A Country That Has Grown to Like Division
The 2026 Unification Perception Survey released by Seoul National University's Institute for Peace and Unification Studies on September 28 is the heaviest material in this section. Let's start with the numbers. The response that dialogue and compromise with the North Korean regime are impossible rose to 78.3 percent, up 11.8 percentage points from 66.5 percent last year. The response that unification is necessary was 39.0 percent. That is just over half of the 63.8 percent in 2007, and the second lowest since the survey began. The response that it is better to remain as we are without unifying was 31.5 percent, the highest ever. Among those in their 20s, 44.8 percent, and among those in their 30s, 47.0 percent, said unification is not necessary. Half of the youth have chosen division as a condition of their own lives. To call this number the decline of the unification generation or the result of worsening inter-Korean relations is to read the result as the cause. For those with nothing to inherit, unification is a future burden, and on the bill for that burden, today's housing prices, jobs, and debt are written first.
But one must read the other side of the same survey to see this country's position. The percentage naming the United States as the most intimate country was 71.9 percent, still first, but it has been falling for three consecutive years since 82.1 percent in 2023. The response viewing the United States as a partner for cooperation also fell to 76.4 percent, below 80 percent for the first time since 2015. What is decisive is that the response that the United States would help South Korea if war broke out fell to 61.2 percent, down 9.3 percentage points from the previous year. Conversely, the response that the United States would follow its own interests exceeded 30 percent for the first time at 34.4 percent. The people no longer trust North Korea, and at the same time they have begun not to trust Washington either. This is the core of this section. It is not that the two pillars of the division system are shaking at the same time, but that as faith in one of the two pillars loosens, fear of the other fills its place. The emotional foundation that sustained subordination is wearing away, and that wear is now flowing not into a discourse of peace but into resignation. Where this resignation will go is not yet decided. If anti-American autonomization and anti-monopoly democratization absorb this resignation, the ideology of division collapses; if left alone, it hardens into the indifference of maintaining the status quo. Unification will not be revived as a national imperative. It is revived only when rebuilt as a class interest.
Other scenes in this section show what kind of state machine this resignation stands upon. The Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, which opens its doors on October 2, has no chief even three days before its launch. The sending of candidate Kim Ji-yong's personnel hearing request to the National Assembly is adrift, blocked by the pro-Yoon prosecutor controversy among hardliners in the ruling camp, and an acting system is becoming visible. It is pointed out that investigative personnel are short by 912 and that the number of rank-and-file prosecutors actually conducting investigations is around 40. At the very spot where the Prosecutors' Office, which lasted 78 years, disappears, the new agency hangs only a signboard without a head or staff. At the September 29 Cabinet meeting, President Lee Jae-myung said he would expand the autonomy of ministry bureau and division-level personnel appointments and change prior reporting to after-the-fact reporting. It looks as if authority is moving downward, but this is merely a rearrangement of what the Blue House will hold and what ministries will bear. While the state machine redraws its threshold, a different kind of calculation proceeded at labor sites. On September 28, the financial union and the employers' side reached a tentative industry-wide bargaining agreement after five months. A 3.0 percent wage increase and a 30-minute shortening of bank business hours, with opening at 9:30 a.m. starting next April. The second general strike scheduled for September 30 was withdrawn. Labor called a strike, and capital bought that strike at the price of turning the clock of business hours back by 30 minutes. In this deal, what workers gained was 30 minutes a day, and what capital preserved was dividends, interest, and the right to decide investment.
A sharper scene than this is in the courtroom. For the first time since the Yellow Envelope Act took effect, on September 18 the Seoul Administrative Court granted a suspension of execution against the Central Labor Relations Commission's retrial decision ordering separate bargaining for the subcontract unions at POSCO and Donghee Auto. This is the first case in which, just as the new law opened a door for subcontract workers to bargain with the primary contractor, the court put a lock on that door. In a structure that separates primary and subcontractors and gives bargaining rights only to the subcontractor, the right to bargain remains a right on paper, and the actual bargaining table returns to the primary contractor's hands. POSCO's labor-management bargaining resumed after 12 days and then broke down again, and the Samsung Electronics union has been split into semiconductor and non-semiconductor units and is even suffering internal division. These three scenes speak to one fact. The threshold of the state machine is being redrawn, capital turns the clock back 30 minutes to buy off a strike, and the court puts a brake on subcontractors' bargaining rights. The resignation shown by the unification perception survey stands on the stage where these three scenes unfold. As they come to distrust North Korea and come to distrust Washington, workers in this country, unable to secure a place for themselves on either side, are satisfied with extracting 30 minutes a day.
So the question of this section is not whether unification will happen or not. To the half of young people who have chosen division as the status quo, we must ask whose interests that choice is calculated for. The number one reason young people reject unification is social problems after unification, and number two is economic burden. These two items are not things that unification would eliminate, but things that the delay of unification is rather preserving. Housing prices, debt, and job insecurity were created by division, and subordination to division fixes them in place. If there is a force that shows the cost of unification as a bill to those who oppose unification, that force is now the side writing its own name on that bill. In a previous diary I wrote that the hand rewriting the premise is in Washington and in the Strait. This section has shown that that hand is moving inside the Korean Peninsula as well. The work of redefining North and South as two hostile states, young people as stakeholders in division, and subcontract workers as contractors without bargaining rights is proceeding simultaneously. Rewriting these definitions is not a matter of diplomacy but of class. When the subject of unification is rebuilt not under the name of the nation but as the working class, a country that has grown to like division will be able to recalculate its own interests.
But one must read the other side of the same survey to see this country's position. The percentage naming the United States as the most intimate country was 71.9 percent, still first, but it has been falling for three consecutive years since 82.1 percent in 2023. The response viewing the United States as a partner for cooperation also fell to 76.4 percent, below 80 percent for the first time since 2015. What is decisive is that the response that the United States would help South Korea if war broke out fell to 61.2 percent, down 9.3 percentage points from the previous year. Conversely, the response that the United States would follow its own interests exceeded 30 percent for the first time at 34.4 percent. The people no longer trust North Korea, and at the same time they have begun not to trust Washington either. This is the core of this section. It is not that the two pillars of the division system are shaking at the same time, but that as faith in one of the two pillars loosens, fear of the other fills its place. The emotional foundation that sustained subordination is wearing away, and that wear is now flowing not into a discourse of peace but into resignation. Where this resignation will go is not yet decided. If anti-American autonomization and anti-monopoly democratization absorb this resignation, the ideology of division collapses; if left alone, it hardens into the indifference of maintaining the status quo. Unification will not be revived as a national imperative. It is revived only when rebuilt as a class interest.
Other scenes in this section show what kind of state machine this resignation stands upon. The Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, which opens its doors on October 2, has no chief even three days before its launch. The sending of candidate Kim Ji-yong's personnel hearing request to the National Assembly is adrift, blocked by the pro-Yoon prosecutor controversy among hardliners in the ruling camp, and an acting system is becoming visible. It is pointed out that investigative personnel are short by 912 and that the number of rank-and-file prosecutors actually conducting investigations is around 40. At the very spot where the Prosecutors' Office, which lasted 78 years, disappears, the new agency hangs only a signboard without a head or staff. At the September 29 Cabinet meeting, President Lee Jae-myung said he would expand the autonomy of ministry bureau and division-level personnel appointments and change prior reporting to after-the-fact reporting. It looks as if authority is moving downward, but this is merely a rearrangement of what the Blue House will hold and what ministries will bear. While the state machine redraws its threshold, a different kind of calculation proceeded at labor sites. On September 28, the financial union and the employers' side reached a tentative industry-wide bargaining agreement after five months. A 3.0 percent wage increase and a 30-minute shortening of bank business hours, with opening at 9:30 a.m. starting next April. The second general strike scheduled for September 30 was withdrawn. Labor called a strike, and capital bought that strike at the price of turning the clock of business hours back by 30 minutes. In this deal, what workers gained was 30 minutes a day, and what capital preserved was dividends, interest, and the right to decide investment.
A sharper scene than this is in the courtroom. For the first time since the Yellow Envelope Act took effect, on September 18 the Seoul Administrative Court granted a suspension of execution against the Central Labor Relations Commission's retrial decision ordering separate bargaining for the subcontract unions at POSCO and Donghee Auto. This is the first case in which, just as the new law opened a door for subcontract workers to bargain with the primary contractor, the court put a lock on that door. In a structure that separates primary and subcontractors and gives bargaining rights only to the subcontractor, the right to bargain remains a right on paper, and the actual bargaining table returns to the primary contractor's hands. POSCO's labor-management bargaining resumed after 12 days and then broke down again, and the Samsung Electronics union has been split into semiconductor and non-semiconductor units and is even suffering internal division. These three scenes speak to one fact. The threshold of the state machine is being redrawn, capital turns the clock back 30 minutes to buy off a strike, and the court puts a brake on subcontractors' bargaining rights. The resignation shown by the unification perception survey stands on the stage where these three scenes unfold. As they come to distrust North Korea and come to distrust Washington, workers in this country, unable to secure a place for themselves on either side, are satisfied with extracting 30 minutes a day.
So the question of this section is not whether unification will happen or not. To the half of young people who have chosen division as the status quo, we must ask whose interests that choice is calculated for. The number one reason young people reject unification is social problems after unification, and number two is economic burden. These two items are not things that unification would eliminate, but things that the delay of unification is rather preserving. Housing prices, debt, and job insecurity were created by division, and subordination to division fixes them in place. If there is a force that shows the cost of unification as a bill to those who oppose unification, that force is now the side writing its own name on that bill. In a previous diary I wrote that the hand rewriting the premise is in Washington and in the Strait. This section has shown that that hand is moving inside the Korean Peninsula as well. The work of redefining North and South as two hostile states, young people as stakeholders in division, and subcontract workers as contractors without bargaining rights is proceeding simultaneously. Rewriting these definitions is not a matter of diplomacy but of class. When the subject of unification is rebuilt not under the name of the nation but as the working class, a country that has grown to like division will be able to recalculate its own interests.