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if you and again if you go to Korea in 1910 or 1950 you would not bet on this
country having done this there's no way if you looked at Korea in 1950 say
that's a country that's going to be a economic miracle that everybody's going
to know about around the world and is going to be a stable democracy the 20th
century was extraordinarily tumultuous for Korea colonization division War
military kous data up until the 19 late 1980s millions of people in the street
protesting for democracy so that that that though Korea has managed the
transition to modernity quite well
given the kinds of uh things it had on its plate so to
speak hi everybody thank you for coming I really appreciate
it I want to ask a question which is why is Korea interest and I'm sure you've
done this before but like why are you here and the the thing is of course
every country is important every region is interesting uh so in some ways the
question is why would you take some time out for Korea right and so what I'm
going to do today is basically you know talk a little bit just an overview like
what is Korea anyway like what does it look like how big is it uh and then I'm
going to talk about basically history really quickly and my goal is not to
give you all the facts but rather to give you a sense of the Contours of what
Korea's gone through up until today because clearly in in you know even if
we spent a whole week I wouldn't be able to do all the all the details of Korea
but I want you guys to take away some of the things that I find most interesting
about why Korea is uh something worth studying right so we'll start like why
should anybody care in the first place right just in case you don't know where
Korea is you are
here it's really small if you think about it right it's not in the center of
anything it's not in the center of Europe or in the center of Asia it's all
way off on the side way up North uh but it is worth trying to figure out why it
has been uh so GE geopolitically important as I'm sure Mary told you
earlier uh Korea is interesting geographically
because there's there's a lot of things we say the most the biggest Etc in the
world but this is actually true it's the only place in the world where the
interests of the four major superpowers literally touch each
other and what I mean by that is like if you go to India or Iran or Iraq USA is
10,000 miles away Russia is 10, you know here whoops Korea shares land borders
with Russia and China its closest relation uh to Japan
is 50 miles by ferry and of course as many of you know
the United States had at one time 100,000 troops and nuclear weapons on
the peninsula and now we have 30,000 troops so the four biggest economies the
four biggest countries in the world are literally nose to nose on the Korean
Peninsula and I'm not sure if you guys have heard this before but uh you know
how Italy looks like a boot what does Korea look like if you
sort of squint what does it look like raise your hand don't shout it
out uh in the back yeah a rabbit wow you guys are good did you hear this before
you already heard this no did you okay where where where is it right
Korea looks like a bunny right here's the
ears here's the little nose here some pause and here some pause
right now the interesting thing is that uh this is sort of traditionally when I
was growing up this is what we said but what it what it's what it's come what
it's come to be known sort of in in international relations is like being
looking like a bunny not that Macho right not manly enough so Koreans will
now tell you uh that it looks like a tiger however this may not be
politically correct but I submit to you that is not what you would think of you
know I mean you really have to squeeze the tiger to get it in there right I
mean I think it looks more like a bunny frankly but uh I will admit a tiger is
more Macho so um anyway that's that's what Korea looks like now how big is
Korea in in general as as as we know we tend to think of China and Japan as
huge and Korea is really small so one thing that we did uh you
can do is you can take population and sort of land mass the size in thousand
square kilometers and you put a bunch of Asian countries on there and it looks
sort of what you expect Japan's big 130 million
people Thailand Philippines South Korea 45 50 million people Singapore is Tiny
of course it's a little city state so yeah right there's some really big
countries there's some small countries but in a way that doesn't
necessarily tell us that much about it one of the interesting things we can do
is what if we picked up Korea if we picked it up and we put it
in Europe how big would it be because in
general we tend to think of European countries is big and you know a lot of
these Asian countries is small so we did the same thing
population and land mass what's interesting about this chart
just go ahead and look at it for a minute go ahead it's as big as the UK so
but just from where it is on the plot it's more in places like Spain and
France okay sure right I mean the first thing I would say is Japan is huge right
with 130 million people Japan is almost twice the population of Italy France UK
Japan is a mon huge country if we put it in
Europe and a unified Korea would be roughly the same size as all the
European countries 75 80 million people and a land mass roughly the same it's
not like UK Germany and Italy are over here and Korea's down there I mean Korea
is a big country if you put it in Europe it's actually not that small
because we're used to thinking of Germany and France and whatever is being
big right the problem for Korea and frankly for Japan is that this is a
false map because this is really what East Asia looks
like that's Japan down there that's Thailand Korea is the 48 right South
Korea China is huge China is a continen sized country so of course compared to
China everybody's small it's the same way as the United States right we are a
continen sized country right so European countries
would all be clustered around there you know and the US is
here but it's just to give you a sense of the scale right for most countries
that aren't continent sized Korea is actually pretty normal sized it's not
that small now why also do we care this is a chart
and and I don't have too many charts but I think this is very interesting one way
we compare is economic development we all know that Kore how many of you have
a Samsung or LG phone TV Etc Hyundai car right Korea's had an economic miracle in
many ways it's one of the things when I teach my undergradu my MBA class that we
we spend time on how did they grow so fast but this chart is particularly
Vivid because it's not just are we richer than we were
before because every country is basically richer than they were before
no matter how poor they are you know cell phones didn't exist and now you've
got people in the poorest of countries who can actually buy a cell phone right
so they're better off than they were but often we want to measure are you
catching up to the richest countries or in in
this case the United States so what this does here is puts
economic wealth per person income GDP per capita gross domestic product per
capita or wealth per person as a percentage of American Wealth per
person if you go back to 1950 uh the red is Mexico and the blue
is Brazil 25 15% is Rich so every Mexican was about 25% as rich as every
American per person you watch over uh a generation by
the 1980s Mexico had risen to 35% they were beginning to catch
up however that was shortlived and so by 2005 2004 Mexico is basically per person
as rich as it was 50 years ago so yeah Mexicans today are richer
than they were yesterday Brazilians were at 15% now they're at 20% right but
they're not really closing the Gap in terms of wealth compared to the United
States the United States is getting richer just as they're getting richer
and sadly the is the case for most countries around the world outside of
Europe Africa Latin America Middle East many South Asian
countries so why are Korea Taiwan these kind of countries so interesting they
started out green is Taiwan yellow is Korea they started out at 10% as Rich
one tenth as Rich per person as America in
1950 but rather than a sort of up and down thing it's almost a direct line
upwards so that by 2004 they're over 50% as rich as the United States and they've
continued to close the gap these numbers just haven't been updated so these are
countries that have truly closed the Gap compared to the United States in terms
of Economic Development and you can see that if you
ever go to Soul if you anyone goes to Korea Japan Taiwan these countries in
many ways are more sophisticated more technologically intense than um uh
American countries yes is this unified Korea no this is just South Korea we'll
talk we're going to talk about North Korea later because North Korea has not
closed the gap but the South Korean economy right so we have uh the world's
largest ship Builder Hyundai or South Korea and Hyundai heavy Industries right
um Samsung and and LG are now global Brands so in many ways uh we know South
Korean companies they've managed to transform themselves in ways and that's
so one reason even if you don't have Korean students or direct in
interactions with Koreans why it's an interesting story because this is truly
amazing what the sou uh what the East Asian countries have done particularly
South Korea and Taiwan how did they do this how did they catch up and nobody
else caught up uh but you know this is just some
reasons why we think Korea is interesting why we might want to study
it so I'm going to I'm going to talk now about uh uh premodern Korean history a
little bit and I'm going to leave you with uh I want to start with a question
which I don't expect you to be able to answer uh uh but how many times did
Japan and China invade Korea does anybody know I don't expect you to I
didn't know before I started doing this research does you don't have to give me
a number but does anybody think they could they could come up with an
answer you guys are too well trained this will not be on the test
um Korea has just been constantly invaded we're the small country the big
countries do whatever they want here's Korea in 1905 this is the uh
King's Palace this is called quanguang moon
it's the main gate to go how many of you guys have been to
Korea oh okay good number of you okay uh have you seen this Palace I mean this
gate they're fixing it up right now they're restoring it right um but this
was the main road the king's Palace is right behind here uh it's got good funu
because there's a mountain in the back south facing water there's a river right
here Chung Chun right oh um sort of the alignment the
geographic alignment of the of the energy you know of the energy of the
world yeah I should not have said that because I have no idea what I'm talking
about other than that I don't know anything about funu or in Korean they
call call punu well this was Korea right and a bunch of indigenous Koreans
running around right this this looks like Korea well in 1905 and then
formally in 1910 uh Japan colonized Korea they
formally took it over and annexed it so that Korea no longer existed now you're
going to hear a lot about this I think both in in these classes or if you read
about Korea so I'm not going to say a whole lot
here other than to say from 1910 to 1945 is is a period that many Koreans
remember or learn about as being extraordinarily
harsh the Japanese came in there was repression over time they were forced to
learn Japanese and were were forced to not use their own Korean names you had
to choose a Japanese name uh my father was born at that time
so he's fluent in Japanese right and they all took when
they took Japanese names he said they all tried to use ones that were sort of
similar to the Korean name right so a lot of internal resistance but it was a
very very difficult time and obviously for Koreans who had been a strong proud
country proud of their accomplishments for literally unified since the 6th
Century ad is extraordinarily humiliating and the best example I can
give that to you is this is the the the king's Palace and what the Japanese did
in the center of that Palace is build their Administrative Building right over
the top so here's that same picture this is the only one I could find had I known
better I would have taken pictures when I was there right so here is that same
Quang hamon and here is the Japanese Imperial
administration building there can't be a more uh insulting thing that you do than
to put down your building right in front even more than that if you look at it
from the top and I wasn't able to find a picture of this if you looked at that
building from the top It Was Written in the Japanese character of uh son for
Japan so the building is built as sort of like a the Japanese character for for
Japan extraordinarily humili you can imagine right if there was and again the
example of course in DC in front of the Washington Monument the Soviets built a
big onion Dome thing right it be now the reason that uh many of you
can't see it today is finally uh a couple years ago they decided to tear
down this building uh and they're they're re restoring the the the palace
to what it looked like before right so here's another view from the
other side of what that of what that Palace looked like and here's the of the
building right so it was an extraordinarily difficult time for
Koreans many came to uh either China or the United States some tried to fight
gorilla you know off in the in the wilderness of mansuria they tried to
fight here at USC we have one of the famous Korean uh Independence activists
we have the house that his family lived in on changho he wrote the Korean
national anthem D hey uh right uh but he was living here in La for 20 years as he
went to try and fight for independence so it was a very difficult
time well after that you get independence in 1945 but immediate
division of the peninsula into North and South it was decided in around
1943 by the US and the Soviet Union at the uh I think Malta conference Stalin
and and Roosevelt are sitting around with um Churchill and they say what are
we going to do let's divide up Germany to to make sure that Germany
doesn't fight again let's divide up the Korean Peninsula you take the northern
half Soviets I'll take the southern half will demobilize the Japanese
troops now the interesting thing about this is and I I'll just briefly talk
about this is this is never all made made that much sense to me I mean I do I
understand why the Americans did not want to let the Soviets have the entire
Peninsula because it's geopolitically important why the Soviets agreed to to a
division is sort of surprising but but even beyond that this this doesn't make
any sense to me we divided up Germany because they started a
war so why didn't we divide up Japan right why do we divide up Korea and not
Japan the Japanese and Russians had even fought a war in 1904 over Islands they
still dispute to this day the Northern Territories why didn't you divide sort
of Soviets get Tokyo and the Americans get Kyoto or something like that right
the world would be totally different actually probably all of the
Korean peninsul would be communist but you know it's interesting to think why
did you why do we not divide up Japan what would the world look like if we had
not divided up Korea that being said it was divided the
beginning of the Cold War uh the war the Korean War destroyed about 75% of all
productive capacity on Korean Peninsula as you know the North Koreans invaded
all went went all the way down to a tiny foothold at pan then the Americans
outflanked them we went all the way up to the yo River then the Chinese
intervened and we went all the way back down again and eventually the war
stabilized exactly where it started in the 38th
parallel the American Air Force ran out of targets to bomb in North Korea there
was nothing left to bomb and this is soul which changed hands three
times now in some ways horrific tragedy everybody who's Korean has a memory of
the Korean War lost a friend lost a a a brother or their family is divided
somebody's in the north somebody's in the
South about 2 million Koreans died 10% of the population at the
time right so everybody has a story now there's a lot of tragedies in the world
right so I'm not going to say this is bigger or worse than Soviets losing 20
million in in World War II but it is a horrific tragedy to
Koreans the tragedy today is and I'll talk about this when I talk about North
Korea we are exactly in the same place we were in as we were in
1953 there has been almost zero change in now north south South relations us
whatever right we is still a divided Peninsula Cold War etc etc except North
Korea now has a couple nukes it's only difference right nothing has changed
basically in 60 years Soul on the other hand the benefit and again I would never
I would never give this as a policy prescription have a horrible horrific
war that wipes out 10% of your population because then you'll get to
rebuild but in fact you did get a chance to rebuild and what South Korea was able
to do this is the Han River this is soul and after the Korean War basically
everybody got to start over in 1950 so not just with
infrastructure here's the here's the uh quanum with the gate again here's 1980
you can see there's the uh the mountains around soul some buildings and here we
are today right you can't even see somewhere over there is uh you know but
they got a chance to start over and it wasn't just physical social classes got
screwed up everything was up for grabs so there was no ruling class peasants ET
I mean there were but with a war and colonization and division basically
everybody got a chance to start over
uh this is the other side this is not a sort of we you know you're the king
We're The Peasants you can do whatever you want when Koreans aren't happy with
something they let you [Laughter]
know which is which is really interesting right there is a deeply I'm
not going to call it Democratic but egalitarian strand in Korean society
which says I'm as good as anybody and it's my right to tell you what to
do and they didn't like what the government was doing and
uh now we have democracy today
stable Placid it is interesting right I mean uh
it's still it's still evolving and and and it is fun it is fun to do this
because they they literally spray each other with fire hoses and and beat each
other up and stuff at the same time it's a young democracy and we we had we had
um in the United States 200 years ago we had um what do you call it duels right
we it took us a long time to get to where we are today where even though we
hate actually I'm not I think we're going backwards right
now I mean Korea has a lot of things to be proud of the economic development
this transition to democracy I should put another
picture on but like people vote right there is a a movement towards better
freedom of press freedom of speech things like that right there's a lot of
a lot of stuff if you and again if you go to Korea in 1910 or
1950 you would not bet on this country having done this there's no way if you
looked at Korea in 1950 say that's a country that's going to be a economic
miracle that everybody's going to know about around the world and is going to
be a stable democracy the 20th century was extraordinarily tumultuous for Korea
colonization division War military cous data up until the 19 late 1980
millions of people in the street protesting for
democracy so that that that transition though Korea has managed the transition
to modernity quite
well given the kinds of uh things it had on
its plate so to speak but you never know yeah we we'll
talk about that let me just conclude very briefly and then we can talk about
whatever you want right so so why is Korea interesting I think there's a
number of reasons beyond the fact that I happen to be korean-american and I care
first of all North Korea remains a major International Security problem for the
entire region and for the United States if North Korea was gone the whole region
would look different if that was not a problem obviously the economic success
and democracy in South Korea and Koreans are very proud passionate people not
emotional just passionate thank you very much I uh really appreciate
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