[KS] Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST): Opening tomorrow, Sep 16!
Afostercarter at aol.com
Afostercarter at aol.com
Tue Sep 15 13:26:32 EDT 2009
Dear friends and colleagues,
This is the best thing I've yet seen about PUST,
whose own website appears to have disappeared
just as the place is about to be declared open.
(Its sister college YUST is at _www.yust.edu_ (http://www.yust.edu) ,
but Pust.edu brings up something pontifical in Rome.)
- Sorry, found it! _http://pust.kr/_ (http://pust.kr/) or
_www.pust.or.kr/_ (http://www.pust.or.kr/)
What amazing faith. Call me naive; but surely this is
one way of easing the NK knot, and well worth a try.
Aidan FC
Aidan Foster-Carter
Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds
University, UK
Flat 1, 40 Magdalen Road, Exeter, Devon, EX2 4TE, England, UK
T: (+44, no 0) 07970 741307 (mobile); 01392 257753 Skype:
Aidan.Foster.Carter
E: _afostercarter at aol.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at aol.com) ,
_afostercarter at yahoo.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at yahoo.com) W:
_www.aidanfc.net_ (http://www.aidanfc.net/)
_________________________________
_http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_nort
h_korea.fortune/?postversion=2009091509_
(http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/?postversion=200909
1509)
The capitalist who loves North Korea
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.
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By _Bill Powell_ (mailto:bill_powell at timeinc.com) , senior writer
September 15, 2009: 9:17 AM ET
James Kim, founder of the Pyongyang University of Science and
Technology (PUST)
Kim in front of PUST, which is slated to open this month in North
Korea.
Kim lecturing students at Yanbian University of Science and
Technology, located in China near the border of North Korea
Kim eating with students at Yanbian University
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(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
Kim's success in America
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.)
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."
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
Support from the Christian community
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.")
North Korea, not surprisingly, is the object of intense passion among the
evangelical Christian community in the South.
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.
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."
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.
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?"
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."
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 pea
ce." What he heard back, Kim says, is that the Dear Leader was touched by
that sentiment.
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.
There is no evidence that any of that is true, and Kim Jong Il, despite
his recent diplomatic charm offensive, isn't giving interviews.
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.
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."
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.
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.
This is a government whose underlying philosophy is known as Juche, 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
Reporter associates Scott Cendrowski and Marilyn Adamo contributed to this
article. (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#TOP)
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