Most South Koreans consider North Koreans as neighbours, not foes. But support for reunification dips among millennials
of 2019, South Koreans were shocked by the news that a North Korean woman, who had fled her country through China a decade before, had died with her young son in her flat in Seoul. Weeks passed before a building manager found the bodies. Authorities concluded she had starved.
For a few heady months in 2018, change was in the air. In April 2018 Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un met for the first time in Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone and stepped hand in hand across the border between their countries. South Korea swooned. The two leaders vowed to accelerate efforts to reunify Korea by stepping up economic co-operation and intensifying personal exchanges. They promised to reduce military tensions and formally end the Korean war.
Mr Moon’s government, however, favours a more gradual process. His “new northern policy” envisions a phased opening of North Korea through the rebuilding of railways, pipelines and roads, intensifying trade links across north-east Asia. Eventually, the two Koreas would move towards a federal system and reunification. His plan is tactfully silent on its political implications.
There is no sign of political loosening, but Marxist economics is now mostly a thing of the past in the North. Marketisation has intensified under Kim Jong Un. Most trade with China is controlled by conglomerates close to the armed forces and the party, which operate largely according to market principles. They are “North Korea’s version of the”, argues Rüdiger Frank of the University of Vienna.
From the late 1990s, lively smuggling networks between North Korea and China enabled tens of thousands of North Koreans to escape, including, via an underground railroad through China and South-East Asia, to the South. But political repression has intensified since the latest Mr Kim took power. Security along the border with China has been tightened.
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