Kim Daejung and the Nobel Peace Prize

From The Marmot's Hole, we get a reminder of a persistent meme:

It was a progressive President (Kim Dae Jung), who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his summit with KJI. It’s comical now to see their famous photo together in light of the obvious payoff that got that photo-op in the first place – for which one of Kim’s administration was sentenced to prison.

A persistent but incorrect meme, attributed not just to the above commenter but shared and spread by countless commenters, bloggers, pundits, and journalists.

To be specific, the meme is that it was the Kim Daejung-Kim Jong-il summit in 2000 that got him the prize. That would be the null hypothesis, whereas the alternate hypothesis would be that without the summit he would still have gotten it.

Let's go directly to the horse's mouth for the reasons Kim Daejung was awarded the Nobel, the Nobel Committee's announcement itself:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2000 to Kim Dae-jung for his work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and in East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular.

In the course of South Korea's decades of authoritarian rule, despite repeated threats on his life and long periods in exile, Kim Dae-jung gradually emerged as his country's leading spokesman for democracy. His election in 1997 as the republic's president marked South Korea's definitive entry among the world's democracies. As president, Kim Dae-jung has sought to consolidate democratic government and to promote internal reconciliation within South Korea.

With great moral strength, Kim Dae-jung has stood out in East Asia as a leading defender of universal human rights against attempts to limit the relevance of those rights in Asia. His commitment in favour of democracy in Burma and against repression in East Timor has been considerable.

Through his "sunshine policy", Kim Dae-jung has attempted to overcome more than fifty years of war and hostility between North and South Korea. His visit to North Korea gave impetus to a process which has reduced tension between the two countries. There may now be hope that the cold war will also come to an end in Korea. Kim Dae-jung has worked for South Korea's reconciliation with other neighbouring countries, especially Japan.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to express its recognition of the contributions made by North Korea's and other countries' leaders to advance reconciliation and possible reunification on the Korean peninsula.

Nowhere does it mention the summit, though that would be covered more generally under "sunshine policy." However, the reward itself was by no means just for the Sunshine Policy, as is clear by the statement by the Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee in the award ceremony speech:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2000 to Kim Dae-jung. He receives the prize for his lifelong work for democracy and human rights in South Korea and East Asia in general, and for peace and reconciliation with North Korea in particular. We welcome the Laureate here today.

Again, the summit is not mentioned, and what it is a part of is mentioned secondarily. It was his work long before 2000 that got him notice and got him the prize. That, in fact, was specifically mentioned when he was awarded the prize in 2000:

The question has been raised of whether it is too early to award the prize for a process of reconciliation which has only just begun. It would suffice to say in reply that Kim Dae-jung's work for human rights made him a worthy candidate irrespective of the recent developments in relations between the two Korean states.

But, you might protest, would he really have gotten the Nobel without the attention-grabbing Kim-Kim summit? Again, we can look at the words of the Nobel Committee for the answer. Kim Daejung's "lifelong work for democracy and human rights in South Korea" is on par with other award winners, notably Aung San Suu Kyi from Myanmar/Burma in 1991, Lech Walesa of Poland in 1983, Nelson Mandela in 1993, etc. The latter is notable because Kim Daejung has often been referred to as "the Nelson Mandela of Asia."

At best, the June 2000 summit may have caused the Nobel Committee to take notice of Kim Daejung's nomination, which would have been received by February 2000, four months before the summit actually took place, but a lot more happened prior to that which would also have gotten them to take notice. South Korea and its very messy moves toward democratization were a major story in 1987 and 1988 as the Olympics had all eyes on the ROK.

This was part and parcel of an Asian Spring that flourished a decade and a half before there was an Arab Spring. It was the likes of Corazon Aquino and Kim Daejung, among others, who shaped the East Asia of today, and it is for that primarily that Kim Daejung was awarded the Nobel.

These are people who risked their lives to bring democracy and respect for human rights to their country and their region. To diminish this by saying Kim Daejung "bought the Nobel Prize" — even if the case can be made that he bought that summit — is a revisionist travesty.

(More on Kim Daejung here, in my ode to him after he died)

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Echoes of Lee Hanyŏl?

When I heard about Occupy Wall Street protester Scott Olsen, who was severely injured in Oakland, California, after being hit by a fragment from a tear gas grenade (or something else as bad), I couldn't help but make the connection with Lee Hanyŏl (이한열), the Yonsei University student who died twenty-four years ago after being struck in the head with shrapnel from a tear gas grenade that detonated over his head.

Mr Lee's death became a catalyst for wider protests that drew in everyday citizens outside the protest-prone universities. Although Mr Olsen is thankfully on the mend, one wonders how things might have changed had this injury been fatal.



Of course, having an inadvertent (near-)martyr is one of the few similarities between US11 and ROK87. For starters, what the students and other citizens were fighting for in 1987 was much clearer than what the OWS crowd is after, which is what exactly? In 1987, the goal was well defined: to get direct elections that had been promised in the wake of Park Chunghee's death, and many of the people were willing to pay with their freedom and possibly their lives.

By contrast, in the United States we already have the open elections South Koreans were fighting for. The problem is that Americans have allowed their democracy to erode. They stay home instead of voting, and they fail to push for effective reforms that would curtail the ability of moneyed interests to control their electoral process and thus the pursestrings.

And I suspect that many of the "occupiers" wilt in the face of a tear gas cloud. Well, so do people in Korea, but the latter, at least back in the 1980s and 1990s, walked into the situation expecting to be gassed, and possibly even craving it. You were no one if you'd never inhaled the burning waft.

If you've never been teargassed, let me tell you it's not a pleasant experience. Sting gas would be a more appropriate name for the stuff, because it does just that, and it gets into your facial orifices, from your nostrils to your eye sockets, and it stays there. It debilitates you, making you unable to run away and sometimes blinds you so you can't even walk very far. Nasty, nasty stuff.

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A constitutional crisis in China

Monster Island favorite Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times is reporting from Beijing on a subtle form of protest being employed in the People's Republic of China:

Whoever is sending out the mysterious tweets calling for regular Sunday afternoon "strolls" around China has come up with a highly effective psychological operation against the government, sending a paranoid security apparatus chasing at shadows.

The possibility that somebody might heed the coy calls to protest led Chinese security to virtually shut down some of the most heavily trafficked sites in the country: a McDonald's on the popular Wangfujing pedestrian mall in downtown Beijing and Shanghai's People's Park.

Wangfujing on Sunday had the feel of a Cold War spy novel, with shifty-eyed plain-clothed agents scanning the crowd and dozens of foreign reporters doing their best to remain incognito in fading sweatshirts and wool hats.

After roughing up one journalist and injuring several others, police cleared the area using a novel method: They deployed a battalion of street-cleaning trucks, preventing anybody from leaving or entering for more than an hour and causing curious pedestrians to wonder why authorities were cleaning the street on a sunny weekend afternoon.

The crackdown has only emboldened the organizers of the protests, who remain anonymous and appear to be operating from outside China. For this weekend, they've named 55 locations in 41 cities, all popular gathering places, such as a Starbucks in Guangzhou and a spot in front of the statue of Mao Tse-tung in Chengdu.

"The Chinese government is its own worst enemy," said Minxin Pei, a Chinese-born political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. "You can see that the level of paranoia and insecurity at the top levels of the Chinese government is truly beyond what you would imagine."

Hmm... I wonder if any of these outside-China organizers are here in Honolulu.

Anyway, I like this story in part because (a) it's nice to see the Chinese government get nervous that they are not satisfying the wants, needs, and desires of the people, as this is one of the few checks the people of the People's Republic have on their government, and (b) it's not often you get to use that other meaning of constitutional (i.e., a walk or stroll to maintain or restore one's health) when referring to politics.

Gatherings near Wangfujing McDonald's late last month [source]

It's also interesting that a number of the sites for these protests with a hint of jasmine are using symbols of Western corporatism (e.g., McDonald's, and I think Starbucks and KFC) as gathering points. Interesting, but not surprising given that these become meet-up landmarks in a given locale (not unlike South Korea).

It's important to remember that despite the peaceful nature of these protests, Beijing is taking it grimly seriously. Reporting from the area has been formally prohibited, and as the LAT piece mentions, they're targeting and tracking the foreign press (and perhaps bloggers as well). They're also using good old-fashioned physical obstructions to thwart would-be protesters.