Eastern Asia

We continue to follow the events that can potentially transform into the latest political crisis in South Korea.  Even at this stage, the online comment-rigging scandal buried Moon Jae-in’s plans of ensuring the constitutional amendment referendum coincided with the 13 June local elections, almost sabotaged work on an extra-budgetary project and, in the end, led to the appointment of a special prosecutor to spearhead this case.

On 7 July 2018, a 700-strong protest took place in front of the office of Seoul’s mayor. People came out into the streets carrying signs, such as “Put Koreans before refugees”, and protesting against the policies of the provincial administration of the Jeju island, which, in their opinion, is responsible for flooding Korea with “fake refugees”. Other slogans bore messages as “Koreans first”, “We want security” and “Who is this country for?”.

Earlier we bore witness to a remarkable number of noteworthy events in world politics that occurred in the first half of July in Europe. During this period leaders of all the world powers (China was presented by its Premier Li Keqiang), with the exception of India and Japan, paid a visit to the EU for various reasons.

Here it is – my short film about North Korea. No need to drag it, to prolong it – let’s just watch it all together:
The Faces of North Korea

Washington’s initiation of a new game on the Korean Peninsula has become an important element in the overall process of reformatting the political map at global and regional levels.

Strictly speaking, this article is about a new building complex of the so called American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), which from 1979, the year when Washington severed diplomatic ties with Taipei, serves as a de facto US embassy (but with a status of a non-commercial organization).

The South Korean President Moon Jae-in made an official State Visit to Russia from 21 to 23 June.
This was the third summit (after their meetings during the G20 summit in July and the Eastern Economic Forum in September 2017) and the first State Visit to Russia in 19 years (South Korean leaders’ visits at other times did not have such a high status).