On 3rd October 2007, North and South Korea held what was only their second summit meeting since splitting up in war almost 60 years ago. The most important person in attendance, the one who brought the two sides together, was neither the host Kim Jong-il—Pyongyang’s Stalin—nor Roh Moo-hyun, his democratically elected counterpart from Seoul. Instead, attention was focused on a 52-year-old South Korean woman dressed, as usual, in black and described to me by some people there as a “housewife.” Basking in her triumph during a break in the talks, she stood by the edge of the Taedong river, surrounded by television crews. She stared across the water to the far shore, where smokestacks puffed among Soviet-style housing blocks. “According to my husband, Pyongyang gets brighter with every visit,” she told the cameras, turning around with a girlish twirl, an extravagant gesture for her. “Now I know what he means.”

Hyun Jeong-eun is a reserved mother of three children who says on her website that she likes to cook cheese fondue. She also happens to be the US-educated head of Hyundai, the vast conglomerate founded by her father-in-law as a car workshop in 1946. Hyundai went on to build supertankers, skyscrapers and computer chips, as well as operating department stores, hotels and banks. “Imagine a GM or Ford that offers almost every product or service imaginable,” says Donald Kirk, a US expert on chaebol—family-run conglomerates. Hyundai is the symbol of modern South Korea and its rise to 11th largest economy in the world. It’s no coincidence that the country’s current president, Lee Myung-bak, who came to office earlier this year, is a former chairman of Hyundai. Some refer to South Korea as the “republic of Hyundai,” given the company’s success and power. Or at least they used to. In the 1990s, Hyundai accounted for 16 per cent of South Korean GDP and 12 per cent of exports. Its low-cost cars became a household name in America. But then the Asian financial crisis struck. In 1998, revenues slumped, debts loomed, the founding family’s shareholding was diluted and divisions were sold off. Today Hyundai’s finances have stabilised, but the company is dwarfed by other Asian conglomerates.

A return to glory may, however, be imminent. Chairwoman Hyun is placing a large bet on expanding into communist North Korea, the former heartland of Korean industry and the last great untapped market in Asia. It has the lowest wages in the region, perhaps a tenth of those in China. American worries about cheap Chinese imports could soon seem quaint. Situated at the dead centre of Asia’s three big economies—Japan, China and South Korea—the “hermit kingdom” is the focus of growing foreign investment, and could soon manufacture everything from GE fridges to GM cars at bargain prices.

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