Word: korean
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After witnessing the japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor as a dockworker in his native Hawaii, Al Chang joined the Army, got recruited as a cameraman and quickly became one of the country's best combat photographers. His most famous image, above, was of a U.S. soldier in the Korean War who, upon learning of a friend's death, broke down in another soldier's arms. Chang...
North Korea would be an economic basket case if only it could afford the basket. It was once the industrial engine of the Korean peninsula, but decades of disastrous central planning have left its infrastructure in a state of advanced decrepitude and its citizens in de facto peonage. The U.S. government estimates the North's per capita GDP to be about $1,800, roughly the same as Zimbabwe's. Per capita exports are about $60 a year--less than 1% of South Korea's. Aside from fishing, mining and cement production, the North has only a hodgepodge of functional industries...
...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 and other low-end consumer goods; 150 others have signed...
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...
...other pioneers are already there. Orascom, an Egyptian conglomerate, recently signed a $115 million deal to buy a stake in a North Korean cement company. And later this month, a British firm will begin offering subscriptions for the first ever D.P.R.K.-focused investment fund. Colin McAskill, director of the Chosun Development & Investment Fund, says it will concentrate on the mining industry. "You have to think off the wall in North Korea, because nothing conventional has ever worked there," he says...