South korea

On a humid summer’s day in Singapore three years ago today, Donald Trump became the first incumbent US president to meet with his North Korean counterpart. For all of the summit’s theatre, Kim Jong-un’s pledge to ‘work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ seems unlikely to be realised. Three years on, and the country shows little intention of either abandoning its nuclear ambitions or reforming Pyongyang. Instead, the regime has tightened its control over society, not least ideologically, after the failure of the Supreme Leader’s five-year economic plan. In 2018, the leadership assured North Koreans that the country had achieved its primary geopolitical aim of becoming a ‘fully-fledged nuclear state’.

Across Europe, more and more states are imposing stricter and stricter restrictions to try and slow coronavirus’s spread. The Irish, despite having initially rejected the advice of their scientists to move to the highest level of restrictions, have now done so. Emmanuel Macron set himself against another national lockdown, but then announced one on Wednesday night, albeit with schools staying open. But, as I say in the Times this morning, life in Asia continues to return to normal. Case numbers are pancake-like in Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore, while Taiwan has gone 200 days without a locally transmitted case.

At the start of the pandemic, the situation in care homes looked particularly grim. One report on 19 March said: ‘Experts warn that hundreds of substandard long-term care facilities could serve as hotbeds for the contagious coronavirus.’ The alert came not from Wiltshire or Manchester, but from Park Chan-kyong, Seoul correspondent of the South China Morning Post. There was real fear that the residents of the city’s care homes would become victims of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet three months on, South Korea as a whole — let alone its care homes — has suffered fewer than 300 deaths nationwide. The world is asking: how? Things have looked slightly worse recently — 49 new cases discovered last week — but this is nothing in comparison with Europe.

By offering to pursue a joint bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2032, the two Koreas hope to right a historical wrong: no doubt, the exclusion of Dennis Rodman from the 1992 Dream Team. But just as the retired Piston rebounder and peninsular hero would be a fool to pursue today’s Olympic Gold, let’s stop fooling ourselves about the Olympic Games. Through the Koreas’ absurd suggestion, the time has come to question the fool’s gold of the modern games and its longstanding currency among the world’s murderers, despots, and thieves. The ancient Olympics were a religious rite and a celebration of free people. According to myth, inaugurated by Heracles and consecrated to Zeus, the first recorded games began in Olympia in 776 BC.

Fake news of the week, I suggest, was the sudden warming of relations on the Korean peninsula following the visit to the Winter Olympics of cute little Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korea’s nuke-waving Kim Jong-un — not only attracting positive coverage for the games but driving a splinter between South Korea and the US and nudging Vice President Mike Pence towards a tentative offer of direct talks with the North. But is the thaw for real? As a long-time student of prospects for Korean unification, I suspect not.

We are, of course, a nation committed to celebrating cultural diversity.    Except, that is, when a foreigner sits down to tuck into a plate of dog meat.   Then, we start to behave like the Taliban, believing that we have the right to dictate standards to the entire world. On Monday, MPs staged a bizarre debate in Westminster Hall on the subject of what should and what should not be served in restaurants in South Korea.