Seoul
When Beijing announced earlier this month that it would ban Chinese tour groups from traveling to South Korea, South Korean social media lit up with a tasteless joke: “Thank God!” the wags said. But in truth, the decision to curtail tourism to Korea is no laughing matter.
On Wednesday, the Yonhap news service tallied up the damage: “A total of 280,000 Chinese tourists came into the country between March 1-19, down 21.9 percent from 360,000 tallied over the same period last year,” it reported. Those numbers can be expected to worsen, as the ban didn’t officially go into effect until March 15. The economic effects are already being felt, with sales at duty-free shops (a popular stop on the Chinese tourist trail) down 12 percent over a year earlier. On a recent weekday afternoon in Myeongdong, a popular Seoul shopping district that would normally be jam-packed with Chinese groups, none were in evidence, and it was Korean rather than Mandarin that rang out on the crowded streets.
This is a THAAD story. Beijing is furious that Korea has decided to, jointly with the United States, install the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system on its territory. Seoul’s reason for wanting a system that can shoot down short and medium term missiles is obvious, but China is having none of it. Beijing claims (spuriously) that THAAD’s radar capabilities will be used to spy on China. The Chinese regime has deeper reasons for opposing THAAD as well, a senior-level South Korean diplomat in Seoul tells me: It indicates that South Korea is tilting towards the United States, and away from China. In an era of “strategic competition” between the world’s two largest economies, Beijing has been trying to lure South Korea into its orbit and THAAD shows it has largely failed in this effort.
And so in response, China has decided to sanction the wrong Korea. It shuttered dozens of Lotte department stores in China, after the Korean conglomerate allowed one of its golf courses to serve as a staging ground for THAAD. It banned Korea’s pop and television stars from China, where they are wildly popular. And it imposed the tourism ban, an apparently favored technique: Beijing also sharply cut tourism to Taiwan after the Taiwanese people had the temerity to elect a president that the Chinese government didn’t much care for. China’s attack on South Korea has badly hurt its public image here. New polling suggests that China is now less popular among South Koreans than Japan is, an absolutely amazing fact given Japan’s history of brutality towards Korea and its perceived lack of contrition.
A government official here says that the sanctions, thus far, are largely “symbolic.” Beijing hasn’t stopped importing the Korean components that are key to Chinese manufacturing supply chains, and tourism is not a hugely important source of income in this industrial powerhouse. (Though the ban will surely badly hurt Jeju, a scenic island south of the Korean peninsula that has in recent years become utterly dominated by Chinese tourists.) But it’s an outrageous attack on South Korea’s national sovereignty nonetheless. And don’t forget that it’s partially because of China that South Koreans have to worry about missiles in the first place, as Beijing refuses to take the steps necessary—such as suspending oil exports to North Korea—that could cause the Kim Jong-un regime to collapse.
China has thus put South Korea in an intolerable bind: It refuses to take the steps necessary to curtail North Korea’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and then turns around and punishes South Korea for trying to protect itself from the North’s pursuit of those weapons. Actually, it’s not a THAAD story. It’s an appalling story.
