KEI Live

On the eve of the third inter-Korean summit, stakes are understandably high for what the meeting will mean for the future of inter-Korean relations and North Korea's weapons program. In over a half-century since the end of the Korean War, the two countries have struggled to find a substantive peaceful resolution to their decades-long conflict. North Korea's recent diplomatic outreach has brought up questions of the reclusive country's motives and how peace could realistically be acheived. 

General Chun In-bum (retired) of the Repubic of Korea Army recently presented on North Korea's outreach at KEI as part of KEI's Academic Symposium. He sat down with Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson to discuss the upcoming summit and what may be on the table for both countries.

On April 27, South Korean President Moon Jae In will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a historic summit that may include discussions of major changes for the peninsula, including denuclearisation and an official peace treaty to end the Korean War. But what do the South Korean people think about their president's new outreach?

Yonsei University Professor John Delury joins Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson to discuss this and other issues ahead of the historic summit this week.

With the exception of Gangnam Style, few mainstream radio stations have ever even thought to play Korean pop music. But in the last year or so, the United States has seen a surge of interest in k-pop, with superstars BTS appearing on the American Music Awards, Jimmy Kimmel and the Ellen Show, and with radio stations around the country starting to introduce some k-pop into their playlists.

Katie Brownlie is no stranger to the emergence of k-pop in the United States - she has been a fan of Korean pop music for about a decade, and has run a k-pop themed radio show on 90.3 FM the Core at Rutgers University for more than three years. In this episode, Korean Kontext host Jenna Gibson talks with Katie about her show, about her love of k-pop, and about the genre's growing popularity in the United States.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

After a year of discussions, the Trump and Moon Administrations recently announced their tentative agreement to update the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), focusing almost entirely on the automotive sector and a few other spots, including pharmaseuticals. But one are that was left completely untouched was agriculture, perhaps due to the fact that the United States saw significant improvements in ag trade to Korea following the implementation of KORUS. Now, with the Trump administration saying they may continue to discuss changes to KORUS, American farmers are continuing to watch the discussions closely.

In this episode of Korean Kontext, Jenna Gibson sits down with David Oppedahl, a Senior Business Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Veronica Nigh, an Economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, to discuss what KORUS has meant for the American agriculture industry, and what to keep an eye on as the agreement continues to go into effect.

This week's episode is a conversation with the third and final honoree for Korean American Day 2018! This year's theme - Recognizing Leaders in Journalism - fits this week's guest perfectly. She had a long career in print journalism, including with KoreAm, a magazine focused on telling stories for and about the Asian American community. Now, she is focusing her skills on a documentary film project called "Free Chol Soo Lee," about a Korean American man wrongly convicted of murder and the huge grassroots movement to free him.

Julie is joined in this episode by her co-director, Eugene Yi, who also shares his experiences as a journalist and filmmaker focusing on telling stories about the Korean American community.

Looking at the trade numbers between China and North Korea, trade expert Bill Brown is confident that China has finally become serious about enforcing international sanctions against the DPRK - but only in the last three months or so. Brown, who is a nonresident fellow at KEI and who writes extensively on China-DPRK trade and the economic effects of sanctions, believes this could be a tipping point for North Korea's domestic economy.

In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson asks Brown why he thinks China has finally decided to crack down on its trade with North Korea, what effects this may have on the economy and Kim Jong-un's decision-making process, and more.

In the late 1930s, nearly 200,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly removed from the Soviet Far East, packed into trains and sent to Central Asia. More than 70 years later, their descendants still live in the former Soviet Union, most of them in what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.  

Victoria Kim grew up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, knowing that her grandfather was Korean. But it wasn't until much later that she began looking into what that meant - how her grandfather and other Central Asian Koreans arrived in Uzbekistan and made their lives there. This story became a multimedia project called "Lost and Found in Uzbekistan: The Korean Story."  

In this week's episode, which originally aired in 2016, we talk with Victoria about the experience of Central Asian Koreans in the 1930s until today, how her project delved into these stories, and much more.  

To view Victoria's project, please click here.

From February 9-25, athletes and fans from around the world gathered in PyeongChang for the 2018 Winter Olympics. But while the athletes competed for gold, the Olympics also had major political implications, especially after the North Koreans decided to send a high-level delegation to the Games and agreed to field a joint women's hockey team with South Korea.

In this episode of Korean Kontext, host Jenna Gibson spoke with Jonathan Cheng, the Seoul Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, about how he and the Journal's team chose to cover all these different aspects of the Olympics, how Korea prepared for the Games, and, of course, the rise of Korea's famous Garlic Girls curling team.

As part of KEI’s annual commemoration of Korean-American Day on January 13th, KEI honors exceptional Korean-Americans in various fields and industries for their respective contributions to both their professions and the Korean-American community. 

For 2018, KEI honored three Korean-American journalists. Jenna Gibson also sat down with honoree Chang Lee, a photojournalist from  the New York Times. He spoke with Jenna on how he first became interested in photography and his experiences of covering everything from war zones to the Olympics. 

The New York Times featured Chang Lee and his photographs from the Pyeongchang Olympics in a February 15th article, which can be found in the link below.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/lens/a-times-photographers-journey-home-to-the-winter-olympics.html

Note: The interview took place on January 12th and prior to the start of the Pyeongchang Olympics.