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Category: Korean Politics

March 3, 2016

South Korean National Assembly passes human rights bill. Finally.

Last month, I leveled some bitter criticism at South Korea’s opposition Minju Party for blocking North Korean human rights legislation (ironically enough, “Minju” means “democracy”). This week, after an eleven-year battle, the opposition finally gave up its obstructionism, yielded to the tides of morality and history, and allowed the bill to pass the National Assembly. The final vote for 212 for and 24 abstentions (and none against?). Belated as it was, this victory gives us some reasons to rejoice. First, it’s a...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Korean Law/Korean Politics/Korean Society
February 2, 2016

Of the North’s crimes against humanity, the world will ask, “Where was South Korea?”

South Korea’s political left, which has long been divided over whether to be violently pro-North Korean, ideologically pro-North Korean, or merely anti-anti-North Korean, has again blocked a vote in South Korea’s National Assembly on a North Korean human rights law that’s been languishing there since 2005. The law itself is weak bori-cha. It had been watered down until it did little more than fund NGOs seeking direct engagement with the North Korean people. But even as a symbolic gesture, as a...
Categories Human Rights/Japan & Korea/Korean Law/Korean Politics/North-South
March 11, 2015

Roh Moo Hyun’s ex-campaign manager just hates it when politicians exploit tragic isolated incidents

The good news is that Ambassador Mark Lippert has been released from the hospital, and is recovering well. [Joongang Ilbo] Give the South Koreans credit for making lemonade from lemons — the news coverage here has been filled with images of well-wishers greeting Lippert, or expressing regret for the attack on him. The greetings look both staged and sincere,* but because of that reaction, most Americans will see Kim Ki-Jong as one small turd in a vast, sweet, fizzy bowl of gachi gapshida....
Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Terrorism (NK)/The Fifth Column/U.S. & Korea
December 15, 2014

Can peer pressure do what South Korea’s conscience couldn’t?

Did the U.N. have to care about human rights in North Korea first for South Koreans to care, too? What is it about Michael Kirby that gives him the capacity to move the South Korean government that, say, Ban Ki Moon, Park Geun Hye, and Moon Jae In all lack? Assuming that anything can make a majority of South Koreans give a damn about North Koreans, what would that say about Korean society and its leaders? South Korea’s unification minister appealed to lawmakers...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society
November 21, 2014

South Korea’s illiberal left: authoritarians in the service of totalitarians

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. [Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19] In America, we have grown accustomed to a political polarity in which we associate “left” with “liberal.” Whatever the merits of that correlation here, it’s useless to any understanding of politics in South Korea, where very few people...
Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
September 9, 2014

Are South Koreans always the last to learn facts about North Korea or

… does it just seem that way? Years after Google Earth made North Korea’s gulags visible to any American with an internet connection, Daum is launching a Korean-language map service covering North Korea. It’s not clear what new information this will provide for English speakers, other than helping us with those pesky problems of spelling North Korean place names in English. Separately, South Korea’s National Human Rights Commission says “it plans to open a permanent exhibition hall on North Korea’s...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society
August 1, 2014

Election result throws Korean left into chaos, me happy

Wow. This has to be really painful: In Wednesday’s parliamentary by-elections, the ruling conservative Saenuri Party scored an thumping victory, winning 11 out of 15 seats and increasing its majority to 158 of 300 National Assembly seats. The major opposition party, New Politics Alliance for Democracy, won in only 4 districts and now has 130 seats in parliament. The most surprising result was a conservative win in the Jeolla region in the southwest of the country, a traditional staunch stronghold...
Categories Korean Politics
June 5, 2014

Park Geun Hye didn’t lose. That means she won. (updated)

Ruling parties are supposed to lose mid-term elections, especially when they look incompetent, uninspiring, visionless, and scandalous. I expected Park Geun Hye’s Saenuri Party to lose, and frankly, it deserved to. Despite all of this, it didn’t lose, which means it won. Saenuri’s opposition was the New Politics Alliance for Democracy, formerly known as the Democratic Party, the Uri Party, the Millennium Democratic Party, and before that, Prince. It has not weathered Korea’s modest political realignment well. At the moment, it...
Categories Korean Politics
February 6, 2014

In South Korea, a political realignment

When President Park speaks of reunification as a “jackpot,” she is seizing an issue that the left had “owned” for at least a dozen years. Ten years ago, the left could draw crowds of candle-carrying thirty-somethings to swoon about reunification, at least in the abstract. The dream was qualified, complicated, and hopelessly unrealistic, but it intoxicated them. The DMZ would have become a “peace park,”* the disputed waters of the Yellow Sea would have become a “peace zone,” and both...
Categories Censorship/Korean Politics/Korean Society/The Fifth Column
February 5, 2014

Can Park Geun-Hye prepare Korea, and the world, for reunification?

Yesterday, Yonhap reported that an unusual billboard had appeared in Times Square in New York: “Korean Unification would be an immeasurable BONANZA for any nations with interests in the Korean Peninsula.” To most of the Americans who read it, the billboard will seem odd, but Korea-watchers will recall when Korean-Americans took out similar ads in the United States, about things that matter much less. Beneath the paywall, we learn that “[t]he ad was set up by Han Tae-gyuk, a 66-year-old Korean-American man, at his own expense,”...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Reconstruction/Regime Change/ROK Military/U.S. & Korea
February 4, 2014

Post-Sunshine South Korea is sober, pragmatic, and grouchy.

In this post last week, I cited polling data showing how South Koreans’ views of North Korea have hardened in recent years, representing a dramatic swing since the fervent anti-Americanism and pro-appeasement sentiment of the Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun years. I reckoned that the 2010 Cheonan and Yeonpyeong attacks were the tipping point in this shift, but a wealth of polling data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project changes my mind about this. I wish the data...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Sunshine/U.S. & Korea
December 21, 2012

Best Graphics of the Week (So Far)

The first shows the persistence of regionalism, in living color. Via Yonhap; hat tip to Step Haggard and Jaesung Ryu. If I’m sitting in Pyongyang right now — and also, if I’m a malignant narcissist with a bloated army — I’m thinking the people who voted this way must be punished.  One sense of ill foreboding has been replaced by another. The second graphic is a newer, higher resolution image of the Koreas at night. Don’t stop there.  The full-resolution version...
Categories Korean Politics/NK Economics
June 27, 2012

Flower Indeed: Lim Su-Kyung and the Bigotry of the Korean Left

For several days, I’ve hoped to find time to write about the new hit TV show in South Korea, “Now on My Way to Meet You,” featuring (and humanizing!) photogenic North Korean women: Each woman also entertains, some by singing and dancing. Others perform comedy skits, including several who mimic North Korea’s iconic, stern-faced female TV newsreader. But the ending turns sad as the women send video messages to family members back in the North. Everyone in the studio sobs...
Categories Korean Politics/Korean Society/Refugees
May 30, 2012

Fifth Column Watch

I haven’t really had time to follow the story of the United Progressive Party as carefully as I’d have liked; South Koreans who are avowedly pro-North are a constant source of fascination to me. In South Korea, political parties break up, re-form, and re-brand every election season. During the most recent National Assembly election, the far left was represented by the UPP, which occupies approximately the same position as the former Democratic Labor Party. The largest UPP faction is openly...
Categories Korean Politics/The Fifth Column
April 23, 2012

See Kim Run!

It’s very rare that an election in any country is anything but a choice between the lesser of two evils. For a brief moment at least, South Korea’s election will be an exception to that dreary rule, because Kim Moon Soo has said he will run for president. Years ago, before he was elected as Governor of Kyonggi Province, I profiled Kim here and here. On Saturday morning, while conversing with my wife, I was lamenting that Park Geun Hye,...
Categories Korean Politics
July 14, 2011

Sohn Hak-Kyu’s Olympic Folly

Why did I shudder when I heard that South Korea had won the winter Olympics? Because I knew it was just a matter of time before some imbecile had an idea like this one: Rep. Sohn Hak-kyu, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party, said Monday the party would push for “some events at the 2018 Winter Olympics to be staged in North Korea. He said he would also bring up the issue of forming a unified team with the North...
Categories Korean Politics/Sports
November 24, 2010

Mayor of Incheon Blames North Korean Shelling on Little Eichmanns Coming Home to Roost

I’ve often said that in the eyes of many “progressive” South Koreans, it’s just not physically possible for North Korea to do wrong, and Incheon Mayor Song Young-Gil has done much to confirm our worst fears. A day after the North Koreans shelled Yeonpyeong Island — which, by the way, is undisputed South Korean territory — Song tweeted out that the attack was provoked by South Korean military exercises. Song also uploaded some pictures and said that North Korea shelled...
Categories Korean Politics/Useful Idiocy/WTF?/Yeonpyeong Attack