Korea Briefing, 1992, and: Korea Briefing, 1993 (review)

Book Reviews Korea Briefing, 1992, edited by Donald N. Clark. Boulder: Westview Press in cooperation with the Asia Society, 1992. 198 pp., $39.85 cloth, $14.85 paper. Korea Briefing, 1993, edited by Donald N. Clark. Boulder: Westview Press in cooperation with the Asia Society, 1993. 251 pp., $15.85 paper. Korea Briefing, published annually since 1990, aims to brief the reader on pertinent issues—in descending order of emphasis—on Korean politics, economy , society, and culture for the year in question. It consists of articles written by recognized authorities on the topics addressed. These are not research articles ; rather they are meant to be informative on current issues. I assume that the purpose of a briefing book is to accomplish that task. These two volumes cover a wide range of topics. I cannot presume to discuss them as an expert. Hence, I will discuss the volumes from the point of view of their usefulness. When I saw the first volume, Korea Briefing, 1990, I was happy that there was a publication that recorded in one volume the important political events and economic data for the year. That they are presented to us analyzed and summarized by leading scholars was welcome. I felt that scholars and lay persons interested in Korea might use Korea Briefing fruitfully either as a reference book for data or as a window on changes in contemporary Korea. Reading Korea Briefing, 1992 and Korea Briefing, 1993 more or less confirmed this impression. The most useful pieces are the close surveys of politics and economics. Three articles in the 1992 volume—"Domestic Politics Korean Studies, Volume 19. ©1995 by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. 1 84KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 1 9 and External Relations" by Byung Chul Koh, "North Korea Braves a New World" by Kongdan Oh, and "The South Korean Economy: Is Business Led Growth Working?"—concentrate on one year or a similarly small span of time, but without losing sight of the larger picture. I find their conceptualization and presentation persuasive and informative. The 1992 volume has two essays on Korean society—women and media. These are indeed timely choices, and the essays attempt to place these two important issues in the context of a Korean society on the cusp of change into a more democratic polity. Two writers, however, take different approaches. Chungmoo Choi in "Korean Women in a Culture of Inequality" writes on the state of the art in gender scholarship and discusses inequalities, conditions under which Korean women have lived, under the rubric of patriarchy and capitalism. This is useful from the point of view of introducing the general framework and the central issues in thinking about the question of gender to many readers who might not have been familiar with these perspectives. The article on print media, "The South Korean Press" by Chin Sok Chong, on the other hand, traces the role of the South Korean press, placing it in the context of its political history. While the article focuses on how it evolved from a tool of authoritarianism under repressive regimes to a symbol of freedom of speech under a democratic one, it does not ignore the human complexities involved in the process. It briefly discusses how the media establishment was coopted by the military regime, and at the same time how some of its members put up resistance, and Chong manages to do this without moral condemnation or effusive praise. The 1993 volume on the whole takes a somewhat more macro approach by taking stock of Korean (mostly South Korean) politics, international relations , economics, and culture over a span of forty years, from the conclusion of World War II until the present. I believe this approach is less useful than the approach taken in the 1992 volume which, on politics and economics, concentrated on 1992. 1 am not sure that one turns to a briefing book for overviews of this sort. There are numerous articles and books of varying length and depth to provide fuller perspectives. For instance, the 1993 volume does not have an article on South Korean politics in 1993, a pivotal year in the process of democratization, as South Korea launched the first "democratic...