Many people ask me where I came from. Then, I have to explain them kindly that I came from South. In addition, people ask me how different from South and North. Or which Korea is good one. I want to say there is not any good one between them. It is just matter of bad leaders in North Korea. North Koreans are the purest in the world. Moreover, another thing that I was surprised with was not many people know about South Kore. I expected that quite a lot of people would know South Korea because of companies such as Samsung and Hyundai. However, as a result of my long travel in Europe and study here for 6 months, I recognized it is different than my expectation.
If I explain differences between South Korea and North Korea, one of the biggest differences is economic power. South Korea is in 11th in GDP ranking (knoema). However, North Korea is out of 50th. Moreover, according to South Korean government, South Korean person usually have 160 times larger income than one North Korean. In short, when assuming that one South Korean has 25,000$ of annual income which is average GDP per capita, North Korean has to live out with estimated 151$ of GDP. In addition, when you see this satellite picture, while South Korea is filled with lights, North Korea is not. Due to lack of money to spend for electricity, they have to shudder even in winter. It is because all the money in North Korea is dominated by government and some privileged classes. Thus, majority of North Koreans should suffer from famines, when South Koreans enjoy affluent lives. Another differences between South Korea and North Korea is ideology. South Korea adopted democracy as our main political ideology and capitalism as our market ideology. On the contrary, North Korea chose dictatorship and communism as their main political and market ideologies. Actually, North Korea’s official name is ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, therefore originally, government should give political rights for citizens, yet since their democracy is superficial, it is right to say they are dictatorship country. South Korea and North Korea are brothers. We had been same country for 4000 years, so same bloods flow in our blood vain. However, about 60 years ago from now, tragic war outbreak, and it was prelude of this tragedy. It caused almost 10 millions of casualties in both sides, and millions of separated-families. Due to segregation, I have to go to military service to aim gun against my brothers in north. Furthermore, my grandmother does not know whether her older brother is alive or not. To prevent these repetitive tragedies, I think that re-unification is the only solution of this long turmoil. However, since our segregated term was really long, people from each country perceive each other as different countries. Also, on accounts of vast money that South Koreans should pay, people cannot say yes for re-unification hastily.
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Jacob (Chan Woo Kim)
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