Deeper reading #1: Korea, guns, Xi4Eva
The most dangerous thing in Seoul in February has to be the weather. The second the sun goes down the temperature plummets to well below zero, and the air is so dry that every gust of wind carries a sandblast of pale dust.
The city empties out at lunar new year, and, with all the colour leeched out by the winter and the drought, the landscape looks like the aftermath of some terrible disaster, populated by a few figures bundled up in heavy clothes, flitting from doorway to doorway. Like cargo cult icons, the mascots for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics are installed on roofs and in the lobbies of office blocks.
Bomb shelters are just part of the furniture in Seoul; emergency alerts ping onto cellphones with the frequency of special offers. Life goes on.
The games, which came to an end this week, have spun out a number of contradictory narratives. Some segments of the international media seemed incredulous that South Korea could hold a major sporting event at a time when Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un are holding their—let’s call them swords—of Damocles over the country.
Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, attended the games in order to not meet US vice-president Mike Pence, and more importantly to conduct the first visit by a leading Kim to the south in years. North Korean musicians performed in Pyeongchang, and the North and the South fielded a combined ice hockey team. Some in the American commentariat have been consumed with incomprehension and splenetic fury that the two sides actually involved in what is theoretically still an ongoing conflict can talk without an adult present; others have fretted over how the US’ belligerence is creating distance between Washington DC and Seoul.
This is fundamentally a Korean issue, though. There is a distinct oddness of the relationship between individuals divided by a thin strip of land and an ideological abyss, one which inevitably feeds into how citizens approach the tentative rapprochement.
This piece by David Josef Volodzko in Roads and Kingdoms looks at Haebangchon, the area of Seoul once known as Little Pyongyang, and gives a sense of how “returned brothers” fit into the fabric of South Korean society—as outsiders now settled amongst immigrants from around the world, some of them pining to go back to a country that vilifies them as defectors.
The physical imposition of the demilitarised zone, which is usually only seen in tourist snaps and grainy videos of daring escapes, is captured in this series in Wired by photographer Park Jongwoo, taken from his newly-published book, DMZ.
The complexities of South Korea’s relationship with politics and its own ruling class, and how the trauma of its political transition—still underway—influences the Korean psyche, are explored in heartbreaking detail in Han Kang’s novel Human Acts.
Guns do kill people
Another school shooting in Florida has driven another cycle of the same old debate in America around whether it is guns that kill people, or people with guns that kill people. The bravery of the teenagers who survived the attack and are now speaking out for their generation has diluted the usual sense of futility that accompanies these events, but the gun lobby’s machinery has started to clank as ever.
This profile of lobbyist Marion Hammer by Mike Spies in The Trace shows how that machinery works, while the ever-impressive investigative data journalism of Mother Jones gives a sense of the incredible scale of America’s gun problem.
A New Great Leader
China’s Xi Jinping has a claim to be the most powerful person in the world, and he has no intentions of giving up his position. China’s state media’s deification of Xi has been stepped up over the last year or so, culminating in him being handed the title ‘great leader’, echoing that given to Mao Zedong. Now, the constitution looks likely to be changed to allow him to stay on indefinitely without being bound by term limits.
For a longform story of a different kind, Xinhua published an 8,000 word hagiography “Xi Jinping and his era” in November at the Communist Party’s national congress. It contains some diamonds, like:
“From 2035 to the middle of the century, China will become a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious and beautiful.
By then, China will be a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence. Prosperity for everyone will be basically achieved, a prospect that the Chinese nation has been longing for since the Opium War (1840-1842).”
If you’d like a more readable look at how Xi became Xi, try this 2015 New York Times profile by Chris Buckley and Didi Kirsten Tatlow.