Category: East Asia

Posted on

[lost in translation]

Now and again, various diplomats ask me about English idioms or snippets of text that they don’t understand.

Today I got a doozy: the following quotation from the Reverend Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius:

If you sincerely desire a truly, well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and “nutty”. You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day… no matter what… Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket…even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone, of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.

What particularly through my diplomatic colleague was the sentence “You need the balance,” because balance with what?

I did my best to explain that the Reverend Ivan Stang is not in fact one of those inspirational Christian pastors with whom Koreans are so often enamored, but I’m not sure I managed to convey the extent to which Stang is a figure of counterculture and satire — elements of our culture that most Koreans have difficulty grasping anyway.

I followed that up by suggesting that the balance was between the mainstream point of view, which we will learn automatically, and the views of the extremists, which it takes effort to study. I think I got this idea across.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask where the diplomat had stumbled across an inspirational quotation from Stang, of all people. But know that the Spirit of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, Jr., has entered the United Nations!

Posted on

[who is a korean?]

In an interesting and laudable development, South Korea has decided to start teaching units in its elementary schools about mixed-race Koreans and overseas adoptees.

“Children in multi-cultural families get disadvantages and unfair treatment due to their accent, physical appearance and culture upbringing. We need to teach children that discrimination against or contempt of biracial people or overseas adoptees is wrong and that we can get along with children from an international marriage,” said Kwon Ki-won, head supervisor of the ministry’s curriculum policy division.

As the article points out, the number of biracial students in Korea is still incredibly small — well under 10,000 — but this will be a growing issue as Koreans continue to move abroad while maintaining links with home, and as interracial marriages continue to increase. I don’t think Korea will ever be an immigrant society like America, nor should it be, but the Koreans will have to come to an understanding of what it means to be Korean that is not wholly centered on race and native understanding of the language. This is a step in the right direction.

Posted on

[whaddaya know?]

So the early report is that a deal has been reached with North Korea: energy aid in exchange for steps toward disarmament.

It’s very preliminary still, and this whole thing could collapse over a North Korean demand for more energy than the other five powers are willing to give, or, more likely, over shifting North Korean positions on what disarmament steps they will take and when.

It will be interesting to see, as the details emerge, where exactly this leaves the Bush administration in terms of its North Korea policy. Did the hard line work? Were the Bushies right all along to toss the Agreed Framework over North Korea’s dabbling with uranium? Were they right to insist on talking only through the six-party framework rather than one on one?

The last question is the easiest to answer: No. The North Koreans have proved far more willing to compromise since Chris Hill, our lead negotiator, started talking one-on-one with the North Koreans (albeit in a format that the Bush administration, never sticklers for reality, continue to insist doesn’t qualify as one on one). As for the rest of it, let’s keep in mind that we’re now asking North Korea to roll back its plutonium-bomb developments, which wouldn’t exist if not for the collapse of the Agreed Framework.

There is no indication that the central problem of a poor, hostile, dictatorial, aggressively criminal North Korea has been solved. Still, if we’re all stepping back from the brink of nuclear war, that’s good.

For more on North Korea, check out Richard Bernstein in the New York Review, who notes that back in the early Clinton years, conventional wisdom had it that the communist regime in North Korea would wither and collapse like so many others had in Central and Eastern Europe. At this point, I think a more realistic model is that of China and Vietnam, where the Communist Party has maintained control while transforming into something new and pro-capitalist. And the road to such a transformation is through engagement, not isolation.

The Kim dynasty seems unlikely to collapse through internal decay, though one never knows. And even if it did, that would hardly be the end of our troubles: a headless state full of fanatical militants with no food is not a pretty prospect for any of its neighbors. Only engagement has any chance of creating a North Korea that can join with South Korea to become a prosperous, peaceful Korea.

Update: It turns out that South Korea’s lead negotiator is Chun Yung-woo, with whom I had the pleasure of working closely on a number of occasions when he was Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. In my experience, he was extremely intelligent, incisive, charismatic and tough-minded — ideal for his current role, really. Should an accord be signed, I will have to send him a note of congratulations.


Posted on

[bong joon-ho festival]

Looks like there’s a mini-festival of Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s films coming to the IFC Center later this month.

The only Bong film I’ve seen is the brilliant Barking Dogs Never Bite, a richly textured dark comedy that captures contemporary Korean life better than anything else I’ve seen or read.

From what I hear, though, his subsequent films, Memories of Murder and The Host, are supposed to be great as well. The Korea Society has more information on the films.

Check it out if you have the chance!

Posted on

[still a closed country]

South Korea thinks it wants to welcome the world, but it doesn’t. After hundreds of years of keeping the borders closed, followed by a period of foreign occupation and war, Koreans still have a hard time thinking of their country as anything but a bastion of Korean monoculture. One still hears about blood and soil — ironically, since the very concept is probably German by way of the Japanese occupiers — and half-Korean children are still treated terribly in schools, to the extent that apartheid villages have been proposed.

But forget all that. How good is South Korea with long-term visitors? A new report suggests: not very. From buying cellphone service to getting fair prices on clothes to going to the doctor, foreigners find daily life in Korea difficult. Worse yet, they don’t know what recourse they have, if any, when things go wrong.

South Korea still has a long way to go if it wants to be the hub of Asia.

Posted on

[un to nepal]

After UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour culminated a tour of Nepal by calling for war crimes trials, the New York Times reports that the UN Security Council has decided to send a political mission to Nepal to oversee the ceasefire.

This is the first time since my arrival in UNistan that the organization has begun a serious involvement with a country I actually know something about. I’m certainly not a Nepal expert, but I’ve been there twice and followed its story over the years. And I’m not at all certain that the fragile new order needs outside interference.

Like Thailand, another tourist favorite, Nepal was never colonized. Certainly it has deep-seated problems, but they are not the problems of post-colonial societies. The thought of Western good intentions going awry in Nepal fills me with dread; I imagine Nepal’s warm hospitality — which, let us not forget, is its only really viable product for foreign trade — curdling into the bitterness and resentment of the colonized.

On the other hand, my concept of Nepal’s internal sensibilities comes from visits to the Kathmandu Valley, one particularly tourist-favored stretch of the Himalayas, and one small town on the edge of a lowlands national park. The angry part of Nepal is down there, in the area known as the Terai, where the draining of malarial swamps has opened up new land for farming, but where the zamindar system of landlordism keeps most people impoverished and powerless, just as it does in some neighboring Indian states. Or so I have read. Maybe these sections of the country feel just as colonized as anyone else ruled by people who speak another language and see them as less than fully human.

In any case, it’s a test for the UN and for Ban Ki-moon, and one in which I feel a personal sense of anxiety over its outcome.

Posted on

[it depends what your definition of “is” is]

From the BBC:

This is not an instance of bilateral negotiations,” White House spokesman Tony Snow told Reuters news agency.

“What you had …this week in Berlin were talks with Chris Hill and a North Korean representative as preparations for the six-party talks.”

Oh. Sure. Not negotiations, talks. Right. That makes all the difference. Thank goodness it was talks and not negotiations!

Either way, the US seems to be showing some flexibility on a number of issues, including economic sanctions, which means that there is now the actual possibility of negotiation at the upcoming resumption of the Six-Party Talks.

Posted on

[the genius of diplomacy]

See, here’s the crazy thing about diplomacy: sometimes engaging in it works better than declaring it pointless.

For years, the North Koreans have been trying to get the US to engage in talks. But the Bush administration has insisted that the only way we could ever possibly talk to North Korea is in the format of the Six-Party Talks, with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in the room. The successes of this approach include North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests last year.

Now, in a surprise move, the US seems suddenly to have decided that bilateral talks could be possible. How did this come about? Well, Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill made this discovery while in bilateral talks with senior North Korean officials.

Does this strike anyone else as spectacularly tortured? Our high-level officials met their high-level officials, with representatives of no other country present; at this meeting, they discussed the possibility of bilateral talks?

The whole argument against bilateral talks was that they would somehow encourage the North Koreans to more bad behavior by demonstrating that prior bad behavior got them what they wanted. And so we did: nothing. That’ll learn ’em! Of course, this is typical Bush admin thinking, which puts talks with us on a pedestal as the ultimate prize to be earned for doing what we want, instead of seeing talks as how we convince other countries to do what we want. Traditionally, talks have been seen as relatively safe, even if they’re not expected to produce results, while wars have been seen as relatively dangerous, even if they’re expected to go well. The Bush administration has turned that thinking on its head.

But now something seems to have changed. This is good. Talking to North Korea is wise. Talking to all our enemies would be wise. And perhaps one day we will have a government that realizes you flip more bad guys with dialogue than with waterboarding.

Posted on

[banwatch: sweating the small stuff]

New Yorkers love to complain, and the Daily News is already bitching about how new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, after advising diplomats to do “as Mayor Bloomberg does” and take public transit to work, decided to be driven the eight blocks from his hotel to a breakfast meeting, then left his driver idling in a no-standing zone.

Gestures are important, but I think the Daily News is jumping the gun on this one. Yeah, Ban’s driver should obey the law, and yeah, it’d be nice if Ban followed his own advice and took the subway everywhere. On the other hand, driving really is a lot faster much of the time, and Ban isn’t mayor of Subwayland. His work really is important — more important than impressing New Yorkers or fellow diplomats with his individual devotion to combating gridlock. Also, unlike a lot of the diplomats, Ban is actually busy.

Via Gothamist.