[KS] Re: KSR 1998.08: _Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats,

[James M. West]

Timothy Lim's just-circulated review of "Troubled Tiger: Businessmen,
Bureaucrats, and Generals in South Korea", by Mark Clifford contains
several assertions which are highly subjective and, in my opinion,
misleading and unwarranted.     

Lim writes:

>Overall, in reading Clifford's perspective on South Korea's political
>economy, one is treated to a fairly balanced, sometimes surprising, and
>always easy to read account of a complex story. For these reasons, however,
>I was particularly unhappy to see Clifford slip into a stereotypical and
>somewhat offensive (if not racist) mode in the last few chapters of his
>book, where he discusses the difficulties Korea has faced, and will
>continue to face, as it moves from the status of a Third World country to a
>"developed" nation. In these chapters, Clifford seems primarily concerned
>with showing that Korea and Koreans have a long way to go before they will
>be ready to "join the Big Leagues" - which to Clifford, seems to mean
>accepting liberal economic policies. 

While the reviewer apparently finds Clifford's criticisms of institutional
features of Korea's political economy "offensive" because they strike him
as patronizing, to insinuate that racial prejudice is at work in Clifford's
narrative is itself offensive to some of us who know Mark Clifford
personally.   Mr. Lim's superficial assessment of the book provides no
basis at all for crying racism.  Ironically, Lim himself is engaged in a
series of stereotyping maneuvers which ill serve potential readers.
    

Lim writes:

>For example, in alluding to a conflict
>over the importation of Florida grapefruits, Clifford refers to the Korean
>press as "hysterical," "conspiratorial," and "xenophobic" (297). He then
>argues that Korean resistance to a fully liberalized agricultural market is
>little more than an irrational and infantile demand for "affirmative
>action" (298).  In almost the same breath, Clifford turns his attention to
>Koreans more generally: he notes that, with regard to bilateral trade, US
>officials are "unhappy with the cocksure attitude of Koreans and their
>often adolescent assertions of national pride" (italics added, 298).
>Clifford himself repeats this theme in chapter 24, when accuses Korean
>authorities of engaging in "juvenile tactics" to discourage imports (337).

The factual record of various incidents in the 1980s supports the
characterizations used by Clifford:  at times Korea's non-tariff barriers
were egregious by international standards (from such incidents as the
notorious release of snakes in theaters screening foreign films to abusive
quarantines which caused whole shiploads of imported fruit to rot at the
docks).  These incidents did infuriate Korea's trading partners in North
America and Europe, in no small part because Korea enjoyed continuous free
access to those export markets.   Does Lim think that Korea's policies were
rational?  Spurious propaganda was churned out by Nonghyop under the Chun
and Roh administrations suggesting that Korean physiology demanded
indigenous produce, as if imported agricultural products were ipso facto
substandard for Koreans.   The anecdotes Clifford uses -- and others which
might have been added -- support the adjectives Lim regards as racist.
As for the chauvinism of some government officials, it disserved Korean
interests precisely because it antagonized foreign counterparts and led
them to more confrontational tactics in trade negotiations, often out of
sheer frustration.   Anyone who was involved in trade matters in the 1980s
can attest that Clifford's narrative does not at all exaggerate the
frictions that prevailed.  Some on the American side displayed prejudices
against Korea (in my experience more in the private sector than in
government), but even Korea's best friends in America had their efforts
undercut by ill-conceived maneuvers on the Korean side.            

Lim goes on:

>In his zeal to stereotype Koreans, Clifford even engages in a bit of
>oxymoronic foolishness - he asserts, for example, that "Koreans too often
>have a greediness, a sense of atomistic individualism that makes common
>cause only with others with whom one has an existing connection, such as
>the family, schoolmates, or coworkers" (342). How one can be atomistically
>individualist and oriented toward larger social groups at the same time is
>certainly beyond me.

While the expression "atomistic individualism" was perhaps unhappy, Lim's
"reductio ad absurdum" is disingenuous.   This relation-centered,
network-based characteristic of Korean culture has been remarked at length
by many Korean academics and pundits -- are they also racist?  

Lim:>It is worth reiterating that all of Clifford's denunciations are based on
>the unwillingness of Koreans to immediately embrace a policy of full
>liberalization. In other words, because Koreans, in general, are afraid of
>the risks posed by a sudden opening of their economy, Clifford feels
>justified in condemning them as infantile, xenophobic, hysterical, and
>untrusting. 

The foregoing is a misstatement of Clifford's arguments -- Clifford does
criticize 
statist policies and contend that liberalization was overdue (and
inevitable), but his denunciations focus also on the shortsightedness of
tactics adopted by many Korean bureaucrats and policymakers.   Clifford
deserves credit for sensing that Korea's failure to engage in steady and
incremental liberalization and structural adjustment over the decade
between 1985 and 1995 would lead to a crisis in confidence (and it did lead
to the IMF crisis, a situation in which Korea lost autonomy it might
otherwise have retained). The issue was not really whether Koreans had
cause to fear the impact of a "sudden opening" -- the nation is facing such
a sudden opening today on highly unfavorable terms largely because Korea's
leadership (not only public officials but chaebol chairmen) misjudged their
ability to cope with the globalization process by an extension of delaying
tactics and ad hoc trade diplomacy.  Clifford's analysis tries to show how
mistakes were compounded by a corrupt and undemocratic political system
that too often sought to externalize domestic problems by blaming
foreigners for infringing on Korean sovereignty.     

Lim:

One might argue, instead, that Clifford's unwillingness to
>acknowledge the social cost associated with "liberalization" is the real
>problem. One could also argue that Clifford's condemnation of Korea is
>extremely unfair: after all, few countries in history - including the
>United States - have readily freed themselves of neo-mercantilist practices
>as they moved from developing to developed status. Indeed, even advanced
>industrial democracies have recurrent problems regarding "free trade" and
>open borders - witness the hysterical backlash against Mexican immigrants
>in the United States. In addition, can one forget the sledgehammering of
>Japanese imported cars in the 1980s by American autoworkers? Was this the
>"mature" response to liberalization that Clifford implies the West has
>taken?

We see now that the social cost of NOT liberalizing at the right time is
turning out to be far higher than anyone expected.  Lim's argument is wide
of the mark -- Clifford never set the US up as a paradigm to be followed.
Now Chrysler is merging with Daimler-Benz and GM has labor trouble, but in
Korea we have Kia being auctioned off and Hyundai facing labor strife over
massive layoffs which stem from excess capacity as well as slackened
domestic demand.     It is nonsense to suggest that Clifford is crucifying
Korea in an ahistorical, exceptionalistic tirade.  


Lim:
>None of this is to say that Koreans should avoid liberalizing their
>economy; rather, it is to say that Clifford's "hysterical" rhetoric is not
>an appropriate or particularly constructive way to deal with the issue.

It is true that Clifford's narrative -- based in large part on his earlier
journalistic work in Korea -- is written in a "lively" and sometimes
sarcastic tone rather than in the measured cadences of scholarly discourse.
  But to accuse him of "hysterical rhetoric" is itself a little hysterical.
     

Lim:
>Despite these misgivings, I still believe that Troubled Tiger is a useful,
>informative, and even important book. It should, however, be read with
>caution and with the understanding that Clifford's perspective is deeply
>colored by a neo-liberal and distinctly Anglo-American bias, which the
>author neither questions nor acknowledges.

Here the bias is largely in the eye of the beholder, it seems to me.  The
dismal science is not a domain in which consensus is to be expected, but to
me "bias" implies systematic distortion devoid of objectively rational
grounds.   Clifford is selective in his focus, and I do not always agree
with his diagnoses and prescriptions, but I think he makes a constant
effort to produce reasons and evidence for his opinions.  My own major
criticism of the book is that it is too anecdotal and lacking in a
compelling theoretical framework.  Mr. Lim, on the other hand, supplies us
with a caricature of that missing theoretical framework:  Clifford is a
dogmatic neo-liberal imperialist who has no respect for Koreans and wants
to homogenize Korea by incorporating it into the world-system in a
semi-peripheral role.  Also, Mr. Lim seems predisposed to assuage the
wounded pride of (fellow?) Koreans, as if Clifford were kicking them when
they are down. Actually, that is impossible, for he wrote the book five
years ago and finished this revised edition (only the last chapter is new)
before the IMF crisis broke.  Clifford saw the writing on the wall five
years ago, unlike those who were congratulating Korea on its "miraculaous"
elevation to the promised land of the OECD.  

James West
Research Fellow, East Asian Legal Studies
Harvard Law School


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