Create job opportunities for young IT talent!
This month, I will participate in volunteer work along with college students for 20 days in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (Northeast China) to provide educational services to the disabled, the elderly and orphans. Since 2000, free IT education has been provided in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture during winter and summer vacations without fail. Last summer, while volunteering in Yanbian, I happened to meet a special man who took care of orphans abandoned by North Korean defectors. His name was Han Chul-Bum, an ethnic Korean living in China, who was running a charity center called Aeshim. This man, who claimed to be a descendant of North Korean partisans (communist sympathizers during the Korean War), built a shrine for Manchuria independence fighters who fought against Japanese colonial rule. He was the highly-respected leader of the ethnic Koreans living in China. He told us that his hope was to see the two Koreas put their differences aside and reunite for the sake of the generations to come. He asked us to work hard for national unification.
At the end of this month, the government of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture will hold the 5th Korea-China IT (Yanbian) Forum and the International Exhibition in its capital YAN JI. The Forum is scheduled to be held on August 29th at the Grand Hall of Yanbian Baek-San Hotel. This year's theme, like last year's, will be "cultural originality", which indicates that the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture is pinning its hopes on the promotion of the IT industry including the games and animation industries. In addition, I have delivered a keynote speech each year since the first Korea-China IT Forum. The theme of the keynote speeches has also been cultural originality. Last year, I delivered a keynote speech on ways to create the 13th Yanbian sports team, and intend to make a presentation on outsourcing 3D visual technology to Yanbian this year.
The reason why the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture is keen on the contents industry among other IT industries is because Yanbian stands at the crossroads of China, Korea, Japan and Russia against the backdrop of growing economies in Korea and China, far-ranging cultural exchanges between Korea and China and the unstoppable opening of the Tumen River region. In particular, in an era of globalization when the information industry is growing rapidly, the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture's unique culture, history, geography and language-wide advantages are revitalizing IT exchanges between Korea and Japan. Yanbian is indeed emerging as an IT hub in East Asia. Moreover, to provide platforms for IT companies in North East Asia, Yanbian is ramping up cooperation in the IT sector by building a Korea-China software industrial park.
Last year, for example, the International Exhibition put various software products, made by North Korea, on display -- such as biometric authentication (fingerprints, irises, voice and face recognition), machine translation, DRM and image processing technology. These products were mainly produced on a demand basis, not for development purposes. These products bore a label saying, "In the hopes of software development orders, joint development and joint R&D projects between China and Japan, we do our best to maximize customer satisfaction in terms of product quality, development time and costs". North Korean R&D workers dispatched to China are no less than IT prodigies. They are in the top 0.1% of North Korea's college graduates, so they are under direct control of the North Korean government.
Academic papers introduced by the North Korean journal "Information Science", whose fourth issue was published in 2008, show that only those papers that cover both the development of mathematical algorithms and test results of developed programs appear in the journal. Judging from this, North Korea's prowess in developing mathematical algorithms has been proven. What's more, I have witnessed North Korean software developers working on software programs day and night even on weekends in Danding China and Yanbian. Therefore, I saw unlimited potential lurking in IT talents, who are armed with strong knowledge in mathematics and physics.
Economic cooperation should take center stage of South Korea's unification policy. Offering unconditional aid to the North will end up stripping North Korea of its self-sustaining abilities. One of the ways to help the nation economy-wise is to create jobs. And we need to thrash out a win-win strategy, which is focused on turning North Korean IT talents' technological innovations into economic benefits. By allowing them to enjoy economic prosperity, we can expect more openness in their ways of thinking. Thus, in the spirit of brotherhood, we should give North Korean IT talents opportunities to prove their worth.
By doing so, they will learn that there are different ideologies and ideological freedom translates into high-level originality. The driving force behind the two Koreas' future, peace and prosperity will gain momentum when the whole nation obtains harmony in national sentiment and national bonds. Once young people living in the two Koreas demonstrate their ability to the fullest and develop world-class IT technologies, the two Koreas will be greatly touched.
Written by Choi Sung, Professor of computer science at Namseoul University
email: sstar@nsu.ac.kr
