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North Korea and South Korea are two different countries with separate sovereignty. They should not be allowed to field a joint team. Remember, unification fist, then joint-anything else second.

I second Kushibo's prediction:

At any rate, I don't think this is a done deal. An awful lot can happen between now and 2008 (or even 2006). I think that ultimately there won't be anything more than walking into the stadium together.

In fact, I think that, in the long run, this is going to be bad for mindless supporters of North-South relations. The North will probably back out, leaving someone in Seoul with egg on their face.

Now, it seems they finally listened. Angry Chinese Blogger reports:

After many years of public and private debate, and nearly 25 years of protests by neighboring China, it has been announced that Tokyo is to form a cross party committee of 100+ lawmakers, drawn from all sides of Japan's political system, to once and for all deal with the thorny issue of providing Japan with an internationally acceptable national war memorial that is free of the controversies that have wracked Yasukuni.

Now, Angry Chinese Blogger reports that Google has changed its story, sort of:

In September, Google became embroiled in an argument over its naming of Chinese-Taiwan as ‘Taiwan, Province of China’. In October, Google Merged its Google Map service with its Google Local service, and in doing so removed the legend describing the island as a Chinese province. Problem solved? Not quite.

It appears that Google has not entirely gone over to Taiwan’s side.

Apparently, Taiwan is only Taiwan so long as you speak English, and the same goes for Taipei.

What this meant, however, was that rice pricing was distorted from the market supply-demand equilibrium (either the price was too high or the government subsidized the cost).

Of course, the economically rational thing to do is to allow free trade in rice like any other commodity. The resulting competition naturally lowers the price to benefit the consumers.

In a positive step (via The Marmot's Hole):

A National Assembly panel Thursday passed a bill aimed at ratifying rice import agreements that South Korea signed with nine countries last year despite fierce protests from lawmakers of the minor opposition Democratic Labor Party (DLP).

Under the agreements, South Korea will raise its rice import quota to 7.96 percent by 2014 from the current 4 percent in return for a 10-year additional delay in introducing tariffs on rice. The minimum import amount of rice will increase from some 200,000 tons to 400,000 tons by 2014.

The rice accords also call on Seoul to permit up to 30 percent of the imported rice to be sold directly to consumers by 2010.

Predictably, the mainstream media is talking up the "milestone" of the 2,000th American military death in Iraq to portray the struggle as a useless, costly quagmire.
According to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, the total number of American military deaths in Iraq, including non-battle deaths, now stands at 2002 in approximately 32 months of combat from March 2003 to October 2005.

It is often said that these deaths are not simply statistics. They are real faces and lives, each with its own story and family. Yet we do rely on statistics sometimes, because they offer a sense of scale...

Chairman Henry Hyde, the Republican head of the House International Relations committee, has chimed in on the debate.

Recall that I heartily applauded a previous Hyde letter to President Roh Moo-Hyun of South Korea about the MacArthur statue.

It's really too bad that Congressman Hyde is retiring. I really like the letters he sends out to foreign leaders. They always strike the right note.

It just seems so, well, childish. On the other hand, it might also be a sign that feminism has not exactly made much inroads in Asia. Women are still in love with cutesy things there, and are not afraid to show it.

Public approval for the democratic members is low at the moment. The government of Donald Tsang is very popular, unlike the previous administration. Beijing seems to be making peace offerings to the democrats as shown by the get-together in Guangzhou earlier this month. Another mass demonstration being bruited for early December might prove embarrassingly sparse.

The public may look on opposition as being simply stubborn obstructionism in pursuit of a utopian cause. The baby thaw with Beijing, which they are so eager to nurture, would freeze again. In the end the democrats are in a corner and may not have many good options other than to accept the proposals and try for some compromises.

Of course, the desire for democracy can be bought off with prosperity for only so long, e.g. South Korea and Taiwan). But South Korea and Taiwan had powerful external influences for pro-democracy movements from other governments, most notably the United States.

Unfortunately, because of China's increasingly economic juggernaut status, many governments are "going along to get along" with China's, and by extension, Hong Kong's political repression. And my country, the US, is to some extent guilty of that too.

Some technophiles thought that the Internet might derail China's oppression, but the big technology-as-liberator has turned out to be a decidedly mixed bag where China is concerned:

On one hand, the internet has been a tremendously empowering and liberating force for many Chinese - economically and culturally. On the other hand, a business and regulatroy model is emerging that enables censorship to work in a way that is actually tolerable for most Chinese internet users (except for political dissidents who are - to put it mildly - out of luck). As a result, China's extensive system of censorship and internet controls doesn't hold businesses back when it comes to innovating and making money from products and services that enable users to create media (blogs, posdcasts, etc.). We are also looking at a future in which soft censorship will be "baked" into a new generation of software and online services coming out of China. And these products and services will prove very attractive not just for the Chinese government but for many other governments - including some that call themselves democratic.

South Korea will dispatch its deputy foreign minister to Iran early next week to solve what looks like a bid by Teheran to punish Seoul for voting for a U.N. resolution on its nuclear program [boldface mine].

Iran rejected imports from South Korea since Oct. 17. At least five cases of such a retaliatory measure have been confirmed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Seoul said on Thursday.

An advisory panel to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has reached a consensus that an emperor's first-born child, regardless of sex, should be the heir to the Chrysanthemum throne, sources said.

If the proposal is accepted, Princess Aiko, the 3-year-old daughter of Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako, would be given priority to ascend the throne.

No boy has been born in the imperial household for 40 years.

However, a group of scholars on Oct. 6 issued an "emergency statement" arguing that former imperial family members who withdrew from the imperial registration after Japan's defeat in World War II should be allowed to return to the imperial lineage. Such a move would put a male in line for the throne.

The group wants to maintain the imperial tradition of passing succession on to only males.

Never one to shy away from rattling the saber, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his customary digs about China's growing military machine while in the country. But the words are something of a smokescreen; his visit could mark a new beginning in bilateral military ties.

1. China's GDP per capita is 2.2 times higher than that of India.

2. China's economy is more globalized.

3. India has better corporate governance and more "commercially driven" companies.

What this tells me is that China's reform policies have paid off handsomely, but that China's business culture has some strong hurdles. Conversely, India has fared less well due to slower reforms, but has a greater potential in the sense that there is more ingrained Western-style business culture.

Some explanations are interesting (cultural view of "blood" and genetics, reverence for scientists), some are questionable ("collectivist" research culture) and others are just down right silly ("chopsticks"!).

A couple of points that caught my attention:

For example, despite a nearly absolute ban on abortion, Korea has one of the highest abortion rates in the developed world because the government looks away and no one protests.

The article goes on to criticize American-style "moral wresting," but what it really shows is that, in some way, South Korea is a pretty materialistic, amoral culture.

On the positive side:

Korea reveres scientists more than we do. Science is trendy in Korea. It attracts the nation's best students. There's no nerd derision. Hwang Woo-suk is a celebrity in a way we can't imagine an American scientist could be. The national law-enforcement agency assigns officers to protect him. Korean Airlines flies him around the world for free. The minister of science and technology ranks at the top of the South Korean Cabinet—as high as the secretary of state or treasury in the United States. While most foreign scientists who study in the United States end up staying there, nearly 90 percent of Korean scientists end up returning home, despite much lower salaries.

When I was growing up, I couldn't hear enough about studying science, engineering or medicine from my parents, relatives, friends, parents of friends and ad naseum (when I showed some interest in the study of law, I couldn't hear enough about studying computer science first and then doing intellectual property law).

And, yet, the prevaling social culture of South Korea, in my view, is a mythic-bureaucratic one, rather than a rational-scientist one. Policies and laws are often fashioned from rumors, hearsays and wild shifts in popular emotions rather than after substantive debates about the consequences.

If I may so speculate, I think this has much to do with the prevailing materialistic emphasis on education (study science, invent something or become respected and rich) rather than spiritual one designed to teach one to be a learned, rational gentleman/lady.