by Ian Buruma
It was perhaps unfair to watch the opening ceremony in Seoul with Leni Riefenstahl’s films and books by prewar chauvinists fresh in my mind. Yet, with all the banners bearing Coubertin’s slogans, the uniformed athletes marching behind their national flags, the parades of folk dancers, the sacred flame, the thousands of children drilled to form gigantic flags and Olympic symbols, the chatter about Peace and Progress, one realized how profoundly old-fashioned South Korea (not to mention the North, of course) still is. This is one of the few countries that combines a capitalist economy with the militant patriotism and obsession with folk culture more often seen in communist states. And more than once I imagined Friedrich Jahn watching the proceedings in Seoul with great approval from his great stadium in the sky. Much heavy weather was made in the Korean press about the bad behavior of American athletes who would not march in line (the Soviets gave the Korean riot policemen, dressed in natty white for the occasion, no such trouble). I found myself applauding American rowdiness, just as I applauded the Japanese in their events when the entire Korean audience was baying for Japanese blood.
It might seem perverse to call South Korea old-fashioned when its image in the world press is that of a superdynamic steel-and-glass economic miracle. But this is not necessarily a contradiction. Industrialization, nation-building and “internationalization” formed the background in nineteenth-century Europe to world fairs and the Olympic ideal, but also to world wars and totalitarianism. South Korea is not on the warpath, nor is it totalitarian, but it is still struggling with democracy. One often hears in Seoul that a political miracle followed the economic one, and that the Seoul Olympics will make Korean progress even more miraculous. Well, perhaps. It depends on what one means by progress. Politics are not the result of miracles, and international rallies have nothing to do with democracy—or with peace.
The ideals of unity and patriotic harmony were not only, as is so often assumed, the natural aspirations of a people cast adrift by rapid industrialization. They were an integral part of political propaganda. Park Chung Hee, the father of Korea’s economic miracle, enforced a military dictatorship in the name of harmony to achieve economic progress. Dissent was called unpatriotic. Dissenters, for their part, called the government unpatriotic for making deals with foreigners. Both sides claimed a monopoly on patriotism. The Seoul Olympics were used by Park’s successors to lend legitimacy to yet another dictatorial regime. One of the major promoters was Roh Tae Woo, then a minister without portfolio, now president of the republic. Now that South Korea finally has achieved a more liberal political system in which politicians are taking over from military strongmen, the ritualized patriotism of the Olympic Games may be good for what Korean columnists, students and scholars call “the Korean identity,” but not so good for the budding democracy.
The gradual opening up of Korean society is not helped by a process of nation-building that is not only anachronistic, but encourages xenophobia instead of openness. Nation-building can be good for sports—which explains, perhaps, why the U.S. is one of the few noncommunist nations to do well: it is in a constant state of nation-building. And the dynamism, optimism and faith in progress of South Koreans are exciting, even inspiring. South Korea indeed astonished the world by organizing the largest games ever, under great provocation from belligerent northern neighbors and some of its own students. That the games went off smoothly for the most part—some unpleasantness about drugs and boxing decisions aside—testifies to Korean efficiency and goodwill.
But the pressure on the Korean athletes was extraordinary. Not to win a gold was regarded virtually as a national disgrace. Several Korean winners of silver and bronze medals actually apologized for their failures. I watched the Koreans in action in several sports, among them women’s volleyball. They played Japan. The stands were filled with rival tribes, preparing for war: Japanese tour groups waved their flags and banners, while Koreans stamped their feet and banged their drums, the men howling, the women ululating. Every Korean point put the entire Korean tribe into a frenzy. But when it became clear that the Japanese were going to win, the audience went very quiet, then began slinking out of the stadium, as though embarrassed to witness defeat.
Korean chauvinism was often hysterical, particularly when it involved Americans or Japanese. During the games, many ordinary Koreans went out of their way to be polite and helpful to foreign visitors, but there was a mean-spirited edge to comments in the Korean press. When the Japanese brought over for the first time since the end of the war an entire Kabuki theater troupe, the Korea Herald ran a headline saying COARSE KABUKI SHOW FAILS TO IMPRESS. The play, the story went on to say, “stirred up bitter memories of the Japanese samurai culture, or Japanese militarism … which clashes with Korea’s time-nurtured consciousness of literati.” I thought of the images I had seen in the papers of Korean athletes being drilled in boot camp, wearing full military gear, and screaming “Fight, fight, fight!”
There had been a disgraceful incident in the boxing ring. When the decision went against a Korean boxer, several people, including his coach and a security guard, jumped into the ring and beat up the hapless New Zealand referee. The Korean television cameras quickly averted their gaze, but NBC did not—rightly so: it was good TV. Why did the Korean security guard shed his blazer to indulge in some punching of his own? His honest answer was “The Korean man, he win, so I pissed off.” The immediate reaction in Korea was to blame the referee. “He was bribed by the Americans to get at us Koreans,” was one comment I heard. But things clearly had got out of hand, and the papers called the rowdy behavior a national disgrace. “Referee number ten, Korean men number ten,” was the opinion of my taxi driver, who had a more balanced view of the matter than many.
But that was not the end of it. NBC was accused by, among others, members of the ruling Democratic Justice Party of being anti-Korean, even of insulting the “Korean identity.” One wonders whether NBC’s Bryant Gumbel even knows what the Korean identity is, let alone desires to insult it. But perhaps that was the problem: he should have been more informed about Koreans. I had lunch with a Korean government spokesman who did little else but talk about the crass attitudes of Americans. The American press, he said, had ignored the deep significance of the opening ceremony. They willfully refused to understand Korean culture. The Europeans, they were quite different. The Germans, especially: they understood the symbolic depth of the ceremony. Well, I thought, with an element of spite (I must confess here that the Dutch defeat of Germany during the European soccer championship made me as happy as a Korean watching the Japanese go down): they would, wouldn’t they?
Some American commentators put the anti-American mood down to a clash of cultural values. Tony Kornheiser, for example, writing in The Washington Post, pointed out that Koreans were hurt because American journalists refused to obey the unspoken rule that they should look only at what Koreans chose to show them. If press censorship, self- or government-inflicted, is a cultural value, then let us help change the value or shut up about democracy in South Korea.
The rhetoric from the left, if one can call it that in Korea, was even more aggressive. When Carl Lewis appeared impatient with reporters on his arrival at the Seoul airport, the Hangyoreh Shinmun berated him the next day for his “shallow-hearted and haughty attitude,” which
clearly betrays the twisted racism among American black people, looking down upon the Asian people more than the white people.… Champions from Africa, where he should find his “roots,” say that “the black people are not free as long as Mandela is in prison.” Carl Lewis is a degenerate American.
The tone of the article betrayed two things: the anxiety behind the swagger and the politics of this paper, which was set up by antigovernment activists as a result of more liberal press laws.
What is disturbing about South Korea is the way both government spokesmen and antigovernment radicals often sound like members of Action Française. Sometimes I felt that Charles Maurras, even more than the woolly Baron
de Coubertin, would have felt at home in Seoul. This is not a matter of being for or against the Olympics. The radical students seducing the TV newsmakers with their daily demonstrations of firebomb-throwing are every bit as antidemocratic as the authoritarian generals who wanted the Olympics to give them face. They blame the division of their country on American imperialism. And they believe that America deliberately prevented North Korea from sharing the Olympics. The division of Korea is a political problem, which radicals think they can solve by violence, by prayer meetings, and by marching to the DMZ to meet the North Korean delegations to discuss peace and unification. Like Coubertin, they proclaim that, by cutting out politics and staging mass meetings, peace and brotherhood will naturally follow.
Perhaps the Korean belief in miracles is cultural. Korea is, after all, a nation of mass prayer meetings and new religions, the birthplace of the Reverend Moon, and a hospitable destination for the likes of Billy Graham. Russell Warren Howe, in his otherwise egregiously ill-written, misinformed book The Koreans, is probably right to call Korean culture shamanistic. Filipinos often seem to be waiting for a national messiah, but Koreans have a tendency to take a messianic view of the nation itself. One of the more amusing spectacles at the Seoul games was the peddlers of many different sects and creeds lying in ambush outside the main entrances of sports arenas. I shall restrict my quotations to only two of the many pamphlets pressed into my hands by beaming proselytizers. One was from one Presbyter Park Tae-sun, of the Sun Kyung (Fairland) Development R&S Institution:
To All Mankind!—We proclaim that the Republic of Korea is the country where mankind was first created and civilization was cradled, and the parental country of all mankind. All mankind now participating in the ’88 Olympic Games! We advise you to realize the fact that the Republic of Korea having about 5000 years [sic] long history, is your parental country.
The Kingdom Gospel Evangelical Association had this to say:
The reason why the kingdom of God where our human body can live eternally comes true herein [sic] the Republic of Korea is that the Taegukki, Korean National Flag has the figure of glorious God, and the Republic of Korea has seen the Second Advent of Jesus Christ really coming to it. Now, all the world should recognize the fact that the republic of Korea is the right place where the heaven of eternal life shall be realized.
One suspects something wrong happened on the way to modern nationhood in Korea. An unfortunate synthesis must have occurred between West and East. The West, usually via Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, gave Korea half-baked German notions of Blood and Soil; it also exported, mostly from America, the equally half-baked notions of vulgar evangelism. Korea contributed an emotional legacy of historical bitterness and a propensity for shamanistic rites. These are precisely some of the ingredients that went into Independence Hall, and were encouraged by the Olympic games. No doubt the sense of victimhood, of being ignored or worse by other powers throughout history, has contributed to the modern zeal to gain recognition, to win gold medals, to beat the Japanese, and ultimately, who knows, even the Americans. The Koreans got twelve gold medals, an astonishing number, and for that they should be congratulated.
But as one casts one’s eyes on the list of the most successful sporting nations—East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, the Soviet Union—gold medals are not necessarily the marks of great national progress (of any kind), let alone of civilized and open societies. South Korea wants—no, craves—to be recognized as a great nation and a democracy. Less zealotry, less reliance on shamanistic incantations, and a greater willingness to let bygones be bygones would carry South Koreans a long way toward that goal. If that spells a little decadence, then so be it.
1988
*Hitler’s games should, of course, never have been held at all, but the president of the IOC, a Belgian aristocrat in Coubertin’s mold called Henri Baillet-Latour, insisted that Nazi politics were a domestic matter of no concern to the IOC. When the subject of the Nazi persecution of Jews was raised, the Belgian remarked that “the IOC does not go into such details.” Baillet-Latour has been praised in The New York Times by George Plimpton as “one of the great heroes of Olympic history.” Well, no doubt he is.
THE LAST DAYS OF HONG KONG
Everything you need to know about a new life abroad.… It’s all in the pages of The Immigrant.
Advertisement for a new Hong Kong periodical, 1989
May 1983: it was exactly seven months after Mrs. Thatcher stumbled and fell on the steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing that I arrived in Hong Kong to take up a job. The prime-ministerial fall, which preceded a fierce quarrel with Deng Xiaoping about the future of the British colony, was regarded in Hong Kong as a dark omen: a few days later the stock market crashed and the Hong Kong dollar slumped to a point not seen since the riots of 1956.
As usual in Hong Kong, the market bounced back, some canny speculators made a killing, and corporate towers of silver- and gold-tinted glass sprouted up in a Babylonian frenzy that lasted until the end of the decade. Still, I thought, as I arrived on that hot spring morning, this place must be feeling jittery, not to say fragile, not to say terrified of the likely prospect of being handed over to a communist regime. It was still only a prospect, to be sure, for the deal was yet to be concluded, but Deng had made no bones about Beijing’s firm intention to take back what it saw as rightfully its own.
On the afternoon of that same day, I was taken by an old friend to a barbecue party attended by a group of what the white people call “expats” and the Cantonese call gweilos, or devil men—a collection of nice, suntanned young Aussies, Brits, an American or two and the odd Chinese girlfriend for local color. The talk was of parties, boat trips, restaurants and absent friends. Partly out of boredom but also out of genuine interest, I asked my new acquaintances how worried people in Hong Kong were about the not too distant future. There was a moment of rather awkward silence, as though I had asked the wrong thing. Then I realized it was simply the result of a misunderstanding.
“Worried?” asked an Australian PR man in Bermuda shorts. “Us worried? ’Course not. Lots of opportunity here. Why, Bob, he’s opening a new hairdressing salon. And Kevin is doing great in advertising, and Ann’s just got a huge pay rise at the bank. No, no worries, mate. Every day I wake up, I’m glad to be in Hong Kong, and the moment that ends I’ll move somewhere else.”
It was a valuable lesson in Hong Kong anthropology: it had not occurred to my PR friend that I might be referring to 6 million Chinese and not to our cozy bunch of expatriates. It was also clear that people were not in the habit of measuring time much beyond the immediate here and now, that you avoided thinking of the future (or, for that matter, the past) until, well, until you moved somewhere else.
I found this extraordinary insouciance both refreshing and perplexing. It came in different forms: “Give Hong Kong back to China? Oh, no, dear boy. That will never happen. You see, it’s simply not in China’s interest to take Hong Kong back. Too much money to be made.” This was said to me by a charming old hand who had lived in “Honkers” for almost thirty years. We were having lunch at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where there was no dearth of such old hands to sort out the ignorant newcomer on the Chinese mentality, not to mention China’s interest. Such experts were always ready to explain that the Chinese are by nature indifferent to politics. Making money is all they really care about. And the Hong Kong Chinese, they’re a clever lot. No need to worry about them. They’ll manage to make some kind of deal. Anyway, it’s in China’s interest to let them be.
Perhaps I am being unfair. How were these people to know that only one year later, on September 26, 1984, a declaration was signed in Beijing by representatives of the Chinese and British governments that formally sealed Hong Kong’s fate? The formula was one country, two systems: Hong Kong was to be a Special Autonomous Region under Chinese sovereignty, allowed for fifty years to retain its own legislation, judiciary and socioeconomic system. There was no mention of a
bill of rights, and freedom of speech would not extend to criticism of the Chinese government.
But even then the propensity for wishful thinking was extraordinary. On the day of the announcement, the British editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, the most authoritative local newsweekly, wore a Union Jack T-shirt and arrived at his office to celebrate the good news with a bottle of champagne. He wrote an editorial firmly in support of the agreement, and put the “dark voices prophesying doom” sternly in their places. Hong Kong, he said, would help put “China back on to its traditional search for peace, stability and prosperity—the Confucian Golden Mean …”
Perhaps he was not to know that Hong Kong was the victim of a cruel confidence trick often termed a “conspiracy of euphoria.” Everything would stay the same. Lots of money to be made. Stability and prosperity. Democracy with a fully elected legislature. (Just how it was to be elected was never made clear.) The Confucian Golden Mean. All this, and more, was promised by officials from London and Beijing who kept on grinning fiercely in the hope that this would keep the locals quiet.
But things didn’t stay the same. Hong Kong is hardly stable, though still relatively prosperous. Hong Kong is run by a British governor appointed by Her Majesty’s government, who presides over a legislative council, none of whose members are directly elected. Democracy never materialized, and probably never will. Instead we have had a succession of grotesque financial scandals; a string of broken banks that had to be bailed out; a calamitous collapse of the Hong Kong dollar, which had to be pegged hastily to the U.S. currency; a serious shortage of labor; forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees; a judiciary compromised by corruption—and, on top of all that, the Beijing massacre. And still the incantations ring daily in our ears, albeit with an increasing tone of desperation: it is not in Beijing’s interest to change Hong Kong; everything will be all right; democracy will come, though perhaps at a slower pace; stability and prosperity; etc., etc.
