The inter-Korean relationship, long defined by national division, offers the clearest mirror within East Asia for cross-strait relations.
Yet even there, reunification language is breaking down.
The South Korean government disclosed on Wednesday last week that North Korea’s constitutional revision in March had deleted references to reunification and added a territorial clause defining its border with South Korea.
South Korea is also seriously debating whether national reunification with North Korea is still necessary.
On April 27, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung marked the eighth anniversary of the Panmunjom Declaration, the 2018 inter-Korean agreement in which the two Koreas pledged to improve relations, reduce military tensions and build a permanent peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
Lee acknowledged the reality of “two hostile states,” in which Pyongyang has abandoned the old language of one Korean nation and now treats the South as a separate belligerent country.
However, his answer was not to return to emotional slogans about national reunification.
If Pyongyang has insisted on “two hostile states” since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un introduced the buzzword in December 2023, South Korea cannot pretend that “one Korea” still exists in practice.
The opposite of “two hostile states” does not have to be one state. It can be “two peaceful states.”
Lee added that his government would continue pursuing a policy of “peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula,” which Seoul officially released on Feb. 3.
The policy outlines three guiding principles: Seoul respects North Korea’s system, rejects unification by absorption and would not engage in hostile acts.
South Korea currently responds with a framework of peaceful coexistence with North Korea.
Last year, the Korea Institute for National Unification found that more South Koreans said reunification was unnecessary than necessary, and 63.2 percent said reunification would not be required if the two Koreas could coexist peacefully.
A Gallup Korea survey conducted in December last year found that 64.6 percent of South Koreans viewed North Korea as an independent state, while 79.4 percent said peaceful coexistence mattered more than reunification.
Seoul increasingly reflects this “two Koreas” reality in official language.
Just as Kim has referred to South Korea by its official name, the Republic of Korea, Lee’s unification minister Chung Dong-young has referred to North Korea as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
On April 29, Chung said that talking about reunification is, in one sense, “violent.” Under today’s conditions, making reunification the immediate language of policy can sound less like reconciliation and more like a hostile merger.
South Korea has already seen how easily reunification language can become a language of confrontation and elimination.
Former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, Lee’s immediate predecessor, framed reunification as the expansion of the value of freedom to the North, as outlined in his Aug. 15, 2024, unification doctrine.
Critics saw this as a freedom-led vision of northward expansion, one that risked turning reunification into pressure, provocation and even a military contingency with Pyongyang, which could have justified Yoon’s imposition of martial law.
Based on evidence and testimony presented in Yoon’s ongoing trials, the South Korean military under the Yoon administration provoked North Korea by sending drones over Pyongyang in October 2024.
This prompted severe reactions from Pyongyang two months before Yoon declared martial law.
Similarly, China has never renounced the use of force in pursuit of reunification. It continues to conduct military drills around Taiwan.
China’s Anti-Secession Law authorizes non-peaceful means if Taiwan is deemed to have seceded or if the possibilities for peaceful reunification are completely exhausted.
Hardline reunification politics could therefore slide into dangerous provocation and even military crisis.
During the Korean War, control of the Korean Peninsula shifted repeatedly and violently.
The capital cities of Seoul and Pyongyang changed hands a total of six times, resulting in millions of casualties.
By August 1950, North Korea had nearly overrun the entire peninsula.
Two months later, South Korea, backed by UN forces, came close to reunifying the peninsula under Seoul’s control until communist China entered the war.
Today, however, leaders of both Koreas increasingly speak in terms of a “two-state” reality.
This reality gives Taiwan, with its clear territorial status, more room to reject Beijing’s claim that political separation must end in unification.
Taiwan’s government says Beijing has no right to represent it because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never ruled Taiwan.
No territory currently administered by the Republic of China has ever been governed by the PRC.
Within East Asia, if North and South Koreans are questioning reunification language, even though reunification nearly happened several times in 1950, Taiwanese have reason to ask why unification with a state that has never ruled them should be treated as destiny.
If the two Koreas can move toward peaceful coexistence, do the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait not deserve the same?
Alan Jeong is a writer on politics, policy and foreign affairs based in South Korea.
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
RSS