But then, we shouldn’t ever count on them to make the world a better place anyway. It will have to happen despite the rich old elites. As it almost always has had to…

In that at least Korea is not alone . . .
*sigh*

The gist was mostly a mix of pessimism and optimism (depending on how you see it) about #1, agreement about #2, and deferral about #3, with Canadian-socialist type caveats thrown in. I would love to see your thoughts in more detail.

Or have a beer or coffee sometime, for that matter… Maybe when my housing situation stops collapsing around my ears…

You’ve touched on a lot of poltical-economic points here, and I can’t even hope to touch on all of them for this comment, but just a few points:

1) I personally believe that should reunification occur, there should be limits on movement of people, at least temporarily. But, I give this zero chance of happening. Poor North Koreans will do everything they can to cross the border, and I doubt if South Koreans are willing to shoot North Koreans trying to cross the border for a better life. Also, think back on what happened in East and West Germany (which IMO is the most likely scenario for what will happen – and Korea is likely to repeat their mistakes as well).

2) One of the problems IMO is that every Korean says they want reunification, but no one seems to realize that there may be very little in common between present day North Koreans and South Koreans. The people who may act as links between the two Koreas – the North Korean people who escaped before the Korean war, and remember the pre-war unified period, are now in their 70s and 80s. When they pass away, the two Koreas may have no “links” which can smooth over problems.

3) Also, on balance of economic power and philosophy between government and businesses – the balance passed to businesses around the 1980s, though what the businesses want is probably not what economists would think of as a “free market.” There’s a lot of good Korean economic history books and articles dealing with government-led period of 1960s-early 1980s; but relatively few which deal with 1990s and beyond.

One of these days, I’ll try to make a fuller post.

That’s interesting. I think my understanding of Korean development history differs from yours. (Top-down government involvement was massive, wasn’t it?)

It’s mostly insofar as the guys in the Blue House will be under the thumbs of the corporate elite — and they’ll have to be, nobody else in South Korea has the resources to even think about dealing with the North — the agenda will necessarily be driven by what’s good for big business. (And sweatshop exploitation is always good for business!) Besides, I suspect that by the time this happens, the population is going to be saturated with young people (and immigrants) who don’t really consider North Korea their problem, and everyone else will be so used to not knowing what’s going on up North that outcry will be fringe, at least for the first few years.

(I think that’s part of why the room might have been silent after Bruce’s speech. Besides it being a great speech, it insists on something Korea’s not yet grokked: Korea is responsible for Korea’s future. Bitch about Japan all you want; rage at the US despite its military expenditures here; but it doesn’t erase the fact that Korea’s future is in its own hands. Some people get this. Most don’t.

This idea hasn’t yet penetrated deeply, which is why so many regular young people wish they could emigrate, or wish they were born elsewhere. It’s a kind of national identity infused with a kind of learned helplessness, really.

We’ll see, though: this summer showed that people can be mobilized. Maybe over a more dire issue, they can come out in greater numbers and stay mobilized. I am hopeful.

(By the way, as for people wanting the government to be hands-off, well, yes and no. Most young people I know across the political spectrum seem eager to throw away anonymity online, and seem to accept the necessity of government censorship.)

I will throw out one prediction, though: there is absolutely no way in hell that the borders will be open within five years after ostensible “reunification” (ie. there is no way that North Koreans will be wandering into Seoul with cell phones) and there is no way that anyone’s going to allow mandatory military service to be stopped, the latter for specifically cultural reasons. This seems to suggest the border will become much more heavily guarded.

But South Korea will have an analogous problem with its immigrant and mixed-race population (poorer, cell-phone equipped), and now that I think about it, what Bruce is talking about applies just as much to those populations.

I wonder if your view is not a bit too centered around these guys in the blue house ;)

Though I imagine the exploitation will be South-Korean dominated. Korea’s government (and corporate elite) is going to be very loudly screaming, “That’s our sweatshop brethren and you need to let us exploit them put them to work in modernizing their country by making crap for us cheaply doing basic labour to build up their economy.”

I don’t think the majority of people will be sympathetic to this plan — I think it will anger a lot of people — but I also don’t know to what degree the majority of people will have imagined alternatives or examined different models of how post-Kim-Dynasty collapse could look. And the thing is, while the Korean populace can certainly rise up about things they care about — resistance to educational reforms was pretty constant and relatively effective during the dictatorships and up to the present — there are some things they just don’t seem to feel moved to rise up about.

I was talking with a student who’d dropped by my office about the North Korea depicted in one of my forthcoming stories, and she sat there in shock, and said, “You know, nobody’s ever broken down what a post-”reunification” Korea would actually look like to me before. I’ve never even imagined what it’d look like.”

That’s pretty scary given the amount of political lip-service given to the idea. It’s one of the dire consequences attendant to the relatively scarce inroads SF has made here, too, I think. Because where else but in SF would anyone dare ask the realistic questions that don’t get shunted aside by mutterings about the “gateun minjok”?

It’s telling that in all the futuristic films in which we see a “reunified” Korea, all of the action happens in the South or a place that looks like the South, and no serious exploration of Inter-Korean dynamics would look like has happened onscreen.

(I’m hoping, and guessing, that things are different in the realm of literary SF.)

The countries around it, and those not around it, have been drooling at the chance to make North Korea the world’s largest sweatshop once someone friendlier to the outside takes power. So I’m doubting any plans of “stabalization” will have any goal outside of keeping that entire nation of prisoners where they’re at. (In all interpretations of the concept)