China’s bullying is backfiring in South Korea’s presidential race

ANY excuse for a party. On April 25th North Korea celebrated the 85th anniversary of the founding of its glorious army. Ten days before its young despot, Kim Jong Un, had marked the 105th birthday of his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder, with a vast military parade. Mr Kim loves fireworks, too. He set off a ballistic missile in honour of his grandpa, though it fizzled on launch. Rumours of a nuclear test still hang in the air. Of North Korea’s five underground blasts to date, the young Mr Kim, in power since 2011, is responsible for three.

Mr Kim’s growing nuclear ambitions have agitated Donald Trump. This week America’s president called both his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to discuss them. He also summoned the entire Senate to the White House for a briefing on the subject. And an American aircraft-carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, has finally shown up for reassuring annual drills with South Korea, after an embarrassing incident in which American officials claimed it was on its way to the Korean peninsula when in fact it was going in the other direction.

Heaven knows South Korea needs the reassurance. For all the mutual intimidation between North Korea and America, the North is probably still a couple of years away from being able to attack the American mainland; the North’s promise to make a “super-mighty pre-emptive strike” against the Carl Vinson is bluster. South Korea, in contrast, has long faced an existential threat from North Korea’s 20,000 artillery pieces and 1m-strong army. The North’s growing nuclear capability compounds the danger. Just because Seoul in spring, with its bustling craft markets and festive air, is a cheerful place does not mean the threat is imaginary. Seoulites have simply learned to live under it.

Among South Korean policymakers, the unease is palpable. It hardly helps that the country is in limbo after the impeachment in March of the president, Park Geun-hye. A presidential election will take place on May 9th. Meanwhile, only part of the unease is generated by the North. Mixed signals from America have unsettled as much as they have reassured.

Yes, the vice-president, Mike Pence, recently glared across the demilitarised zone in solidarity with South Koreans. He also declared that “all options were on the table” in dealing with the North. Yet, in a later interview with the Washington Post, he rejected the idea of direct negotiations of the sort that have brought North Korea to the table in the past. Such negotiations were in keeping with South Korea’s long attempt at engagement with the North, which for the decade after 1998 was known as the “sunshine policy”.

Mr Pence acknowledged that if America will not talk to North Korea, and if the North will not give up its nukes, then American military action in the form of a pre-emptive strike becomes more likely. For South Korea, that carries horrendous implications of a retaliatory attack. It was no comfort when Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the more thoughtful voices in Washington, said that a war in those circumstances “would be terrible”, but would at least be “over there” rather than “here”. Strategists in Seoul talk of “uncertainty to the East”—meaning America.

They also refer to “uncertainty to the West”, meaning China. As they see it, America has not helped there either. Mr Pence describes the Trump approach as “not engagement with North Korea, but renewed and more vigorous engagement with North Korea’s principal economic partner”—ie, China. Mr Trump wants Mr Xi to deliver a breakthrough with the North, by applying ever more pressure until it abandons its nukes.

Yet South Koreans point out two problems. First, the American approach misconstrues China’s aim, which is not to bring Mr Kim’s regime to its knees but just to get America and the North to talk to each other. Second, it fails to acknowledge China’s ugly bullying of South Korea in the wake of the country’s decision last year to approve an American missile-defence system known as THAAD, which is designed to shoot down incoming North Korean missiles. China claims the system threatens its own security—the radar might see into Chinese territory. To South Koreans, this proves how China elevates its solipsistic and woolly concerns over a threat to the South’s very existence.

Suddenly, it’s become a security election

In protest at THAAD, the Chinese authorities have also encouraged a boycott of South Korean consumer goods and discouraged Chinese tour groups from visiting the South. Chinese hackers have been assaulting South Korean government websites.

Such bullying has gone down badly. South Koreans used to admire China. But now, for the first time, opinion polls suggest they hold it in lower esteem than Japan, which colonised Korea and with which Seoul still bickers endlessly about the extent of colonial abuses.

Meanwhile, North Korean and Chinese bullying are helping shape the presidential race. The longtime front-runner, Moon Jae-in, a dovish progressive, promoted the sunshine policy in a former administration. He used to say he was willing to visit Pyongyang before Washington if elected president. Such talk is heard no more. Mr Moon still favours engagement, including reopening the Kaesong industrial zone, which brings together South Korean capital and North Korean workers. But he has come around to THAAD, to which he sounded hostile at first, and about which many South Koreans still have their doubts.

Indeed, the whole race is becoming more hawkish. Mr Moon remains the front-runner, but Ahn Cheol-soo, a doctor and former software entrepreneur, has gained rapidly in the polls. He has attacked Mr Moon for being soft on the North, including over Kaesong. Whoever wins, it looks as if Mr Xi’s and Mr Kim’s hostility will earn them the government they deserve in South Korea: one less inclined to humour them.