Word: kaesong
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...Five years ago Kim opened a factory in Qingdao in northeast China to combat intensifying competition from Chinese garmentmakers, but that move wasn't enough to keep his profit margins from eroding. In 2005, he grabbed for an economic lifeline: he became one of the first investors in the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a special economic zone in North Korea that lies just across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), 50 km north of Seoul. Kaesong is a symbol of South Korea's so-called "Sunshine Policy,'' the effort of the country's past two Presidents to draw the North and South closer...
...deal with the U.S., Japan, Russia, China and South Korea to begin dismantling his nuclear program in exchange for aid and normalized relations with Washington, there has been a burst of cooperation between the two Koreas. In mid-December, a direct rail link opened between Seoul and the Kaesong Industrial Complex across the DMZ in the North, and work continues on a variety of other infrastructure projects, including extending the rail line all the way to the North's border with China. Not even South Korea's newly elected President Lee Myung Bak, a political hard-liner when it comes...
...companies. But in South Korea, economic engagement with the D.P.R.K.--the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself--is government policy. South Korea has invested heavily in two well-known public-private development projects: a resort area at Mount Kumgang and an industrial zone in Kaesong, about six miles (10 km) north of the Demilitarized Zone. There, 13,300 North Korean workers earning $70 a month churn out exports in conditions a former Western diplomat compares to a labor camp's. So far, 15 South Korean companies have opened factories in Kaesong, producing shoes, watches, mufflers...
Largely because of Kaesong, North Korean exports to the South shot up 63.3% in the first half of 2007. Hyundai Asan, the South Korean conglomerate that manages the two projects and has invested nearly $1 billion in them, is convinced that North Korea is ready to embrace capitalism. "The North Koreans are really studying the market-oriented system," says Jang Whan Bin, Hyundai Asan's senior vice president of international business and investor relations. Such optimism is essential for South Koreans, for whom investment in the North is less an overture for integration than a hedge against their neighbor...
Seoul said this morning that diplomats from both North and South will immediately begin lower-level meetings in advance of the summit. They will gather at the Kaesong Industrial park, just north of the demilitarized zone that has divided the Korean peninsula since 1953. The choice of site pays implicit homage to the June 2000 summit between Kim Jong Il and then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. The Kaesong park - where South Korean light manufacturing plants employ North Korean workers - is one of the few lasting achievements to come out of that meeting. After Kim Dae Jung's term...