From the Standard (China) and LA Times:
3/2/2006
The Kaesong industrial park is only an hour from Seoul but it’s like traveling to the moon, writes Barbara Demick
It takes barely an hour to drive from downtown Seoul to the other side of the demilitarized zone, but the culture shock is such that you might as well be commuting to the moon.
Mobile phones, books, newspapers, magazines, videos, laptops, MP3 players and many other appurtenances of 21st-century life must be checked on the south side of the border.
Also best left behind are any wisecracks about the North Korean regime, or in particular its leader, Kim Jong Il.
“You’ve got to watch what you say,” said Kim Yi Gyeom, a South Korean telecommunications worker standing in a long line of Monday-morning commuters waiting to go north. “The spirit of openness has not come to North Korea yet.”
In the boldest experiment to date with inter-Korean cooperation, nearly 500 South Koreans are working side by side with more than 6,000 North Koreans in a year-old industrial park just north of the DMZ.
South Koreans are assuming all the financial risk, having invested more than US$2 billion (HK$15.6 billion).
The South would like to reduce political tensions and reap the benefit of inexpensive North Korean labor so its manufacturers can compete with China.
For the North Koreans, the Kaesong experiment is a way to build its economy with only the most limited dose of openness to the outside world. But the political risk is all for the North Korean government, which fears that contact with the better-fed, better-clothed South Koreans could endanger its grip on power.
“It is natural that there is a culture gap,” said Hwang Boo Gi, director of the Kaesong Industrial District, who led a group of foreign journalists through the park Monday.
“We are talking about the difference between capitalism and socialism.”
Or as a North Korean official, Han Cheol, said diplomatically, “We like to emphasize what we have in common, like our heritage, and not our differences.”
Nevertheless, the contrast is particularly glaring when coming from Seoul, the high-tech, neon-lit capital of the world’s 12th-largest economy, a mere 58 kilometers away. Around the industrial park, which lies outside the center of the city of Kaesong, there is little but desiccated rice paddies and yellow hills denuded long ago by people scratching for firewood. Nearby is an abandoned agricultural college, its crumbling facade decorated by a faded red sign trumpeting the achievements of the North Korean Workers’ Party. Scrawny goats graze outside two-story white- washed houses with windows made of plastic sheeting.
The industrial park itself is surrounded by 8km of perimeter fencing and poker-faced, rifle-toting North Korean soldiers.
Inside the fenced compound everything from the toilets to the machinery are South Korean-made, mostly the latest, state-of-the-art models. Although all 11 companies now operating in the 9.31-hectare pilot project are South Korean, the North Koreans keep a tight rein over the work environment. No South Korean money is accepted here, even at a Family Mart convenience store set up for the exclusive use of South Korean employees.
North Korean patriotic music in praise of Kim Jong Il blares over the loudspeakers of a futuristic warehouse where North Korean women in crisp royal blue uniforms stitch athletic shoes using brand-new sewing machines.
The monthly salaries of US$57.50 for each North Korean worker – regardless of position – are paid directly to the North Korean government, which in turn gives the workers about US$8, more than double the average monthly salary. South Korean companies have asked repeatedly to pay the workers directly and to give bonuses for better work, but have been refused.
Even New Year’s gifts such as extra food and warm clothing could be given only after elaborate negotiations to make sure everybody was getting the same.
South Koreans, many of whom live for weeks at a time in modular housing in the complex, have their own cafeteria and their own medical clinic, all off- limits to North Koreans.
Last year, stories appeared in the South Korean media about a purported Romeo-and-Juliet romance between a North Korean woman and a South Korean man. But people at Kaesong said the story was apocryphal because the North Korean women are never alone.
There have been countless cases of culture shock. When Shinwon held a fashion show in October – complete with disco music, strobe lighting and slinky models in denim mini-skirts – it offended the conservative sensibilities of some North Koreans.
For their part, some South Koreans were taken aback recently to see the North Koreans workers dancing and singing enthusiastically to an accompaniment of accordion music at a fuel- pump factory. It turned out they were rehearsing in anticipation of Kim Jong Il’s birthday on February 16.
As is often the case, many misunderstandings resulted from acts of kindness.
South Koreans have tried covertly to give medicine from their private clinic to ailing North Koreans.
One South Korean employee was accused of trying to bribe a North Korean soldier when he gave him two packages of instant ramen noodles, according to a military source.
In a more serious incident, a South Korean was caught trying to distribute Christian literature, which is strictly anathema in the communist country, the source said.
“Almost every day something happens, some small quarrel or misunderstanding. But because Kaesong is so important to Kim Jong Il, the North Koreans choose to ignore it,” said Lim Eul Chul, a scholar at South Korea’s Kyungnam University who has written extensively on Kaesong.
Both sides have ambitious plans for Kaesong. When fully completed in 2012, the enclave is supposed to encompass 64.75 square kilometers and employ 700,000 workers.
The biggest impediment to the project’s success might be North Korea’s ongoing nuclear weapons program and its hostility to the United States. The tensions have limited the nature of the products manufactured at Kaesong to low technology – with anything having potential dual use for military purposes prohibited – and mostly confined sales to the domestic market within South Korea.
Although Shinwon Apparel, for example, supplies clothing to Kmart and Wal-Mart, among others, those garments are largely produced in Vietnam. US officials, who earlier this month announced negotiations toward a free- trade pact with South Korea, have said they would not consider Kaesong products to be labeled “Made in South Korea.”
With no progress on the horizon in its long war of nerves with the United States, the North Koreans have no choice but to chum it up with South Korea. If they are merely holding their noses and tolerating the presence of the South Koreans for their money, they go to pains not to show it.
The well-disciplined North Korean cadres who were showing foreign reporters around Kaesong Monday all lavishly praised their South Korean counterparts.
