(Turfan, China) Religion, values and capitalism?

Its ironic that my work has gone into the State of the School report to support Penn’s largest fund raising campaign in its history, when I will not even be getting the financial aid that would help me complete my education. Regardless, I am still grateful for the bountiful opportunities Penn has afforded me and after a year of thinking, I realized I would probably not have chosen any other school if given the chance to choose again.

From the State of the School report:

A Global Perspective on Corporate Citizenship

During his 22 years, Oikono, a sophomore in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, has lived in Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai and Singapore. He speaks Chinese and Korean and has presented his ideas on development issues at forums around the globe, including the World Bank Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics in Tokyo, the 11th World Business Dialogue at the University of Cologne in Germany and the St. Gallen Symposium in Switzerland.

Now, supported by the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism (DCC), this citizen of the world is working with the World Economic Forum to study how corporations can become more conscientious citizens in the global marketplace. See won a DCC undergraduate research grant to study how China’s Harmonious Society policy — which shifts political focus from rapid economic growth to addressing social tensions — can serve as the framework for Chinese corporate citizenship. He approached the DCC program because he felt his project fit the program’s goal of examining the interplay between experiences of citizenship and issues of democracy and constitutionalism in an increasingly interconnected world.

See has also focused his curiosity about institutional responsibility on Penn with a study stemming from his own service for EduHealth, a project operated by Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships. For EduHealth, Penn students join students from West Philadelphia’s Sayre High School to provide the surrounding community with health care. See found that by fully integrating a public health care program into a high school’s curriculum, EduHealth could build social capital that would strengthen the urban community in which it was located. His research won the award for best paper on the topic of “Changing Society — Civilizing the City” in the 11th World Business Dialogue’s essay competition. As a result, See was one of only three students invited to present their work at the event. “Few people have established communityhealth centers as possible resources for building social capital,” See says. “What was unique about our research work was how we used it to catalyze change.”

(Turfan, China) A new year brings new challenges

Taking a cue from Mrwangsaysso, I have conducted an annual life update using a rudimentary framework. As the years go by, I hope to update this framework for better analysis and planning of my life.

Going forward - 1st Half of 2008

Context: With only two more semesters to graduation (excluding the semester abroad), I need to start making the hard decisions for post-graduate life. This includes both looking for a job, as well as exploring graduate school options. The pace is expected to pick up as I try to pull up my grades, complete my research project, and pursue summer job opportunities simultaneously.

Social: Social life is expected to take a backseat in what will probably be my busiest semester ever. I am afraid that I will not see my friends as much as I would like to.

Professional: Finding a summer internship in London is an overriding priority if I wish to have a job offer to work there post-graduation. After talking to many people, I decided to prioritize London as my top city, although I am willing to consider offers in other cities.

Academic: I hope to focus more on understanding how business and development interacts through my research and classes. Completing my research project with the Chair of the Legal Studies Department, another 8 more classes, and pulling up my grade, while staying sane, is crucial. I need the grade to apply for the Gates Cambridge Fellowship to pursue development studies post-graduation, and need to start thinking about which concentration I wish to pursue, and how serious I am about further studies.

Hobbies/Interests/ Passions: I am making progress on arranging an academic exchange at North Korea for fall 2008. However, I will be setting aside intensive Korean language studies next semester to focus on recruiting and my core classes. I will probably start a mini-research project on unofficial market-replicating mechanisms in North Korea though.

In retrospect - 2nd Half of 2007

Context: This semester was spent on a lot of soul searching: what to do post-graduation, what I want out of life, and what are the things that truly make me happy. I think the way ahead looks a lot clearer now and I decided not to transfer after talking to people at different schools.

Social: I spent a lot of time catching up with friends, many of whom I had not had the time to meet the previous semester, and whom I see only once or twice a semester. I was much more active socially this semester, and enjoyed the improvement here. There was also someone whom I could see myself being with, but she did not reciprocate and that’s the end of it. Unlike finding jobs or doing research, I do not believe romance is solved by persistence. Either the chemistry is there or it is not. I am also going to be too busy next semester to get distracted.

Professional: The internship hunt has officially started as I made the decision to graduate early (2.5 years) after negotiations for financial aid broke down. It is both an exciting and wearisome process, and after much discussion, I decided to pick London as my top location for the summer, and possibly after graduation.

Hobbies/Interests/ Passions: EduHealth’s work is going well as we wrapped up three significant projects this semester. In particular, the work on pushing social entrepreneurship at Wharton consumed the bulk of my time, and on this front, we have made significant progress in building an informal coalition among student leaders, faculty and administration.

I also managed to learn a lot from my travels this summer, covering China from the West to the East and into North Korea. My research with the World Economic Forum on corporate responsibility also went well, and allowed me to publish two articles.

Academics: My grades this semester plummeted, owing in large part to taking the toughest 3 Wharton core classes alongside 5 other classes. On the upside, I felt that I had grasped the concepts in the classes I did badly in, and did badly because the insane Wharton curve gave greater weighting to carelessness than to understanding the concepts in determining a grade.

I have a friend who is doing humanitarian work for a respectable international aid agency in North Korea. We met in Beijing and exchanged emails several times since she moved to Pyongyang. In October, I stopped receiving emails from her and was worried that something might have happened. I received an email with Christmas greetings from her recently. I was immensely relieved to hear from her again! It always gladdens me to hear from friends I seldom see.

Happy holidays dear readers and I hope your new year will be fulfilling and exciting.

(Hong Kong, China) WWBLD: What would Bruce Lee do?

After years living away from Singapore, I thought I had finally escaped the stereotypes of the past. However, some recent conversations have resurrected bad memories. Perhaps it is just human nature to see everyone as a stereotype rather than as an individual.

Story 1: Just before the finance finals, I was talking to a friend who is a scion of a rich influential family in Hong Kong. The friend described the complex web of elite living in Hong Kong, and how everyone went to the same international schools, same Ivy League universities and would go on to run Hong Kong’s business circles. The friend believes that it is impossible for someone to truly succeed (friend’s definition: be in Forbes 100 list) regardless of how smart and hardworking they are, unless they are born into and grew up in the right circles…or unless they are willing to do something immoral.

Story 2: I had dinner with a group of Singaporeans who were on exchange at Wharton. Every one of them was from the same few top primary/ middle/ high school. They asked the usual what is your middle/ high school questions, and when I told them I attended “nondescript ghetto school” as my middle school, the person said “wow” as a reflex. My Chinese friend asked if it was a good school. I told her that the “wow” came because no one from my school was expected to get into a good high school, much less a good overseas university.

Story 3: While going through my resume with a friend who studied in Singapore but never served military service, he immediately rubbished my work in the military as a desk job. The friend came from a top high school, where everyone is expected to become officers. Instead of finding out more about what I did for my job, his first reaction was that (a) I did not choose to go down the officer path and (b) I was not a scholar and did not end up at the Ministry of Defense doing analysis job as some scholars do. Hence, I probably wasted my time doing work that was not worth mentioning.

I do not blame them. We are all victims of our upbringing. Such stereotyping of work/education is not done on purpose by these well-intentioned people. Instead, it reflects a thinking so ingrained from living in a small society where the meaning of success is so narrowly defined because there are so few people who break the grain and prove that another path/destination exists.

It reminded me of how our middle school teacher (who was from an elite Singaporean school) used to tell us that if we were smart, we would not be attending our school. I went on to do well academically, partly because I loved intellectual challenges, partly because I was young and wanted to spite her. However, every time I meet someone from that island, I am thrown back into the stereotypes that fail to capture this journey. On one hand, I want to continue proving these people wrong, and prove that someone from the “wrong” circles can succeed, in a moral way, through sheer capability and talent. On the other hand, I feel that I should break free and define a path of my own, instead of seeking to win their approval. I should do more of the second, but I keep falling back on the first out of bad habit.

(Yalu River, China) The lighted half of the bridge in the Chinese side. The other side is the North Korean side.

I was in Dalian when I met Shan Weijian, a soft-spoken but incredibly smart and approachable managing director at TPG. I had previously read his article dissecting the World Bank’s analysis of the profitability of China’s firm. He disagreed with their prognosis of Chinese profitability, and his analysis was impressive. He is also renowned for pioneering PE investments in Chinese and Korean banks, where negotiations are fraught with complex government interference and intense feelings of economic nationalism.

However, these were not the reasons why I arranged the meeting. I had just returned from North Korea, and wanted to understand a person’s thought process during the Cultural Revolution. How do they rationalize the system? How did they feel towards the personality cult? How does this affect the way they view society today? Mr. Shan’s background was extraordinary: he was exiled to farm in the Gobi Desert during the Revolution, and learnt English through listening to a hidden radio at night. After the Revolution, he made it to America to study Economics, taught at Wharton for a while, worked at the World Bank, before heading back to work in Newbridge and now TPG. His background is awe-inspring, and it would be an honor to work beside someone with who had weathered such adverse life experiences.

We met in Dalian over lunch. I believe he had misunderstood why I had arranged the meeting. I wanted to learn more about the Cultural Revolution, and understand how it affects economic and business thinking in contemporary China. However, he was not willing to talk about the topic, a feeling I understand considering how the Revolution was an unpleasant experience, and a sensitive topic for a businessman involved with China. He might have thought I was arranging the visit to learn more about work opportunities with TPG, as I told him that I was a student at Wharton.

We still had an interesting discussion over the World Bank analysis of Chinese firms’ profitability. He was nice to have spared some time for me, and we communicated after the event when I asked him for career advice. He suggested that I look into private equity, as the intense competition for talent in the industry has meant that three years in banking was no longer a prerequisite for attaining a job in the field. I did think about it for a while, but I doubt PE is something suitable for me at this point of time.

(Turfan, China) Being penny-wise and pound foolish: Postponing reforms will come back to haunt Korea.

I previously commented on Korea’s chaebols (conglomerates) and how there needs to be urgent reform in this sector if Korea is to become a financial hub of the region, promote domestic entrepreneurship, and prevent the prevalent rent-seeking and corruption stemming from the influence of big business on the government. Corporate governance has been a fundamental weakness in Korea ever since Park Chung Hee allied business interests with public purpose.

Samsung has recently gotten into another scandal for its purported slush funds (NY Times). I doubt there will be any meaningful action against Samsung despite charges being levied by an influential company insider. As long as voters and the government believe that these corporations are too large to fail (the myth of daema bulsa), Korea will continue to blunder from scandal to scandal. The Asian Financial Crisis revealed how rent-seeking eventually levies its costs on society when insolvent chaebols, dependent on cheap government loans, blow up in an illiquid environment. Supporting the chaebols in the short-term could harm them in the long-term.

On the costs side, we need to evaluate claims that this unraveling will be disastrous for the economy in the short-term. Inter-group transfers help prop up weaker groups within a chaebol, and such groups could collapse in the event of a breakup. At the same time, stronger performing groups (e.g. Samsung electronics) could benefit from being freed of the deadweight of underperforming assets. There also needs to be a discount applied to the separated group holdings as their rent-seeking capabilities dwindle in their non-chaebol form.

The first step to reform should involve unraveling the complex inter-linkages between different groups in a chaebol. The complexity of corporate ownership in Korea often leads to a holding company held by a founding family that exerts strong influence across the entire conglomerate. Controlling such a large swath of the economy allows the family to exert its influence on the government and media. One possibility could be for the government to give a one-time cash infusion to the dissolved chaebol to give the separate parts time and capital to reform and become competitive. The costs of this change should be paid for from the theoretical existing costs of corporate rent-seeking in Korea.

(Beijing, China) A Global Identity?

It looks like I will have to shelve my plans to visit Latin America this winter break and postpone meeting my good friend Virginia from Argentina. It has been awhile since I last visited Singapore, and I knew that this trip was due eventually. I wonder if Singapore has changed much.

Admittedly, I am not particularly excited at heading to Singapore beyond escaping the cold weather in Philadelphia and seeing my parents and friends. It seems so long ago since I left, and memories of the island are faint and distant. I wonder if immigration will stop me, considering that I had not reported back to my military unit since I left the country. At least making this trip now means I would have freed up my summer for alternative travel arrangements. Beyond summer internship, the set of possibilities include:

1. Follow Beatrice around India as she conducts her research
2. Latin America – Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba
3. South Korea (again!)
4. North Korea (if my study abroad does not work out)
5. Europe (especially Russia and East Europe) if I end up working in London

I find it hard to see myself having a home or identity that is grounded geographically. I remember talking to a friend about service to our community. She sees her community in ethnic and national terms (i.e. Korean) while I see community as humanity in general. Our discussion made me aware of how travel and globalization are changing our mindsets towards society, which I hope is building a shared history among a global community that will lay the foundations for a post-modern system of global governance and cooperation.