The Big Business of South Korea's Mega-Churches

http://www.economist.com/node/21532340

KOREA has long been a hotbed of religiosity. Before a certain Kim Il Sung began having other ideas, Pyongyang (now the capital of North Korea) used to be known as “The Jerusalem of the East”. And in today’s Seoul, practitioners of traditional shamanism, Buddhism, Christianity and even cults such as the Unification Church (better known in the West as the Moonies), all have plenty of followers.

Many of them also have lots of money (not least because religious institutions are tax-exempt). The Protestant church, in particular, seems to have produced a tribe of flashy, mansion-dwelling pastors. This is partly a result of the character of Korean Protestantism: a common theme, for instance, at the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul is that a poor Christian is not a good Christian. However, it is also a result of the incentives created by the sheer size of some churches. Yoido itself ranks as the largest Christian congregation in the world, with over 1m members. Another, Somang Church, has hundreds of thousands of faithful, including South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak.

With all these people throwing their spare won into the collection plate, mega-churches have become big businesses. Yoido Full Gospel Church’s founder Cho Yong-gi, who has run the congregation since 1958, has family interests ranging from private universities to newspapers. Members of his church were once asked to pray for higher sales for one of his titles.

A pastor at a Seoul-based church of a mere 60,000 members notes that the likes of Yoido have become “so big, and with assets so huge, that human greed comes into play”. And in late September, following complaints by 29 church elders, prosecutors began investigating Mr Cho over the alleged embezzlement of 23 billion won ($20m) from Yoido’s funds. A documentary aired by MBC, a television station, claims that this money was used to buy property in America. The show also charged that Mr Cho’s wife sold a building constructed with collection money for her own gain. Its buyer was Hansei University—an institution where she also happens to be president. Mr and Mrs Cho deny the allegations.

Yoido Church’s founder is rarely out of the news in South Korea. In March he sparked a storm of criticism by claiming the earthquake and tsunami in Japan was “God’s warning” to a country that follows “idol worship, atheism, and materialism”.

He is also too political for some. When President Lee’s government drew up plans to legislate for Islamic sukuk bonds in South Korea, Mr Cho argued that this would aid “terrorists”, and that the president was forgetting the vital role the Protestant lobby had in electing him. Following concerted efforts by Mr Cho and other South Korean church leaders, the government blinked first, and the plan was dropped.

There are plenty of rank-and-file Christians in South Korea who do not indulge in the cathedralism of the mega-pastors. Many of the underground networks helping North Koreans on the run in China are organised by South Korean Christians. Refugees who reach South Korea are often cared for by church groups, and South Korean church aid-agencies are usually among the first to respond to natural disasters around the world, including the Japanese tsunami in March.

But in a country that thrives on group activities and collective bonding, as well as religion, Seoul is a natural home for mega-churches. The likes of Mr Cho, for all their flaws, provide something that millions of Koreans find irresistible. ◦

The Big Business of South Korea's Mega-Churches

Video: Did Koreans Invent Pizza?

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Video: Did Koreans Invent Pizza?

Samsung: Asia’s new model company

http://www.economist.com/node/21530984

Samsung’s recent success has been extraordinary. But its strategy will be hard to copy
Oct 1st 2011 from the print edition

THE founders of South Korea’s chaebol (conglomerates) were an ambitious bunch. Look at the names they picked for their enterprises: Daewoo (“Great Universe”), Hyundai (“The Modern Era”) and Samsung (“Three Stars”, implying a business that would be huge and eternal). Samsung began as a small noodle business in 1938. Since then it has swelled into a network of 83 companies that account for a staggering 13% of South Korea’s exports. The hottest chilli in the Samsung kimchi bowl is Samsung Electronics, which started out making clunky transistor radios but is now the world’s biggest technology firm, measured by sales. It makes more televisions than any other company, and may soon displace Nokia as the biggest maker of mobile-telephone handsets.

Small wonder others are keen to know the secret of Samsung’s success. China sends emissaries to study what makes the firm tick in the same way that it sends its bureaucrats to learn efficient government from Singapore. To some, Samsung is the harbinger of a new Asian model of capitalism. It ignores the Western conventional wisdom. It sprawls into dozens of unrelated industries, from microchips to insurance. It is family-controlled and hierarchical, prizes market share over profits and has an opaque and confusing ownership structure. Yet it is still prodigiously creative, at least in terms of making incremental improvements to other people’s ideas: only IBM earns more patents in America. Having outstripped the Japanese firms it once mimicked, such as Sony, it is rapidly becoming emerging Asia’s version of General Electric, the American conglomerate so beloved of management gurus.

There is much to admire about Samsung (see article (http://www.economist.com/node/21530976)). It is patient: its managers care more about long-term growth than short-term profits. It is good at motivating its employees. The group thinks strategically: it spots markets that are about to take off and places huge bets on them.

The bets that Samsung Electronics placed on DRAM chips, liquid-crystal display screens and mobile telephones paid off handsomely. In the next decade the group plans to gamble again, investing a whopping $20 billion in five fields in which it is a relative newcomer: solar panels, energy-saving LED lighting, medical devices, biotech drugs and batteries for electric cars. Although these industries seem quite different from each other, Samsung is betting that they have two crucial things in common. They are about to grow rapidly, thanks to new environmental rules (solar power, LED lights and electric cars) or exploding demand in emerging markets (medical devices and drugs). And they would benefit from a splurge of capital that would allow large-scale manufacturing and thus lower costs. By 2020 the Samsung group boldly predicts that it will have sales of $50 billion in these hot new areas, and that Samsung Electronics will have total global sales of $400 billion.

It is easy to see why China might like the chaebol model. South Korea’s industrial titans first prospered in part thanks to their close ties with an authoritarian government (though Samsung was not loved by all the generals). Banks were pressured to pump cheap credit into the chaebol, which were encouraged to enter dozens of new businesses—typically macho ones such as shipbuilding and heavy industry. Ordinary Koreans were chivvied to save, not consume. South Korea grew into an exporting powerhouse. Does this sound familiar?

In China, too, the state draws up long-term plans, funnels cash to industries it deems strategic and works hand-in-glove with national champions, like Huawei and Haier (see article (http://www.economist.com/node/21530974) ). Some of Beijing’s planners would love to think that state intervention is the route to world-beating innovation. No doubt inadvertently, Samsung feeds this delusion.

Of hindsight and survivor bias

For delusion it is, on three levels. Most broadly, South Korea’s prosperity owes less to dirigisme than China’s dirigistes believe, and nothing to dictatorship—South Korea is now a democracy, and much happier for it. Second, the chaebol system has been less beneficial for South Korea than Samsung’s success might imply. Some of the state-directed cheap credit that powered the chaebol produced superb companies, such as Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motors. But it yielded some costly failures, too. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, half of the top 30 chaebol went bust because they had expanded recklessly. Daewoo, the Great Universe, is no more.

Defenders of the chaebol say that the crisis spurred reforms, curbing the tendency of the chaebol to overborrow and overexpand. They don’t hog credit as much as before—Samsung Electronics now generates oceans of cash to finance its expansion plans. But in general the giants still crowd out small entrepreneurial firms: a former boss of Samsung Electronics has warned that South Korea has too many eggs in too few baskets. And despite a decade of political reform, the ties between the chaebol and the state are still too cosy. President Lee Myung-bak (the ex-boss of a Hyundai firm) has pardoned dozens of chaebol bosses convicted of corporate crimes.

Find out how much of an Apple iPhone is actually a Samsung with our "teardown" infographic.As for Samsung, it is an admirable company, packed full of individual successes that managers (and not just ones in Asia) should study. But inevitably it has not always got everything right—who now drives a Samsung car? And its overall success is not easily replicable. Samsung is patient and bold because the family of its late founder, Lee Byung-chull, wants it to be. Family control is guaranteed by a complex web of cross-shareholdings. This is fine so long as the boss is as brilliant as the late Lee or his son, Lee Kun-hee, the current chairman. But if the founder’s grandson, who is being groomed for the top job, fails to measure up, he will be harder for the company’s shareholders to oust than his peers at GE, Sony and Nokia.

To that extent, for all its modern technology, Samsung’s story is an old one writ new—the well-run family firm, with a strong culture and a focus on the long term, which has made good use of an indulgent state. Celebrate it on those grounds and Asia’s new model has something going for it. Just don’t expect it to keep going at its current rate for ever. ◦

Samsung: Asia’s new model company

The Slowdown in China: How Much is South Korea at Risk?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-slowdown-in-china-whos-exposed-07072011-gfx.html


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The Slowdown in China: How Much is South Korea at Risk?

South Koreans Balk at Saturdays Without School

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/south-koreans-balk-at-saturdays-without-school-07072011.html

The government wants to end weekend classes. Mothers revolt
By Sangim Han and Rose Kim

Chung Eunjung, a mother of two sons in Seoul, says South Korea’s plan to give children extra playtime by ending Saturday classes means only one thing: more private tutoring.

On June 14, President Lee Myung Bak’s government announced it would recommend that Korea’s schools end the Saturday classes, a feature of school life since the 1950s. Most schools now hold classes for four hours on two Saturdays a month. President Lee wants Koreans to consume more, and he hopes to wean the school system off its obsession with standardized tests. He figures giving kids and families the weekend off would help achieve both goals.

Don’t expect the playgrounds to fill up with liberated kids, though. “It would be a brave mother who let them play,” says Chung, who spends $1,700 a month on additional classes. Even the kids sound focused. Eleven-year-old Charlie Lee takes 15 hours of cram courses in English and math every week. “I like those classes,” he says. “I can meet my friends and play with them.”

East Asian nations dominate the top five slots in the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development’s assessment of reading, math, and science skills. U.S. students are ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading. President Barack Obama has cited South Koreans’ zeal as an example of the need for American kids to study harder to compete. Three out of four South Korean parents use cram schools, tutors, or online learning to help get their children into college.

Rather than creating more family time, shutting schools on weekends could boost publicly traded cram school operators such as MegaStudy or language instructor JLS, says Kim Mi Song, an analyst at Hyundai Securities in Seoul. “If private institutions expand Saturday classes, I’ll definitely send my son,” says Kim Hyeran, who pays $2,800 per month for out-of-school classes for her 13-year-old, including as much as 20 hours of math. The Kim family, like the Chungs, live in Seoul’s Gangnam district, renowned in Korea for its specialized schools and private academies.

Traditional Confucian reverence for learning matters less to parents these days than the fear their children will be left behind, says Han Zun Shang, a professor of education at Yonsei University in Seoul. Annual per capita income has doubled in the past decade, to $20,759, and wage inequality is increasing.

The Koreans don’t want to repeat the experience of Japan, which cut the school week to five days in 2002. In 2009 the Japanese reversed course after their students began sliding down the OECD’s rankings. Between 2000 and 2006, Japanese high school students slumped from 1st to 10th in math, 2nd to 6th in science, and 8th to 15th in reading comprehension. Japan has added 278 hours back to the elementary school year and 105 hours to junior high school.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which governs state education in the capital, says it plans to add two hours to weekday classes and cut some vacation days to offset the end of Saturday school. That doesn’t include all the new cramwork that will eat up those newly empty Saturday hours. “I put great stock in my son’s education,” says Kim, the mother of the 13-year-old boy. “I will make sure he gets whatever he needs.”

The bottom line: Koreans are so scared of falling behind at home and abroad that they do not want to ease up on intensive school prepping. ◦

South Koreans Balk at Saturdays Without School

Virtual Grocery Shopping in South Korea

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Virtual Grocery Shopping in South Korea

South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital by 2015

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/03/south-korea-plans-to-convert-all-textbooks-to-digital-swap-back/

By Zach Honig
















Well, that oversized Kindle didn't become the textbook killer Amazon hoped it would be, but at least one country is moving forward with plans to lighten the load on its future generation of Samsung execs. South Korea announced this week that it plans to spend over $2 billion developing digital textbooks, replacing paper in all of its schools by 2015. Students would access paper-free learning materials from a cloud-based system, supplementing traditional content with multimedia on school-supplied tablets. The system would also enable homebound students to catch up on work remotely -- they won't be practicing taekwondo on a virtual mat, but could participate in math or reading lessons while away from school, for example. Both programs clearly offer significant advantages for the country's education system, but don't expect to see a similar solution pop up closer to home -- with the US population numbering six times that of our ally in the Far East, many of our future leaders could be carrying paper for a long time to come. ◦

South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital by 2015

Tiger Moms Hire Private Tutors in South Korea as Saturday Classes Scrapped

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/tiger-moms-hire-private-tutors-in-south-korea-as-saturday-classes-scrapped.html

Chung Eunjung, a 46-year-old mother from Seoul, says South Korea’s plan to give children more play time by ending Saturday classes means only one thing: more private tutoring.

President Lee Myung Bak’s government said on June 14 it would recommend schools adopt a shorter week starting in 2012, ending Saturday classes that have been a feature of the modern education system since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Most schools now hold classes on two Saturdays a month.

“I’m not the only parent to feel this way,” said Chung, who already spends $1,700 a month on additional classes for her two sons. “It would be a brave mother who let them play.”

The reaction of mothers like Chung helps explain why students in Asia are outperforming the rest of the world. Nations in the region dominate the top five slots in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s assessment of reading, math and science skills. U.S. students are ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science and 17th in reading.

President Barack Obama has cited South Koreans’ dedication to schooling as an example of the need for American kids to study harder to compete. Three out of four South Korean parents use cram schools, tutors or online learning to get their kids into college. More than half of the students in Asia’s fourth- largest economy take private math and English lessons, according to the government.

Education Stocks
Rather than creating more family time, the plan to shut schools at the weekend would be a boon for academies like MegaStudy Co., or language-course operator JLS Co., said Kim Mi Song, an analyst at Hyundai Securities Co. in Seoul.

“This will be good news for education stocks,” said Kim. “It is clear that the amount of time students spend in private courses will increase.”

Even with the change, South Korean children will spend more time in school than their U.S. counterparts. In his State of the Union address in January, Obama said South Korea treated its teachers as “nation builders.” In 2009, he said: “Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea every year. That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy.”

In the latest round of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessments in 2009, South Korea placed second in reading, fourth in math and sixth in science. Finland was the only country outside Asia to make it into the OECD’s top five in any of the three categories.

‘Send My Son’
“If private institutions expand Saturday classes, I’ll definitely send my son,” said Kim Hyeran, who pays $2,800 per month for out-of-school classes for her 13-year-old, including as much as 20 hours of math. The Kim family, like the Chungs, live in Seoul’s Gangnam district, renowned in Korea for its concentration of specialized schools and private academies.

South Korean parents spend about $220 per child every month on out-of-school classes, tutoring and online learning, according to government statistics.

Traditional Confucian reverence for learning matters less to parents these days than the fear that their children will be left behind, according to Han Zun Shang, a professor of education at Yonsei University in Seoul. Annual per capita income has doubled in the past decade to $20,759 and wage inequality is increasing, said Han.

Japan, which cut the school week to five days in 2002, is reversing course after its students began sliding down the OECD’s rankings.

Reversing Course
Between 2000 and 2006, Japanese high school students slumped from first to 10th in math, second to sixth in science and from eighth to 15th in reading comprehension.

Japan added 278 hours to the elementary school year in 2009 and 105 hours to junior high school. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government in January last year told schools they could resume Saturday classes twice a month, according to its website.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, which governs state education in the capital, said it plans to add two hours to weekday classes and will reduce some vacation days to offset ending school on Saturdays.

Hyundai Securities’ Kim is one of 10 analysts with “buy” recommendations on MegaStudy, which prepares kids for college exams. Eleven others rate the stock a “hold,” according to Bloomberg data.

Kim said the stock should rebound from a 13 percent drop in the past 12 months, after the government cracked down on cram schools holding classes past 10 p.m. and changed the way college-entrance-exam questions were chosen.

MegaStudy, Thinkbig
JLS, which offers online courses as well as regular language classes, has declined 7.8 percent over the past year.

Officials at MegaStudy and JLS declined to say if they would begin offering more classes.

Daekyo Co. and Woongjin Thinkbig Co., providers of home- study materials for elementary school students, may also benefit from the end to Saturday classes, said Joseph Shon, an analyst at Shinyoung Securities Co. in Seoul.

Weekly workbooks produced by Daekyo and Woongjin provide a cheaper alternative to private tutors and academies. The companies are setting up study centers where parents can leave children to work by themselves under limited supervision.

Daekyo has gained 9.4 percent on the Korea Exchange this month while Woongjin has advanced 0.6 percent. The benchmark Kospi index has dropped 2.2 percent over the same period.

“I put great stock in my son’s education,” said Kim, the mother of the 13-year-old boy. “I will make sure he gets whatever he needs.” ◦

Tiger Moms Hire Private Tutors in South Korea as Saturday Classes Scrapped

Wi-Not? South Korea's Seoul To Blanket The City With Free Wi-Fi

http://www.fastcompany.com/1760834/the-wi-rich-get-wi-richer-south-koreas-seoul-to-add-free-municipal-wi-fi

By Tim Carmody (Fast Company)

South Korea's capital city is already the best connected in the world [1], so it's not surprising that the local government has announced a $44 million project to bring free Wi-Fi Internet access [2] to every outdoor space and street corner city-wide. Surprising, no. But jealousy-inducing? Oh my, yes.

All buses, taxis, and subway trains will be covered, too. Korea Telecom (KT) already had Seoul's subway lines covered with WiBro [3], its nationwide commercial wireless broadband service.

Was that good enough? Not in Seoul.

KT had rolled out that leg of its service back in 2004 and put it into service in 2007. Before North American telecoms got serious about 3G, before much smaller municipal Wi-Fi projects stateside collapsed under their own weight, South Koreans were already living the IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX dream.

South Korea's wireless penetration rates and download speeds make most of the U.S.'s cabled broadband look like an anachronistic joke. (Like when your grandmother tells a long, meandering story that's only funny because she's so old and adorable.)

Seoul is already the long-reigning hotspot champ [4]. You can already get wireless almost everywhere. Their version of the last mile problem [5] is getting Internet signal outside. Actually, Seoul's problem (such as it is) illustrates both the genius and the frustrations of municipal wireless plans worldwide.

They boil down to this: City and regional governments don't want to blanket their jurisdiction in Wi-Fi for the benefit of their citizens. At least not directly. They need data coverage for government workers: police, fire, emergency responders, city inspectors, parking meter readers, and so forth.

Putting Wi-Fi everywhere a city worker might go means putting Wi-Fi everywhere in a city. That's expensive. Metropolitan and regional coverage is even more expensive. Nor do these cities or regions themselves typically have the expertise to do it.

Enter the service providers. They agree to wire up the city and run the service on the cheap so long as the city can help give them paid private subscribers on top of the government users. This sounds like a win for everybody.

But then the long-delayed pain sets in. It turns out that citizens (who are now paid subscribers to a public/private service) want Internet access in strange, exotic places, like their homes. Government workers actually don't want Wi-Fi inside your house as much as they want it on your street. They're not going to hang out and watch a movie. Nor would you like them to.

The conflict between the needs of the two user groups means that either one group or the other is unhappy until the ISP runs a lot more string and puts up a lot more cans than it thought it would have to. Meanwhile, big telecoms (at least the ones cut out of the deal) are doing everything they can to throw up obstacles to public wireless, from lobbying the government [6] to whispering (or shouting) about poor service quality.

Sometimes projects go broke; sometimes they fall apart entirely or have to be saved or taken over by the city, like in Philadelphia [7]. Often, there's a big gap between the initial vision of what a public wireless network could be and what it winds up becoming.

These, however, are birth pangs. They are known bugs, to borrow some jargon from software development. Because when it works, it works. It works for all of the reasons everyone wanted to start the thing in the first place: because it's arguably only at the scale of a metropolitan public works project that you really can deliver the smooth, broad, deep data coverage that we all say and believe we want--not just for those who can put down a mint, not just in place of convenience X, Y, and Z, but everywhere, and for everyone, for the public good.

It's worth remembering that even in South Korea, our wireless infrastructure is still in beta.

[1] http://www.focus.com/briefs/mobile-wireless/most-connected-cities/
[2] http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-seoul-free-wifi-areas.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiBro
[4] http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/25/technology/wifi/index.htm
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile
[6] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/57034
[7] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357395,00.asp
[8] http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardosotelo/
[9] http://twitter.com/?lang=en&logged_out=1#!/fastcompany
[10] http://www.fastcompany.com/1728968/south-korea-invests-718-billion-in-smart-grid ◦

Wi-Not? South Korea's Seoul To Blanket The City With Free Wi-Fi

Video: Meet Sung-Bong Choi, South Korea's Susan Boyle

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Video: Meet Sung-Bong Choi, South Korea's Susan Boyle

South Korea needs fewer wage slaves and more entrepreneurs

http://www.economist.com/node/18682342

Earlier this year Humax, a maker of digital set-top boxes based in Seoul, announced that its annual revenues had exceeded 1 trillion won ($865m) for the first time. For South Korea, this is something of a milestone. Humax is a classic start-up, founded in 1989 after a chat between engineering students in a bar. Alas, scandalously few Korean start-ups grow this big.

The Korean economy is dominated by the chaebol, huge conglomerates with tentacles in every stew. The biggest, Samsung, accounts for around a fifth of the country’s exports. Although the chaebol have played a vital role in South Korea’s development, they also suck up credit and obstruct the rise of start-ups. “Everyone knows you don’t compete with the chaebol” is a commonly heard refrain.

Parents of bright young Koreans typically steer them into steady careers in the chaebol, the government or the professions. As in Japan, being a salaryman (or woman) is far more respectable than running one’s own firm. “In Korea, stability is everything,” says one such parent.

Widespread youth unemployment is changing that calculation, however. An impressive 58% of Koreans aged 25-34 have attended university, but 346,000 graduates are currently out of work, up from 268,000 two years ago. Some become entrepreneurs out of necessity: almost 30,000 young South Koreans say they want to launch their own companies, one survey found. And according to the government, the number of “one-man creative enterprises” in the country has risen by 15% in the past year, to 235,000.

Young entrepreneurs often favour tech fields such as social media or gaming, where the only barrier to entry is the power of your imagination. Challenging the chaebol at, say, shipbuilding, might be trickier. The previous wave of young entrepreneurs—a result of the first internet boom, and the unemployment that followed the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis—threw up fizzy firms such as NHN, the operator of Naver (the “Korean Google”), and NCsoft, a maker of multiplayer online role-playing games. Each was once tiny but now belongs to the trillion-won club.

These new entrepreneurs are being joined by a growing band of foreigners, including ethnic Koreans from Western countries. Californian Koreans see no stigma in starting your own business. And they see South Korea, where the economy grew by 6.2% last year, as a land of opportunity compared with sluggish America. The country issues about 35,000 investor visas a year, mostly to small-scale entrepreneurs. The Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Global Centre has recently been swamped by expats seeking to attend its classes on Korean business procedures and regulations.

The city has also launched a “Youth 1,000 CEO Project”, to provide young entrepreneurs with free office space and grants of up to 1m won per month. South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak grumbles that Korea has no Mark Zuckerberg (the baby-faced founder of Facebook).

The problem, though, is not young Koreans, who are both bright and energetic. Nor is it business-throttling regulations: South Korea does better on that score than Japan or Taiwan, says the World Bank. The real obstacle to enterprise is a society that urges its best young minds to aim low. ◦

South Korea needs fewer wage slaves and more entrepreneurs

Hunger in North Korea: Let them eat maize husks

http://www.economist.com/node/18682803

It is the time of year when the previous harvest has been nearly eaten and the next one has just been planted. Time, in other words, to worry about North Korea’s perennially hungry masses.

North Korea had long grown dependent on food handouts from its estranged brother, South Korea, and from the United States. But the South’s current president, Lee Myung-bak, has taken a tougher line, tying assistance to less provocative behaviour by Kim Jong Il’s nuclear-tipped regime. So Mr Kim’s envoys have travelled further afield of late, reportedly doing the rounds of Europe.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) is now preparing to distribute emergency aid to 3.5m North Koreans suffering from “severe malnutrition”. Programme officials are concerned about the possibility of a famine on the scale of the one in the mid-1990s, in which over 1m died. They blame a series of shocks, including the coldest winter in years, widespread flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among livestock. Some 297,000 tonnes of cereal and 137,000 tonnes of fortified blended food must reach the most vulnerable.

With murky data, and diplomats and foreign-aid staff restricted in where they may travel, not everyone agrees with the WFP’s assessment. Certainly, estimating North Korea’s food needs has long been a politicised business. A member of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, Yoon Sang-hyun, says that the North is hoarding 1m tonnes of rice, playing up a shortfall in order to get aid on the cheap. Some say Mr Kim wants the aid in order to announce a bumper harvest in 2012. That year is the 100th anniversary of North Korea’s founder, Mr Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung. Something approaching paradise has long been promised to North Koreans for 2012.

The South’s unification minister, Hyun In-taek, also suspects North Korea of exaggerating its troubles for political gain. Certainly, he says, starvation has begun to overshadow other topics that the South would rather discuss, namely denuclearisation and the North’s refusal to apologise for last year’s shelling of Yeonpyeong island and the presumed sinking in March 2010 of a naval corvette. This is apparently a view shared by Daily NK, an activist network and news source which says that the price of rice in the black market has actually fallen by around half in recent months.

Others, such as Good Friends, a South Korean Buddhist charity long working in the North, insist the situation is very bad—and that tuberculosis is on the rise owing to malnutrition. Rimjingang, a magazine with reporters secretly stationed in North Korea, says that in North Pyongan province by the Chinese border even the army is going hungry.

Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, both at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, say that even though the WFP has overstated the case, “all indicators point to a deteriorating food-security situation”. What is more, they take issue with Mr Lee’s belief that withholding aid will temper the North’s behaviour. Rather, they argue, the response will merely be for the hermit kingdom to “hunker down and tighten repression”. The regime has been consistent chiefly in showing complete disregard for its people.

But arguing is pointless. Widespread malnutrition and starvation in at least some parts of the country is a reality in North Korea. For Jimmy Carter, the former American president, who visited Pyongyang recently, the fault lies mainly with South Korea and the United States. That is presumably tonic to the real culprit for the hunger, the chubby Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. ◦

Hunger in North Korea: Let them eat maize husks

Conscription in South Korea: Elvis and the draft-dodger

http://www.economist.com/node/21516831

Every South Korean man of sound mind and body is obliged to complete 21 months of compulsory military service. For those with enough money or influence though, the temptation to cheat one’s way out of early mornings, crew cuts and square bashing is often too much to resist. Sons of politicians and business leaders are notorious for this, as are the likes of pop star MC Mong, who spent his youthful years on more enjoyable pursuits, e.g., Mr Mong, or rather Shin Dong-hyun, as he is known to the army and the courts, was given a six-month suspended sentence last month (http://sangchusan.blogspot.com/2011/04/rapper-gets-suspended-sentence-super.html) , plus probation and 120 hours of community service, for “delaying” his enlistment. Judges however could not decide on whether or not he deliberately had healthy teeth extracted by a compliant dentist in order to disqualify him from service—hence their relative leniency.

Not everyone in his position is so recalcitrant. Hyun Bin, a hugely popular hallyu (http://www.economist.com/node/15385735) TV actor, last week embarked on the toughest assignment of all: a posting with the marines, to Baengnyeong Island (http://www.allkpop.com/2011/04/hyun-bin-boards-for-baengnyeong-island) —close to the Northern Limit Line and Yeonpyeong, where last November’s lethal North Korean bombardment (http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2010/11/conflict_korean_peninsula) took place. The army’s original plan was to put him on “public relations duty”—appearing in promotional videos, and the like—but highly vocal criticism and Mr Hyun’s reported desire to serve as a marine have seen him sent to the front line.

In a country increasingly preoccupied with the issue of fairness—“Justice”, an academic book on ethics written by Harvard’s Michael Sandel’s sold 1m copies in its Korean edition last year—Hyun Bin’s preference for the Elvis Presley route (http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/elvisandtheusarmy.shtml) to service is likely to go down well. MC Mong, having been seen as trying to sidestep his national duty, will have a harder time turning his service into a virtue. A quick march towards career oblivion seems more likely. ◦

Conscription in South Korea: Elvis and the draft-dodger

Censorship in South Korea: Game Over

http://www.economist.com/node/18561127

A liberal, free-market democracy has some curious rules and regulations

Over 700,000 South Korean children own smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone or a local rival by Samsung Electronics called the Galaxy S. Many use them so much for mobile online gaming that some 50 parental associations have called for an imminent night-time curfew for under-16s playing online computer games to be extended to mobile phones.

Concern over computer games is nothing new. Claims that marathon gaming sessions in South Korea’s “PC-bang” internet cafés have led to violence, including deaths, have prompted much soul-searching. All the same, the state seems too keen to use heavy-handed regulation. Its Game Rating Board (GRB), with the legal power to ban any game, now risks obstructing the development of an entire industry, one of the country’s most vibrant.

Graphic games such as Grand Theft Auto III are already off-limits to Korean gamers. But the chief problem is the GRB’s trouble keeping up with the sheer number of new mobile games being released on the iPhone and the rival Android platform, which Samsung uses. The board insists on a long approval process for even the most innocuous games. Apple and Google, which developed Android, are avoiding trouble by simply not selling any games to Korean customers. Related topicsCensorshipSocial issuesGamesHobbies and pastimesVideo games Yet many “indie” games developers in South Korea desperately want to reach customers. With talented programmers and a ready-made market of smartphone-owning game obsessives, this is a natural growth industry. The government pays lip service to the idea of encouraging entrepreneurship among the young. Yet the GRB, says Kim Jin-sung at Pig-Min, a games developer, is “the arch-enemy of the Korean gaming community”. This is all part of a bigger problem: technology-related censorship. In 2009 an online “economic prophet” who called himself Minerva was prosecuted for making gloomy predictions about the South Korean economy and casting aspersions on policymakers. The 30-year-old was later acquitted. The only charge that stuck was the state’s heavy-handedness. Unusually in a democracy, a “real-name” system is now in effect for those posting on popular online forums: any participant signing up to websites must use their national identity number. So would-be Minervas are now easily traced. The spread of false information carries a maximum punishment of five years’ imprisonment and a hefty fine. What is more, since 2008 a supposedly independent Korea Communications Standards Commission has had the remit to promote a “sound and friendly communications environment”. Critics argue that the commission serves as the government’s de facto internet censorship body. It is supposed merely to “advise” portals to remove articles believed to contain falsehoods, obscenity or statements in favour of North Korea that infringe the National Security Act. In fact it may issue administrative orders backed up by law, forcing content to be deleted. Unsurprisingly, its “advice” tends to be followed. Chang Ha-joon of Cambridge University, whose free-trade critique, “Bad Samaritans”, is on a list of books the defence ministry has banned troops from reading, argues that such efforts are counterproductive. “This is not the 1980s, when you could just cut a few telephone lines,” he says. Blocking free speech in one place would simply “start a bushfire” somewhere else. Much of the desire to control the flow of information and ideas can be traced back to longstanding fears over the spread of North Korean propaganda, which remains illegal. The administration of President Lee Myung-bak has additional suspicions about the power of IT thanks to massive, internet-driven protests against imports of American beef that brought Seoul to a standstill in 2008. Yet South Korea’s mild paranoia about controlling information harms its reputation as a liberal democracy and undermines its potential as a creative powerhouse. ◦

Censorship in South Korea: Game Over

Video: The Flavor of Seoul

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Video: The Flavor of Seoul

Korean BBQ Taco Box in Orlando

http://www.scottjosephorlando.com/reviews/63-korean/1391-korean-bbq-taco-box Written by Scott Joseph As we gear up to Tuesday’s The Daily City Food Truck Bazaar (gear up; get it?), I thought I would do a preview of one of the bazaar’s participants, Korean BBQ Taco Box. Recently, I told you about Big Wheel Provision’s shiny new truck that is essentially a professional kitchen on wheels. But if Big Wheel’s rig is the Rolls Royce of food trucks, Korean BBQ Taco Box’s is, well, the Dodge. A Dodge Sportsman, to be exact, one of a certain age. Its yellow paint job does not appear to have been professionally applied, and you don’t have to get too close to spot the places where it has been puttied and patched. And from what I could see when I peeked through the open screen door of what is essentially a repurposed camper, it is not outfitted with commercial grade cooking equipment. But the food, though perhaps as quirky as the vehicle, is good. At least the spicy pork taco box I sampled was. Actually, on the menu, it says spicy pork tacos, however there was only one. But a big one. The chunks of fried pork had been marinated in a deliciously spicy sauce and folded with lettuce inside a large flour tortilla. I was hoping it might have some shredded kimchi to further the fusion theme, but alas no. There were some other goodies included in the box, however. There were a couple of small rice balls and two little pieces of an egg roll. One compartment held some lettuce with ginger dressing, and there were a couple of pieces of fried tofu and a fried chicken wing. It was plenty to eat for $5.99. KBBQTB has only one table with two plastic chairs for people who choose to eat their lunches onsite. It’s really more of a take-away sort of truck.

I had only one major complaint, and that was the length of time it took from the time I ordered my food to the point where it was passed through the window, which was more than 20 minutes. That’s a long time to stand around in the hot sun. But when I saw that one of the people who had placed an order before I arrived was handed three bags of about seven boxes, I figured that was the holdup. And when my order was finally ready, the young man who gave it to me apologized for the long wait, so I’m guessing it was an anomaly. During the day -- everyday -- Korean BBQ Taco Box is parked at the Citgo gas station on the northwest corner of Colonial Drive and Primrose Avenue, next door to a McDonald’s. The actual address is 2705 E. Colonial Drive, Orlando. In the evenings, it can be found at a Shell gas station in Oviedo, at 4300 Alafaya Trail and the corner of McCulloch Road. Click this link to go to the Korean BBQ Taco Box website, but you can call orders ahead to 407-844-3990.

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Korean BBQ Taco Box in Orlando

Photo: South Korean Street Food

These are photos from South Korea. I took it at a very famous, open 24/7 shopping central called Dong Dae Moon in Seoul. The lady in the first photo (above) obviously specializes in sea shells and other seafood. In the second photo, you find a menu on the top left corner that reads vertically from left to right,”chicken gizzart, chicken feet, octopus ocellatus, pig skin, seafood pancake, kimchi pancake, and udon. (the rest are not legible due to the reflection.) You also see a big sign on the top middle that reads “Original Mira’s Intestine.” In addition, you see Shin Ramen that you can find at Ralphs, Korean style sushi called “Gim Bap”, and boiled fishcake skewers. http://blogs.kcrw.com/goodfood/2011/04/photo-south-korean-street-food/

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Photo: South Korean Street Food

Post-Daewoo, GM Plasters Chevy Brand In South Korea

http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/03/31/post-daewoo-gm-plasters-chevy-brand-in-sk/?mod=google_news_blog

South Koreans will see more cars and dealerships carrying the Chevrolet logo as General Motors Co. focuses on its core brand globally.

General Motors took a big gamble in South Korea at the start of March by getting rid of the brand name that was long familiar to Korean shoppers, Daewoo, in favor of its Chevrolet brand. So far, the transition is going smoothly, says Mike Arcamone, president of GM Korea. In the past four weeks, GM has re-outfitted its Korean dealers with Chevrolet signage and merchandising. More importantly, car inventory has rapidly shifted into Chevrolet-only product. Daewoo is one of the classic names of Korean business history, one of the major conglomerates to have been built during the 1960s as the country began its meteoric rise from poverty. But it was also the biggest conglomerate to fail during the country’s financial crisis of 1997-98. GM bought Daewoo’s car-building assets in 2001. But GM kept the Daewoo name, in part because South Korean consumers have long tended to favor Korean brands over foreign ones. Renault Nissan bought the car assets of Samsung under the same circumstances and in the same time frame and continues to brand its South Korean cars as Samsung, though they are basically re-badged Nissan models. But the Daewoo brand was tired, Mr. Arcamone said in an interview at the opening of the Seoul Motor Show on Thursday. And the move with the broader reshaping of the General Motors, which recently exited a bankruptcy process that allowed it to trim its brand portfolio and shed troubled assets. “Chevrolet is a global brand, an iconic brand,” he said. “Our studies demonstrated the Korean consumer was ready for this.” This year, Chevrolet will celebrate its centennial. At the Seoul Motor Show (which actually takes place in the suburb of Ilsan), GM added a couple of classic Chevy models sent in from Detroit and placed them near a futuristic concept roadster, dubbed Mi-ray, that was designed in Korea. GM Korea has the third-largest booth at the auto show, after the soccer-field-sized booths of Hyundai and Kia, which together account about 75% of all auto sales in the country. The giant gold Chevy emblem that dominates the booth is visible from much of the convention floor. A small part of the booth displays Cadillac models. The name change came just a few months after the South Korean and U.S. governments in December hammered out the final details of a free trade agreement that had been bogged down by perceptions that U.S. car makers didn’t fare well in the South Korean market. GM Korea has had about 15% market share under the Daewoo brand, but U.S. lawmakers, pressured by Ford and Chrysler to seek better terms in the FTA, rarely acknowledged GM’s toehold in the Korean market. Mr. Arcamone said the timing of the name change was unrelated to the FTA, which GM officially took a neutral stance on. He said the change took a long time to plan and execute, involving tens of millions of dollars in production and merchandising expense. “We never decided to wait for the outcome of the FTA,” he said.

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Post-Daewoo, GM Plasters Chevy Brand In South Korea

Food-on-a-Stick - Korea and the World

http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/foods-on-a-stick-day-skewers-candy-apples-corn-dogs-yakitori-fondue-pie-pops.html Today is a special day for stick-food lovers. Thanks to SE:Talk, we learned that it's Something on a Stick Day. What qualifies as a stick-food? Corn dogs, yakitori, kebabs, pie pops, fondue, and really anything else that's stabbable with a stick. Slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/4j7l8dk State fairs are usually full of stick-foods. The Minnesota State Fair, for example, sells 60 different foods on a stick, ranging from corn on the cob to spaghetti. In Seoul, South Korea, you can find street vendors selling Tornado Potato, a swirl-cut potato wrapped around a long stick that's deep-fried. Speaking of deep-fried, we've also seen french-fry-coated bacon on a stick, rice-battered hot dogs, and in Ecuador, "chuzos" are deep-fried sausage and plaintain skewers. For those celebrating at home today, here are recipes for 13 of our favorite stick-foods. In most parts of the world, it's not exactly outdoor grilling season yet, so here are some indoor tips. ◦

Food-on-a-Stick - Korea and the World

China cracks down, South Korea speeds up

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/24/6333593-china-cracks-down-south-korea-speeds-up

By Adrienne Mong

SEOUL, South Korea – It’s a strange thing to be reading about China’s continued crackdown on the Internet from our temporary perch in Seoul.

The last time I was here was in 1989. The Pre-Internet Age.

This time, on my first visit in more than 20 years, South Korea owns the mantle of the world’s fastest Internet connection, according to a quarterly survey known as the State of the Internet by Akamai. It's on average four times as fast as that of the U.S.

But that just isn’t fast enough.

By the end of next year, the South Korean government plans to have every home in the nation hooked up to the Internet at a speed of one gigabit per second. Imagine being able to download the entire Godfather trilogy in 20 seconds.

In the meantime, over in China, land of the Great Firewall, reports are emerging that the download speed of Gmail has plunged. We won’t get into the technicalities of kbps, but let’s just say Gmail is now operating 45 times slower than the most popular free Chinese instant messaging service known as QQ.

The disruptions to Gmail don’t end there. For weeks now, ordinary Gmail users have complained about interrupted service. Writer Wang Lixiong tweeted that he received this message from Gmail when he tried to log in: “Your account is locked, because abnormal activities are detected. You may have to wait 24 hours before you can log in again.”

Another user told my colleague Bo Gu that China Unicom appears to be blocking Gmail entirely from mobile devices.

And in the wake of calls for Jasmine rallies foreign journalists in China have been vigilant about attempts to hack into their email accounts.

The disrupted service coincides with a surge in reported failures of several VPNs (virtual private networks), designed to circumvent China’s Internet firewall.

On Monday, Google accused the Chinese government of obstructing access to its Gmail service, saying the company had checked everything on its own end and concluded that the problems are the result of a “blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has denied the accusation.

Speedy Internet = Open Internet
South Korea’s drive to lead the way globally in broadband access originated in the mid-1990s, but its efforts stepped up immediately after its economy was crippled by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. And technology became a cornerstone of the government’s strategy to reboot and refashion its economy.

Seoul's approach to the Internet is instructive. Although there are many reasons it has managed to power ahead of the pack, there is one that stands out in sharp relief against what’s happening in China: the open (and highly competitive) nature of its telecoms market.

“The idea behind an “open” system is essentially that, for a fee, broadband providers must share the cables that carry Internet signals into people’s homes,” says one report. “Companies that build those lines typically oppose this sharing. A number of governments, including South Korea and Japan and several European countries, have experimented with or embraced infrastructure-sharing as a way to get new companies to compete in the broadband market.”

China doesn’t allow that kind of openness—either in its infrastructure or in its content. ◦

China cracks down, South Korea speeds up