In 2016, South Korea officially dropped from the third largest source of international students in the United States to the fourth largest, now sitting behind China, India, and Saudi Arabia. The gap is small – Saudi Arabia sent just 280 more students than Korea in 2016 – but with the number of Korean students in the United States on a downward trend, that gap may widen in the coming years.
The following five documentaries provide insight into the lives of North Koreans and the challenges faced by those who try to escape.
After nearly nine months of suspicion and speculation about Chinese economic retaliation for South Korea’s decision to deploy THAAD, it seems Beijing has finally taken its gloves off.
In 2016, while Thae Yong-ho’s defection from North Korea’s London embassy was widely covered, a total of 1,418 North Korean refugees entered South Korea.
While Niantic Labs launched Pokémon Go in many countries in North America and Europe, it did not fully launch in South Korea until January 23, 2017, despite the popularity of gaming there.
Recently, the number of claw machines around downtown Seoul have greatly increased, especially in busy nightlife areas such as Sinchon, Hongdae and Gangnam.
As the Choi Soon-sil scandal has unfolded over the past several months the Korean public’s dissatisfaction with major Korean conglomerates known as chaebols has become second only to Park Geun-hye herself.
Among the big Korean films of 2016, two of the biggest explored the colonial Japanese period, but they couldn’t be more different.
The South Korean government has been pretty creative in its search for a solution to their rock bottom birth rate – from subsidies for fertility treatment to encouraging employees to go home without saying goodbye to their boss. But one of the country’s giant conglomerates is taking a more drastic step by mandating that their male employees take a month off after having a child.
South Korea faces a household debt crisis. Household debt reached more than 1,257 trillion won ($1.1 trillion) in the second quarter of this year, up 125.7 trillion won and 11.1 percent from a year ago. This marks the highest level for household debt since the government began compiling related data in 2002.