One statistical survey in particular – probably more than all others in the world – highlights the superiority of market economy compared to the communist one: it is the very difference in North and South Korean per capita income.

When the Korean war came to a close precisely fifty years ago (July 27 1953, the Panmunjon armistice) with the country’s final division along the 38th parallel, the two halves of the peninsula were more or less on a same level - both devastated by the conflict, both stricken by hunger and diseases and both with Third World infrastructures.

The North was slightly bigger, just a little less densely populated and endowed with a few more natural resources; the South was instead more fertile, with clearer marks of the long Japanese colonization and a slightly more advantageous geographical position.
But, when weapons were silent at last, these differences were trifling and what counted was only the skill to put their shoulders to the wheel, look ahead and build a future. A centralized, incredibly oppressive regime was consolidated in the North, which had become a sort of joint protectorate of China and USSR, under the Stalinist Kim Il Sung. It combined and still combines all the defects of oriental satrapy and economy ruled by the West

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The South was under a right wing dictatorship for about thirty years, first under Syngman Rhee and then under General Park Chung Hee. He harshly put down the protest but, along Pinochet’s line in Chile, economy was allowed to develop unhindered and people could enjoy the fruit of their work.

And here are the results. North Korea has remained one of Asia’s poorest countries with an estimated per capita income of 1,000 dollars (other calculations state it is only 573 dollars). A famine killed two million just four years ago, the production of food is inadequate to feed the population and the mean life span is only 61 years.

During the same period South Korea has become an internationally important industrial power, whose 46 million inhabitants can count on 19,400 dollars a year. They live up to 73 years and their standard of life would be more than acceptable if not for overcrowding (476 inhabitants per sq.km - twice the number in Holland). The economic, social and now cultural gap between the country’s two sections keeps increasing year by year and has now reached such dimensions as to make a possible reunification a problem under every perspective. Despite this there still is a sort of fatal attraction between north and south due to their common ethnic and linguistic roots and this is greatly influencing Asian policies.
Till the world was divided in two blocks there ran an unassailable wall along the 38th parallel and South Korea depended on the American umbrella for defence. The “unionist” inclination remained quite subdued, confined to Marxist and student environments. The North, on the other hand, conveys only signs of hostility, which the presence of an army comprising over one million soldiers armed to the teeth and positioned along the boundary and the discovery of a series of tunnels that would have permitted them to surface almost at Seul’s doors in case of war have made more threatening. The 38th parallel has been on of the hottest spots on earth for decades. Even World War III could have broken out there. The fall of the Berlin wall raised great expectations here too, but only to be disappointed.

Far from following Gorbaciov and Deng Xiaoping’s example and pulling down the fence, old Kim Il Sung closed himself even more in his small old-Marxist fortress, further accentuating his repressive and claustrophobic traits. The regime seemed to waver on his death in 1994, but his son Kim Jong Il, called “the dear leader” and long-destined to succeed him, just as in ancient long-standing absolute monarchies, regained control and maintained his father’s tyranny. Now and then he seems inclined to open to the outside world to the point of granting an audience to his arch enemy, the American representative and Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in 1999; but these are only brief and always opportunistic events in a policy that highly resists change.

The break-up of the USSR and the end of communism in Europe instead had a strange “redeeming” effect on South Korean society, which, increasingly intolerant of American protection, felt free to experiment with left wing solutions. The first concrete step was to elect the former dissident Kim Dae Yong president in December 1997. He inaugurated the so-called “sunny diplomacy” when compared to North Korea. He even succeeded in convincing Kim Jong Il (also by means of a 500 million dollar bribe paid by Hyundai and only later disclosed) to meet him in a historical summit in Pyongyang.

This earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace, but in short he never succeeded in making a breach in the wall. Despite this, during last winter’s elections, South Koreans repeated their choice based on the inclination to open up by calling the former civil rights lawyer Roh Moo Hyun to the “Blue House” instead of the nationalist candidate Lee Roi Chang, the Americans’ preference. The choice was even more significant as it was marked by a real generational rift: 70 per cent of the youth voted for the left wing, anxious to turn a new leaf and thus open a new chapter in national history, while a good part of the older population voted for the right-wing, not forgetting that they owed their freedom to the Americans.

They want nothing to do with Kim Jong Il and his gang of crusading Stalinists. The majority almost considers it a national duty to keep up the dream of reunification, though for the moment analysts exclude the North Korean regime’s collapse according to the 1989 East Berlin pattern and economists warn that the merger with a country that has been heavily damaged and humiliated by communism for fifty years could make Korea slip back thirty years. Matters have been further complicated by the new Pyongyang nuclear challenge eight years after the crisis that lead to the verge of an armed conflict with America at the beginning of Clinton’s presidency.

At the time, after a tug-of-war that lasted months, Washington and Pyongyang ended up by signing an agreement in Geneva - the United States undertook to supply North Korea 500,000 tons of fuel oil a year and to finance the construction of two light water nuclear reactors in exchange for the closing of a heavy water plant that could be used to produce the plutonium required to manufacture nuclear weapons. The plant was really closed and subject to periodical inspections by the AIEA. All fissionable material judged to be dangerous was sealed in special containers.

Despite ups and downs the compromise held till last October when Pyongyang suddenly declared he had resumed the uranium enriching process that precedes bomb manufacturing. Washington, approved by all its partners’, reacted by interrupting its supply of fuel, freezing every contact and formally enjoining North Koreans to retrace their steps. Shortly afterwards Russian and Chinese leaders gathered in Peking echoed America’s worries, inviting their former ally to respect the agreement and abandon his rearmament project. It served no purpose. Kim answered by gradually denouncing the non-proliferation treatise, reactivating the Yongbyon nuclear station closed eight years before, throwing out the AIEA inspectors and starting the production of the fissionable material required to manufacture the nuclear bomb. When finally he succeeded in his intent in mid April and sat down at the same table with the Americans, from whom he demanded a non-aggression treatise and considerable economic aid and food supplies, he declared that he already possessed nuclear weapons and was ready to proceed with tests if Washington did not cease its “aggression”. Nobody has understood whether the dictator is serious or whether he is only taking advantage of US engagements in Iraq to stage his umpteenth blackmail, but his behaviour has cooled Seul’s enthusiasm for the “great embrace” with the North at least for the present. On the other hand the extent of anti-Americanism remains very strong. It is fed from time to time by friction between the population and 40,000 GI’s still stationed around the main cities, by the memory of the support the US gave authoritative regimes of the past and by the delusion that the country’s safety, especially concerning the terrorist threat, is better guaranteed by an inter-Korean pact rather than by a complete alignment with the West. A survey conducted between last July and October revealed that 44 South Koreans out of one hundred have a negative opinion of the United States, even though the influence of American culture – music, cinema and lifestyle is very strong at all levels.
Many realize that this is dangerous: “The national sentiment” said the Chancellor of the University of Seul after a recent demonstration “is following a collision route with the national interest and the government seems to wash its hands of it”. The shift towards the left wing can be felt both internationally and internally too. Roh has won the elections on an unprecedented reformist platform that ranges from the reorganization of the great conglomerates (the so-called chaebol) to the gradual redistribution of wealth and from a democratic re-examination of the judicial system to the extension of high school education to the weaker classes.
Despite being acceptable objectives, they cannot be easily reconciled with the smooth running of the “Country’s System” based on other principles and which has launched one of the most competitive global economies. If brands such as Hyundai or Samsung rapidly met with success throughout the world, it was mainly thanks to power being concentrated in a few hands. This enabled great investments in crucial sectors such as the automobile, shipbuilding and electronics industries and a rational use of motivated and qualified labour, which was not always easy to control. After having lead the “tigers” who, taking advantage of the fact that Japan was slowing down, guided East Asian ascent to new economic power in the early nineties, South Korea was also the first to recover from the ‘97-‘98 financial crisis and is growing again today at a yearly rate of 5%. It is even avant-garde in a very important field: 70 per cent of its houses are cabled, enabling a quick access to the Internet that is envied throughout the world. Korea’s entrance into the World Trade Organization has equally brought it great advantages, especially in the form of foreign investments that touched their peak during the two-year period preceding the crisis (1999-2000). Despite the national market’s constant growth Korean economy is still based on exports, which are on the other hand balanced as few others and hence less dependent on others’ circumstances: 21 per cent is destined to the United States, 19 per cent to China, 13 per cent to the European Union and 11 per cent to Japan. But exchanges with the Third World are also constantly growing. Korean enterprises are increasingly winning tenders for large infrastructures in these countries. It is left to be seen whether this expansion, which is often the result of an aggressive capitalism and numbers more than one corpse along its path, can be maintained also under a socialist-orientated government that is determined to end certain liberties and to increase workers’ rights despite the difficult international economic moment. Curiously, some problems resemble ours: for instance, the strict labour market has lead many firms to resort, for new recruitments, to atypical contracts or even to import illegal labour from neighbouring countries at a lower per capita income. Consequences would be heavy if trade unions, whose strictness recalls the CGIL, should succeed in their attempt to force the chaebol to abandon these practices. However things turn out, the Korean lesson must be kept in mind by those interested in the fate of developing countries: in just two generations South Korea has scored an epoch-making progress thanks to a spirit of sacrifice, enterprise and one quality in particular that is conspicuously absent in other countries, which are today more or less in the situation Korea experienced in 1953: a work orientated mentality.
Translated by interpres sas