Steamroller Repair

Mitt Romney proved this week that he has repaired his steamroller, the one that suffered a minor break-down in South Carolina.

I now see no likelihood of anyone other than Romney getting the Republican nomination, though Newt can keep it entertaining in the meantime.

That still doesn't tell us how the end of this political year is going to go.

On another, but not an unrelated point, I was talking recently with bright finance-industry people in east Asia. They said two things.  First (my paraphrase), some of them say: buy Samsung. The year 2012 is shaping up as a good one for Korean industry in general and for that company in particular. (By the way, if you actually are stupid enough to buy Samsung based on hearsay in this or any a blog ... just please don't. Stick with broad-based indexes, some of which can get you exposure to east Asia in general.)

The second thing I've taken away from these recent conversations is more intriguing, and more worth passing on to you, dear reader. Some of them believe that there has been too much emphasis on the part of certain analysts, in London and New York, about how China is going down for a "hard landing." My sources believe there will be some contraction in the PRC, but it will be rather soft, as landings go.

I don't know whether that's true. Surely the PRC seems to be due for some sort of landing, and indeed a contraction is underway.  If my friends were kidding themselves, wacky optimists as they may be, and it really is a hard landing, a bursting of a Sino-bubble on the way, then this could have macro global implications.

Which brings us back to the politics of this campaign.  We could be hearing an awful lot about China before November.

Liu Xiang

Every August of the last three years I have written an entry about the Chinese track-and-field star Liu Xiang.  Here are the earlier such entries:

2008
2009
2010 

Here is a trip down memory lane from the China Herald, their thoughts back in 2008 about "what killed Liu Xiang's Olympic ambitions?"

There is some news about Liu.  This year he is expected to be the PRC's star in the IAAF World Championships, to be held in Daegu, from August 28 to September 4.  The IAAF, by the way, the the International Association of Athletics Federations, and Daegu is the fourth-largest city in the Republic of Korea.

Apparently, in the hurdles, Liu has adopted a new technique since his injury, approaching the first hurdle in seven strides instead of -- as in his earlier days --  in eight.  Here is a discussion from China's Xinhua News Agency.

In that event Liu will face tough competition in the 110 meter hurdles from a US star, David Oliver, who has a season best in this event of 12.94 seconds. Liu's season best is 13 seconds flat.

Here's an Oliver biography.

Due respect to Oliver, but this blog has adopted Liu as its track-and-field fav, and we'll be cheering him on.  Besides, it's a good bet he won't be suffering from jet lag the way Oliver might be at the Daegu competition!

And there's London next year, i.e. the 2012 Olympics.  I'm psyched already.

South Korea

I wrote about politics in South Korea in August, when I focused on the presidential campaign of Lee Myung-bak, why some people were calling him a "pragmatist," and what that term meant in such a context.

So now, I'm hapy to report, the pragmatist has prevailed.

Mr. Lee won the election this week with a strong plurality. He received 48.7% of the vote in a multiple-candidate field. The runner up, Chung Dong-young, received only 26.2%.

Mr. Chung was seen as the proxy for the incumbent, Roh Moo-hyun, and the electorate was unhappy with the sluggish growth of the last five years under Roh.

Sluggish is a comparative term, of course. Nearby, the Japanese government just announced that its only predicting growth of 2% in its next fiscal year. The growth that makes Koreans so unhappy has been at about 4.5% annual. Still, it was a good deal more than that in pre-Roh years.

Mr. Lee was a natural figure to replace the current leadership under such conditions, as a former executive within the Hyundai corporate empire.

East Asia in general is a crucial economic driver for the world's economy, and South Korea is in the thick of it, so everyone has a special reason, not just distant philanthropic sentiment but a genuine basis in self interest, to wish the best for the people of the half peninsula.

Pragmatism in South Korea

A former CEO of Hyundai, Lee Myung-bak, is now running for president of South Korea as a member of the Grand National Party.

Lee calls himself a pragmatist. Indeed, he uses the phrase "empirical pragmatist," which sounds a tad backwards to me, but that may be an artifact of translation. I prefer "pragmatic empiricism" when both terms are used, because pragmatism is a variant within the broader empirical camp.

Lee, at any rate, used "empirical pragmatism" as a label for his desire to get beyond ideologies, which he believes have simply blinded previous governments to the national interest. He also thinks the national interest is best served -- pragmatically advanced, by what he calls the "smart market economy," in which on the one hand competition, freedom and creativity are protected, and on the other hand stragglers are assisted.

I don't know South Korean politics well enough to comment, but I will say as a pragmatist I don't object to Lee's use of the term. In my own mind, as I have long contended, the fullest political expression of pragmatism is anarcho-capitalism. But ....

I recognize that the Republic of Korea is unlikely soil for anarcho-capitalism, largely because the notion of a free-market system for territorial defense leaves people queasy, and with Communism-induced famine so evident just to the north of an arbitrary line on a map, that queasiness is rather hard to overcome. So, pragmatically, I suspect Lee is going as far in what I regard as the rational direction as could be expected of him.

Iceland, after all, in the days sometimes evoked as an anarcho-cap model, or for that matter in all days since, has been ... well, an island. Not the southern half of a peninsula.