UK Minister of State Jeremy Browne at KU DIS

Last evening, the Minister of State for the UK in charge of Asia and Latin America Jeremy Browne gave a talk in our department here at Korea University entitled something like "Korea: Miracle of Our Times". The bulk of the talk focused unsurprisingly on encouraging the strengthening of relations between Korea and the UK accompanied by a clear advertisement enticing Korean students to study in the UK. But a few interesting emerged for me. First, it became clear that Korea's historic alliance with the US ties it in to the historic alliance between the US and UK. Second, though it was unclear to me how Japan fits into the picture, this triangular neoliberal alliance was clearly poised in opposition to China. Though Browne never used the word "China", it was clear that his praise of Korea's progress into democracy, human rights, and free markets was situated as a model for China to emulate.

Curiously, in the human rights context, he called on Korea to formalize its de facto, fifteen year ban on the death penalty. I missed some of his talk because this prompted me to formulate a question about his opinion of the US use of drones to execute Americans overseas who are perceived as threats to the state. I abandoned this however.

I'm also struck now by a more polite and directly pertinent question which I might have asked (though students were correctly given priority in asking questions). It would be interesting to know how much of the effort to attract Korean and other overseas students is an effort to shore up the resources of UK universities, which have suffered immense cuts under Cameron.