[Viewpoint] The Challenges and Opportunities of the US-China Confrontation for South Korea

Lee Yong-jun, Former Ambassador for North Korean Nuclear Affairs, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs

The Soviet Union, a communist state born out of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, rejected adherence to existing international laws and norms. The primary goal pursued by the Soviet Union was to overthrow all capitalist countries through a global revolution.

Although the Soviet Union initially advocated peaceful coexistence due to its weak national power, its power expanded following World War II, leading to the communist takeover of vast regions in Eastern Europe, support for the Chinese Communist Party's control over the mainland, and backing North Korea's invasion of the South, thereby openly pursuing hegemony. The resulting Cold War system between the democratic and communist blocs lasted for 40 years until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

During the Cold War, an official hostile relationship was maintained between the American and Soviet blocs, and the world was divided into two opposing camps. The United States and the Soviet Union protected their member states through numerous military alliances, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), with the South Korea-US alliance treaty and the North Korea-China alliance treaty being part of this framework. This Cold War system extended beyond the military sphere to dominate all areas of state relations, including diplomacy, trade, science and technology, and foreign aid.

As a result, two opposing worlds coexisted on Earth at the time, with no international cooperation, trade, or human exchange between them. The Soviet Union established a socialist trade system based on barter with communist bloc countries, while the United States led capitalist trade within the free world.

The United States also broadly prohibited trade with communist countries through the Trading with the Enemy Act and the multilateral Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). This created an almost complete economic blockade, or decoupling, between the two blocs.

China, which has grown economically by riding on the free trade of the capitalist world, suddenly revealed imperialistic expansionist ambitions under Xi Jinping’s era, pursuing hegemony and focusing on territorial expansion, resembling the expansionist policies of Stalin-era Soviet Union.

In response, the U.S. policy of economic decoupling, including semiconductor supply chain control, resembles the Cold War containment policy against the Soviet Union. The difference is that while the Soviet Union could achieve economic self-sufficiency within the vast socialist bloc, the Chinese economy, parasitic on the capitalist world, cannot survive if the U.S. completely severs its supply chain.

The Chinese economy, which combines communism with capitalism, is both the strength that made today’s China possible and its fatal weakness. For example, in semiconductors, which account for 60% of global consumption, if the U.S. does not export semiconductor manufacturing equipment and core technology to South Korea and Taiwan, they cannot produce semiconductors to export to China, and China cannot manufacture consumer goods with those semiconductors to export to the U.S. and Europe.

Recently, the U.S. has strengthened supply chain controls against China and applied military pressure with allied joint fleets in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. Next week, it will hold the "Democracy Summit," excluding China but including Taiwan, aggressively pursuing alignment diplomacy and completing a multifaceted encirclement and decoupling system against China.

In the U.S.-China confrontation involving most major countries worldwide, South Korea is still deliberating which side to take. Rather than deliberation, it seems hesitant to leave China, on which it has been economically overdependent and politically and diplomatically submissive.

Whether South Korea will board the sinking China ship and perish together or seize the opportunity to rise as the new factory of the world after China’s decline depends entirely on ourselves. The U.S.-China confrontation is both a serious challenge and a once-in-a-lifetime great opportunity for us.