang (姜) and Han (韓) are pronounced as Kan and Khan respectively. And finally, in one of those handy coincidences, Hankyoreh has a story this week on Sakhalin Koreans visiting Ansan.