Korea and East Asia: The Story of a Phoenix

Lee, Kenneth B. Korea and East Asia: The Story of a Phoenix. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1997. 285 pp.

This is a spirited, comprehensive, yet appealingly concise account of Korea's fascinating history and of that singularly important country's situation in its, at times, tough regional neighborhood. The book, based primarily on a few secondary sources in Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese, is a fine general reading contribution to the much-to-be-welcomed growing literature on Korea's unique, rich past and on its role in the world. It is to be hoped that Dr. Lee's book will be consulted frequently and widely for it deserves serious attention. Certainly, Americans, among others, need to be better informed about Korea. As it is, either China or Japan or both of these countries together tend to monopolize the attention of Americans, which is understandable, of course, given the stature and importance of Korea's two principal historic neighbors. But these circumstances leave too few foreigners, it seems, who are willing to make the yet extra effort to learn more of this other pivotal Northeast Asian nation's quite distinctive culture and to follow its continuing development in the rapidly changing present.

Dr. Lee clearly demonstrates that knowledge of Korean history and culture is an enriching undertaking, Korea has contributed notably to civilization. But among the most important of its contributions is that, as the author shows, Korea really does stand as a heroic model of a people who through ingenuity and persistence are repeatedly able to surmount considerable difficulties in order to reach yet new levels of national greatness. During the 1980s and early 1990s South Korea's economic success had come to reach phenomenal proportions. This economic success has finally come to be matched by fundamental and far-reaching political achievements too, as South Korea joined the ranks of genuinely democratic countries in the 1990s. Of course, North Korea, on the other hand, remains caught in its tragic, downward spiral, much to the misfortune of Koreans constrained to live under its feckless regime. Fortunately, with regard to the long-standing impasse in North-South relations, Dr. Lee is able to record that by the mid-nineties, "North Korea's turnaround toward South Korea" had become "a welcome indication of improving relationships between the two parts of the Korean Peninsula." But the North remains, on the whole, and despite its basket-case condition, a strange and dangerous phenomenon with which Seoul must deal.

The book was completed before the current serious financial crisis hit Korea in 1997. This protracted crisis is proving to be a serious setback for the government and people of South Korea who additionally still must deal with the trauma of national division between the north and the south, with the uncertainties attending the emergence of China once again as an effective major power in the region, and with the consequences of Japan's continued failure to acknowledge adequately its miserable record as a colonial power earlier in the century. But the expectation, certainly after reading Dr. Lee's stimulating history of Korea, is that the Korean people will once again rise to the occasion and do what is necessary in order to surmount this unexpected new challenge. Indeed, there is evidence already that South Korea has taken the measure of this latest challenge and may be mounting the kind of response, as painful as it is, that will eventually overcome it.

Stephen Uhalley, Jr.

Pacific Rim/Ricci Institute

University of San Francisco

Copyright Association of Third World Studies, Inc. Fall 1999
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