South Korea to take center stage in global culture via G20

By Lee Hyo-won

When Angelina Jolie visited Seoul recently, the Hollywood beauty said it was unfortunate that news of inter-Korean tensions eclipsed the international media coverage on South Korea.

Case in point: Sohn Jie-ae would have been busy reporting Pyongyang’s human rights violations or artillery activities as the CNN correspondent to Seoul. But since February, she has been able to focus on the southern half of the Korean Peninsula as the spokesperson for the upcoming G20 Summit here.

“While working as a CNN correspondent for 15 years I covered the Korean Peninsula from top to bottom. I mostly dealt with North Korea but at some point I wanted to do a little more of South Korea. There are a lot of things about South Korea that is important, but North Korea dominates the global arena so much,” Sohn told The Korea Times last week in her office in Samcheong-dong, downtown Seoul.

“It’s about time South Korea’s global growth should take center stage,” she said.

South Korea is the first non-G7 member state to chair the summit, which is due to take place on Nov. 11 and 12. It is also the first emerging economy to host the event.

This is particularly meaningful for a country, which, just 60 years ago, had been ravaged by the Korean War (1950-53). Korea’s rise from being among the poorest countries in the world to the 13th largest is a popular topic in Economics 101, but it’s about time it should move beyond the rags-to-riches story.

“The summit is important in South Korea’s development from a war-torn country in the 1950s to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the top 20 economies in the world,” the 48-year-old said. “It will be a new role for South Korea, which can not only show its economic growth, but furthermore, demonstrate leadership.”

The G20 was launched in 1999 following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, for leading and developing economies to join hands in stabilizing the global financial market. In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, summits have been held in Washington in 2008 followed by London and Pittsburg in 2009 and most recently in Toronto in June.

“It’s the first time the summit is taking place in a non-G7 state, which suggests that the meeting has moved beyond the G7. It’s a watershed meeting; there is apprehension about whether the G20 process will be maintained after the economic crisis,” she said. “A successful meeting can be a signal that G20 is here to stay. The newly joined G20 countries thus depend on South Korea to do well.”

Asia’s fourth largest economy is the first in the region to chair the event. It is also the first non-Anglophone country to assume the responsibility. “We have to work in both Korean and English. It’s doubly hard and doubly time-consuming with all the translation work,” said Sohn. During the G20 Deputy Finance Ministers’ Meeting, for example, Korea’s representative intentionally baffled the audience by showing a slide in Korean during a presentation ― it was a good icebreaker but it was also a gesture demonstrating how difficult it is to work in two languages.

The painstaking effort to host a seamless order of events in which 20 of the world’s top leaders are gathering together, however, will invite unprecedented coverage.

“We expect thousands of media people to cover the summit. South Korea will be exposed in a way it was never exposed before,” she said. The global image of South Korea has been undervalued due to the association with the North’s nuclear issues but this can change once people see that the world’s top leaders can be safe in Seoul.

On the flip side, however, thousands of people, namely tourists, may not come because of the summit. “It’s not so much about how the summit boosts tourism as much as it is about the indirect, long-term effects ― how South Korea can be shown in a different light and there can be more knowledge and interest in the Korean culture, she said. “It’s about becoming part of the global culture.”