Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

DARJEELING, India — You know the planet is truly a global village when you turn on the TV in a cheapie room on the lower slopes of the Himalayas early one morning and find ESPN carrying the Red Sox-Cardinals live in the World Series.

OK, you could do without the talking heads of CNN and BBC for a few days, but baseball fans will understand the World Series is another matter. Soon you’re mesmerized by whatever the Sox and Cards are up to and beginning to wonder why you’re watching a ballgame when you should be out meeting people and absorbing local sights and sounds.

It wasn’t always that way. Years ago, covering Vietnam, tuning in to Armed Forces Vietnam, I don’t think I ever saw a ballgame. Technology had advanced when I began spending much time in Korea on a book project after the 1988 Olympics and recall actually watching every game of a World Series on the Armed Forces Korea Network, no idea which one or who was playing.

But wait a minute — the global village isn’t really that open after all. Pretty soon AFKN had to stop carrying baseball, and most of football and basketball, thanks to the deals the patriotic flag-waving, Star-Spangled-Banner-playing titans of American sports had made with Korean networks. The idea was the Korean networks would definitely not have to compete with AFKN even if they carried the broadcasts in Korean, not American English.

Then, not too long after that, AFKN disappeared almost entirely from screens outside the American bases. So much for free speech and the open society. Probably those with a lot better know-how than I will tell me how easy it is to get American sports on Korean screens, but It’s been quite a while since I caught U.S. sports on TV in Korea — even with Korean sportscasters doing the talking.

Not that India is really all that open either. Business people keep telling me about all the tremendous red tape and bureaucracy they encounter whenever they try and get something done here. Korean companies have persisted through all the hell of operating in Korea and may be the most successful — they and the Japanese. Hyundai makes nifty cars in a plant in Chennai — small models just right for the burgeoning Indian middle class.

Indian IT is tough here for another reason, namely the poor infrastructure.

An investor from Hong Kong summarized the problems – poor transportation over a sagging rail network, poor ports, poor roads and uncertain communications. Every time you see signs of high-tech progress here, you see equally negative evidence of stuff not working right, deteriorating, breaking down.

And then there’s another problem, that of the need to bribe various and sundry people at so many stages. Business people have endless tales to tell of requests for donations, fees and all the rest. Still, Koreans keep coming, patiently enduring where many others dropped out, having decided the pain was just not commensurate with the gain.

Among the most patient no doubt is POSCO, dreaming for years of building an immense steel plant in the eastern state of Odisha. POSCO has met with tremendous opposition from farmers and leftist politicians but is hanging tough. Sooner or later POSCO is sure it will be able to overcome all obstacles. It’s a deal from which India would benefit as much as POSCO. The investment would be the largest ever made by a foreign company in India. The country badly needs foreigners to come here with cash in hand, the more the better.

But we get back to how much freedom South Korea is giving to foreign interlopers, whether American sports networks or foreign manufacturers. GM Daewoo does provide an opening for manufacturing cars with American labels, but isn’t the company surviving by exporting them elsewhere rather than from sales in Korea?

Korea and India think alike in ways when it comes to foreign competition. Think of Wal-Mart, which gave up in Korea and has recently had to pull out of a deal with a huge Indian firm when Indian bureaucrats insisted they had to obtain 30 percent of their product line from Indian sources. That might sound fine in theory but not in reality.

Basically the Indians, like the Koreans, don’t care for a foreign giant coming in and competing with their own retailers.

As for why ESPN gets away with broadcasting American baseball, the games are in a time slot when most people are still sleeping. No sooner are the games over than ESPN India goes back to India’s favorite sport, cricket. That’s a British game, of course, that permeates the culture here just about as deeply as baseball in Korean society.

  Armed Forces Korea Network, Cardinals, ESPN, POSCO, Red Sox, Watching the Series from the Himalayas: Survival of the fittest in the global village