Free Republic

Anyways, talk of war is just people like us realizing that South Korea is definitely taking a leading role in this crisis by internationlizing this incident as it forces China and to an extent the U.S. to address the issue. So here, when we read about 3,000+ articles about the possibility of war, it's actually a good thing. Yes, I'm saying it's a good thing [well, not so much for China] as it puts a giant magnifying glass on both China and obscure, little North Korea. This makes the political and diplomatic price of China supporting North Korea very expensive...

It's as if China wishes to project this image that the country does have leverage over North Korea. But, as argued in this book and as I have been saying all along in this blog... However, Scott Snyder puts it best when he writes: Thus, China's increased use of aid, trade, and investment as vehicles for enhancing political influence on North Korea has thus far worked in precisely the opposite manner, making China hostage to and enabler of North Korean provocations (132). Moreover, if you think about it, if Korea ever does re-unifiy, I believe a unified country will be...

The point of this posting is to continue to systematically attack the notion that it is natural for two Koreas to exist and to continually eat away at all the justifications that South Koreans make in order to some how to ease their collective guilt as they lead their moderately wealthty lives as the other half of the nation continues to suffer (For more on how North Koreans continue to suffer see last week's issue of the New Yorker or what Professor Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley has noted to be last weeks "must read.") I do this under the...

Today we will have a presentation on how North Korean institutions have changed since the death of Kim Il Sung. One particular item, the presenting group this week has looked at is the new North Korean constitution, adopted in late September of this year stands out to highlight how much North Korea has fallen. Below is a rough draft of a translation of the North Korean constitution. There is a section missing on the draft copy of the translation, but I hope to have that updated shortly. But, what is fascinating about looking at the constitution is how far North...

My claim is that Koreans are still unable to acknowledge that it was natural for some people to have benefitted under Japanese rule and that these people still loved Korea and the like (I'm thinking more along the lines of a Park Chung Hee than the founders of either Dong-a-Ilbo or Samsung), but the opportunities they had in life only existed if they accepted that Korea was for the time being a Japanese colony and that they realistically couldn't do a single thing about it. And, more so, and this is a claim purely along the lines of the early...

You could also look at what South Korean historians are doing. Historians in South Korea put weight, as I've pointed out earlier (in Part I), on theories now that would otherwise be of little relevance were it to not the case that Korea still remains divided today. Specifically, the North-South States Period (남북국시대) serves mainly to justify the division of the peninsula in the mind of Koreans and to make it seem as if the division is entirely natural (since it happened before and the country eventually unified) and that it's perfectly alright to think of other things for the...

And, I've found the data. It's actually a report from the U.S. Census Bureau entitled, "We the People: Asians in the United States" (the full file can be found here and the link is also in the Selected Articles part as you scroll down on your left hand side). I've taken a photo of the graph and circled the relevant portion in red. While definitely, not the poorest, it does show that Korean-Americans are the poorest among Northeast Asians and actually have a lower median income than that of all American households, which stands in stark contrast with the fact...

But, what's interesting is to see the parallels between what this paper finds and how it stacks up to how ethnic Koreans are perceived or how Koreans are expected to be in the United States. Considering that China too is a very diverse, multiethnic country and that, at least on paper, the Chinese have a similar definition of identity as that of the United States, I'd like to argue that it can be shown that the expectations or beliefs that Americans may hold towards Korean-Americans can indeed be validated. We can show by seeing if these same expectations can be...

But, what makes East Asia different is that the Communist leaders were first and foremost, popular national heroes, who, by the above logic and the U.S. decision to support colonial colloborators or participants of past institutions, that happened to choose to be communist. You see, while I'm not exactly writing part IV in this installment, I'm setting the argument up for how economic development, or these so called "miracles" in East Asia seem to keep happening over and over again. Also, it has been pointed out that Mongolia is a state that does not enjoy economic development, which is geographically...

You see, I'm of the belief that President George W. Bush, the first president I voted for during the 2000 election cycle, though I really was pulling for Senator John McCain at that time, became president since he was a likeable figure thought to be not different than the average American (Though, former President Gore's likeability issue and disgraced activist Ralph Nader probably also had something to do with it), but yet, then Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. and a tutor of George W. Bush's answers precisely why the U.S. should care and in a very concise manner too. If...

Anyways, take these xenophobic tendencies that have been created for over the past 1300 years (or more than 5,000 years, depending on your source) and then brutally colonize the country for thirty six years. Then, add in a devastating civil war (the Korean War) that wasn't allowed to see its natural conclusion - a war ending with there being two rival Korean states is definitely unnatural (or just look at the fact that the armistic isn't even a peace treaty, but a cease fire signed by China, North Korea, and the U.S.). That's at the heart of my argument. And,...

How Will We Judge the Korean War in a Century? [...] What I am arguing is will this be the consensus twenty years from today (or forty years after this article was written). I mean, yes, most ordinary South Koreans enjoys such material prosperity that probably only a select few and I mean a very select few in North Korea could only begin to dream about. I am saying that had the Korean War run its course without intervention from the United States (or equivalently had Harry S. Truman not settled on a policy, the Truman Doctrine, where not winning...

U.S. naivete not only wrongly interfered with the natural development of East Asia, but in particular with respect to Korea, the greatest tragedy was that by the U.S. interfering in what was basically a civil war, the peninsula saw all the carnage and destructionthat would've played out anyways had the U.S. not interfered, but the wardid nothing to unify the nation ("Containment"). Moreover, the perverse state that North Korea finds herself to be in is a direct result of the natural order of things being prevented from occurring. Other Sinic nations experienced similar bouts of reconciliation, but with the fruits...

Previously, I alluded to the Balhae(발해,渤海) topic or the North-South States Period: "By the way, on a tangent here, for those Koreans, who believe in this newly created North-South States Period Theory or 남북시대 (신라+발해 = Korea), let me tell you -- it's pure rubbish, which I would like to address in detail one day(The main question behind that issue comes down to who were the Mohe (말갈, 靺鞨) people (A Schizophrenic Han : Breaking Down Borders: Korea)." Well, I'm not sure if it's "pure rubbish" anymore. A lot of information that is available on this topic is the subject...

"Indonesian Tribe adopts Hangul" I kid you not (and it kind of makes sense). But, something about this story strikes me as a bit perverse. As in, it feels as if the South Korean government is taking advantage of this poor innocent Indonesian tribe.

The last couple posts were largely written from the perspective of me trying to put forth what I thought Clinton's summit meant now and what it could mean in the future. But, for today's post -- and I'm trying very hard to refrain from posting for the sake of posting, I'm going to have to criticize probably the worst editorial I've come across in a long time and try to undo the disservice to the American public that the New York Times has just committed. It's definitely worse than the fairly recent editorial from the Los Angeles Times on which...

Personally, I believe what will drive North Korea-U.S. relations as well as with the other four parties from the six party framework, is how each party comes to accept the fact that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons. This stands in stark and direct conflict with the fact that the United States will never accept North Korea as a legitimate nuclear power along the lines that the U.S. has with India -- and rightly so. But, I do believe the U.S. would be content to see a steady-state where North Korea has nuclear weapons, but doesn't share/sell...

While in principle I've always been a supporter of John Bolton even when he fell out with the George W. Bush administration when the administration did its sudden U-turn on its North Korean policy, I wouldn't believe it to be as bad as Bolton makes it out to be (yes, it's a form of appeasement, but to rigidly be against a policy just because of it's name is a strike against common sense and an exercise in sheer stupidity) and considering how things currently are I think its realistically the most the U.S. can ask for. Yes, while sending another...

But anyways, for me, it wasn’t that great. At least, for playing “문명” (Civilization, if you don’t have a Korean font installed). But, you see, as an English teacher there I saw a parallel. The funny thing is that you would think that Korea would have the largest market for books teaching Koreans English from a Korean perspective. But, I cannot tell you how many times I came across expensive, no, very expensive textbooks published by large American or British companies that were published to teach the domestic market (Americans or the British) English. In America, the last time I...

(Probably Part I of II) From previous posts, such as this one, you can tell I am somewhat sympathetic towards Lee Myung Bak. He seems to be the wrong president at the wrong time, but anyways I just read this article and every single time I read something like this, the political situation in Korea boggles the mind (But on a side note, I'd also argue that South Korea is one of just two East Asian countries with democratic institutions - Taiwan being the other one. And Japan, well, we'll see). That is, how on earth can people care so...