Taiwan vs SKorean

[roddy]

It's been four years, Outofin. It's time for you to tell us who won and then start the next PK. Otherwise we're never going to get to the final.

[renzhe]

South Korean movies have been very successful internationally, ranking right behind Hong Kong and Japan. They have a very healthy film industry growing there.

If you go to the average non-blockbuster cinema or any DVD shop in Europe, you'll find many Korean, Japanese and Hong Kong movies. Very few Mainland Chinese or Taiwanese. Same with international film festivals.

In particular, the horror and thriller genres have had a stream of very good movies from South Korea and Japan in the last 10 years, with a huge number of Hollywood remakes.

[Outofin]

roddy, to me, Korea won. But there's no final, and I don't know why they won. If I have to say something, I guess it's because

- the credibility of a nation's elite class

- protectionist policies

- a people's self-esteem

[bhchao]

Taiwan has retained its folk religions and Buddhism to a greater degree than South Korea. Buddhism remains firmly entrenched in Taiwan and continues to grow there; while it is rapidly fading in Korea. Buddhism is no longer a dominant religion in the latter. Buddhism rapidly fading in Korea

Today you hear all these Buddhist organizations from Taiwan such as Tzu Chi, while you hardly hear any from Korea. Buddhist activities remain popular at college campuses in Taiwan.

Decades of Japanese rule, Cold War division, and the communist victory in China prevented Korean Buddhism from connecting with Chinese Buddhist sources.

Taiwanese Buddhism renewed itself when many Buddhist monks of high eminence from the Mainland went to Taiwan with the KMT. These monks reinvigorated Buddhism in Taiwan based on traditional Chinese precepts.

Buddhism in Taiwan: religion and the state, 1660-1990 by Charles Brewer Jones

We turn now to the group of monks who..came to dominate Taiwan Buddhism until the 1970s...One of the most significant facts about these monks is that almost all of them came to Taiwan after distinguished careers in the areas of Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and the city of Shanghai. These are the very areas in which Buddhism was the most active and vibrant, where the monasteries were kept in the best repair and had the largest monastic populations, where the clergy kept the precepts most scrupulously and were most serious about spiritual discipline, and where they enjoyed the greatest degree of respect and patronage from the laity.

http://buddhistethics.org/11/hinsch-review04.html

To rid the sangha of Japanese influence, the KMT undid much of the previous secularization and forced monks to conform to traditional Chinese monastic rules. Buddhist ritual and education were now conducted in Mandarin or Hokkien instead of Japanese, and major Buddhist activities were reorganized to emphasize their Chineseness. Overall, the campaign to make Taiwanese Buddhism completely Chinese was remarkably successful. Sinicizers also stressed ideas that were popular in mainland China in the 1940s, especially the Chinese version of humanistic Buddhism. In this way, monks from China such as the prominent Xingyun (Hsing Yun) accelerated humanist trends already present in Taiwan.

I am not endorsing Buddhism, but there seems to be a connection here with regards to Taiwan and South Korea.