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<DIV><FONT size=4>Dear friends and colleagues,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>This is the best thing I've yet seen about
PUST,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>whose own website appears to have
disappeared</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>just as the place is about to be declared open.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>(Its sister college YUST is at <A
href="http://www.yust.edu">www.yust.edu</A> ,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>but Pust.edu brings up something pontifical in
Rome.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>- Sorry, found it! <A
href="http://pust.kr/">http://pust.kr/</A> or <A
href="http://www.pust.or.kr/">www.pust.or.kr/</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>What amazing faith. Call me naive; but surely this
is</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>one way of easing the NK knot, and well worth a
try.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>Aidan FC</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="COLOR: black; FONT-SIZE: 14pt" lang=EN-GB><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Aidan Foster-Carter<o:p></o:p></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><I
style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><SPAN style="COLOR: black" lang=EN-GB><FONT
size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology
& Modern Korea, Leeds University, UK
<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></I></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="COLOR: black"
lang=EN-GB><o:p><FONT size=3
face="Times New Roman"> </FONT></o:p></SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="COLOR: black"
lang=EN-GB><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Flat 1, 40 Magdalen Road,
Exeter, Devon, EX2 4TE, England, UK<o:p></o:p></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="COLOR: black"
lang=EN-GB><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">T: (+44, no 0) <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>07970 741307 (mobile); <SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><SPAN
style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">01392 257753<SPAN
style="mso-tab-count: 1"> </SPAN></SPAN><I
style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Skype</I>: Aidan.Foster.Carter<SPAN
style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><FONT size=3><FONT
face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="COLOR: black; mso-bidi-font-style: italic"
lang=EN-GB>E: </SPAN><SPAN style="COLOR: black" lang=EN-GB><A
title=mailto:afostercarter@aol.com
href="mailto:afostercarter@aol.com">afostercarter@aol.com</A>,<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><A
title=mailto:afostercarter@yahoo.com
href="mailto:afostercarter@yahoo.com">afostercarter@yahoo.com</A><SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN><SPAN
style="mso-tab-count: 1"> </SPAN>W: <A
title=http://www.aidanfc.net/
href="http://www.aidanfc.net/">www.aidanfc.net</A><o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt" class=MsoNormal><SPAN
style="COLOR: black; FONT-SIZE: 14pt" lang=EN-GB><o:p><FONT
face="Times New Roman"> </FONT></o:p></SPAN></P></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4>_________________________________</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=4></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><A
href="http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/?postversion=2009091509"><FONT
size=2>http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/?postversion=2009091509</FONT></A></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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<H1
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class=storyheadline>The capitalist who loves North Korea</H1>
<H2
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 18px; MARGIN: 0px; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-SIZE: 16px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold"
class=storysubhead>After making it as an entrepreneur in America, James Kim is
fulfilling his dream of opening an university in North Korea that will offer, of
all things, an MBA.</H2>
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<DIV style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87); FONT-SIZE: 11px"
class=storybyline>By<SPAN class=Apple-converted-space> </SPAN><A
style="COLOR: rgb(0,66,118); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="mailto:bill_powell@timeinc.com">Bill Powell</A>, senior writer</DIV>
<DIV style="COLOR: rgb(87,87,87); FONT-SIZE: 11px"
class=storytimestamp>September 15, 2009: 9:17 AM ET</DIV><BR clear=all>
<DIV style="LINE-HEIGHT: 20px; WIDTH: 618px !important; FONT-SIZE: 14px"
class=storytext>
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<TR>
<TD align=middle><IMG border=0 alt=james_kim.03.jpg
src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/james_kim.03.jpg"
width=220 height=232></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top align=left><SPAN
style="Z-INDEX: 100; BORDER-BOTTOM: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; POSITION: relative; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; PADDING-BOTTOM: 6px; PADDING-LEFT: 6px; PADDING-RIGHT: 6px; DISPLAY: block; FONT: 11px Arial; BORDER-TOP-STYLE: none; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87); TOP: -7px; BORDER-RIGHT: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; PADDING-TOP: 12px"
class=captionname><B style="FONT: 11px Arial; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87)">James
Kim, founder of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology
(PUST)</B></SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
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src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/james_kim_north_korea.03.jpg"
width=220 height=172></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top align=left><SPAN
style="Z-INDEX: 100; BORDER-BOTTOM: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; POSITION: relative; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; PADDING-BOTTOM: 6px; PADDING-LEFT: 6px; PADDING-RIGHT: 6px; DISPLAY: block; FONT: 11px Arial; BORDER-TOP-STYLE: none; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87); TOP: -7px; BORDER-RIGHT: rgb(235,235,235) 1px solid; PADDING-TOP: 12px"
class=captionname><B style="FONT: 11px Arial; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87)">Kim in
front of PUST, which is slated to open this month in North
Korea.</B></SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
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src="http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/kim_lecture.03.jpg"
width=220 height=159></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top align=left><SPAN
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class=captionname><B style="FONT: 11px Arial; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87)">Kim
lecturing students at Yanbian University of Science and Technology,
located in China near the border of North
Korea</B></SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
<DIV style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 15px; WIDTH: 220px; CLEAR: both" class=IErow>
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width=220 height=154></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top align=left><SPAN
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class=captionname><B style="FONT: 11px Arial; COLOR: rgb(87,87,87)">Kim
eating with students at Yanbian
University</B></SPAN></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
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<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">(Fortune Magazine) -- James Kim, an American
businessman turned educator, once sat in the very last place that anyone in the
world would wish to be: a cold, dank prison cell in Pyongyang, the godforsaken
capital of North Korea.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim, who had emigrated from South Korea to the
United States in the 1970s, had been a frequent visitor to Pyongyang over the
years in pursuit of what, to many, seemed at best a quixotic cause. He wanted to
start an international university in Pyongyang, with courses in English, an
international faculty, computers, and Internet connections for all the
students.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Not only that -- in the heart of the world's
most rigidly Communist country, Kim wanted his school to include that training
ground for future capitalists: an MBA program.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">During one of his trips to the capital in 1998,
with North Korea in the midst of a famine that would eventually kill thousands,
the state's secret police arrested Kim.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il didn't lock up
the educator for being crazy. He got it in his head that the oddly persistent
American -- who at the time, among other things, was helping to feed starving
North Koreans with deliveries of food aid from China -- was a spy.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">So for more than 40 days, Kim languished in a
North Korean prison. An evangelical Christian, Kim wrote his last will and
testament during those days, not knowing if he'd ever get out.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Which makes where he plans to be in
mid-September all the more astonishing. Kim will lead a delegation of 200
dignitaries from around the world to North Korea for the dedication of the first
privately funded university ever allowed in the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea: the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST).</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">The school will have an international faculty
educating, eventually, around 600 graduate students. Kim dreams ultimately of
hosting an industrial park around the PUST campus, drawing firms from around the
world -- a North Korean version, as bizarre as it sounds, of Palo Alto or
Boston's Route 128.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">There will be Internet access for all,
connecting the students to an outside world that they've heretofore been
instructed is a hostile and dangerous place. And among the six departments will
be a school of industrial management.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">"We ended up not calling it an 'MBA program,'"
jokes David Kim (no relation to James), a former Bechtel and Pacific Gas &
Electric executive who has relocated to Pyongyang to help set up PUST, "because
they [the North Koreans] think it sounds vaguely imperialistic."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">That the North Koreans are permitting this to
happen -- that they have given James Kim the nod to create his university, just
as he intended -- is remarkable.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">It's hard for outsiders to understand just how
backward, isolated, and impoverished North Korea is. Since the collapse of the
Eastern bloc 20 years ago, fewer and fewer North Korean university students
study abroad. Allowing PUST to proceed lets a gust of fresh air into a stilted,
frightfully isolated environment.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Ben Rosen, the venture capitalist who co-founded
Compaq Computer in 1982, befriended Kim last year on a visit to Pyongyang with
the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. After touring the 248-acre campus with Kim
as it was under construction, Rosen became a believer. The university, he says,
will give students "a window to the outside world and will create a new
generation of technocrats with the potential to lead a post-Kim Jong Il
government."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">The man behind this masterstroke of
international relations consciously creates a bit of an air of mystery around
himself. Ask him two very basic questions -- how old are you, and where were you
born -- and Kim (whose Korean given name is Chin-Kyung) cheerfully demurs.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">As for his age (public records in Florida, where
he was a small-business man for more than a decade, say he was born in September
1935), he says it's all in the mind -- a function of your health and your
attitude. "And I am very healthy," he says with a grin.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">As to where, exactly, he was born, he declines
to say, without much explanation. Kim's father -- himself an educator -- was
very much a product of the tumultuous history of colonization and war that
engulfed Northeast Asia in the first part of the 20th century, and thus very
much on the move. During World War II, Kim's father fled the Japanese occupation
of Korea, escaping to northeast China -- not far from Yanji, where his son's
dreams took shape half a century later.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">That dream -- to bring Western education to his
countrymen -- first manifested itself some 17 years ago, when Kim built a small
(1,750 students) but thriving, privately funded university in Yanji, the Yanbian
University of Science and Technology (YUST).</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Twice this summer I met at length with Kim in
Yanji, which abuts the North Korean border, and sits in Jilin province, where
more than half of the citizens are ethnic Korean. Though pleasantly cool in the
summer, this part of China is cold and dark in the winter, and Kim's standard
greeting to visitors is "Welcome to the North Pole."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">He is endlessly energetic. When he's not off
fundraising around the world, he bounces around the campus starting at six each
morning, buttonholing students he happens upon. But these days, as the
dedication of the school in North Korea draws near, he is more often than not in
Pyongyang.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">He carries an American passport and has what
amounts to a multiple-entry visa to the most closed country on the planet.
(Although the Korean War ended more than 50 years ago, Washington has never
signed a peace treaty with the North.) He wants to make sure the dedication
stays on track.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">It has already been delayed once: PUST
originally was to be dedicated last year, but Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had a
stroke in the summer of 2008, and everything froze. Until very recently the
overt hostility North Korea had evinced toward the U.S. and its allies cast real
doubt as to whether PUST would ever open.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">And for that reason Kim is very, very careful to
parse his language when he talks about the North Korean government. Read him
what Ben Rosen said about the potential PUST has to change North Korea, and Kim
interjects quickly: "We're not going to change North Korea. We're going to help
it."</P>
<DIV
style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 5px; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-SIZE: 16px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold"
class=inStoryHeading>Kim's success in America</DIV>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">This is pretty heady stuff for a former
small-business man who made enough money running a South Korean taxi company to
move to Pensacola, Fla. (He had been visiting a cousin attending school in the
Sunshine State and liked the area.)</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">After arriving in America in 1976, he started a
wig business. "In those days, South Korea dominated the wig export business,"
Kim recalled recently. "So I set up a business in Florida importing wigs from
South Korea. It turned out to be pretty successful."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim says he came to the U.S. for a
straightforward reason, the same reason so many immigrants do: He figured it was
the best place to "make some money."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">But money, for him, was always only going to be
a means to an end. "I knew that if I were to go to these two Communist countries
-- China and North Korea -- and do what I wanted to do, it would not only
provide me with some wealth, but a U.S. passport as well. You guys are the Roman
Empire of your day; you can go pretty much wherever you want."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">His commercial landlord at the time, Frank Webb,
recalls two things about James Kim: that he was a devout Christian, and that he
always talked about setting up schools in China and North Korea.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim added a clothes store in the 1980s, then
bought a chain of women's shoe stores in Pensacola that he expanded
successfully. In short, Kim and his wife, Grace, who helped him run the
business, were living the American dream: They were recent immigrants who worked
hard and were more than making a go of it. They were prospering. "By the
mid-1980s we had three good businesses," Kim says now.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">And that's when he decided it was time to get on
with his life's work. Leaving his wife behind in Florida to sell the family
business and join him later, Kim headed for the northeastern part of China,
where his father had been before him.</P>
<DIV
style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 5px; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-SIZE: 16px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold"
class=inStoryHeading>Support from the Christian community</DIV>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Of all the nations in Asia where Christianity
has tried to put down roots, Korea has been the most fertile ground. Roughly 20%
of the population is Christian. Westerners who come to Seoul for the first time
are often surprised by the number of neon crosses that glow atop churches in the
city at night.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">But it is not only South Korea where Christian
missionaries worked successfully to find converts. Long before war divided Korea
at mid-century, Christian missionaries had gone to North Korea. Ruth Graham, the
late wife of evangelist Billy Graham, went to prep school in Pyongyang in the
1920s.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim is emblematic of just how deep those
Christian roots run in Korea. His father converted to Christianity as a young
man and attended a university in Pyongyang started by Presbyterian missionaries
in 1897.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">He was running a Christian school near Busan, in
the South, when he fled the Japanese occupation "rather than bow to Shinto
gods," as Kim now says. In 1939 his father went to Heilongjiang province in
northeastern China, where he opened another school for girls; he returned to
South Korea in 1945, with the defeat of Imperial Japan.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">When James was 15 years old, he tried to enlist
in the army as the Korean War broke out, but a recruiter first turned him away
as too young. "I cut my finger and wrote in blood, 'I love my country,'" so the
recruiter changed his mind and accepted him. He joined an army unit of 800, and
by 1952 only 17 remained. The rest had been killed.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Until that point, Kim had not himself been
particularly religious. He had watched his grandfather "persecute" his father
for his conversion to Christianity. But on the battlefield one night, Kim read
from the Gospel of St. John, which had been passed out by a U.S. Army chaplain
to the troops who remained. Having watched so much of his unit get wiped out, it
was verse 3:16 that spoke to him: "That whosoever shall believe in Him should
not perish, but have everlasting life."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Then and there, says Kim, "I vowed to God to
work with the Chinese and the North Koreans -- then our enemies. I would devote
my life to it, if I survived the war."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">For Kim, this was not a convenient "atheist in a
foxhole" moment: He studied his newfound faith assiduously. In the early '70s
Kim traveled to Europe, where he attended a school set up in Switzerland by an
esteemed American evangelist, Francis Schaffer. He then went to England to study
at an evangelical seminary before returning to Seoul in 1972.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">His plan upon arriving in China was to follow in
his father's footsteps and to do sort of a dry run for his ultimate goal:
setting up a university in Pyongyang. Using some of the money he had made from
selling his small businesses in the U.S., and then raising money from private
donors -- drawing heavily on the evangelical Christian community in South Korea
and abroad -- Kim in 1992 began YUST.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">To date, more than 90% of the graduates get
jobs, and South Korean companies operating in China are particularly aggressive
in hiring its students. "They just line up to recruit them," says Malcolm
Gillis, the former president of Rice University who is on the board of PUST.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim and his wife now live in faculty housing, in
a small two-bedroom apartment. Though not officially a Christian school, which
would be illegal in China, both the faculty and the students tend to be drawn
from the devout. Many faculty members go without pay (as some will in
Pyongyang). And the provincial government allows YUST to have a chapel on campus
accessible only to university-affiliated personnel.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">"There was a lot of suspicion from the
[government] at first," Kim concedes. "But as the school has grown we've shown
them that we are not in any way a threat to them." Left unstated is the obvious:
that the small school on the North Korean border was Kim's model for his
Pyongyang project.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">He had two challenges: funding it and getting
the North Korean government to agree to it. Kim's deep roots in the South Korean
Christian community have given him a lot of contacts among Seoul's corporate and
educational elite. He has the presidents of two prestigious Korean universities
on PUST's board of directors, and on a recent weekend in Yanji, Kim had two
senior executives, including vice chairman Heon-Cheol Shin from South Korea's
biggest oil company, SK Energy, visiting him to check on the progress of the
Pyongyang project.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Kim has the energy of someone half his age --
and he never stops plumping for the university. Venture capitalist Rosen recalls
that on his tour of the campus in Pyongyang early last year Kim kept pushing him
to join his board of directors. At one point he pointed to one of the buildings
under construction and joked, "Look, Ben, there's your new office!" (My wife,
Rosen jokes, "just about died.")</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">North Korea, not surprisingly, is the object of
intense passion among the evangelical Christian community in the South.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">South Korean churches have done much good work
publicizing human rights abuses in the North -- to Pyongyang's intense
displeasure -- but they have also raised funds for food aid and helped
distribute it via a variety of networks. But to say that a good portion of the
evangelical community in the South -- and indeed worldwide -- is hostile to the
Kim Jong Il government is to state the obvious.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">It is into this diplomatic minefield that Kim
has stepped. "If you had told me that [Kim] was going to raise money from
evangelical churches worldwide to help fund a new university in Pyongyang, and
that he'd get the North Korean government to go along with it, I'd have told you
that you were nuts," says a state department official. "Remember, in 1998 Kim
Jong Il had him held in detention."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">That fact does raise questions. Ask him how he
has been able to pull this project off, and Kim says, "I have unlimited credit
at the Bank of Heaven." The suspicion, voiced by some skeptics in Seoul and
elsewhere, is that he also must have had to make a pretty hefty deposit at the
Bank of Kim Jong Il.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">To the extent that any business gets done in
North Korea, the piper has to be paid, foreign businessmen and diplomats say.
"I'd find it hard to believe otherwise," one Seoul-based executive who has done
business in the North says, "but who knows?"</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">Asked directly whether any of the roughly $10
million he raised to fund PUST has gone to the regime in Pyongyang, Kim says:
"Every brick we used, every bit of steel, every bit of equipment, we brought in
from China. I have never brought any cash into North Korea."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">So why did the North Korean government come to
trust him? "When I was detained, I was very calm. I wrote that I was not afraid
to die, because I knew I would go to a better place. And I wrote that if I did
die, I would donate my organs for medical research in North Korea. I told them I
was at peace." What he heard back, Kim says, is that the Dear Leader was touched
by that sentiment.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">There are so many horror stories about Kim Jong
Il and the country that he rules that it's hard to know what to make of that.
Suspicions linger that some sort of deal was cut. That somehow Dear Leader Kim
is using University President Kim. Or being paid off by him. Or that Kim has
divided loyalties.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">There is no evidence that any of that is true,
and Kim Jong Il, despite his recent diplomatic charm offensive, isn't giving
interviews.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">And for the record, though Kim is excruciatingly
diplomatic in terms of what he says publicly about the regime, Fortune, having
spent a considerable amount of time with Kim and his team in Yanji this summer,
is pretty convinced that his loyalties lie in only one direction -- to the man
upstairs. And by that, we don't mean Kim Jong Il.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">PUST Board member Gillis believes that Kim's
lack of guile may ultimately be what convinced the North Koreans. "This is a guy
who is doing this for the reasons he says: that it would be a good and helpful
thing for North Korean students to have a modern, international university, with
faculty drawn from abroad. Through many years of hard work, [he's] been able to
convince the government that that's the case. And it has the added benefit of
being true. He's open and transparent. There are no hidden agendas here."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">With the formal dedication set for Sept. 16 --
Kim and his staff are deep into trying to hire faculty and settle on
nuts-and-bolts issues, like which textbooks will be used in courses that will
begin in a few months. As David Kim, the Bechtel alum, relates, very little of
that stuff is straightforward in North Korea.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">How, for example, will economics and finance be
taught? While students at elite universities in most of the world learn the same
basic principles from the same authors -- Econ 101 from Samuelson and Nordhaus
et al. -- in North Korea, Western economics is not only alien to most citizens
of the Communist state, it is also downright threatening.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">This is a government whose underlying philosophy
is known as<SPAN class=Apple-converted-space> </SPAN><I>Juche</I>, or
self-reliance, and everyone is supposed to be a servant of the Dear Leader. How
you square that with Adam Smith's invisible hand and enlightened self-interest
is not at all obvious.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">"If we're just going there to teach things the
way they teach them now, it's a waste of our time," concedes Kim. "But we also
don't want to be perceived as doing anything that threatens them."</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">So PUST is -- very much -- a work in progress.
But given how close it is to reality, issues like curriculum fade. The only one
out there who thought there'd be an international university opening in
Pyongyang in 2009, offering the equivalent of an MBA, with courses in English to
some 600 students, was the same guy whom the North Koreans arrested in 1998.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">James Kim and his cohorts will no doubt figure
out a way to teach Econ 101. They're going to teach Western economics, and
finance, and management in one of the most backward economies in the world, one
which again is having trouble feeding many of its citizens, according to recent
reports from NGOs there.</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px">That may seem like a rather hopeless task, but
hope -- not to mention faith -- is something James Kim has in abundance. And
given that he was sitting in a Pyongyang jail 11 years ago this month, who could
blame him?</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px"><I>Reporter associates Scott Cendrowski and
Marilyn Adamo contributed to this article.</I> <A
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