Category: Korea-General Topics

This is a bit surprising that the Chinese have decided to join the ROK and Japan in a trilateral summit in Seoul:

Leaders of South Korea, China and Japan will hold a long-suspended trilateral summit in Seoul next week for the first time in 4 1/2 years, the presidential office said Thursday.

President Yoon Suk Yeol will meet with Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Seoul on Monday, Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Kim Tae-hyo said during a press briefing. 

Yoon will separately hold bilateral talks with Li and Kishida at the presidential office on Sunday. It will be Li’s first visit to South Korea since taking office in March 2023.

It marks the first trilateral summit among the Asian countries since December 2019, after a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic and strained Seoul-Tokyo relations over historical disputes.

Kim said the summit will cover six areas of cooperation, comprising economy and trade, sustainable development, health issues, science and technology, disaster and safety management, and people-to-people exchanges, which will be included in a joint statement.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see if any tangible comes out of this.

If these Korean doctors keep striking they may not have as many jobs to go back to if foreigners start filling them:

Those holding a medical license issued from foreign nations will be allowed to legally practice medicine in South Korea in the case the government declares a top-level medical service warning, the health ministry said Wednesday.

The revision to the enforcement regulation of the Medical Act came as the country is experiencing major medical service disruptions due to the monthslong walkout by trainee doctors in protest of the government’s push to increase the number of medical students by 2,000 starting next year from the current 3,058.

Under the revision, those who have foreign medical licenses will be able to practice medicine in South Korea upon the approval by the health minister when the country is in the highest medical disaster alert mode.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The striking Korean doctors have lost their court case against the Korean government’s plan to stop the increase of medical students to address the country’s doctor shortage. I wonder what the doctors’ legal defense was against the quota? I can’t imagine they argued for their real reason which was to keep an artificial doctor shortage to ensure they keeping getting high paychecks:

A Seoul appellate court rejected Thursday an injunction sought by the doctors’ community to halt the government’s highly contested plan to increase the nationwide medical school admission quota, paving the way for the first such quota hike in 27 years. 

The Seoul High Court made the decision on an injunction filed by trainee doctors, medical professors and students seeking to suspend the government’s plan to increase the medical school quota by 2,000 starting in the 2025 academic year.

This would pave the way for the government to finalize the first medical school quota hike in 27 years, aimed at addressing chronic shortages in essential but unpopular medical fields as well as remote rural areas. 

With the legal limbo lifted, the government is expected to expedite the process of having increased medical quotas reflected in universities’ 2025 admission announcements to be made public by late May or early June.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

If you are accused of a crime I can understand having protections to your identity. Sometimes people get falsely accused of things and spreading their information online causes them irreparable harm. However, once convicted of a crime there shouldn’t be issues with posting information about the criminal:

Concerns surrounding the disclosure of the personal information of convicted criminals and those suspected of having committed crimes have been mounting in South Korea, sparked by the recent revival of a name-and-shame website known as “Digital Prison,” around four years after it was shut down by South Korean authorities.

The debate was triggered by the unauthorized release of the personal details of a 25-year-old man surnamed Choi, who is accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death on top of a building in the densely populated Gangnam district of Seoul on May 6 at around 5 p.m. Local reports suggested that Choi has admitted to planning the crime.

Choi’s personal information, including his full name, photos, university entrance exam scores, the medical school he was accepted into and social media accounts, rapidly spread across the internet, with Digital Prison pinpointed as the originating platform.

Following the release of Choi’s personal information on Wednesday, Digital Prison published more posts containing the information of several other criminals and those suspected of having committed crimes. These include the personal information of a YouTuber in his 50s who allegedly stabbed a fellow YouTuber near the Busan District Court on Thursday morning on live stream.

Korea Herald

Dr. David Tizzard who has lived in taught in Korea for 20 years recently wrote an article in the Korea Times about how he is a happy immigrant to Korea. Here is how he concluded his article:

In the near twenty years that I’ve been here, I’ve had to do drugs tests and aids tests to get my visa. I’ve had to provide transcripts and fingerprints. I’ve sat in Jongno for hours wondering whether the person the other side of the glass will stamp my document or not. I’ve been kicked out of nightclubs for being a foreigner and found myself unable to register for things online. I’ve typed my name all sorts of ways and yet ultimately failed to sign-up for a variety of offers given to other citizens. And as frustrating as this is, it’s fine with me. The country is slowly changing in its own ways and according to its own history and culture. I hope that it keeps moving at its own speed and in its own direction.

I love Korea. I am thankful for everything that it is. I support gay rights and am open in my alliance with people from these communities, but I don’t demand 50-million Koreans do the same as me right now if they are not ready. I don’t always change my clothes when I get home but I don’t think Korean people have to do this as well. I write a weekly column in the paper and try to observe what’s going on here and communicate it to other people, but I never tell the country what it’s doing wrong or how it should improve. There are far too many imperfections in my own life for me to be able to judge a country as rich and as complex as this and try to improve on everything that it has achieved thus far.

Some people consider themselves expats. Some consider themselves experts, here to change the country and enlighten the people as to their own ways. Some people think of themselves as foreigners. Some, no matter how long they live here, will never learn the language or ingratiate themselves to the people and culture. That’s all good. Everyone gets to define themselves. And for me? Whatever others might say, I consider myself an immigrant. A poor man in another’s country trying to start and raise a family. I don’t ask for anything. I don’t seek to change a culture. I just appreciate the opportunities. And Korea has plenty of that for which I remain grateful.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It appears Indonesia is getting cold feet in regards to boosting their Air Force capabilities with new fighter jets from South Korea:

 Indonesia has proposed reducing its payment for a joint fighter jet development project with South Korea to around one-third of its original amount, sources said Monday, amid concerns over its delayed payments.

Indonesia recently suggested paying only 600 billion won (US$442.3 million) in total for the KF-21 jet project, they said, after originally agreeing to pay about 20 percent of the 8.1 trillion-won program launched in 2015 to build the advanced supersonic fighter by 2026.

Jakarta had initially agreed to pay the sum in return for receiving one prototype model and technology transfers, and producing 48 units in Indonesia, but is said to have proposed reducing the payment amount for fewer technology transfers.

It has so far contributed around 300 billion won to the project and has failed to keep up with payment deadlines, leading to questions over its commitment.

Indonesia is known to have asked South Korea late last year to defer its payment for the project to 2034, but Seoul has maintained its stance that it should be made by the development deadline of 2026.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Being a farmer in South Korea is definitely not a lucrative business and very dependent on subsidies according to this report:

I ask people around me how much money I earn from farming in Korea on average per year. It usually refers to about 30 million won to 60 million won. Maybe it’s because there’s an amount of money I heard from somewhere. That’s roughly correct, as farm household income averaged 46.1 million won in 2022.

However, among them, the actual agricultural income earned from farming is only 9.5 million won. It’s about a fifth. The rest are non-agricultural income (19.2 million won), transfer income (15.2 million won), and non-ordinary income (2.2 million won). In other words, money earned from business or government direct payments or subsidies accounts for 80% of farm income.

Maeil Kyeongchae

You can read more at the link.

None of this should be surprising to people who have lived for a while in South Korea; always check your receipts and make sure the taxi drivers turn on the meter:

Foreign tourists to Korea are least happy with its shopping and taxi riding experience, a Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) report showed Sunday.

The KTO said its Tourist Complaint Center received 902 complaints last year, seeing a significant increase compared to 288 in 2022.

It said the number of complaints decreased between 2020 and 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic but hiked last year as the tourism industry recovered.

Of the complaints, 808 (89.6 percent) were made by foreign visitors.

The highest number of complaints (215) was related to shopping, including price gouging, tax refunds and refund and exchange policies.

“I bought a set of 10 foot masks after viewing the price at 8,000 won in combine, but later realized that I was charged 80,000 won. When I asked for cancellation, the seller told me to come back the next day because the store manager wasn’t present,” a Japanese tourist was quoted as saying by the KTO.

Taxi service was the second-greatest inconvenience for foreign tourists, taking up 18.8 percent of the complaints (170). Problems included overcharging and refusing to turn on meters, drivers not being courteous with customers and deliberately taking longer routes for higher fares.

The Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Police Agency said Thursday it caught a taxi driver who tried to charge a Chinese tourist an exorbitant fare for a ride from Jeju International Airport to a hotel near Hamdeok Beach.

The police said the taxi driver received 200,000 won when the taxi fare should have been 23,000 won and ordered him to return 177,000 won.

Complaints concerning accommodations came in third.

Among 142 reported cases, those related to poor facilities and hygiene accounted for 31.7 percent.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It looks like the doctor strike is slowly defeating the will of the Korean government to take action against them to get them back to work:

This photo taken April 30, 2024, shows a hospital in Daegu, 237 kilometers southeast of Seoul. (Yonhap)

The government appears to have shelved a plan to take punitive measures against a protracted walkout by trainee doctors and have pulled back slightly from its plan to increase medical school admission quotas amid a standoff with major doctors’ associations, according to officials Sunday.

Still, the doctors’ associations remained adamant over the issue and renewed their call for the government to revisit the medical reform from scratch, despite some signs of an internal split.

During a media briefing last week, Second Vice Health Minister Park Min-soo said the government has decided to grant local universities autonomy in deciding their medical school quota by a range of 50 to 100 percent for the 2025 academic year in a bid to break the monthslong deadlock, according to officials.

Additionally, the government has delayed the suspension of licenses for doctors who have been inactive for months under its “flexible disposition” policy since late March.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.