On December 19 1950, the SS Meredith Victory, a 7,600-ton merchant marine vessel, was about to leave from the North Korean port city of Hungnam. Hundreds of thousands of refugees flocked to the pier at Hungnam as the bombing of the Chinese army came closer.
By riding on the popularity of its original content (House of Cards, Orange is the New Black) and incorporating Korean media into their library, Netflix is now in a prime position gain a market share in the entertainment industry in Korea.
At the end of May, Korea’s largest media company announced it would be opening a Turkish unit to help create and promote local content for the Turkish market. They already have plans to film Turkish versions of popular Korean movies, and hope to move forward with more Korean-Turkish co-productions in the future.
An unexpected early presidential election was held on May 9 in South Korea. This election was the result of the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The election was won by Moon Jae-In, who strongly argued for eradicating ‘deep rooted evils”’ in Korean society, referring to the turmoil from the former President Park.
It’s official – new numbers from March confirm that China’s THAAD retaliation has significantly cut into South Korea’s tourism industry.
A question frequently asked is whether the next South Korean administration will tilt towards China and away from the United States, based on Seoul’s purportedly shifting perception of the relative importance of the two countries. In reality, it is not helpful to judge whether the United States or China are more important to the Republic of Korea. There is no simple reply to the general question and, honestly, there is no reason to answer it.
Late last year, the Bank of Korea (BoK), South Korea’s central bank, announced its plans for a “Cashless Society,” which first and foremost means getting rid of coins by 2020. But while the BoK has reduced its annual expenditure on coin production by 200 million won from 2015 to 2016, it could do more.
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 larger voter registration numbers this year signal greater enthusiasm among Koreans abroad in participating in the upcoming election. While there are certainly a myriad of other factors that will shape the election narrative in the coming weeks, overseas voters will play an influential part of the election outcome.
KEI Communications Director Jenna Gibson, host of the KEI podcast Korean Kontext, recently interviewed Yun Sun, Senior Associate with the East Asia Program at the Stimson Center, about the Chinese perspective on the THAAD missile defense system.