A realist with big dreams

Kim Moon-soo

Gyeonggi Governor Kim Moon-soo’s reply to a casual greeting recently sounded like the sullen response of a frustrated investor.
“There’s one restriction after another for regional governments in Korea,” said the 56-year-old leader of the most populous province in the country. “It’s devastating.”
Kim, a three-term Grand National Party lawmaker, currently heads the metropolitan region that is home to 27 cities surrounding the capital Seoul. About 22 million people, about 46 percent of the country’s total population, live in the Seoul-Gyeonggi metropolitan area. Kim was elected governor of the province in general elections a year ago. New satellite towns are continuously on the rise in his province.
“I fly over the Gyeonggi area and look down from the chopper, and I think this is a very big piece of good, rich land. Comparing it with the desert of Dubai, it really is,” Kim said. “But while a quarter of the world’s cranes are now in Dubai building the best skyscrapers in the world, Gyeonggi has to deal with questions like ‘why are you building another satellite city out there?’”
Kim said the country’s administration is still centered around the policies of the central government. It’s embarrassing, he said, to speak of regional governments in Korea because there are so many barriers to what local governments can do themselves.
“I fight every day to change this situation. Just now [the interview took place on July 2], I came back from meeting with lawmakers, pleading with them to let us build a factory or a college campus on the site what a U.S. Army base is going to vacate,” he said. “Sometimes we fight, sometimes we hold protests or seek legislative measures, if there’s an opportunity. But we don’t get much in return.”
One of his proud achievements is the new discount transfer fare system between Seoul and Gyeonggi’s public transportation lines, into which he poured 100 billion won ($109 million). Kim is currently concentrating on enhancing the water quality of Lake Paldang, which supplies drinking water for an estimated 23 million Koreans.
He plans to lower overall housing costs by providing more housing units for the public. When his plans are completed, 11 giant residential districts filled with apartment complexes will be built in Gyeonggi.
“This should not be seen as a mere competition between the metropolis and the non-metropolitan areas,” he said, acknowledging ongoing arguments that development should not be centered only in the region around Seoul. “In order to prevent [Korea] from falling behind the competition in northeast Asia, we need to create a bigger merger for bigger development.”
Kim is proposing the creation of an exclusive economic zone stretching along the coastal area facing the Yellow Sea, which will include Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi and North and South Jeolla provinces, and will reach across to Shandong and Shanghai in China. He said the coastal belt would then attract more factories, leisure facilities and colleges.
He disagrees with the Roh Moo-hyun administration’s policies of balanced national development, which are supposed to promote even development between the Seoul metropolitan area and outlying regions.
“Such an idea is very outdated,” he said. “You can dream of even development, but it’s merely a low-road strategy that has been proved a failure by past communist regimes.”
This governor, a believer in rapid growth and capitalist development, however, had in the past fought fiercely for labor and political rights. When he was in the 12th grade, Kim was kicked out of school for leading a protest against the constitutional change that former president Park Chung Hee had sought to prolong his rule. After attending Seoul National University, he lived as an activist. He had himself hired at small clothing manufacturers to promote and set up labor unions in the factories. He spent his 20s and 30s hiding from the police, then spent time in prison, suffering police torture. He met Seol Nan-yeong, who would later become his wife, a former union leader at an electronics company who provided him refuge at her home.
In 1987, he launched a left-wing party. In the general elections of 1992, his party managed to win 310,000 votes nationwide, but did not win many National Assembly seats. In 1994, he decided to join the then-governing party, headed by former President Kim Young-sam.
He was criticized as an “apostate” and a “traitor” for joining what is now the conservative group in the National Assembly. But Kim said he only chose to join the party because he supported Kim Young-sam’s ideas for renovation.
“My conclusion is that I have learned a lot since then,” Kim said. He was quiet for a while before he started to explain the ideological changes he went through. “Korean society needs people who can speak as labor rights advocates, but I believe there are important things the mainstream can also do.”
He said he was no longer an advocate of marginal groups; he is now with the mainstream.
Kim said he changed his political and ideological stances mainly due to the fact that socialism has collapsed. He said he was “shocked” to see a woman from a former communist nation come to Korea and prostituted herself just to buy a pair of denim jeans.
“I think Kim Jong-il should visit Dubai and learn something,” he said. “Dubai succeeded because it opened up, while North Korea collapsed because it closed its doors to the outside. Capitalism is on the fast track to further success. The United States has become the most powerful state in the world.
“When you finally face the reality, you learn to become responsible,” he said. Kim said he still shared the sorrows of the Democratic Labor Party and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. But his view on the problems differs a lot from the country’s two major activist labor groups.
“What was in the past is important, but I think what we have now and what’s coming up in the future is more important,” he said.
Despite being a three-term GNP lawmaker, there are questions whether the party considers him a strong enough leader to potentially become its next chairman or presidential candidate.
“I think the mainstream group within the Grand National Party took me in without problems,” he said. “Sohn Hak-kyu [the former GNP lawmaker who turned to the liberal bloc] has always said he left the party because it deserted him first ― but I don’t think I am like him at all. I am a realist.”

By Kim Gyo-joon JoongAng Ilbo [mina@joongang.co.kr]