Asian Studies in Credo: Korea

Korean Hanguk or Choson, region and historic country, E Asia. A former country in E Asia (85,049 sq mi/220,277 sq km), now divided into two separate countries, North Korea and South Korea. A peninsula, 600 mi (966 km) long, Korea separates the Sea of Japan on the east from the Yellow Sea. On the south it is bounded by the Korea Strait (connecting the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea) and on the north its land boundaries with China and Russia.

Country in East Asia, bounded north by North Korea, east by the Sea of Japan, south by the Korea Strait, and west by the Yellow Sea.

City, capital of South Korea. It has special status equivalent to that of a province. The political, commercial, industrial, and cultural center of the nation, Seoul is by far the most important city in the country, containing almost one quarter of its citizens.

Country in East Asia, bounded northeast by Russia, north and northwest by China, east by the Sea of Japan, south by South Korea, and west by the Yellow Sea. North Korea has a centralized authoritarian political regime, dominated by the elite within the ruling party and with a cult of personality around the leader.

Capital of North Korea, SW North Korea, on a high bluff above the Taedong River. It is a special city with the status of province.

Communism (from the Latin communis, meaning "shared" or "common"); fundamentally, a system of social organization in which property (especially real property and the means of production) is held in common. Advocates public ownership and communal control of the major means of production, distribution, transportation, and communication. Although modern communism is associated with ideas advanced by German political philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Russian Communist leader and theorist Vladimir I. Lenin, its intellectual roots are as old as Plato's republic in the fourth century BCE.

General term for the political and economic theory that advocates a system of collective or government ownership and management of the means of production and distribution of goods. Note: socialism is much used, and abused, term. It can be employed to refer to quite different social and political systems.

Ideological, political, and economic tensions from 1945 to 1989 between the USSR and Eastern Europe on the one hand and the USA and Western Europe on the other. George Orwell first used the term cold war in a 1945 article entitled “ You and the Atom Bomb,” which described the United States, Russia, and China as postwar “superstates” whose nuclear arsenals would involve them in a “permanent state of cold war.” Orwell borrowed this phrase from the French la guerre froide (“ the cold war”), which he translated as a state of war that lacked the overt conditions of war.

War from 1950 to 1953 between North Korea (supported by China) and South Korea, aided by the United Nations (the troops were mainly US). Considered the forgotten war by some because it fell between the “good” war, World War II, and the “bad” war, Vietnam—was the first time in the nuclear age when the United States committed its forces to combat.

An association of independent states formed in 1945 by 51 states as a successor to the League of Nations. The UN aims to maintain peace and international cooperation as well as to promote social development and human rights; has headquarters in New York City. At the end of World War II, the United Nations was established with the aim of preventing further devastating wars. It is a member-based international organization open to all legitimate sovereign states in the international community. While it has a broad and expanding mandate that changes with the times, maintaining international peace and security remains a central aim.

Korean is now the national language of North and South Korea. There are considerable Korean minorities in Manchuria and (as a result of recent migration) in Japan and central Asia.