Hanguk

All of my previous trips to Korea were brief, and my impressions largely superficial. On my first visit ten years ago, I am reported to have said (Erma has a good memory for such things) that Korea struck me as a cross between Japan and Taiwan.

I've now lived in Seoul for about three months. Although my contact with Korean people and culture is still somewhat superficial, I feel that I've started to develop a reliable sense of how Koreans in Seoul live.

One of the impressions that has grown deeper over the last few months is how prosperous Korea is. Seoul is full of people out spending money and having a good time. Cafés and restaurants are full to bursting. Koreans are sophisticated, worldly, and materialistic. (I don't intend the last descriptor to be pejorative.) They are incredibly technologically savvy. In many ways the country seems more advanced and functional than the US.

Prosperous Koreans strolling at Cheonggyecheon 청계천, the recently daylighted stream that runs through the heart of downtown Seoul

One negative characteristic of Koreans is impatience. (The Koreans themselves often describe their own national personality type as geup hada 급하다 "rushed".) They don't like to wait; they park illegally; they weave through traffic; they shove past people on the sidewalks. But even this characteristic seems to be ameliorating. Younger Koreans wait patiently on the subway platform while riders exit (even while their older compatriots shove their way on and fight for seats).

I don't know when Korea made the transition from being a developing country to a developed country, but it is fully entrenched in the latter category now. It also has a vibrantly functioning democracy, in contrast with the repressive military dictatorships that were the norm, with US support, through the 1980s.

Koreans no longer need to think about catching up to the West, or catching up to the States. Whereas before the '80s emigrating to the US was commonly viewed as the major pathway to an improved life, many Koreans can look forward to a better standard of living and greater career and educational opportunities if they stay here.

Freed from the need to catch the West, and freed from the burdens of political repression, Koreans now have the confidence and capability to shape their own future on their own terms. Where will they go?

Of course, Korea's current prosperity and freedom may be something of an historical aberration. Two serious dangers loom on the horizon.

The first is North Korea. Although technically it is still a military threat (the North Koreans could probably reduce Seoul to rubble if they made an all-out missile attack), war seems highly unlikely because of the fragile state of the isolated North Korean regime. And the North is certainly no longer a political threat, thanks to the end of the Cold War. South Korea was once obsessed with Communists, infiltrators from the North, a fifth column in the country. (One of our acquaintances said that when he went abroad to Scotland for a few weeks in college in the 1980s, he had to first watch a propaganda film about the dangers of fraternizing with any North Koreans one might meet overseas.) South Koreans and their government seem now to have realized that there is no need for all that paranoid nonsense now, and that for the most part it's better to just ignore the North and go about one's business. (This isn't to say that implementing a policy for dealing with the North isn't a major concern of the South Korean government; it certainly is.)

The true danger that is posed by the North is economic: should the regime fail and the South be forced to take over administration of the North, the economic and cultural strain will be enormous and potentially destabilizing.

The second, and in my view more serious, long-term threat is China. Korea is a very small country attached to a very large regional military power. China will eventually dominate Asia economically, politically, and militarily, and it's not clear how much true autonomy Korea will be able to maintain for itself. (In part it may depend on whether the US continues to station a large contingent of forces here and in Japan.)

This seems like a historically special time for Korea not only because it enjoys so much prosperity and autonomy, but also because it is culturally ascendant in Asia right now. When I lived in Hong Kong in 2001, I became aware of the widespread popularity there of Korean films and pop music. In China and Japan too Korean pop culture continues to be extremely popular. It's not just economic opportunity that is bringing so many foreign students to Korea to learn Korean; I've encountered many students at our language institute who are here because they love Korean television soap operas.

It is interesting for me to contrast these impressions of Korea with my impressions of China. Many Chinese people I've met are still deeply obsessed with nursing national grievances and with the perceived struggle to catch up with the West. I remember talking with a man in a bus in Fujian, when I was doing fieldwork there, who was bemoaning the fact that even though the Chinese economy was improving so dramatically, it would still be decades before China "caught up" with the West. I asked him why it was so important to "catch up" with the West, and what China would do after that happened. He couldn't really answer those questions; he didn't know how to think about them. In my experience in America and European countries, citizens don't worry about catching up to or comparing themselves with other countries. They worry about how best to improve their own societies. It seemed to me that it would be healthier for the Chinese to think about what they want their country to be like, and to work toward that, instead of viewing the world as a battleground for ascendancy between China and the West. (To be fair, I know that many intellectuals in America view a future conflict with China as an inevitable feature of the coming century.)

I think part of the mentality derives from a sense that China would never have become so backward if they hadn't been humiliated at the hands of Western imperialists in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This sense of grievance drives national attitudes in a way that often seems unhealthy and counter-productive.

This past weekend I was at a party at which several mainland Chinese were present as well as one Taiwanese guy. I'm used to educational settings in the US where there are students from both Taiwan and mainland China studying together, so I'd forgotten that for most Chinese it's a rarity to meet and speak to someone from Taiwan. This was the first time that these Chinese had had a chance to do so in their lives.

The first thing the Chinese were surprised to learn is that, contrary to what is reported in their media, it is not the case that all Taiwanese wish to reunite with the mainland. There was some further discussion about the political status of Taiwan, and then one of the Chinese guys said something that struck me as very strange.

"The reason we want Taiwan back," he said, "is because for centuries China has been bullied and humiliated by the West. Now China is finally strong again, and we can reclaim the territory that should have been ours all along. We got Macau and Hong Kong back, and we want Taiwan back too."

Nursing a grievance against 19th-century Western imperialism doesn't strike me as the best basis for formulating foreign policy today. Nor does it strike me as a justification for ignoring the interests and well-being of the Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. But I think in the minds of many Chinese the two simply can't be separated.

Not long after this conversation I read a passage in Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones that reminded me of it. In a discussion of the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, Hessler notes that the primary driving force behind Chinese international sports competition has been shame, not pride (p. 265). In his view, China competes not for the joy and pride of athletic success, but to erase perceived humiliations by beating the West at their own game.

I can't resist ending this blog entry by plugging Hessler's book. It's fantastic. It's the book that I and many of my friends who've lived in China have always wanted to write. Hessler's experiences reverberate because they are so similar in many respects to mine, and because as a gifted writer, he is able to distill and describe those experiences vividly and thoughtfully.

Hessler interweaves his observations about modern China with reportage about academic work on China's ancient past. He has interviewed many archeologists and philologists, and it's astounding how many points of intersection there are with my own life. Just a few examples: He profiles a guy who was a graduate student colleague in my department; he profiles the professor from whom I first learned to read oracle bones; he mentions some of my current colleagues and their recent work. Somehow he's taken these academic topics that I'd previously imagined could never be popularized and woven them into a compelling and thought-provoking account for the general reader.