Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The New Koreans
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/31/1952
WEBSITE:
CITY: Seoul
STATE:
COUNTRY: Korea (Republic)
NATIONALITY: British
Lives in South Korea and the UK * https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466864498
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 99265618
Personal name heading:
Breen, Michael, 1952-
Variant(s): Bŭrin, Maikʻŭl, 1952-
Found in: The Koreans, 1999: CIP t.p. (Michael Breen) CIP galley
(writer, former correspondent, consultant) t.p.
(Maikʻŭl Bŭrin [in Kor. r.])
Infor. from Pub., Sept. 13, 1999 (Michael Breen; b. July
31, 1952)
Invalid LCCN: no 00015547
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born July 31, 1952.
EDUCATION:University of Edinburgh (graduated).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, public relations professional, and consultant. Guardian (London), Korea correspondent; Washington Times, Korea correspondent. Management consultant specializing in North Korea, 1994-99; Merit/Burson-Marsteller, public relations professional, 1999-2004. Insight Communications Consultants (a public relations firm in Seoul), founder and CEO.
MEMBER:Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club (president, 1987).
WRITINGS
Author of regular column for The Korea Times; contributor of opinion columns to international and South Korean magazines and newspapers.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael Breen is a writer, journalist, columnist, and consultant who writes frequently on Korea. Since his first assignments as a Korea correspondent in 1982, he has specialized in writing about both North and South Korea for both American and international newspapers, including the London Guardian, the London Times, and the Washington Times, noted a biographer on the Macmillan Website. He has also been a columnist for the Korea Times, an English-language paper in South Korea. In addition to his work in journalism, Breen has also worked in management consulting and in public relations. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh.
The Koreans and Kim Jong-il
The majority of Breen’s books focus on Korea, including its leadership, its political environment, its culture, and its society. In The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, Breen presents a “useful and often surprising survey of Korea’s culture” and the efforts that have been made over the years to “integrate that culture with the outside world,” noted Booklist reviewer Jay Freeman. Breen covers in depth the difficulties a country like Korea faces as it tries to balance its traditionalist nature with new technology and an industrial economy. The author also looks at issues such as how civil liberties are, or are not, addressed in Korea; how corruption can be found at almost every level of society; and how friction between the generations affects family life. Breen writes on both South Korea and North Korea.
Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader is Breen’s biography of the former supreme leader of North Korea. Breen acknowledges the difficulty in finding reliable information on the man and his regime, but he gathers together what is known and what can be gleaned from existing sources. The author delves into Kim’s life and personal history as well as his rise to power in North Korea. He explores how Kim keeps hold of power in a country that is ravaged by poverty, famine, disease, and other hardships, along with the totalitarian brutality of the government. In addition to biographical material on Kim, Breen includes available details on the North Korean economy and how it functions. “He describes an almost wholly secret special economy, earning many millions from gold, minerals, heroin, counterfeiting, and arms sales, benefiting, he says, only Kim and his circle,” noted reviewer Jonathan Mirsky, writing in the Spectator. Breen provides insights into the Korean mindset and offers suggestions on how other countries can deal with Kim and his successors.
The New Koreans
Breen focuses more on the other half of Korea in The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation. Here, he “illuminates the nature of the South Korean economic miracle that took this nation from postwar ruin to prosperity” in less than fifty years, noted a Publishers Weekly writer. Financial Times contributor Victor Mallett remarked that “rarely has there been a more urgent need for outsiders to grasp what is happening on the Korean peninsula.” In Breen’s detailed discussion of Korea, he “comes across as a friendly uncle who sits you down in an armchair with a cup of tea—or perhaps a beer—and tells you all the interesting things he knows about the admirable if sometimes frustrating Korea of today.” Breen describes the economic growth of South Korea, which he describes as just as surprising to the Koreans as it has been to the rest of the world. He considers both positive and negative aspects of both South Korea, including the country’s almost total literacy rate, it’s high suicide rate, it’s reliance on authority and leaders, and how the South dealt with, and continues to deal with, threats from North Korea.
A Kirkus Reviews writer called The New Koreans a “solid entry point into the lives of a people who have fully earned their place on the world stage.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 1999, Jay Freeman, review of The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, p. 596.
Financial Times, April 7, 2017, Victor Mallet, “The New Koreans by Michael Breen – Danger and Dynamism,” review of The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of The New Koreans.
Management Today, May 24, 2017, Stephen Evans, “Books: The Path to Prosperity,” review of The New Koreans, p. 22.
Publishers Weekly, February 13, 2017, review of The New Koreans, p. 65.
Spectator, February 28, 2004, Jonathan Mirsky, “The Fat Controller,” review of Kim Jong-il: North Korea’s Dear Leader, p. 33.
ONLINE
Macmillan Website, http://us.macmillan.com/ (October 31, 2017), biography of Michael Breen.
Michael Breen
Born 31 July 1953 (age 64)
Aylesbury, United Kingdom
Nationality British
Occupation Writer
Michael Breen (born 31 July 1952) is an English author, consultant and journalist covering North and South Korea.
Breen writes occasional opinion columns for international and South Korean media. Since 2000, he has written a featured column for The Korea Times, an English-language daily in South Korea, where he comments on South Korean society, culture, and political issues.[1]
Contents
1 Career
2 Controversy
2.1 Lawsuit
3 Published works
4 References
5 External links
Career
Breen is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and first began living in South Korea in 1982.[2] He was the correspondent in Korea for The Guardian and the Washington Times.[3] In 1987, he became the first non-Korean president of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club. In 1994, he became a management consultant specializing in North Korea, with clients such as Coca-Cola. He entered the public relations field in 1999 as the managing director of Merit/Burson-Marsteller, where he remained until 2004. He is the founder and CEO of Insight Communications Consultants, a Seoul-based public relations firm. Breen was made an honorary citizen of Seoul in 2001.
A former follower and biographer of the controversial Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon, Breen was described in a 2005 American Prospect story as having brokered talks in the early 1990s between Moon and the North Korean leadership, laying groundwork for a visit by the staff of Moon's Washington Times.[4] Breen has also authored an unauthorized biography of Moon, Sun Myung Moon: The Early Years.[5]
Controversy
Unbalanced scales.svg
This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material. (March 2015)
Lawsuit
On 25 December 2009, Breen wrote a satirical column in the paper which lampooned various South Korean public figures, including president Lee Myung-bak, singer Rain, and Samsung. Displeased with Breen's allusions to their corruption and arrogance, Samsung filed civil and criminal suits against him and the paper for libel. After an apology and after Breen told prosecutors during interrogation that the column was his own idea, the paper was dropped as a respondent, but the suit against Breen himself remained.[6][7] One South Korean media outlet claimed that the entire column as an insult to the country of South Korea itself.[8][9][10] Samsung dropped the civil suit after an apology by Breen. The criminal case went to trial but was thrown out by the judge on the grounds that there was "no victim."
Published works
Sun Myung Moon: The Early Years. Refuge Books, 1999.
Kim Jong-Il: North Korea's Dear Leader. John Wiley and Sons, 2004. ISBN 978-0-470-82131-2.
The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies. St. Martin's Griffin, 2004.
The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation. Thomas Dunne Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1250065056.
Michael Breen
Author Collection
MICHAEL BREEN is a writer and consultant who first went to Korea as a correspondent in 1982. He covered North and South Korea for several newspapers, including the Guardian (UK), the Times (UK), and the Washington Times. He lives in Seoul.
Books: The path to prosperity
(May 24, 2017): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Haymarket Media Group
http://www.haymarket.com/home.aspx
This is a perceptive study of South Korea's transformation from a poor country of paddy fields to an industrialised economy, says Stephen Evans
The New Koreans: The Business, History and People of South Korea
Michael Breen
Rider Books, pounds 14.99
Can any country have come so far so fast? Sixty years ago, South Koreans had the same income as the Sudanese. Poverty was worse than in India and Pakistan. Until the 60s, peasants boiled grass and bark to fend off starvation. The greeting of the time was, 'Have you eaten rice today?'
The phrase is still occasionally used, but from habit not need. Five decades of continuous annual growth of 5% have turned the bullock-cart economy of South Korea into a prosperous industrialised nation. The swish Seoul metro makes the London Underground seem like a clanking, dirty throwback to a dark age. Gangnam in Seoul reminds you of Manhattan in the opulence of its skyscrapers - and yet a half century ago, it was no more than paddy fields. Where huts once crowded along the River Han, now people cycle for leisure and buy property for profit.
And all this has been done against the conventional Western free-market wisdom. A dictator dictated to business leaders how the economy would grow - and how they would make it happen or face jail. Korea was a victim of a brutal colonialism at the hands of the Japanese but victimhood has not stunted post-colonial development.
There is no simple recipe for South Korean success. It's a combination of factors which Breen identifies in this well-written account. The central figure is Park Chung-hee, the general who seized power in 1961 and who as self-appointed president 'inspired, bullied, beat, cajoled, and enticed the Koreans out of the paddy fields and to the forefront of the industrial world'.
But the world's ranks of failed dictators are legion. Park, in contrast, was working on favourable territory. South Koreans were a people literally hungry for betterment. They had known extreme hardship. All wars are brutal but no war was as brutal as the Korean War. The atrocities still make the jaw drop. Continuing from that episode of blood-soaked history, came the brutality of the regimes that followed.
And Park was working within a culture which valued learning. In Seoul, statues of that ruler, Sejong the Great, abound and he is depicted reading a book.
What Breen brings to this broad history is elegant phrasing and keen perception. He married a Korean and he loves the country so he looks with an outsider's eye but combines it with a deep familiarity.
On top of that, he worked as a journalist and so knows both the people in power and those without power
His account is to be recommended to anyone who wants to understand the phenomenon of South Korea, including scholars of 'development studies' The story is not one of a people who relied on outside aid.
The book is primarily about South Korea but you can't dodge the elephant in the northern part of the room. Breen thinks the Korean War brought so much enmity that the bonds of national unity were broken. But some sympathy for the North does still exist in the South - not so much for the regime but for the people as fellow Koreans. Despite the vibrancy of South Korea's economy and democracy, there is still fear of the North (the obvious fear of nuclear attack but also that citizens in the South will be seduced by the ideas of the North - the scorched grass may somehow seem greener). Sympathisers with North Korea get imprisoned even today.
Breen knows the big history but also the intimate habits of the people, so he does dwell, for example, on latrines and farting. And sex Prostitution is illegal but he quotes one person he talked to: 'High-ranking officials in the police, the tax offices, and elsewhere buy sex, regardless of their age, profession, or region. It's everywhere. This sex culture where men think money can buy anything distorts their view of women.'
Which is surely true. One of the most intriguing aspects of the country is the relationship between men and women as modernity and money change attitudes of one sex to the other - men retain traditional expectations while (at least some women) want change. This can lead to unexpected outcomes: 'In Ulsan a few years ago, when a team from a conglomerate went out to a karaoke bar and the executive in charge asked the owner to arrange for some women, one of the women who arrived turned out to be the wife of one of the men in the room.'
The detail and the anecdote illuminate a bigger picture of change. The book is as good a guide to a fascinating country in transformation as you will get.
Stephen Evans is the BBC's Korea correspondent
--------------------
Did you find this article useful? Why not subscribe to the magazine? Please call 08451 55 73 55 for more information or visit www.haysubs.com
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Books: The path to prosperity." Management Today, 24 May 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492643369&it=r&asid=5bc3a5dd809a6c79f74444d931db9966. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492643369
The New Koreans: He Story of a Nation
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The New Koreans: The Story of a Nation
Michael Breen. St. Martin's/Dunne, $27.99 (480p) ISBN 978-1-250-06505-6
Journalist Breen (Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader) illuminates the nature of the South Korean economic miracle that took this nation from postwar ruin to prosperity, Gangnam style, in less than 50 years. South Korea's transition to democratic capitalism was shockingly fast and thorough, which Breen attributes to a combination of deep-seated cultural and historical factors--an underdog complex, the desire to "win," the myth of national purity--before attempting to peer into the South Korean soul and thereby predict the future of politics on the Korean peninsula. Despite Breen's decades spent living in Korea, he has not lost the casual, wink-and-nod cultural chauvinism of a foreign correspondent sent to cover the Third World. "There is of course some history, but not much," he asserts flatly about modern South Korea, following this up with a series of anecdotes about when the country stopped signifying "third world" poverty in the eyes of Westerners--who are the only readership with whom Breen is concerned. Breen's insights into South Korean culture and politics are undercut by his joking tone and uneven writing style. This bizarre mix of pop psychology and cultural determinist theories won't serve Korea specialists or general readers. Agent: Kelly Falconer, Asia Literary. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The New Koreans: He Story of a Nation." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198217&it=r&asid=1107d3a76963f54fe4ab55d22da232d2. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198217
Breen, Michael: THE NEW KOREANS
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Breen, Michael THE NEW KOREANS Dunne/St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 4, 4 ISBN: 978-1-250-06505-6
An exploration of "the cultural emergence and...international awareness and acceptance of South Korean expression to a point of familiarity."In this update and extension of his earlier book, The Koreans (1999), Breen (Kim Jong-Il: North Korea's Dear Leader, 2004, etc.), a longtime observer of the country's rise to global prominence, finds much to love and emulate about people, specifically those in the South. Indeed, his fondness for the Koreans often causes him to excuse some of their less-pleasant traits, such as the tendency, as part of their hierarchical culture, to act rudely toward people they deem inferior. In Breen's characterization, the South Koreans are as amazed as the rest of the world by their success, since only 40 years prior, the future still looked bleak under their dictatorial government. Only in the 21st century have the Koreans woken up "to their own arrival in the world," largely thanks to the hard-striving generation of those born between 1920 and 1955, who embraced and contributed to the country's economic development. In discrete chapters, Breen tackles some of the themes dear and/or onerous to the country, including its defiance in the face of Japanese invasion and North Korean aggression; its proud reforestation projects started in the late 1960s; the stubborn obeisance to authority and need for a leader; massive gentrification; growth of Protestantism; near-universal literacy rate; high suicide rate; and near-lowest birth rate in the world. Along with a deep consideration of the materialistic bent of the worker bees, Breen is rooting for the country's democratic system, only in place for two decades and living in uneasy compatibility with an independent-minded military. And where once the author was predicting unity of North and South in the Korean peninsula, he now calls rather for "reconciliation" between the two sides, which can only happen, he admits, when the North's leadership decides to make the change. A solid entry point into the lives of a people who have fully earned their place on the world stage.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Breen, Michael: THE NEW KOREANS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234398&it=r&asid=ead0513e2aa087a1a0c91a0fc496e86e. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234398
The fat controller
Jonathan Mirsky
294.9160 (Feb. 28, 2004): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
KIM JONG-IL, NORTH KOREA'S DEAR LEADER: WHO HE IS, WHAT HE WANTS, WHAT TO DO ABOUT HIM by Michael Breen John Wiley, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 200, ISBN 0470821310
This is a badly written book--another stake through the heart of what used to be editing--and to learn anything from it read the last three chapters and skim the rest. The first two of these are about the North Korean economy, about which little is known, but Michael Breen has drawn that little together, and the last is an alternative suggestion of how to negotiate with one member of George Bush's 'axis of evil', whose leader, Kim Jong-il, Mr Bush calls 'the pygmy'.
North Korea is one of those places--Tibet used to be another--about which very little is known, but much is written, extrapolated or invented. There are some useful books about it, however, by Bruce Cumings, Nicholas Eberstadt and Selig Harrison, for example, all of them listed by Breen in his bibliography, but not cited in his sparse footnotes.
Breen, who used to write for newspapers, describes himself as a management consultant advising companies on dealing with North Korea, which he has visited several times. He lives in the South and has a lot to say about the Korean character--obedience to powerful leaders, patience with what elsewhere might be called corruption, and a longing to unify the Korean regimes. He claims that 'loyalty touches the Korean soul deeper than a balance sheet'. Serious country specialists should be more cautious about such generalisations.
Breen starts with a quick introduction to North Korea, which he says is run by 'one fat man in the whole country'. He explains that because everyone else is starving--although he also makes plain elsewhere that the ruling class is very nice to itself--Kim alone is fat. He describes an almost wholly secret special economy, earning many millions from gold, minerals, heroin, counterfeiting and arms sales, benefiting, he says, only Kim and his circle. He wants to understand 'Kim's shrivelling odiocracy', and above all estimate whether he is willing to wage a nuclear war. Should Kim he demonised? Much of this is worth thinking about, but Breen's vulgar exposition is likely to put off all but the most doggedly curious reader.
He skates through Korean history including a mention of the national creation myth, the mating of a god and a bear--and in his saloon-bar way needs to crack 'which we can be thankful wasn't caught on video'. This survey is a gloomy picture of a tiny elite and a repressed, suffering mass without any mention that classical Korean ceramics, painting and literature are among the most beautiful in Asia or that the Koreans may have invented moveable type. He passes on to the origins of Kim's father, Kim Il-song, his importation into Korea by the Soviets, the creation of his cult and his succession by Kim Jong-il, who Breen, ever the joker, insists on calling 'the Dear Substitute'. He rightly points out that for many years the Americans maintained repressive and corrupt governments in Seoul, although they were much less awful than the regime in the north.
On Kim Jong-il he interestingly draws on some psychological profiles and a few accounts of those who have tact him to demonstrate that he may be selfish, dictatorial, cruel and vain, but he is not mad or evil, is 'at ease with himself and able to be flexible in policy'. Breen concludes that Kim could be open to negotiation with the West if there was less focus on the nuclear issue and more offering of advantages if Kim came to the table. These could include--after 50 years--a post-Korean war peace treaty--which Pyongyang wants--a US embassy, 'loans, and access to US markets' and an offer to Kim Jong-il 'of a vision of a secure future'.
Breen 'confesses' that 'I've always enjoyed my trips to North Korea', where he states that fear is pervasive, millions have died of hunger, the gulag is vast and journalists are under constant surveillance. He has seen almost nothing in any depth--this is not his fault--of agriculture, industry, education or health, but says that North Korea's 'fascination' lies in this astounding hybrid: 'It's Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia in the middle of Mao's Cultural Revolution.' Unless this means 'very bad indeed', it is vacuous. North Korea is indeed very bad. But, unlike Nazi Germany, no minority group has been extinguished in Korea, nor is there a fascist union of private industry and government; Kim does not, like Stalin, murder his closest colleagues, oppress minorities or massacre moderately well-off peasants; millions of Mao-style Red Guards are not tearing around the country destroying cultural monuments, closing down schools and universities, persecuting intellectuals, killing tens if not hundreds of thousands, and fighting the army. Actually, much of what Breen says about North Korea could have been said about China until about 1980: essentially closed, secretive, deeply repressive, and still recovering from a famine in which 20 years earlier 30 million people starved to death. But as Breen admits, 'the truth of North Korea is deduced rather than directly experienced'.
His writing makes me cringe. What can this mean? Commenting on Kim's military experience, he writes, 'He couldn't drop and give you ten if his life depended on it.' He describes excited North Korean crowds greeting 'Kim Jong-Elvis'. In a chapter titled 'Is Kim Jong-il Evil?'--itself a crude question--he asks, 'Does Kim have horns on his head?' He analyses dialectical materialism like this: 'At heart, dialectical materialism is a lie: materialism holds there is no spirit, no God, just stuff. When you shut your eyes, your world goes dark.' Progress requires co-operation, Breen generalises, 'even if that co-operation involves, as Victorian mothers told their daughters, just shutting your eyes and thinking of England.' This kind of language might pass around the bar of the Seoul Press Club after a few beers, but why does John Wiley, a respectable publisher, permit it?
Mirsky, Jonathan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mirsky, Jonathan. "The fat controller." Spectator, 28 Feb. 2004, p. 33. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA114327532&it=r&asid=d2025124357fd87af4770b71a1eb1b6b. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A114327532
The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies
Jay Freeman
96.6 (Nov. 15, 1999): p596.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Breen, Michael. The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies. Nov. 1999.304p. index. St. Martin's, $24.95 (0-312-24211-5). DDC: 951.95.
Korea is an ancient land that has struggled against foreign domination for centuries. South Korea has emerged as an economic powerhouse with, it is hoped, democratic inclinations. North Korea, despite occasional signs of openness, remains a Stalinist backwater. Breen, a journalist who has covered Korea since 1982, has written a useful and often surprising survey of Korea's culture and efforts to integrate that culture with the outside world. He effectively illustrates the difficulties that a still "traditionalist" society encounters as it develops facets of an industrial and even a postindustrial economy. Breen probes such diverse topics as the status of civil liberties, generational social strains within families, and the massive corruption that permeates Korean society. He writes with a snappy, readable style that is appropriate to the frequent ironies inherent in many of the situations he describes. Those wishing to learn about an increasingly important civilization will find this a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Freeman, Jay. "The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies." Booklist, 15 Nov. 1999, p. 596. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA57894234&it=r&asid=ee8e40980d3f00232247bb102d9c1dcd. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A57894234
The New Koreans by Michael Breen — danger and dynamism
A lively portrait of the world’s least understood economic powerhouse
Read next
One Nation After Trump by Dionne, Ornstein and Mann
Monday, 9 October, 2017
People in Seoul watching a television news report of a North Korean missile launch on April 5, 2017 © AFP
Share on Twitter (opens new window)
Share on Facebook (opens new window)
Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)
April 7, 2017
by Victor Mallet
Visitors to Seoul are often asked what friends back home think of the rising nation of South Korea, forcing the embarrassed foreigner to mumble the words “Samsung” and “Hyundai” and admit that few outsiders ever consider it at all.
Thanks in part to such brands, as well as the spread of South Korean film and music, that ignorance is gradually being dispelled. Even so, the country’s international profile does not reflect the size of its economy — in dollar terms it ranks 11th, ahead of Russia and Spain — or its strategic significance. It was once said of Vietnam that to Americans it meant a war rather than a place: Korea today does not enjoy even that kind of unwelcome name recognition, although the Korean war pitted US forces under the UN flag against the might of communist China and left some 3m soldiers and civilians dead when it ended in 1953.
Yet rarely has there been a more urgent need for outsiders to grasp what is happening on the Korean peninsula. In recent months, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has accelerated the country’s plans to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to the US; he has ordered the assassination of his half-brother Kim Jong Nam; and he has managed to provoke a partial Chinese boycott of South Korea because Beijing is angry about the US anti-missile shield now being deployed near Seoul.
In The New Koreans, Michael Breen is a sympathetic guide to what used to be called “the Hermit Kingdom”. A journalist and consultant who has lived there since 1982, Breen’s main subject is South Korea and its 50m inhabitants, although he examines the prospects for reunification and mentions in passing that he once attended a lunch with Kim Il Sung, at which the late North Korean leader was asked what he did for recreation. (The answer — a “dictator joke”, says Breen — was that Kim liked hunting but suspected that his troops were raising tame bears and pushing them out from behind the trees for him to shoot.)
Breen charts Korean history from the time of the country’s purported origins 5,000 years ago, passing from ancient kings and the travails of a people periodically buffeted by China and Japan to the postwar era of military rule, rapid growth and the gradual entrenchment of democracy. Intriguingly, as with China, the local name of the country is not the same as that used by outsiders. “Korea” derives from the Goryeo dynasty heard of by Marco Polo; Koreans themselves call the country Hanguk or Chosun depending on whether they are from the south or the north.
But this is not a dry work of academic history. Breen is at his best in his anecdotes about the habits and the changing attitudes of modern Korean families, political parties and religious groups, and the corporate executives whose business practices would elsewhere be condemned as corruption and thuggery.
He is in awe of the achievements of a country that turned itself from one of the world’s poorest into one of the richest in half a century, and has reached 100 per cent literacy from a mere 20 per cent in 1945. The author comes across as a friendly uncle who sits you down in an armchair with a cup of tea — or perhaps a beer — and tells you all the interesting things he knows about the admirable if sometimes frustrating Korea of today.
As in the north, events in South Korea are moving fast, leaving this first edition of The New Koreans without any mention of the recent impeachment of President Park Geun-hye or of the arrest of Samsung’s de facto chief Lee Jae-yong. Both deny guilt in a cash-for-favours corruption investigation involving Park’s shaman adviser Choi Soon-sil.
Breen’s book, however, provides all the necessary background. Shamanism and fortune-telling are common practices and the country has long been home to an extraordinary number of Christian, Confucian and other sects. The chaebols, family-controlled conglomerates, continue to dominate industry but are being forced to adapt to a new climate of popular distaste for the old ways of doing business.
And the politicians are struggling to satisfy an increasingly demanding population of tech-savvy, well-travelled Koreans, prompting Breen to liken the democratic body politic to a drunken man on the streets of Seoul, lurching “from right to left and back again, but generally in a forward direction”.
The New Koreans: The Business, History and People of South Korea, by Michael Breen, Rider, RRP£12.99/Thomas Dunne, RRP$27.99, 480 pages
Victor Mallet is the FT’s Asia news editor
Photograph: AFP