A Sunny Take on Peninsula’s Grim Tensions

Beauty and the beast shared a billing in Los Angeles last week; it would be hard to imagine a lovelier setting for the international symposium on the ugly issue of South and North Korean tension than the canvas provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This important conference, organized by the Asia Society here in California and partly financed by the Korea Foundation from Seoul, drew participants including influential Korean and American political, community and academic figures, including South Korea’s U.S. ambassador. It took place alongside the official opening of the museum’s new Korean art galleries that, collectively, add up to the largest assemblage of Korean art outside Asia. In fact, the conjunction of this exhibition and the inaugural Asia Society “Korea Today” conference seemed even to augur well for the prospect that North and South Korea might reunite as one country.

Certainly, the conference participants seemed to be under the spell of that great art: At times they seemed so optimistic about the future of the Korean peninsula that one had to wonder if the results of serious-minded international political conferences might be better if conducted in art museums instead of the usual drab venues. For, at the same time, thousands of miles away from the museum’s art-splashed walls, the North Korean propaganda machine was cranking out its usual unartful line.

The latest line, enunciated last week by the Tokyo-based Center for Korean-American Peace, trumpeted the virtues of the late father-dictator and his living son, dictator junior. Did you know that the late Kim Il Sung, the founder of impoverished North Korea, was a “Korean Moses”? Or that his successor, his son Kim Jong Il, is often called “North Korea’s ‘David’ ”? The Tokyo-based “peace” center also denounced the “unwarranted, undisguised armed hostility toward [our] small Far Eastern country,” and blamed the United States for the continuing division of the peninsula. It indicted Seoul (brilliantly emerging from the dregs of the Asia flu under the administration of President Kim Dae Jung) as a lackey of the capitalists and reported that Pyongyang was prepared to go to nuclear war with the West. “The North Koreans,” declaimed a formal paper issued by the center, “are far better geared for a nuclear shootout. Less than 30 minutes are enough to evacuate most of the population into underground shelters. . . . The American authorities will have to confess that there are no physical means of evacuating tens of millions of people safely from Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego in time before incoming North Korean ICBMs strike.”

Yes, that’s today’s party line in Pyongyang, and what a barren line it is. North Korea should have buried the hatchet with South Korea years ago, and taken China’s advice to replace hopelessly inept Stalinist economics with some Deng Xiaoping-like reform reality. Remember the late maximum leader’s famed dismissal of domestic objections to his thinly disguised capitalist innovations? What does it matter, he’d ask, whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse? Alas, in North Korea there’s nothing to catch--even the mice are starving. “No one in Asia wants a collapse of North Korea, or wants war, or wants a nuclear North Korea,” said University of California Berkeley professor Robert Scalapino, 80, hailed at the conference as the dean of U.S. scholars on Korea. “One of the problems is the only bargaining chip the North has is the threat of military action.”

Accordingly, Scalapino and others praised the recently released report of former U.S. Defense secretary and special Korean envoy William Perry. It recommended that the Clinton administration gradually loosen economic sanctions if North Korea keeps its missile testing on hold. Many at the conference also praised the “Sunshine Policy” of Kim Dae Jung--naive-sounding, but a sensible approach nonetheless--for its unwavering pursuit of engagement with the North. And, yes, they even had a kind word for President Clinton, for his achievement of a relationship with Seoul that is as strong as any that Washington has had with South Korea since 1945. Agreed Claremont McKenna professor Chae-Jin Lee, a leading Korea expert: “The U.S.-South Korean relationship has never been this good, and because of the work of Perry and others, the prospect of war is lower than ever before.”

In fact, many at the conference were, on the whole, rather hopeful that North Korea would before too long see the light and cut some kind of deal with the West, and with fellow Koreans in the South. Even by the optimistic standards of sunny Southern California, and in the glow of a luminous art collection, that’s a whole lot of sunshine, indeed.

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Times contributing editor Tom Plate’s column runs Wednesdays. More participant views from the Asia Society conference can be found at www.asiamedia.ucla.edu.