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Maintaining the 'Korean High'
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13266 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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10 / 1987 |
2,359 Words |
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Edward Neilan
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"The Korean High" is noticeable wherever you go in Seoul these days - from a stroll through the trendy shopping district of Myongdong, to dinner at the uppity Seoul Club, to the boardroom of the Daewoo Building, to a hawker's lane in the Namdaemun market.
It is a state of mind, a sort of confidence and "let's get it done" attitude that can be more easily felt than explained.
The plain fact is that South Korea is the most dynamic country in the world today.
However bold that premise may sound, close examination will find the statement's marksmanship to be unerring. Further, there is every reason to believe that South Korea will continue to provide a vibrancy in Northeast Asia that contrasts and complements both Japan's sophisticated stability and China's plodding emergence.
The political turbulence of last spring and early summer supports rather than undermines the argument that South Korea's current vitality promises a strong and positive future.
Political expectations that were straining to match economic and developmental accomplishments finally spilled over following some incredibly poor timing on the part of President Chun Doo-Hwan in making an April 13 statement ending political debate on a new constitution.
Students began protesting and then labor unions joined in, expressing a society bursting to fulfill itself. Already South Korea's economic growth has impressed and startled the world. In the midst of all the rock throwing, chanting, and tear-gassing, the government calmly announced 15 percent growth for the first quarter - the highest of any nation in the world.
Did the riots hurt the economy?
"Oh yes," said a government bureaucrat. "New letter of credit openings showed a decline in increase from 39 percent growth in March to only 28 percent growth in April."
The watershed has already been reached in South Korea's passage into the ranks of newly industrialized countries and world-class economic players, but such transformations need symbols. For South Korea, that symbol will be the Olympic Games, which will catapult the country's new image internationally, just as the 1964 Olympics did that trick for host Tokyo.
'The Korean miracle'
When I first arrived in Seoul on a cold February day in 1957 - as a young journalist joining a project to upgrade the daily Korean Republic, (later the Korea Herald) - I was staggered by the economic backwardness and the destruction of the Korean War. Even as I packed my bags to leave three and a half years later, I would not have guessed that barely 30 years later South Korea would be building supertankers and introducing the fastest-selling new automobile into the U.S. market.
Even skeptical journalists should have been better prepared for "the Korean miracle," which wasn't really a miracle at all but the
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