Some interesting figures stated in this article about international marriages in Korea.

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Small talk, especially between enemies, is meant to break the ice. But sometimes it can have the opposite effect - and also prove unintentionally revealing.

Last Wednesday, major-generals from North and South Korea were chatting before a second day of tough talks on border security. The North's Major-General Kim Yong-chul noted that farmers must be hard at work. Indeed, replied South Korea's Major-General Han Min-gu. But since the rural population is falling, many are marrying women from Mongolia, the Philippines, Vietnam and elsewhere.

That did not go down well. According to the Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo, Kim grimaced and snapped that "our nation has always considered its pure lineage to be of great importance."

Far from challenging him, Han replied that this is "but a drop of ink in the Han River."

Kim was unmollified: "Not even one drop of ink must be allowed to fall into the Han river."

As this unsavory little exchange shows, in one respect a divided Korea is already unified. Overt and unabashed racist attitudes and assumptions are deep-rooted on the peninsula.

North Korea makes no bones about this. "The theory of 'multiracial society' is a poison," thundered the party daily Rodong Sinmun on April 27. Pyongyang media does not pull its punches. The paper lambasted those behind this "strange farce to hamstring the essential characters of the Korean nation" as "riff-raffs who have not an iota of national soul."
Was not communism meant to be internationalist? Not so North Korea, whose emphasis on not merely nationalism but racial purity calls to mind Hitler and Nazism more than Stalin.

Nor is this just theory. A recent Time cover story reported the horrific experience of Kim Myong-suk - one of thousands of North Korean women who seek a better life in China or, more sinisterly, are trafficked there. Either way, their lives are furtive and precarious. Caught and repatriated in 1998 at age 20, five months pregnant, she was repeatedly kicked in the stomach by a prison guard until "the Chink," as he kept yelling, was aborted.

In South Korea, things are changing. The "strange farce" which so bothered the North was actually a welcome and worthy, if overdue, outburst of soul-searching in Seoul about race.

In Seoul the inspiration was Hines Ward, the Pittsburgh Steelers receiver named in February as the Super Bowl's Most Valuable Player. For the uninitiated, we are talking about American football.

Ward's South Korean mother raised him after his father, a black GI, deserted them. Facing huge prejudice in Korea, they moved to the United States.

The MVP award prompted a media blizzard, not least in Seoul. Cynics suggest that Koreans might be racist, but they sure do like a winner.
A visit by Ward spotlighted those less fortunate who grow up biracial in Korea rather than the United States. They face not only popular prejudice but official discrimination.

As the astonished footballer noted: "You can't even get into the military if you're biracial. That is their rule, 100 per cent pure."

The thousands of biracial Koreans hope the Hines Ward effect will not be just a nine-day wonder. On May 10, South Korea's police authority said it will hire biracial officers from next year. Yet it justified this by citing their putative language skills - dubious, as 80 percent are raised by Korean single mothers, a further source of stigma - rather than rights and equity.
If entrenched racism is to change at all, the new marital trends referred to by Maj-Gen Han may do the trick. In a now highly industrialized and urbanized country, the farm sector has long been in decline. (The militancy by South Korean farmers which shocked Hong Kong at December's World Trade Organisation meeting is a desperate rearguard action by a violent minority.)

For many of South Korea's dwindling band of farmers, finding a wife is no less a challenge than resisting rice market opening. But just as workers from poorer Asian countries flock to Seoul (legally or not) to do the 3D jobs - dirty, difficult, dangerous - that Koreans shun, the living standards of the world's 10th-largest economy may hold out a hope of a better life to foreign women with few good options at home.

This trend is still new, but already its impact is striking. A survey by the JoongAng Ilbo, a leading Seoul daily, found that the proportion of marriages to foreigners grew from 8.4 percent in 2003 to 13.6 percent last year. In Seoul and two mainly rural provinces, the figure was over 17 percent. At a local level, in at least four counties over 37 percent of marriages involved a foreign spouse.

Soon an education system whose textbooks reinforce ideas of national and racial purity will have to adapt. In one primary school in North Jeolla Province, which had its first mixed-race pupil (half Filipino) in 2003, 20 out of 357 pupils are now biracial.

Though statistics are not kept, over half the foreign brides are thought to be ethnic Koreans from China. They do not face the same cultural and linguistic challenges as women from elsewhere - but by the same token, they can more easily vanish into Korea's anonymous cities. Hence, according to the brokers who serve this new market, Southeast Asian women are increasingly preferred despite their darker skin, previously a turn-off in racist terms.

South Korea has wider policy reasons to encourage this trend. Last year its birth rate fell to 1.08, one of the lowest in the world. If not checked, then, as in Japan, population will start to fall. In a rapidly ageing society, care of the elderly is also a growing burden.

Demographics aside, it is high time South Korea ditched racism. For a country which sells to the world and aspires to be East Asia's business hub, South Korea is far too self-obsessed and culturally inbred. An era of globalization demands a more open mindset.

Next time some benighted North Korean general starts a racist rant, his Southern partner should tell him sharply that, in the civilized world, that sort of thing went out with Auschwitz.

Aidan Foster-Carter is an honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Britain's Leeds University. - Ed.

By Aidan Foster-Carter