And yet, with the presidential election less than a month away, the conservative candidate Yoon Seok-yeol is showing a slight edge in polling over his liberal rival Lee Jae-myung. How have the country’s conservatives been able to regroup in just five years?

A major reason for this resurgence is the sharp conservative turn of young South Korean men, who are increasingly animated by aggressive misogyny and anti-feminism. These young men have found their champion in Lee Jun-seok, a 36-year-old, Harvard-educated political pundit who became the leader of the conservative opposition party last summer. Warning of the “totalitarian tendency” of feminism and accusing the ruling Democratic Party of fixating on a “pro-woman agenda”, Lee and his supporters have injected a jolt of energy into the South Korean Right.

Until recently, South Korean politics followed a conventional demographic pattern. The younger generation leaned liberal and the older generation leaned conservative, with only marginal differences between the sexes. That began to change, however, after the emergence of the country’s #MeToo movement in early 2018. Since then, politics has polarised along gendered lines.

A January 2022 survey by Gallup Korea, for example, showed that 48% of male voters in their 50s approved of President Moon, as did 46% of female voters in same age group. For voters in their 70s, the gender gap was similarly minuscule — 36% approval among men against 34% approval among women. But among voters in their 30s, only 35% of men approved of the President, compared to 51% of women. The gap was even starker for voters in their 20s: 18% approval among men versus 42% among women. In other words, men in their 20s are more conservative than men in their 70s.

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While sexism in South Korea is nothing new, the aggrieved misogyny animating young men is of a more recent vintage. In their 2019 book Men in Their 20s, journalist Cheon Gwan-yul and data scientist Jeong Han-wool found that the young generation’s misogyny was marked by over-the-top hostility against feminism: 58.6% of South Korean men in their 20s said they strongly opposed feminism, with 25.9% rating the intensity of their opposition as 12 on a scale from 0 to 12.

Unlike older men, who held to a patriarchal worldview defined by rigid gender roles, young men reject the sense of masculine duty that typically accompanies old-school sexism. Rather, they see themselves as victims of feminism and define themselves politically by this sense of victimisation.

Among young South Koreans, gender is emerging as the primary dividing line between liberals and conservatives. For the older generation, politics was largely about attitudes toward South Korea’s dictators and the democracy movement of the 1970s and 80s. But for South Koreans under 30, who were born into a wealthy and secure democracy, debates about whether economic growth is more important than freedom are no longer relevant.

Today’s young people came of age after the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 had destroyed South Korea’s previous model of lifetime employment, and they have spent their entire lives preparing for and taking a series of ruthlessly competitive examinations — for prestigious high schools, then colleges, then large corporations. Instead of poverty and oppression, their main struggle is to achieve economic security in a society that is often brutal to those who lose out.

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In this new environment, young women have fared better than before. Sexism, of course, remains a problem: a recent study estimated that structural sexism depresses South Korean women’s wages by between a quarter and a third compared to South Korean men. But since 2009, more women have attended college than men, and in some standardised examinations, they dominate to such an extent that men now benefit from affirmative action. In an exam selecting mid-level civil servants, for example, a rule requires an additional hire if one of the sexes fall below 30% of the overall staff; that is, if a department is hiring ten new employees and two men and eight women make the cut, the department is required to pass one more man and hire eleven employees. In 2021, 79 men and 22 women benefitted from this rule.

The effect of rising autonomy among young women is particularly visible in dating and family formation. In a 2021 study that surveyed residents of Seoul, only 58% of men in their 20s said they had had sex in the past year, a lower rate than for men in their 60s. The numbers were similar among women in their 20s, but for a different reason. While most celibate men said they didn’t have sex because they couldn’t find a partner, most celibate women said it was because they had no interest in sex.

Young Korean women are also increasingly sceptical of marriage and childbirth. According to a survey by the magazine SisaIN, only 8.1% of young women and 0% of self-identified feminists agreed with the statement “People must marry”, versus 37% of the population overall. And South Korea’s fertility rate, which fell to 0.84 births per woman in 2020, is the lowest in the world.

As sex and marriage become matters of individual choice, they are also becoming, for men, a luxury for the economically secure. In the Yonsei University study, men who rated themselves as upper middle class were 12 percentage points more likely to say they had had sex in the previous year than men who rated themselves as lower class. A 2019 analysis by KBS News, which studied men in their 30s, found a clear linear correlation between income and marital status: 86.3% of men in the top income decile were married, compared to only 20.3% in the bottom decile.

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These divisions around sex, marriage, and feminism are increasingly mapping onto political divisions. For instance, another study, a December 2021 survey of people aged 20–35, found that those who say they could marry but did not want to were more likely than average to be college-educated liberal women. On the other hand, those who said they wanted to marry but couldn’t were more likely than average to be conservative men who did not attend college.

Frustrated by these arrangements, many young men have focused their ire on women and feminism, which they blame for their economic and sexual frustrations. These young sexists have poured their anger into conservative politics, reviving the country’s formerly moribund Right. They scored their first major political victory in the Seoul mayoral by-election in April 2021, in which exit polls showed a staggering 72.5% of male voters in their 20s voting conservative. This win was followed by the rise of Lee Jun-seok, who made anti-feminism his calling card. Despite never previously winning an election — he had tried three times and failed — Lee was elected president of the main conservative party, the People Power Party, in June 2021.

In the current presidential race, Lee and his sexist supporters have been a major force for the PPP presidential candidate, Yoon Seok-yeol. Lee and Yoon initially feuded, until Lee loudly quit Yoon’s campaign in late December, in part because Yoon courted the support of a few prominent feminists in an attempt to appeal to young women. With Lee and his backers gone, however, Yoon’s support cratered. His double-digit polling lead over his main rival, the liberal Lee Jae-myung, evaporated, and by early January, he had fallen into a double-digit hole. To regroup, Yoon ditched the feminists and welcomed Lee Jun-seok back to the campaign.

Since Lee’s return, Yoon has strongly focused his campaign on appealing to the young misogynists. He has, for instance, promised to eliminate the Ministry of Gender Equality, a bête noire of the sexists, who consider it to be a feminist cabinet ministry. And on his Instagram account, he has peddled alt-Right memes, including a photo of himself buying anchovies (“myeol-chi”) and beans (“kong”) at a supermarket — a dog-whistle for “myeol-kong”, or “Exterminate Communists.” After the shift in tactics, Yoon’s polling numbers soon bounced back, taking a narrow lead over Lee Jae-myung at the time of this writing.

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South Korean politics is undergoing a transition. Since the end of dictatorship in 1987, the country’s politics was largely about litigating that past. Conservatives argued that political oppression had been worth it to escape dire poverty, while the liberals focused on the lack of freedom and the crimes of the dictators. The humiliating 2017 impeachment of Park Geun-hye, the daughter of dictator Park Chung-hee, was the final nail in the coffin for that old conservative argument.

Rather than evolving toward the embrace of sound conservative principles like the limited government, however, Korean conservatives have found a new lease on life by appealing to sexism and male grievance politics. If Yoon Seok-yeol does prevail on 9 March, his victory will be touted as the triumph of anti-feminism. That will be an ominous sign for South Korea’s future.

North Korea has been a nuclear power for almost exactly 15 years — but in 2018, the nation agreed to put its nuclear ambitions on the back burner, in the first meeting between a Supreme Leader and an American President. Recently, though, the regime has been on a weapons testing binge. Two weeks ago, North Korea successfully tested a new “strategic weapon” — meaning one that can carry nukes — in the form of a hypersonic missile called Hwasong-8. It was the country’s third missile test in the space of a month, having earlier tested a new type of cruise missile, as well as a Hollywood-sounding system that launches missiles by train.

All this is just evidence of the military-powered petulance of a despotic regime, you might say. What Western commentators seem reluctant to point out, however, is that their neighbours on the other side of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) have been upping the stakes too. Few remarked upon the fact that the train-launched system test happened the same day that South Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, making it the first country without nuclear weapons to develop such a system.

Analysis tends to centre around the two Koreas as proxies of China and the United States. And in the West most have a binary view of the North as relentlessly aggressive and the South as virtuous yet besieged. But this flurry of weapons testing reveals a worrying arms race in which both nations are participating, as each side seeks more independence from their superpower of choice. It’s been a mere three years since Kim Jong-un and his counterpart Moon Jae-in first met — and promised to work towards reunification. Now, both are upping the ante in search of heavily fortified peace, as a new generation of leaders are stepping back from the long-held goal of returning to one Korea.

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For the North, becoming a nuclear power was always an existential calculation — partly triggered by the US invasion of Iraq. One of many disastrous consequences of a disastrous war, the toppling of Saddam Hussein — and, later, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya — led Kim Jong-il to conclude that dictators unarmed with nuclear weapons get overthrown. But there are other, more oblique, benefits to having a nuclear armoury. Lankov tells me:

“They have used their weapons to squeeze aid from foreign governments which would not normally provide aid to North Korea, or at least would provide aid on conditions which the North Korean government does not see as acceptable, such as total monitoring distribution of aid to the needy population by foreign NGO workers.”

The regime doesn’t want to be wholly reliant on China, so needs to coerce other nations into charity. At the moment, China keeps the state afloat, partly in line with its foreign policy of “non-interference”, and partly because it does not want a humanitarian crisis of 25 million people on its border. I’ve seen that border, from both sides, and parts are painfully easy to cross: in some places, like Dandong, it’s nothing more than trickles of rivers with flimsy wire fences and a couple of disinterested border guards who knock off at sunset.

For their part, the Chinese are said to be unhappy with the Kim regime, setting red lines for its military program — such as not reintroducing long range missile and nuclear tests — which the North has wisely obeyed. At the same time, China’s only real influence is economic: if it were to overthrow the Kim regime and install a favoured general, it would create just the kind of destabilising effect the Chinese are afraid of.

To put it bluntly, North Korea is nobody’s ally and a pain in everyone’s neck. Beyond its military, two of the state’s greatest capabilities appear to be manufacturing methamphetamine and hacking (it’s believed to be behind the hack of Sony in 2014 after an unflattering portrayal of their leader in the film The Interview). Experts believe that its military capabilities are likely stolen from Russia and reverse engineered.

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All of which is to say that the North Korean military program is about ensuring the regime survives. Appearing responsible allows them to negotiate sanctions relief with the United States, adhering to the moratorium on nuclear tests keeps China happy, and a happy China continues the flow of aid and resources to the tune of about $2 billion per year (without it, the nation could fall into decay within weeks).

Old promises offered by the United States to the North, namely economic growth, are now of little interest to the regime. Military might is the only tried and tested way of getting what it wants. “Markets are bad for political stability, and the North Koreans are rolling them back,” Lankov said. “It means that we are probably going to deal with North Korea for the next 10 years or so as a significantly more repressive society, where the government will care more about central control than they do about economic development.”

Talks between the two Koreas about reconciliation and unification are an accepted theatre. People often point to the unification of Germany, which he says was really a conquest of the East by the West (albeit one that most people wanted). “North Korea dreams of conquering the South, but it is a dream that will probably never come true,” says Lankov. Recently, Kim Jong Un moved away from the old goal of liberating Southern compatriots from their miserably capitalist lives to “common prosperity of the entire nation.” 

This is something the North and South seem to agree on. “Unless you’re talking to old school, anti-communists or hardline human rights people in the South,” Lankov tells me, “reunification is not what they want — because they don’t want to have to pay for the victory,” he said. Young South Koreans, in particular, care less and less about reuniting the two nations and closing the huge gap in health, education, infrastructure — even language and culture — cleaved by almost 70 years apart. It’s estimated that doing so would cost the South $591 billion over a decade.

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The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has labelled public opinion in the South — significant majorities of people wanting military alliances with both the United States and China — “a mixture of paradoxes”. In reality, it’s an expression of wanting peace, with Koreans knowing all too well the cost of civil war — which is what any dissolution of the North Korean regime would probably amount to. “Any sort of reunification would immediately provoke the collapse of the regime,” says Lankov. “It won’t look like Germany — we’re talking serious bloodshed on the scale of Libya or Syria.”

“They’re not a bunch of suicidal idiots — the idea of reunification with social justice and righting wrongs is the kind of rubbish intellectuals like to believe.”

The real paradox here, then, isn’t the Southern yearning for multiple military alliances, or moving away from reconciliation — it’s the current and substantial military build-up taking place in the country, on top of the United States’ continued military expansion in the Pacific.

The best prospect for a unified Korea would be a situation where the Chinese decide not to intervene, the US agrees to pay, and the South Korean tanks roll in — conquest disguised as reunification. In other words, something so unlikely that the status quo is looking like the only way forward for people on both sides of the DMZ. This is the reality of post-Cold War peace and harmony: two neighbours armed to the teeth, looking beyond the patronage of their superpower ally to advance their own military capabilities in a futile game of chicken.

There were ten balloons in total, constructed from agricultural tubes of polythene. Each one carried three bags, filled with about 5,000 leaflets providing information intended to penetrate the lies of the North Korean propaganda machine. They soared into the sky surprisingly fast, soon disappearing from sight, one trailing a satirical cartoon of the ‘supreme leader’ Kim Jong-Un. “Obviously, we have no idea how many get in,” Park admitted, before adding that he was confident enough that some of them would make it across the border and into the arms of citizens in the world’s most bunkered state.

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Park is a remarkable and resolute man. Once he was a rising young bureaucrat from a well-connected family, a fervent believer in the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea for more than seven decades. Today he is public enemy number one in the North, having fled to the South and dedicated his life to defeating the brutal regime that brainwashed him along with 25 million other citizens. He has survived assassination attempts, death threats and even missile responses to these nocturnal launches of clandestine materials. In recent days, he has been denounced again as ‘human scum’.

Yet he is also detested by South Korean authorities who see this diminutive dissident as a danger to their stability. They have launched legal actions and legislative efforts to thwart his activism. And now he is at the centre of rising tensions in the region.

First Kim Jong-Un’s government raged that sending over such seditious information “dared to hurt the dignity of our supreme leadership” and was “provocation graver than gun and artillery fire”. Then came dark warnings of drastic action, the breaking of communication links with Seoul and now destruction of a joint liaison office near the border town of Kaesong.

This explosive move, coming hours after warnings of military action in response to the South “stoking a confrontational atmosphere”, has sent waves of concern around the fragile region again. Russia called for restraint; the United States reiterated its support for Seoul. Meanwhile, the South Korean government — which had staked significant political capital on its latest bid to seduce Pyongyang’s dynastic dictatorship — said the demolition wrecked fading hopes of a peace settlement on the peninsula.

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As ever with North Korea, it is hard to determine precisely what is going on. Kim Yo-jong, the increasingly-visible younger sister of Pyongyang’s leader, blamed Moon for putting “his neck into the noose of pro-US flunkyism”. Clearly ‘sunshine policies’ — to pursue peace and an arms control deal with Pyongyang — led by Donald Trump and South Korean president Moon Jae-in have come to an entirely predictable halt.

Analysts believe it may just be another manufactured crisis to extract some cash and concessions. As one said, there is a weary cycle in which the north pretends it wants peace while it pockets aid and sorts out internal issues before returning to belligerence.

Certainly it seems the action has blown up the Panmunjom declaration, signed by the two Korean leaders two years ago, in which they agreed to cease ‘hostile acts.’ South Korea has warned it will not accept any more hostile activity. It shows also the failure of the talks on Pyongyang’s missile programmes after that high-profile summit last year between Trump and Kim. And it is always worth remembering two key points when watching events here: first, that the Korean War — used by three generations of the Kim family to justify their paranoid stand against the world — has technically not ended after the 1953 armistice. And second, that five of the world’s biggest armies hover around this divided peninsula dangling beneath China.

Yet the North’s fury also indicates the success of the activities pursued by Park and other dissident groups as they send in contraband to corrode the hermit kingdom from within by undermining belief in the bloodstained Kim dictatorship. I have heard from several dissidents about how they would watch foreign soap operas and films secretly to see the clothes, the cars and the food that strongly challenged their own government’s claims about life being so much better under their thumb. I also met a woman jailed for eight years for watching foreign films, and a party cadre — a member of the state censorship team — who defected after being caught sharing seized books and films with his friends.

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Indeed Park himself is proof of the success of such a strategy. When we first met four years ago he told me how his eyes were partially opened to the outside world after a leaflet fell from the sky as he walked around a square in the port of Wonsan. “All the flyers fell at once,” he told me. “There were about 800 people and just five security people so I grabbed one and put it in my pocket. My friend was too scared but we read it together. The most important information was that it said people in North Korea had escaped to China.”

Park defected at the start of this century with help of his father. Three years later he became determined to bring down the regime, after learning that his fiancée had been hideously beaten for two months and two uncles had been murdered in retaliation for his escape. “I had to do something,” he told me. “I was mad that these innocent people had been tortured and killed.”

I met him first through the US-based Human Rights Foundation, which has funded such subversive activities for several years, sending in more than 50 million hours of reading material. Alex Gladstein, the group’s chief strategy officer, said:

“Pyongyang shows with its actions that it fears Mr Park’s leaflets, which carry the truth and information about the outside world. His efforts are peaceful, creative and effective. They should be met with support by the Moon administration, not indifference — and certainly not punitive action. Sadly it appears they are firmly against human rights advocacy.”

Park’s most recent batch of balloons containing half a million leaflets was fired off at the end of last month, amid suspicions the pandemic has hurt North Korea’s fragile economy and rumours the obese Kim Jong-un has been struggling with illness. Other activists use drones to fly in memory sticks loaded with Bibles, books and films; or pay border guards and smugglers to take in banned data and electronic equipment. The risks are big: Kim tightened controls with threats of execution for people aiding illegal crossings and substantial rewards for soldiers who stop them.

President Moon has promised a crackdown on such efforts and tried to sue Park and his brother, to the anger of the conservative opposition party. Yet many of his countrymen look down at dissidents and show little interest in the suffering of North Koreans trapped in the bubble of the world’s most barbaric state. The balloon launches also infuriate people living near the border when they fall short and spew rubbish over homes in the area — although satellite trackers found some flew almost 500 miles to Vladivostok in Russia.

Yet Park remains set on his path. “South Korea is gagging us, who are its citizens, while kowtowing to the evil regime in the North,” he said. “The more they suppress us, the more leaflets we will send.”