The Korea Herald

[Trudy Rubin] Trump shaking up Mideast, Asia

Shake, Rattle and Roll.The title of that rock and roll oldie popped into my head as I followed President Trump’s travels to South Korea and China, along with this week’s stunning developments in Saudi Arabia.The president clearly wants to shake up the region -- and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un -- by convincing Asian leaders he’s willing to use force to compel Kim to denuclearize.Meantime, Trump is cheering this week’s efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to shake up the Mideast. MBS (a

Nov. 12, 2017

[Mihir Sharma] The Pacific gets a little bigger

As President Donald Trump makes his way across Asia, ears in local capitals have picked up a subtle but unmistakable change in messaging from the US administration. The shift focuses on an apparently innocuous term: “the Indo-Pacific.” US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster introduced the president’s itinerary to reporters as “a great opportunity to demonstrate America’s and the Trump administration’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific.” Trump himself has used the term and it’s all over the offi

Nov. 12, 2017

[Timthoy OBrien] Trump, trade and the art of the spiel

There are billions of reasons to be skeptical whenever President Donald Trump and his White House team roll out headline-worthy trade deals and job announcements.　Take the president’s visit to China, for example. Trump announced $250 billion of deals there on Thursday, and he and Chinese President Xi Jinping described them as “win-win” transactions full of economic benefits for both superpowers.　But as a Bloomberg News article reported, “The roughly 15 agreements unveiled on Thursday are mostly

Nov. 12, 2017

[Timthoy OBrien] Trump, trade and the art of the spiel

[Wahnkil Chung] Digitization of health care industry

The size of the global medical equipment market was estimated to be $371 billion as of the end of 2015, of which the Korean market share is estimated to be about 1.7 percent, the ninth-largest in the world. It is expected that the global digital health care industry will increase by 6.8 percent per annum to $6.8 trillion by 2020.　The global medical equipment market is dominated by major companies of advanced economies, such as the US, Germany and Japan, and each of these governments is very care

Nov. 12, 2017

[Wahnkil Chung] Digitization of health care industry

[Vladimir Putin] Russia’s role in securing Asia’s prosperity

Russia values the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum -- which begins this week in Danang, Vietnam -- for the opportunities it affords all participants to engage in discussions and coordinate positions on a variety of economic, social, environmental and cultural issues. Member states strive to cooperate based on the principles of consensus and voluntary participation, mutual respect and willingness to compromise, regardless of the political situation. This is what APEC’s spirit of partnershi

Nov. 10, 2017

[Vladimir Putin] Russia’s role in securing Asia’s prosperity

[Joshua J. Whitfield] We are unwilling to talk about our freaks

The reason why Flannery O’Connor and other Southern writers often wrote about “freaks,” she said, was because “we are still able to recognize one.” Writing about murderers, racists, traveling Bible-selling hypocrites, O’Connor was a master of her art, the strange genre she called grotesque. It was her way of telling the truth through lies and good through evil.Such writing was possible, she said, because for the most part, Southern writers still held “some conception of the whole man,” a faint n

Nov. 10, 2017

[Noah Smith] US and Japan don’t have a trade problem

On his recent trip to Japan, President Donald Trump sounded more like a 1980s trade negotiator than a 2010s statesman. He urged Japan to invest more in the US, buy more military equipment and import more liquefied natural gas, and generally pressed for other measures that he thinks will reduce his country’s trade deficit with its main Pacific ally.But Trump is focusing on the wrong things. Japan’s trade surplus with the US is mostly not about protectionism or aggressive Japanese policy -- it’s a

Nov. 9, 2017

[Noah Smith] US and Japan don’t have a trade problem

[Kent Harrington] How Americans became vulnerable to Russian disinformation

As the United States marks the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s election, the question of how Trump won still commands attention, with Russia’s role moving increasingly to center stage. Each new revelation in the investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign brings the vulnerability of the US democratic process into sharper focus.Last week, Congress unveiled legislation that would force Facebook, Google, and other social media giants to disclose who buys online advertising

Nov. 9, 2017

[Kent Harrington] How Americans became vulnerable to Russian disinformation

[Adam Minter] China reinvents literature (profitably)

Smartphones may be killing print in China, but they’re revolutionizing literature. Last year, 333 million Chinese read fiction written for their phones and other devices, according to government data. Some is written by hobbyists and some by professionals. Increasingly, though, it’s hard to tell the difference, as China’s “online literature” morphs into a $1.3 billion industry.　Investors have taken note. On Wednesday, China Literature Ltd., the country’s biggest online publisher, will go public

Nov. 9, 2017

[Chicago Tribune] How to help prevent the next gun massacre

Mass killings like the one at a South Texas church are acts of extreme violence that defy rational explanation and simple solution. They raise demands for specific steps to be taken to ban horrors that are as indiscriminate as they are depraved.That doesn’t make this a time to mourn and shrug. America needs to deal with its propensity for gun violence. Here was another reminder.Tens of thousands of churches across America held worship services Sunday, but it was the First Baptist Church in tiny

Nov. 9, 2017

[Pankaj Mishra] What Tories can learn from Communists

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s assumption of supreme leadership seems to suggest that the Chinese Communist Party has finally reached the impasse long predicted by its critics. It may no longer be able, as Minxin Pei wrote in “China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy,” to “build broad-based social coalitions to pursue its policies and defend itself.”Rule by autocratic decree invariably strangles the possibility of new ideas and innovations -- what advances the process of

Nov. 9, 2017

[Kim Kyung-ho] Trilateral trade talks in limbo

Few people in South Korea, China and Japan now appear to be aware the three countries have held negotiations on concluding a trilateral free trade agreement over the past five years.The latest and 12th round of negotiations held in Tokyo in April drew little attention, having made little headway from previous discussions.During their meeting in November 2015, leaders of the three countries agreed to continue their work toward economic integration by making “further efforts to accelerate the tril

Nov. 8, 2017

[Kim Kyung-ho] Trilateral trade talks in limbo

[Kim Myong-sik] Vicious circle of purges at public broadcasters

History does repeat itself. Jeong Yeon-ju, a liberal journalist, took the helm of the state-run Korea Broadcasting System at the start of the Roh Moo-hyun administration in 2003. He was sacked in 2008 in his second term as Lee Myung-bak’s conservative rule began. To force his departure, the new government reshuffled the KBS board, which then charged Jeong with a host of personal misdeeds. 　Nine years later, no sooner had Moon Jae-in been elected president in May 2017 than the CEOs of KBS and Mun

Nov. 8, 2017

[Kim Myong-sik] Vicious circle of purges at public broadcasters

[Mark Davis] Those of us who pray are not doing nothing

In the wake of another mass shooting, the sides are assuming their familiar postures on cue. Conservatives are circling the wagons to guard their 2nd Amendment rights; liberals are calling for legislative remedies.Equally familiar is the ramping up of rhetoric. The right accuses the left of “gun grabbing,” as if any change in law is a sure path to confiscation, while the left accuses the right of “doing nothing” when restrictive laws are rejected.But this time, as Texas prepares to lay its own v

Nov. 8, 2017

[Michael Schuman] Not all 'bad' deals are bad for US

President Donald Trump visits Asia this week focused on the supposedly bad deals his predecessors struck with America’s partners in the region -- whether job-killing trade pacts or costly defense pledges. In Tokyo, he raised his hosts’ “not fair” trade advantages. 　Contrary to Trump’s narrative, however, previous US presidents didn’t enter these deals blindly. In a very real sense, America’s relationships in Asia were designed to be “bad” -- to sacrifice some US interests in the service of other

Nov. 8, 2017

[Eli Lake] John Kerry’s delusional advice on North Korea

John Kerry has some advice for Donald Trump this week on his presidential visit to Asia: Calm down the rhetoric.　In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the former secretary of state said the president should stop “feeding into North Korea’s fear of regime change, or of you know -- a unilateral attack.”　“I think the rhetoric to date has frankly stepped over the line with respect to the messages that are being sent,” Kerry said. “It’s given North Korea a reason to say ‘Hey we need a bomb

Nov. 8, 2017

[Robert J. Fouser] Rebuilding the South Korean-US relations

In November 1983, US President Ronald Reagan visited South Korea amid rising global tension. In September that year, the Soviet Union shot Korean Air Lines’ flight 007 out of the air, killing the 269 people aboard. One month later, many senior members of the South Korean government were killed by a North Korean bomb attack in Rangoon, Burma. The 1980s economic boom in South Korea was gathering steam, but anger at Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship was building.During his visit, Reagan addressed the Na

Nov. 7, 2017

[Robert J. Fouser] Rebuilding the South Korean-US relations

[Leonid Bershidsky] Europe is tiring of ‘Anglocondescension’

Just a few years ago, fatigue from “Anglo-Saxon lecturing” was a hallmark of authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Now it’s surfacing in mainstream European media -- a sign that, after Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, the English-speaking world is losing intellectual legitimacy.　On Thursday, El Pais, Spain’s newspaper of record, published an article in English by its Editorial Director Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, entitled “Anglocondescension.” Dripping w

Nov. 7, 2017

[Kim Seong-kon] What we can learn from Korean literature

Experts agree that literature and film are excellent cultural texts as well as important social documents that faithfully record and vividly mirror the contemporary society from which they originate. Therefore, while reading Korean literature and viewing Korean films, we can find and understand the cultural phenomena and social milieu they try to depict and convey.Reading Hwang Sok-young’s gripping novel “The Guest,” for example, we can imagine the atrocities of the Korean War, at a time when th

Nov. 7, 2017

[Kim Seong-kon] What we can learn from Korean literature

[Jean Tirole] France’s labor laws should protect people, not jobs

French President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to loosen the country’s labor code are innovative and welcome. They might help attract more investment. But if France truly wants to reconcile the interests of companies and workers, it also needs a different kind of reform -- one focused on protecting people, not jobs.　Macron’s plan increases legal penalties for “wrongful” dismissals, while curbing the ability of courts to grant workers even greater compensation. This is the right approach; the problem

Nov. 7, 2017