Two
Koreas: A beehive and a desert
By Aidan Foster-Carter
South Koreans are tireless rankers. Seoul
churns out reams of statistics - while anxiously
scanning everyone else's - to see how they match
up.
An abiding self-image as a "shrimp
among whales", as a Korean saying has it, belies
the fact that this half-nation of less than
100,000 square kilometers - but more than 48
million people - is in fact not just in the top
20, as you'd expect, but one of the
dozen largest economies on
the planet.
Indeed, in 2003 South Korea
made the top 10. Not long ago it was bigger than
China, and India only overtook it in 2004. A gross
domestic product (GDP) of US$787.6 billion last
year still put South Korea ahead of Russia and
Mexico, and just behind Brazil. Asia's
fourth-largest economy is almost as big as the
whole of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations) put together. More of a dolphin, surely?
Of course, it all depends how you measure.
At purchasing power parity (PPP), South Korea
slides further down the list. Even in current
dollars, these figures reflect not just real
growth but also the won's steady appreciation
against the greenback. Still, Korea is right up
there with the big boys: major league, not merely
a regional but a global player.
Had anyone
predicted this half a century ago, he'd have been
laughed out of court. On August 15, Liberation Day
- from Japan in 1945 - the National Statistical
Office released a raft of figures to remind
today's often blase South Koreans just how far
they've come.
Though seemingly not
adjusted for inflation, the numbers are
mind-blowing. Back in 1953, amid the rubble of the
recently ended Korean War, GDP was just $1.3
billion: so it has soared 605-fold. Per head,
1953's $67 rose 243 times to 2005's $16,291: only
29th in the world and still trailing fellow tigers
Hong Kong and Singapore - but ahead of Taiwan.
It is also one of the top dozen trading
states. South Korean exports of $284 billion in
2005 were 12,928 times the paltry $22 million of
1948, the year the Republic of Korea was founded.
In 1960, just 8,000 South Koreans traveled abroad;
in 2005 it was 9.5 million. And so on.
No
less striking is the demography of all this. A
total of 48.5 million souls crammed into just
99,646 square kilometers already gives Asia's
third-highest population density (city-states
apart) of 487 people per square kilometer: more
than the Netherlands. In Asia, only Bangladesh and
Taiwan are more jam-packed.
But the
Netherlands, famously, is flat. Not so Korea.
Two-thirds of South Korea is mountain forest;
another 21% is farm or grassland. In a huge social
change, 90% of South Koreans now live in cities,
mostly in highrises. That's 44 million of them
squashed into the mere 13,625 square kilometers
where the action is. Maybe we should think of
South Korea too as virtually a city-state like
Hong Kong and Singapore - but with four times as
many people as both put together.
Greater
Seoul alone has 20 million people - and looks like
it, as you fly into Incheon airport. Serried ranks
of highrises march to the horizon in all
directions, as far as the eye can see.
Yet
the South is but half of Korea. Indeed, less than
that in area: the North's 122,762 square
kilometers give it nearly a quarter more
territory. But its 22.7 million population,
decimated by famine a decade ago, is less than
half the South's. With more than 70 million
people, a unified Korea would be among the world's
20 most populous nations. No shrimp in numbers
then, either.
Figures that Seoul is less
keen to publicize show just what a challenge
reunification will be. Evenly matched until 1970,
the Korean economies are now too far apart to fit
on the same graph. While the South soared, the
North stagnated - and took a great leap backward
in the 1990s, after Moscow pulled the plug on aid.
It's almost a case of one country, two planets.
North Korea itself, need one say, is a
statistical desert. The southern Bank of Korea
strives to fill in the blanks. Its latest figures,
for 2004, put Northern gross national income (GNI)
at barely 3% of the South's: $21 billion against
$681 billion. Per head, the gap was $14,162
against $914, or more than 15:1. The former is
First World, the latter Third.
In trade,
the gulf is staggering. South Korea's $478 billion
was 167 times the North's $2.86 billion; the South
trades almost as much in 48 hours as the North in
a whole year. In oil imports, the South's 826
million barrels dwarfed the North's 3.9 million
211-fold. South Korea produced 44 times as much
steel, and 79 times as much synthetic fiber. Et
cetera ...
If numbers make your eyes glaze
over, try flying into Seoul. South Korea's dense
urbanism is all the more striking after passing by
North Korea's west coast en route. While obviously
not overflying the North, the weird thing is that
there seems to be nothing there: just gray-brown,
featureless hills, with no sign of habitation
whatsoever. It's strange, and spooky. This is the
daytime equivalent of those telling night photos
of the peninsula, showing South Korea ablaze with
light while the North is all but shrouded in
darkness.
And now you can pore over such
stark contrasts in detail without leaving your
desk, thanks to Google Earth. Satellites see it
all, and even the hermit Kimdom can no longer
hide. The Los Angeles Times' Sonni Efron recently
described "soaring over North Korea, looking down
on a denuded landscape and zooming in to hover
over missile batteries, nuclear sites, huge
palaces and prison camps". Anyone with broadband
can do likewise - and it's free.
As Efron
adds: "Click on down into South Korea and the
barren, deforested mountaintops give way to lush
forests, the dusty valleys to emerald rice fields,
the surface-to-air missiles to factories, houses
and cars." A picture, as they always said, is
worth a thousand words.
Pictures, words,
numbers: they all tell the same story. The
contrast between South Korea's dense, busy beehive
and the North's dusty desert - studded with wasps'
nests - is glaring.
On their present
courses, the two Koreas can only go on growing
apart economically. One day, somehow, they will
come together again. South Koreans had better
brace themselves - and log on to Google Earth now,
the better to grasp the formidable long-term
challenge that will face them, their children and
grandchildren, of putting Korea's Humpty Dumpty
together again.
Aidan
Foster-Carter is honorary senior research
fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds
University, England.
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