Author: ahasuerus

“We would like to restore ethnic homogeneity by progressively making available North Korea’s press, publications, broadcasting and other means of communication and thereby expanding mutual understanding and common ground,” [Unification Minister] Kwon Young-se reportedly said in a briefing on the ministry’s future plans. (Kyung-Sin Park, NK News, 26 August 2022.)

The above will surprise nobody who’s been following my blog for the past year. On the contrary, you may well feel the “euphoria” at seeing a prophecy fulfilled that Moon Jae-in says he felt when South Vietnam fell to the Vietcong.

But if you rely on other foreign sources of Korea news, which did their usual election-season shtick of warning that a conservative president would turn the clock back to the Cold War, you’re likely wondering what’s going on. Now, we at Sthele Press demand no fees from readers, nor even registration, but if we’d misread developments that grossly, perhaps to the undoing of a stock portfolio or two, our snake-haired editor wouldn’t leave readers to figure out the blunder we’d made. No, she’d make us address it in a contrite new post, explaining what kind of government this has turned out to be, and why.

Such articles must be lurking behind all the paywalls I can’t get past, because I see nothing of the sort in what I can read for free, least of all in coverage of the above statement. For example, the gist of NK News articles by Jeongmin Kim, Kyung-Sin Park, and Andrei Lankov, which range from the merely uncritical to the enthusiastically supportive, can be synthesized as follows: the danger posed to the South by the Kim regime’s unappealing propaganda has been vastly overestimated, so it’s high time the restrictions on it were lifted. Good idea, Yoon government; don’t let the McCarthyists talk you out of it.

If few will pay attention to North Korean propaganda anyway, why does an ostensibly conservative administration want to out-Moon Moon in this fashion now, when the public wants a hundred other things addressed first? Western readers aren’t to wonder about such matters; they’re to infer that Yoon & Co. just want to improve inter-Korean relations and make the South a true liberal democracy.

I see more to the story than that. Let me start by repeating that the personality cult isn’t half as absurd as it’s made out to be. Spare me the bit about Kim Jong Il’s eighteen holes-in-one, and all the other tales foreigners laugh at, yet provide no primary sources for. “They say Kim Il Sung could move through mountains, be in two places at once…” No; the cult twinklingly relates how his guerrilla victories made peasants believe he could. There’s a difference.

The central myth, as I wrote in The Cleanest Race (2010): The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader — the leader they’ve been blessed with.

Debatable, sure. So obviously nutty that only a few South Korean kooks would swallow it? I can think of weirder things that half the world believes, but let’s stay on point: when I was in Seoul in the mid-1980s, the best and brightest college students fell en masse for the North’s official culture. Ancient history? Try finding even one member of the largest contingent in the National Assembly who has publicly renounced his or her youthful radicalism. Or travel to A Certain Region (as it’s tactfully called in negative contexts) and strike up some conversations.

Or open a South Korean history textbook, and see that while it talks of “Dictator Park Chung Hee” and “Dictator Syngman Rhee,” it never neglects to put “Chairman” before any of the Paektu Kims; see that Kim Il Sung’s raid on a Japanese border outpost (1937) gets more space than the Battle of Midway. The North’s line is already much closer to the one taught in ROK schools than the latter is to the conservative line.

Have you ever met a dumb North Korean? I haven’t. Yet NK News seems to believe that legalization of their propaganda would result in no great refinement or improvement of the thing itself. I’m sure Thae Yong-ho knows better, having long dished out legal propaganda to Londoners. And Uriminzokkiri is already much slicker than those who’ve never read it assume.

It’s interesting how Thae, Kwon, and the rest of the ruling party appear much more bothered by restrictions on North Korean propaganda than by the memory laws recently imposed by the nationalist left. In fact, President Yoon wants to go the Minjoo Party one better by enshrining the “spirit of the Gwangju Democratization Movement” in the preamble to the constitution.

[Let me haul you between brackets for greater privacy, as Flann O’Brien used to do. I feel about the above term the way I’d feel if someone were to talk of the Watts Civil Rights Movement of August 1965. First, the word movement or undong is normally used in political discussion for causes of longer duration than a week or two. Second, the formulation Gwangju Democratization Movement implies a local cause ideologically distinct from the one struggled for on the national level. Yet you must never speak of a Kim Dae Jung Movement aimed at outdoing the Kim Young Sam Movement of October 1979. Third, it implies a unity attributable to no violent protests in history. However thoroughly provoked or mistreated protesters may be, there’ll always be disagreement between supporters and opponents of violent retaliation, and boy was it pronounced in the city in question. But if you now apply to May 1980 Badiou’s insights (“a riot cannot really purify itself,” etc), or Manzoni’s brilliant description of bread riots in The Betrothed (1827), which makes the same points in better prose, literature anticipating social science as always; or if you so much as talk of riots having taken place in Gwangju, you can get in serious legal trouble here. Which is fine by the PPP. It has no apparent problem with the restrictions on Japanese pop culture either — are they not outdated?] 

The upshot is that while South Koreans should be free to access North Korean propaganda, they should not be free to disparage, or read the disparagement of, historical events or icons revered by the nationalist left. Is this because right-wing talk is less obviously foolish, therefore more likely to mislead people? What, the closer something is to the truth, the greater the need to ban it?

No; the reasoning (which informed a March First speech of Moon Jae-in’s) is that while the relatively minor ideological differences separating the North from enlightened South Koreans can and indeed must be lived with for the sake of ethnic harmony, the divisive, peace-endangering polemics of the old-school right cannot.

If I seem to be overstating the case, note that the Unification Ministry — presuming local press coverage is correct — doesn’t just want to lift restrictions, but to make the North’s broadcasts available, to open up (kaebang) the ROK to them. To prove to Kim Jong Un the superiority of liberal democracy, as Thae — with one eye on Washington — says is the goal? No; to “restore ethnic homogeneity” and “expand mutual understanding and common ground.” Pure Moonspeak. Considering the technological problems that would complicate any such kaebang, it’s hardly unreasonable for critics to assume that the government wants to play an active role in making those broadcasts widely accessible. Or that taxpayers would effectively start paying Kim for them as soon as Uncle Sam permits.

As I see it, this story must be grasped in the context of three things: 1) the Yoon government’s effort to divide the opposition’s Moon faction from the Lee loyalists, 2) its desire to lure the North Koreans back to talks, and 3) the depoliticization process aimed at creating a naegakche or parliamentary system. You know what the step after that would be.

I understand the conditions every foreigner here must write under. There are many things I too refrain from writing about. But if we aren’t going to delve any deeper than the Korea Herald, there seems little point in discussing local politics at all.

 

UPDATE: 13 October 2022:

Sure enough. This is from the Korea Times of 11 October: 

An official told The Korea Times Tuesday that the Ministry of Unification has been stepping up its efforts over the past three months to give the public access to North Korean television and, in the long run, other media outlets such as Rodong Sinmun…. 

During a parliamentary audit session, Friday, Unification Minister Kwon Young-se said that the first phase of the plan is to enable ordinary South Koreans to watch content from North Korean broadcasters, such as the Korean Central News Agency, in their living rooms if they choose to….

The ministry hopes that such efforts will help the isolated North gradually open up to the outside world. 

If that hope is sincere, the ministry wins this year’s Luise Rinser Award for North Korea Naivety.

Even before his inauguration in May 2022 it became clear that Yoon Seok-yeol isn’t simply bad at politics; he lacks all interest in it. The former prosecutor gives every appearance of being mainly out to enjoy the perks of the presidency — from the freedom to leave work “like a knife” every evening, as Koreans say, to the privilege of dispensing key posts to people he met in the sauna.

Was the ruling party unaware of this side of Yoon when it nominated him? And could it really not keep him from abandoning the Blue House in order to work out of an office building? I doubt it. This is precisely the sort of self-diminishing, depoliticizing president the party hoped he would become, so as to smooth the way to a semi-parliamentary system.

Having made vote-getting noises to the contrary last year, Yoon now expresses support for such a transition (as I predicted he would). Last week, according to the Korea Times, he delighted the National Assembly Speaker — a Minjoo man who has long opposed the “royal presidency” — by stressing

the need for the Assembly to play a central role in managing state affairs even though the country has a presidential system.

Which is a remarkable thing for a newly-elected leader to say about a body in opposition hands. I feel like asking local conservatives what Johnny Rotten famously asked an American audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” But that’s not all:

Sound vague, opaque, boring? It’s meant to, those “reforms” being of the sort that only the 1% wants. (If you’re new to this issue, which my readers can hardly say I’ve neglected, see here among other posts).

Presidents tend to oppose the weakening of the office the moment they move in, naturally, but it’s easy to see why an apolitical one like Yoon might like the idea of becoming an integrative figurehead like Germany’s Bundespräsident, cutting ribbons and flying around the world while the Assembly takes the blame for a tanking economy.

The public, however, voted last March for a strong president and a weak assembly. Too fundamental and abrupt a change to the current system would require not only constitutional revision, but also new presidential and parliamentary elections, perhaps as early as next year — with Yoon likely to lose the former (unless a tomato can is winkingly chosen to run against him) and the Minjoo likely to lose seats in the latter.

The above-mentioned consultative body can thus be expected to focus on “underwater” ways of strengthening the assembly while the media spend a year or two softening the public up for formal change. Journalists are already po-facedly touting the advantages of a new system as if the main force behind it were disinterested social scientists. For a while there I hoped the Hankook Ilbo was becoming a world-class newspaper I could cling to, like Thomas Bernhard to the NZZ, but now I see it’s just like all the rest.

The foreign media have been ignoring this issue, as they ignore everything under the surface. When things go fully public, we’ll be getting their reactions — which, judging from Youtube thumbnails, are all people want from the media anymore. What position Western journos then take will depend on the one taken by their man Lee Jae-myung, whose legal woes they continue tiptoeing around. The Minjoo chairman, who has made conflicting statements over the past few months, is going to have to decide soon whether a) to go with the flow in the hope of favorable treatment from prosecutors, or b) to launch an impeachment push against Yoon on a crowd-pleasing, anti-naegakche platform.

If he takes the latter route his party may see pro-naegakche members defect to the PPP. On the other hand he can expect support even from some “asphalt” or extra-parliamentary conservatives, who argue that while a President Lee could usher in a kleptocracy, there’d at least be a chance to repair things afterward. Whereas the only way out of a naegakche would be a military coup. As happened the last time.

It’s to keep South Koreans from recalling the paralysis, president-PM tussles and runaway corruption of 1960-61 that the media try to associate the semi-parliamentary model with today’s Germany. The consultative body mentioned above is already being pitched as a counterpart to the Bundestag’s Council of Elders. But as economic historians know already, Koreans like to talk Germany while thinking Japan. Deep down each big party wants to become like the perma-ruling LDP.

Considering that the bedrock left comprises a third of the electorate, and the bedrock right only about a quarter, the Minjoo seems more likely to make that dream a reality. (I’d expect a President Lee to turn pro-naegakche himself near the end of a very “royal” term.) Unlike the Park-impeachers and Park-loyalists of the right, who still loathe each other, the “moderate” and “radical” left have been discreetly engineering electoral alliances for the past 20 years. A ruling coalition of the two forces — which blend into each other anyway — would be almost certain, with the smaller partner demanding and getting the North-relevant posts of intelligence agency boss and Unification Minister. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that Moon, unforced, appointed both Park Jie-won and Lee In-young.

A semi-parliamentary system would not only grease the rails to “North-South cooperation,” but make it far easier for Kim Jong Un, who would then be the only authoritative leader on the peninsula (if he isn’t already), to keep the ROK under his heel. All this is another reason why Pyongyang watchers, the circularity of whose commentary has become so apparent since the North closed its borders, should take a more inter-Korean view of things.

I was dining at a European ambassador’s house in 2017 when — ever the life of the party — I raised the possibility that President Moon might someday be prosecuted for abusing power. A younger diplomat there took stiff umbrage at the notion that such a fine man could end up like Park Geunhye. Not long afterward, at a reception on a naval vessel docked in Busan, I encountered another European envoy, NATO country of course, whose lapel button bore the blue peninsula flag beloved of North Korean poster artists and the nationalist left.

I wonder what those diplomats have made of Moon’s extradition of two fishermen back to North Korea, there to face certain execution on murder charges. I hope their reaction was of a higher order than that of local Moon supporters and an NK News contributor, which boiled down to the lynch-mob logic that people plausibly accused of a serious crime have no right to a fair trial.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the rush to extradition in November 2019 was the apparent motivation for it: to encourage Kim Jong Un, by this grotesque show of servility and shared values, to appear at an ASEAN conference in Busan later that month.

Now, I too expected Kim to carry out the promise to visit South Korea “in the near future” that he made in September 2018. I still think it would have been a smart move, provided he and Moon had met someplace suitably sequestered — on Jeju perhaps. What I don’t get is how anyone could have expected the Supreme Dignity to make his first appearance here in connection with an ASEAN conference. He was as likely to crash on my sofa.

A failure of nunchi, that unique ethnic gift for mutual mind-reading? Perhaps. Also a failure to grasp the chasm between the South’s victimhood nationalism, the main symbol of which is a statue of a little girl, and the North’s forward-looking, militaristic nationalism, the main symbol of which is Kim Jong Un.

In related news, the Monthly Chosun reports that the Moon government allegedly paid over a million dollars (in American terms) for a house in Paju, near the DMZ, and another half-million for a yacht now docked in Incheon, both being intended for Kim Jong Un’s use should he opt for that sort of visit. Allegedly some $50,000 was spent on a table for the house, chairs for which were presumably not picked up at IKEA. Almost 2o million dollars were earmarked for constructing facilities at which to host Kim on Jeju Island. (East Asia Research has the story in English.)

The source of this information is a former high-ranking NIS official, but it’s in keeping with a Moon aide’s cheerful statement to the press in 2019 that various possibilities of hosting Kim had been well prepared for.

Imagine, if you will, an American president promising to make his first visit to South Korea very soon, hinting that Air Force One could touch down at short notice, yet imparting neither a ballpark time frame nor a preferred itinerary. Now ponder the even greater unlikelihood of the ROK responding with the sort of scattershot buying spree described above. And now try telling me that the Moon government was not already — from its own perspective, never mind Kim’s — the happily subservient partner in a nascent confederation.

This becomes all the more obvious when one considers that Moon’s desperation to lure Kim here was primarily informed — as Nam Seong-uk explained in a recent article — by the desire to persuade America to relax sanctions. Moon was abasing himself before Kim Jong Un in order to help him. I suspect the outlays may also have been internally justified with a view to a more publicly confederated Korea, one better purged of southern troublemakers, in which Kim would be welcome to stay in his accustomed style at any of several properties.

Of course there’s more to the story than that. The other day, reading from my cell phone, I recited the above shopping list to a few Koreans. When I got to the $50,000 table they started nodding disgustedly, having already intuited the angle, the shot. And sure enough, it’s reported that about twice the market price of the Paju house was paid to the owner, an alleged associate of the very NIS chief who ordered the purchase. The chance that a harder bargain was driven for the yacht, or that no one in the Minjoo stood to gain from the planned Jeju construction, seems remote in the extreme. In this context I recommend another former NIS official’s book on the Sunshine era, the gist of which is that the vaunted southward benefits of northward aid came much earlier for some than others.

I suppose we mustn’t be too judgmental. Access to the intelligence agency’s enormous slush fund, plus the veil of secrecy thrown over all North-related expenditures and transactions — for “security reasons,” you understand — are bound to tempt people in a position to exploit them. Especially if they expect their party to stay in power for another ten or twenty years.

But it would be wrong to think merely in terms of an ad hoc skim here and there. The only reason the Moon-era takings seem to have been relatively small was because sanctions precluded the billion-dollar infrastructural projects the government couldn’t wait to get underway. In every oligarchy’s planning, pecuniary motives are just as constitutive as ideology, and contribute far more to the urgency with which plans are implemented, whether it’s environmental and energy policy in the US or North Korea policy here.

Those who think me too cynical should consider how many of Moon’s top officials spent the 1980s denying the legitimacy of the state, or cozying up (as many a former revolutionary has recalled) to gangsters in prison. Is it far-fetched to see a connection between this history and the conspicuous decline in prosecutions of organized crime under President Moon?

Not for nothing does the city of Seongnam have equally strong traditions of radicalism and gangsterism –and ever the twain shall meet, as witness the Eun Soo-mi saga. Besides, there’s only one plausible reason why the pro-North left now pins its hopes on scandal-ridden Lee Jae-myung, another former Seongnam mayor, who only narrowly lost to Yoon last March. If ideology alone can’t motivate a president to defy Washington, so the obvious logic, perhaps an insatiable — how to put it? — entrepreneurial spirit will.

To make myself perfectly clear: We mustn’t divide these people into well-meaning, true nationalists on one hand and cynical crooks on the other. The general state-disparaging nationalism encourages the general greed and vice versa; the two forces are as inextricable as the greed and ideological directionlessness — the keeping-open of all options — of the South Korean right.

Apropos of the latter: I remember well the Park administration’s impatience to do something about all that unsightly nature and wildlife along the DMZ. Proposals for peace parks and monuments abounded, complete with computerized images of northerners and southerners building trust on expanses of chaebol concrete.

But surely it’s harder, you think, for Gangnam leftists to square corruption with their principles? No. As I pointed out in another post, they have long touted a convenient pseudo-Gramscian line according to which they must thoroughly infiltrate the upper class, displacing all “accumulated evils” from it, for the revolution to succeed. You can’t serve God and Mammon, but serving the minjok and Mammon is the height of synergy.

This whole side of things is what Western pooh-poohers of the confederation drive never grasp. For all their economy-centricity they fail to see what could be in it for the South. Especially touching is their belief that no ROK government would dare implement such a set-up, because it would require too great a sacrifice from the middle class. Have these experts forgotten Obama’s bailout of the banking industry, or Merkel’s great migrant welcome? Perhaps they now overlook the inflation raging everywhere. Extracting involuntary sacrifices from the middle class is what liberal democracy does best.

The bigger and not unrelated story here involves the unaccounted-for flow of some 7 billion dollars out of the country during Moon’s presidency. How seriously prosecutors will investigate either that matter or the Kim-welcoming expenditures remains to be seen. As I predicted last November (countering warnings to the contrary), this administration hasn’t yet diverged greatly from the previous one’s policy toward North Korea. Some may think prosecutors’ new interest in North-related offenses a sign of hardline spirit, but it was softline Roh Moo Hyun who initiated an investigation into the illicit transfer of half a billion dollars to Kim Jong Il.

For their own reasons both left and right-wing media have misrepresented Yoon’s August 15 speech as a fairly uncompromising offer of aid for denuclearization. In fact (as the Joongang rightly reported) he offered to reward any early progress at the negotiating table. The ROK’s long tradition of conservatives striking stern notes on the campaign trail and softline ones in office continues. Some voters never learn.

The other day the Unification Minister suggested, in an obviously prearranged exchange with a ruling-party lawmaker (the North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho of all people), that America establish diplomatic relations with the Kim regime as an inducement to denuclearization. I interpret this proposal — which was surely run by Washington first? — as an implicit recognition of the problem of the Fraternization Trap that I’ve harped on here since the demolition of the liaison office in 2020. So far, then, the administration’s apparent position seems closer to Park Geun-hye’s Trustpolitik than to Lee Myung Bak’s stricter approach.

In The Communist Postscript (2010), Boris Groys writes:

Modem capitalist society is defined by the fact that the things in it are as they are because there is not enough money to fashion them differently. And indeed, if today one visits the home of an acquaintance, or a school, a church, or a bar, and asks why it is that what one sees is the way it is and not otherwise, one invariably receives the answer that it has long been planned to arrange things completely differently … but that unfortunately the money for this is still lacking.

I thought of this the other day while reading in the Korea Times that despite the Hallyu wave, Korean studies is still an “underdog and straggler” on the academic front. According to Professor Ross King at the University of British Columbia,

 “The Korean government and companies should make long-term investments in the infrastructure for Korean studies…. We need more endowed teaching positions, scholarships and bursaries for students and programs.”

Whereas I believe that Korean studies (like most fields) is big enough already, and should think more about consolidation than expansion. If it must keep up with the Joneses, it should first close the gap in academic standards that became so apparent — speaking of endowed teaching positions — during the Armstrong affair. I’m not implying that Prof. King cares less about standards than I do, only that he seems more optimistic about the prospect of simultaneously increasing size and quality. But I agree with him when he says:

 “A lot of people seem to believe that foreigners will happily pay their own money to learn about Korea because they enjoy its cultural content, but this is not true, especially for those hailing from the countries that have a higher gross national product (GNP) than Korea.”

Many a university here has learned this the hard way. I assume that a higher proportion of Westerners are willing to pay their own money to learn about China or Japan, because such a degree promises enhanced access to a much bigger economy, therefore better job prospects. I doubt if Hallyu fandom and demand for Korea-related courses are even a reliable indicator of an all-surpassing interest in this country. One can be crazy about BTS, and even crazier about Japanese anime.

The question is whether the measures Prof. King proposes will help incentivize young Westerners to pursue a Korean studies degree. Although not in a Korean studies department I have some relevant experience. About a third of my students are from foreign countries. Some stay in Korea for one semester, some for four years, and some settle down here, usually in an enclave of their countryfolk. Most seem to lose interest in studying the host language and culture within a year or two.

Funding is not a factor. Virtually all of my foreign students get at least half their tuition paid for; some are on full scholarships. They tend to become disaffected with the study of Korea because they become disaffected with Korea itself, and its perceived nationalism or xenophobia in particular. To give just one anecdote: recently some of my best foreign students, including one in an advanced stage of pregnancy, were asked to leave a coffee shop lest their alienness unsettle local patrons worried about COVID.

I must emphasize that my Korean students, the women in particular, tend to return from exchange semesters in Western countries with at least one story worse than that. Worse as in frightening.

The difference is that foreigners here tend to treat such occasional incidents (as the Korean kid in Finland, say, does not) as reflections of a generally unwelcoming or hostile culture. One reason they do so — and wrongly, in my opinion — is because the very interlocutors to whom they turn for reassurance and insight often espouse ethnocentric views. For example, many language instructors still teach that the Sino-Korean word jeong refers to a distinctly Korean sort of altruistic loving kindness, or to a loving kindness Koreans possess in unique abundance.

I remember this myth encountering the raucous skepticism of my zainichi Korean classmates at Yonsei’s language institute in 1986. German friends at the Ruhr Uni were equally critical of the notion of a special ethnic bitterness or han when it was asserted by Korean exchange students, along with claims to a racial homogeneity stretching back five thousand years. Minoring in Koreanistik for the easy credits, those grim, thirtyish exiles from the protest movement comprised half the students in some of our classes. Of the very small number of young Germans who bothered to dip a toe in the field, about half seemed to end up down the hall in Sinology or Japanese studies.

Was it just a coincidence that Hallyu began to take off circa 1999 (with the movie Shiri) only a year or so after the campus protest movement breathed its last, and Korean youth culture stopped being presented overseas as a matter of faux-proletarian woodcuts, shamanist rites for dead martyrs, and sloganizing poetry? The unfortunate result, however, is that foreigners now arrive with much higher expectations than I did. The more intense the newcomer’s K-fandom, I find, the greater the disillusionment with Korea after a few months.

Many other countries disillusion foreigners in similar ways, yet the fields devoted to studying them thrive. I think this is partly because they maintain enough critical distance to the relevant culture, as Korean studies has never done. In the introduction to my first book (1994), which I must quote from memory, not having it at hand, I complained about the prevalence of an “advocatorial tendency, usually expressed in terms of a desire to help Korean culture get the attention it deserves.” One reason I focused on North Korean literature was because it promised an escape from the pressure to over-praise that I saw reflected in papers on South Korean fiction.

Not that the North Korea discussion has been free of the apologetics and ethno-mysticism pervading the field as a whole.

The term [Juche] is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away. For the foreigner its meaning recedes into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore it is ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. (Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 2005, p. 414.)

I doubt if that sort of thing (mutatis mutandis) has passed inspection in the American reaches of Chinese or Japanese studies since about 1960, but the book from which it’s taken remains on KS reading lists. It’s hardly the only one in the field’s canon drenched in “revisionism,” meaning Korean nationalism. What other post-colonial state do Western historians take to task for not “purging” itself of colonial “collaborators”? (But note that it’s often a white man’s Korean nationalism; the above declaration of reverent helplessness in the face of a perfectly straightforward word, one imported from the Japanese no less, would baffle most South Koreans.)

Before anyone tries telling me how much things have changed in recent years, this is from the Korea Times article quoted above:

“Interest in Korean popular culture is also generating an interest in ‘high culture’ ― from Korean language to gestures to semiotics to culture customs,” Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford, told The Korea Times. “Even ‘Korean common sense’ in the form of concepts like ‘nunchi’ ― which can be compared to emotional intelligence in the West ― is a hot talking point across the globe.”

Just as han must be dissociatively presented as Korean bitterness, and jeong as Korean kindness, nunchi can only be Korean common sense, as opposed to a wonderful word for an intuitive skill common to all socialized humans. I realize that some members of the Korean diaspora have been trying to make this a “thing,” just as some like to tout the unique profundity of a Korean mother’s love, but must Korean studies join in? Would any Germanist define Gemütlichkeit as German conviviality?

Far more visitors find Koreans conspicuously lacking in sensitivity to each other’s unverbalized feelings than find them abounding in it. Take for example the custom of pointing out to a young woman in mixed company the pimple she has piled concealer on; or of cheerfully interrogating an older, obviously crestfallen woman as to why she doesn’t have kids. But the diaspora is well known for preserving the guk-ppong myths that they or their parents emigrated with.

Meanwhile most of the homeland has moved on. My foreign students’ unpleasant experiences here (like my own) usually involve Koreans of a certain age. After the Seoul Olympics in 1988 children stopped getting that frog-in-the-well stuff dinned into them. I just asked a young acquaintance over Katalk (not in a leading way) if she considers nunchi a Korean thing. Her surprised response: Who says it is? She’d always assumed there was an English word for it. People planning to marry foreigners no longer have to hear warnings, as my wife did in 1987, that most international marriages end in divorce, a fake fact chalked up to the Other’s lack of that “Korean common sense.”

So I’m afraid visitors who still want to hear an old-school ethnocentric fuss made about han, jeong, nunchi, etc, will have to buttonhole someone over 50 — or fly home and take Korean studies. But how many want to hear it? If the field’s popularity isn’t growing in proportion to the popular culture’s, it’s in large part because the one thing seems so much more inclusive than the other.

“Does one every really want to hear any lecture?” asks a character in a Barbara Pym novel. “One just submits, as it were.” But my students submit more readily when I let someone from North Korea do the talking, as I did a few weeks ago. A former factory worker now in her thirties, Haewon (as I’ll call her) escaped in mid-2019, arriving at Incheon airport a few months later, after journeying through China and Vietnam to the ROK embassy in Bangkok.

“I wasn’t assigned to Busan,” she said, “I chose it; I didn’t want to live in Seoul.” Why, we asked, eager to hear our city praised. “I wanted to get as far away from North Korea as possible.” In her home town she’d had to work from seven to eleven every night — in the Led Zeppelin sense: 16 hours, not four — with a preliminary hour or two cleaning up around the neighborhood pair of leader statues. Having decided to escape after her father died, she needed a year of preparation just to get to the China border without exciting suspicion. The last thing she heard before almost drowning in the Tumen was the broker at her back whispering: Don’t worry, the river’s shallow here. She laughed as she described the water closing over her head, her fear of dying. (And I see aspiring K-Pop singers crying on TV because they have to rehearse a lot. But they say northern Koreans were a tougher bunch even in the Chosun Dynasty.)

With Q & A came the inevitable question: Difficulties adjusting? While Haewon pondered, I urged her psychically from across the room: anything but the usual remarks about Busan dialect and how querulous it sounds, which everyone here is tired of… “Busan dialect,” she said. “At first I thought everyone was fighting.” Okay, but how about North-South differences, culture shock? After a moment’s reflection she laughed again: Ignorance of the word “OPEN” had kept her dawdling outside a shop one morning, yet when she ventured into a bank, they gave her English-language forms to fill out, thinking she sounded foreign.

Afterwards, outside the classroom, Haewon wanted a photograph with me, never having met an American before. I told her I had the impression, from things like the North’s birth rate and the relatively unfortified state of the border to China, that the Kim regime still enjoys a good deal of popular support. She agreed. “The nuclear program in particular makes people proud. A big fuss is made about each step forward.”

Which brings me back to what I asked on this blog four years ago: How could Kim Jong Un hope to abandon military-firstism and still stay in power? This central question should be the subject of entire conferences and think-tank papers, but it’s rarely even raised. In a WebEx gathering a few weeks ago I asked it of some Pyongyang watchers of an optimistic bent. As expected, I got back some talk about how the lifting of sanctions and the improvement of living standards would probably suffice to keep Kim’s subjects happy.

I’ve argued against that assumption too often to want to do so at length here. Let me just say about North Korea what Kingsley Amis once said about the Soviet Union: things could get a lot better there and still be bloody awful. Being essentially a family-owned state, it would be particularly slow to narrow the inter-Korean gap in the “progressive” areas of health care, workers’ rights and social welfare. In contrast East Germany ranked higher among the world’s economies than South Korea does today, and was able to make some claim to superiority over the Federal Republic on socialist grounds. The Wall came down anyway.

So I’ll keep asking the question: how’s a denuclearized, economy-first North Korea to survive for more than a few years at the outside? While that’s as far ahead as our elected leaders tend to think, the de facto monarch in Pyongyang takes a long-term view — or has “low time preference,” as the economists say. Perhaps our hardliners and softliners should try jointly working out a credible political plan for the fellow to mull over. If we don’t know ourselves how he could survive as the leader of a poor man’s version of South Korea, we can hardly hope to persuade him, through carrots or sticks, to leave the road he’s on.

The general realization that no such plan is devisable would mark a step forward in itself. We could then all agree that the unification drive is dictated not only by nationalism, something Americans always have a hard time taking seriously, but also by the regime’s correct assessment of objective conditions. It must subjugate the South at some point or go under.

South Korean news outlets have finally had to admit that their reports of weird cultic rites in Park Geun-hye’s Blue House had no basis in fact. Her former confidante, then accused of being a shaman herself, is suing various media companies and politicians for defamation. But will the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, etc, which passed on the fake news under lurid headlines, ever set their readership straight? I doubt it.

Nor is the bad news about Moon Jae-in that Western journalists swept under the rug likely to come to light either. Should he escape punishment for his abuses of power — as the new law hamstringing prosecutors was created to help him do — the Western news consumer will have no cause ever to hear about them. And Reuters may never have to admit that Lee Jae-myung, another beneficiary of the new law, wasn’t so much “Korea’s Bernie Sanders” as its Rod Blagojevitch. (Before that, mirror-imaging buffs, he was Seongnam’s Saul Goodman.)

I realize that if the folks back home are to show any interest in ROK politics, they need a team to cheer for and a team to boo, but correspondents wanting to frame Yoon Seok-yeol as Korea’s Trump are going to have their work cut out for them. He’s no conservative even by South Korean standards, let alone ours. Any local person who (waking from a long coma, say) knew only that Yoon helped imprison Park Geun-hye, that he plans to enshrine the spirit of the Gwangju uprising in the constitution, and that his political idols are Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, would naturally take him for a leftist.

That assumption wouldn’t necessarily change upon hearing news — well-founded this time — of the incoming First Couple’s interest in shamanism, fortune-telling and feng shui. The left was always more into that sort of thing. (The main objective of the propaganda about Park was to turn her Christian-heavy base against her.) To this day shamans perform ceremonies for “democratization martyrs,” and Japan-bashers recall colonial attacks on the nation’s feng shui, such as metal spikes driven into mountainsides. Certainly no conservative president-elect would let a “spiritual advisor” talk him into abandoning the Blue House, one of very few bona fide state symbols in this shamefaced republic, in order to work out of a so-called People’s House instead.

I’m not saying Yoon is on the nationalist left. Even his projected center-leftism seems more a matter of conformism and class-envy deflecting than conviction; in America he’d be moderately woke. No wonder the People Power Party was so quick to latch onto him.

Depoliticization is underway here all right, but not as something new to South Korea. One could well argue that since Park’s impeachment in 2016, the country has reverted from an aberrational period of ideological conflict — which was never as sharp as foreigners thought anyway — to an old patrimonial tradition of fighting over everything except ideology. The following is from a book by Norman Jacobs for which I paid a fortune at Kyobo during the Chun Doo Hwan era (only to find, to my annoyance, that every mention of “DPRK” had been blacked out with a felt pen).

Inter-party contention over issues [in the ROK] is shallow and superficial, being but a vehicle to denounce opponents as inept and hence unworthy to exercise power, or a bargaining device to obtain a share of the available power and prebends. Indifference to ideology … encourages raiding and the formation of opportunistic cliques whose members will ally themselves to anyone willing and able to offer some advantage. (From The Korean Road to Modernization and Development, Urbana, 1985, p. 26.)

That seems even truer today, except for “indifference to ideology,” which remains wrong; “acquiescence in the hegemonic ideology” makes more sense. When Jacobs was researching his book, that ideology was anti-North conservatism. Today it’s nationalist leftism, and the new ruling party has no will to change that. Last month the PPP refused to allow Kim Jin-tae to run for governor of Gangwon province until he made a groveling apology for questioning the orthodox narrative of the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

Softline Korea watchers are already wringing their hands about Yoon’s pledges to strengthen the alliance and take no nonsense from North Korea, but even Moon said that sort of thing. As yet there are no indications that Yoon will break sharply with his predecessor’s policy toward Pyongyang — unless, that is, he’s forced to do so by acts of aggression, as happened to Lee Myung Bak after a few “underwater” overtures to Kim Jong Il.

It has been announced, for example, that Yoon will abide by the inter-Korean military agreement of September 2018. Like all agreements since 2000 this is a far better deal for the North than the South. (Just compare the relative proximity of Seoul and Pyongyang to the DMZ, and ponder the obvious implications of demilitarizing it in earnest.)

Yoon even appears ready to leave Park Jie-won in charge of the intelligence agency for a while yet. Like a good patrimonial official — and a few precision-centrists in the Korea-watching community — Park has moved rightward since the election. The other day he contradicted Moon by saying the North will never denuclearize. Let’s not forget, however, that the main reason the old man got the job was because the regime in Pyongyang is known to trust him.

Meanwhile Park Jin, Yoon’s nominee for foreign minister, has signaled that the administration may continue Moon’s policy of the “Three No’s”: no additional THAAD deployment, no participation in America’s missile defense system, and no formation of a trilateral military alliance with America and Japan.

The White House can’t very well demand more loyalty. A day after meeting Yoon in Seoul on May 21, our president is scheduled to meet with Moon — the same Moon who told a stadium in Pyongyang that the North does all Koreans proud by going its own way.

Of course this breach of diplomatic protocol needn’t have the same effect as Carter’s meeting with Kim Young Sam in July 1979, a show of “dropping” Park Chung Hee t0 which many historians attribute the dramatic events of the following October. Still, Biden’s gesture (which was probably much lobbied for) will eliminate the pseudo-conservatives’ only remaining selling point: their claim to get along better with the US ally than the left does. And this only a few weeks before local elections! Why go out on a limb for the Americans, Yoon may well be thinking, if they’re nicer when you don’t?

But he has much bigger problems than Biden. Depoliticization always helps the side that avows the hegemonic ideology more convincingly. It also makes voters less interested in the daily news. This may help explain why Lee Jae-myung, whom no self-respecting voter in the Philippines would look at twice, remains so popular here. The better part of a billion dollars is estimated to have gone missing on his mayoral-gubernatorial watch over the Seongnam area, yet he came within a hair’s breadth of winning the presidency, and is now expected to win a parliamentary seat in Incheon (as he must do to stay out of prison).

Perhaps I should add that many on the ROK left subscribe to a convenient Gramscian logic according to which their kind must ascend to the upper class by any means necessary, so as to rout the pro-Japanese “accumulated evils” there and take back the country. Also, as I’ve written a few times before, nationalist politicians count as more truly Korean and therefore incapable of premeditated evil; their transgressions are but errors, etc.

On the other hand, it was only thanks to the Minjoo’s nomination of Lee that the less-left candidate could plausibly present himself as the cleaner of the two, perhaps a first in the history of ROK presidential races. Had Yoon behaved accordingly after his victory, the Minjoo majority in the National Assembly wouldn’t have dared ram through the law I mentioned above. Fortunately for Moon and Lee, the president-elect squandered his moral authority within days, first by selfishly insisting on the costly abandonment of the Blue House complex, and then by appointing several people with records of the usual Gangnam sleaze.

The latter blunder did more damage, throwing as it did a harsh retrospective light on Yoon’s crusades against Park Geun-hye and Moon’s darling Cho Kuk, neither of whom did anything much more serious than what some of these cabinet picks appear to have got up to. Was Yoon in cahoots with the pseudo-right all along? Or did “spiritual advisors” on a stormy heath send him on his winding road to kingship?

As my readers must know already, Yoon Seok-yeol’s approval ratings are at record lows for a president-elect. I expect them to continue falling after a post-inaugural jump, if he gets even that. This is the danger of standing for competence and honesty instead of political values; one’s missteps and scandals are naturally judged more harshly than the other side’s.

Inter-party talks on constitutional revision are expected by many to begin later this year. They will bring more disappointment for conservative citizens without winning Yoon any support from the left. What demographic does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off? I once asked a Munhwa Ilbo journalist to explain the absence of a big paper in the dead center of the ideological spectrum, and she said, “Because there’s no place to stand there.” That goes for governments too.

 

UPDATE: 19 May 2022: No Biden-Moon Meeting

After two weeks of South Korean media reports of a 21 May meeting between Joe Biden and Moon Jae-in, the White House has denied that any such event is planned.

In Asia Times this week Andrew Salmon writes:

Ever since 2006, when North Korea first tested a nuclear device, the broad understanding among analysts and observers has been that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal exists to deter an Iraq- or Afghanistan-style attack by nuclear-armed US forces… Of late, cracks have appeared in this long-held belief.

This reminds me of reading in the media in 2013 about how we Pyongyang watchers had all wrongly expected “Swiss-educated” Kim Jong Un to be a reformer, and were bitterly disappointed. In The Cleanest Race (2010) I had predicted a very military-first chip off the old block.

I realize “broad understanding” doesn’t mean “unanimous consensus,” but surely David Maxwell, Nicholas Eberstadt, Daniel Pinkston and I, to name just a few of us, made for a few earlier cracks in the conventional wisdom Salmon describes?

His article induced me to revisit what I’d written on this point. Like the following, from a cover story for Newsweek in 2013:

Especially subversive, now that so many of Kim Jong-un’s subjects have access to outside sources of culture and information, is the South Korean public’s manifest lack of interest in either the personality cult or unification. The regime is right to believe it cannot be secure until the peninsula is unified under its own rule. This is, of course, the “final victory” that Kim Jong-un and his media keep boldly promising the masses.

In 2016 I wrote an article for NK News entitled “Taking North Korea at its Word”:

The nuclear program has already progressed far beyond the stage needed to keep the enemy at bay. The regime hardly needs long-range missiles, or any more nuclear capability than it acquired years ago, to keep using Seoul as the world’s largest human shield.

Isn’t it time, then, that we paid more attention to the DPRK’s own declarations of its intentions? …. The slogan of “autonomous unification” … has always stood for the conquest or subjugation of South Korea.

In February 2017 I said in an interview with Reuters War College:

Those who treat the “axis of evil” remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative, because if a regime has spent 50 or 60 years defying, humiliating and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country, its safety clearly does not depend on [its] developing a new kind of weapon. Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed.

…. The very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far, proves that it was never necessary for North Korea’s security in the first place.

So the question we have to ask ourselves in 2017 is: Why does North Korea risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack, to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties?

The only plausible goal big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense is the goal North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence: the unification of the peninsula.

That year saw journalists finally take notice of this view of things, as I noted in a blog entry:

For a long time there, I seemed to be the only Anglophone Koreanist who kept bringing up unification when discussing the North’s motives….[But] with every new missile launch or nuclear test, a few more people seem to realize that the North is arming too urgently, and at too great a risk to its own security, for such benign explanations to keep making sense. As a result more journalists than usual have been asking me to elaborate on my published views….. I feel safe in saying that this interpretation of North Korea’s motives has finally “arrived.”

How premature I was. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to create a bandwagon effect. Granted, the old maddening consensus that the regime wanted to develop nukes only in order to trade them away for an aid deal had disappeared by 2017, but the newer trendy ideas were equally wishful, equally far removed from my view: the regime wanted only perfect security from US attack; it wanted to force the normalization of Pyongyang-Washington relations; it wanted a peace treaty; it wanted only to survive, to muddle through; and so on.

If memory serves, Andrei Lankov went in for most of those reassuring lines in turn, making him more popular in Foggy Bottom than yours truly. For a while there the US Embassy in Seoul would invite us in tandem to deliver North Korea briefings to people passing through. In retrospect I think the reason I was always instructed to speak first was so that Andrei could provide the quick economy-centric antidote to my nationalism-centric poison.

“Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends,” as Yeats said of AE. In a Russian-language article in December 2017 Andrei nutshelled my views in indulgently-dismissive passing — including my assertion of the North’s intent to conquer the South — while expressing doubt about their “relation to reality.”

But I’ll be darned if he didn’t appear in the FT the other day sounding uncannily like — well, you tell me:

“But now [the nuclear program] is clearly overkill from a defensive point of view. They don’t really need intercontinental ballistic missiles and they don’t really need a thermonuclear device. This leads me strongly to suspect that their ultimate dream is to assert their control over South Korea.”

They all come around in the end.

2

Here’s the thing though: you can’t do justice to the topic of the North’s unification/control/domination drive without also discussing South Korean politics. To talk of the former while ignoring the latter is to convey the very wrong impression that Kim can only get his way through some form of “hot” coercion. Indeed, the FT quotes Andrei as giving the following scenario:

“When the situation is favourable … the North Koreans would provoke a crisis, deploy their ICBMs, and keep the Americans out by forcing them to choose between sacrificing San Francisco or Seoul,” said Lankov. “They could then use their tactical weapons to obliterate the significant conventional superiority of the South Korean forces, and install an ambassador in Seoul with veto power over any South Korean policy they do not like,” he added, likening Kim’s ambitions to Vladimir Putin’s “demilitarisation and denazification” strategy in Ukraine.

I feel bad criticizing soundbites, because I know how much vital and qualifying context they tend to get ripped away from. Let me say it anyway: Kim needn’t go to those lengths to achieve that end. The simple reason is that South Koreans’ attitude toward their state and the would-be hegemon next door couldn’t be less like Ukraine’s.

The longer explanation, which my readers have heard ad nauseam from me already, is that the South can be much less riskily subjugated via confederation, something that North Korea began proposing in 1960, and both states formally pledged to work towards in 2000. The ROK’s Unification Ministry has promoted the concept online and around the country since 2017.

The planners and architects of confederation — like Moon’s mentor Paek Nak-chung — make clear that the main goals are a) the elimination of the American military threat to North Korea and b) the elimination of the ideological threat to the Kim regime posed by the very existence of the South Korean state. Note also the expert consensus that the supra-state body administering the confederation should be located in Kaesong, and consist of equally-sized delegations from the two states. The North’s delegation, I need hardly add, would vote en bloc, enabling it to win every vote with only one supportive vote from the more pluralist side. An easier way to veto power than risking nuclear war, eh? Lankov would no doubt agree, if he didn’t consider the imputation of a confederation drive to the South Korean left a laughable “conspiracy theory.”

Not that the inter-Korean partnership has to be accompanied by any visible institutions or formal procedures. As many here argue, it makes more sense for Seoul and Pyongyang to come together “underwater” until such a time as the masses (and the US) can be safely apprised of the new reality. The Moon years thus saw both flashy displays of nascent partnership — like the construction of the liaison office, touted in the press as the first step to confederation — and “underwater” stuff like the South’s coaching of Kim on how to deal with Trump.

Then the breakdown of US-DPRK dialogue in Hanoi in 2019 forced the Koreas to revert (as they had done in 2002 after the “axis of evil” speech) to outward frostiness. This brings me back to what I call the Fraternization Trap, i.e. the fact that any significant, lasting improvement in inter-Korean relations raises the risk of America thinking it can strike North Korea without incurring the retaliatory destruction of Seoul. It was to keep an increasingly unfriendly Trump administration from doubting the automaticity of such a retaliation that the inter-Korean liaison office had to be blown up in 2020, and Moon subjected to a string of theatrical insults he well understood the reasons for.

The spirit of partnership continued regardless, occasionally making itself plain to the public, as when Kim Yo-jong angrily demanded the passage of a law criminalizing the launch of leaflet balloons into North Korea, and South Korean lawmakers proposed relevant legislation the next day.  They did this not because they feared the dictatorship but because they respected it, on nationalist grounds I have explained here at length. No coercion was necessary.

3

Contrary to what some Westerners may have assumed, the recent election to the presidency of an ostensible conservative — who is in fact an avowed admirer of the two Sunshine presidents, and a former prosecutorial scourge of the anti-North right — portends no reversal of South Korea’s drift into confederation. A slowing down or arrest of it perhaps, until the bumbling Yoon is either impeached or made irrelevant through constitutional revision, but not a reversal. His people have already pledged to abide by the 2018 Moon-Kim military agreement that effectively prevents ROK troops from rehearsing the defense of Seoul.

Lankov and others are free to go on discussing North Korea’s nuke-backed unification/domination drive in isolation from the topic of South Korean politics. They should realize, however, that in doing so they may make Uncle Sam more worried and jittery about the threat of fireworks than is conducive to peace on the peninsula. I’m afraid it does no good for Andrei to add the somewhat contradictory disclaimer, on the apparent basis of nothing more than optimism, that the scenario he describes is “very unlikely.” We Koreanists may be listened to in regard to Kim’s motives, but the man’s ability and readiness to act militarily on them is for experts of a different sort to judge.

In closing let me repeat what I’ve said before: There’s no understanding the one Korea without understanding the other. I hope I don’t have to wait five more years for people to come around to that.

 

UPDATE: 25 May 2022:

Having expressed incredulity in 2019 at the notion that Moon Jae-in might be interested in “some unequal confederation scheme,” Lankov wrote in the Chosun Ilbo on 16 May 2022:

If America takes fright and abandons Korea, North Korea will begin an all-out attack on South Korea. The ROK military’s weaponry would be no more than toys in the face of North Korea’s tactical nuclear weapons. What would the next stage be? North Korea could unify the peninsula by absorbing the South, but there is a higher possibility of its establishing an unequal relationship through confederation. Simply put: the Hongkongification of South Korea…. Many people will think this a too pessimistic scenario. Of course it would not be easy to realize. But while the possibility of this scenario was zero until recently, I think it is now 5-10%.

I can overlook the second half of that last sentence; whatever percentage values a man chooses to put on his gut feelings are up to him. I’d like to overlook the first half of it too, if only to avoid looking like I’m hounding Andrei, but I know what will happen if it’s left unchallenged.

First, people will start thinking that North Korea has only recently made some very fundamental shift in strategy. Then we’ll start hearing about what belligerent American statements or behavior provoked it, and how we can make things right again. And still more time will be wasted.

So let’s get serious here. Kim Il Sung began calling for unification by confederation in 1960, and began talking of a North Korean nuclear program only a few years after that, according to many sources. The DPRK has been pursuing a nuclear program in earnest since the 1980’s, all along making clear in its inner-track propaganda that the ultimate objective is “final victory,” i.e. unification.

South Korea’s pro-North left has been publicly putting 2 and 2 together since about 2000, when Han Ho-seok et al began articulating the scenario of the two Koreas entering a confederation after nuclearization forces the Yankees out. The Kim Jong Un regime’s ROK-oriented propaganda has been about as explicit on this point as it could be without waking the dozing Americans. As NK News reported some 4 years ago, Uriminzokkiri said:

The current South Korean government has no need to fear or feel unnecessary repulsion about our nuclear weapon. It is a means for securing peaceful unification and the survival of the race (minjok).

And all this is why for the past several years I have blogged and spoken publicly about the nuclear program in the context of a confederation drive to which the two Koreas have repeatedly expressed their commitment. During that time the very notion of a confederation drive was subjected to mockery from various Pyongyang watchers, of whom Andrei Lankov was perhaps the most vocal and influential.

So perhaps I can be forgiven for insisting on clarification: Was there really zero possibility of the scenario in question until very recently? If so, when, why and how did things suddenly change? Wouldn’t it be closer to the truth for Andrei to say that he didn’t begin taking the scenario seriously until very recently?

UPDATE: 27 May 2022:

I was just contacted by a friend who suggested I’d misunderstood Andrei. The gist: “Surely his point is that while unification was always the North’s goal, Kim Jong Un is only now militarily capable of bringing it about by forcing the ROK into a confederation. So while there was zero chance of this happening a few years ago, now it’s a 5-10% possibility.”

I see I presumed too much familiarity with Andrei’s work on the part of some of my readers. His position has until very recently been the common one of asserting — in direct contradiction of my own view — that neither North Korea nor the pro-North left even wants unification or confederation. In February 2019 he wrote: “The unification idea produces little optimism in both parts of the country.” Of confederation: “No serious politician in either Korea will ever consider such an option.” The reasoning, given at some length, is that these things would be equally impracticable for the South (for economic reasons) and the North (for domestic political ones). Official talk of unification/confederation in North and in South Korea is thus but “lip service.” (Andrei’s article mocking the ROK right for worrying about confederation followed several months later.)

This is why I find these latest statements so interesting. We are obviously to infer from them that the goal of the North’s nuclear weapons program has now changed. The logic behind this apparent view is what I would like to see clarified.

UPDATE: 6 July 2022:

I have it on the immense authority of native Irish speaker Myles Na gCopaleen (1911-1966) that apart from meaning “a heron’s boil,” “a sound made in an empty house by an unauthorized person,” and many other things, cur is Gaelic for “the art of predicting past events.” I see some cur on display in Lankov’s latest, “How North Korea could control the South without ever conquering it.”

In a scenario in which it wins a second Korean War in say the 2030[s] or 2040s….North Korea would probably demand the removal of what it would label reactionary forces from South Korean politics, art,  education and culture…The DPRK would reserve the right to intervene in South Korean politics, easily silencing all political forces, individuals and media outlets hostile to the new system.

In other regards, South Korean life would continue in established ways….[but the North Koreans] will seek to find ways to extract their due through some forms of obligatory payments and money transfers, though this could be a difficult task. In a sense, such an unequal confederation under nearly complete North Korean control would amount to the Finlandization of South Korea.

The above scenario is discussed without mention of any of the following:

• the purge and imprisonment of scores of prominent conservatives in 2017-2018, with special prejudice shown toward people who had aroused North Korea’s anger,
• the Moon camp’s assertions in 2018 that the two Koreas had entered the first stage of confederation,
• the alacrity with which the ROK National Assembly fulfilled Kim Yo-jong’s demand for a ban on anti-North leaflet balloons,
• pro-government academics’ call for Pyongyang watchers here and abroad to engage in peace-minded self-censorship, refraining especially from statements that might make it harder for Kim Jong Un to maintain control,
• the ROK foreign ministry’s campaign to get sanctions on North Korea eased or lifted, and the attendant coalescence of the North and South Korea lobbies in Washington,
• the government’s hours-long refusal to intercede with the DPRK on behalf of a ROK fisheries official who had floated across the NLL,
• the government’s proposal to send back North Korean fishermen suspected of murder even before extradition was requested, and
• a Blue House official’s advice to the DPRK on how to maximize the propaganda effect of its military parades.

Much more in that vein can be found in my blog entries from the past five years, and more will doubtless become known to us in the months ahead. But doesn’t the above suffice to indicate that Finlandization (to use the mildest possible word for it) was well underway by the time Yoon was elected? And can anyone deny that the process would have continued under Lee Jae-myung? Again: North Korea does not need a war to get much of what it wants.

Lankov’s repeated invocation of a conderation-via-war scenario deserves attention from the many Pyongyang watchers whose desire to downplay the threat of North Korean aggression is matched only by their commitment to covering for the ROK left. They’re going to have to choose between those two urges, for if America goes on ignoring what happened here under Moon (as Lankov seems determined to do), it will be all the more likely to overestimate that threat.

UPDATE: 12 July 2022:

Two days ago the Joongang Daily published an article, “The gutting of Korea’s spy agency,” about the Moon administration’s effort to end the gathering of critical intelligence on North Korea. I read this as further confirmation that a loose confederation was already underway.

And here are photographs from 2019 of South Korean officials at Panmunjeom forcibly returning two North Korean fishermen — ROK citizens, according to this country’s constitution — to the Kim dictatorship.

UPDATE: 14 August 2022:

What better way for a pro-North ROK administration to disable counter-intelligence than to transfer domestic spy-catching duties to a police agency that has just been purged of North-critical people?

Pennmike looks into the purging prosecutors’ unconstitutional argument that online criticism of North Korea by members of the police agency constituted illegal meddling in politics. The implicit extension of the concept of the domestic is yet another indication that in 2018 the Moon government already considered itself — as many prominent people on the nationalist left considered it — the partner in a de facto confederation.

[Note: This is the start of a thread on the race; I will be posting updates until 9 March.]

“There’s never been a presidential election like this one,” the newspapers keep saying. Because the two parties are already looking beyond it to “democratic integration,” they’ve been going easy on each other, to the annoyance of their respective voter bases. Most of the ideological noises made thus far have been of the integrating sort. The left-wing candidate Lee Jae-myung has praised Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan for their economic policy, while his conservative rival Yoon Seok-yeol has again pledged to enshrine the spirit of the “Gwangju Democratization Movement” (May 1980) in a new preamble to the constitution.

Most of the time the two candidates just promise extravagant hand-outs, and say disapproving things about each other’s moral failings. Their followers are remarkably impervious to bad news. It seems no number of serious allegations about the corruption of Lee and his wife can keep his approval ratings under 35%. Conservatives are no less ready to shrug off the fact that Yoon was until 2019 Moon Jae-in’s loyal servant, and a left-winger by his wife’s proud account. He’s still reluctant to criticize Moon by name. The Christian right overlooks even the couple’s interest in shamanism, talismanic symbols and fortune-telling, although baseless rumors of weird Blue House rites did much to turn it against Park Geun-hye in 2016. (By the way, Western observers who want to treat shamanism as a kooky right-wing thing should read about the role it played in the minjung movement.)

The main issue dividing left and right remains North Korea, but the two parties disagree with each other much less strongly about it than their bases do. Last year the opposition party framed the Seoul mayoral election as an opportunity to protest the government’s obsession with inter-Korean relations. No sooner was Oh Se-hoon elected in a landslide than he vowed to support the bid for a Seoul-Pyongyang Olympics.

Having argued already that the local right isn’t as hardline as the foreign press makes out, I want to make clear in this post that pro-Northism has always been more moderate than Western or Japanese radicalisms. One of the things that drove the student leader Kim Young-hwan from Marxism-Leninism into the figurative arms of the Great Leader was the film The Killing Fields (1984), about the Khmer Rouge. Seeking a kinder, gentler socialism, he found it in the bland truisms of Juche Thought, as well as in North Korean radio broadcasts, which urged the campus protest movement to employ more populist rhetoric and tactics than its Marxist-Leninist core was then using.

Not surprisingly his National Liberation or NL group (known here by that English acronym), ended up outnumbering the Leninists by a ratio of about 9:1. To its credit neither faction went in for the terrorist killings we associate with the Rote Armee Fraktion or the Brigate Rosse. While the Leninist youth were big on throwing Molotov cocktails, the NL protesters staged the more effective downtown lie-ins of the so-called June 1987 Struggle.

Although mythologized nowadays (as in 1987: The Day Comes) as the driving force behind democratization, the student protest movement was monolithically abstentionist and in favor of “people’s democracy,” despite its belated strategic alliance with the bourgeois opposition. A good book on this subject has just been put out by Min Gyeong-u, an oft-imprisoned former official of the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification. It wasn’t pro-North students like himself, he says, but Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung who forced the Chun regime to allow direct elections.

Let me just say something here about the word “pro-North.” Globalization globalizes taboos, so Korea watchers are now as nervous about calling people “pro-North” as South Koreans themselves have become. For some reason “pro-” is thought to express something far more extreme in this connection than it does in all comparable ones. You can call South Koreans pro-American without implying they want another US military occupation. But you can’t attribute pro-Northism to South Koreans without some Western fool on Twitter accusing you of thinking they want a North Korean takeover. Even saying that Moon Jae-in admires the country is considered a horrible slander, although the address he delivered to a packed stadium up there in 2018 speaks for itself.

I could understand it if the Korea watchers flying off the handle at the word “pro-North” considered the DPRK as impossible for any sane person to like as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But no, these tend to be the same people who tell us what a wonderful place it is when you get to know it. So forgive me if I find their jeering a little forced, and “double down” on my use of the term in question: South Korea’s nationalist left is pro-North.

But there have always been differences of opinion inside this ideological community. Even the hardcore students who slogged through Juche texts in the 1980s could be divided into those who did and those who didn’t accept the Leader Theory twaddle. (The latter group was larger.) There was also a branch of the NL movement that refused to take orders from the North’s southward radio broadcasts. To my knowledge none of these groups wanted KPA tanks to come rolling down again like in 1950. They wanted — just as Kim Il Sung professed to want — a transition stage on the way to unification, namely federation or confederation.

Here the Westerner, determined to keep rooting for what CNN tells him is the “liberal” South Korean party, asserts that the nationalist left must have abandoned its earlier beliefs. But age doesn’t necessarily moderate people. (I’m more radical about animal rights now than I was 20 years ago.) The most prominent members of today’s ruling party refuse to renounce the National Liberation movement. They still consider the “poorer but purer” Korea the more legitimate state, just as it’s routinely presented in those inter-Korean buddy movies and romance dramas the Moon government likes subsidizing. Min Gyeong-u has remarked on how radical (gwagyeok hada) many people who went to university 30-some years ago still are. The president’s own worldview as expressed in public-holiday speeches is straight out of the 1980s. Whatever he may say to his Western counterparts, his base sees no reason why the North should denuclearize, and holds Washington responsible for the ongoing crisis. The efficacy of appeasement, a word which in Korean lacks the negative associations it has in English, is still wholeheartedly believed in.

One plank most pro-Northers  certainly have abandoned is the “Yankee go home” line. Yes, this is partly because they don’t want Kim Jong Un to do anything crazy. But they also understand which half of the peninsula the US-ROK alliance has done a better job of protecting since the truce. Make Yankee go home, and South Korea ceases to be a human shield deterring even the most limited strike on the North.

The goal of the nationalist left, then, is still an inter-Korean confederation, or “de facto unification” as many (including Lee Jae-myung) prefer to call it, but on paper this is a remarkably loose and tame affair. We’re told it would come down to little more than routine summits, a constitutionally anchored commitment to cooperate economically, and some sort of EU-type, supra-state body to administer the partnership. Let’s leave aside for now the restrictions on anti-North expression that would be sure to accompany such a set-up here. Let’s also disregard the question of whether (and why) the North would be interested in it. My point is that the concept is probably moderate enough for the Minjoo and the People Power Party to integrate over in the near future — or at least to join in removing all constitutional obstacles to. The sanctions currently in place would give the conservatives cover with their voters: Relax, it’ll never come to fruition.

In any case I don’t see that a President Yoon would have much choice but to go along with this, and with whatever else the Minjoo-run National Assembly chose to make a stand on. He’d be lucky to serve a full term anyway. Already some are saying a Yoon victory in March would constitute a “coup d’état.” The implication is that street resistance would have to begin at once, probably before his inauguration in May, for the nationalist left reserves the right to remove or at least neutralize a president if voters pick the wrong one. This sort of thinking goes back to the protest movement too, the apex of which was the May 1991 Struggle to topple President Roh Tae Woo — whose successor was due to be elected the following year. But that’s one episode of modern history there won’t be a movie about.

UPDATE: 9 February 2022: Protecting President Moon

Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society [1958; not, as I had originally written, The Unheavenly City] has received quite a bit of attention in South Korea, where sociologists have been struck by the parallels between southern Italy (as he describes it) and their own society. I like Banfield’s anecdote about how a mere payment dispute induced a Monarchist Party member to join the Communist Party, only to defect back again as soon as the problem was resolved.

Of course that wouldn’t fly in North Korea; defect from their monarchist party and you’d better keep running. But here in the South I see a leftist lawyer speaking out on behalf of Yoon Seok-yeol, and Lee Myung Bak’s former nuclear negotiator stumping for Lee Jae-myung. Self-styled followers of Park Geun-hye have come out for Lee too, on the grounds that Yoon put Park in prison on trumped-up charges. (Which is an odd motivation considering that Lee, although a mere mayor at the time, was one of the first to call for her impeachment.) And in the city of Ulsan, about 200 Minjoo Party members, declaring themselves disgusted with Lee’s corruption, have defected to the conservative opposition.  Rumor has it that whether the independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo throws in his lot with Yoon or Lee will depend on who can offer him the best post in the next government.

I suspect the above has as much to do with Korea’s patrimonial tradition as with what Banfield referred to by the somewhat unfortunate term “amoral familism”; so many high-paying, perk-laden jobs come up for grabs with each new administration that it pays to be open-minded. If the aisle-crossings seem especially numerous now, it’s because the ideological gap between the two main camps has never been narrower, due mainly to the leftward drift of the right.

Many Moon-loyalists are thus still undecided about who to vote for, because they can’t figure out whether Lee or Yoon is more likely to have their man prosecuted when he steps down. (The Blue House’s alleged meddling in the Ulsan mayoral election would be enough to get things rolling.) Implicitly acknowledging that Moon is vulnerable to prosecution, a Minjoo lawmaker in Lee’s camp has assured the party’s base that he’s the only candidate who “can watch over President Moon Jae-in well,” the other fellow being likely to “inflict harm on him through an investigation.” This may be one reason why the mounting allegations against the Minjoo candidate are not hurting him that much in the polls: Moon’s many followers may be reasoning that if anyone now has an incentive to stop the custom of presidents sending their predecessors to prison, it’s Lee.

UPDATE: 11 February 2022: Strong Anger

In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo the other day, Yoon was asked if as president he would subject the Moon administration to a “purge of accumulated evils,” i.e. an investigation into corruption and abuse of power. Moon himself came to power on pledges to carry out such a purge against the Park administration. Instrumental in the wave of arrests that followed, which saw almost 200 former officials sent to prison with remarkable speed, was Yoon Seok-yeol, who rose to the post of prosecutor general as a result.

Until that interview Yoon had asserted that he considers Moon an honest man whose underlings have let him down. He has to take this mild position if he wants a) to win over Lee-disdaining Minjoo voters and b) to work as president with a National Assembly dominated by Moon loyalists.

On the other hand Yoon knows that many conservatives now plan to boycott the election, claiming to see no meaningful difference between him and Lee. So in answer to the question, Yoon said, yes, of course, a “purge” would take place if necessary, in accordance with the law.

Surprised to hear the opposition party candidate sounding like an opposition party candidate, Moon responded by saying through a spokesman: “I express strong anger, and demand an apology” for “treating the current government, without basis, as an object of an accumulated-evils investigation.” (In its translation the Korea Herald rendered “I express strong anger” as “I am deeply resentful.”)

In fact there’s quite a bit of evidence that the Blue House has abused its power, especially in connection with the Ulsan mayoral election and the shutdown of a nuclear reactor, but Yoon rushed to explain that he and the president are “of the same mind”:

Our President Moon has always emphasized the need for investigations without sacrosanct areas, in accordance with principles and the law.

[Note that in the above the possessive pronoun connotes affection or good will.]

I too have said that official corruption and irregularities must be handled in accordance with laws, principles, and a fair system.

Meaning that an investigation would not necessarily be a matter of “political retaliation.” But even when there is evidence that an administration abused power, Koreans tend to regard it as score-settling if the next president lets prosecutors go after its officials. Roh Moo Hyun, who killed himself in 2009 after being apprised of the case against him, is considered a martyr here; Moon referred to the cautionary “tragedy” of his death in that interview I just mentioned. The reason Kim Dae Jung is still held up as a model of integrative spirit is because he turned a blind eye to the wrongdoing of the government that preceded his.

Why then (you ask) was there no outcry against the 2017-19 purge of Park and her people? Because the opposition party and media also needed it to take place, in order to justify their calls for her impeachment — calls that had actually been motivated by the drive for constitutional revision.

This whole episode must be seen as a blunder on Yoon’s part; he has spooked the Lee-mistrusting left without convincing conservatives that he’s one of them.  And Moon, the opposition party now alleges, has broken the South Korean law forbidding presidents from siding openly for or against a particular candidate.

In an interview on 10 February, Moon also said in regard to Yoon that whether it’s election season or not, sowing discord and division is not the way to “go towards a politics of integration.” There’s that word again.

UPDATE: 17 February 2022: Lee Changes His Tune

“Everyone agrees,” Professor Jeong Byeong-gi (Yeungnam University) wrote in the left-leaning Kyunghyang a few days ago, “that the main problem with our politics is the imperial presidential system.” That may indeed be the consensus of South Korean journalists, academics and politicians these days, but I doubt if one in ten average citizens would agree with it, or with the assertion that “the fundamental reform of changing the presidential system to a parliamentary one is necessary.” If any institution has a worse reputation here than the presidency, it’s the National Assembly.

There’s no arguing with the professor, however, that by this yardstick of reform-mindedness, “Yoon Seok-yeol is ahead of Lee Jae-myung.” Since the start of his campaign Lee has stated a few times, to the disapproval of many in his party, that he’s no more interested in a parliamentary system than the public is. At most he would support the change from one five-year presidential term to an American-style four-year term with the possibility of re-election (which, as a few critics have pointed out, would hardly weaken the Blue House).

Lee could afford to play the maverick in this fashion when he was beating Yoon in the polls, but the (ostensible) conservative is now slightly ahead according to most of them. Particularly damaging to the former governor’s popularity have been recent allegations that his wife had two provincial government employees at her beck and call, their daily challenge being to find ways to charge family expenses to the taxpayer. Meanwhile the investigation into the Daejang-dong development scandal has been progressing at a tempo which in itself reflects Lee’s lack of Blue House support. (The wheels of justice grind far more slowly for President Moon’s kind of people, i.e. veterans of the nationalist-left protest movement.) That investigation has just yielded more momentous revelations, but the talk of expensive Lee family meals charged to various Seongnam-municipal  and then Gyeonggi-provincial government accounts is easier for the public to understand.

Lee has thus felt compelled to strike more conformist notes on reform, pledging to “form an integrated citizens’ government in solidarity and union with all political forces supportive of political change,” and to implement a system whereby the National Assembly would put forth one or two candidates for prime minister, a post to which Lee now agrees to assign more powers. If necessary, he added, he would serve a four-year term, and even refrain from talking of a Lee Jae-myung administration. This doesn’t quite add up to a parliamentary or even a semi-presidential system, but it’s about as far in the direction of one as Yoon has said he wants to go. Whether this reassures the Moon loyalists in the National Assembly that they would be able to prevent a President Lee from allowing their leader to be prosecuted is another matter.

UPDATE: 18 February 2022: Incel Election?

The literary historian George Saintsbury wrote of “the sound rule that anonymous writing should never be personal,” and took Leigh Hunt to task for violating it. But Hunt at least encouraged one great poet and wrote a few excellent poems himself. This is more than can be said for the DC-based lawyer and member of the Korea lobby who, when not reviling the Moon government’s critics on Twitter under the handle “TK of AAK,” shills for it in slightly more measured prose under the name S. Nathan Park. (Many of his older and more abusive tweets were recently deleted.)

A few days ago Unherd published an article of Park’s entitled “Inside South Korea’s incel election.” The gist: If Yoon wins the election on 9 March, despite the marvelous record of “liberal” Moon Jae-in, the “most popular president in [the ROK’s] democratic history,” it will be in large part because the conservative party’s chairman Lee Jun-seok has had such great success in riling up young misogynists who aren’t getting enough sex.

Korean conservatives have found a new lease on life by appealing to sexism and male grievance politics. If Yoon Seok-yeol does prevail on 9 March, his victory will be touted as the triumph of anti-feminism. That will be an ominous sign for South Korea’s future.

No one who has been following South Korea’s English-language press for more than a few weeks will be taken in by the piece, but let me just set out the main countervailing facts as concisely as possible.

• The Moon administration is considered by most left-wing commentators to have been a disappointment. (Many of them judge even his performance on the inter-Korean front quite harshly, or more harshly than I do; as I’ve explained here, there’s no way for overt inter-Korean relations to progress beyond the state of US-DPRK relations without endangering the North’s security.) To quote the left-wing Hankyoreh: “Moon’s performance has been dismal…. Nor does Moon have anything to show in terms of political reform.” This despite his party’s having enjoyed a comfortable majority in the National Assembly for the past two years.

• Moon’s current approval rating is 40%.

• Polls indicate that only about 40% of the electorate want to see another Minjoo government. Alas, there aren’t nearly enough young men in this country (as we provincial university professors know better than anyone) for the anti-feminist portion of them to make up a substantial part of the over 50% of voters who want a change.

• In 2019 the former nationalist-left governor of South Chungcheong Province was sentenced to a three-and-a-half year prison term for the protracted sexual exploitation of a female provincial employee. The nationalist-left mayor of Seoul committed suicide in 2020 after a city employee reported him for sexual harassment. (The frightened woman was then attacked on Moon-loyal social media for making a fuss over nothing.) The nationalist-left mayor of Busan had to resign that same year amid charges of sexual assault. The last two of these scandals were followed by conservative landslides in mayoral elections — victories which S. Nathan Park attributes to, of all things, a surge of hostility toward women.

  

• The nationalist left’s sense of humor shows that it’s anything but liberal, let alone feminist. In 2012 a media personality who had joked publicly about raping and killing Condoleezza Rice was nominated by the Minjoo to run for a National Assembly seat. (He lost.) Nor can there be any denying the misogynist overtones of much of the criticism of Park Geun-hye between 2012 and 2017. (See the “satirical” picture above.) Since last year the nationalist left has tried to “slut-shame” Yoon’s wife by alleging that she was a bar hostess in her younger years. Mockery of her plastic surgery is on the rise; a middle-aged singer loyal to Lee Jae-myung has just put out a song entitled, “The Woman who Looks like Michael Jackson.”

• The conservative party chairman is now unpopular among Yoon’s supporters, as witness the daily excoriation to which he is subjected on popular Youtube channels like Garosero. There is general unease over his reluctance to criticize Moon, which exceeds even Yoon’s, and the support he gets from some left-leaning commentators as a “reasonable conservative.”

• As for Lee Jae-myung: Rather than take responsibility for his family’s misuse of government employees and expense accounts to private ends, which could hardly have continued for as long as it did without his knowledge, he has had his wife and a female employee take the fall. (See the previous update.)

• Like Moon, he does indeed seem to appeal more to young female voters and less to young males than Yoon does, but considering the Minjoo’s record over the past five or so years, I think this can be sufficiently explained in regard to longer-standing, Korea-transcending gender differences in support for higher taxation and social welfare. In any case, the latest poll (reported on in the Hankyoreh) puts Lee Jae-myung’s popularity among South Koreans in their 20s at 20%, so clearly most young women are no more interested in a continuation of Minjoo rule than most young men are.  (The incel- or feminist-relevant issues that Park makes so much of do not feature in the pollster’s breakdown of voters’ reasons for preferring this or that candidate.)

Whether writing under his own name or as “TK,” S. Nathan Park always seems to proceed from the assumption — perhaps a correct one — that his readers are too parochial or dim-witted to get their Korea news from anything but an American source. Thus does he omit all mention of the scandals now besetting Lee Jae-myung, which are doing far more to boost his lackluster rival’s poll numbers than anything else.

UPDATE: 23 February 2022: No Costco in Gwangju 

“There is such a thing as the Jeolla viewpoint,” a European couple said somewhat wearily to me after a year in the region, “and everyone there seems to have it.” But the southwest has been looking less monolithically supportive of the nationalist-left candidate than everyone expected. Recent polls have put Yoon’s popularity in Jeolla and Gwangju at a whopping 18%. This is partly due to his success in wondering aloud, on a recent campaign stop, why the city of 1.5 million residents — which would put it between Philadelphia and San Diego in an American list — doesn’t have a single megamart or big shopping mall.

That the news of this lack was at first indignantly denied by ruling-party officials in Seoul, and took even the conservative media by surprise, shows how isolated from the rest of the ROK the southwest still is — or, to be more exact, how few outsiders who are not of the Jeolla diaspora ever go there for a visit.

Upon confirming that there is indeed no Costco, E-Mart or Starfield mall in Gwangju, some Minjoo members explained that it’s because local merchants don’t want them around. Well, of course they don’t; but other cities in Korea have overridden such opposition and continue to do so. It has been uniquely effective in Gwangju only because the Minjoo power elite wants to keep Big Retail out too. Ideology is at work here. One Moon-loyal panelist responded to Yoon’s problematization of the issue by saying clumsily that “putting a brand-name watch on a poor person doesn’t make him rich.”

Such talk is of a piece with the viewpoint mentioned above, central to which is the claim that Jeolla was so cruelly held back by the Gyeongsang-centric military dictatorships that it still hasn’t caught up to the rest of the country. Paradoxically enough this mythohistory goes hand in hand with pride in the southwest’s preservation of a more rural and sobak han (benevolently naive), therefore more “purely Korean” way of life. Hence the common assumption that Jeolla somehow represents the true will of the nation (minshim) regardless of what national polls say. It’s sort of an aggrieved version of Texans’ belief that their state is the most quintessentially American one, that the Dallas Cowboys are “America’s team,” etc.

Whatever other elements go into this victimhood regionalism – if I may adapt J.H. Lim’s term victimhood nationalism – the bloc voting that results has served the nationalist left well enough to make it worth cultivating. The mood in Jeolla matters so much because its diaspora is so numerous, especially in Seoul – which is why most district chiefs in the metropolis are from the area.

But word has finally got around in Gwangju that the city’s per capita GDP is higher than megamart-rich Busan’s, and locals, the younger ones in particular, are wondering why they can’t live accordingly. When polls appeared showing a solid majority in support of change, Lee Jae-myung — who had only just accused Yoon of “far-right populism” for bringing up the issue — pledged to help the city reach a compromise between supporters and opponents. It has been odd to see the two candidates treating this municipal affair as a president’s business, despite agreeing that the office must be weakened.

UPDATE: 4 March 2022: Asymmetric Mudslinging

Like all Americans here I relish the civilized escapability of Korean election campaigns. On a 40-minute trip from Yeoju to the Democratization Movement Memorial Museum the other day I saw no indication that the country was about to choose its next leader. And this is the heart of Lee Jae-myung country.

President Moon isn’t even allowed to express support for the ruling party’s candidate. Then again, it was pretty obvious why he chose to claim in his March 1 speech that the Kim Dae Jung government was the first democratic one in Korea’s history. (This remark elicited a swift protest from the Kim Young Sam Center for Democracy.) Another signal of sorts was the decision of a candidate for the obscure New Wave Party to abandon his run and join hands with Lee. The man in question, Kim Dong-yeon, had been rumored to be Moon’s choice of a last-minute substitute for Lee should the latter have to bow out early. Yet on the same day a group of Moon-loyal “honey badgers,” as they call themselves, came out in support of Yoon Seok-yeol.

The third-party candidate Ahn Cheol-soo had been expected to live up yet again to his name, a homonym for the Korean word for withdrawal. The only question had been which of the two main candidates would win his favor; now of course we know. The assumption is that Yoon promised him a few ministerial posts to distribute among members of his party, which will now merge with the People Power Party. (Yoon couldn’t simply promise to make him premier, as the Minjoo majority in the National Assembly would have to sign off on that.) This makes me wonder how Yoon could afford to give a few additional posts to Minjoo people — as he would have to do to live up to his promise of an “integrated government” — without making conservative voters feel thoroughly duped.

What I found more interesting, since Ahn stands for nothing in particular, was an electoral alliance that didn’t quite come to pass: Lee Jae-myung reached out invitingly to the arch-conservative candidate Cho Won-jin, a Park-loyalist firmly opposed to the constitutional enshrinement of the spirit of Gwangju 1980. Even by Korean standards of bedfellowship this was a bit much, and Cho evidently felt the same way, explaining his “firm refusal” by saying simply, “Our ideologies are different.” It was an odd proposal from a strategic viewpoint too, since Cho’s candidacy can only cut into Yoon’s vote.

It would be wrong to conclude from such episodes that the Minjoo has abandoned ideological principles to the extent the People Power Party has. A nationalist-left candidate trying to get a conservative to drop out of the race is something quite different from a conservative – an ostensible conservative – positioning himself as the true heir to the nationalist-left tradition, the way Yoon does with his constant homages to Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun.

One could of course argue that Kim and Roh were both more conservative than Moon. It’s also true that Lee Jae-myung has said kind words about the military dictators’ economic policy, as if it hadn’t consisted to a large extent of suppressing workers’ wages, which for the braver and bolshier gender in the vanguard of the labor movement translated into things like being doused with fecal water and beaten with steel pipes.

What matters here, however, is not history but the mnemo- or mythohistory generally agreed upon. The so-called Miracle on the Han River is now remembered mainly as proof that government intervention in the economy works wonders, a message harmless enough for a nationalist-left candidate to invoke. The myth of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, on the other hand, is inseparably bound up with the Sunshine Policy. Yoon’s invocation of it is by no means nullified by his noises about tolerating no guff from North Korea, which recall remarks made by Kim, Roh and Moon on the campaign trail. He cannot live up to that part of his rhetoric without running afoul of the National Assembly.

The two main candidates are still ideologically far enough apart for their docile voter bases to consider the election on March 9 hugely important. The die-hard left-wing third of the populace will hold its nose and vote for Lee, just as the die-hard conservative quarter of it will vote disdainfully for Yoon. If the latter candidate ends up winning, it will be because the free-floating vote is so big here, and many more undecideds fear the kleptocracy that the right warns against than fear the “prosecutor’s republic” the left warns against.

One reason for this is that the Moon camp itself made much of Lee’s alleged dishonesty back when it perceived him as a rival. It was the left-wing entertainment industry that put out the movie Asura (2016), about a corrupt mayor pushing a land development project in “Annam”; it was the pro-Moon Youtubers who had a field day with Lee’s foul-mouthed telephone call to his sister-in-law, and with his effort to have an older brother sectioned (who, in his own recorded conversations, seemed the more stable of the two men).

Another reason is that the left cannot fully explain its fears of prosecutors running rampant under a Yoon presidency — fears shared by old-school right-wing pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae — without admitting that Yoon and his colleagues played fast and loose with the law during the Moon administration’s purge of conservatives (“accumulated ills”) in 2017-2019. This forced reticence has left voters wondering what was so horrible about Yoon’s insistence on prosecuting Cho Kuk and his wife, two members of the Minjoo camp against whom the evidence of document forgery appears to have been solid.

UPDATE: 5 March 2022: Yoon and Ahn, Together at Last 

I have to return to Busan tomorrow, but as luck would have it, Yoon Seok-yeol and Ahn Cheol-soo chose to make their first joint campaign appearance today in Icheon, about half an hour away from the house on the Han River where I’ve been staying. Due to difficulties finding a parking space, I arrived only minutes before Ahn and Yoon stepped up on stage to great cheering and balloon-shaking. The crowd was smaller than the one at the Moon Jae-in rally I attended in Busan in 2017, but seemed to fill all the space available on the street. (I see the Hankyoreh’s man on the scene had the same impression.)

After Ahn and Yoon walked up and down the runway for an unconvincing display of chumminess, Ahn came back out on his own to call briefly for a change of government. Then it was Yoon’s turn to speak. Urged on perhaps by the icy wind knifing up and down the street, he got straight to the point, assailing the “clique politics” and “protest-movement ideology” of the current administration as if a different Yoon Seok-yeol had done its bidding for two years. The Daejang-dong development scandal, the selective enforcement of the law, and the government’s beholdenness to militant trade unions: all came in for special criticism in a voice surprisingly free of late-campaign hoarseness.

Meanwhile I scanned the masked faces around me. There were a few more young men and women in sight than is usual at conservative events, but not enough, I thought, to justify the Chosun’s hype about Yoon’s popularity with the so-called 2030 demographic. On the other hand those present seemed as confident of their man’s victory on election day as Moon’s followers did at that Busan rally five years ago.

After talking for about twenty minutes Yoon summed things up by calling the election “a battle between the corrupt Lee Jae-myung forces and the great citizens of the Republic of Korea.” Then Ahn came out again, the two men shook hands with people on both sides of the catwalk, Yoon did some of his signature “victory uppercuts,” which went down a storm — and then they were off to the next campaign stop. The crowd didn’t linger either.

As I walked back to my car a silver-haired man coming from the other direction asked if everything was over. I said yes. “Did Ahn Cheol-soo turn up?” he asked, turning and falling into step with me. I affirmed that question too. “He didn’t arrive together with Yoon, did he?” “Different cars, I think.” He pondered this for a moment, then shook his head ruefully, saying, “I wanted to hear what he had to say.” And with that he stepped off the sidewalk and opened the driver’s door of his taxi. So maybe Ahn stands for something after all?

UPDATE: 9 May 2022: Election Day

12 pm: To everyone’s surprise, the turnout so far is over 3% lower than it was in 2017, which is good news for Lee Jae-myung, even if it’s especially low in the nationalist-left stronghold of Jeolla. At this point I don’t see how it can reach the 75% turnout that Yoon has said would be necessary to counter the very high turnout in the early vote, which everyone assumes went for Lee. (Polls had shown that far more of his supporters than of Yoon’s intended to vote early.) Granted, some pundits are pointing to the difference in predictions emanating yesterday from the two camps — the left talking  of winning by 2-3% at most, the right of winning by 10% — as an indication that both parties’ own last-minute (unpublished) polls point to a Yoon victory.  Nevertheless, my impression while going back and forth between the pro-Lee and pro-Yoon broadcasters is that the conservatives are more worried.

9:00 pm: Well, it’s going to be a long night of vote counting, but despite Yoon Seok-yeol’s razor-thin edge in exit polls I don’t much fancy his chances of coming out on top. The glum eyes of the masked people at PPP headquarters also seem to me to indicate foreknowledge of defeat.

Even if Yoon somehow ekes out a victory, there is clearly a disparity between the outcome of the exit polling and the consistent poll finding over the preceding months according to which about 50-53% wanted a change of government. Of course some 2.5% of that group seems to have voted for the Justice Party candidate Sim Sang-jung, the closest thing to a real liberal in the race. Nevertheless, Lee seems to have pulled off much the same sort of feat that Park Geun-hye did in 2012: being of the ruling party while appearing to be somehow not of it at the same time.

Another one or two percent that wanted change yet clearly did not come out for Yoon consisted of those conservatives — represented by well-known pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae, Hwang Jang-su and Byun Hee-jae — who talked all along of either boycotting the election or voting in protest for some fringe candidate, either because they hadn’t forgiven Yoon for his role in Moon’s purge of “accumulated evils,” or because they opposed the semi-parliamentary system he and the PPP appeared to favor. But when a candidate loses by a very small margin, virtually all explanations for his defeat can be considered valid to a certain degree.

10 March 2022, 0:30 am. It’s just after midnight, and now that the early votes are out of the way, Yoon has edged into the lead, to great cheering at PPP headquarters. There is increasing talk that the exit polls may have been quite seriously off, a claim that would seem to be borne out by Yoon’s having apparently received over 10% in Jeolla. But a lot of votes remain to be counted.

02:20 am. KBS has tipped Yoon as the likely winner. The exit polls turned out to have been quite accurate after all.

UPDATE: 10 March: Finally, a Note on US Press Coverage

Anyone who relies wholly on the American media for insight into South Korean politics is likely to be wondering today how such a well-educated people could have rejected, by however small a margin, a candidate as obviously wonderful as Lee Jae-myung. The answer, in a word, is Daejang-dong, the name given here to the land-development scandal that most American journalists seemed averse to discussing at any length.

TIME’s puff piece on the man who “wants to calm his country” was too laughably over the top to be considered representative of anything except TIME. (See its piece on Moon). All too common, however, was this sort of effort to equalize the negative talk about Yoon and Lee:

South Korean media has dubbed the race the “most off-putting election” over the mudslinging between the two candidates. There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals. The wives of both major candidates came under fire over alleged improprieties. Mr. Lee apologized after leaked audio showed him hurling obscenities at his sister-in-law. Mr. Yoon denied associations with a shaman and an anal acupuncturist. (Timothy W. Martin, Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2022.)

The great importance of mudslinging in this election resulted largely from the de-politicization process that has been underway here since Park’s impeachment. But extraordinary things would have to happen for an American journalist to venture into topics like that.

Instead the WSJ’s readers — many of whom might well have had a financial interest in the outcome of the election — were left with only a hazy impression of unpleasantness, of pols being pols. They were to regard the mutual accusations as beneath notice because they cancelled each other out. They weren’t to consider the quite obvious difference between shamanism and anal acupuncture on the one hand, and sexist verbal abuse on the other; nor were they to consider the difference between an apology and a denial.

Note especially: “There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals.” Surely a financial newspaper could have condescended to explain which candidate had been accused of what. After all, one of those deals was Daejang-dong, which Lee Jae-myung organized (by his own proud admission at the time), and one of the men involved described in a secretly recorded conversation as the “theft” of almost 400 million dollars (in our terms). Two other land-development deals in the same province were also made much of in the conservative press. The general public appeared more interested, however, in Lee and his wife’s alleged, systematic abuse of municipal and provincial funds to private ends (see the relevant update above).

Now, Lee and his wife are of course innocent until proven guilty, and Yoon’s wife’s purchase of a favorably priced property from a man mixed up in the Daejang-dong scandal is something I too find hard to set down to mere coincidence. In regard to some of the people Yoon and his wife are rumored to associate with, I hope I don’t need to explain how I feel about “folk-religious” ceremonies that entail the skinning of live cows.

But the fact that the allegations dogging Lee all winter far outnumbered those aimed at Yoon (who had already been under intense and hostile official scrutiny for three years) was something American readers deserved to know before the election. Daejang-dong alone played a much larger role in the political discussion than any of the stuff our press preferred to divert readers with: the backstory about Lee’s impoverished childhood and factory accident, the Korea-as-curiosity-cabinet talk of shamans and anal acupuncture, and the few ideological issues that Americans could grasp without background knowledge of the country (feminism, incels).

I’ll say this for the press, having recently said a few things against it: any journalist at a respectable newspaper who was found to have linked plagiarized information to a bogus source 8 times, let alone 80, would be out of a job very quickly. But this makes it all the more remarkable that no major news outlet reported on the scandal surrounding Charles Armstrong’s prize-winning book Tyranny of the Weak (Cornell University Press, 2013), which contained 83 separate linkages of plagiarized information to irrelevant or — more often — non-existent East Bloc sources. Nor did any big paper except the New York Post report in 2019 on Columbia University’s decision to force the professor into early retirement.

In contrast, evidence of relatively minor research misconduct in Arming America (Knopf, 2000), a study of 18th century gun ownership, made the Emory professor Michael Bellesilles the object of several critical articles in both the New York Times and Washington Post. He resigned in 2002, but the press dredges up the affair in regular updates on his effort to live it down. So it is that he and not Armstrong is thought responsible for “arguably the greatest scandal the historical profession has ever seen” (The Week, 18 September 2019).

Why did the more newsworthy story — an Ivy League research hoax dealing with the perennial headline topic of North Korea — go virtually unreported on? Armstrong’s bland centrism had something to do with it; neither the left nor the right saw anything to crow over. (The gun lobby went after Bellesilles.) A more important reason, I believe, was that the scandal would have embarrassed the top echelon of US academia, and by extension our intelligentsia, at a time when all their authority was thought necessary to counter Trumpism and “fake news.”

The field itself, it seems, is yet to come to terms with what happened. To my knowledge I remain the only person to have revoked a recommendation of Tyranny. None of those who publicly accused the main plagiarism victim Balázs Szalontai in 2016 of “sour grapes” or “cyber-bullying,” of having “no balls, no decency,” etc, has apologized. In October 2021 a Canadian Koreanist tried to frame the scandal in passing as a methodological controversy over actual research, even warning gothically of “temptations” inherent to archival work. (My understanding is that it didn’t tempt Armstrong enough.)

But now the European Journal of Korean Studies gives us Robert Winstanley-Chesters’ account of the Tyranny affair, a welcome step forward. A brave one too, for which I commend both the British geographer and his editors. The title of the article (which deals with other cases as well): “Authorship, Co-Production, Plagiarism: Issues of Origin and Provenance in the Korean Studies Community.” This is a much more dispassionate and thorough chronicle than the one I created here piecemeal as everything unfolded; the precise nature of the misconduct that went into Tyranny is discussed in great detail. Winstanley-Chesters also fills readers in on the Columbia committee’s report, quoting, for example, its conclusion that Armstrong had “more likely than not” made uncredited use of Szalontai’s work even in his tenure application package (2003), which has conveniently gone missing.

We learn too that the committee found against Armstrong in all 61 of the cases of alleged misconduct that it chose to examine (namely cases in which his bogus Russian or German source bore the exact same date as Szalontai’s authentic Hungarian one). There’s an interesting revelation in puncto Soviet archives that I won’t spoil here. Also noted is an allegation of sexual assault that a former student has leveled against Armstrong, who denies it.

I have to admit, I’m much less interested in the Tyranny hoax itself than in the academic power elite’s efforts to sweep it under the rug. Like, say, how the American Historical Association privately informed Armstrong in 2017 that it was revoking his Fairbank Prize, then let him “voluntarily” return it weeks later. That kind of thing. But Winstanley-Chesters prefers

to use the experiences of 2016–2019 to explore previous moments of unsavory, unconventional or substandard academic practice in Korean Studies both historically and in contemporary times.

I shouldn’t be surprised to see a Koreanist grouping “unconventional” with “unsavory” and “substandard,” but this reverse-chronological, large-to-small approach seems odd, like bringing up a recent bank heist only to draw attention to old shoplifting cases. We’re taken from the drama of Tyranny to the story of how, in the late 1990s, an Italian lifted stuff from a prominent American’s translation of an old Korean text and got quickly rebuked for it. No collegial wagon-circling there. Why did the field react so differently, 20 years later, to more serious misconduct? I would have liked to see this question answered or at least asked. Winstanley-Chesters alludes in passing to the power Armstrong had amassed, but the declared goal of his article is

to question and consider issues of authorship, co-production and plagiarism in Korean Studies more widely than simply a highly detailed review of the issues surrounding Charles Armstrong. In order to do so the paper will have to a certain extent, define terms and concepts. When it comes to authorship or by co-production what do we mean as scholars of Korean Studies?

I think we mean what everyone else does. Neither the Tyranny hoax nor the attempted cover-up resulted from good-faith confusion that must now be brooded over with a lot of theoretical talk. Nothing good will have come of this bizarre and unprecedented scandal if we allow it to be filed away as “merely the latest example of the complicated navigation of notions of individual authorship,” to quote from Winstanley-Chesters’ astonishing conclusion. Complicated? Every college freshman knows that linking stolen info to a bogus source is wrong, always wrong, and that it can’t happen 83 times without an intent to deceive. It was because the old-boy network instantly grasped the import of our evidence that it attacked us for making it public. No debate over issues of “authorship and co-production” was even attempted.

The actual root cause of the whole affair was — must I say it? — the tendency of academic fields to concentrate too much power in the hands of one or two networkers. Most of my readers will know what I mean already. Let me explain for the benefit of the younger ones. Were I to become Korea Foundation Professor at Columbia University, and then get all the fellowships, journal and book editorships, board memberships and project managerships that accrued to Armstrong in his heyday, the whole tenor of Korean Studies in the West would change within a year, even if I did nothing to assert myself. Why? Because every Koreanist would have to reckon on encountering either me or someone intent on pleasing me at each key stage in his or her career: doctorate, journal submission, job interview, grant application, MS review, review of published book, tenure application, prize committee, and so on.

My main ideas would become orthodox very quickly. To be on the safe side, scholars would have to cite me within the first few pages of anything to do with North Korea. “This paper examines pre-natal care in Pyongyang, a city known for ‘enormous monuments’ (Myers, 2010)….” My citation index would go through the roof. Journals would give each new book of mine the double-review, roundtable, big-event treatment. Token acknowledgment of a flaw or two would be followed with something like: “But it seems petty to quibble with such an impressive….” Everyone who’d dissed me in the past would have to set out on the wanderings of Cain. “We can’t invite Fitz-Boodle to the Honolulu conference, not with Brian there. It would be awkward.”

All this would have a bad effect on more than just my work, for no academic community tiptoeing around a gatekeeper can compete with researchers working in freedom outside the gate. Each year my coterie and I would fall further behind. We’d have to defend ourselves by slagging off the outsiders, but rather than expose our disparagement to counter-criticism, we’d  restrict it to withering asides in classrooms, offices and conference breaks. The younger generation would get the message soon enough, and review our rivals’ work accordingly. Always the tactic in our own writings, to renew a formulation I’ve used elsewhere, would be that of moving cuckoo-like into the outsider’s nest with the air of being its first truly scholarly occupant. Naturally this would mean non-citation of the cite-worthy, shading into deliberate plagiarism and worse. And woe to anyone who called us out.

Junior scholars are more content with this culture than I’d always assumed. In Tied Knowledge (Sydney, 1998), which I wish I’d read earlier, Brian Martin writes: “Students and academics believe wholeheartedly in the necessity and virtue of a hierarchy of positions.” Yes. Go through that thread on the Korean Studies listserv in 2016, and you’ll see that young and old alike were much less bothered by the evidence against Armstrong than by the sarcasm with which the victim of his parasitical plagiarism presumed to address him. Whatever the author of Tyranny might have done he was an Ivy League professor, dammit, and that had to count for something.

A few self-styled neutralists even sounded us out on a proposal whereby Armstrong would wipe the slate clean by allowing Szalontai to co-host a conference with him. Yessir, the Hungarian would get to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the Columbia professor, quasi as his equal, right there on the opulent Manhattan campus! Surely there could be no ill will after that? 

I bring all this up again, for what I hope is the last time, not only to set the record straight, but also to urge anyone pondering a career in Korean Studies to think it over carefully. If nothing is changed, the field will get another ward boss in the last one’s place; it’s a matter of time. At the very least, the simple measure should be taken of ensuring that no professor sits on too many boards and committees. Or is even that asking too much?

 

UPDATE: 30 April 2022: Podcast interview on the scandal 

On 17 April Jed-Lea Henry and Robert Winstanley-Chesters engaged in an interesting discussion of the Armstrong scandal on Henry’s Korea Now Podcast.

A British journalist called me a few years ago with questions about South Korean politics. I told her I’d grown tired of talking for twenty minutes only to see one sentence in print, and suggested she get a soundbite from someone else. “But everyone’s a Pyongyang watcher these days,” she replied goodhumoredly. “Where are the Seoul watchers?”

Indeed, things have changed a lot since the early 1990s, when every Koreanist I ran into at the Library of Congress seemed to be researching either the “Miracle on the Han River” or (groan) something minjung-related. K. P. Yang at the Korea desk was so pleased to encounter a young North Korea buff, he used to let me browse the stacks on my own — until an aproned busybody caught me back there and raised hell. When I told the curious in the photocopier queue what I was researching, they’d return incredulously, “North Korea?”

Nowadays I suppose you’d be likelier to hear “South Korea?” (Unless you were doing Hallyu of course.) The young Westerner interested in politics, ideology, etc, is far more likely to specialize in North than in South Korea. It’s a worrying trend.

Not that I can’t understand it; Pyongyang watching is the quicker and easier route to recognition. Someone who focuses on the Kim regime’s relations with Washington can rely quite safely on news reports in English. Read a few books, follow events closely for a month or two, and you can speculate as well or badly as the next person. (It’s mostly speculation.) The less context you know, the more glibly you can pronounce on the latest developments. Stick to the consensus, and invitations to conferences will soon follow.

[As will calls and emails from Western journalists, who are always on the hunt for a fresh soundbite provider — of the right sort. When turning down media requests I used to recommend this or that South Korean expert, only to hear back that his English wasn’t good enough. I then learned that journalists on the Korea beat don’t want to talk to knowledgeable Westerners overseas either. For local color they need a white person physically on the peninsula.]

Becoming a South Korea analyst is a more difficult affair. Anyone who attempts authoritative discussion of the latest developments on the basis of English-language coverage is going to look a fool. Korean reading skills are a must. But keeping abreast of developments here poses challenges even to native monitors. The number of news sources that must be followed makes perusal of North Korea’s short and predictable party daily seem very easy in comparison. To further complicate things for the foreigner, the language of South Korean politics is richer and more difficult than official DPRK idiom, which hasn’t changed nearly as much over the decades. Older South Korean texts are replete with Chinese characters to boot. Why go to such trouble to acquire expertise that’s in no great demand right now?

Because for one thing, there’s less static to deal with than in the North Korea discussion. Far fewer English-only types are tossing out nonsense you must constantly waste time in correcting. No one too lazy to learn the language can claim to know South Korean politics on the grounds of having visited this country a dozen times, or resided here for a year or two, or done business or charity work. Still less can one spin a whole country-expert career out of having participated in diplomatic talks with ROK envoys 20 or 30 years ago.

South Korean politics is also much more fun to research, and I say that as someone still fascinated by the North Korean system. Surprisingly enough Western scholars will find more doors open to them than local ones will. I’m no networker, to put it mildly, but I’ve somehow come into contact with many prominent people over the past 20 years, from Kim Young Sam to protest-movement leaders to National Assembly members on both sides of the aisle. This isn’t to deny the pleasures of North Korea research, but if I could go back to my twenties, I’d want to be right in the thick of things, meeting newsmakers, attending rallies, gathering eyewitness testimony on modern history, etc, and not looking at microfilms of old Rodong Sinmun issues. Not to mention that my spoken Korean would be less awful had I gone that route.

Ideally, though, one should start by concentrating on the South and then gradually read one’s way northward, because there’s no understanding the one half of the peninsula without understanding the other. This will become more obviously true over the next few years. Whoever wins the presidential election here in March, the construction of the “peace system” — the official euphemism for confederation — is almost certain to continue. I’m not talking of splashy summits and joint declarations, but of a slow and low-profile process the outside world is likely to keep ignoring for a while. I call it inosculation, with an implicit nod at Willy Brandt’s line: “What belongs together, grows together.” We’ve reached the point where a pan-Korean or holistic approach to the peninsula virtually forces itself upon us.

Divided Vietnam used to be looked at in the sort of way I mean, and not just by scholars. One reason many Americans were skeptical of upbeat war propaganda was because they grasped the full importance of the two Vietnams’ shared nationhood; they knew what a formidable force we were up against. Something like Willy Brandt’s meaning was widely intuited if not articulated. Perhaps we retained some collective memory of the lengths to which our North had gone to get our South back. (My middle name comes from a Union general killed at Gettysburg, a direct ancestor on the Pennsylvanian side of the family.) It helped that neoliberalism hadn’t yet weakened our ability to take nations seriously. I mean ethno-nations of course, minjok.

Analysis of Vietnam was conducted accordingly. No stand-alone fields of North or South Vietnamese Studies existed to encourage the misperception of two countries whole unto themselves. Due attention was given to — if I may borrow a striking phrase I encountered in Korean somewhere — “the South in the North and the North in the South.” Especially the latter; Viet Cong infiltration was a common subject.

Of course a war concentrates the academic mind as well as a pending hanging famously concentrates the mind of a condemned man. I’m not saying North Korea watchers must focus quite so exclusively on what is here the main issue. The problem is that they talk only about the side-issues — and yes, even the US-DPRK relationship is a side issue. Or at least, it gets discussed like one, with little recognition (for example) of the effect an end of war agreement would have on the North’s unification drive.

The result: Many Westerners seem to be under the impression that North Korea has evolved into a stand-alone nation — still speaking the same language as South Korea, but constituting a virtually separate ethnos, like Austria vis à vis Germany. “There’s no reason for this conflict [between the US and North Korea] to persist any longer,” Stephen Biegun, the deputy secretary of state, said in 2019, purely on the grounds that America means North Korea no harm. Did the North’s commitment to hegemonic unification, to the elimination of our ally, not rise for him to the level of a reason for conflict? More probably he took it for granted — as I have it on tolerable authority that many in Biden’s State Department do — that that commitment has been abandoned.

As Barry Buzan emphasizes in People, States and Fear (1982), the two Koreas are part–nation-states, each one necessarily undermining the other’s security through its separate existence. Paek Nak-cheong and other South Korean proponents of confederation say much the same thing. I have the feeling that a failure to grasp this will induce America, with its usual mix of credulity and condescension (see our dealings with the Taliban), to sign an end of war agreement at some point. Yes, it will open a very large can of very large worms. It will also make for an interesting time to be in Korean Studies.