Category: Sunshine

It’s a rare moment when I express even mild interest in metric football, otherwise known as soccer. This year, however, North and South Korea have both qualified for the World Cup, which holds the distant promise to beat down the saccharine we-are-one, brotherly-love hippie crap of the 90’s. According to this pernicious stupidity, sports could overcome differences between nations with diametrically opposed interests, values, and psychologies. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. It’s enough to make you retch. On...

North Korea’s latest demands seem calculated to drive away investors: Although it was expected that North Korea would ask for higher salaries during the talks, an increase of more than fourfold was a surprise and is unlikely to be accepted by the South Koreans, who pay about $170 a month to Chinese laborers at their factories in China. “That’s nonsense!” Park Jung-ho, a former official of a shoe factory operating in Kaesong, said of the North’s wage demand. “We have...

Yesterday, I passed along reassurances by the head of the trade association for Kaesong investors that there was no reason to worry about a southward exodus.  What a difference a day makes: South Korean firms at a jointly-run industrial estate in North Korea will ask Seoul for emergency funds as business slumps amid tensions between the two governments, an official has said. On Tuesday a clothing firm became the first to announce it would quit the Kaesong estate, which opened...

I’ve seen a number of different estimates of how many South Korean taxpayer dollars Roh Moo Hyun sent to Kim Jong Il and his regime during Roh’s term in office.  Starting from this 2006 estimate of approximately $3 billion (based on an approximate average exchange ratio of 1,000 won per dollar) and extrapolating about subsequent transfers, a rough estimate of $4 billion seems fair. Now consider: Kim Jong Il, who never actually bothered to visit Roh and granted him just...