[Citizen College Season 7] #3 The U.S.-China Confilct and Korea

On May 10, 2023, the Seongbuk Adult Education School, PDI, and the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University held the third lecture of the Citizen College Season 7  “Politics in Everyday Life” in Asiatic Research Institute, Korea University.  In this lecture Dr. Seung Joon Paik, Senior Researcher at PDI, talked about “U.S.-China Confilct and Korea”.

The lecture, titled “The U.S.-China Conflict and Korea”, deals with strategic competition between the U.S. and China, cross-strait conflicts, the U.S., the U.S.-China conflict and Korea from the history of U.S.-China relations. After the post-Cold War, the United States engaged in China to incorporate China into the U.S.-led world order, but the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States entered a phase of strategic competition of strategic competition. China has emerged as the world’s second-largest economy, modernizing its military power and implementing policies to expand its external influence, including one-on-one. On the other hand, the U.S. national power has declined due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2008 economic crisis. Against this background, the United States defined China as a revisionist state to check China’s rise, shifted its regional foreign policy unit to the Indo-Pacific, strengthened its alliance and formed Quad. The US-China strategic competition has spread to all-round conflicts such as economic and human rights issues. As a result, military tensions remain in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Korean Peninsula. In this lecture, we also discussed the U.S.-China conflict and Korea. Korea has close ties with both the United States and China. The United States is a traditional ally that provides extended deterrence to Korea. China is South Korea’s largest trading partner and a major player in the North Korean issue. In the past, South Korea has implemented “trope diplomacy” between the U.S. and China, but the scope of South Korea’s movement is gradually shrinking as the U.S.-China strategic competition intensifies. In the lecture, there were discussions and Q&A sessions between speakers and citizens on the impact of U.S.-China strategic competition on reality and Korea’s choices and policy directions.