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This work looks at the success of the Republic of Korea's heavy and chemical industry development (HCI). It reviews the history of the policy decisions that started and then ended the HCI drive. It also examines government intervention in the Korean economy. ... Read more

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The eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula will send political and economic reverberations throughout Northeast Asia and will catalyze the struggle over a new regional order among the four great powers of the Pacific--Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. Korea's Future and the Great Powers addresses the vital issues of how to achieve a stable political order in a unified Korea, how to finance Korean economic reconstruction, and how to link Korea into a cooperative framework of international diplomatic relations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The great powers position -key to twoKorea,s Reunification
In last page of Cover the book Editors write : "The eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula will send political and economic reverberations throughout Northeast Asia and will catalyze the struggle over new regional order amnong the four reat powers of Pacific-Russia, China, Japan, and the United States." Book is edited by leading american reaserchers korean issue. Book is very current now at time start Bejings 6-sides talks. The contibutors of book was outstanding scholars and former politicians , like prof. Robert Scalapino from University California, Marcus Nolland, Robert Galluci,Chuck Downes, Michael Armacost. Book is divided to three parts: first - Historical and political context, second economic context and third strategic implications. Analysis of international enviroment Korean Peninsulais deep and serious. I agre with genaral conclusions book: America must prepared to solve very serious challenges from North Korea and must cooperate with China, Japan , Pacific-Russia
and specially Republic Of Korea. I recomend this book readers want understand korean issue. ... Read more

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During the 1990s the Korean economy was regarded as a possible "role model" to be followed by other newly industrializing economies, but the "Asian Crisis" of 1997 destroyed this image. Past practices, challenges and responses are explored in this collection by an international group of authors. ... Read more

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"The POSCO Strategy" brings to life one of the world's great industrial success stories. Told by William T. Hogan, a commentator on the global steel industry, the work traces the meteoric rise of South Korea's Pohang Iron and Steel Company and the incredible impact it has had on this small agrarian country. In a mere quarter of a century, POSCO has grown to become the largest steel company in the world and has dragged South Korea into the industrial age. The book not only provides a blueprint for the world's steel industry but offers a case study to students of modern Asian economic history seeking to understand how a non-industrialized economy can be so dramatically modernized by the development of a single industry. ... Read more

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Ignorant of basic accounting.
Here's an example: "POSCO attributed these improvements behind its 2000 record profitability to... a decrease in the cost of goods sold due to lower depreciation expenses..." Depreciation is never part of cost of goods sold; cost of goods sold are costs that are directly related to the goods produced, and incurred in the same period in which the goods are produced. Depreciation is related to investment in fixed assets in prior periods. ... Read more

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How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West. ... Read more

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Developing Ajummas
"Dynamic Korea" is the local government's official slogan used to promote the country as an international tourist destination and would-be "Hub of Asia," and might also serve as the rallying cry of those cheerleaders of South Korea's breakneck development ethos. For those more skeptical of the country's ideology of development as it has manifested itself over the past four decades or so, "melodrama of mobility" perhaps more accurately and succinctly describes the mood and condition of South Korean society in the modern era. After reading Nancy Abelmann's "The Melodrama of Mobility," the utopian thinking expressed in such phrases as "Dynamic Korea" and the "Hub of Asia" ring all the more hollow.

Any foreigner who has lived in South Korea for a while has no doubt noticed the confusion and anxiety that seem to permeate just about every level and aspect of Korea society. Change, after all, is the only constant in South Korea. "The Melodrama of Mobility" is a satisfying exploration and analysis of some of the root causes of such confusion and anxiety, specifically from the gendered viewpoints of eight middle-aged South Korean women. The next time the visiting foreigner is elbowed brutally in the side by an ajumma ("auntie") rushing onto a subway car to occupy the last free seat, while they may not quite forgive her, at least they can better understand her.

"The Melodrama of Mobilty" uses the concept of social mobilty to trace the lives of these women as they travel back and forth from countryside to city, across class lines and generational divides, across ever-shifting landscapes of memory and desire. A kind of poststructuralist approach to ethnography and anthropology, the author's main aim is to show that these women's social and personal lives are in constant flux, and cannot be neatly "fixed" or "reified" into static categories of class, status, gender and identity. In this, she largely suceeds.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but had a few problems with the form or structure of it, as well as deployment of the notion of "melodrama" as displayed prominently in the title.

First of all, it's hard to tell who this book's target audience is, beyond some nebulous "Korean Studies" or "Women's Studies" community. At times the book is overloaded with all the usual academic apendages such as constant citations of other academics including page number and year within the text, as well as constant definitions of critical terms and an overly self-concious attention paid to the writer's working methodology. And at the same time, the book is often theoretically dense, befitting a poststructuralist approach, all of which suggests this is a book geared for academics and perhaps undergraduates. However, the book is overly simple in parts and seems to treat the reader like a high school student who needs his or her hand held to get the author's points. Every chapter begins and concludes with summaries of the points made in the chapter, and often includes summaries and restatements already made in previous chapters, as well as teasers advertising points to be made in later chapters, etc., etc. This gets to be tedious after a while, and one wonders why readers capable enough to read poststructuralist enthnography need such "help" in getting the point. Again I ask, who are the intended readers? Personally, I could have done without all the constant summarizing and explications of methodolgy (which take up at least a third of the text) and done with more ethnographic observations of the women represented. One of the main women in the book deals privately in the real estate market in Seoul, for example, but there is little discussion of the networks she navigates while undertaking such work, focusing instead largely on her familial relations. For a book arguing that the division between the personal and the social is artificial, such an ommision is unsatisfying to say the least.

I also found the theme of "melodrama" insufficiently explored. Clearly melodrama is one of the most popular film and TV genres in Korea, and Korean society is indeed often melodramatic (witness weeping politicians hurling shoes in the National Assembly just a few months ago, televised around the world). This is an intriguing framework through which to view Korean society, yet the theoretics of melodrama as well as its application to Korean society and the women in the book are cursory and remain largely unexplored. Again, I would have preferred less self-conscious explication of methodology, and more solid theoretical insights.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the emphasis on retelling the stories and narratives of mobility of these women, as originally told to the author. Strip away the academic elements, the theory and emphasis on detailing methodology, and the book comes to resemble a novel of sorts, or at least a collection of interrelated short stories. I had no luck finding this book in Korea and had to order it online. Adopting more overtly the techniques of narrative, or at least restraining somewhat the distracting "academic" elements, would no doubt guarrantee a much wider readership in the future--which such individuals as appear in this book truly deserve. But then again, I am not an academic, so what do I know? If you're going to play that game, I guess you have to play by those rules. ... Read more

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The second half of the Twentieth Century has seen South Korea transformed from an impoverished, war-ravaged nation to one of the most successful economies in East Asia. This has been accompanied by a military authoritarian regime to a vibrant democracy. ... Read more

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In this volume, an international group of contributors provides a multi-layered analysis of the emerging East Asian media culture, using the Korean TV drama as its analytic vehicle. By closely examining the political economy of TV industry, audiences of the regional media flows in terms of gender subjectivity constructions, perceptions of colonial-postcolonial relationships, and nationalist responses to trans-national media culture exchanges, contributors highlight the multiple connectivities and implications of popular cultural flows and exchanges in East Asia.

In spite of the obvious flows and exchanges that constitute pan-East Asian Pop Culture as a relatively coherent unit, the academic research community is far behind the cultural industry producers who have long factored the regional consumer market into their production and marketing. This volume is motivated by the need to find both the conceptual and institutional site(s) for the constitution of an East Asian Pop Culture. The resulting discoveries demonstrate that this culture co-exists with US domination in global media industry, and offers new empirical and conceptual insights into cultural globalization which cannot be ascertained in existing US-centric analyses. ... Read more

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good book for East Asian popular culture
It's a very good book to learn about the East Asian pop culture and the Korean Wave phenomenone. ... Read more

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Nearly half a century after the fighting stopped, the 1953 Armistice has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War. While Russia and China withdrew the last of their forces in 1958, the United States maintains 37,000 troops in South Korea and is pledged to defend it with nuclear weapons. In Korean Endgame, Selig Harrison mounts the first authoritative challenge to this long-standing U.S. policy. Harrison shows why North Korea is not - as many policymakers expect - about to collapse. And he explains why existing U.S. policies hamper North-South reconciliation and reunification. Assessing North Korean capabilities and the motivations that have led to its forward deployments, he spells out the arms control concessions by North Korea, South Korea, and the United States necessary to ease the dangers of confrontation, centering on reciprocal U.S. force redeployments and U.S. withdrawals in return for North Korean pullbacks from the thirty-eighth parallel. Similarly, he proposes specific trade-offs to forestall the North's development of nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella in conjunction with agreements to denuclearize Korea embracing China, Russia, and Japan.The long-term goal of U.S. policy, he argues, should be the full disengagement of U.S. combat forces from Korea as part of regional agreements insulating the peninsula from all foreign conventional and nuclear forces. A veteran journalist with decades of extensive firsthand knowledge of North Korea and long-standing contacts with leaders in Washington, Seoul, and Pyongyang, Harrison is perfectly placed to make these arguments. Throughout, he supports his analysis with revealing accounts of conversations with North Korean, South Korean, and U.S. leaders over thirty-five years. Combining probing scholarship with a seasoned reporter's on-the-ground experience and insights, he has given us the definitive book on U.S. policy in Korea - past, present, and future. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Commentary on Selig Harrison's Korean Endgame
For a long time I have been searching for a book that addresses the potentially explosive issue of Korea, and even more specifically North Korea. Is Kim Jong Il a madman? What is he seeking? For answers to these questions, and even more imporant ones, this is a book worth reading.

Because I served in Korea during the war, I am more than a little interested in what takes place there. Mr. Harrison's evenhanded account of events over the past few years gave me a better understanding of the Korean situation. If only certain elements in the US government gave this a read, I think all of us would benefit.

Concise and Well-Researched
I went into this book with the normal American preconceptions about North Korean stability and their aggressive track record.The author takes the time to lay out the reasons - and offers concrete steps for all sides that, if carried out, would end the Korean War once and for all.Significant research went into this book.I have yet to find a more well-researched and documented presentation on the historical and present state of Korea, and what it will take to finally declare the end of the war and reduce the $40B spent anually to drag it out. ... Read more