No Fear or Just Smug? South Korea’s Youth Dismiss the Northern Threat
No Fear or Just Smug? South Korea’s Youth Dismiss the Northern Threat
Five South Korean university students filed into a small conference room in downtown Seoul to discuss North Korea and related issues. Each of them casually placed a smartphone on the table. Two pulled earbuds out as they entered the room. And then, with no hesitation at all, they made plain their view that they had no use for the United States troops who have been based in their country for more than half a century.
As Seungwon Choi, a political science major, put it: “After all these years, we are still under the US. We can’t make decisions ourselves. We have to reassume operational control and sovereignty.”
South Korea is undergoing a transformative generational change—one that has strong implications for the US. The younger generation, living a comfortable life in a first-world state, cares little about the threat posed by North Korea, which has been the dominant theme of South Korean life since statehood in 1948. The North is a dilemma of their grandparents’ generation that, to them, is no longer relevant.
North Korea remains painfully backward as its neighbors experience booming economies. But the Kim family dynasty’s grip on the country is loosening. That’s why China and others in East Asia are planning for a North Korean future that involves painful and possibly chaotic change—and why the US needs to as well.
As Park Ji-Eun, an undergraduate at Yonsei University in Seoul, said about North Korea, “We’re just not affected by it.”
Given that Park’s view is widespread among the under-thirty set, which makes up at least one-quarter of the population, the South Korean government is clearly concerned.
“Young people in Korea are not really interested in North Korea,” a senior minister in the Ministry of Unification (who declined to be further identified) acknowledged. “They have their IT devices, their cars and comfortable lives. They believe in the old policy, co-existence. But then the North developed nuclear weapons, so we have to educate them now that co-existence won’t work. We have to inspire them” to care.
For this minister and other Korean officials, the problem is that South Korea has grown into a prosperous, modern, successful state whose largest exports are semiconductors, cell phones, and automobiles. Annual per capita income is about $32,000, eighteen times higher than in the North.