The poor relations

WHEN, in a hissy fit, North Korea shut down the Kaesong industrial zone almost three years ago, pulling out its workers and expelling their South Korean managers, many were puzzled as to why the conservative administration of Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s president, would work so hard to restart it. A product of the “sunshine policy” of her left-leaning predecessors, the factories just north of the border kept alive a few of South Korea’s twilight industries, producing low-grade shoes and clothes with subsidies from the South and cheap labour from the North.