Cults and Conservatives Spread Coronavirus in South Korea(FP)
The cult isn’t the only ideology helping push the virus forward. Conservatives, still recovering from Park Geun-hye’s impeachment and removal in 2017, have held large-scale rallies in the middle of Seoul each week for months. Even as large corporations are advising their employees to work remotely and people are canceling meetings, these conservative groups—largely made up of a high-risk older population—continue to hold rallies, cavalierly ignoring the Seoul government’s advisory to the contrary. Shouting down Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon’s plea to stop the rally, the conservative group leader and pastor Jeon Gwang-hun implausibly claimed it was impossible to contract coronavirus outdoors, while those attending claimed “God was making the wind blow to drive out the virus.
The more well-heeled South Korean conservatives, in the legislative halls or at the editorial desk, are not muh more a help. Since the outbreak began, South Korea’s conservatives have been a broken record, demanding over and over again that the government place a complete travel ban against China. United Future Party chairman Hwang Gyo-ahn said on Feb. 24: “We once again strongly urge a ban on travel from China. That is virtually the only available response.” On the same day, the right-leaning newspaper JoongAng Ilbo made the extraordinary move of putting its editorial at the top of the front page titled: “Implement Total Ban of Foreigners Entering from China Now.” (Apparently with no sense of irony, JoongAng Ilbo ran a large story immediately below the editorial complaining of the “Koreaphobia” displayed by the Israeli government when it turned away Korean tourists visiting Jerusalem.)
It is a cynical attack that is both red-baiting and race-baiting. Since the election of the liberal President Moon Jae-in, one of the conservatives’ major attack points has been that Moon was too soft on China’s Communist government. With COVID-19, South Korea’s conservative politicians found a neat way to connect this point with the viral outbreak originating from China: Moon is too afraid of China to shut down travel from China. This line of attack also whips up xenophobia against ethnic Chinese immigrants to South Korea, a convenient target, as South Korea is holding legislative elections in April.
To remind the public of the connection between the coronavirus and China, South Korea’s conservative politicians and press persist in calling the viral disease “Wuhan pneumonia” or “Wuhan corona” in lieu of the official name. The United Future Party went so far as to hold up the formation of a special legislative committee for COVID-19 response because it opposed any committee that did not have the word “Wuhan” in the name. (The United Future Party finally relented on Feb. 26, allowing the committee to form.) All this comes despite the proven failure of travel bans and experts’ consensus against them—not to mention that there was no crossover between Shincheonji and ethnically Chinese areas. As if to illustrate the point, United Future Party leadership, including parliamentary leader Shim Jae-cheol, was briefly quarantined following a large meeting with the Korean Federation of Teachers’ Associations to criticize the Moon administration’s education policy, as the president of the association was infected with COVID-19. (The association’s president apparently was infected through his wife, who met with a Shincheonji follower.)
And yet, the government is carrying on. Despite the sudden explosion of cases, South Korea is in the rare position of having an effective means of detecting the disease and the transparency to report the results accurately. The seeming explosion compared to other countries may be a matter of testing as well as contamination. Thus far, KCDC has administered more than 40,000 tests for coronavirus, and more than 7,500 coronavirus tests a day with an eye toward being able to test more than 10,000 a day by the end of February. (In contrast, the United States has tested fewer than 500 people.)
