Word: kim
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...decades, South Korean entrepreneur Kim Cheul Young has struggled to keep his manufacturing business from unraveling. Kim's company, Sunghwa Trading, makes socks for familiar Western brands including Calvin Klein and Gap. His is a business that competes on cost and not much else, which is why the majority of the world's sock supply comes from countries such as China and Vietnam where labor costs are low. 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...
...Kim's prediction would have once been laughable. After all, North and South Korea are still technically at war, and in the autumn of 2006 Pyongyang's insular regime defied the world by testing a nuclear bomb. But since February 2007, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il struck a 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...
...Indeed, when Lee is inaugurated next month, he will assume office at a crucial time for the Korean peninsula. In October, outgoing South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun met in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il, marking just the second inter-Korean summit ever. The North may also be on the brink of a historic peace agreement with the U.S. - one that President George W. Bush, in his last year in office, appears to want desperately in order to shore up his controversial foreign-policy legacy. A deal between Washington and Pyongyang - predicated on the North verifiably giving up its nuclear...
...South cooperation is a victory for Roh, whose national political career will end when he leaves office next month. (South Korean Presidents under the constitution are limited to one five-year term.) In his first years in office, Roh was derided by many in Washington as an apologist for Kim Jong Il. Now, Bush has all but adopted the "Sunshine Policy" by promising Pyongyang a range of diplomatic and economic blandishments in return for the North's nuclear disarmament. Although Pyongyang missed a Dec. 31 deadline to come clean about the full extent of its nuclear-weapons program...
Before we arrived at our government-run hotel (which had authentic North Korean touches like no heat or hot water despite the freezing temperatures), our minibus stopped at a statue of the deceased Great Leader Kim Il Sung, where we were told to bow and present flowers. Being a tourist in North Korea was going to be even more bizarre than we had thought...