What a jet-lagged football team says about China-Korea relations
Beijing’s unofficial sanctions on Seoul following its decision to deploy THAAD are being blamed for everything from a film festival’s block on ‘Train to Busan’ to a drop in business for plastic surgeons
A record-breaking movie about a zombie apocalypse is blocked from a film festival; a jet-lagged football team suffers a stunning loss; plastic surgeons note a drop in customers; and actors’ scenes are cut from television shows.
Welcome to the new world of Sino-Korean relations, where no sanction – official or unofficial – appears too symbolic (or as critics might have it, petulant) to register Beijing’s displeasure at Seoul’s decision to deploy a US-made antiballistic missile system.
It’s a world in which even the jovial face of Psy, the tongue-in-cheek pop singer behind the viral hit Gangnam Style, has become an object of political intrigue.
South Korean films were banned by the Beijing International Film Festival last week in a decision that ended the hopes for glory of such crowd pleasers as The Wailing, The Age of Shadows, The Handmaiden and Train to Busan – a zombie thriller set on a train that broke box office records for Korean films in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
That decision, which came despite earlier invitations for Korean movies to take part, appeared to be the latest in a string of moves by China to turn the screw on its neighbour in the spheres of culture, sport and tourism in retaliation for its embrace of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system.
Those moves have been ratcheting up for months, but have taken on a new impetus since the first parts for the system began arriving in South Korea in early March.
