A History of Korea (105 page)

In early January 2006, the
SNU
investigators released their final investigative report, declaring that Hwang’s research team was found also to have fabricated data included in the February 2004
Science
article. The panel found, however, that Snuppy was indeed created from cloned stem cells of the donor dog, Thai. Meanwhile, the South Korean prosecution launched an investigation into the alleged swapping of cloned stem cells in Hwang’s research. Editors at
Science
journal retracted the 2004 and 2005 articles after they saw the final report from Seoul. The yearlong scandal ended as a Seoul court handed down a suspended two-year jail term to Hwang on 26 October 2009.

Through Hwang’s downfall, South Koreans belatedly learned a lesson that biotechnology was not the forum in which to play out its industrial policy ambitions. In a strategy envied by other developing countries, South Korea became one of the largest economies in the world by focusing national support on target industries and producing quick results. Unlike electronics or information technology, where the country excelled by building upon technology pioneered by others, biotechnology was a cutting-edge sector, teeming with critics and requiring a highly sophisticated regulatory system.

The Hwang U-s
ŏ
k scandal was likened in the scientific community to the “S
ŏ
ngsu Bridge collapse.” The bridge, a jerry-built structure on the Han River in Seoul, collapsed in October 1994, claiming 32 lives. The greatest lesson that the stem cell scandal taught was that scientific research would progress only gradually and would rarely, if ever, generate remarkable results overnight.

In July 2007, the Sin Ch
ŏ
ng-a scandal, in which the academic credentials of the former college professor and up-and-coming art curator nicknamed the “art world’s Cinderella,” were revealed to be false, sparking a wave of revelations of fake diplomas that seemed to involve South Koreans in all walks of life, including professors, actresses, a cartoonist, and even a Buddhist monk. Sin was accused of fabricating a doctorate degree and other documents from Yale University and using them to secure a position as an art professor at Seoul’s
Tongguk University in 2005. The scandal exposed South Korea’s obsession with titles rather than merit, especially its serious tendency to excessively emphasize a person’s educational background.

A credential-obsessed society prioritizes a person’s educational background instead of his or her actual ability and career performance. In South Korea, degrees from top universities at home and abroad have had a profound impact on every aspect of life, from one’s career to one’s marriage prospects. South Koreans have tended to hold different attitudes toward a person after learning which school he or she attended and to rank schools and categorize them depending on their location and educational ranking. A majority of South Koreans have an inferiority complex regarding their credentials, and those who graduate from lower-tier schools feel much deprived. This has left universities in regional areas with fewer students and has led to less regional development. This tendency dates back to the traditional Confucian attitude in the pre-modern era and was strengthened following liberation in 1945 in the process of nation building and industrialization by a few elite groups.

In this pressured environment, students are forced to make the utmost efforts to get into prominent schools, but they are given only one final opportunity to gain admission to these schools—the national college entrance examination. Because a student’s entire life depends on a single examination, school curricula have tended to focus on the subjects included in the College Scholastic Aptitude Test. The subjects that do not appear on the college entrance examination have either disappeared or occupied a shrinking percentage of the curriculum. Also, many parents claim that what their children learned at school is not enough to succeed in the national examination, which forces the parents to spend tens of thousands of dollars for tuition at private institutions. In this way, “education fever” in South Korea has made the private educational market prosper. Some students go to other countries for better educational opportunities, despite the huge costs. In the 2000s, about 2,000 students left South Korea every month, creating a serious invisible trade deficit. A 2007
OECD
report showed that 7.2 percent of South Korea’s
GDP
was spent on education.

Overly enthusiastic parents and a subsequent surge in private education costs have been just a small part of the social malady caused by the country’s credential-driven society; another negative aspect is that the overall competitiveness of South Korean universities compared to overseas educational institutions has been undermined. Many different proposals have been made for reforming this credential-fixated society, but the most important step would
be to change citizens’ attitude and move beyond the belief that educational credentials are everything.

The term “hallyu,” or “Korean wave,” was coined by the Chinese media in 2001 to describe South Korea’s export of pop culture products including one of its popular drama series,
A Jewel in the Palace
, as well as its music and popular singers, all starting in the late 1990s. After a while the Korean popular culture, which had affected millions of Chinese, expanded its popularity over other neighboring countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan, and became a regional phenomenon. Since 2000 not only television dramas, music, and movies but also Korea’s own traditional foods—such as
kimch’i,
a spicy fermented cabbage dish;
koch’ujang,
or hot pepper paste; and ramen, or instant noodles—and even electronic software have become popular in those countries. This regional success has propelled the more energetic introduction and circulation of Korean culture in other parts of the world, including North and South America, Central/West Asia, and Europe and North Africa. Although hallyu as a distinctive cultural phenomenon has seldom occurred in non-East/Southeast Asian regions, the introduction and presence of a growing Korean pop culture in those areas have occurred to an unprecedented degree. In this sense the Korean wave has been an elastic concept, broad in scope and in constant flux.

More amazing than the wave itself was that the people welcoming it were so attracted to Korean culture, as well as singers and individual actors in popular dramas, that they wanted to learn the Korean language and to visit Korea. In the 2000s, the number of foreigners who visited South Korea from Asian countries more than doubled. Travel companies in South Korea started competing for those visitors with a package that included the popular places where TV dramas took place. Hundreds of thousands of people from Japan, China, and other countries have already visited as a result of hallyu.

Historically Korea was thought to have been dominated culturally by China and Japan, but now it has been spreading its own culture abroad and has become a cultural leader in Asia. The transformation began with South Korea’s democratization in the late 1980s, which unleashed sweeping domestic changes. As its democracy and economy have matured, its influence on the rest of Asia, negligible until a decade ago, has also grown. Since 1998 the South Korean government has gradually loosened its authoritarian cultural policy and, with
transnational flows cultivated by its far-flung diasporic population, South Korea has created a dynamic and syncretic popular culture. The size of South Korea’s entertainment industry jumped from $8.5 billion in 1999 to $43.5 billion in 2003. South Korea’s export of cultural products exceeded $1 billion in 2005.

In China, South Korean movies and TV dramas about urban professionals in Seoul have presented images of modern lives, centering on individual happiness and sophisticated consumerism. They have also shown enduring Confucian-rooted values in their emphasis on family relations, offering the Chinese both a reminder of what was lost during the Cultural Revolution and the example of an Asian country that has modernized and retained its traditions.
Three Guys and Three Girls
” and
Three Friends
were South Korea’s homegrown version of the U.S. TV show
Friends
. As for
Sex and the City
, its South Korean twin
The Marrying Type
, a sitcom about three single professional women in their thirties looking for love in Seoul, was so popular in China that episodes were illegally downloaded or sold on pirated DVDs.

Why did the Korean media industry have a chance to market its pop cultural products to other Asian countries and experience such unexpected success? Relatively free from political and historical burdens, Korean pop culture was considered in some countries a good alternative to the hegemonic and imperialist Western and Japanese pop culture. Moreover, it was sophisticated and interesting enough to appeal to Asian consumers with diverse preferences and tastes, and could provide something new and different to consumers bored with familiar and abundant Western and Japanese pop culture. Another attractive point was that, early on, Korean pop culture was reasonably priced.

This impassioned and rapid favoritism toward Korean culture has moderated previous negative thoughts about South Korea, such as, for example, that the country was male dominated, feudalistic, and conservative, and has also spurred sales of Korean consumer goods, with Korean car sales rising sharply in Taiwan and other countries in the 2000s. Simply put, the Korean wave has brought considerable political and economic benefits to South Korea.

With the dawn of the 1990s, North Korea had to struggle with unprecedented adversity. The collapse of global communism and the Soviet Union, in 1989– 1991, imperiled the existence of the North Korean state. In this time of national
crisis, North Korea staked its fate on the juche ideology; the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union convinced Kim Il-sung that his independent policy of juche was correct.

Since the late 1970s the North Korean regime had become even more rigid than ever. The origins of North Korea’s crisis in the 1990s were embedded in juche socialism itself, which caused a resistance to fundamental economic and political reform. In the early 1990s, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, flatly refused to move toward Chinese-style economic reform and adhered inflexibly to an economic autarchy. As a result, the North Korean economy drastically worsened. The “socialist paradise” suffered consecutive years of economic decline, and North Korea’s
GNP
, once on a par with that of South Korea, was estimated at one-sixteenth the size of the booming South Korean economy in the early 1990s, and the gap was growing rapidly. Despite such economic difficulties, both Kims exercised absolute authority over the poverty-stricken North Korean population.

In early July 1994 Kim Il-sung was preoccupied with preparing for the unprecedented summit meeting with South Korean President Kim Young-sam, which was scheduled to begin in Pyongyang on 25 July. But he died of a sudden heart attack on 8 July at the age of 82. Kim’s sudden death greatly complicated the problems facing North Korea in the second half of the 1990s.

For the past many years, while South Korea has portrayed Kim Il-sung as a demon, a scoundrel, and a fraud, North Korea has glorified him as a demigod. In particular, the communist North continued to argue that Kim was
the
leader of all Korean independence fighters during Japanese colonial rule. Even South Korean high school history books, revised in 2002, credited him for his role in combating Japanese colonialism. Because the prime test of legitimacy for leadership in postwar Korea was one’s record as an independence fighter against Japanese rule, Kim was able to secure legitimacy for power in his own way. But he failed in governing North Korea, providing neither “bread” nor freedom to the North Korean people. He never achieved his stated goal that North Koreans would be able to “eat rice and meat soup, wear silk clothes, and live in a tile-roofed house.” Obsessed with the juche ideology, he virtually ruined the North Korean economy, and when he died, instead of a “socialist paradise,” he left one of the poorest, most repressive countries in the world to his successor, Kim Jong-il. The “socialist paradise” has been widely seen abroad as a despotic regime that starves its own people. Kim Il-sung’s greatest fault, perhaps, was that he failed to solve the chronic food shortages in North Korea.

Kim Il-sung’s death was the single most momentous event in North Korean politics in several decades and came at a time when North Korea was facing perilous crises. The very survival of the North Korean state was in question. With Kim Il-sung’s death, his son, Kim Jong-il, succeeded him. The younger Kim’s rule, in the three-year period of mourning (1994–1997), went smoothly, beginning with pledges of loyalty by the nation’s power elite. This atmosphere of stability and continuity is easily explained by the fact that Kim Jong-il’s succession had been long in the making. After his initial promotion to the inner circle at the Sixth Party Congress of the Korean Workers Party in October 1980, the next major step to succession came a full decade later, when he was made Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army on 24 December 1991. Because the army was the real foundation of power in North Korea, this was a vital step. Following his father’s death, Kim Jong-il immediately gained control of his country, but this was not officially confirmed until 10 October 1995. Kim Jong-il did not formally assume his father’s offices, those of General Secretary of the KWP and President of the DPRK.

During the period of mourning, from 1994 to 1997, the less than charismatic Kim Jong-il ruled North Korea in accordance with the teachings of the departed Great Leader,
yuhun.
Kim Il-sung proved that he was omnipotent in death as well as in life. The younger Kim was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, and thus “Our Style Socialism” continued and was strengthened under his rule.