charming of personality

Updated: Sept. 8, 2009, The New York Times

By Su-Hyun Lee and Sang-Hun Choe

Korea's old name, Chosun, means "the land of morning calm." But the nation has had a turbulent modern history. After 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, it was liberated by the Allied forces at the end of World War II - only to be divided into the Communist North and the pro-Western South. The two sides, the North aided by the Chinese and the South by the Americans, fought the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. The war ended in a cease-fire, not with a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula technically still in a state of war.

Korea Today

Today, the inter-Korean border remains the world's most heavily fortified frontier, guarded on both sides by nearly two million battle-ready troops. To the north, North Koreans live under a totalitarian dictatorship that keeps its people in isolation and hunger. To the south, people live in the freedom of one of the world's largest economies - although the country's once fast-growing export economy has been hammered by the global downturn. Former white-collar workers, for instance, have been forced to go into more physically demanding work or traditional kinds of manual labor that are relatively well paid in South Korea - from farming and fishing to the professional back-scrubbers who clean patrons at the nation's numerous public bathhouses.

South Korea has suffered its worst unemployment since the 1997 Asian currency crisis. According to the National Statistical Office, the unemployment rate had risen to 3.8 percent as of July 2009 - low by American standards, but high for this Asian economic powerhouse. (Since then, economic difficulties have eased somewhat.)

Nonetheless, in South Korea, most households are fitted with high-speed Internet. Players at the "e-sport" professional leagues - dragon slayers in cyber space - have a bigger fan club than traditional pop stars. Cell phone text- and image-messaging has replaced voice calls and e-mails as the primacy tool of communication among the nation's youngsters.

The government of President Lee Myung Bak, a conservative elected in 2007, has upended many of the policies of his immediate predecessor, Roh Moo Hyun, a liberal who had focused on developing ties with North Korea and sent it significant amounts of aid. Mr. Lee has taken a much tougher stance toward the North, pushing hard for it to give up its nuclear program. Many South Koreans had expressed frustration with the North even before its latest nuclear test, on May 25, 2009, and missile tests that followed in early July.

After the death in August 2009 of former president Kim Dae-jung, whose "Sunshine Policy" had led to the two Koreas breaching their border to connect roads and railways, ties seemed to improve slightly. The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, sent a message of improving ties with South Korea, through a high-level delegation to Mr. Kim's funeral. The delegation met with Mr. Lee in Seoul in the first major political meeting between the two Koreas in nearly two years. North Korea also restored regular traffic for South Korean companies that have operations in a joint industrial park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong. In late August, agreement was reached to resume reunions, begun under Mr. Kim, of families divided north and south.

The Post-Korean War Era

Unlike many other dictators in the third world, the military leaders of South Korea, ruling over a country devastated by the war, had a vision for economic development. They marshaled the country into rapid industrialization. But people wanted more. When people rose up in the southern city of Kwangju in 1980 to demand democracy, the junta dispatched paratroops and tanks to kill hundreds. Student and labor movements rocked campuses and factories throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1993, military generals relinquished power to Kim Young Sam, the nation's first civilian leader in three decades. One thing that didn't change was a prevalent anti-communist sentiment.

South Koreans were shocked and humiliated when their country had to beg a $45 billion international bailout amid the region-wide financial meltdown in the late 1990s. They elected Kim Dae-jung, a long-time opposition leader, as president in 1998. He flung the door open for foreign investors, who bought distressed South Korean firms at fire-sale prices, restructured them and exited, often with staggering profits. Many of the people who had rolled out the red carpet for foreign capital felt bitter.

Mr. Kim's election brought long-persecuted liberal forces into power. They focused on engaging North Korea - an approach that resulted in the first-ever summit meeting between the two Koreas in 2000. In its wake, two million South Koreans visited a North Korean mountain resort. And in a scene televised worldwide, aging Koreans separated by the war a half century ago tearfully hugged one another in temporary family reunions.

The Presidency of Roh Moo Hyun

Mr. Kim tried to reshape South Korea's alliance with the United States. Friction with Washington over how to deal with North Korea - with sticks or with carrots - increased under Mr. Roh, who came to power in 2003, vowing not to "kowtow to the Americans" - an election-year slogan hugely popular among the postwar generations of nationalistic and often anti-American South Koreans. But in the second half of his term, Mr. Roh also took major steps toward expanding the Korea-U.S. alliance by completing a free trade agreement with the United States; he also dispatched non-combat troops to Iraq as a partner in the American-led coalition forces.

After a decade of liberal rule, however, South Koreans grew concerned about what many perceived as a growing rift between Seoul and Washington. They also felt "sandwiched" between high-tech Japan and low-cost China. They worried about rising housing prices and unemployment among the young. They thought Mr. Roh was bungling the economy.

Lee Myung Bak in Power

The sentiments translated into a landslide victory for Mr. Lee in the presidential election in 2007. His election put conservatives back in power. He promised to strengthen ties with Washington and run the country like an efficient business. A former construction C.E.O., Mr. Lee is South Korea's first president with a business background.

Mr. Roh jumped off a cliff on May 23, 2009, as prosecutors were aggressively pursuing allegations of corruption against him and his family. He had long insisted that in a country where all the recent presidents were touched by scandal, his government was clean. His death set off a weeklong period of grief and mourning unrivaled in recent South Korean history.

In September 2009, President Lee replaced his prime minister in a cabinet reshuffle that also removed the country's defense minister, who had clashed with Mr. Lee over military spending. Mr. Lee appointed Chung Un-chan, 61, an American-educated economist and a former president of Seoul National University, to replace Prime Minister Han Seung-soo. Mr. Chung, who earned his doctorate from Princeton University, is frequently described in the South Korean news media as a possible presidential candidate.

Mr. Lee had been under pressure from his ruling Grand National Party to revamp his cabinet since the party, amid economic difficulties, suffered a crushing defeat in parliamentary by-elections in April.

A Changing Society

Korean society is changing rapidly. Learning English is a national obsession. South Koreans supply the third largest group of foreign students in the United States after the Indians and the Chinese. They were immensely proud when their former foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, became the secretary general of the United Nations in 2006.

Dynamic, emotionally rich and descriptive of modernized yet deeply Asian ways, South Korean pop culture - or "K-pop" - has proved widely popular in the rest of Asia. From Japan to Myanmar, people tune into South Korea drama shows and movies. Thanks partly to the "Korean wave," foreign brides from poorer Asian countries like Vietnam flock to marry Korean men in the countryside, where there is a shortage of young women of marriageable age. Asian migrant workers toil in farms and factories in South Korea, doing the menial work many South Koreans shun. Only a few years ago, school textbooks used to declare proudly that Korea is a "homogeneous nation." No more. The country is rapidly turning into a multiethnic society.

Source: The New York Times, November 13, 2009