Korea swallows its pride in Chinese
kimchi war By Ting-I
Tsai
TAIPEI - Lee Eh-ren, a 21-year-old
Korean college student, moved to Beijing two months ago to
learn Chinese. During that time, her most vexing
problem has been finding an acceptable supply of
kimchi, the pickled cabbage dish that is a staple
at nearly every Korean meal.
Lee found the
Chinese-made kimchi inferior in quality, but
imported, Korean-made kimchi was too expensive.
Eventually, due to economic considerations, she
made the same choice as most of the restaurant
owners back home in Korea - she made do with
Chinese kimchi.
However, South Koreans'
tolerance for the Chinese-made product has been
tested in recent weeks, after South Korean authorities
said
they had found parasite eggs in Chinese kimchi.
Both countries stopped importing kimchi from each
other, but instead of reacting emotionally, the
South Korean government chose to play down the
issue. South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon
noted that the kimchi issue "must not have a
negative impact on Korea-China relations, [which]
have been making rapid progress in all areas".
Kimchi means everything to South Koreans;
but they also place an increasing value on the
nation's relationship with China, a country Korea fought
against in the Korean War during the 1950s. The
kimchi affair was not the first trade spat between
the two sides, either: the "garlic trade war" in
2000 also involved Chinese food imports to Korea.
On November 6, during the Henan-ROK Friendship
Week, the South Korean ambassador to China, Kim
Ha-joong, said that the bilateral relationship
between South Korea and China was far more
important than the ongoing kimchi dispute. Chinese
Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, who noted that
kimchi was his favorite dish, also called for
calm, saying the row should be resolved with some
flexibility and creativity.
South Korea's
food watchdog, the Korea Food and Drug
Administration, reported that parasite eggs were
found in some kimchi imported from China on
October 21, and further noted that they were also
discovered in some domestic brands on November 3,
sparking a consumer panic over the national dish's
safety. South Koreans took the incident as an
indication that the country's food safety
management needed to be tightened, but Chinese
authorities and kimchi makers regarded the fuss
over Chinese kimchi as a tactic to protect South
Korean kimchi production. According to the Korea
Food and Drug Administration, kimchi imports from
China soared 79% in the first nine months of this
year, to 85,266 tons, compared with 72,605 tons
for all of 2004 and just 90 tons in 1999.
Starting in 2002, Korean kimchi makers
began to cooperate with their Chinese counterparts
in China's Liaoning and Shandong provinces. One
of the largest Korean producers, Doosan,
established its factory in Beijing's suburban
Miyun industrial zone in August 2003. According to
a Korean kimchi factory manager based in China,
who declined to be identified, there are about 60
to 80 kimchi factories in Shandong's Qingdao
region, but he said "one opens and one goes
bankrupt every day" because of the high
competition and low profit. Even so, Chinese
kimchi makers insist that their operations are
based on high-standard procedures.
"Some
South Korean kimchi factories' environments are
actually worse than ours," said Zhou Guoming,
manager of Shandong's Shunchang kimchi factory,
which exported some 7,000 tons of kimchi to South
Korea in the past two years, but halted kimchi
production because of the soaring price of cabbage
early this year. Zhou said that Chinese kimchi
factories were producing kimchi as they had always
done, and emphasized that Korean kimchi experts
monitored production. "I don't understand why
there are so many problems all of a sudden," he
said.
Zhou's factory sold kimchi at about
US$500 a ton, whereas Korean-made kimchi costs
between $1,500 to $1,900 a ton. In Shandong,
cabbage can cost as little as $0.01 per kilogram,
and factory workers' wages are between $50 and
$125 per month.
Lu Jie, manager of
Shandong Weihai Jiashiyi Foodstuff Co, which has
produced kimchi for Japanese customers, suggested
that the contaminated kimchi was produced by South
Koreans who hired unskilled Chinese peasants and
bought cabbages from the markets. "Our production
follows very high standards. We grow our own
cabbages to control the quality. But these people
just ruined our reputation," Lu said, adding that
Japanese quarantine authorities had begun
stringent checks of their kimchi shortly after the
South Korean government reported the parasite
eggs. Lu noted that local Chinese authorities had
been encouraging South Korean businessmen to hire
unskilled peasants, and that as many as 60% of
factories in his area failed to follow basic
hygiene standards.
A China-based South
Korean kimchi factory manager confirmed Lu's
assertion. "That's where the problems came from,"
the manager reluctantly noted, although he
suggested the percentage should be only about 10%
of the industry in China. The Chinese government
shut down nine kimchi factories in Shandong and
Liaoning recently, but the ownership of these
factories was unclear.
Around 60% of the
restaurants in Seoul say they use kimchi from
China. But Koreans say that even when Chinese
kimchi is made according to high-quality
production standards, it simply tastes different
from Korean kimchi. A kimchi expert at Seoul's Han
Jung Ae Cooking School, who gave only her surname,
Choi, said she never eats kimchi at restaurants
because it tastes horrible and is too salty.
"Koreans should eat kimchi from Korea," she
emphasized.
South Koreans, who reportedly
consume an estimated 1.53 million tons of kimchi a
year, not only consume the dish with all three
daily meals, but even travel with their own kimchi
when overseas. In the wake of the contamination
reports, more and more South Koreans are making
their own kimchi at home. But Park Chae-lin,
curator of the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul, said
that the trend would not last long, since many
Koreans no longer know how to make kimchi
themselves.
Kimchi is more than a mere
food to Koreans, who believe the pickled dish has
antibacterial qualities that can cure or prevent
numerous diseases, including high blood pressure,
cancers of the digestive system, diabetes, and
even SARS and bird flu. In order to protect its
national heritage, South Korea engaged in a kimchi
dispute with Japan from 1996, when Japan proposed
designating Japanese kimchi as "kimuchi". Korea
eventually scored a diplomatic coup in the
six-year battle in 2001 when the Codex
Alimentarius, which sets international food
standards recognized by the World Trade
Organization, adopted a global standard for making
kimchi cabbage that matches Korean methods.
South Koreans' toughness toward Japan -
and the garlic dispute with China, during which
Seoul slapped a 315% tariff on Chinese garlic -
led observers to expect a trade war over kimchi.
Surprisingly, however, both China and Korea
minimized the dispute within a week. Choi
Byung-il, international trade professor at Ewha
Women's University, explained that South Koreans
learned "a very hard lesson" during the garlic war
with China, when China barred Korean microchips,
mobile phones and petrochemical products in
retaliation. Collectively, these products were far
more important to Korea than the garlic exports
were to China, so Korea had little choice but to
accede to greater garlic imports. Since that time,
Choi said, South Korea has tried not to provoke
China in trade matters. The two nations' common
interests in various fields, such as economic and
regional security, are also believed to be reasons
for the drama's fading out.
China and
South Korea established official ties in August
1992. According to the memoir of China's former
foreign minister. Qian Qichen, Ten Stories of a
Diplomat, China's former president Deng
Xiaoping noted in 1985 that it was necessary to
develop relations with South Korea, since they
would be helpful to China's economic development
and lead to South Korea's cutting its ties with
Taiwan. But it was then-South Korean president Roh
Tae-Woo who eagerly took substantial steps to
normalize bilateral ties as part of implementation
of the Northern Policy. Furthermore, Chinese
academics Wang Chuanjian and Chen Fengjuen noted
in their book, The Major Asia-Pacific Powers
and the Korean Peninsula, that normalizing
bilateral ties would ensure China's influence in
Korean peninsula affairs, as well as boosting
China's ability to attract South Korean investment
and technologies that were difficult to acquire
from Western countries.
The 13-year-old
relationship reached a new high in 2003 when
presidents from the two countries signed a
memorandum in Beijing to establish a comprehensive
partnership. Jin Linbo, director of the Department
of Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of
International Studies, noted that the memorandum's
signing erased the uncertainties in the two
nations' relationship, which is why China didn't
repeat its confrontational approach of the 2000
garlic war during the recent kimchi incident. "The
main structure of the bilateral relationship was
established then, and all of the side issues would
be downplayed, if both sides cannot reach a
consensus in the short term," Jin said, citing the
example of how the two countries dealt with the
2004 Goguryeo dispute. "Both countries now need
each other in the Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) forum and the six-party talks,"
he added.
China is now Korea's number-one
trading partner, and the bilateral trade figures
are expected to hit $100 billion by the end of
this year. South Korea's leading enterprises are
gradually becoming major players in the Chinese
market, and the popularity of Korean soap operas
is increasing among Chinese audiences. Chinese
President Hu Jintao was reported to be a fan of
the Korean historical soap opera Dae Jang
Geum, which was watched by more than 180
million Chinese when it was broadcast last
September. The announcement just days ago by
Korea's President Roh Moo-Hyun that Korea would
grant China market economy status, made during
Hu's visit to Seoul in advance of the APEC meeting
in Busan, was yet another sign of how close the
relationship between the two nations has become.
Nico Lee, a 21-year-old South Korean
studying Chinese in Taiwan, said that she would
never eat China-made kimchi because of her
distrust of Chinese food, but her goal is to deal
with Chinese clients for a South Korean company
when she graduates from college. When reminded of
the Korean War, Lee said "The two countries were
not really against each other. That was a war of
ideologies."
In Beijing, the South Korean
kimchi factory manager insisted the flavor of
Chinese kimchi was no different from that of
Korean kimchi, and further noted that the incident
could open the way for the two countries to work
together on a mechanism to ensure kimchi quality.
On whether the dispute would lead to further
damage to sales of Chinese-made kimchi, the expert
said: "I hope the kimchi dispute can be peacefully
resolved as soon as possible. We all know that
Korea's economy [is developing] along with
China's."
Ting-I Tsai is a
Taipei-based freelance writer.
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country Korea fought
against in the Korean War during the 1950s. The
kimchi affair was not the first trade spat between
the two sides, either: the "garlic trade war" in
2000 also involved Chinese food imports to Korea.
On November 6, during the 
