Gangnam not Vietnam: Why Koreans are taking the long view

 
Well, if the artillery shells start landing, I’m a goner. That is my fleeting thought while sweeping the curtain aside.

My hotel is slap bang next to Seoul’s new City Hall: the historic building has a postmodern sibling – a wave-shaped cathedral of glass and steel that, presumably, would transform into a shrapnel storm if hit. The great box of the Seoul Finance Centre stands a few streets away. A prime capitalist target, surely, for the hundreds of artillery tubes parked a little over 30km to the North?

But concern quickly gives way to being struck by the sheer disparity between the two Korean capitals. A little over a year ago, I stood in another hotel room, taking in the unique charm of Pyongyang.

Back then, I gazed over an alien-looking expanse of concrete monoliths. It was often dark in the tower-block apartments but the lights still blazed on the various monuments built to honour the ruling Kim dynasty. Sometimes, I heard music drifting from loudspeakers.

Typically, these were rousing hymns to the peasants and workers, unified under the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il-sung. And somewhere in that cold and murky city, his grandson was getting into his rather menacing stride.

Now it’s a year later and the fate of the South Korean capital, if the threats are serious, could be decided by the pudgy young finger of Kim Jong-un. When the now 29-year-old unexpectedly ascended to the throne in

December 2011, there were faint hopes that his education in Switzerland might somehow be the catalyst for a more enlightened style of rule. The prognosis wasn’t terribly good. Even before his father, Kim Jong-il, aka “The Dear Leader”, expired, he was widely believed to have masterminded the artillery barrage on a South Korean island just below the maritime border between the two Koreas, which killed four people in November 2010. “Lil” Kim had just been elevated to the ruling Korean workers’ party Central Committee and needed to prove his mettle within the Korean People’s Army (KPA).

But the city below looks unperturbed. Huge digital billboards flash up impossibly pretty youngsters, microphones in hand, their onstage motions a form of crisp geometry. This is “K-pop”. While the outside world agonises and speculates about what one young Northerner is about to do, locals are getting ready to see what one young Southerner will do: the follow-up single – called Gentleman – to Gangnam Style is imminent.

“We are always getting this, every year!” says Mr Lee, a middle-aged taxi driver, regarding the North’s threats to launch missiles or test nuclear bombs. For good measure, he also lists off all the best places to hear “guitar music”.

There is a case to be made for entertainment as the best riposte to a dictator’s aggressive, attention-grabbing rants. Even so, Kim Jong-un has certainly proven to be his father’s son in the last year and his pronouncements have been disturbing, to say the least.

It occurs to me that if he and Psy, born Park Jae-sang to resolutely capitalist parents in the posh Gangnam district of Seoul, have one thing in common it is this: both understand that in today’s mass-communication culture, the audience must be worldwide and it must be overawed.

It is no surprise that there exists a North Korean parody of the smash YouTube hit, in which the current President, Mrs Park Geun-hye, is supposedly shown performing Psy’s distinctive dance. And this was released in a country that bans the internet and only permits televisions, radios and mobile phones that can pick up state signals.

Kim Jong-un was in fine form on March 11, when he visited frontline military units, parked on North Korea’s coast, just a few miles from the maritime border. Gesturing to some South Korean islands, visible just a few miles away, he called on the long-range artillery sub-unit of KPA Unit 641 to throw their enemies into a “cauldron” and “cut their windpipes”.

Given what happened in November 2010, this was one of his scarier outbursts. When the handful of diplomats in Pyongyang and the hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in South Korea were urged to evacuate in case of “thermo-nuclear war”, most stayed put.

“We want to see if the single Gentleman is as big as Gangnam style,” says Jeong Park, a 20-something student, as Psy prepares to combine the launch with a concert in Seoul’s World Cup Stadium. 

If Gentleman is a more pressing matter in the minds  of most people in the city, the reason is straightforward. The scary season worldwide is the silly season here. The volume may be higher this year and the threats more extravagant, but Koreans have heard all this before.

Springtime always means raised tensions. Around March to April, the United States Forces Korea (USFK) and the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) conduct a joint military exercise, simulating air, ground and naval combat scenarios during a large-scale North Korean attack.

Sixty years after the Korean armistice, the two nations are technically still at war. Washington deployed tactical nuclear weapons on South Korean soil between 1958 and 1991. The USFK still has 28,500 personnel in the country. And, predictably, the drills, codenamed Key Resolve/Foal Eagle, never go down well north of the border.

Furthermore, North Korea, despite the spouting of Marxist-Maoist-sounding jargon, the red flags and the lines of goose-stepping soldiers, often seems more like an ancient dynastic kingdom. As per the Confucian mores in this region of Asia, deceased patriarchs must be shown proper deference on their birthdays.

Kim Jong-il’s birthday on February 16 is known as “the Day of the Kwangmyongsong” (Shining Star), and this year was preceded by a nuclear test. Kim Il-sung, born on April 15, is known as the Suryong (Great Leader), and it is believed more than 34,000 statues of him exist within North Korea. Last year, an estimated $1bn was spent on monuments, festivals and mass rallies to mark the centenary of his birth. The figure roughly equals the revenues derived from that year’s exports of anthracite and other minerals to China.

Such a level of cult worship could only be characteristic of a society organised into a pyramid, with an emperor-figure at the top, demanding fervent adulation and suspicious of “foreign devils”.

If this is what Kim is really all about, then the generals of the KPA, who enjoy luxury in a desperately impoverished society, would function like feudal lords. North Korea fields the world’s fourth largest army and is thought to possess around eight sub-Hiroshima strength plutonium and uranium weapons.

Perhaps the brinkmanship is not the petulance of a boy-dictator acting tough in the playground, but a carefully calculated strategy to ensure loyalty among the KPA hierarchy, most of whom are three to four decades his senior.

That would perhaps explain why the offer of negotiation by US Secretary of State John Kerry – visiting the leaders of South Korea, China and Japan last week – was quickly rebuffed by Pyongyang as a “crafty trick” .

Some analysts, however, speculate that Kim Jong-un is not the real power there. While the young despot salutes the lines of troops, tanks and missiles trundling across Kim Il-sung Square, his aunt and her husband conspire in the background.

The Dear Leader’s younger sister Kim Kyung-hee is married to Chang Song-taek, who as Vice Chairman of the National Defence Commission is effectively the deputy premier of North Korea. Chang is believed to have mentored Kim Jong-un and may have been running the country in the final years of his father’s life, when he was badly debilitated by a series of strokes.

He may or may not still do so: it is impossible to verify. Reporting on North Korea is a thankless task. The few journalists who get in almost always have to employ subterfuge of some sort in order to join carefully managed tours, in which they are kept under strict supervision.

As I head down to Seoul’s Press Centre, I hear a row erupting between the BBC and the London School of Economics about the Panorama reporter John Sweeney, who concealed his identity to accompany a student delegation to Pyongyang. The accusations that Sweeney “endangered the lives” of his fellow travellers strike as fatuous. At worst, the rumbling of an undercover journalist would have resulted in everyone being bundled on a plane out of Pyongyang.

But I am reminded of the intense suspicion that followed me during my own visits.
The birthday of Kim Jong-un’s grandfather passes without incident. Two days later, I am part of a party of foreign journalists taken on a guided tour of Samsung Electronics’ “Digital City”, located in Suwon.

Dating from 1969, it is now a small town in its own right, housing the Samsung Research and Development operation. We are shown the usual corporate films and demonstrations of products, informing us that Samsung accounts for 25.4 per cent of the global mobile phone market share, and that the company’s “Vision 2020” performance goal will generate revenue amounting to $400bn.

However, what I don’t expect is a museum devoted to Samsung’s founder. Lee Byung-chull (1910-87) was also known as Ho-Am, translating as “filling up a space with clear water as lakes do, and being unshakable as a large rock”. He eventually became the richest man in Korea.

We are all invited to photograph the various electrical appliances his company manufactured over the decades. But outside the building, when I try to snap a shot of the front edifice, a suited young man requests that I desist.

His smile is polite, but for a moment I feel a faint echo of the other Korea: in Pyongyang you have to be very careful what you photograph. “A guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles,” is a lyric from Psy’s smash hit. Nuclear armed despot, electronics entrepreneur or K-pop sensation, this is the Korean way.