Diary

Perry Anderson

Stereotypes of the Far East, dominated by images of China and Japan, leave Korea in a vaguer limbo, of acronyms or bestiaries: NICs or Little Tigers. But if the Western traveller does arrive with any idées reçues, they are liable to be soon dispelled. Seoul is now the third largest city in the world, as a municipal unit – bigger than Tokyo or Beijing. Size is no guarantee of modernity, as the desperate inequality and violence of the two greatest of all urban concentrations, São Paulo and Bombay, testify. But that is still the Third World. Seoul is not part of it. What a Londoner notices first is the ways in which the city is more advanced than his own.

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Vol. 18 No. 20 · 17 October 1996 » Perry Anderson » Diary (print version)
pages 28-29 | 4539 words

Letters

From Aidan Foster-Carter

Just as Sartre defended Flaubert against vulgar Marxists who said he was bourgeois (‘but not every bourgeois is Flaubert’), so not every tourist is Perry Anderson. His frankly touristic Korean Diary (LRB, 17 October) is a fine piece in many ways; and so rarely does the world’s 11th biggest economy rate two full pages anywhere that we should be grateful, and I am. Enough to overlook (well, almost) the middle-aged bloke who ogles the girls while likening their parents to spuds, and tells us the trains run on time (so to say). Nor am I too bothered by the odd date that the distinguished historian doesn’t quite get spot-on. Kims Dae-jung and Young-sam split in 1987, not 1988; Beijing and Seoul tied the knot in 1992, not 1991; the next election is in 1997, not 1998.

The real trap for the voyager-voyeur is that Korea is so rich and varied that everyone from the SWP to Alfred Sherman and beyond can find kindred spirits there. It’s a heady experience, with Narcissus never far away. So New Left Review’s éminence grise salutes his alter ego Paik Nak-chung, and envies his sales figures (but everything sells better in Korea). And inevitably, the editor of Student Power, the well-red Penguin Special, revels in a polity where student revolt really does topple governments – or does it? The workers did at least as much: odd for a quondam Marxist to play that down. But not so odd as to say: ‘Even churches were caught up in the contagious energies released by student activism.’ In the second most Christian nation in Asia after the Philippines, it was the churches that bred the student movement, not vice versa.

Finally, there’s reunification (or will be), on which our historical materialist collapses in rampant idealism. He of all people should know that revolutions have winners and losers, and so it will be in Korea. Here as everywhere capitalism has triumphed, while socialism (or a grotesque parody thereof) is dying. All that remains to be settled is the precise manner in which the North will make its historical exit, and to pray it will be peaceful. But that unified Korea will be today’s South Korea writ large, as in Germany, is as plain as day. What else could it be?

Aidan Foster-Carter
Leeds University Korea Project